Grub (4 page)

J
ackson Miller slept deeply after the long drive and awoke in time to make the coffee before Doreen got up. The small galley kitchen was the only clean room in the apartment. Neither Jackson nor Doreen owned a vacuum cleaner, so the living-room carpet wore a coat of dust and crumbs too small to pick up by hand. The room was dormitory-like, furnished with boards and concrete blocks, upside-down plastic crates, a foam sofa with stretched seams, a bean bag chair, an old portable
CD
player, discs stacked in random order. The bathroom had neither vent nor window. The roommates kept it from becoming a site of pest infestation with occasional wipe downs using a threadbare towel, but the room never gleamed.

The kitchen, on the other hand, smelled mineral clean and was stocked with Doreen’s good equipment: copper pots, small appliances manufactured in Germany, thick cake pans, expensive knives and whisks. Jackson was no cook, but he liked the sturdiness of well-made objects, as well as standing in a room that was both clean and cleaned by someone else.

Doreen thanked him when he poured her coffee, kissed his cheek, and welcomed him home.

“Master of the small gesture, that’s me. I’ll even make you an omelet. You must be tired of handling food after last night.”

“And I have to work lunch today, so that’d be great.”

Noticeably pretty on first glance, Doreen was one of the few women he knew who looked good in bangs. The rest of her light brown hair was long and straight, and her face was lightly sprinkled with freckles undisguised by makeup. Unless dressed for work, she wore only faded jeans and white tee-shirts. She looked like someone who had done little but ride horses until she was an adult, despite the fact she was from Manhattan and had never owned a pet. Most of all, Jackson admired the line of her back, the way the small of it curved in, leaving a slight gap between her jeans and her skin and revealing the color of her panties, which, in contrast to her tomboyish outer clothes, were always lacey, shiny, silky, or otherwise tempting.

He would have very much liked to win back her romantic affections, but had for months now been assigned to the twin categories of entertaining-but-perplexing friend and money-owing roommate. He knew that any effort on his part to loosen the belt of her turquoise robe and lure her back into bed would be greeted with amusement at best and more likely with irritation. Jackson sighed and cracked the eggs into a bowl. He added a splash of milk and whisked the mixture the way she’d taught him. He buttered a skillet and lit the gas burner with the disposable lighter they kept next to the stove.

Doreen poured orange juice and set the table with cloth napkins, reflecting her commitment not to dining elegance but to frugality. She was a practical young woman, a trait Jackson respected even as it exasperated him.

“You know, Eddie Renfros should have married either an heiress or a girl like you. I don’t think Amanda is going to be satisfied with a modest life.” Jackson divided the omelet between two plates and carried them to the table.

“Things aren’t going well for them?”

Jackson took a large bite. “Eddie still can’t publish his second book. He’s supposed to be well into another one, but I don’t think he’s gotten very far with it. He’s just the kind of guy to end it all with a bottle of vodka and pills.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say, Jack. All the more so because you sound like you enjoy the prospect.”

“Of course not. I will admit that I was jealous that he conned the prettiest girl at Iowa into taking a chance on him, but he’s still my best friend. It’s frustrating to see him squander his talent. And her life. He’s just not the kind of person who can make it without a job.”

“As opposed to you?” Doreen’s tone bordered on scornful.

“At most Eddie’s going to write a competent, modest seller every three years.” Jackson drank his whole glass of juice. “As for me, I’ve got a plan to make some decent money. Then maybe I’ll marry a rich woman.”

Doreen laughed. “I thought you were going to wait until you were old enough to marry a woman half your age. You’ll need your own money for that.”

“Doreen, you should write a book. One of those cat mysteries or maybe a children’s book. What you need to do is get together half a dozen examples of the kind of book you want to write. Study their conventions. Think of something new to add—an attractive twist, something that will get you a bit of attention—and then go to work methodically.”

“Like you?”

“I’m serious. Forget the muse and just write a certain number of pages every day. Five pages a day, and you’ll have a whole novel in two months. Clean it up, query forty agents at once, and you’ve got a career.” Jackson noticed that Doreen was surreptitiously reading the front page of
The Times
, but he continued, undeterred by her lack of interest. “That’s what Eddie doesn’t understand. He thinks he’s Homer or Shakespeare. He thinks I’m a hack, which of course I do aspire to be in a way. If you want to make a living writing, you’ve got to give the people what they want. You can’t tell them what they should be reading. We’re not geniuses—just smart guys who should be supplying the public with the food it likes.”

