Amateurs (19 page)

“And are you a writer as well?” Linda asked.

“I'm gathering material.” This was another thorn of her situation, knowing that people took her to be an odd-jobbing literary wash-out or rudderless trust-funder when in truth she was a self-made, improbably deep-pocketed Geppetto. “I haven't had much time for my own stuff lately,” she told Linda, “but I hope to get back to that soon.” She hoped to get back to that on this trip, in fact, but so far she'd added only nine words to her notebook (“birds roosting on airport beams, dust falling like molt”), and this afternoon's writing session had morphed quickly into a nap, her body logy from the sun, her adobelike cabin cool with the punningly green jalousie blinds shut, her pen slipping from her fingers as she reminded herself that two rested hours were often more productive than four tired ones.

Now they were on the paved road, grooved in the interest of traction like a freshly raked sand trap. The hill was at its steepest grade, and Sara was breathing heavily, feeling each step in her thighs. A light-footed gardener weeded on the side of the road in a conical straw hat. Sara and Linda didn't talk again until they reached the ridge, where the resort had its main building and its original white-washed cabins, built in the thirties by Newport merchants with distant family ties to Benjamin Franklin. “Will I see you at cocktail hour?” Linda said.

“Unless the cocktails impair your vision,” Sara answered.

Cocktail hour was a simple operation held in the lounge of the main building, which guests were encouraged to call the Great House. Two trays of hors d'oeuvres—including, to widespread puzzlement, deep-fried grapes—and a few dishes of hot nuts were brought out and placed on a teak buffet. Guests mixed drinks or grabbed beers and sodas for themselves at the honor bar a few steps down from the lounge. At present there were only sixteen guests at the resort: the Bondarenko party; Linda and the painter; a DC lawyer and her Defense Department husband; and an aged English couple, he a former Labour MP, she a versatile hobbyist with the look of someone
constantly processing lorry exhaust. Sara found the swirl of wealth, power, and status intoxicating, arousing, tiring, and sometimes nauseating, as though she were experiencing all the effects of alcohol at once, or all the effects except relaxation; for that, she was turning to alcohol. Her piña colada rested on a table whose glass top displayed seashells identified by sallow, typewritten labels the size of cookie fortunes. The lounge had a high ceiling with exposed wood beams, bamboo and rattan furniture with muted floral cushions, moldy guest books, watercolors of local scenes painted by a daughter of the founding family, and a framed coral leaf of a purplish brown much like the Plymouth Reliant Sara's parents owned when they were still married.

She sat at the end of a sofa next to John Anderson. He wore a seersucker jacket, salmon shorts, camp moccasins, and his leonine beard. She hadn't seen him in two years, and his presence stirred up suppressed guilt over how passively she'd dumped him. The guilt might have engendered a cautious, expiatory tenderness toward him. It didn't. It made him twice irritating: first, for being himself; second, for stirring up her suppressed guilt. Another of Archer's college friends, a photographer of rising reputation, was now describing her latest series, for which she traveled the country photographing local semicelebrities, basically nonhomeless eccentrics known for spending a lot of time out of the house in odd clothes. “I know I keep coming back to this,” Archer said to Jessica, the photographer, “but we really need to work on something together; my text in response to your photos, or vice versa, anything.”

“Yes, we have to,” Jessica said with what sounded like legitimate enthusiasm, though her choice of words was telling; Archer must have been her top patron; an attempted collaboration of some sort was probably as voluntary for Jessica as a sneeze. Sara liked books in which prose was augmented by photos—Breton, Woolf, Berger, Gass, Ondaatje, Marías, Sebald—though the practice seemed dissuasively
faddish of late, and perhaps she didn't like all those books as much as she had once professed. “The only thing,” she ventured, looking at Archer, “is that so many writers are using photos right now. There's a risk.”

“A risk of what?” Archer said.

