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“Your name, young man. Remind me of your name.”

Forgiving Yarborough for not remembering his name, Jackson congratulated himself for taking a risk.

“Jackson Miller,” he said, “author of ‘Old Waldman’, the story from yesterday’s workshop. If things go my way, and I have every hope they will, you’ll be hearing my name a good deal in the next few years.”

“Not if I can help it, but, Jackson Miller, I guarantee you that I won’t ever forget your name again. And for your information, my wife is one of this country’s finest poets.” Yarborough took the blue-eyed woman’s elbow. “She’s won prizes you’ve never even heard of.”

Jackson cursed himself aloud as he pushed through the absurdly narrow doorway and into the crowded bar, seeking the only person who could restore his confidence after so serious a misstep.

He found Amanda Renfros at the bar, surrounded by a buzzing semicircle—men trying to catch her attention with louder voices, sharper or merely raunchier jokes, larger bills appearing to buy more rounds of drinks.

“Make room,” he heard her say. “Our next most important writer has arrived. Make room.”

He heard a male voice parse the double meaning of
next most important
. Emotionally winded from the encounter with the Yarboroughs, he was relieved to have such weak competition.

He shouldered through, and Amanda popped up, patted the stool. “Take my seat while I lengthen my legs. I need to stand.” And there she was on full display. She had the long blonde hair and green eyes of the it-girls of his teenage years, impeccable posture, and a waist curve that gave Jackson an uncomfortable misty feeling that he preferred not to examine. Doreen, his ex-girlfriend and current roommate, always said Amanda had perfect bone structure, but Jackson saw in her face an endearing asymmetry. Her smile reached a little further on one side, and her nose, while straight, pointed just slightly to the left. A modern girl, he thought, though there was something regal about her that transcended contemporary style. He couldn’t quite see her as an ancient Greek beauty or a Victorian aristocrat, but he could easily imagine her cast as one. Someone should write her a screenplay, he thought, wondering if her beauty would translate into two dimensions.

“Bartender, get this man some gin.” Amanda leaned over him to place the order, pressed her hand on his shoulder, let him smell her hair—grapefruit clean despite the visible smoke in the bar. “Throw in a twist while you’re at it.”

“I could use a double,” he said to her ear. “Do you think I’m turning into an asshole?”

“Turning
into
one?”

“Aren’t you the wit. But seriously, I think I made two women cry today. In any event, I’ve gone from ‘next-most-important’ to ‘most-likely-to-be-blacklisted.’
And
I’m a fraud. I can’t even think of a new way to describe those mountains outside.”

“Of course you can, Jack.” Her voice was bright as she swirled the ice cubes in her glass. “If anyone can think of a new way, you’re that guy. You may not have timeless beauty and profound themes and unobtrusiveness of plot going your way, but you’re nothing at all if you’re not a man of your day.”

E
ddie Renfros awoke feeling as though his forehead was wrapped in rubber bands. It was going to be one of the major hangovers of his life. Top ten, he thought, perhaps even top five. He opened one eye, closed it, then reluctantly opened both, wincing from the already full light. Lying on his side, he took in the brown acrylic blanket, the cabin’s glossy faux stucco walls, the artwork painted by someone untrained in perspective, the white resin table holding last night’s final empty bottle. This is what it’s going to be like, he thought, once we lose the apartment.

He’d suspected, even at twenty-three, that his early success was a jinx. Still in Iowa, his
MFA
a semester away from completion, he’d been granted an advance that sounded like the beginning of wealth and prompted him to propose to Amanda, whom he’d always figured would wind up with Jackson if she didn’t abandon them both to marry a rich guy.

Now, indulging in a little hangover-earned self-pity, he resented his early fortune. It would have been better to have had his first novel go unpublished, to have placed
Vapor
modestly but with a good house, and to be on the eve of his breakout book. That’s how it used to happen for writers, how it’s supposed to happen. If Eddie couldn’t finish and sell his new book soon, they’d lose the Murray Hill apartment where Amanda said she could live happily until they really made it. She had already worked in a publishing office a year longer than the year they’d agreed upon, and Eddie knew all too well that Amanda wasn’t the kind of person who could work indefinitely for a boss who wasn’t as smart as she was. He contemplated what it would take to keep her if they had to move somewhere cheaper, but that was too dreadful to consider even when he was feeling well. He could barely admit to himself and certainly had not admitted to Amanda that he had nothing of a third novel beyond a thrice reworked thirty pages.

He turned to reach for his wife. He would pledge undying love, show remorse, beg her to find the vending machine and buy him a coke. “I’m ready to get home and really write. Tomorrow I go back on a schedule,” he rehearsed. “Once we’re back in the city, things will be better than normal. I’ll finish my book by winter. I’m not even going to revise the first chapter again.”

