Grub (12 page)

“I’ve never before associated zebras with Rome,” Jackson said, his smile relaxed.

Henry grabbed a breadstick and consumed it faster than he meant to. He took a slice of bread, stacked it high with butter, and ate that too.

When the waiter trudged over, Henry ordered last. “Bring me your largest meal, but no squid.”

“Bring him a steak,” Jackson said, “with a few pounds of pasta on the side.”

“So what’s up with the zebras?” Eddie asked. “Italian zebras?”

“I guess it’s fitting,” Henry said.

“And why is that?” Jackson asked, his voice louder than anyone’s.

“Your book: it’ll be black and white and read all over.”

Jackson and Eddie winced at his joke but laughed nonetheless.

Jackson called out, for the whole place to hear, “And bring us one of those really big-ass bottles of Chianti. We’ve got some toasting to do.”

T
he day after he took Eddie Renfros and Henry Baffler to lunch, Jackson Miller still didn’t have a formal offer on his novel. He believed that good things generally happen quickly, that delay was most often ominous. Cursing all fifteen editors for stalling his advance, he paced his apartment and considered a very early drink. He was relieved to receive Amanda’s invitation to meet her at the Frick.

Before heading uptown, he left a message with his agent instructing her to call him on his cell phone if the news came. “Yes, I know,” he said in irritation, “I know you could have figured that out yourself, but I’m letting you know. Use the cell phone.”

“The drinks are on me,” Amanda had said when she called him, “to celebrate your imminent fame.”

He planned his reply on the subway: “Your money will never be any good when I’m in the room.” She’d go along, he was sure of it.

He found her in the Fragonard room, looking beautiful in a pale blue dress and high heels. It was so different, he thought, looking a woman eye to eye. With Margot, he had to look at the top of her head or crick his neck to meet her gaze.

“You look like you belong here, Amanda. You positively match. You’re a vision of pastel.”

Amanda smiled. “I suppose I’ll be seeing your name in the ‘Hot Deals’ section of
Publishers Weekly
soon. Are you holding out for six figures?”

Jackson registered that she said
I’ll be seeing
rather than
we’ll be seeing
. “That’s what my agent expects.” He rubbed his stomach. “I love saying ‘my agent.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

Amanda gave him a hug and kissed him halfway between his cheek and mouth. “That’s wonderful, Jack. I’m so happy for you.”

“I just hope that it’s deserved.”

“You worked hard. You looked at what the market needed, and you sat down and wrote it. Of course you deserve every success. I’ve got a good feeling, too, about the splash you’re going to make.”

“Amanda, there’s no reception my book could meet that would make me any happier than I am seeing the smile I see now.” He delivered this line in a tone of mock charm intended to veil the truth in his words.

“Jack, I brought you here because I want to show you something.” She linked her arm in his and walked him through the rooms of the museum.

Jackson was struck by the complete absence of smell, which gave him the impression of rarified air, of life in a vacuum. “I could live in a house like this,” he said.

“In here. There.” She pointed to a landscape of a somewhat ramshackle house in the woods.

“Not there, I mean here, in this house, the Frick house.”

“I know what you mean, silly. But I want you to look at this painting. Find the people.”

Jackson focused on the canvas and, sure enough, was soon able to point out several human figures that had not been apparent on first look. “The original ‘Where’s Waldo’ game,” he said.

“This is the thing,” Amanda said, and she told him the story of the talented young painter who had traded art for bureaucracy.

“That’s a great story,” Jackson said. “A great story.”

“Exactly. I tried to sell Eddie on the idea of writing a book about Hobbema, but he doesn’t get it. I thought you might.”

“But you’re writing again.
You
should write about it.”

Her hair swished across her shoulders as she shook her head. The fabric of her dress was very thin, real silk under his fingertips as he held her arm, lightly, as though it meant nothing.

“I’m fishing for different trout,” she said. “I’m working on something else, going for the women’s market. But this book would be just right for you. More serious than your first, but it could still be clever. And it would appeal to your audience now in a few years. Write for them as they age, and you’ll have a career the rest of your life.”

Jackson nodded and further studied the painting, admiring the moderate use of primary color among the woodsy tones. It was accomplished, clearly, yet there were odd glitches in perspective and the texture of the paint was sometimes smooth and sometimes bumpy. The painter hadn’t got it quite right. He could have been a great, Jackson concluded, but he needed more practice. Amanda was right about everything, which had always been part of her magnetism. A beautiful woman who was practical, with instincts you could trust. Eddie had no idea what he had, none at all.

