Grub (18 page)

O
n Christmas Eve, Jackson Miller was enjoying Amanda’s saffron-laced seafood stew. Amanda and Eddie had toasted Jackson’s publishing contract at the beginning of the meal, and Amanda had inquired about every detail of the sale except for the size of his advance, which was, no doubt, the piece of information that most interested her.

Jackson talked some about his publisher’s plans for the book: the pre-publication publicity lunch, the publication soiree, the plot for media infiltration, the advertising budget, the corporate sales. It was clear by the way he concentrated on his utensils that Eddie was not enjoying the conversation. Jackson wasn’t even sure that his friend was happy for him.

When Eddie’s book had sold, Jackson had faced down his own jealousy and cheered on his friend. He had told himself: I wish it were me; I’m glad it’s Eddie; I look forward to the day when it’s me. And so now he felt a bit dented by the lack of reciprocal enthusiasm. After all, Eddie had already published a book—and he had Amanda.

It rankled Jackson, too, that underlying Eddie’s lukewarm congratulations was the belief that Jackson’s success was undeserved, that he wasn’t a good writer. Still, Jack sympathized with Eddie’s failure to follow up on his early success, even if the misery was largely self-inflicted, and understood that disappointment fuels bitterness. Jackson could now afford to be magnanimous, and he’d always been affable if not particularly loyal. He always wished others well, all the more so if it didn’t cost him anything.

Directing the conversation away from his contract for Eddie’s sake, he said, “So fill me in on the doings of Whelpdale.”

Eddie lightened. “He’s offering a local workshop called ‘how to write and sell a novel in ten weeks,’ if you can believe it. He claims to have invented something called the ‘crystal method’ of novel writing, which he promises will generate a publishable novel through a series of easy-to-follow steps. All you need to start is one idea for a character.”

“At least he’s trying to succeed,” Amanda met Jackson’s eyes as she poured more Pinot Gris into his glass.

“At what?” Eddie’s tone echoed the contempt in his wife’s.

“That’s funny,” Jackson said, stepping around the palpable tension between his married friends. “Doreen had a copy of a pamphlet called
The Crystal Method of Novel Writing
. I hope that means she’s going to write some romances or children’s books so she can quit her godawful job.”

“What’s most scandalous,” added Amanda, “is that the advertisements for Whelpdale’s workshops suggest that he can help his victims get their dreadful little novels published. The ads have lines like ‘instructor has extensive contacts in the publishing world’ and ‘instructor will evaluate completed novels for suitable agents.’”

Jackson set his spoon down in his empty bowl and sipped the wine. “Speaking of literary enterprises,” he continued, “what’s up with Henry? Any news?”

“He says he’s close to finishing his novel. He read some pages to me. He really is a first-rate writer. It will be unfair if he can’t find a publisher.”

“I, for one, will be quite disappointed if I never get to read it.” Amanda spoke with such charm that it was unclear whether she was serious or making fun of Henry.

“I’m not sure it’s your cup of tea, Amanda,” Eddie said. “You’d likely call it too quiet.”

“The hero’s actually a bailiff, right?” Jackson said, amused. “What does Henry call him? The decently ignoble or the ignobly decent? Something like that.”

“No doubt your sales will dwarf his, but he’s like me,” Eddie said. “He’s not in it for the money.”

“Art and money are not antonyms,” Jackson replied, “but I freely admit that money does motivate me. I’m not a martyr for literature like you. I plan to develop an extravagant lifestyle and lead it into deep old age.”

“Did you tell your family about your book?” Amanda asked him.

Jackson saw his father compulsively touching the tops of his sailing trophies, counting them forwards and backwards. He shook his head. “When it’s published, I’ll send a copy to my mother. She can tell my father or not. I don’t give a damn.”

“Really?” She paused for his answer but quickly moved on when he didn’t respond. “Are you dedicating it to anyone?”

Again he shook his head, thinking that he had no one he could dedicate his first novel to. “No one helped me write it,” he said, his voice buoyant. “I’m taking all the credit.”

Two bottles of wine later, Amanda excused herself to go to bed. “Merry Christmas, Jackson,” she said as she hugged him. “I’m glad you still have time for your ordinary friends.”

“There’s nothing ordinary about you, my dear,” he said, holding the embrace for what felt like a few seconds too long, his hands spanning her shoulder blades, his fingertips only a layer of angora from her skin.

The two men finished another bottle of wine. Jackson felt remarkably even and fresh, but clearly Eddie was feeling the wine’s effect; he was beginning to slur his words and was now pacing the room erratically.

“You know,” Eddie said, “it’s all well and good for you to worship Mammon, but you should at least try to notice what it costs me when you’re always praising success in front of someone else.” He emphasized the final two words.

