Amateurs (23 page)

“But there might have been some less immediate quid pro quo,” Lucas said. “One time my mom and dad brought the Gum Man a
turkey, which was pretty admirable since my dad was having all these musculoskeletal problems at the time, so he was still doing carpentry but not much of it. I'm pretty sure we were on assistance ourselves.” He pulled his shirt away from his chest. “Sorry, this story doesn't have a point.”

“They don't always have to.”

“Or any real bearing on your play. That's why I stopped writing notes.”

“Well, I'm glad I let you read it.” Too shy to look at Lucas, she stared into the dining room. Maxwell seemed to be arranging his drawings into conferences.

“We should do a scene,” Lucas said.

“How do you mean?”

“Act it out.”

She hesitated. She wondered if his idea was planned or spontaneous, and if that mattered. Probably she spent too much time wondering if people were being “natural” or not.

“Like, I love the part”—he looked for the page—“where Callum wants to cut Anisette's song from the record. ‘It has nothing to do with quality, it's simply a matter of conceptual cohesion.'”

She was sheepish about smiling over her own line. “I thought about having ‘Kissing Bug' become a fluke hit,” she said, “their signature song. But.”

“No, too pat.” He flipped back to the start of the scene. “You have an extra script?”

“I'm off book.”

“Wow, okay. Want me to do a Scottish accent?”

“Um, sure.”

He broke off in the middle of the scene's first line. “That's not quite Scottish, is it?” He resumed in his own voice, and Karyn answered in Anisette's.

“What are you guys doing?” Maxwell said from his workstation.

“Your mom and me are mummering.” He turned to Karyn. “Sorry, I'm not profesh.”

“You're fine,” she said. “In this setting, you probably don't need to project so much.”

“Ha, yeah. Sometimes, the harder I try, the worse I get.”

“That's how it was with me and the violin,” Maxwell said. “I was really good when I was just messing around.”

That wasn't true at all.

They ran through several scenes twice, doubling up on roles where necessary. Though she had recited some parts of the play a hundred times, hearing Lucas read uncovered a few ungainly phrases, and they explored variations. They seemed to be working toward something, which was fun but worrying; the project thrived as art and therapy because it had no aspirations. It was vulnerable to even the most fleeting ideations toward production.

She had sworn to end the evening by ten, but it was Lucas who, at quarter to eleven, let out a sighing, “Well.”

“Yeah,” she said. “You too, Maxi Priest.”

“She doesn't actually call me that,” Maxwell said, getting out of his chair.

“Cool kicks,” Lucas said.

Maxwell looked confused.

“Your shoes. Those new?”

“No, I just stopped wearing them for a while.”

“It's a dope color,” Lucas said.

“Thanks!” He trotted up the stairs.

“So, I have a job interview tomorrow morning,” Lucas said to Karyn.

“Hey!”

“Yeah, I'm amped. Marketing director at this company, Aria, that makes hot-air dryers.” He walked toward the door. “Lot of times I'm a wipe-my-hands-on-my-khaks guy, like I'm too busy or something, but
these are the most effective”—he described the dryer's innovations. “Check it: I vividly remember the first time I used one—MSP airport men's room, probably the same one with dude and the foot tapping.”

“Larry Craig.”

“I figure that's a good story for the interview,” he said, carrying his bike off her porch.

“Maybe not with Larry Craig, though.”

“I'll leave him out of it.”

She leaned down to pick up a damp newspaper from her stoop. “Thanks for coming over.”

“Yeah, it was nice.” He started to pedal.

Perhaps for the first time in her life, she said, “Bon chance!”

“I don't speak French,” he said, looking back and smiling, “but wish me luck.”

November 2009

Not only did skipping out on Thanksgiving relieve Sara from impending brushes with John Anderson and cranberry sauce, it freed her to spend the day guiltily, miserably alone. By midafternoon she at least summoned the strength to turn on internet-blocking software, for fear that she would spend the rest of the day looking at pictures of turkeys baked by peripheral friends, most tantalizingly one served less than a mile from Sara's apartment to a table of unmarried creative types not native to Buffalo. Two weeks ago, when Sara still planned to join the reunion in Lammermuir, she had turned down an invitation from her friend Emily, whose household had recently burgeoned to five. Thanksgiving there might place too much emphasis for Sara's taste on giving thanks. She was willing to take that chance but didn't want to admit to Emily that she had shirked her familial promises, nor did she want to perpetuate the lie about her pressing deadline.

“Who,” asked Donna Crennel three days later, “sets a deadline
for the Monday after Thanksgiving?” Or she wanted to keep the lie in the family. Her mother was standing at Sara's stove, making an exploratory incision into a Cornish hen. Sara had her own apartment now, the rented upper unit of an Elmwood Village Victorian whose first floor was a consignment shop.

“I'm sure it's not unusual,” Sara said, shaking almond slivers over the green beans, “but
I
set the deadline. I needed an extension and couldn't push it more than a week.”

A tsk. “I'm sure your father and grandfather were disappointed. I'm giving the hen another ninety seconds. Oh, speaking of your work, I mentioned you to Tom's kid brother—of course he's no kid.” Donna had just returned from meeting her boyfriend's relatives in Little Rock. “He's getting ready to shop around a novel of some kind. About the outdoors, he says.”

“The outdoors?”

“I think he means hunting. He wore a camouflage hat—not during dinner; he was very polite.” She picked up two plates and a gravy boat. “I said you'd be an excellent freelance editor.”

Sara followed her mother into the dining room, a small, lopped-off hexagon with white trim and robin's-egg walls. “Did he seem to have money?” she said.

“He's a male nurse.”

“You don't need to clarify that he's a
male
nurse, Mom. That's like ‘lady doctor.'”

Donna may have been silently counting.

