Grub (22 page)

Amanda phoned in regularly with news of large crowds, successful signings, radio interviews, wining and dining. “I’m going to be on national television!” she exclaimed into the receiver one night.

“It’s three hours later here,” Eddie said.

“Need that beauty rest?” she’d asked sharply.

“No,” Eddie lied. “I’ve been getting up early. I’m working on a new book—something I’m really excited about, something that feels important.”

“Fantastic,” Amanda said, compounding his guilt with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm. “That’s great! Now we can all be on
TV
.”

“All?” Eddie asked, but she’d already signed off with a smooch sound that barely simulated a real kiss.

Eddie slept in the middle of the bed that night, clutching Amanda’s lemony pillow, able to smell but not touch her. His sleep made shallow by the alcohol that wore off just after midnight and rendered him insomniac, he rearranged himself and the pillow, reviewing Amanda’s words and telling himself that he would moderate his drinking as soon as she returned. At four he rose and did something that surprised him: he wrote a poem. It struck him as a good poem, though he knew it would be awful if read in the morning light. He pressed himself into a few more hours of sleep.

Shortly after he got up the next morning, he understood what Amanda had meant on the phone: she had one national morning show; Jackson, the other. In a moment of panic, Eddie pictured them both in Los Angeles, leaving their television studios, walking tan arm in tan arm to the beach. But, no, Jackson had been in a Chicago studio; only Amanda was in California. Still, Eddie wished that she’d invited him to go on tour with her and worried about what it meant that she hadn’t. And it wasn’t lost on him that his wife had known about Jackson’s television appearance even though they were separated by numerous states. They’d been comparing notes, if nothing else.

Eddie poured himself his earliest drink to date. After he drained it, he poured more whiskey into a flask. Sensing that Henry Baffler might make him feel better about his life, he headed out and caught the subway to the 125t? Street station.

R
ather than riding all the way into Grand Central, Andrew Yarborough disembarked the commuter train at the 125t? Street station. Most people he knew did not, and in fact would not, get off or on the train in Harlem no matter how many artists or former presidents set up lofts or offices in the neighborhood. And so he was surprised when he saw a familiar face on the platform. Andrew tried to place the young man but could not, and so was more relieved than irritated that the fellow strode past, looking too preoccupied by anger or dyspepsia to recognize the man of letters.

It was unlike Andrew to forget a name, but lately he had forgotten more than names. He’d missed more than one appointment and sometimes found himself standing in the market unable to remember what he had come to buy. Throughout his career, he’d often failed to meet deadlines due to procrastination or even malice, and many times he had
claimed
that a deadline had slipped his mind. But that had never actually been the case—not until this week, when he’d received a phone call asking for a book review he could not for the life of him remember agreeing to write. There on his desk sat the book—a meta-fictional detective story narrated by a deaf-mute protagonist—but he couldn’t remember how it had landed there.

It was this episode that had convinced him, finally, to see a doctor, which is how he came to be standing on 125t? Street, buying a bag of boiled peanuts while fending off a vocal young woman hell bent on selling him a pair of ostentatious knock-off sunglasses.

He hailed a taxi with little trouble and closed the door as the woman screamed, “you rich fuck.”

As he ascended in the Upper East Side elevator, he thought how ironic it was that he had just been called a rich fuck; he wished he had spent some of his earnings on better health insurance. During his hour in the plush waiting room he tried to ignore the other waiting patient: a drooling elderly man with blank eyes who was accompanied by a sad-looking, overweight daughter. To distract himself, he read the available magazines, including
The City
and some woman’s magazine with an attractive redhead on the cover. Finally, grudgingly, he lifted
The Monthly
from a glass side table and felt his blood pressure rise as he saw Chuck Fadge’s name on the masthead. He scanned the table of contents and saw Jackson Miller credited with a story about the travel destinations of well-known writers, as though any idiot couldn’t figure out that the Amalfi coast was a nice place to be if you could afford to stay above the crowds. Perhaps, he thought, a faulty memory was more blessing than curse.

