Junket

 A short story by Lauren Groff:

A friend calls the writer out of the blue on the darkest and coldest day of the year: Does she have any interest in a free junket to a fancy spa in Arizona? The friend hosts retreats there, and sometimes they bring artists down to demonstrate that they can do so, to give deep luxury a tang of the intellectual. But only for a weekend. Any longer would simply be disturbing, artists being notoriously unstable, slovenly at the table, gaping at celebrities who just want to pretend to be nobodies for a weekend.

No offense, the friend says.

None taken, the writer says. Yes, yes, there is great interest. She smiles into the phone, imagining Arizona sun baking her undercooked winter skin. Boston, with its mean early March glitter, the cold shadows, the insomnia, can stay where it is. The work that lies slack and boneless, barely twitching these dark months, won’t miss her. Nor will the apartment, which she came back to one afternoon in the fall to discover that it had been emptied of half the books and furniture, as well as the entire boyfriend. And the cat. She told her friends that she missed the books most, she almost convinced herself of this, but had begun to want to rub up against strangers in the elevator and was starting to suspect that her body disagreed.

Does it matter, her friend says delicately on the phone, that she’s being invited so late because a far more famous writer has double-booked herself?

Read more: Granta