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E
ddie Renfros surprised himself, finishing his first draft of
Conduct
ahead of schedule. When he compared the experience to the exultant day he completed
Sea Miss
or even the quiet, proud moment he typed the final word of
Vapor
, he found that his happiness was watered down, the sense of satisfaction mixed with some more common substance. He wondered whether this marked a more mature stage in his life as a writer, or whether it was simply because he’d never felt passion for this book.

Still, it was an accomplishment: two hundred ninety-seven pages sat stacked next to the computer under a title page that bore his name. And there was something to the idea of story; this book had a plot. Yet it wasn’t completely inorganic. Despite his detailed outline and, under Amanda’s tutelage, his strict adherence to it, there had been discoveries. He hadn’t planned, after all, for the reader to suspect that the narrator’s promiscuous friend was, despite her promiscuity, really in love with the cellist all along. That had been suggested by the material itself; it had come the way that writing used to come for him—from the act of writing itself.

Of course the manuscript was a mess, full of many ordinary sentences and lines of dialogue that were mere filler for the more interesting, stylized dialogue he would weave in during revision. It needed to be curried with a very fine-toothed comb.

Though Eddie had finished the draft of
Conduct
and Amanda celebrated with him that evening, in general she seemed no happier with him. She was silent more often than not. Eddie knew that silence was reproach and that Amanda used it to conserve energy. “Just because you’re unproductive,” she’d once explained to him, “doesn’t mean you can drag me along for company.”

But now that he was productive, it seemed unfair of her to pout because his book needed revision. “Every book needs revision,” he said.

She tried to explain her mood away, to blame it on the fact that she was now preoccupied with her own work. But then one day he rounded the blue shoji screen and saw that the stack of his pages was gone. He sat, his hand resting on the spot where his novel had been, until he heard the door to their home open and the tips of Amanda’s heels clicking softly on the wood floor.

“Where is it?” he asked, projecting his voice over the screen but not shouting. “Where is it?”

He heard her sigh, soft and tired. “I gave it to your agent.”

Amanda knew that the book wasn’t ready for his agent. He had overheard her at parties and on the phone telling not just Jackson Miller but also Henry Baffler and Whelpdale, whom she loved to loathe, that her husband had written a book he would be unwilling to read. Should his agent accept the novel and then sell it—both events seemed far-fetched—everyone he knew would greet the publication date with private scoffing or a sad shake of the head.

Sitting there, his hand still where his pages had been, he imagined for the first time what his life without Amanda would be like. Not the vague fear of abandonment—that muted hollow terror he’d experienced before—but an actual conjuring of the days, some of them lonely, but all of them free of the tightness in his stomach, the creeping guilt of failure, the extra pair of eyes always on his work.

What he said was this: “Thank you. That should expedite things.”

She rounded the screen and looked at him as though his face was new to her. “I thought you might react differently. I’m pleased that you’re pleased.”

She smiled, and in that smile Eddie read recognition: they both knew that something had changed between them.

Over the next several days, Amanda’s willful defiance of his wishes—and her apparent disregard for his long-term best interests—cemented a transformation in Eddie’s feelings toward his wife. He loved her as madly as ever, but what had once given him joy now gnawed and festered. He felt wronged by her.

She sensed it, he could tell, though he couldn’t identify anything particular she said as specific evidence. But they no longer talked about books or music; they didn’t even gossip about their friends and acquaintances. Indeed all of their conversations, which became increasingly brief, centered on money, publishing, and the necessary quotidian details of shopping and errands and mail. For the first two years of their marriage, their relationship itself had afforded them many happy conversations in which they reviewed moments of their days at Iowa, their courtship, their honeymoon, their late nights during Eddie’s first book tour. Now their relationship was too dangerous to mention, as if naming it aloud would call forth its destruction. They had sex perhaps once every three weeks—a situation Eddie considered an abandonment of their vows.

Amanda was forever typing, typing, typing. When he finally reached the point where he had to confront her about it, in anguish accusing her of taking a cyber lover, she confessed that she was well into a novel—a fact Eddie knew should please him but instead frightened him. He fretted that her novel would be bad or would be very good—better than his—and he worried most of all that it would bring her enough money to buy her way out of not only their debts but their marriage. On the bleakest days, he told himself that would be for the best. He’d procure another copyediting position and marry a nice waitress with no materialistic tendencies or unbounded ambition.

While he waited for his agent to read
Conduct
, he idled away many of his days at the
NYU
library. Though he wasn’t able to read with much concentration, he preferred sitting among strangers than under Amanda’s resentful gaze or hearing her fingers clacking away on the keyboard. As he browsed the stacks, he began to think about writing some nonfiction—a magazine piece or a review, perhaps. Something to keep his name in circulation. Anything other than a novel. He started a piece on the phenomenon of being ‘post cool,’ thinking he might place it with one of the magazines marketed to men moving into and through their thirties. In a better mood, he could have written up the piece happily and easily, could have written with the light touch that had made his column in the University of Wisconsin paper such a hit. But pressure had ruined him; he belabored every word and abandoned the essay by the fourth paragraph like the sinking ship that it was.

