Amateurs (25 page)

“Crimean War,” he answered.

“Hello?”

“Third novel. On the Crimean War. I'm thinking 560 pages, swinging for the fences.”

“Well, we could talk about—”

“Florence Nightingale in there somewhere, but unnamed; she's just ‘the Nurse.' That's all I've got so far, but, you know, mustard seeds. So what's shakin'?”

“I'm calling to demand an audience with you.”

“Just a head's up, I'm about to drive into a tunnel.”

“But you can hear me?”

“For now.”

“I need to see you in person.”

“Hey, anytime.”

“Well, would—”

“Sorry, losing you.”

She expected “anytime” to mean something more like, “Anytime after we're back from Bali and the kitchen remodel's done,” but two mornings later she was on a flight to La Guardia. Everything had changed, a little, and she wanted everything to change a lot.

He had called early one afternoon in January, about three weeks after receiving the manuscript of
The Second Stranger.
Sara, microwaving a naanwich, had answered with a breathy, unsteady voice, as if winded from weeks of preparing her greeting's cheery nonchalance. Outside her kitchen window's linty screen and spotty glass, snow was falling in fat, wet flakes. “It's odd,” Archer had said, “I like this much less than the first book, but I absolutely know it's a better piece of work.” It wasn't the warmest praise he could have given her,
but it was sincere, and his sincerity was, as always, validating. They talked more about the book, though not as much as she had hoped; his brevity, as far as she could tell, didn't arise from discomfort. She had expected him to allude to the novel's personal subtext, to acknowledge, if only indirectly, that the lovesick narrator was her surrogate. There was none of that. At one point it became clear that he had missed something key to the book's conclusion and interpretation, and they entered an unresolved debate as to whether the book was too subtle or Archer's reading too inattentive, both parties taking the humbler and more diplomatic side, though perhaps without full conviction. He had practically nothing of substance to say. He intended to let the editor request any changes and had already passed the manuscript on to his agent, who was reportedly approving. “I mean, I don't think anyone's eyes are turning to dollar signs with this one,” Archer said, “but I think she digs it.” Sara hung up feeling heartened that Archer recognized the book's quality, but the about-face she had previsioned obviously wasn't forthcoming. He wouldn't gallantly surrender credit and copyright, nor would he pursue the status quo with enthusiasm. The book would sell even more limply than the first, and soon he would lose interest in the whole undertaking. Decades in the future, when his latest social-media enterprise or seawall-manufacturing concern was about to go public, or he was one of three futuristically tuxedoed producers accepting the Academy Award for Best Documentary, his early literary career would be little more than color for the late paragraphs of a business-section profile, a badge of youthful idealism.

So she had been surprised—
shocked
might be employed without hyperbole—when Archer called a month later to tell her he'd been short-listed for inclusion in “20 Under 40,” the
New Yorker
's forthcoming honor roll of notable young and youngish fictionists. “They do it every decade,” he had explained, superfluously, since Sara remembered when the first list came out in '99, “except the first
list came out in '99,” he added, “so it's more like a baker's decade.” He was mainly calling to prepare Sara for extra work. He didn't sound excited, and she couldn't tell if his neutrality was self-protective, as it would have been for her, or if he really didn't care. It seemed more like the latter, but why would someone orchestrate a man-of-letters sham if not to reap honors, awards, and status markers? (Archer's options for such things were restricted, since as a matter of principle, or to avert bad PR, he didn't apply for grants and fellowships and had made a vow, thus far hypothetical, to refuse any award that came with a cash prize.) She knew he
did
care—she remembered him asking if she thought the first book would be a hit, his intonation related to the one children use to ask about Santa's methods and reliability—but either his interest was waning or he was getting better at hiding it. At times, she understood him well enough to write as him, through him, but she had never unraveled precisely what he was after, why he had hired her. Was he just too lazy to put in the years it takes to maybe get good at something, and was it especially embarrassing to be a rich novice, a smooth talker without the chops to silence jealous skeptics? Could he only imagine himself as a fully formed minor genius, all semi-intellectual sprezzatura and sidelong euphony? Given his means, why didn't he tap someone with stronger credentials? Because he wanted her around?

Those on the short list had been asked to submit something for consideration in the special “20 Under 40” issue, so Archer's agent and Sara qua Archer refashioned what they agreed was the strongest section from
The Second Stranger.
Sara wasn't convinced that the excerpt stood on its own, an opinion she hoped would cushion the predictable slap of rejection. Her pessimism helped her preserve some degree of sanity while waiting for the magazine's response, but only some. Normally still-bodied, metabolically conservative, she was now full of nervous energy; by summer she'd lost six pounds by twitching alone.

Archer squeaked in as a dark horse. When he called with the news, Sara said “wow” several times in a row, and he responded with contrapuntal
yeahs;
it sounded as if they were rehearsing a piece of experimental theater. She asked if she should fly to New York to celebrate. “Sure,” he said discouragingly. She stayed in Buffalo, treated herself to a massage, redoubled her commitment to surfing the internet. She'd become a master of vanity searches by proxy, someone whose most humiliating insomniac hours involved spelunking to search-results pages well into the triple digits. She saw everything the internet had to offer about Archer and his, which is to say her, work. When the
New Yorker
list was announced to the public, at least seven internet commentators seemed to share her initial surprise at Archer making the cut. Most who went beyond mentioning his name were supportive or agnostic, but a few were unapologetically acrimonious. The pseudonymous wag who tweeted “Archer Bondarenko? Really? #agentblowseditor” is a fair representative of this second group. Sara spent several days trying to puzzle out Archer's position on the list. Drawing on her own perception and three or four hours killed on Google Analytics, Googlefight, Amazon, and other sites, she guessed that he was the list's eighteenth most famous honoree, his numbers trumped even by a woman with a debut novel still months away from publication. Nor was he at home with the prestigious obscurities. There were others on the list whose critical reputations were insecure, but they were among the comparatively popular writers; Archer was the only commercial laggard without a compensatory succès d'estime, reviews for
Eminent Canadians
having been divided, with praise never coming from critics of the first tier. Going over these facts, Sara started to think that Archer's inclusion was in some way capricious, that he didn't really belong on the list (which of course he didn't), and that the real, if widespread, honor would be exclusion, the premise and purpose of the list being too crass and bourgeois for the serious to take seriously.

