Grub (19 page)

W
ith the exception of the horrible night her father got drunk with Quarmbey and Frank Hinks, Margot had found his demeanor greatly improved since they’d turned in his book. Everyone in the house had been relieved when his editor accepted the manuscript. No doubt her father’s pride was hurt because it had taken the woman two months to get around to reading it and because she’d told him that the modest advance initially mentioned had been further reduced after in-house discussions. The editor had promised her father, though, that they “would make money.”

Margot was unsure whether it was a sign of softening or weakening that her father had agreed to this. He even said that it was better this way, better to have some of the money up front and the bulk of it later. She didn’t doubt that the speedy publication schedule was keeping him in better humor than he might have been in otherwise, and she’d smiled when he told her that the book needed only the lightest of copyedits, that it was virtually without error. In her work on the galleys, Margot found only three small mistakes, and one of those had been introduced by the editor.

Since that awful night with Quarmbey and Hinks, her father had been reasonably nice around the house, even to her mother, and one Sunday after reading the ongoing dispute over Quarmbey’s review and Fadge’s response in the letters page of
The Times
, he apologized, in his way, for his comments about Margot’s writing.

“Of course I know you wouldn’t really write a novel about syphilis sufferers in Birmingham,” he said.

“Actually, Dad, it’s not such a bad idea.”

Such extreme alarm overtook his face that Margot immediately admitted that she was kidding. “No, actually, I’ve started a novel set on the coast of Maine. There are only three characters: an elderly man, a boy, and a seagull.” She watched her father carefully to see if he was remorseful enough over his cruel remarks to let this opportunity for sarcasm pass.

“Margot, there’s something I haven’t wanted to mention but which you will eventually need to know.” He folded his paper and removed his reading glasses.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I’m beginning to forget things.”

“You’ve always been forgetful.”

“No, Margot, I haven’t.”

“Well, eventually one’s brain is so full of facts that a few of them have to go.” Margot lifted the corners of her mouth, tried to lighten her words. “But you should go see a doctor, just to reassure yourself.”

“Do you think I could have saved more money over the years? I mean, in one way I might have been able to, but it’s hard when you’re self-employed. I’ve had to buy our health insurance, save for my retirement, pay for your college.”

Margot flinched at his suggestion that he had paid for her education. She’d won and kept a full academic scholarship in her undergraduate years and had had a research assistantship while getting her Master’s. Throughout, she’d paid most of her living expenses—all but a few hundred dollars here and there when her father remembered—by working, likely at the expense of her learning. Because of this, there were holes in her education—books she should have read but had not.

“We haven’t much but this house,” her father continued his lament, “and it would kill your mother to leave it.”

“Dad, I honestly don’t think it would. She often talks about moving into a place that requires less work. She says she’s planted enough flowers and cooked enough meals for the rest of her life. She’d like to move to the southwest, the harmonic convergence place or somewhere like that.”

“I assure you that that would kill me. Besides, your mother just says that. Despite all her crystals and what-not crap, she couldn’t stand to live more than an hour from New York. Just tell her she’ll wrinkle up in the dry desert air, and I guarantee she’ll never mention New Mexico or Arizona again. Anyway, my point is that I don’t know what will happen to us if I’m no longer able to make a living with my pen. And that’s why I want you to think long and hard about the journal we discussed.”

“Oh, Dad, it’s just that there are so many of them.” Margot heard new maturity in her voice—she was talking not as adolescent to parent but as adult to adult, writer to writer. Fatigue tinged her even tone.

“Not one of them worth its salt, though, not one of them with the right editorial vision.”

Margot stood behind her father, wrapped her arms around his thickening neck, and kissed his cheek, smelling his most recent cigar and the one before that. “I promise I’ll think about it.” Again her voice sounded older to her, older and a little tired.

“That’s all I ask, and I appreciate it. I know that I’ve made you something of a martyr, but I want you to know that much of my literary life has been drudgery, scribbling words to make ends meet. It’s not something I can keep doing, and it’s not a life I want for you. A writer should only have to write when he feels like it, when he actually has something to say. And I’m ready to really edit. If it goes well, we can add a small press, so we can publish our friends.”

Since her father had passed up the chance to make a crack about her work, she refrained from saying, “But I thought people publishing their friends was part of the problem.”

Over the days that followed, her father continued to be solicitous, and even kind. Margot was not so stupid or naïve as to believe he was a changed man, but she did think his recent knocks had softened him, and certainly she enjoyed their more harmonious domestic life. If she could launch the journal he wanted and if it could succeed, then perhaps the tranquility would continue. And so she did as she had promised: she considered the proposal. Setting aside the Maine novel, which was causing her trouble because she could not figure out how to account for the presence of a solitary orphan boy on the rocky island, she researched the world of literary journals and magazines. From website to website, she saw the usual writing-program suspects everywhere represented. And she read the appalling web-published efforts in flash fiction side by side with the desperate appeals for donations. The cross-breeding of editors, writers, journals, and links sickened her in the same way as would staring at the progeny resulting from long inbreeding.