“Oh, Eddie, let’s skip this and talk about anything else you wish.”

“Your way of talking isn’t much to my taste just now. It comes with a price tag, you know.”

“Price tag? What do you mean?” Jackson watched his once-easygoing friend.

Eddie thrust his hands deep into his pockets and leaned forward at the waist, as though observing something on the floor. He straightened and said, in a thick voice, “Your way of talking glorifies success at the expense of quality—as though success is the only goal. If you’d talked this way in front of just me, we could have just argued and it wouldn’t have mattered. But you know as well as I do that there’s usually someone else in earshot. Frankly, I’m guessing she’s your real audience, so you’ll be glad to hear that your words have had their effect. Where Amanda once saw talent, now she sees only failure.”

Jackson summoned his anger for a protest, but Eddie looked so wretched that he could muster little emotion other than pity. “That’s an astonishing thing to say, Eddie. I have no idea what’s going on with you and Amanda, but I assure you that it’s more about you than me.”

“Your words, your words have turned Amanda against me. I shouldn’t have implied that that’s what you intended. Maybe it’s just my bad luck.” Eddie looked up and finally made eye contact. “She can hardly stand to look at me, Jack, and we almost never have sex anymore.”

“I always figured you two were after each other like rabbits.” Jackson smiled, hoping to turn the conversation. Seeing that his attempt at levity failed, he said, “Look, Eddie, you shouldn’t tell me about that. But do you remember what I told you when you got engaged? That your success would make her happy?”

“So you’ve always guessed that Amanda wasn’t a for-better-or-worse kind of girl. You think she married me just because my book was being published?”

“I’m not going to answer that. Look, I’m your friend, but if we can’t talk like friends, we’d better not talk about this sort of thing at all.” Jackson paused. “I will say this: what you’re thinking isn’t true. My words don’t have that kind of influence on her. If you two are really having serious trouble, maybe you should see a counselor or something.”

Both men concentrated more on drinking than talking for the next half hour. Jackson mentally replayed his meeting with Amanda at the Frick, their talk about Hobbema, the drink after, imagining how Eddie would view that encounter. Jackson knew that he sometimes said things to Amanda when they were alone in a room that he wouldn’t say in Eddie’s earshot, things wrong in tone more than in the words themselves. It stemmed from his vanity, from his own form of weakness. Yet he was convinced that any troubles in the Renfros marriage had little to do with him and likely much to do with Eddie himself. If a marriage can’t withstand a little harmless outside flirting, it isn’t much of a union in the first place.

Finally Jackson said, “If you love her, talk to her. Work it out.”

“Work it out,” Eddie repeated dully.

It took only one more glass of wine to put Eddie to sleep in his chair, granting Jackson his chance to escape.

L
ate on New Years Eve, Henry Baffler was a single paragraph away from completing
Bailiff
. He toyed with the idea of waiting until morning to finish. Or perhaps he should take the entire day to get the final few sentences just right. Ultimately, he told himself that would be silly—he’d planned the paragraph for weeks now—and he was quite fond of the idea of finishing the novel in the same year he had started it.

And so he composed the last paragraph, noticing that the ink was growing pale, that he needed a new ribbon. He typed
The End
. He took pleasure in the fact that the novel concluded essentially where it began: his bailiff, unchanged despite his brief love affair, still fed pigeons on his lunch hour while contemplating the ways in which the stout birds represented the human types that made their way through petty-claims court.

Life had proved art and theory right. Henry’s real-world bailiff had illustrated a key tenet of New Realism, which debunked the popular attitude that novels were stories of character change. Henry believed that novels should reflect human character. And people rarely change; they only become more themselves. In his final paragraph, his bailiff was precisely the same as he was in the opening sentence—only more so.

Henry hit return and rolled the final page off the cannister. He placed it face down on the stack of its predecessors, lifted the whole manuscript, and carefully tapped its four sides against the tabletop. He made a mental note to be on the lookout for a large rubber band or a clean, manuscript-sized box.

He was hungry as well as anxious to celebrate his accomplishment and toast New Realism. Though he knew his refrigerator was empty, he opened the door anyway and pondered the bare shelves. He didn’t have to examine his money either—he knew exactly how much he had—but he counted and tabulated the same figure: two dollars and sixty-eight cents. There was an all-night market about nine blocks up that sold single bottles of beer, tax included, for a dollar and sixty-nine cents. Six blocks in the other direction, toward Chelsea, he could buy a bag of day-old rolls for a dollar flat. He threw off the sofa cushions and, as if fate rewarded art, found a single shiny penny. He shouldered his way into the corduroy jacket that had been too warm in the fall but was now only thick enough keep him from freezing, setting out quickly, as the store that sold the rolls would soon close. One floor down, he had to step around his only English-speaking neighbor, Martin Briggs, who sat on the landing next to a half-gone bottle of gin, wearing a filthy tuxedo jacket and jeans and using one cigarette to light the next.