“Don't get me wrong,” she said, “Jessica's photos are incredible.” The compliment was unpretending—well, “incredible” overstated the case—but unnecessary, since Jessica's attention had been pulled elsewhere. “But a risk of seeming late to the party, you know? Like a rock band adding sitar to its sound in 1971.”

“The ISB made brilliant use of sitars,” Archer said reverently.

“But earlier than '71, right?” Sara said, trying to salvage her illustration, not as artfully pandering as she had hoped.

“There's no expiration date on sitars,” he said.

“So, Archer, tell me,” said the lawyer, who'd been listening in, “are you already into your next novel, or is it too soon for that? A friend of ours is a novelist—political thrillers, mainly, quite polished—and he literally starts the new one the morning after finishing the last.”

“I wish I could do that,” Archer said. “I . . . I have a few things brewing,” he added, waving his fingers around his head. “Nothing solid yet.”

“Are you an outliner?”

“Well, I make them, yes, but I grow quickly heedless of their directives.”

“Men and maps, eh?”

“I suppose,” Archer said. “This last book—how to put it?—it's fastidiously plotted, but the plotting came about gradually and organically.” Sara tried not to roll her eyes while Archer swept a hand through his wispy hair. “It's a matter,” he said, “of listening, very attentively, to what your characters want.”

“What they really, really want,” Sara said, referencing the Spice Girls.

The lawyer shook her head approvingly at Archer. “I so admire that kind of creativity.”

“Oh, I don't know,” he said, smiling shyly as he got up to revisit the bar.

Sara held up her glass. “Another?”

Several conversations flitted around her along with a moth the size of a young bat. She watched the moth and listened to Archer run the blender. Soon he returned, deftly carrying three glasses and a can of club soda as if he were an experienced waiter, though in fact he had no traditional work experience of any kind. Most of the guests had dressed up somewhat for dinner, but Archer was still wearing rolled-up Levi's, his dirty Jack Purcells, and a one-pocket T-shirt with broad horizontal stripes. He looked like he was trying out for Yo La Tengo or delivering the
Sacramento Bee
in 1966. She noticed now that his tongue was poking out irresistibly from the effort of balancing the glasses, which to Sara made up for his puffed-up replies to the lawyer's questions.

He was such an attractive mesh of arrogance and awkwardness. It was hard for her to remember how she'd once found him ugly. As a kid she'd always hated the Buffalo City Court Building, a symphonically dystopic concrete tower, not windowless but with vast window-less expanses and, around its edges, wedge-topped slits that brought guillotines to one's mind, or to one's head. Then in college a friend told her the building was a distinguished example of brutalism, and instantly she recognized its overcast beauty, became one of its staunch defenders. Her view of Archer had changed gradually, but the reversal was comparably stark. As far as looks went, Archer and she were suited to each other, she thought, both somewhat off, even homely at times, but with reserves of acquired-taste beauty. (The
Stickler
had called him “publishing hot,” which Sara guessed was roughly analogous to “hockey smart.”) Money was part of his allure, of course, and she wondered about the purity of Gemma's motives,
and of her own, though she didn't precisely have motives. If she did, she didn't pretend they were pure. Besides, one could enter a situation with dicey motives and find purity along the way. She remembered something Mary Anne Disraeli had said: “Dizzy married me for my money, but if he had the chance again he would marry me for love.”

“The thing is,” Archer's friend Seth was contending, “the most interesting long-form fiction happening today is happening on television.”

“I'm just reminding you that Plame's covert status at the time of the Novak column isn't indisputable,” someone held in a different conversation.

“My God, look at that enormous moth!”

“Well, there
will
be climate-change winners. Mushy to deny that obvious fact.”

Sara pivoted to still another group: “They're definitely related,” Linda said. “Ira is Philip's nephew or something.”

“Water rights is one area, sure. Mitigation and adaptation products and services is another.”

“Is it indeed a moth?”

“It's not that close,” Archer said, turning with an apologetically raised finger from his finance-industry friend. “It's, like, second cousin, or first cousin once removed.”

“I've never bothered to learn the finer points of cousinage,” Gemma said.