She emailed Jackson about her quandary, which elicited the speediest response she’d ever received from him: “Save your money. Just write your next book. Let them publish you and not the other way around. And come see me soon. I’m surrounded by idiots. I’m lonely for you. I’m becoming someone I don’t even like.”

They weren’t right for each other on paper, no matter what her mother’s charts proclaimed, but she knew Jackson was fond of her. Margot pictured herself at his side, imagining both of them with money in the bank and books on the shelves. Yet each time she tried to still the image, to hold it in her mind and see it clearly, it went grainy and faded out.

She approached her mother, who advised her to go ahead and extend the invitation for Jackson to visit. “I’m playing my cards with your father, and he’s unlikely to ever be in this good a mood again. He certainly won’t be after he reads his reviews.”

It was a good idea, Margot decided, to see Jackson in another setting, to determine if their affection was transferable or belonged only to the city. She had never seen him anywhere else.

H
enry Baffler had saved his manuscript from the fire, but he had lost everything else beyond the clothes he was wearing and his cash-empty wallet. In the confusion, he had even lost track of the beer and bread that had occasioned his excursion. Faced with seeking a shelter cot, he phoned Eddie Renfros.

Henry had worried that Eddie had invited him to stay without first asking his wife, and Amanda’s greeting had been a little cool, even as she’d fluffed guest pillows into clean cases. Yet she seemed genuinely enthusiastic when they saw the story on several television news shows: “Local writer risks life for novel”, and “Would-be novelist risks all for book”.

“I’m not a would-be novelist,” Henry objected, but he laughed at the footage of him pulling his manuscript from its corduroy swaddling as the firefighter’s smile smeared into disapproval.

Even
The Times
covered the event, including with the story a photo of Henry, flat on his back on the inflatable trampoline, manuscript lifted triumphantly toward the camera. The three writers laughed themselves hysterical.

For two days, Henry enjoyed the Renfros’ hospitality, which included the sizeable pleasures of sweetened coffee, good water pressure, and hearing Amanda pad around in bare feet. The sofa pulled out into a bed more comfortable than Henry’s own, and he realized that a clean apartment with hardcover books and
CD
s and nice things on the wall calmed his mind. New stories tickled his brain, exciting but soft like feathers. On the third day, however, when Henry remembered to phone his absentee roommate, he found out that he was planning to tell his Southern Baptist family he was living with his girlfriend. Henry realized the dire nature of his situation.

“I’ve lost everything!” he said to Eddie that morning. “I’ll never find such a cheap and easy living arrangement. My clothes weren’t much, but they were my clothes. And my books—and the years of handwritten margin notes. And my copies of
Swanky
.”

“Henry,” Eddie said kindly. “Is there anyone you can email or call? Family that could help out?”

The last time Henry had seen his brother, he’d just lost the condo flanked by stone lions, lost their grandparent’s furniture store, and relapsed after thirty days in rehab. “I’d rather starve,” he told Eddie.

“People always say they’d rather starve, but as soon as their stomachs growl, well, the call doesn’t seem as hard to make.”

“That’s people, but you may have noticed there’s something wrong with me. I actually would rather starve than speak to my brother. He can’t help me anyway. There’s no one I can call.”

“The starvation outcome seems increasingly likely, Henry, unless you can find a job quick. You and I are alike in one sense: no one warned us that writing is now a gentleman’s profession, an occupation only for those who don’t need to make money.”

A series of images of himself at work blinked across Henry’s mind, clicking in and out as in a child’s viewfinder: screwing in the grounds holder of an espresso machine, spreading mayonnaise on a slice of white bread, handing ticket stubs back to cinema goers, netting goldfish to transfer into a portable plastic bag.

“Maybe now that the book is done I can spare the time,” he said.

Amanda, who had been watching the street from the window, chimed in. “Is your novel completely finished? Yes? It’s obvious then: you saved your bailiff and now maybe he can save you. You’ve got to query agents right away. I’ll help you research some.” Just before the doorbell sounded, she added, “Jackson’s here.”

“I’m sorry to come over uninvited,” Jackson said as he entered the room. “But I wanted to talk to Henry. I think he’s got to strike while the iron is hot.”

“Precisely what I was just saying,” said Amanda.

Jackson and Amanda helped Henry compose a query letter on Amanda’s computer, while Eddie, drinking in the living room, shouted occasional comments across the blue shoji screen.

“Should I say much about the nature of the book? Maybe hint—only hint—that it deals with the ignobly decent?” Henry asked his friends.

Eddie called out, “Maybe you should just say that it’s a realist novel about a court worker in New York. You know, keep it simple.”

“You need to make it sound even more interesting than I’m sure it is,” advised Amanda.

“I know. I’ll just say that I’d like them to consider a novel of modern life, the scope of which is in some degree suggested by the title.” He paused, liking the idea. “I wish I could tell them how close the manuscript came to conflagration, plead with them to save from obscurity the book I saved from oblivion.”

“That’s exactly what you have to do,” Jackson said. “Include clippings, for godsakes. Name the
TV
stations that covered you.”

“Wouldn’t that be tacky? I couldn’t do that.” As he contemplated the idea, Henry’s neck heated, the warmth spreading up each side and climbing over his jaw and into his cheeks.

