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A
manda Renfros was more dispirited than her husband when the final rejection of his novel
Vapor
—a form letter from a tiny press—arrived early in the week’s mail. She had enjoyed being married to a man of distinction. “My name is Amanda Renfros,” she’d tell clerks. “I see you have several copies of my husband’s book, but after last week’s review in
The Times
, you might want to consider a table display.”

Now that
Sea Miss
was out of print and the laudations were cold, Amanda was as likely as not to offer what she considered to be her more interesting maiden name: Amanda Yule. Her worry that Eddie had lost his talent had developed into an anxiety that gnawed her stomach like her childhood fears. Above all, she was angry with herself. She knew that she should have been more circumspect, thought more carefully about the future and what it meant to grow older before committing to, of all things, marriage to a writer. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible if Eddie was at least fighting back, but it seemed as though he didn’t much care if one or both of them wound up working in an office for the rest of their ordinary lives. The worst thing she could imagine was leading an uninteresting life, working the same hours as all the other drones. Every month she felt the doors to her future narrowing.

It was with such thoughts running through her mind that Amanda, on a whim, called in sick. The call was easy; she’d always been a good liar, knowing, as most fiction writers know, the precise amount of detail with which to decorate the untruth. After she hung up, she deleted the name “Amanda Renfros” from her silly first attempt at a popular book. She replaced it with “Amanda Yule” and then, for no real reason, with “Clarice Aames”. She sent the file containing “Bad Dog Séance” to
Swanky
, one of the magazines that both accepted electronic submissions and had a circulation worth counting.

After showering and drying her hair shiny straight, she dusted herself with verbena powder and dressed in good underwear, slinky gray pants, and an interesting shirt. She couldn’t be running around the city looking like she wasn’t even trying. She admitted this: if Eddie refused to do what was necessary to make things work out for them, she’d need to look her best wherever she went. “What women should do,” she told herself, “is choose a man after he’s old enough for it to be clear whether he’s made it for good or not.”

This thought troubled her, because it suddenly made the future unpredictable. She pictured the Eddie of old—boyish in his animation over every positive review, every “best of” short list—and felt melancholy wash away whatever had sparkled inside her.

Feeling sad and newly hollow, she completed the task of packaging herself well. She put blush on her cheeks, gloss to her lips, and diamond studs in her earlobes before easing her feet into pumps that made her six-feet tall. When she looked in the mirror, she saw again the awkward girl with the off-center mouth, but when she softened her frown and centered her lips, she glimpsed what she was after: the woman most men found beautiful.

Thus readied, she struck out for the Frick to find a painting begging for its own novel. She rode her high heels well, walking quickly past the old firehouse. Looking up at the inexplicable relief of a bulldog’s head that crowned the building, she wondered if that had planted the subliminal idea for “Bad Dog Séance” and vowed that her future literary choices would be conscious. At Third Avenue, she rounded the corner where Carmen Gigante had been shot, everyone said by Gotti, fifty years after Gigante murdered the editor of
Il Progresso
just down the street. She walked down 36t? Street, slowing to look at the much-coveted apartments of Sniffen Court—now gated and fully gentrified and looking much cleaner than it did on that Doors album cover that her brothers probably still listened to.

She walked uptown on Lexington, away from what she considered her neighborhood’s most dispiriting landmarks—the former Rutledge Inn where the Tylenol killer once stayed and the silly bar that had finally taken down its “first baseball game played here” plaque under threat of lawsuit from civic boosters one river and eight miles away. Now she strolled by anachronisms she found charming: the weird little police outpost that had guarded the Cuban embassy since Castro’s platform-shoe-era visit and the subterranean pool hall still called the ‘Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen Club.’ Maybe she’d put them in a book someday.

Not many women could walk much of Manhattan’s length in the shoes Amanda wore, but her stride was unchanged as she approached the Frick. After paying fifteen dollars, she flipped open her notebook and moved methodically through the small museum’s various rooms, reassured by the feminine click of her heels on the floors, imagining what it would be like if the Frick was a house—her house.

