The Plot, Jean Korelitz [read e books online free txt] 📗

halcyon period just after The Invention of Wonder was published he’d received a named fellowship to Yaddo, and flown out to Wyoming to spend a couple of productive weeks at the Ucross Center. He’d done Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, too, and also Ragdale, and if Ragdale had marked the end of his lucky streak a year after Reverberations was published, then at least he could (and did!) list those august institutions on his résumé and on his website for their sheer writerly luster. At none of these places had Jake ever been asked for a dime of his own money, however, so he had to read deep into the Adlon website before he understood what new entity this place represented: a self-sponsored artists’ retreat, at which the celebrated environment of a Yaddo or a MacDowell was made available, not just to the elite or traditionally advantaged person of letters, but to anyone in need of it. Or at least, anyone in need of it with a thousand dollars per week to spend.

Jake examined the photographs of the old place: a great white hulk of hotel, listing slightly (or was that merely the angle of the photograph?), and dating to the 1890s. The Adlon was one of several large hotels still standing in Sharon Springs, a former vacation town arrayed around sulfur springs and once dotted by Victorian spa buildings. Sharon Springs was located an hour southwest of its more celebrated counterpart, Saratoga Springs, but had been rather less prosperous even back then and certainly was today. The town had entered its decline at the turn of the last century, and by the 1950s its half-dozen hotels were variously collapsed, torn down, shut up, or withering away as their guests abandoned longstanding summer routines or simply died. Then, somebody in the family that owned the Adlon had come up with this novel idea to avert or at least temporarily delay the inevitable, and so far it was working. Writers had apparently been gathering at the hotel since 2012, paying for the peace and quiet, the clean rooms and studios, and the communally served breakfasts and dinners (plus lunch in a folksy wicker basket, discreetly left at the door so as not to interrupt the writing of Kubla Khan). They came when they wished, spent their time as they wished, and socialized with their fellow artists if and when they wished, and left when they wished.

Actually, the place kind of sounded like … a hotel.

At the top of the web page, he had idly clicked on Opportunities and found himself reading the job description for a program coordinator, on site, to begin just after the New Year. It didn’t mention a salary. He looked up the town to see if it was commutable from the city. It wasn’t. Still, it was a job.

He really had needed a job.

A week later he was on a train to Hudson to meet the young entrepreneur—“young” meaning, in this case, a full six years his junior—whose family had run the Adlon for three generations and who’d managed to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. By the time they finished their meeting at a coffee shop on Warren Street, and despite Jake’s obvious lack of program-directing experience, he was hired.

“I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests when they arrive. Gives them something real to aspire to.”

Jake opted not to correct this remarkable statement in any of the ways he might have done.

It was a temporary solution, anyway. Nobody left New York for a tiny town in the exact middle of nowhere on purpose, or at least not without a plan to return. His own plan had a lot to do with the relative rent he was paying in newly fabulous Brooklyn and the one he expected to pay in Cobleskill, a few miles south of Sharon Springs, and the fact that he would be retaining his private writing clients and his gig work for the reconstituted Ripley Symposia even as he received a paycheck from the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts. All of it added up to an exile of a couple of years, three at the most, which was also ample time to begin and even complete another novel after the one he was writing now!

Not that he was really writing one now, or had the tiniest idea for another.

The job itself was a kind of hybrid of admissions officer, cruise director, and plant supervisor, but even cumulatively these were not particularly taxing. More onerous, of course, was the fact that he was required to be physically present at the Adlon during the daytime (and technically on call at night and on the weekends), but given the actual labor associated with most jobs, Jake tended to feel pretty fortunate. He was living frugally and saving money. He was still in the world of writing and writers (albeit farther than he had ever been from his own writerly ambitions). He was still able to work on his novel in progress (or he would be, if he had one), and in the meantime he could continue to nurture and mentor other writers, beginning writers, struggling writers, even writers like himself undergoing what might be called a mid-career retrenchment. As he had once long ago opined, in a cinder-block conference room on the old Ripley campus (which, last he’d heard, had been purchased by a company that did corporate retreats and conferences), this was merely what writers had always done for one another.

The Adlon, on this particular day, had six guest-writers, which meant that the center was only at about 20 percent capacity (though that was six people more than Jake imagined would choose to spend January in a snowbound latter-day spa town that hadn’t even had the good sense to turn into Saratoga Springs). Three of the guests were sisters in their sixties who were collaborating on a multigenerational family story, unsurprisingly based on their own family. Another was