“So do spill,” he said. “What’s your book about?”

“I’ll tell you soon enough.”

“Put a dead child in it. That’s what’s selling now.”

“True, which means that won’t be selling in a year and a half, when my book will be published.”

“Will be?”

Amanda nodded readily. “Will be. Speaking of dead children, do you know the awful story of the Frick child? A little girl, I think, about three or something. It was a needle or pin that got stuck in her arm or leg. Shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it got infected and this was before antibiotics. She died, and her parents were naturally devastated.”

“It goes to show us that money can’t buy everything,” Jackson said, grabbing a handy platitude.

“Exactly. It can’t buy everything.”

After walking a few blocks, they picked out a bar advertising its formidable line-up of martinis and stepped into pulsing florescent blue light. Jackson used his line when Amanda slipped her billfold from her purse: “Your money will never be any good when I’m in the room.”

“You’re such a good friend to me, Jack,” she answered, her billfold quickly disappearing.

One drink later, Jackson asked her if she was sure she didn’t want the Hobbema idea for herself.

“It’s something I want you to have,” she answered. “It’s one thing I want to give you.” Another drink later, she asked him about Margot. “How’s the new girl? Still thinking about her too much?”

“I care a lot about what happens to her. I can say that. She’s a very nice person, absolutely decent.”

“Is she well suited to you? I bet she’s just the sort to really shine at your publication parties—brilliant and stylish and full of tact and wit. Just like you.” Amanda circled her cocktail with the little straw, bit her bottom lip, gazed back at Jackson. “That’s what you deserve—and what you’ll need.”

“Well, that’s not quite the right description for her, but I care about her tremendously.” Jackson reached again for the studied charm that he hoped would mask the truth in his words and added, “After all, you’re already taken.”

M
argot Yarborough was online looking up train schedules to New York. She’d meant to get down sooner, as soon as she’d finished her novel, but the days had slipped by. She’d spent some time investigating and selecting a reputable agent—and of course her father’s book still required her ministrations—yet she still couldn’t quite account for the time that had passed, not to herself or to Jackson. In his emails, Jackson continued to seem solicitous of her welfare. He asked her about her home, the name of her childhood dog, whether she’d gone to her high school prom, and, most recently, whether she ever wore high-heeled shoes. He also pressed her. “Just pick a day,” he’d written most recently. “Like tomorrow.” Of course he must be questioning her interest. She did like him, but the idea of having his affection at a remove was sometimes more attractive than the idea of seeing him. She knew this was crazy, just a funk or something. She had warned him she was a homebody. But still, this was the week. Tuesday, she thought. She was deleting an email in which she promised to come down on Wednesday when she heard her father yelling.

“Margot!” His voice, even from down the hall, was large.

“Telephone! Please do tell your friends never to phone here before noon. You know I can’t work with these distractions.”

Margot couldn’t imagine who would be calling—she’d let all her school acquaintances fall away—and chided herself for hoping it was good news. On the other end of the line was the agent who had agreed to represent
The Reluctant Leper
provided she kept her expectations in check.

“The money’s not great, but it’s not too bad for so literary a first novel.” The agent then named a senior editor at one of New York’s most prestigious imprints.

Margot made her repeat the name, dug her fingernail into her fingertip to ensure that she was awake, and then said thank you nearly a dozen times. She promised to come into the city to have lunch with the agent, whom she had never met, and her new editor. Her editor! It seemed too good to be true. She would have to remember which woman was named Lane and which was Lana.

“By the way,” Lana intoned as a calculated afterthought. “One thing we’ll want to discuss is the title, so give it some thought. Make a little list.”

Margot explained that she had made a list, that she’d thought very hard about the title and decided that
The Reluctant Leper
was exactly right.

“Just think about it,” her agent said. “I’m sure Lane will have some ideas to bounce around as well. Lane’s super busy, but I’ll try to schedule us a lunch next month.”

At the good news, her mother hugged her. “You believed in yourself, set yourself free, took real ownership, and look what happened! This belongs to you, Margot, and no one can ever take it away.”

“No one can ever take it away from me? Why would you say something like that?” But Margot accepted her mother’s hug and grinned.

