Grub (29 page)

A
fter their second criss-crossing book tours, Amanda Renfros settled happily into near-married life with Jackson. His decision to turn down the talk show had proved a brilliant publicity move. There was no other way to explain how a novel about the rather mundane life of a not-particularly-well-known Dutch artist could top the fiction bestseller list.

“Do you mind,” Jackson had asked, “being number two?”

“Not as long as I’m your number one,” she’d said in the voice she’d perfected for delivering sweet clichés in a way that made them sound at once ironic and genuine.

And, indeed, it was true that she did not mind. After years of marriage to Eddie, it was a relief to feel that she was finally wedding up.

Their apartment, located behind the locked gates of Sniffen Court, so perfectly suited her taste that she suspected Jackson had had her in mind when he bought it.

She kept busy conforming the interior of the apartment to her tastes—adding a grand piano, selecting window coverings, choosing colors for their guest room. She grew busier still planning a wedding likely to be covered in the society page of
The Times
and at least mentioned in
The Fair
or
Monde
.

Still, ever mindful of the disastrous fate of the has-been, she typed away at a new novel every morning. Titled
True Story
, the book told the story of a woman whose marriage destructs after she publishes a thinly disguised novel about her own adultery.

Occasionally, when Jackson went out to a party that didn’t interest her, she coughed up a Clarice Aames story. She toyed with the idea of killing Clarice dramatically—perhaps in the line of fictional duty—but she loved and perhaps even needed her alter ego. She enjoyed having two different fan bases; she certainly didn’t want to write only for women. But it was more than that. The truth she admitted to herself was that she liked Clarice’s fiction more than her own. Clarice’s stories seemed more important, telling the awful world into which she’d been born not what it wanted to hear, but what was wrong with it. She even liked the idea that she didn’t get paid for most of Clarice’s work, and so her bleeding-edge stories formed a kind of penance or tithe to literature, in exchange for the money she earned under her own name.

About two months before their own nuptials, Amanda and Jackson attended the wedding of Doreen to the insufferable Whelpdale. As Amanda expected, the ceremony—held in Grub’s banquet room—was a rather appalling affair of interdenominational hoo-ha and weak floral artistry. Still, Doreen looked like the sweet girl that she was in a simple ivory satin dress. Amanda and Jackson were seated at the bridal table, together with two of the Jonathans. She had to hand it to Whelpdale; he’d put together a fairly impressive literary guest list.

“I have news.” Doreen sounded slightly manic.

“Do tell,” replied Jackson, ever charming and on cue.

“She’s signed a book contract!” said her groom, pride visible in his smile and expanded chest.

“Oh my, my!” answered Jackson. “And this, after I had to sit through your little everyone-doesn’t-need-to-be-a-writer speeches. What happened to culinary training?”

Doreen blushed and popped her shoulders up and down twice. “I admit it. I was wrong. Besides, we want to start a family, so I can’t be working long restaurant nights.”

“A children’s book?” Amanda asked, scooting backwards as the waiter set down a plate of goat-cheese manicotti before her.

Whelpdale continued to beam.

“Let me guess,” said Jackson, pausing as though really thinking. “A chick-lit novel.”

“Close,” answered Doreen, eating gingerly across the satin of her bodice. “Two. Well, they’re really two versions of the same book, geared at different audiences.”

“Brilliant, isn’t it?” said Whelpdale, his mouth not quite closed around his food.

Doreen turned back to Jackson. “One is for that adult chick-lit line, “Thong,” and then I’m toning it down and younging it up for their new teen chick-lit series, which will be called “Kiss and Tell.” My book will be the first in the series, and they’ve got some other writers lined up.”

Other writers, Amanda thought, knowing those words would have elicited angry laughter from Eddie.

Jackson raised his glass. “To the author, on her wedding day!”