“Like I’m supplying the food you like?” Doreen stood, cinched her belt, and cleared the dishes. “I’m guessing that you’ll need a patron, or at least an indulgent roommate, to be able to enact your scheme.”

Jackson was glad he hadn’t phoned her for money from North Carolina. “If I had it in me, I’d write the trashiest of trashy novels.”

“Under a pseudonym, I suppose?” she said, rinsing the dishes in the kitchen sink.

“Absolutely not. I’d sign my name proudly. But I’m not claiming that it’s easy. To please the vulgar, you must somehow embody the genius of vulgarity. I doubt I have that specialized talent, but I know that I can write for the college-educated dolt. I think I could write the books that doctors and lawyers read on planes—or at least buy at the airport to hold while they nap. Or the kind of books that people just out of college talk about with each other. What they want is to feel that what they are reading is special and clever, even though they can’t distinguish between fine pastry and supermarket birthday cake, to use an analogy from your world.” He paused for a breath. “I’m gearing up to write a vapid book that appears to be smart.”

“Please don’t rock the chair back like that. The slats are getting loose.” Doreen leaned against the kitchen counter, the sun wrapping her shoulders. She gnawed at the fingernails of her left hand—her single unattractive habit.

“And,” Jackson finished, “I’ll get laid left and right. What was the name of that guy who joined The Band because someone told him he’d get more pussy than Frank Sinatra?” He’d said it to get a reaction from her—she hated crudeness—but she was already headed for the shower, and didn’t hear.

Jackson showered after she was done, then dressed in his last clean shirt and pocketed the two emergency twenty-dollar bills he kept hidden in an empty
CD
case.

When Doreen emerged from her room, pretty and neat in her white blouse and short black skirt, Jackson said, “I’ll walk you to work. I’ve got to talk to a girl who works at the bookstore.”

“The cute short-haired one?”

“Curly hair? Skinny?”

Doreen nodded.

“How do you know her?”

“I’ve talked to her a few times at the store or when she picks up takeout for the owners. She’s a nice person. Not your type at all. How did she have the misfortune to meet you?”

“At the conference, sort of.”

“It’s a small world, I guess is the thing to say.”

“See, you could write for the masses.”

“You know what else they say: New York is a big city of small neighborhoods.”

“Exactly,” Jackson said, bounding down the stairs. Out on Ninth Street the late summer sun warmed the stacks of garbage bags and the air smelled like overripe bananas, coffee grounds, and something less pleasant.

As they walked, Jackson asked himself if he believed his own arguments and the answer was equivocal. He didn’t really want to write trash, but neither did he want to waste years of his life writing things that no one would read much less pay for.

A block later, he asked: “Doreen, why do you say she’s not my type?”

Doreen just laughed and shook her head.

“Doreen, I really am going to pay you back.” He put his arm around her shoulder as they strode toward midtown.

W
hen Margot Yarborough encountered Jackson Miller at a North Carolina gas station, she’d been on the cusp of two realizations. The first was that she was writing a novel—possibly a fine one.

As the daughter of Andrew Yarborough and the filer of new fiction at a large, failing bookstore, she suspected that the last thing the world needed was another novel. Particularly one by someone like her: young, lacking in real-world experience, and sometimes more interested in words than in people. But it was precisely her love of words that made the realization pleasing. She was making the thing she most valued: a lovely novel.

Her second realization was less pleasant. She was on the verge of losing the only non-disagreeable job she’d been able to obtain—without her father’s help, which she had refused—with nothing but an
NYU
literature degree. She would have to return to her parents’ bicker-filled house on the Hudson until she could make a better plan for her life.

As distressing as this situation was, at least it would give her more time to write. What she felt every morning and every evening as she neared her computer could be described only as pleasure. All day the store was filled with writers shopping instead of writing, writers complaining of writers’ block, writers lecturing each other about the agony of creation or the fickleness of their muse, writers browsing the shelves and griping that they had no time to write. Her days were filled with writers not writing, and she had told more than one of them go home and write.

