Grub (30 page)

T
here hadn’t even been a campus interview—just the one in the cattle-call pit and then the small surprise of the telephoned job offer, not tenure track, but permanent so long as she held up in the classroom. So Margot saw Rebuke, Illinois, for the first time when she arrived with a car full of her belongings. Driving in, she had been disheartened by the dreary two lane highway peppered with sex shops, hunting stores, and a single behemoth club grocery. Yet the town itself sat on a river, and there was a charm to the old albeit cheaply constructed houses. Rebuke could be walked end to end easily. There would be little, other than her students, to distract her from her work. The teaching load would be heavy, she understood this well, and her nights would be filled reading uninspired compositions about capital punishment and cigarettes and the electoral college and the virtues of sunscreen. She realized already, though, that it would be better to feel as though she had too little time than too much of it.

She taught sincerely and well. She drank coffee with her colleagues and occasionally tested a romance with a nice man in another department. She wrote and she published, sometimes in relatively obscure periodicals, but not infrequently in the country’s most prestigious literary magazines. She did not read the other stories in these journals, though, and instead retreated to the eighteenth-and nineteenth-century novels she had always loved. Not only did she not attempt to write another novel, she determined that she would never write another book.

But the day came when she was contacted without warning by an editor at a university press. He had seen and loved some of her stories and wanted to collect her work into a volume. She agreed after he promised that she wouldn’t have to give any readings and that she would have veto power over the cover art and title. As it turned out, she liked the jacket design presented to her: a simple black and gray graphic with the words
Bend, River, Bend
.

Encouraged by her colleagues, including the kind souls who had interviewed her and recognized her as one of their own, Margot earned her
MFA
through a low-residency program. She paid her tuition, submitted via email stories that had already been anthologized in
Best Midwestern Short Stories
, and endured wrong-headed suggestions for revisions offered by the energetic, barely published writer assigned as her mentor. With the terminal degree in hand and a new book in print, Margot was promoted to a professorship and awarded the tenure that would allow her to spend the rest of her career at Rebuke College.

Still a person who loved, perhaps above all else, reading and working with words, Margot was content. On those rare nights when she drank a little too much sherry, she sat in her bay window, listened to the passing river, and imagined herself as the heroine of one of the novels she loved: beautiful, well-spoken, and happily chaste.

A
s a final payment, and to secure the consequence-less evacuation of his contract with
The Monthly
, Jackson penned a loving tribute to Chuck Fadge, praising his balanced encouragement of aspiring young writers, crediting him with far more influence than he in fact commanded, and lauding his silly compendium.

As a final effort to help good-hearted Doreen, he fervently argued, via phone and email, that she publish under the name she had been born into. But, alas, her incomprehensible love and respect for Whelpdale overpowered her slightly feminist upbringing. Both of her books were to be published under the name Doreen Whelpdale.

“It will help sell his how-to books,” she explained. “You of all people should understand the financial component of my decision.”

Despite his good effort to do the right thing by Doreen, Jackson no longer much cared. He realized, albeit somewhat sadly, that friends such as these were of the past. There were a few people in every life who were original casts. Amanda was one, and he could admit that there would never in his life be a replacement for Margot Yarborough or for his crusty old friend Eddie Renfros. Other people were, no matter how pleasant, interchangeable. Perhaps when he and Amanda started a family they would hire a down-to-earth nanny who thought ill of no one and whose eyelashes had a girlish flutter. She would be their new Doreen. But the real Doreen wasn’t worth the price of being linked to Whelpdale’s how-to industry, which preyed on the hopes of aspiring writers. Jackson could have endured a connection to the “Thong” imprint, but not that. He had to let the association fade.

No doubt the organizers of the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference had sent him the invitation in some vain hope for generosity and nostalgia—past participant wins major literary prize—and indeed the director sounded disbelieving as Jackson mentioned possible dates for his short layover.

“We appreciate this so much!” she said, in a way that forced him to think of a word every writer loathes as much as utilize: enthuse. “Really, any day works for us. Any day at all.”

