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I
t was like a sore Eddie Renfros couldn’t resist picking. But at least he set limits: Amazon checks no more than twice per hour, internet review searches no more than twice per day, and attempts to infiltrate his wife’s email accounts—she seemed to keep several—only when he knew she was out of town or, at a minimum, out of the apartment for at least several hours. He came to see the latter as a test: if he couldn’t crack her password, how well could he claim to know her? He was certain that Amanda was the sort of person who would choose her own password as she determined her own life; she would never accept a random combination of letters issued by someone else.

He had tried various combinations of her name (first, last, married, maiden, middle) and important dates. He’d tried his own name and, in one of his most pathetic moments, Jackson’s, as well as the name of the professor he was sure she’d slept with at Iowa. He’d tried various words associated with her novel, including anagrams of its title, the name
Fragonard
, and the word
Frick
.

Frick had come to him in the middle of the night and seemed so perfect that it was difficult to wait for his wife to leave the house so that he could try it. It was so very Amanda in its bridging of high and low, its innocently crude innuendo, that he was stunned to receive the “incorrect password/please retype your password” message in the annoying red triangle.

This was one of the ways he passed the time in which he was supposed to be writing. He had alternatives: he had taken up baking and computer solitaire and was doing his utmost to keep up his prodigious and growing tolerance for alcohol in several of its varieties. In response to the expanding waistline that accompanied his increased consumption of homemade baked goods and cocktails, he assigned himself a hundred crunches and two longs walks daily. He was much less likely to give himself permission to forego the crunches than the page-a-day minimum he had also set for himself. A long paragraph covering the better part of a page could easily be rounded up, and sometimes a single sentence could be considered a good day’s work if it promised momentum for the next day. And, of course, sometimes Eddie wrote nothing at all.

“How can I be expected to write a book I wouldn’t want to read?” he had asked when Henry Baffler called to confirm their plans to see Clarice Aames at the CIA Bar.

“Do you think that matters?” Henry had asked. “If it’s a book you really want to write, does it matter if anyone wants to read it?”

So Eddie had begun to ponder the meaning of writing a book he wouldn’t want to read. He’d written one already, but not on purpose.
Conduct
hadn’t been the book he’d hoped, but it wasn’t a book he’d hurl into the fireplace. Now he imagined following his wife’s advice: he would write just the sort of novel he always cursed for its very popularity.

After checking the Amazon ranking numbers for his book, Jackson’s, and Amanda’s one more time, he ordered a copy of Whelpdale’s
How to Write a Novel
. He perused the “customers who bought this title also bought” list and added to his shopping cart
Give the People What They Want
,
How to Write a Damn Good Book
, and
Scribble Yourself to Wealth
. Maybe he’d gather the wisdom in these jewels and hack out a bestseller. Probably not—he wasn’t that desperate yet—but it was important to know what the enemy was up to.

He shut down his computer and contemplated the liquor cabinet, wondering how much Irish whiskey he’d have to drink to actually vomit.

M
argot Yarborough drove her mother’s sedan upstate toward the first reading of her author tour, skirting the Adirondacks as the area awakened to economic life after a winter’s hibernation. The car’s
CD
folder contained a large selection of non-classical instrumental music and assorted people singing or chanting in Gaelic, Native American languages, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Butanese, and Hungarian. There was not a single English-language lyric in the lot, and Margot decided that it might be a good thing that her drive would not be intruded upon by other people’s words—at least not by any that she could understand.