Her father looked momentarily stricken, though she couldn’t discern whether it was her news or her mother’s affirmation-speak that had sickened him. His recovery was quick, and then he seemed happy for her.

“Wonderful news, my dear, wonderful. I always knew you had a real talent. Now someone else has finally noticed. Wonderful. Let’s all go out tonight. Hell this news is even good enough that I don’t mind eating out with your mother if we can find a restaurant that doesn’t serve fois gras or milk-fed veal or swordfish or oppressed broccoli stalks or God knows whatever else your mother isn’t eating these days.” Despite his mini-tirade, his laugh was warm. “Say, Margot, what kind of advance did your agent mention?”

“Not bad,” he said when she named the sum. “Very respectable.”

Though her news was large enough to warrant a phone call, Margot, as ever, felt more comfortable expressing herself through written words. She emailed Jackson about the acceptance of her novel for publication, wrote that she was certain that his would be next—and in a much bigger, more impressive way. And she told him that she was finally coming down to New York. “I have wanted to see you,” she said. “It’s just been an odd stretch.”

For dinner that night, Margot’s parents settled on a Japanese place where her mother could have green tea and sushi and her father could order steak, pan-fried noodles, and sake. He talked Margot into a glass of wine with her dinner and then into a second one for dessert. Her thoughts had an audible buzz as she rode home in the back seat, her parents up front squabbling over whether or not the heater should be on.

Back in her room, she opened an email from Jackson. His note congratulated her heartily and thanked her for thinking of his book in her moment of triumph, mentioning that it was now in possession of a top agent.

“There’s something I must be honest about,” his words continued. Reading them, her chest tightened and yet she also felt giddy, flattered by his intimate tone, his seriousness of purpose. “I must tell you something, because you are one of the few people I respect. I don’t know you very well, it’s true, and you certainly have made yourself scarce lately. But I know quite enough to respect you, and so I feel that I have to warn you that I’m a selfish person. Not brutally selfish, and the thought that I’m at all selfish does trouble me. If I were rich, I think I would be generous. I would be a good person. I’m civilized, if nothing else. Because I’m not rich, though, and because I
am
selfish, I’m likely to do ugly things to make some money and make a name for myself. Or at least I’m willing to do them. I tell you this in case you read my book and despise it, which you may. I cannot afford to live as I would like to, to write the literature I might aspire to if I could touch the family money or if I won the lottery. That is, simply, one of my facts.”

Margot smiled, thinking that someone really living an unworthy life and writing unworthy books wouldn’t declare it so plainly as Jackson had.

She read on. “I hope you really will come to see me soon. And maybe because I don’t trust you to, I’m wondering if that invitation to visit up there might be possible. Perhaps enough time has elapsed since I met your father that it might now be all right if I spent an afternoon on the Hudson. I think we need to see each other. Otherwise we’ll never know, and we might as well know, don’t you think?”

For the next day and a half, Margot’s mood alternated between elation over the sale of her novel and anxiety over broaching the subject of Jackson’s visit with her father. Long possessed of the ability to work under any circumstances, she concentrated on completing her father’s manuscript. Its delivery, she knew, would improve his mood. Meanwhile, her mother did little to help the atmosphere at home and had inflamed her father by advertising—in the local paper as well as the bulletin board at the health food store—a new workshop based on an ancient system of personality types. To make matters worse, the new workshop was not limited to poetry, about which Andrew cared little, but included fiction, about which Andrew cared deeply, and memoir, which Andrew actively loathed. Memoir was fifth on her father’s “enemies list”, a page topped by Chuck Fadge,
The Monthly
, the editor who had granted Fadge a full page to respond to Quarmbey’s review, and an agent in Manhattan who had once rejected Andrew’s single attempt at a postmodern novel and who now accepted only clients under the age of thirty-two.

Margot decided to approach her father about Jackson’s visit when she handed him the completed and copyedited manuscript. She convinced herself that, as stubborn as her father could be, he would not be able to ignore the hard work she had donated to him. And if she could make him understand her affection for Jackson, then surely he would be happy for her. Perhaps he could even understand Jackson’s ambition and grudgingly respect the success that she believed was about to come to her friend.

One of the few rules her mother had succeeded in enforcing in their home was the no-smoking rule. So when Margot finished her work on the still-untitled manuscript, late in the afternoon after working practically through the night, she was unsurprised to find her father outside, in a lawn recliner, in the midst of one of the year’s first snows.