It was that night, the very moment he crossed the threshold, that Amanda showed him Jackson Miller’s new essay, which had just come out in
The Monthly
. Eddie dropped his backpack and sat at the dining-room table to flip through the magazine. The piece chronicled Jackson’s brushes with famous authors, including the time he’d “borrowed” Denis Johnson’s swim trunks and the time Norman Mailer extinguished a cigar on the toe of his shoe. The litany of literary misbehavior concluded by describing the drunken night Jackson had felt up the chunky wife of a Pulitzer-winning novelist in a diner booth and later had agreed to tackle Richard Ford for twenty dollars but had managed only to fall at his feet.

“I remember that guy’s wife,” Eddie said, hoping to catch Amanda’s attention. “After her husband won the Pulitzer, she made him introduce her as ‘also a novelist’, though I don’t think she ever wrote anything for adults. He even had to put it in his bios. Now that’s whipped.”

“Did I tell you about Jackson’s piece in next Sunday’s
The Times
?” Amanda asked. “He got hold of the iPod lists of well-known writers and analyzed them in relation to their work. He sent me an advance copy. It really is hilarious. You won’t believe what some people listen to!”

“Greasing the wheels in anticipation of his publication date.” Eddie heard the gloom in his tone and tried to lift it. “Actually, I’m working on an article, too. For a glossy, I should think. It’s about being post-cool.”

“I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to.”

“I figured you weren’t interested. Why didn’t you ask?”

“I was afraid to, Eddie. It would have seemed like reminding you that, well, you know.”

“That we’re still broke and facing another crisis? That I’m a failure as a provider?” He pushed back his chair with intentional drama, moved into the living room, and sank into the sofa. “At least you’d have appeared interested in me.”

Amanda started to reply but waited. After she sat down, facing him across the coffee table, she asked, “Do you think you can place the piece? There was that book last year, you know, written by that journalist, on how you can’t be cool after you have kids.”

“Well, this is ‘post-cool with no kids’, not ‘uncool with kids’. Different thing, and, anyway, it’s not like things don’t get published just because they’re not thoroughly original in every way.”

“Maybe Jackson could hook you up with Chuck Fadge, help you place something in
The Monthly
?”

“This isn’t right for Fadge. And I’d rather do things on my own, without begging anyone for help.”

“Jack’s not ‘anyone’. He’s our friend. That’s one of your problems, Eddie.” Though her words cut, there was no edge to her voice. “Only the very strongest men are self-made. You should use any means of help possible.”

“Because I’m weak.”

“Don’t be offended. That’s not how I meant it.” Exasperation tinged her words now, but, still, she didn’t seem angry.

“You’re right. I’m the sort of person who needs all the help I can get. But, really, this piece isn’t right for
The Monthly
.”

Amanda smiled a victor’s smile and said, “Because it’s unfinished or barely started?”

Eddie didn’t want to answer. The article was barely begun and would never be finished, and they both knew it. He groped for another angle to direct their fight. “Amanda,” he said at last. “Are you always regretting that I’m not more like Jackson? If I had his peculiar talent, we’d likely be coming into a lot more money, I don’t doubt. But then I wouldn’t have my talent. And, frankly, I wouldn’t trade the one for the other.”

“That’s ridiculous. And just to prove it, I’ll never mention Jackson Miller’s name again.”

“Now that really
is
ridiculous.”

“Then let’s just drop this whole subject. Anyway, my book is nearly done, so maybe I’ll save us both.”

“You say ‘us both’ instead of just ‘us’. As though we aren’t a unit, as though our fates are separate.”

“Really, Eddie! I might as well have married a goddamn poet.” Now obviously furious, she left the room.

Eddie knew that their union was chewing its own foundation, even that it was for the best, in the way that the inevitable often seems like it’s for the best. Yet he also believed that money, if he was the one who earned it, could still save the marriage. He believed that if he could publish a successful book, he could win back Amanda’s love. He gave up the short-lived idea of writing articles and began to consider ideas for a new novel. As much as Amanda would like to be rich, she valued prestige above wealth. She would choose Eddie over Jackson, even if Jackson’s book was a bestseller, so long as Eddie had the more important reputation. If he could be short-listed for a major prize, Amanda’s heart would be back on his side. Again he weighed a historical novel. Maybe the Hobbema book wasn’t a bad idea. He vowed to read the literature from the Frick the next time Amanda was out of the apartment.

A
full week after the initial phone calls suggesting that his novel would soon be at the center of a bidding war, Jackson Miller still lacked a firm offer. He began to revise his expectations. His initial plan had been to pay off his debts, leave Doreen with a few extra months rent, and buy and furnish his own place. Perhaps also a home in the country or, better still, in Europe. After those interminable six days, he would have been relieved to just pay off most of his credit card debt, square things with Doreen, and buy some Italian shoes and a really good steak.