She’d always been calmed by the presence of great art, almost as though she knew the painters themselves and had not grown up in a house where the only art in evidence was a paint-by-numbers covered bridge and her brothers’ black-light posters. The point of pain in her stomach, which had been nearly constant for weeks, disappeared.

She dismissed Corot quickly, remembering the joke: “Corot painted three thousand paintings and five thousand of them are in the United States.” The Rembrandt’s rich color held her rapt for several minutes, but ultimately she decided that the portrait of a single person, no matter how much narrative it implied, did not offer enough material for the two hundred fifty-six printed pages that made the ideal book-club novel.

Doubting her instincts, she wondered if she should have gone instead to the Whitney or the MoMA. Maybe a Lichtenstein was the thing; she could mimic the comic-strip pointillism. But, no, that would be too arty, too punk, would hit the wrong audience. Its audience would be too small. She smiled at the thought that Clarice Aames could write a Lichtenstein story. For that moment, she thought of Clarice Aames as another person, a someone she might phone and offer an idea for a story.

Amanda lingered at the Hobbema pictures. They appeared to be landscapes or scenes of empty houses and sheds in landscapes, but, at the right distance and angle, it was easy to see the people the artist had hidden in window frames, behind tree stumps, huddled in tall grass. A possibility, she decided, though she was concerned that the artist was not famous enough. It seemed a shame that he had quit painting so young when he might have made a real name for himself.

Amanda forgot Hobbema as she stepped into the frothy bizarreness of the Fragonard room. Of course, she thought, she needn’t have considered anything else! She must have known, in the back of her mind, that it would be the Fragonards, and that was why she’d started for the Frick rather than the Met or that godawful Dahesh shrine to ravished virgins and false exoticism.

Alone in the room, her faith in her instincts restored, Amanda smiled sideways. Fragonard was perfect: famous enough, weird enough but not too weird, historical, pretty, and—this was key—full of sexual possibility. That odd fellow heading off the canvas had to be sneaking off to do something kinky. She determined, on the spot, to title her novel
The Progress of Love
, to name her buxom heroine Libertine, and to write the book in four months.

Before leaving, she bought a copy of each of the gift shop’s publications on Fragonard and also a book about Hobbema, which she paged through on what she considered a well-deserved taxi ride home. After all, she’d walked all the way up the east side in the highest of heels and this was the day she was taking her fate into her own hands.

Eddie was busy in the kitchen when she opened the door. “I’m making you a real Caesar salad,” he said. “The kind the Hollywood types used to drive to Tijuana for.”

“They went to Tijuana for the liquor and bull fights,” she said. “The salad was secondary. But it sounds good, so long as you leave the raw egg out.”

His head dropped a little. “I sort of coddled it, and I washed it first.”

Amanda’s mood was so light that she couldn’t summon her nasty side. She kissed her husband’s cheek. “All right, then, but if I get salmonella poisoning I’m filing for divorce.”

“If I poison you, I’ll hold your hair back while you puke.”

“Don’t be gross, Eddie. Particularly not if you want me to eat.”

Over the chilled salad bowls, she told her husband the story of Meindert Hobbema. “You should write a novel about him. It’s perfect for you. He had all this talent, but he just stopped painting in his late twenties. Just stopped. And it’s apparently not because he was ill or tortured or consumptive or anything. He just up and quit and took some clerk’s job like the assistant important underling of weights and measures.” She paused to roll an anchovy onto her fork and bite into its saltiness. “Anyway, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find out why he quit painting and write a novel about it. Think tasteful but not low-budget screenplay while you’re at it. You know, include enough dialogue and some cinematic scenes and images.”

Eddie shoved salad into his mouth at an impolite pace.

“Slow down,” she said. “Try to enjoy it. It’s really very good.”