“Anyway, I'd hate to take advantage.”

“He's not a child, Sara.”

“Most of these books don't have a prayer. Maybe tell him—”

“I gave him your e-mail, so you can patronize him yourself.”

“Mom.”

After a moment, Donna asked, “Is your deadline for Lord Bondarenko?”

“No, proofing an academic book, a history”—she improvised—“of railway timetables.”

“I suppose I can see why you blew the deadline. I love this dining set, honey. So sleek.”

It wasn't a set. “Scratch-and-dent sale,” Sara said.

Donna followed Sara's finger. “You hardly notice.”

Sara had gently taken a tack hammer to the table on the day it was delivered. She mainly concealed her money through the no-fun trick of not spending it, but subterfuge was sometimes necessary; she had inflicted moderate do-it-yourself damage to several pieces of exorbitantly expensive furniture, all purchased with a future, more modern residence in mind. She sometimes thought of buying a house while she could afford to, though that would entail explanations far more elaborate than scratch-and-dent sales, since everyone except Archer thought she was precariously balanced one or two rungs above plasma donors. There wasn't a strong argument, anyway, for acting quickly. Buffalo's real estate market had so far been stable—no boom before the recession, no bust during—and, despite her new weakness for high design, Sara wasn't convinced that she would take much pride in owning a home or much pleasure in maintaining one. She had always imagined buying a house with someone else, or pointedly
not
buying a house (or a home-entertainment system or a Baby Björn or a rake) with someone else. TJ had left her (and, presumably, other members of his seraglio) to get shockingly, hurriedly married, and Sara's on-the-town, wild-oats experiment had lost its sheen. She was letting herself become increasingly isolated. Before her mother arrived late this afternoon, she had passed not more than ninety minutes of the last ten days in spoken communication with the rest of the world, the majority of those minutes spent in fits-and-starts dialogue with a lethargic representative of an internet-service provider.

“But you're still doing some work for him?” Donna said.

“For Archer? Not too much at the moment; some research for his next novel.
The Second Stranger,
it's called. Pretty good title, I think.”

Donna shrugged.

“It's a weird little sophomore novel; I told him it should be called
The Second
—comma—
Stranger.
”

“I don't think that would work.”

“Well, no, I was joking.”

“You were joking just now or to him?”

“To him,” Sara said.

“I finally got around to reading the first one.”

Sara waited a moment. “Oh?”

“I didn't see any mistakes.” Alas, two were known to have slipped through; corrected, at least, for the paperback. “So you must have done good work, no surprise.”

Here was a time to change the subject. “But . . .”

“I'm sure it's very clever,” Donna said, “but that's all it is, you know.” She wrinkled her nose. “And so
proud
of its cleverness. I want to read books with . . . with some soul.”

“But, I think”—trying to keep a tremble out of her voice—“I think that develops toward the end, you know, as Bowman matures.”

“Tacked on,” Donna scoffed. “The scene by the old church, the hole where the stained glass used to be.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “The void!”

“That's not what it's supposed to mean.”

“I'm sorry, honey; I know he's your friend. And of course I'm glad he's giving you work. But I just don't see it.”

Sara stood up, tried to relax her neck muscles. “Should I make coffee?”

“I might survive half a cup,” Donna said, and excused herself to the bathroom.

Though some readers were more taken with
Eminent Canadians
than Donna Crennel was, the novel fell sacks short of earning back
its advance and was remembered, in suspicious company, on only one year-in-review list. The book, as goes the old joke, made quite a ripple. About six months after its publication in early 2008, Sara had tried to work that ripple line into an interview, a protracted interview conducted over e-mail with a man whose questions were written in a slurry, free-associative prose that Sara hoped stemmed from actual drunkenness. Archer, in one of his rare executive mandates, nixed the joke. Perhaps the ultrarich have to be especially on guard not to overindulge in kvetching and self-depreciation, or perhaps he was punishing Sara for not finding a home in the novel for his gather-my-singular-thought witticism.

It was probably for the best: self-depreciation about the book's reception would be, like the bulk of Archer's money, unearned, since a chasm roughly the width of three dozen press clippings and four thousand books sold in the United States and Canada separated Archer from truly overlooked novelists. And maybe, as Archer contended, he and Sara were indeed building a strong foundation. In his mind,
EC
—his penchant for initialism drove her nuts—was the kind of book that hip collegians, MFA candidates, and freelance graphic designers would want to be seen reading on quadrangles and subways, while eating paninis in Canadian museums. An accretion of fans would follow from these tastemakers, setting up a breakout second or third novel. “Diffusion of innovations,” he had proclaimed, settling the matter. Signs that this pattern was in progress, however, were more hunchy than empirical.

The good news was that Archer's contentment with the book's performance indicated contentment with hers. Probably his thinking was off on that head too. She knew there was more she could do to advance his career, more than the journalism she wrote competently but unspectacularly in his name or the Twitter and Goodreads accounts she managed for him spiritlessly and erratically. At the start, they had produced a quartet of personal essays, each infused
with sociological musings and undemanding historical research, but Archer tired of that before they had enough material for a collection, and Sara never came up with ambitious essay ideas on her own—or she did, but rejected them as unoriginal, untenable, and uninteresting. Her big managerial idea—a thicket of underdeveloped ideas, really—was that Archer should be launching literary journals, micropresses, film festivals, boutique record labels, pop-up galleries, medicine shows—it didn't matter what, just that he spearhead and bankroll a few presumably money-losing ventures that might generate feature articles, “get his name out there,” establish him as a Renaissance culture baron of the firing-on-all-cylinders type. She left these ideas undivulged, fearing he'd cotton to one of them and delegate all the work. He wasn't, after all, the firing-on-all-cylinders type; the metaphor would rarely fit even if one had in mind the engine on a small pressure washer.