And then, come June, there were her words in the
New Yorker,
there was the preening diaeresis over the second
o
in
coöperation
(a word she'd added to the excerpt only to see it so rendered), there, it could be imagined, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg perusing her words in the bath. It was a lonely sort of pride, pride that gave her a few days of renewed joy, then deliquesced into anger and anxiety. The magazine's imprimatur raised her regard for
The Second Stranger,
but now, maddeningly, she feared that her talents had reached their scale-model Everest while she was writing the book, that her artistic degeneration had started the moment she sent Archer the manuscript, and that if she ever got around to writing again under her own name, the results would be so inferior to her deputative work for Archer that, were the secret to get out, everyone would think she had truly been a proofreader and research assistant rather than an unusually autonomous ghostwriter.

Her flight to New York was delayed by a faulty backup transformer rectifier that concerned Sara's first-class neighbor not at all (“Let's take our chances!” he yelled). As a result, she didn't arrive at Archer's apartment till early evening. Something Indian was simmering on the stove, but Sara hadn't been invited to stay for dinner.

“What I'm leading up to,” she was saying, “is that the work—really the work is mine, mainly mine.” Already she was lapsing into the equivocation she had warned herself against. “And I don't think I can go on much longer not getting credit for it.” Though they had always sat together on the sofa when they worked here, this time she sat across from Archer on a plywood chair swathed as a point of design in bubble wrap.

“I can appreciate that.” He rubbed his patchily progressing beard. “I was planning to really highlight you this time in the acknowledgments.”

“That's not what I had in mind.”

“But I might say that, you know, I fed you all sorts of strong material for
TSS,
and you pretty much pissed on everything.”

“I did no such thing.” The words had come out too primly. “I tried to use what the book needed, and its needs evolved with its topos.”

“Its topos, yes. Well,” he sighed, “we're in the same boat.”

“That's just it, though: we're not.”

“We are in that this isn't the collaboration I had in mind either.”

“Archer, it's not a collaboration.”

“It is, Sara.” He partially concealed his disgusted expression by leaning over to tie his bootlaces. He was dressed in his full “heritage brand” costume, ready to chop wood in a catalog. He stood up and walked to the kitchen. The domesticity of the scene made it harder to stomach, made her pine to talk instead about some happily mundane thing: whether forks should be placed prongs up or prongs down in the dishwasher, whether Tucker and Clare had been bickering or just teasing each other at dinner the other night. “You say you don't get enough credit,” Archer said while stirring the curry, “and I'm sure that's true—”

“I don't get
any
credit,” she said, raising her voice to reach the kitchen.

“And yet you give yourself way too much.” He paused, filed the edges off his tone. “There's this team of translators, Richard Pevear and Laura Volokhovsky. They've been doing all the great Russian—”

“You don't have to fill me in, Archer. They're extremely famous.”

“I wasn't condescending to you,” he said, bringing the tasting spoon to his lips. “I didn't know how famous they were.”

“Very famous, and it's Larissa, not Laura. Larissa Volo . . . You have the last name wrong too.”

“But what is it?” He was adding a pinch of turmeric or something to the sauce.

“I can't remember. You're close, but off.”

He walked back to the sofa. “If they were extremely famous, you'd know the name. When you see the vice president on TV, you don't think, Oh, yeah, what's his name again, Bolden?”

“But it's a bad—”

“Biddle?”

“I get it. But it's a bad analogy because I have trouble with Russian names. When I'm reading a Russian novel I often don't consider how the names should be pronounced. I just remember what letters they include and keep track visually.”

“Your Russophobia is secondary to your skewed sense of who's famous.”

“Fine, they're famous in literary circles, though their
Anna Karenina
was an Oprah pick, so it's a big circle. The point is that you don't need to explain them to me.”

He leaned forward, held his mouth open, and widened his eyes to ask silently, sarcastically, if she was done. Then he said, “And the point I was about to make is that Pevear, according to an article I read, has an impressive facility for languages but doesn't have a full command of Russian. Laura—Larissa—does the initial line-by-line translation, and then he refines the English.”

“Without gravely compromising its fidelity to the original,” she said.

“Yes, right, good. And they consult, argue certain words, whatev.”

“Again, I know this.”

“I'm saying it's supposed to be like I'm Larissa and you're Richard. I give you the raw material, a kind of literal translation, and you refine my wheat into flour.”

“You're mixing metaphors. And I thought you said you were the director to my screenwriter. Which is completely different.”

“This is a new analogy,” he said. “And it was kind of like that at first, but then with
TSS
you went rogue. And fine, great, it's starting to work out; Gemma, my parents, they're all stoked. But it's not as if you're the only one with a grievance.”

Sara's chair popped when she recrossed her legs. “Haven't you had this stupid chair for, like, two years?”

“It's not stupid.”

“How is it that some of the bubbles are still unpopped?”

“They just came by to rewrap it.”

“They?”

“Yes. If you anticipate a lot of fidgeting, maybe choose another seat.”

She took a deep breath. “Look, I think things would be better for both of us if we—what I want to propose is that we share credit for the books.”

He narrowed his eyes. “In what way?”

“In the most conventional way. Gilbert and George, Lennon and McCartney, Sacco and Vanzetti.”