He puffed angrily at a cigar. “Damn thing’s rolled too tight. They’re making cigars for people who don’t actually smoke them, that’s what’s happening.”

Margot rolled a sympathetic sound from her throat and refrained from making a comment about people with real problems.

“So we should put word out about your book, line up some reviewers sympathetic to the Yarborough name.”

Margot’s purr caught in her throat like hair. She’d given no thought to reviews, and almost no thought to the idea that publication meant that people would read her novel. She pictured the shelves at The Shadow of the Valley of the Books, the short queue of buyers with a twenty-dollar bill or a credit card. She pictured her pretty hardcover—imagining Spanish Moss tangled with the long dark hair of the Creole girl on the cover—and realized that people would be asked to spend more than twenty dollars to read what she had written alone in her room.

“Yes, dear?” her father asked, inflating and deflating his cheeks as he worked the unsuccessful cigar.

“Your book,” Margot said quietly, noticing that it was quite cold. “It’s finished.”

“Thank you,” her father replied. “I just never feel quite right about sending a book out without a second pair of eyes on the proofreading. Glad you had a few minutes to spare for me.”

“Dad?”

“Well, now, well, of course you’re more of a copyeditor than a proofreader. I’ll be sure to put your name in the list of people I thank on the acknowledgements page. I can’t single you out, because that might ruffle other feathers, but you and I’ll know you’ll be the most important person in the list.”

“It’s not that. It’s just that I want to invite a friend up for a day, for a visit. He’s a writer, in fact.” Margot was about to add that Jackson’s book was being represented by a top agent when she realized Jackson’s agent was the woman who occupied the number-four slot on her father’s list of enemies.

“Oh, I see,” her father was saying. “It’s a he, now, this friend, A he.”

“Yes, Dad, my friend is of the male persuasion. You’ve actually met him, though it’s unlikely you’d remember.”

“I have a great memory for faces and names. Never forget one. Who is your young man, my dear? I must say I’m jealous like any father would be, but I think it’s high time for this sort of thing. The way you always read and avoid the sun, and even your mother knows more about a kitchen.”

“I have had boyfriends, Dad. And I do cook—for myself. But here, well, you know. Between you and Mom, there’s really nothing I could make.” Margot stopped herself, got back to the point. “The thing of it is, Dad, the thing of it is that you met my friend and—I’m sure owing to circumstances more than anything else—you two got off on the wrong foot. But really he’s a very good guy, and you have a lot in common. You’ll find him good company. And he’s a gentleman, he really is. A bit of southern charm.”

“What father’s heart doesn’t warm to the term
gentleman
?”

Margot was relieved to see that her father finally was inhaling smoke from his cigar. She paused to give the nicotine time to make it into his bloodstream.

“Yes, terrific, so what’s his name?”

Margot smiled. “His name is Jackson. Jackson Miller.”

Giving her every hope, her father’s words started quiet and slow. “Ah, Jackson Miller. A nice young gentleman with literary aspirations. I’m sure he’s a top-drawer, first-class, A-list sort of chap. Ah, yes. I’m sure he’s a truly fine human being. Well, that’s wonderful for you, and I’m sure you will have nice visits in all sorts of houses.”

“Dad?” she asked, frightened by his increasing speed and volume.

“But here’s the thing of it: not one of those houses will be mine. I’m sure he’s upstanding and talented and the king of all the dance cards.” He worked his cigar expertly now and seemed to enjoy the crescendo of his own voice. “But I don’t like him, and I don’t trust him, and he will never set foot in any house I own.”

Margot’s shoulders stiffened.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his tone back to normal. “I know I sound like an asshole. But I promise you that I’m doing you a favor. Jackson Miller is not a good guy. You can do much better, my dear. Much, much better. Hold out for a real talent—or at least a man who’s a lot nicer than your father. Take a look at what I’ve turned your mother into.”

He looked almost sad, and the uncharacteristic candor made Margot’s come-backs die in her throat. She sealed her mouth, her swallow dry, and rested her hand on his shoulder.

“Now that that’s out of the way, my dear, I wanted to talk to you about using your advance to best advantage. Take some time to think it through, but don’t dismiss this idea:
The Hudson Review
.”

“It’s freezing out here,” she said, stepping toward the house.