“We don't need to learn that kind of stuff anymore,” Lucas said. “We can just look it up.”

“We couldn't look it up before?” Sara said.

“At any rate, a talented family,” Gemma said.

“But didn't you say you hated
Nixon in China
?” Archer said, smiling at Gemma.

Sara didn't like to think of Archer and Gemma having private conversations about art. She could only tolerate their relationship if
she imagined it to be unvaryingly shallow and dull: restaurant deliberations and unfulfilling sex and voiceless games of draughts.

“I may have done,” Gemma said. “I don't really care for that lot; I prefer maximalists.”

“It's not quite to the point, though,” Sara said, “since
Nixon in China
is by John Adams.”

“No, it's by Philip Glass,” Archer said.

Sara's shoulders clenched as she looked at him. He was so sure of himself that for a moment she thought
she
was wrong.

“Yes, that's Glass,” said the painter evenly, permitting Archer to gloat silently in his misattribution. Of course it would seem small of Sara to drag Archer into the internet closet to resolve the dispute. She was still seething when a member of the uniformed kitchen staff entered the lounge, waiting for talk to fizzle so she could announce to the ladies and gentlemen that dinner was served.

A steep, rain-slick staircase led from John's cabin to a private deck on which there were two lounge chairs, a straw bench, and a wooden kiosk for shade. John had so far spent much of his vacation on the deck, reclining for hours at night, finding constellations and listening to the rhythmic chirps of tree frogs, reminiscent in a backwards way of industrial sprinklers. This morning he was up in time for sunrise, before most of the workers arrived from the nearby populated island, whose tree-covered northeast coast was visible from John's deck. Also in view were palm shrubs and organ-pipe cacti, the sickly green salt pond at the bottom of the hill, and the ruins of a Quaker-owned sugar mill once worked by African slaves. When John said yesterday to Sara that it didn't seem very Quakerish to own slaves, she reminded him that Richard Nixon had been a Quaker. He didn't think that answered,
since Richard Nixon hadn't, after all, owned slaves. “But he would have,” she had said.

He swept last night's rain off one of the lounge chairs, dried his hand on the resort's terry-cloth bathrobe, and sat down. It was strange to be here. A few years ago he had felt slighted by Archer's efficient upkeep of their friendship; now he missed that efficiency. They saw each other rarely, and when they did, there was an echoey sadness about their interactions. John understood now that, from the beginning, he had wanted the friendship more than Archer had, though dorm life, demanding little in the way of plans and overtures, covered that up; you sort of fell into talking, drifted toward the same party, tagged along to the boring Fassbinder movie. Still, there was an imbalance of need and affection and, naturally, an attendant imbalance of power. That's what kept John from doing anything that might jeopardize the friendship. He never argued with Archer, not about anything serious, because he knew Archer would win, would juke him toward some illogical generalization. For some reason John was drawn to people who wanted to make seemingly simple things complicated, when all he wanted to do was make complicated things simple. Complexity could be fascinating, sure, but John more or less believed what he'd been taught in church, not the literal truth of the resurrection or whatever, but in the universals: be honest, be humble, be nice to people, really mean it when you say “peace be with you.” He wasn't saintly at enacting those beliefs, but he was trying. Hard to know what Archer believed in, except maybe that you should do the wrong thing prudently. Like: every semester back in college, he would hire out most of the work for one of his humanities courses, employing a wheezy comp-lit concentrator to write the papers, which Archer would subject to shrewdly dilapidating revision. He was proud of his small, probably unneeded precautions, how for instance he would misuse a word in class, then insert the same mistake into his next paper. (Maybe he'd meant to mix up Philip Glass and John Adams—John
had done some fact-checking last night—but to what end?) John never expressed his disapproval of the inexplicable cheating, inexplicable in that Archer wasn't pressed for time and was so smart, so quick to absorb the ideas John often couldn't wrap his head around, even quicker to adopt the jargon John couldn't tolerate.