Even with his cell phone in his pocket and set to ring loudly as well as vibrate, he felt anxious away from his home phone and his email, which he checked hourly even though he knew that good book news always arrives by phone. He limited his calls to his agent to once a day, but this was not an easy discipline. For the first time in his life, his confidence felt brittle, like dry earth that could be washed downslope by sudden rain.

It was during the night of the fourth day of this misery that he re-read Margot’s email about the sale of her book over and over. For a moment, a short but whole moment, he felt only happiness and respect for her. In the next moment, he felt angry that she still hadn’t set a date for him to visit. Then he decided that what he wanted more than anything was to sell his book for stacks of money so that he could sweep Margot off her feet—her pedantic asshole of a father be damned—and take care of her so that she could write her little books and mother their children and keep him from becoming the awful person he knew he was capable of becoming.

“I’m worried about your mental health,” Doreen told him on the fifth day.

After telling Doreen to go to hell, he phoned Amanda, who wasn’t home. He told himself that was a good thing, that she would only get him into trouble with his friends, with himself, and with the world.

On day six, his agent sounded annoyed when she said, “There’s no need to check in. You know that I’ll call you the second I hear.” Later that day, she offered to give the editors a deadline. “I can call this thing in,” she said. “There’s some risk, but the outcome will probably be the same either way. They either want the book or they don’t.”

Jackson asked her to hold off, promised to calm down, and drank himself nauseous. He didn’t make any phone calls the next day, which he spent on the stained futon sofa, sipping ginger ale and nibbling saltines to cure his hangover and nourish his self-pity. On Monday, recovered fully from the hangover if not the self-pity, he phoned his agent. “Let’s call it in, risk be damned.”

“That’s my boy. I’ll set the deadline for Thursday. I’ll call you Thursday at five with the good news.”

That night he was back at the vodka when Margot phoned. “I’m having lunch with my editor and my agent tomorrow. I thought we might take a walk or something after.” Her voice was still hesitant and girl-like, but Jackson thought he could hear something new: the lilting confidence of success.

“If you can squeeze me in,” he said and heard her tinkling laugh.

“Doreen,” he was saying even as he hung up. “You still dating that lawyer?”

“Must you call him ‘that lawyer’ every time? I might start thinking that you’re jealous.”

“My sincerest apologies. Of course he has a name. Calcium or Limestone or something, isn’t it?”

“Dolomite. Mark Dolomite. I wasn’t so sure at first—just thought it would be nice to go out with someone who has real furniture and new clothes and a job he goes to every morning. I thought it would be a refreshing change.” She gave him a pointed look. “But now I quite like him. He’s not witty, exactly. You know lawyers. Their brains are, well, specialized.”

“The intellectual version of the tennis forearm on a scrawny body?”

“But he’s sweet and really a lot of fun.”

“You know me, I don’t judge a person by looking into his heart but by looking at his bookshelves and
CD
collection.”

“Gotcha. You’d approve of his music. He listens to a lot of the same awful music you do.”

“What about his bookcase?”

Doreen sighed. “He doesn’t have one. Why are you asking anyway?”

“Does he have books?”

She shook her head.

“Doesn’t he even read books on the airplane?”

“Magazines, most likely. Why are you taking such an interest?”

Jackson stood behind the futon sofa and massaged his roommate’s shoulders. “Well, dear, I was wondering if you might stay over there tomorrow night.”

“You slut!” she exclaimed, but her relaxed shoulders suggested only feigned interest.

“Not like that, not this time. This is a nice girl, and I’m serious about her.”

“You aren’t still picking on that sweet pixie-looking girl from the bookstore, are you? Jackson, are you?”

“She has a name, too, just like your Dolomite. And I’m not picking on her. She’s not helpless. She happens to be publishing a novel, I’ll have you know. I admire the hell out of her. At least I’m a good enough person to recognize she’s a much better person than I am. I should get some kind of credit for that.” He squeezed the back of Doreen’s neck, working his way up and down.

“You are serious, aren’t you?” Doreen pulled forward, out of his grip, and turned to look at him. “I guess I’d better check the temperature in hell and the flight path for pigs.”

Jackson took the vodka from the freezer and refilled his small tumbler. “I was serious about you, too, you know.”

Doreen rolled her eyes. “I’ll stay over at my beau’s tomorrow if you promise not to have a hangover for your big date. And don’t call your agent until she calls you.”

“Of course, you’re as right as ever.” Jackson smiled at his pretty roommate, pleased to realize that he was no longer interested in anything other than her friendship. “Oh, and Doreen, ask Mr. Dolomite if he’d buy a book about cut-throat, bed-hopping, ecstasy-taking Wall Street types. Say if he saw it in an airport bookstore near the magazines and it was titled
Oink
. For instance.”

“For instance,” she repeated.