A
s the edges of his mind frayed, Andrew Yarborough often remembered how he’d felt before his bitterness had turned him into the self-and others-loathing version of himself that he had become. Related to this reawakening of his more likable self was his new life’s work: the cleaning of his office and ordering of his papers and mementoes. This work would take months, perhaps even his remaining lifespan, but already he was reaping the rewards of less clutter and pleasing rediscoveries. He’d re-read letters from the best and brightest novelists from the generation after his, thanking him for reviews, recommendations, behind-the-scenes help. He had been someone, damn it; he had been known and respected.

One morning he tried to explain to Janelle this remembered sense of being someone, of mattering, of needing to be reckoned with. She’d set his breakfast before him—he might need her to cook, but he could still feed himself—and suggested that perhaps he’d been most powerful when he had concentrated on helping others. “It’s when we focus on our own ambitions that they begin to outpace us.”

Sharp come-backs were harder and harder for him, so he just muttered, “Mumbo-jumbo, write it up in a gift book.”

But what he was thinking was that Janelle had held up remarkably well. He reached up and grabbed at her breasts before she backed away. Maybe there was something to that upside-down crap. And the gift books had saved their finances, he had to admit. She wasn’t getting rich, but she was pulling in the money that he used to. They would be able to keep up with the property taxes and stay out of the poor house, particularly now that Margot was leaving home.

He could never have forced a real apology to Margot, but he made amends as best he could. They played the games they had played together when she was that cute, sweet little girl: checkers, jacks, twenty questions, guess the word.

He still had ill-tempered days when he grumbled at the women in his house. These usually came on his sharpest days, when he was closer to the man he had most recently been and could muster only rage at the prospect of his future. But more often than not, he gave way to the softening of his mind and enjoyed the declining responsibilities that accompanied his growing professional obscurity.

“Just don’t ever let me be undignified,” he said to Margot before she drove away. “When I die, don’t let them bang my head on the floor of the morgue.”

“I’m going to miss you, Dad.” His daughter looked up at him with the same wide eyes she’d opened the day she was born.

“I was there when you were born, you know. I at least did that.”

He stood in the driveway, feeling a sudden weakness in his left knee, as though he were standing on a slope and not level concrete. He lifted his hand, more in salute than in a wave.

I
t was a phone call from Chuck Fadge that had Jackson Miller fuming. Fadge had proposed yet another inane writing story, something about which writers were dog people and which cat people, and was it true that one or more of the Jonathans had some sort of reptile for a pet. Except for the money, Jackson could see little difference between writing for Fadge’s paper and writing for Whelpdale’s ridiculous rag.

“He thinks I’m some hack,” Jackson bellowed. “After
Oink
, it was one thing to write those pieces—I needed a platform, a way to get my name bandied about—but not now. Now people want to know what I think about actual issues.”

“You’re the man of letters,” Amanda said, with no audible trace of sarcasm. “Tell him to go to hell.”

“Really?”

He eyed his beautiful new wife, watched her hands as she scrolled out her perfect script on the engraved thank-you cards.

She set down the fountain pen and looked right at him. “Absolutely, straight to hell. You don’t need him any more.”

“Every man should have such a supportive wife.”

“Every woman should have a husband short-listed for the National Novel Award.” She resumed, then paused from her note writing. “Guess what I’ve done?”

“Should I be frightened?”

“No, it’s something nice. I finished
Bailiff
. I even kind of liked it, so Clarice wrote a review and sent it to
Swanky
. I thought it might make Henry happy—if he’s still sweet on Clarice.”

“Are you going soft on me?”

She laughed and said, “Never fear.”

In the living room, Jackson read his way through a couple of dozen pages of the book that had beat out
Hide and Seek
for the prize. It was a relief, really, to find the situation as he had expected. As more than one commentator had noted: the winning book was arty to a fault, written in what the author called “juxtaposed fragments,” and by a woman. No doubt he’d never stood a chance with this year’s panel of judges, and he’d been wise to be “previously engaged” the night of the award ceremony, photo op or no.