She could be alone with thoughts, could figure out what had happened with Jackson. The story she wanted to tell herself was that she was nursing a broken heart and it would make her a real writer, would infuse her future work with depth of feeling, with pain. But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t loved Jackson, though she’d wanted to and he’d wanted her to. For whatever reason, he’d convinced himself that she could give him some form of authenticity, that she could make him a better person, a more serious writer. That meant, of course, that he’d idealized her, saw in her something that wasn’t there. When she asked herself why she hadn’t been able to fall in love with Jackson, she had no answer, and worried that she was missing some capacity she was supposed to have. She hadn’t been in love with the guitar player either. She’d never really been in love, unless she could count the overwhelming crush she’d had on her eleventh-grade literature teacher, which she knew she couldn’t. She always wound up with boyfriends she liked. Maybe that was supposed to be enough—maybe that’s what people called love—but her definitions of love came from novels, and real-life had never come close.

At Keeseville, the snow-cone stand was still locked up. A wooden shingle hanging over the road to the boat that Margot had assumed would ferry her across Lake Champlain read “closed for season.” If she headed back south and went around, she’d likely be late for her reading in Burlington. If she soldiered on, she might be able to catch the northernmost ferry, which the map indicated led to an island in the middle of the lake, from which there was a bridge to the Vermont side. But if that ferry wasn’t operating, she’d have to double back or cross into Canada, circumvent the lake, and reenter the country at the Vermont border-crossing.

Despite her predicament, what Margot felt was resignation more than anxiety. She’d come to expect that anything pertaining to her book would not go her way. Her decision to forge ahead was based on a single criterion: she didn’t like the idea of turning back the way she’d come. She pointed the car toward Plattsburgh and continued to the northernmost portion of New York. Wind pushed at the car, and the sky grayed as French appeared more frequently on the road signs.

She took the last U.S. exit and followed the narrow road as it curved around the lake’s flank. She imagined living on its banks, in one of the houses that somehow stood against odds and sense and against the relentless wind. The idea of living somewhere remote and even harsh had always appealed to Margot—it was a notion that had helped her infuse her Louisiana setting with romance—but she’d always imagined her life as a hermit in a warm climate—desert rather than arctic harshness. Now, though, questioning the substance of her heart and feeling mostly alone in the world, the idea of holing up on some bitterly cold lake and writing about its hardy inhabitants had its appeal. She wondered how one might write about a group of people who rarely interact with each other, picturing each person segregated in his or her own chapter, each chapter like a closed house.

Given her state of mind, she was surprised to find the ferry in service and further surprised to get a space on it, even though she was last in a line of what looked to be more cars than would fit. Perhaps this was a sign that her luck would change if she lived in such a place, a place where men didn’t throw themselves away on the world. As she rode the ferry, Margot tried to reconstruct Eudora Welty’s story of a man and woman who meet at a luncheon in New Orleans and drive practically off the map. There was a ferry ride in that story, she was sure of it, but she remembered only the lush language—and the fact that the two characters failed to ever really connect, departed without knowing one another, and yet were profoundly changed. She wondered if she had changed Jackson, and how she might now be different for knowing him.

Margot had no time to shower, but she made her reading. Like the rest of Burlington, the bookstore sat on a steep hill that rose from the lake and was battered by its cold wind. She was at once disappointed and relieved to find an audience of only six. An elderly man punctuated her reading with demands that she speak more loudly, but otherwise, the reading went well. Three of the six people bought her book and asked her to sign it. She’d practiced her signature, developing a more interesting capital ‘M’, and a ‘Y’ with some flourish, but she was stumped by what to write in the books. In two she wrote “with appreciation,” and in the other she simply wrote the location and date under her signature. She was then left alone with the hard-of-hearing man, who thrust a manuscript into her hands.

“Politics and poetry,” he said, running an index finger over an eyebrow grown long. “Combined. Show it to your editor and then I’ll call her.”

Margot smiled what she hoped was a kind smile. “I wish I had that kind of clout, but I don’t. And my editor doesn’t handle poetry.”

“But it’s politics, too. She’ll love it.”

Margot shook her head. “I’m really not the person to help you, and I’d hate for you to waste a copy. You should get one of those writer’s market books and query some agents who handle your sort of book.”