“Awesome,” he said. “Your conference rocks.” He had no idea if the woman knew he was insulting her.

He’d planned to bring Amanda, to return with her as his wife and not Eddie’s, and yet he found himself relieved when she was called away to Los Angeles. Though her agent had warned that calls from the West Coast meant less than any other calls in publishing, the film option for
The Progress of Love
had come to fruition. It was unlikely that the director would actually use the screenplay Amanda was working on, but she would in any case be paid handsomely for the effort.

“I’ll join you on Saturday,” Jackson had promised, booking a coast-to-coast flight from Charlotte. The New South, he thought, the inkling of a new novel crawling across his inner eye.

The Outlook Bar had been packed for his reading, drawing regional residents and tourists as well as the conference goers. Abiding by his publisher’s sound advice, he’d read only early sections from his most recent book. He’d smiled widely during the signing and offered encouragement and occasionally suggestions of tangible assistance to the most attractive female conference participants. He was pleased to see, though, that not one of the women could compete with Amanda for more than an hour or two. The place was lucky she’d ever stood in the room.

It was much later, out on the deck, that Eddie Renfros approached him. The co-ed Eddie had trotted out to the conference was more young than pretty. She looked eager during the introductions but then, perhaps knowing her place, stepped away to look out at the view.

The two former friends started with small talk. Jackson knew that he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t help asking Eddie what he was working on.

“I’m dead as a novelist, and I’m happy enough to attend my own funeral. No, it’s poetry, wine, and young women for me from here on out. The youngest I can get away with, anyway.” His laugh was good natured, but the edge of one drink too many serrated the surface of his voice. “And I read more these days. To wit: ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made of, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.’ There was a time when a way with words was enough, you know. Anyway, I’ve got a chapbook coming out with a publisher who’s doing some really interesting things. And a real volume, too, with a university press.”

Jackson tried his weight against the rail as the evening moon passed behind a cloud. “If you’ve found your calling, then I’m happy for you.”

“And what of our old friend Baffler? Has he found his calling?” Eddie asked.

Jackson almost said
Amanda saw him
but caught himself and replied, “He’s been spotted on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. Seems he’s hooked up with an anorexic punk writer and lives even further west than he used to. Anyway, they tromp east toward the stagies every morning with those huge over-the-shoulder newspaper carriers filled with self-produced pamphlets. They’re called something like
Flash One
,
Flash Two
,
Flash Three
, and so on. Dedicated to Clarice Aames, one suspects.”

Eddie smirked as though amused, but underneath the smile, he looked fundamentally sad. “He eking out a living from that?”

Jackson shook his head. “I don’t think so, but they also sell used books and make some bit off of that.”

“He’s the purest novelist I’ve ever met,” said Eddie, gesturing back his girlfriend with a wave.

“You’re a lucky man, Eddie.” Jackson winked. “Be sure,” he said in an exaggerated aside to the young woman, “be sure he tells you the story of how the
Sea Miss
emerged from the mist.”

“Oh yes,” she replied with an enthusiasm that already sounded forced. “That’s a great story.”

“Tuck him in tight.” Jackson turned to embrace his friend, who held the grasp a bit too long.

“No hard feelings,” said Eddie.

“None at all,” Jackson whispered, more or less to himself.

After Eddie and the girl tottered off, Jackson stood in the spot where he’d promised himself success. He surveyed the vista he’d tried to describe five years earlier.

“The backs of the mountains curve like those of sleeping monsters,” he tested, “benevolent in that they mean no one real harm—yet dangerous all the same.”

G
rub
is an updating of George Gissing’s satire of the Victorian literary marketplace (
New Grub Street
, 1891). It draws on it, borrows from it, and could never have been written without it. I am indebted, also, to those friends who told me their stories of writing triumph and humiliation. Thank you.

Elise Blackwell
CREDIT PHOTO TO
:
Keith McGraw, University of South Carolina

E
lise Blackwell is the author of
Hunger
and
The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish
. She teaches at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia, where she lives with her husband, writer David Bajo, and their daughter Esme.