She did not mention Fragonard, nor her intention to write a novel, and she most certainly did not state the small, important truth that she already had a title—or the much larger truth that she’d decided to quit her job.

W
hile Margot Yarborough felt a fragment of guilt over moving her snoring father back into her mother’s room and some embarrassment over her failure to make it in the city, she was happy to be back in her family home. Despite her parents’ years of bickering, she thought of her childhood fondly. And perhaps because of that bickering, she had made, from an early age, a sanctuary of her room. She thought of it as spring: the wall paint reflected fresh green, the few pieces of furniture and the floor planks were whitewashed, and her linens and curtains reminded her of meadows in April. Her father had contaminated the room with cigar smoke, but several days and nights of open windows and a vase of fresh lavender restored the illusion of the world emerging from winter even as the yellow and red leaves outside the window made it obvious that winter was still to come.

Her New York apartment had been small, furnished with the basics alone, so she’d moved home with only a suitcase of clothes, a box of kitchen objects, her writing materials, and forty-seven boxes of books.

“Unpack your clothes, honey,” her mother had said. “But these other things need to stay in the garage until you decide what you need at hand. Visual clutter actually inhibits mental clarity. There’s been research—not that your father will hear of it. I shudder when I walk by his office.”

Margot placed her clothes on hangers and in drawers. She set up her laptop, arranged her notebooks and pencils, and stacked both drafts of
The Reluctant Leper
on the antique white table at which she had made her first literary attempt at the age of six. It had been an Emily Dickinson imitation: a poem she’d called “The Long Grass Blade.” She wondered if a copy still existed and whether the poem contained a salvageable line, some phrase she could weave into her novel—a sentimental joke hidden to all but her.

After her mother left to take an exercise class she called “burning pilates,” which she’d begged Margot to try as soon as possible—“you need to build muscle and bone while you still can,” she’d admonished—Margot slipped out to the garage. There she unpacked the forty-seven boxes of her books in order to select ten volumes she would allow herself to keep inside. Several hours later, she had moved thirty-seven books into her room and still had to go back for a dictionary. About half the books she’d pulled out were favorites. The other fifteen were those she had at the top of her to-read list. Though she had many contemporary novels and poetry collections in the repacked boxes in the garage, not one of the books she took to her room, save the dictionary, had been published after 1910.

There was rap at her door, which swung open and was filled by her father’s substantial body.

“Just setting up my workspace,” she said.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that, Margot. Quite a coincidence that you’ve come home now, actually. I’ve been doing some thinking, and I think you’re just the person to help out your dear old dad in his time of need. It’s time for old dad to get some more points on the scoreboard, however late in the game.”

Margot knew the conversation’s blueprint: it was her turn to remind him of his many accomplishments while assuring him that he was plenty young enough to do more. She got so far as to open her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come readily, as they once had.

“I’m not getting any younger,” he said when he registered her silence, “and there’s no use telling me otherwise because I know what I see when I look in the mirror.” He brushed back his hair, resting his other hand on the stomach starting to overhang his belt. “But I’ve still got time to make my mark, at least with the help of my loving daughter.” His tone was playful—mock sarcastic—but it seemed like a transparency overlaying something more serious, even worrisome.

Margot had made herself hungry toting books back and forth, but at this her appetite retreated and her neck felt cold. Her shoulders shuddered, a movement she tried to contain, keep small. Perhaps it was at this moment she first contemplated her father as mortal. “What did you have in mind?” she asked, risking this mistake.

“Just a bit of copyediting. My new book is finished. Finally finished!”

“Congratulations,” she managed. “Has your editor seen it?”

“Just needs a bit of copyediting, you know, a fresh pair of eyes.” Her father’s smile was wide, his voice louder than necessary. “I’d do it myself but my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and of course my time is our money. It’s not like your mother pays the bills around here.”