“Oh, they never write back!” the man growled at her. “Look, I drove for two hours and I listened to your reading—you need to learn to speak up—just to give this to you to give to your editor. Take it.”

“But how would I get it back to you?”

“You won’t need to, because you’re going to get it published.” He poked her repeatedly with the shaggy manuscript. “Take it. Take it.”

At last, the bookstore owner rescued her by telling the man the shop was closing.

“You probably want dinner,” the middle-aged woman said to Margot as she let her out on the street. “You might try the Mexican place right up the street. Or if your publisher’s paying, there’s a good restaurant at the cooking school. Expensive, though. Really nice reading, by the way. Really nice.” And with that, the woman let the glass door fall heavily between them, leaving Margot on the frigid street gripping hundreds of pages of the old man’s poems and musings.

She’d heard a story once, about a writer who had violently destroyed a manuscript sent to him by an unwanted admirer. She couldn’t remember who the writer was—maybe Richard Ford or Denis Johnson or Jonathan Warbury—but she could picture the image of him leaping up and down, gorilla-like, on the offending stack of pages and then jumping in the dumpster after it to finish the job. She walked to the public trash can in the center of the block, but once she got there, she found she just couldn’t drop the manuscript. Maybe her father would get a kick out of it, or at least she’d mail it back to the man, being sure to leave off her return address.

After Burlington, the so-called book tour got worse, and Margot could feel something sour expand in her stomach with every stop. In Montpelier, she read to an audience of two: both bookstore employees who had been called in on their day off under threat of dismissal. In Stockbridge, she read to an audience of one: a very tall woman who, unlike most Vermonters, wore a full face of makeup. Margot offered to skip the reading and instead take the woman to coffee and discuss the book.

“I like readings.” The woman folded her arms. “The flyer said it would be a reading. I’m here for a reading. Read.”

When Margot halted after twenty minutes, the woman said, “More. A reading is supposed to be at least thirty minutes. I want you to read for thirty or forty minutes. That’s what a reading is.”

At a small college in Rutland, her reading got off to a more auspicious start. It was held in a room that looked like a chapel, and the audience grew to more than a handful, then to over a dozen. The setting sun shone through a round stained-glass window and washed Margot in red and blue light. Though exhausted, she read well, and it seemed that the jewel-colored light lent extra depth to her sentences.

At the reception after the reading, a buxom redhead with a tilted glass of wine cornered her. “It must be awesome to be a writer. I think it would be really cool.” The girl guzzled the wine, getting most but not all of her gulp in her mouth and wiping away the rest with the back of her hand. “I’ve got three books in my head. All I’ve got to do is write them down.”

“That’s the hard part.” Margot heard something new and sharp in her voice.

The young woman shrugged and said, “Maybe next summer.”

Margot arrived in Shaftsbury to find that the bookstore that invited her had gone out of business the day before. Its glass door was papered over—blank white except for a sign reading, “Sorry, but you’ll have to buy your books online like everyone else.”

In Bennington, Margot was again handed a manuscript at the end of her reading, this time by a young man who claimed to have been a leper in Louisiana in one of his past lives.

“But my book is about a different life,” he explained. “It’s about one of my female lives. I was Louis the Fourteenth’s lover for twenty years.”

“My editor is handling less and less fiction,” Margot explained.

“It’s non-fiction,” said the young man. “I know that memoir is where the money is these days.”

By the time Margot crossed the southern state line into Massachusetts, she was glad to be leaving her book tour behind. She drove through the Berkshires exhausted but proud of herself for surviving the appearances. What had been demoralizing—the slow death of her first novel—had turned comic. And she was pleased to observe that she thought of Jackson less and less. Let him have his fame, she thought, because that’s what he wants.

Fame wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was to rise after ten straight hours of sleep in her own bed and write a short story while sipping a hot cup of tea. That, and to hand off to her father the manuscript by the old man with the horrible eyebrows, so she didn’t have to look at it anymore.