“I wish I were dead,” the man said. “I mean, you don’t dump someone on New Year’s Eve. It’s just not done. It’s just not right.”

Henry navigated around him, dropping two steps at a time to get by on the narrow staircase. Despite his growling stomach and the cold snapping through his thin jacket, Henry’s stride was springy as he made his way through clots of Dominican revelers and then past the trendy couples on Tenth Avenue. A new year was moving in, his book was done, and he was about to drink the first beer he had allowed himself in weeks.

The owner of the bodega was just lowering the window armor, but the old man opened the door to Henry and sold him the dollar bag of torta rolls. Half an hour later, Henry was on his way home with a bottle of beer and his bread, thinking about how he might submit his manuscript. He could use the library computer to query agents and editors by email and then hand-deliver the manuscript to the first person who seemed interested. But he’d eventually need to make a copy or two. He shouldn’t have bought the beer, but he told himself that since he had, he shouldn’t let regret spoil the taste.

Two blocks away from his apartment, the sidewalks grew heavier with people. He heard sirens close by. At the smell of smoke, he broke into a run. “Let me get through!” he shouted, looking for gaps in the crowd and shooting narrowly through.

Smoke billowed from several windows on the upper floors of his building. Henry sliced his skinny body between two policemen and raced up the steps of the burning tenement.

“Hey you! Stop there!” called one of the cops, but he made no move to chase or restrain him.

“I live here! I’ve got to get something!” Henry called behind him, dropping bread and beer as he ascended the exterior steps three at a time. At the entrance, he had to push by Martin Briggs, who was exiting the building gripping the pack of cigarettes that had likely set the fire. Inside the building, the smoke swarmed the stairwell, but Henry pushed up, holding his jacket sleeve over his mouth and nose and closing his eyes for as long as possible. He was desperate with the dread of losing
Bailiff
—his great work and reason for waking each morning. On the verge of unconsciousness, he pushed his key into his lock and tumbled forward into the fresher air of his apartment. His manuscript lay on the table, where he had left it. Despite the fire raging above and below his flat, the realist felt relief, even joy, as he rested his hand on the undamaged stack of pages. He removed his jacket and used it to wrap the manuscript, bundling it to his chest like a baby.

Now that he had his manuscript in hand, Henry’s courage receded. Watching the flames now engulfing the door to his apartment, he contemplated death by fire—the ultimate melodrama—with a nauseous mind. He had no choice but to climb through his little window and onto the ledge. There should be a fire escape, he thought, and wondered why he had never noticed its absence until now. He looked down the five stories to the street. A crowd looked up, cheering in a mix of Spanish and English.

Two fire engines had arrived, and a man in yellow slickers called to him on a megaphone. “You need to jump. Just push off and point your feet toward the trampoline.”

Henry looked down at the inflatable pad, grasping his novel to his chest. Already pinned to the wall by vertigo, he was sickened further by the nightmarish fantasy of the hundreds of pages of his pure example of New Realism fluttering through the neighborhood, white rectangles scattered the length and breadth of Hell’s Kitchen to be stepped on, snowed on, picked up for scrap. His ideas could be pilfered or mocked. Lines could be read out of context and misunderstood.

The front of his body was cold, but his back was hot from the heat mounting in the building. Spotlights scanned his face in bright flashes as the crowd chanted for him to escape. Holding the manuscript gently against one forearm, he worked to better secure it with the jacket, the shouts of “Jump, jump, jump!” and
“Saltese, saltese, saltese
!” pounding in the canals and drums of his ears. He grasped
Bailiff
tightly and leaped, willing his legs toward the trampoline. At the instant he jumped, he heard a firefighter call out: “I think he’s got a baby!”

He opened his eyes before he stopped bouncing up and back into the embrace of the plastic, taking in the swarm of faces and cameras and flaring light as images from an Ezra Pound poem.

“The brave man saved a cat!” a child called.

A woman firefighter with a beautiful face leaned over him and lifted her hand toward his bundle. “Is it all right? Is it a baby? A pet? It was a crazy thing for you to do, but it was courageous to run in.”

A television crew filming the scene still pointed its camera at Henry. He grinned at them and unwrapped
Bailiff
. “I saved my manuscript,” he said. “It’s a novel of New Realism.”

The look on the beautiful firefighter’s face sharpened, and she crinkled her nose in what even Henry could not mistake for anything but disgust. “You risked your life for an unpublished novel?”

“I guess I do it every day,” he muttered, wondering if something was wrong with him and, if so, whether a doctor could treat it.