Scandalous

Chapter 26

Vroman's on a Saturday afternoon was the kind of place Nathan had identified in his first week in Pasadena as essential to his continued functioning — the oldest independent bookstore in Southern California, which announced itself with the specific, particular atmosphere of a bookshop that had been in the same location long enough to have absorbed the accumulated intention of everyone who had ever walked through it looking for something. The shelves were full in the proper way, not the curated way of a shop that had been designed to look like a bookshop but the dense, slightly chaotic way of a place that actually sold books to people who actually read them.

He and Maryanne had come separately in motivation if not in transport — he had wanted to replace his annotated copy of Middlemarch, which he'd lent to a colleague a few years ago and never recovered; she had a meeting with her publisher next week and wanted to look at how her last two titles were positioned on the shelves relative to comparable authors, which was a thing she did and which she would not have described as vanity because in her framework it wasn't vanity, it was market research.

They had been in the store for twenty minutes and had already separated by the natural gravity of their respective purposes — he toward the classics section in the back, she toward the contemporary fiction display near the front — when he came around the corner of the poetry aisle with Middlemarch in hand and nearly walked into her.

Not Maryanne.

Shae.

She was standing at the intersection of the poetry and fiction sections with a basket over one arm and a copy of something he couldn't immediately identify in her other hand, reading the back of it with the concentrated, unhurried attention she brought to anything she was actually reading. She was in her weekend arrangement — dark jeans, an oversized cream knit, her hair loose. No costume. No uniform. Simply herself, in a bookshop on a Saturday, which was so entirely consistent with everything he knew about her that he would have predicted it if asked.

She looked up.

The unguarded expression arrived before she'd processed what she was looking at — the real one, the brief one — and then she registered the full picture, which included Maryanne appearing at Nathan's shoulder from the direction of the front displays, and the expression composed itself into something more careful.

"Miss Madison," Nathan said. He said it with the even, professional quality he had managed, with increasing effort, to maintain across every unexpected context. "Didn't know you were a Vroman's regular."

"Every other weekend," she said. She glanced at Maryanne — the quick, assessing look of someone taking in a new person — and then back at Nathan with the slight, questioning quality of someone waiting for the social architecture to clarify itself.

He cleared his throat.

"Shae, this is my wife, Maryanne." He paused a fraction of a second. "Maryanne — this is Shae Madison. One of my students at Crestwood."

Maryanne looked at Shae with the specific attention of a woman who has been handed a piece of information she has been anticipating and is now conducting the assessment she has been waiting to conduct. Her eyes moved over Shae with the thoroughness of someone doing exactly what she said she was doing and also something else entirely, and her expression maintained itself in the pleasant, social register she was entirely capable of producing on demand.

"Shae," she said. The name with a slight, particular weight to it — not unfriendly, just specific.

"Hi," Shae said. She looked at Maryanne for a moment. "You look familiar — have we met somewhere?"

"I shouldn't think so," Maryanne said.

"You might have seen her photograph," Nathan offered carefully. "Maryanne is a writer."

Shae's expression shifted — the slight, internal movement of someone cross-referencing. She looked at Maryanne again. "Are you—" a pause "—are you Maryanne Sherman?"

Something moved in Maryanne's face. The particular, involuntary adjustment of a person encountering recognition when they hadn't expected it from this specific source — the pleasure of it arriving before the appropriate response to the source had been calculated.

"I am," she said. "I use my maiden name to publish." She looked at Shae with a freshly calibrated interest. "Have you read something of mine?"

"I've read Under The Stars," Shae said.

The silence that followed lasted approximately two seconds.

Nathan looked at Shae. He looked at Maryanne. He watched both of them register the title and then watched both of their registrations arrive at entirely different destinations.

Under The Stars was Maryanne's third novel and her bestselling by a margin that her other titles had not come close to approaching. It had been on the list for eleven weeks. It had been described by the Times as visceral, punishing, and explicitly adult — the kind of review that was simultaneously a warning and an advertisement. It was dark in the way Maryanne's work was always dark but more so — the violence more present, the sexuality more direct, the emotional landscape so deliberately stripped of sentimentality that several reviewers had used the word brutal in registers ranging from critical to admiring. It was not a book that required a content warning so much as it required an acknowledgment that you were making a choice.

It was, objectively and by every available measure, not a book for a seventeen-year-old girl.

Maryanne recovered first. She looked at Shae with the pleasant expression that had taken on a very slight new quality — the condescension of someone performing graciousness while communicating something quite different beneath it.

"That book," she said, "is quite adult material for—" she paused in the specific way of someone selecting their word "—someone your age. Do your parents not have any opinion on what you're reading?"

Nathan's breath caught in his chest. He had not told Maryanne about Shae's parents — the accident, the hospital, the seven-year-old who had woken up three days later to a different world. He opened his mouth.

He was a fraction of a second too late.

Shae tilted her head. The movement was slight, the composed, unhurried adjustment of someone receiving a question that has arrived in an unexpected shape.

"They wouldn't know," she said. Her voice was entirely level. "They died when I was seven." A pause of half a breath. "They were both passionate readers, though. I don't imagine they'd have minded."

Maryanne's face dropped. It was not the dramatic fall of someone caught off guard but the smaller, involuntary thing — the fractional shift of a person who has said something that has landed somewhere they did not intend, whose composure catches rather than breaks.

"I—" she started.

"It's alright," Shae said. Simply. Without performance. Not forgiving exactly, just — moving past, the way she moved past things, with the economy of someone who has had years of practice at not making other people's discomfort into a scene.

A beat. Maryanne cleared her throat. She recalibrated with the professional smoothness she was capable of when she needed it. "Well," she said, "since you've read it—" the slight recovery, the subject firmly changed "—what did you think?"