The doctor was small and bespectacled. His head was as smooth as an egg, unblemished by lines, pocks, or even, Andrew noticed with small alarm, eyebrows. Andrew completed the series of word games, picture-grams, and jigsaws with which the doctor tried to puzzle him. The man nodded and took notes with a small pencil, but his face was inscrutable.

“That all I’m getting for my money?” Andrew joked.

“Follow me.”

The doctor led him through another door, which opened into what appeared to be a fully furnished, uninhabited apartment. Had it been a real residence, it would have rented by the month for tens of thousands of dollars. Andrew felt his anxiety grow: the doctor’s bill was going to dwarf his wife’s wardrobe budget.

The doctor handed him a hat, a ring of keys, and a book. “Pretend you’ve just arrived home. Put your things where you would if you lived here and then sit down to read.”

“This is absurd.”

“Perhaps, but like so many of life’s absurdities, necessary.”

Andrew placed the hat on a shelf and his keys in a drawer in the model kitchen, before sitting in a recliner with the book.

“Have you read it yet? My wife’s book club loved it.”

The doctor left, and Andrew soon found himself absorbed by a depiction of the sexual antics of the French court. It wasn’t the kind of book he would ordinarily open, but the prose was competent and, despite himself, he was caught up in the romantic quandaries of the main character. He closed his eyes and conjured up the buxom Libertine in a tightly laced corset, batting her eyelashes at him and whispering provocations, practically begging to be spanked for her saucy behavior.

He woke up when the doctor opened the door. “All right, Mister Yarborough. Please collect your hat and keys and return to my office.”

Andrew stood in the center of the faux apartment. He was sure he was in New York, but where and when he had no idea.

“Where am I? Where’s Felice?” he asked, looking around for his college sweetheart, a lovely girl from Lyon.

“Do you remember where you put the keys, Mister Yarborough?”

Andrew looked helplessly around the room.

H
enry Baffler settled happily into the Harlem apartment given to him, for a luxurious year, by the mysterious benefactor he still hoped might be J.D. Salinger. Though the size of the place made the possessions he’d acquired with the book advance seem all the more sparse, Henry believed that the airiness and light from the apartment’s nine large windows would do wonders for his writing. He was formulating the idea of an open book. Though he had yet to discover precisely what ‘open’ meant, or how it would translate into a literary form, he was certain that he’d found his next direction.

His concern was that the hunger he had loathed for all the months it had taken him to compose
Bailiff
was actually a creative necessity. Now that his pantry was reasonably well stocked, he worried that he would lose his momentum, that his edges would be blunted, that he’d become soft and corn-fed, fit for little more than hacking out legal thrillers or sea adventures. It was good to be eating well, but he vowed to restrict his calories should he find his sentences growing flabby.

Such were his thoughts when his doorbell sounded for the first time since he’d moved in. Despite promises of visits, none of his acquaintances had trekked up to Harlem, not even when the Museo del Barrio hosted an exhibit of Rivera, Kahlo, and Seranno—an event that lured quite a few lower Manhattanites into higher street numbers than they tended to frequent.

Eddie’s voice penetrated the intercom, and Henry buzzed him up.

Enjoying the novelty of having both a guest and something to serve him, Henry boiled water for tea and spiraled windmill cookies onto a plate. “I’m turning bourgeois,” he said over his shoulder.

“Henry, there’s no crime in a little caffeine and nourishment. You’re not exactly pigging out like Balzac, and even his sharpest critic was known to eat, drink, smoke, and fuck.” Eddie paused for Henry to catch the reference. “But for godsake don’t start devoting whole paragraphs to describing the corners of your apartment and the slant of your blinds.”

“Curtains,” Henry said. “I don’t have blinds. I have curtains.”

“I was just making a Robbe-Grillet joke. What’s this, The New Literalism?”

Henry laughed. “Never fear. Something else. Something, well, something open.” He lifted his arms over his head, then spread them wide. “Yet contained,” he added, pulling his arms closer a fraction of an inch.

“Open, yet contained.” Eddie eyed him, then walked over to claim a cup of the tea and three biscuits. “Sounds tricky.”