Margot rested her palm on the tall stack of her own draft pages. “Sure, Dad. I’d be glad to help out with a little proofreading, but I’ve got my own project to finish as well.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. Proofreading. Maybe just a little fix here and there, if you see a sentence that could be more elegantly worded. Of course, there are a few spots that need a dash of filling in. You know how the process goes. Every writer leaves in a phrase here or there that’s really just a marker. I mean, all I’m saying is that I may not have caught them all.”

Margot nodded slowly. “When were you thinking? I’d be happy to get to it just as soon as I finish—”

“The sooner the better, really, given that your dad’s not getting any younger. Plus Fadge already has his book out.” He brightened, his smile transforming into something genuine. “Did you see that review in
The Times
? Got what he deserved.” He stepped toward her and set an awkward hand on her shoulder, something like a pat, before retreating to the door.

That night, Margot slept fitfully, dreaming shallow nightmares in which she floundered in a sea of green ink and copyediting marks. Faulkner whispered words she couldn’t discern; not another language but not quite English either. Fitzgerald laughed uproariously and pointed. James Dickey pinched her bottom. The pages of the marked-up Balzac manuscript she’d seen at the Pierpont-Morgan library flew at her like road signs in a 1950s movie. Though she was still exhausted, waking was all relief.

Abiding by Miss Manner’s admonition that a robe, brushed hair, and clean teeth are the minimum requirements for a breakfast appearance, Margot arrived in the kitchen ten minutes after waking to find her father talking at her mother’s back.

“Guess what!” he exclaimed, turning his entire body to follow his perpetually stiff neck. “I just received the best email I’ve ever started the day with. It’s too good to be true.” He paused for encouragement but continued without it. “Fadge has actually made things ten times worse for himself. Ordinarily an abused writer’s only recourse is the letters page, but Fadge pulled his dirty little strings and was granted an entire page—in the goddamed
Times
!—to defend himself like the helpless little boy he is. Quarmbey was livid, let me tell you. But now! Now! Now the employees this was forced on got in the last trick. Fadge’s response will be printed under a huge banner that says ‘I’m Not Really an Idiot.’ It’ll be in this Sunday.”

Although Janelle had purchased two electric juicers, she had since declared them too loud, saying there was too much noise pollution in the world already. Now she squeezed oranges by hand, her waist twisting with her work. Without disrupting her rhythm, she said, “It seems cruel.”

“That’s right! Cruel indeed.” Her father laughed at full volume. “And there’s nothing Fadge can do now. He’ll have had his unprecedented page. They can’t give him more, and he’ll look babyish enough as it is. He won’t even have grounds for complaint, because he actually says those words—‘I’m not really an idiot’—in his response. Can you imagine writing such a thing? Knowing it was to be published with your name on it? You can just shoot me the day I ever so much as think of writing such a line. I mean, if you have to tell the world you’re not really an idiot, the world is going to catch on to that one. People are stupid, but they’re not that stupid.”

Margot was slowly growing accustomed to eating breakfast with others after several years of doing so alone more often than not. And she felt better watching her mother wince at her father’s sausage and freezer pancakes, catching her father make faces at her mother’s raw oats in yogurt.

“It’s like the good old days.” Margot worked a spoon into her berry-laced cereal. “All of us together but different.” Still at the table, she devised a schedule for alternating work on her novel with the copyediting of her father’s mess of a manuscript.

And thus her days passed: after spending three morning hours on her father’s book, she turned to her own work, pausing only for an afternoon snack and, if one of her parents was home to remind her, a bit of dinner. Though she was mostly happy during these weeks, she felt slight alarm whenever she thought of Jackson Miller. His emails to her were much shorter than the long paragraphs in which she elaborated on the movement of the river outside her window, on her worries about sending her book into the world, on the way the books she read changed her moods the way colors shift in a kaleidoscope. Though brief, his emails were frequent, and in them she detected fondness and possibly a good deal more. If she forgot to check her email or failed to write to him for a couple of days, she read both worry and pouting in his tone. The first time he closed a note
Love, Jack
, she wondered if it signified a new intensity in his feelings or something more ephemeral, an affection sliding sideways like a cloud’s shadow.