His fingers grasped only cool, thin sheet, and he turned over to find himself alone in a room that smelled like mold. Sometimes when he awoke to find Amanda already up and about, he feared that she was really gone, that she hadn’t even stuck around to make sure that he would indeed become the failure he seemed capable of being.

When Jackson had asked him if it was wise to marry someone ambitious, Eddie put it down to jealousy. Yet he’d also taken the question seriously; it was something he’d weighed. The simplest answer was that he loved Amanda. He loved her looks, of course, but he also loved her because she was funny and interested in the world. He admired the strength of imagination and the determination with which she had reinvented herself at the age of eighteen. He thought, even, that she could lend him some of what he lacked, that perhaps he could write while she managed his career. And feeling like a success with a book under contract, he hoped he would satisfy her desire to rise in the world.

Now, wretched, he fell back into sleep.

When the creak of the opening door wakened him, he was both grateful and aroused to see his wife, coke can and ice bucket in hand.

“I don’t deserve you. You’re perfect. You’re stunning.” He could barely speak through the headache squeezing the width of his forehead.

She poured the coke expertly. The fizz rose through the ice just to the rim of the glass and subsided before she topped it off. “Drink some cold caffeine and find the courage for a shower. The reading is in an hour, and then we need to hit the road.”

The reading was held inside the faux-chalet Outlook Bar, the sight of which brought back embarrassing memories from the previous night. Eddie could be obnoxious when he mixed liquors. Now he remembered ranting about the drafting of his first novel, telling Henry Baffler about the blurb from Jonathan Warbury that had arrived too late to go on the jacket, and letting Jackson know he’d had sex with Amanda that morning. He vowed that in the future he would stick to the same cocktail all night, alternate drinks with glasses of water, and keep his big mouth shut.

The beer-on-carpet smell unsettled his stomach, and his headache hadn’t let up. He’d only been able to get down about half the coke. His goal now was to not vomit on stage. They took a side-front table, and he concentrated on the view of the mountains through the wall-sized plate-glass windows as the room filled with hundreds of people.

“This will be the most people you’ve ever read to,” whispered Amanda, her hand comforting on his thigh.

The reading of published past participants was the final event of the week-long Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. Eddie was slated to read third, following a woman who’d written a novel about the yearnings and losses of the members of a book club and Jeffrey Whelpdale, a basically amiable fellow forging a literary career in the absence of evident talent.

Whelpdale had not gone so far as to self-publish, but he hadn’t received an advance for his book. It had been printed by a West Coast house whose publisher was an old chum of his, and the son of a man with a wad of expendable capital. Whelpdale had generated sales by placing each of the stories in the book of interconnected short stories—he called it a novel in stories—in assorted youth and other writer-targeted magazines such as
Swanky
. He’d also sold thousands of copies to writers themselves through his “writers’ resource website,” whose features included “hot agent of the month” and “creating a literary prize.” It could only be a matter of months before he penned a how-to book about writing and publishing.

Jackson and Amanda loathed Whelpdale, but Eddie liked him despite himself. Whelpdale was so frank, so utterly honest about what he was doing and why, that you couldn’t fault him for ulterior motives. And his happiness at the success of other writers seemed genuine. Whelpdale seemed to think he was doing what he was doing for all of them. Besides, he was one of those big guys who actually
is
jovial, and Eddie generally enjoyed talking to him.

Jackson, looking incredibly fresh and as annoyingly tall as ever, approached and took a seat at their table. “Great crowd. Capital.” He looked around. “They serving coffee?”

“Downright uncivilized, isn’t it?” Amanda swung her hair over her shoulder. “Who are you looking for?”

“Have you seen Andrew Yarborough here?”

“Nope,” Eddie said, wondering if Amanda’s rearranging of her hair signified a change in mood.

The conference host—an elderly, spry woman with sterling silver hair and a reputation as a master of the short story—stepped on stage and welcomed the crowd.

“This is both the saddest and happiest day of every year. Saddest, because our fabulous week is over. Happiest, because this reading is the proof in the pudding that our hard work and effort, not to mention our faith—yes, our faith—can and will be rewarded.” She punched her fist into the air.

Amanda and Jackson snickered a little. Eddie feared that Amanda would be stricken with the giggles. In Iowa, they’d once had to leave a poetry reading because she couldn’t stop laughing and the poet had hated them both ever after, even though Amanda had tried to apologize, tried to explain that it wasn’t the poems but an association they triggered that had caused her laughing fit.

“Does she think she’s preparing troops to march to their death to save Paris?” Jackson whispered.

The woman at the microphone continued. “Not only that, but our work will reward the world with more great writing to lift the human spirit.” And with that, she introduced the author of
The Book Club
.

Amanda snickered again, and Jackson coughed into his hand.

The writer ascending the stage was a woman Eddie had heard earlier in the week telling a group of young admirers, “Now that I’ve done the novel thing, I’m not sure what I’m going to try next. Some kind of catering business, maybe, or perhaps just a screenplay. And I’ve always wanted to paint.”