“No one’s making you be a writer,” she’d told a regular one afternoon, “You shouldn’t do it if you don’t enjoy it.”

Many of her happiest hours were spent alone with sentences, trying them out in different forms, leapfrogging words and phrases across each other, finding combinations of adjectives and nouns never before placed in proximity. She knew that she mystified her friends whenever she turned down an invitation to a party or out to hear music, but, well, she was who she was.

She reminded herself that her room at her parents’ house—which she would have to reclaim from her father, who had been banished there for snoring—offered a serene view of the Hudson. She’d set up her computer before the window and finish the work on her book. Then she could figure out how to make her way in the world.

Margot finished shelving ten copies of a new novel about a group of women in a sewing club, each, according the flap copy, coping with her own threads of tragedy. It was time for her break when she finished, and she stepped out to get a little sun on her face.

It was still summer, still hot, but the mugginess had subsided, and Margot could feel and smell fall in the drier air. She sipped a cup of tart lemonade from the bookstore café as she walked the block to a courtyard where she liked to sit.

“Miss Yarborough!” a man called out as she was about to slip through the iron gate.

Margot turned but saw only a swarm of indistinct bodies and faces.

“Miss Yarborough, I’m glad to run into you.”

Now Margot recognized the voice. She found it charming that Jackson Miller called her “Miss Yarborough” as though she were a character in a Victorian novel. He was accompanied by the pretty girl who worked at the restaurant across the street and sometimes stopped by to browse the cooking magazines.

“My roommate, Doreen Maud.” Jackson swept his hand from Doreen to Margot and back. “And my agreeable and most kind new acquaintance, Margot Yarborough.”

After they had exchanged greetings, Doreen excused herself to get to work. “You people of books must wonder how I exist in a world of dishes and food,” she laughed.

“On the contrary,” Margot answered. “I kind of envy you.”

Doreen stretched her mouth into a long line, then said, “Because of all the agents and editors who ‘lunch’ at Grub?”

“I didn’t mean that. I envy you because you seem to live a real life among real people.”

“If you can call waiting tables real life and Grub’s patrons real people, you may have a point. But that’s all debatable.”

“I’m telling you, Doreen, you could be a writer.”

Jackson’s comment finalized Doreen’s departure.

“Funny you should envy her for not writing,” he said to Margot, “because I’ve been trying to convince her to try her hand at it.”

“Would that be easier for her than waiting tables?”

“Likely harder, wouldn’t you say?”

He held the gate wide and ushered her into the courtyard. She chose a shady bench, and they sat, Jackson moving closer to her as they talked.

Margot drained her lemonade and set the cup beside her feet. She brushed her shoes lightly over the moss that grew between the bricks, then leaned over to touch its velvety texture. “It depends, I suppose, on several things.”

“Of course,” Jackson said. “And I’m not claiming that Doreen has any particular inclination to write. But I’m not sure she’s got any for cooking either, and there might be more money in writing if she went about it the right way, wrote the right kind of thing.”

Jackson’s gestures were large and easy, and he touched her arm frequently, but in a way that seemed natural. Margot appreciated the way that he gave momentum to the conversation, not seeming to mind that she was soft-spoken. The trait had annoyed her last boyfriend, who’d told her that he was tired of asking her to repeat herself. He’d said that during their break-up fight in the bar where she worked, where his band played, and where they’d met. She’d started to suggest that maybe all the feedback had damaged his hearing, but she let it go. She’d already accepted the job at the bookstore and was happy to leave that particular boyfriend behind with the bar.

“And, well, money matters, doesn’t it? I should know, because I haven’t got any to speak of, though I do have this for you.” He proffered the two twenties.

“Was it this much?”

“Well, maybe if you have a five in change…but, no, keep it. You were kind to have saved me from the Wattleborough debtors’ prison.”

Margot folded the bills into eighths and pushed them into her dress pocket. “I do like a man who pays his debts promptly, but is money still so very important, in this day and age?”

“Without it, you spend most of your life working for the first rung of the ladder. It’s increasingly important to start a writing career with money. Otherwise you wind up teaching five composition courses and never writing a word.”

“I suppose.” Margot leaned over her knees again, this time scraping at the moss with her fingernail. “But don’t you think that really good work will eventually gain attention? Even in this day and age?”