According to what his editor had been able to find out, the winning volume had sold only two thousand copies, even after the award announcement. Yet it was also true that he found the book’s language oddly hypnotic, and he continued to read until he heard the squeak of Amanda’s chair suggest that she was done with her note-writing and might be willing to retire to the bedroom.

A scant few weeks later the call came. He found out not from the Pulitzer committee but from a reporter from
The Times
, calling for his reaction to the good news. He fielded calls all day.

“I think we’re going to have to change our number again,” he told Amanda.

“People don’t realize how hard our lives can be,” she grinned.

“And now we’ll be expected to go out and celebrate in style.”

“Of course,” she said, “but not at Grub. The quality of the food just isn’t what it used to be. I felt sorry for Doreen when I had that manicotti. I read about a new place. I’ll see if I can get us in tonight.”

Jackson nodded. “Amanda?”

She reached for his hand.

“What should I write next?”

“Anything you want,” she answered. “Anything you write will be capital.”

H
e couldn’t remember asking her to, not exactly, but Rhiannon more or less followed him home after they left the exhibit. Despite her growing jealousy of anything he happened to be reading and their near-constant bickering, despite the relegation of his writing area to an office made from a kitchen closet, and Rhiannon’s constant pronouncements that everything “is dead,” Henry grew used to living with another body. With Rhiannon, he was not alone with his poverty and ideals; he shared them with her.

And so everything was both bad and good on the evening that they opened their door to find a somewhat stout man, wearing a suit with faux gold buttons and nervously smoothing back his thinning red hair.

“My apartment,” the man explained, spreading his hands as though displaying his empire.

To Henry’s great dismay, his anonymous benefactor was not in fact J.D. Salinger, John Fowles, John Berger, or some other reclusive genius, but simply a businessman named John Young, who had been overcome by eggnog-inspired good will after seeing Henry’s on-camera leap on television. After a year of rent-free property ownership however, he remembered his disdain for skinny, poorly dressed young men who turned out to be living in sin with consumptive-looking girls in baggy pants. He was evicting Henry and Rhiannon from his Harlem apartment.

“I’m sorry,” said Mr. Young to the unhappy couple, “but I’ve decided to steer my voluntary donations toward a public sports program for the boys up here.”

“Voluntary and donation are redundant,” said Rhiannon before Henry could stop her.

“What? At any rate, I am sorry, but I don’t think I’ve done you young people a service by putting you on the dole. From the looks of you, I would have done better by you if I’d given you a gym membership. You’ve got to exercise the body first, then worry about the mind.”

Henry eyed the bulging stomach on the man and recognized, from his middle-school nightmares, the football shoulders and chest. He had been first saved and then evicted by a man who had probably never read a real book.

Recognizing the foolishness of arguing, Henry said quietly to his girlfriend: “Back to Hell’s Kitchen.”

“If we can afford it.” Rhiannon crossed her arms and issued a snort. “I saw the other day that another gallery has gone in by that old French restaurant with the jigsaw-puzzle portrait of Edith Piaff.”

“Did you know that Edith Piaff was born blind in a whorehouse?”

“Then maybe your girlfriend Clarice Aames can write a story about her.”

John Young interrupted. “I have no idea what you all are talking about, but I’m a decent man and so I’m going to give you two months’ notice instead of one. No need to clean, because a sledgehammer’s the next tenant. Just take all your stuff, lock the door behind you, and throw away the keys.” He strode a few feet down the hall before turning back and handing Henry a letter. “Found this on the landing. Postman must have butterfingers.”

Rhiannon snatched the envelope from Henry’s hands and opened the letter. “Looks like you’ve got a girly fan. Margot something. Before you know it you’ll have quite a harem. You should remember this, though: polygamy is dead.”

“I did buy your book, by the way, and I really did like the first few pages. Nice to see an author writing about a regular guy.” John Young took only one more step before turning again. “Do throw away those keys when you leave, now, because they’ll do you no good. The locks will be changed the very first thing.”