Eddie figured she deserved the disdain of his wife and best friend. He hated the idea of writing as midlife hobby, the idea that writing isn’t a lifelong commitment to an art form but just one more skill to acquire, one more activity to check off your list. Still, he glanced left and right to silence Amanda and Jackson, and the three alumnae of the country’s most prestigious writing program braced themselves to hear the paisley-wrapped novelist read about the small loves and large disappointments of the members of a women’s book club.

“She’s brilliant, really,” Amanda said when it was over, no longer bothering to whisper. “Write about your target audience, and they will buy.”

Whelpdale took the stage next with a swaying gait that moved his formidable body from side to side. He tucked his hair behind his ears, adjusted the microphone with confidence, and cleared his throat into it. What followed was characteristic Whelpdale: slews of sentences containing “as though” and “as if” in which the two parts were identical rather than analogous. “He walked quickly into the room, as though he wished to move fast,” he read in a lilting voice. “The house’s owner had hung a Mets cap and an original Picasso, as though he believed the two belonged at the same level.”

Jackson snorted.

“She put on her sweater, as if she were cold,” sent Amanda back to giggling.

Even so, all would have been fine, except that Whelpdale read for fifty minutes. The entire session was supposed to have lasted an hour—twenty minutes per writer. People were leaving. At first only those in the back slipped away. Then around the room whole tables rose noisily and left.

Whelpdale read on. “He found her appearance simpatico, as though she were agreeable and sympathetic to him.”

“Get off the fucking stage,” Jackson finally hissed, his southern accent leaking.

Whelpdale looked as though he’d been struck across the face and finished with haste.

Eddie stood quickly and read for seven minutes to those who remained. Amanda had pleaded with him to read from the second book or the new one—there were often agents and editors present at these things—but Eddie was more comfortable reading from a published book than from a manuscript and in his condition he wanted to read something familiar. Avoiding eye contact with his wife, he read the emergence scene from
Sea Miss
. The room was well over half empty when he shut the book with a soft clap.

Amanda cursed Whelpdale for the first hour of their trip home. “I’m so angry on your behalf!” She drummed the dashboard of the rental car with both fists, holding the steering wheel straight with her knees.

“I don’t deserve you, Amanda. To defend me when everything is my own fault. If I could be more disciplined, I’d be out on my own book tour now instead of third billing at some conference for would-be writers.”

“You just need to get back home and on a schedule. Maybe a timer would help.”

“I wish I was good at something else, or had a family business I could go into. Then I could give you more. It’s stupid to try to write for a living. I’m an idiot for doing it.”

“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “Writing is as good a business as any. But since we aren’t independently wealthy, you might try a little harder to think of your work as your business. You could do good work
and
work that would sell if you could only look at it a little more practically. I know we always make fun of Jack, but he’s not altogether wrong. I won’t be surprised if he sits down and writes a bestseller someday.”

“Well, I’m not Jack. He’s naturally optimistic, and I’m not. I know you’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean I can actually do what you suggest.” He watched the blur of trees through the passenger-side window. “I need your sympathy more than your advice.”

“Eddie, it’s just that romantic poverty sounds good when you’re young, when it seems noble to write beautiful, obscure work. But it gets old fast. I liked reading your reviews, hearing you on the radio, having people recognize us at the bookstore. And now I know what good things cost. I don’t want to go back to living like I did as a kid. That’s not why I got the hell out of Wilkes-Barre on my eighteenth birthday. If I had to choose between literary reputation and contemptible popularity, I think I might take the bestseller.”

“No you wouldn’t, Amanda. You’re not like that.”

“But you’re so talented, Eddie, I want you to have the audience you deserve. Wouldn’t you rather be read by more people than less? Don’t you want people to hear what you have to say?”

“What I have to say, yes. Not what they want me to say. Not at the price of writing crap. Have you tried to read some of the books that are out there?”

“But you write beautifully. Your book wouldn’t be crap. It would just be more accessible, more the sort of book you can’t put down because you want to find out what will happen.” Amanda always used her hands when she talked, and now, even as she used one hand to drive, her right hand fluttered. “This is what I propose. Take a week and plot out a short book—one with a good story to it. Then write it out, but with the classic Renfros style. You’ll see that you can tell a good story and write well.”

“Don’t forget that it takes a particular talent to write that sort of story,” Eddie continued. “Plot has always been the hardest but also the least important thing to me.”

“We need gas.” Amanda, both hands back on the wheel, veered the car onto a billboard-lined exit. “Look, just pick something straightforward, something that the book clubs will eat up. A love story. A dead child. An animal with supernatural empathy. A narrator with some rare affliction or who’s already dead.”

“I’m going to assume you’re joking. You know that’s against everything I believe in, everything you believe in,” he said as they pulled into a brightly painted station. Before stepping out to pump the gas, he muttered, “Or used to believe in.”