Henry felt a delicious panic. “Maybe,” he called out, “maybe the solution lies in variation.” He played Ravel’s piano trio, one of his several new
CD
s, on the cheap, portable player he’d bought. He listened standing, eyes closed, mentally book-marking the different treatments of the seventh note. By the time Henry opened his eyes, Eddie had finished the cookies and drained his tea.

“Terribly sorry,” Henry said.

“Don’t sweat it,” his friend smiled. “It’s part of your charm, and it beats staring at the blank screen.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got a book to start.”

“I came all the way up from Murray Hill,” Eddie said. “I just got here.”

Henry felt like a heel. “I appreciate it, I really do, and you can hang out if you want, but I need to work. You know how it is.”

“I used to,” Eddie said. “I remember feeling how you feel.”

“Why don’t you stay and hang out?” Henry asked, sensing that his friend was in some sort of writerly crisis, some version of what people mean by the generic term ‘writers’ block.’ “I like the idea of working with someone else in the room. That’s a neat idea actually: a series of stories all written with other people around. Could be very interesting to see the subtle effects of that, see if the presence of different sorts of people would influence tone and style.”

“You’re starting to sound like a poet,” Eddie said, adding quickly, “which I mean as a compliment, not how Jack means it.”

“What’s your opinion of the word ‘splay’?” Henry clamped a clean sheet of paper onto his typewriter and turned the canister, comforted by its familiar clicks. “Is that a word we can still use?”

I
t didn’t take long for Jackson Miller to become accustomed not merely to success but to having his opinion solicited. While he had not enjoyed the travel itself, he had relished the long lines of people wanting his signature on
Oink
, the laughter his puns elicited, the attractive women who lingered at the end of the evening. Now that he was back home, it was a rare day when he wasn’t contacted by a journalist or editor or nonprofit group asking for his thoughts on the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, the quality of Adam Richards’ radio book reviews, or, for that matter, the best sushi in New York or the political landscape in Afghanistan. National Public Radio interviewed him about his adventure submitting the Chekhov story, and, as he’d promised Amanda, he named the editors who’d not only failed to recognize but had deigned to criticize one of the finest short stories ever crafted.

After his triumphant book tour and swift rise up
The Times
’ list of bestsellers, he increasingly associated with a circle of other writers—men in their thirties, all possessed of some version of Jackson’s own name: Jack, Jake, Johnson, John, and Jonathan. These Jonathans often dined at Grub, in combinations of two or three, or occasionally the whole council. Jackson was gratified to observe that they were noticed, watched, eavesdropped upon.

Jackson had become who he’d planned to become on his ninth birthday—a vow he had renewed looking over the North Carolina mountains—and he never wanted to give it up. And so, with Amanda’s encouragement, which was often flirtatious but sometimes quite strict, Jackson began in earnest to write about Meindert Hobbema’s abandoned life of art. In mind of the small human forms the artist tucked into his landscapes, Jackson tentatively titled the new book
Hide and Seek
.

“Don’t read too much, just the basics,” Amanda had advised. “The important thing is to stack up some pages.”

He wondered if Amanda was making him her project because she’d given up on Eddie ever being the great man she could be the great woman behind. He knew better than to vocalize this thought, and the truth was that he was glad for the extra guidance and motivation. Amanda wouldn’t let him fail; he believed that.

Elegant variation was effortless work for Jackson, and, as always, the sentences came easily. He soon realized, though, that the sardonic tone that came to him more naturally than intentionally, and had worked so perfectly in
Oink
, was inappropriate for the new book. So he worked more conscientiously with his ideas, creating full-blown on the page the beautiful female main character for whom his artist-protagonist forsakes art for a desk job, and then used the events of his plot to blame her for the world’s loss in paintings. Jackson presumed this was a much better story than Hobbema’s actual biography. More than likely, the man had lacked artistic commitment from the get-go, was lazy, or had succumbed to the dull pressure of a new father-in-law or small-pursed uncle. Some people needed schedules dictated by others, or maybe the man hadn’t really cared for the smell of paint. Whatever the historical truth was, Jackson penned a romantic tragedy, delivered with a droll cynicism moderated by empathetic diction.