He continued to sign his name with the term of endearment, but of course he couldn’t very well stop once he’d started. Perhaps it had become a habit, even a way of limiting rather than deepening their friendship, like a kiss on the cheek or a routine hug goodbye. She remembered that he was from Charleston, and she understood that social codes were different in the south.

She remembered a visiting writer she’d chatted with during a sparsely attended signing at the bookstore. Sitting behind a large, unsold stack of his novel about baseball reenactors, he’d said, “The problem with a Yankee is that he’ll tell you everything he knows in the first hour you know him.” The man had spent the next hour telling her more than she wanted to know about southern ball leagues while she, northern born and disinterested in sports, had said next to nothing. He’d given her a vigorous hug when he left, as though there were old friend. And so she decided not to put too much stock in the warmth of Jackson’s coda.

Despite stray thoughts about Jackson Miller, Margot thought more about writing than about any person. There were days on which she had little confidence in her novel, concluding that her self-delusion about its quality was total. In the main, though, she was smitten with
The Reluctant Leper
. It told the story of a man traveling though nineteenth-century Louisiana. After a few misadventures in The Crescent City, an encounter with a relatively plain but pure-of-heart Creole girl living in the marshes near Lake Pontchartrain inspires the protagonist to perform a good deed. He agrees to carry supplies to the leper colony at Carville, an institution that Margot had researched painstakingly. If she’d had the money, she might have flown to Louisiana, but, truth be told, she preferred to study books—representations of places, people, and things—over the things themselves. And ultimately writing was, after all, an act of imagination.

Once at the leper colony, her hero is wrongfully mistaken for a diagnosed leper and interred. After fifteen years—years that see increased understanding of leprosy as Hansen’s disease—he finally proves to a doctor that he is not infected with the bacterium responsible for the disfiguring condition. Then on the eve of his release, he realizes that he has lost sensation in his fingertips: he has finally contracted leprosy from a decade and a half of living in close quarters with lepers. No one knows, so he is free to leave. Yet inspired by the memory of the virtuous Creole girl, he chooses to stay and live out his life among an eccentric cast of lepers. He dies an obscure but happy man, sustained by his outcast friends and his love for a woman he met only once, never slept with, and has not seen in years and years.

After two weeks, the novel was only a line edit away from completion—though what completion might mean or bring, Margot could not conjecture. Her father’s book, on the other hand, was still not fit for consumption and was taking every bit as much time as she had expected it to. Not that his book didn’t contain astute observations about the history and practice of literature—it did. But Margot was sadly unsurprised to find numerous faulty quotes, dates, and other facts. Worse, some of her father’s “place markers” represented mere glimpses of undeveloped ideas. Most of the missing material pertained to women writers. One trick she needed to perform was to provide opinions on Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf in her father’s voice but in such a way that would keep feminist critics from eviscerating him. The thing was to write like her father—with flare and expansiveness—only tightened and given more clarity, grace, and compassion than he generally mustered.

Margot finished her work on
The Reluctant Leper
early on a Sunday morning, which left her able at last to foresee the completion of her work on her father’s crowning literary accomplishment. At breakfast, she watched her father—his mouth full of freezer-to-toaster pastry—again laughing at the enormous banner over Fadge’s page-long defense of his history of literature: “I’m Not Really an Idiot.”

Instead of announcing her good news, she retreated to her room and savored it privately. I just wrote a novel, she told herself. I just wrote a novel. Her misgivings gone, at least for the moment, she felt almost giddy.

When she went online and found several new messages from Jackson—all brief but increasingly pleading—she realized she’d let the rest of her life go while she completed her book. Just like a real writer. She hit reply to his latest email and typed: “I just wrote a novel. Can you celebrate?”