“Later rather than sooner, I’d argue. The quantity of books being written makes it impossible for all but the luckiest and most heavily marketed to get any attention. Take Jonathan Warbury. He isn’t a friend of yours, is he?”

She sat up and looked at the bright green under her nail, saying somewhat absently, “I don’t mix in those kinds of circles.”

“Well, I wasn’t going to run him down, but my question is this: is there anything that makes his work any better than that of twenty other similar writers I could name? Not at all. He’s reasonably clever, yes, and he’s certainly prolific. But so are plenty of others. The reason we’ve heard of his name—the reason you think of him mixing in circles you don’t mix in—is because he started with money and moneyed friends. He went to Harvard, and his father is tied in with the editor of
The City
and all kinds of people who have pull.”

Margot noticed that he’d woven her comment into his words, that as much as he loved to talk, he was also listening to her. Her voice registered with him.

“Warbury’s first book was reviewed before anyone had read it. No one cared what was in the thing.”

“Is that true?”

“I
am
a blowhard, but it’s true. My prediction is this: soon writers won’t publish books to make a name for themselves; they’ll make names for themselves so they can publish their books. I’ve got a friend named Eddie Renfros—”

Recognizing the name, she interrupted. “I loved
Sea Miss
.”

“Well, Eddie can’t get his second novel published to save his life, and it’s certainly no worse than
Sea Miss
. But the first one didn’t sell as well as it was supposed to, so he’s history. If Warbury had written
Sea Miss
, it would’ve won the National Novel Award or some PEN prize, and they’d be lining up the Pulitzer for the second book that poor Eddie can’t even get published by the University Press of Southern Alabama or Alaska or whatever it is. Instead,
Sea Miss
was lost in a flood of that year’s books. With computers, anyone who can type three hundred pages can claim to have written a book.”

A pigeon landed a few feet from them and scooted from brick to brick, scrabbling but finding no trace of the stale bread crumbs sometimes tossed out by old men with dogs and children minded by nannies.

“Eddie couldn’t help being born into an obscure Wisconsin family, of course, but he made a mistake in not marrying money. Then he compounded his agony by marrying a woman who loves success. Poverty and failure are disasters for any writer, but all the more so to him.”

Margot resisted the urge to bend down and feel the coolness of the moss again. She looked at Jackson. “And what about you? Do you need to be rich and successful to be happy?”

“Well, Margot, I don’t plan to find out if I’d be unhappy poor.”

Margot tilted her head from side to side, shrugging her shoulders to work out a kink.

He massaged the back of her neck and upper back with his large hand, and she closed her eyes. He was good at touch, strong and unhesitant but not too hard. She slumped a little, relaxing, feeling lines of energy move down her back. Finally she pulled away and stood up, knowing it was time to get back to work.

“I’ll toss that for you.” Jackson pointed to her empty cup, but he looked across the courtyard. “I think I know that guy, you see the skinny one in the brown tee-shirt? I think that’s Henry Baffler. He’s a writer, too. Everyone’s a writer, it seems.”

She raised her cup with two fingers, comparing their hands—hers small and white and unmarked, his large and tan and dotted with freckles and moles—as he took it from her. They both looked up at the same time. He opened his mouth and then closed it without speaking, and it seemed like a full minute before they broke their gaze. He crumpled her cup and threw it to the trashcan, making it easily though it seemed far away to Margot.

“I won’t be looking to marry money. I plan to make my own so that I don’t have to.” He walked away, then turned back, hands stuck in his front pockets. “I haven’t ridden the Staten Island ferry in months and months. Want to go sometime?”

Margot smiled and nodded, wondering why she was attracted to someone even more jaded about the literary life than her father was. Perhaps it was simply because he was tall and good-looking and it had been a while since she’d broken up with the guitar player. But she knew there was more to it. She liked his fluid voice, his abundance of self-assurance, the way he folded her opinions into his own. Anyway, it was just a ride on the ferry and she was fated to head up the Hudson soon enough.

She looked at her hand, the moss now a thin green crescent like an ordinary dirty fingernail. She thought about the chapter she would work on that night, in which she would describe a bayou through the eyes of her protagonist.

Back inside the store, she found a book of black-and-white photographs of southern Louisiana and imagined how they would look in color, trying to evoke the exact hues of brown and green.