“Oh, hell.” Clearly exasperated, Jackson asked Amanda for the phone and took it around the screen.

While he was gone and Amanda rummaged for scissors to cut out
The Times
report, Henry searched the internet for Clarice Aames. There were several websites paying her homage, but Henry was disappointed to discover that none of her fiction was available online. He would have to write to the editor of
Swanky
and get his copies replaced.

“What are you doing?” Jackson asked when he returned.

Henry closed the browser.

“Never mind,” Jackson said. “I just got off the phone with my agent and asked her if she’d heard about the writer who saved his book from the fire on New Year’s Eve. She actually saw your jump on late-night news.”

Henry shrugged.

“She loves the story.”

“But she hasn’t read it,” Henry said.

“Not the book, the story. She loves the story. Fantastic publicity, she said. Anyway, she wants to read your manuscript. Right away—an exclusive. We can take it over so she can read it while you’re waiting on the other queries, which you are going to let Amanda write for you. No ignobly decent crap, and we’re certainly not going to call extra attention to the title.”

Henry smiled at the idea of an exclusive; he wouldn’t need to borrow the money to copy the manuscript.

Jackson walked him through the cold, sunny day to a large office building in midtown, joking that he should take an ad out, à la Whelpdale, as “fiction security” or “the novel guard”. Jackson laughed at his own tag line: “Call him when it’s your only copy.”

After Jackson delivered his name to the security desk, they were issued clip-on badges and allowed to cross the shiny-floored lobby and board the elevator for the eleventh floor.

Though the building was grand, the office had been subdivided with cheap screens to accommodate all four agents who formed the agency. Jackson introduced Henry to Suzanne Reznick, a middle-aged woman dressed in the print skirt and tinkling silver-and-bead earrings of a younger woman. She had interesting eyes, somewhere between green and hazel. Henry tried to invent a word for the color.

“Call me Suze,” she said, shaking his hand. She wrote down the Renfros’ telephone number and Henry’s email address and told him she’d be in touch.

She hugged Jackson, kissed him on both cheeks, and told him to phone the next day. “We have so much to talk about. First serial rights, for starters, and our foreign rights person is working on the Asian markets now.”

“Can you find your way back to Casa Renfros?” Jackson asked when they were back outside.

Henry grinned. “You know me, man on the street.”

That night, Jackson returned with pizzas and bottles of Chianti. His high spirits infected everyone but Eddie.

“I just can’t believe,” Eddie said to Henry, “that you have had to struggle so hard and in such squalor only to lose everything.”

Amanda glared at her husband. “But of course, to every man of mettle comes an opportunity, and Henry’s has arrived. I have a superstitious faith in
Bailiff
. Henry, I only hope you won’t forget us when you’re famous.”

“I’ll never forget my friends,” Henry said, enjoying the pleasant sting of young wine on his tongue.

Jackson set down his third piece of pizza crust, refilled his glass, and crossed his legs. “So then, Amanda, you’ve read about the days and joys of our bailiff?”

Amanda smoothed her hair and held her smile. “I haven’t yet had the pleasure. I’m sure that when I do my faith will no longer be superstitious.”

“Well, Henry,” said Eddie, “I hope that your success will be long lasting. That’s what I wish for you, that your book will stay on the shelves. To have had even a small reputation and to have outlived it, that’s the worst. It’s like anticipating your own death.”

“Slow down on the grape juice.” Amanda spoke sharply to her husband.

“Thinking about my recent adventure,” Henry said, “I find it funny as hell to picture you guys at the morgue identifying my charred body. Imagine the news stories then: ‘Deluded and poverty-stricken writer overestimates the value of his unpublished novel’ and so on.”

“That’s horrible,” Amanda said, but she laughed.

“You’d have even ranked a cartoon in
The City
and been memorialized on the ulcer website,” said Jackson.

“What’s ulcer?” Henry asked.

“A bunch of bad writers who’ve chosen to blame the literary establishment rather than their own shoddy prose for the fact that they’re unpublished. Their name stands for the Underground Literary Coalition for the Elimination of Revision or Reification or some such.”

“It is true, you know,” Eddie meted out his words, “that many very fine books go unpublished. It’s not always a function of shoddy prose. It’s the market. The chain stores control everything now.”

“I hope it isn’t Realism that they want to eliminate,” said Henry, “unless they mean Realism in the old sense of the word.”

“Anyway,” Jackson continued, “these ulcer guys—and it is mostly guys, surprise, surprise—did put me on to a terrific short story by someone I’ve never heard of. Clarice something.”

“Clarice Aames,” Henry said. “Is there a new story?”

“You like her, too?” Amanda removed the empty pizza boxes to the kitchen.

It struck Henry that her smile carried some sort of riddle. He’d enjoyed the domestic calm her ordering of the apartment had yielded, and it had been long enough since his last girlfriend that her presence aroused him. But she most definitely wasn’t his type. In her enigmatic smile, though, she seemed more interesting than the glossy what-you-see-is-what-you-get female he’d always taken her to be. She still wasn’t his romantic type, but he suspected there was something more under the surface. He suspected that she might be worth writing about.