After turning down several invitations because he was busy with the book and with the Jonathans, Jackson at last agreed to have dinner with Doreen and her abominable fiancé. He figured he owed it to Doreen, and Whelpdale’s doings might provide fodder for an article and, possibly, a bit of amusement. Besides, even without formal training, Doreen was a great cook.

His former roommate did not disappoint: she served a first-rate Insalata Caprese, pepper-encrusted lamb shanks with a mint salsa, perfectly roasted potatoes and parsnips, and a simple custard-filled cake studded with pine nuts.

Jackson was struck by the genuine fondness Whelpdale exhibited for Doreen. He would quickly hoist up his large body whenever she approached or rose from the table.

“Southern upbringing,” he said apologetically.

“It’s charming,” Jackson said, as he considered recovering his own manners. “But aren’t you from Toledo?”

He briefly considered a column about the table habits and general levels of politeness of well-known authors—who’s a gentleman at dinner and who’s a real boor, that sort of thing—but dismissed it because it would likely get him in trouble with the Jonathans, one of whom had never encountered an entrée he didn’t consider finger food, and another who guarded his plate with his forearm as though he’d spent long years in maximum-security lockup. Instead, he offered the idea to Whelpdale, who pulled a small stack of index cards and a pen from his inside coat pocket and jotted down a note.

“Yes,” said the large young man, “it might be a good topic for my publication’s ‘Right Writing’ column. I’ll see if there’s someone I can assign it to.” He returned the cards and pen to his jacket pocket. “Say, Jackson, I don’t suppose you’d be interested in writing for me?”

Doreen set down a forkful of lamb and watched Jackson, fearful, no doubt, that he’d say something rude. As she made eye contact with him he was overwhelmed by fraternal love for this gold-hearted girl.

“I’d love to, naturally,” he said, “but my plate is full just now. So to speak, no pun intended. But I hear
ProProse
is a tremendous success.”

Whelpdale’s already formidable chest expanded as his posture straightened. “Well, I just hope that it’s helpful. That’s my mission in life: to help us poor sots who pick up the pen for our livelihood.”

Jackson couldn’t help himself. “So, you’re still writing fiction? Got anything coming out?”

Whelpdale was not flapped. “You know me; I’ve always got my irons in the fire.”

“Caff or decaff with dessert?” Doreen injected into the small pause. “And I hope you both left room.”

“Leaded,” Whelpdale said. “I don’t plan to retire early, and I always have room for your desserts.”

Pushing away the appalling thought of Whelpdale coupling with the pretty Doreen, Jackson asked him if he’d read Henry Baffler’s book.

“A work of genius,” Whelpdale exclaimed. “It’s wonderful.”

“Can I borrow it?” Doreen asked.

Whelpdale shook his head.

“You’re right,” Jackson said. “Poor Henry needs every sale he can get. I’m not going to loan mine out either.”

“Oh, it’s not that,” Whelpdale said quickly. “It’s just not the sort of thing Doreen would like reading.”

“Surely you don’t imagine me so feeble-minded that I’m capable of reading only beach novels and chick lit? If it’s a work of genius, I should read it.”

“Of course not. You have a perfect mind! It’s just that by work of genius, I meant that it’s impenetrable. Literally almost nothing happens in four hundred pages. And I can’t stand the thought of you associated with what Baffler calls the ignobly decent—not even on the page.”

Despite Whelpdale’s blatant flattery and the affectation of his manners and gestures—he’s no more a gentleman than I am, Jackson thought—his tone evinced sincere affection for Doreen.

“I’m afraid,” Jackson said, “that the reviewers are with you there.”

“Except for the anonymous reviewer in
The Monthly
,” Whelpdale said.

Jackson wondered if Whelpdale knew that it was he who had written the review. He hoped not. Real charity is anonymous, but, more important, Jackson wanted Henry to believe a neutral reviewer had really admired and tried to understand
Bailiff
. “Yes,” he said, “now
that
fellow understood the literary importance of what our friend is up to.”

“Or else,” said Whelpdale slyly, “he’s good to his friends.”

“Let’s hope the occasional good deed goes unpunished,” Jackson said, filling his mouth with pastry.