Shae looked at her for a moment. The small, particular curve of her mouth.

"Honestly?" she said.

"Please," Maryanne said, with the tone of an author who is accustomed to being told her work is exceptional and expects the pattern to continue.

Nathan was quiet. He held Middlemarch and watched.

"The central conceit is strong," Shae said. "The premise — the two women, the shared history, the thing between them that can't be named and therefore becomes everything else — that part works. The first third is genuinely good. The tension is built carefully and the prose in those early chapters has a restraint that makes everything feel more loaded than if it had been stated directly."

Maryanne's chin lifted slightly. Receiving a compliment. The posture of a woman settling in for the expected review.

"The middle section," Shae continued, "loses it a bit."

The chin came down a fraction.

"The relationship between Cara and the husband — the way the author escalates the central conflict through him — it starts to feel like it's reaching. He becomes a device rather than a person somewhere around chapter fourteen, and once you notice that he exists purely to create pressure on the central relationship rather than as a character in his own right, it's hard to un-notice it. The violence in that section is—" she considered "—melodramatic in a few places. Not all of them. But there are two or three scenes where you can feel the author wanting an effect more than the story requires the effect, and the wanting shows."

The bookshop was quiet around them. A couple browsed two aisles over. The Saturday afternoon moved at its own pace, entirely indifferent.

Maryanne was looking at Shae with an expression Nathan had never seen on her face in eleven years and approximately four hundred interactions with people discussing her work. It was the expression of someone who has been handed a scalpel by a person they assumed would be handing them a compliment, and is now watching that person use it with a precision they did not expect and are not entirely certain how to respond to.

"The final third recovers somewhat," Shae continued, with the equanimity of someone delivering a report rather than a verdict. "The resolution of the central relationship is earned — the author doesn't take the easy exit. That choice is the best thing in the book structurally." She paused. "The prose in the non-erotic sections occasionally strains. Like it's trying harder than it needs to. The erotic sections are actually where the writing relaxes and becomes most itself — most direct, most honest. There's no showing off in those parts. They're the best-written sections technically."

She stopped.

She shifted her basket from one arm to the other. She looked at Maryanne with the open, uncomplicated expression of someone who has said what they came to say and has no investment in the reception.

"That's just my take, though," she said. "All in all — the s*x scenes carry the book. The rest is good in places and overwritten in others." A slight lift of one shoulder. "But that's just my personal opinion."

The silence had its own specific quality.

Maryanne stood with her hand resting on a shelf and her eyes on Shae and her expression doing the careful, contained work of a woman who is managing several things at once — the fury, which was real and present and entirely understandable; the professional dignity, which required that the fury not be visible; the specific, galling complication of the fact that roughly forty percent of what this girl had just said was not incorrect, which Maryanne knew because it mapped onto three concerns her editor had raised about the manuscript and which she had overruled.

Nathan stood behind Maryanne and looked at Shae and felt the specific, full-body effort of a man attempting very hard to maintain a neutral expression. He pressed his lips together. He looked at the spine of Middlemarch. He looked at the middle distance. He was not going to smile. This was not an appropriate moment for him to smile. He was absolutely not going to—

He looked at the shelf to his left and composed himself with everything he had.

Maryanne took a slow, quiet breath. She looked at Shae with the composed expression of a woman who has filed something to be dealt with later in a private location and is now producing the appropriate social finish.

"I can certainly see," she said, in the tone of someone making an observation that carries several layers of meaning simultaneously, "why Nathan speaks so highly of you." She looked at Shae with the eyes of a woman who has taken her full measure and is not entirely happy about what the measure revealed. "It's remarkable. Genuinely." The emphasis landing where it was intended to land. "For someone who's only — what, seventeen?"

The word seventeen. Held for just a fraction of a breath longer than the sentence required.

"Seventeen," Shae confirmed. Entirely unbothered.

Maryanne smiled with all the warmth of something that had been produced from the correct components in the correct proportions and bore no organic relationship to warmth whatsoever. "It was lovely to meet you, Shae." She picked up the book she'd been holding and turned. "Nathan."

She moved toward the front of the store with the composed, unhurried efficiency of a woman completing a social interaction and moving on to the next item in the sequence of her afternoon.

Nathan cleared his throat. He looked at Shae.

"Enjoy the rest of your afternoon, Miss Madison," he said. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"See you tomorrow, Mr. Kingston," she said. The small smile. The real one, brief and present and then gone.

He turned and went to find Maryanne.

He found her at the front of the store with two of her own novels pulled from the display and repositioned on the shelf with the spines more visible. She was surveying the result with the critical eye of a woman conducting market research, which was what she would have called it.

She didn't look at him when he came to stand beside her.

"That was—" she said, and paused. The pause of someone selecting. "Interesting." She turned her head and gave him a look — the specific, measured look of Maryanne when she has arrived at a conclusion and is deciding how much of it to say out loud. "I can see why you're so interested in her." The word landed in quotation marks she hadn't spoken. "Mouthy little brat."

The flicker of anger arrived in Nathan's chest before he could prevent it — small and immediate, the quick heat of something he did not have any business feeling and felt anyway. He covered it. He arranged his expression into the level, reasonable register of a man making a measured observation.

"She's young," he said. "But she's very bright."

Maryanne went still.

It was a particular stillness — not the stillness of someone who hasn't heard but of someone who has heard precisely and is replaying it. She turned from the shelf and looked at him. Her eyes narrowed by a fraction, the small, exact calibration of a woman who has been studying a person for eleven years and has just detected a variance in a frequency she knows very well.

"Bright," she repeated.

The single word. Back to him. Flat and deliberate, offered like something being returned to its owner for closer inspection.

Nathan said nothing.

Maryanne looked at him for one more moment with those narrowed eyes. Then she picked up her bag and walked out of the store.