Grub (25 page)

A
ndrew Yarborough did not divulge the details of the doctor’s diagnosis to his wife or daughter. Knowing that he would have to depend upon them for money as well as any kindness, that he would all too soon be reduced to playing with teddy bears, his dignity subject to their mercy, he could not bring himself to treat them with anything but disdain. While secretly hoping for its financial success, he continued to deride Janelle’s launch of a line of New Age gift books. Each book was only three-by-four inches large and contained a short story illustrating some dumb-ass Buddhist or Taoist saying. They had names such as
Be Here Now
,
Light a Lamp for Another
,
The Strongest Man
,
One Moon/Many Pools
, and
What You Already Have
.

“You’d be better off selling hypochondriacs those hypoallergenic blankets,” he said. “Those jacket colors are appalling. And if you’re going to hand out inane advice, give the people what they already know. You know:
This is the First Day of the Rest of your Life
and
Nothing Tastes as Good as Thin Feels
. People want to be told what they already think. First rule of publishing.”

“That’s half the point of
Being Unto Yourself
,” Janelle said in her pseudo-benevolent voice. “Besides, sometimes the strongest man is invisible and when you light a lamp for another, your own path is lit.”

Stricken by the idea that all speech would eventually sound as incomprehensible to him as his wife’s mumbo jumbo, Andrew screamed.

When his daughter returned with horror stories from her book tour, he was unable to muster more than a few versions of I told you so. If only she’d have started up the journal, they could have worked together as father and daughter. He would have had a chance to make one more mark before descending into his pathetic future. But now he could only view his daughter with the loathing of the dependent. It would be she, he knew, who would wipe the drool from his chin and change his soiled linens. For a man who valued dignity above most things, it was too awful to think about.

A few weeks after her return, Andrew found Margot crying at the kitchen table.

“Forget him,” he said. “What kind of man wears those sweaters anyway?”

Margot shook her head. “I don’t cry over Jackson. It’s this obituary.” She lifted a finger toward the paper she had pushed away. “You remember Hinks?”

“Hinks is dead?”

His daughter nodded. “By his own hand.”

“Jesus! That’s awful.” Andrew picked up the phone and called Quarmbey.

His friend confirmed the news. “And what’s really horrible is that he did it for literature.”

“How do you mean?” Andrew asked.

“Before he shot himself, he wrote me a letter saying that he couldn’t get his novel published. He’d read about that kid who sold that godawful novel about a bailiff based on the publicity he got for risking his life to save the manuscript from a fire. And he talked about how John Kennedy Toole’s suicide helped get
Confederacy of Dunces
sold. His letter said that he was killing himself so that
The Great Adirondack Novel
would find a wide readership.”

“Jesus,” Andrew said, this time in a whisper, remembering poor Hinks with his turtle shape and solidly crafted short stories.

“I’ve asked a couple of the editors I know to take another look at the book now.”

“Then maybe his suicide wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe it will work.”

After he hung up, Andrew sat in his yard, smoking a cigar and watching the Hudson drowse its way downriver. Even as he pondered suicide as a solution to his own problems, he knew he’d never do it.

S
ipping Grub’s fennel bisque from an absurdly large spoon, Jackson Miller listened to his agent for ten minutes without interjecting. While Suzanne spoke her predictable words, he analyzed her face, trying to guess her age from the depth of the horizontal lines across her forehead. Passing for thirty, he figured, but pushing forty in a business that was increasingly controlled by the young. Her long silver-and-blue earrings shimmied as she spoke, and she drank water before swallowing the food in her mouth.

Finally she concluded her lecture: “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing.”

“I’m not going on the show,” he said, reaffirming his decision to decline an appearance on the country’s most popular talk show.

“Publicity is a good thing, Jackson.”

He waited for the server to clear their first course and scrape the bread crumbs from the table with a silver level. “The book is number two in the country. I don’t have to pander.”

They paused the conversation again when the server set down their entrees.

Jackson pulled a long spear of fried sweet potato from a tall stack of shrimp and vegetables. “Is it just me, or is the trend toward stacked food getting ridiculous?”

“You should never order the napoleon if you don’t like that sort of thing.”

It was at precisely that moment that he decided to fire her. He certainly didn’t need someone who would undermine his opinions and criticize his order skimming fifteen percent of his earnings.

“Trust me, I will gain far more publicity by refusing the show than by going on.”

“I’m trying to trust you, but, contrary to what they say, any publicity isn’t good publicity.”

“What about Stegner? As soon as it was alleged that he plagiarized
Angle of Repose
from Mary Hallet Foote, what was the publishing world’s response?”

His agent looked around the room, but Jackson kept his gaze steadily on her weirdly small eyes. “Well?”

“A box-set of both works.”

“Released in early December. Just in time for Christmas.”

“Look, it was a service to literature to package those two books together so readers could draw their own conclusions. Anyway, it didn’t sell very well. And, besides, they’re both dead. What I’m saying is that if the public perceives you as arrogant, they won’t buy your books.”

“I’m well aware who buys books and who does not.” Mentally composing a letter breaking off their professional relationship, Jackson said, “And everyone who buys books has already bought mine.”

An hour later, he was on the phone to his editor. “Brilliant!” she cooed. “You made the news. The on-line sales spike is unbelievable.”

Two hours later, he completed his revision of
Hide and Seek
.

H
enry Baffler returned to a grueling schedule, writing his “open and circular” novel from six until noon each morning, breaking for a small lunch, and then writing until his stomach could wait for dinner no longer. If he ate dinner in his apartment, he usually went straight to bed afterwards. If he went out, the stimulation was enough to allow him to work a few more hours upon his return. Even when he wrote deep into the night, he never failed to rise at six to begin the next day’s work. If pressed, he couldn’t have said what day of the week it was; he worked all seven.

His only distraction was Clarice Aames. As the date of her public reading neared, his excitement grew and his work ethic eroded. To the best of his knowledge, no picture of Clarice Aames had been published. Sometimes he imagined her as a dominatrix—tall, dark, wrapped in tight black clothes—but sweet-natured. Other times he fantasized about the opposite combination: pretty and petite and innocent-looking, but with a mouth full of biting sarcasm. He knew that speaking to her was a long shot, but he prepared lines anyway. Just in case he got the chance, he wanted to make sure that he didn’t sound like some obsessed or groveling fan. No, he’d speak to her as an equal, only less so, and get her ideas on the triangular relationship between her work, anti-realism, and the
nouveau roman
. He had no doubt, none whatsoever, that she’d read Robbe-Grillet, but preferred Sarraute. He wondered if he would sound immature or mystical if he mentioned that his birthday was the same as Sarraute’s: July 18.

On the appointed day, he took the subway down to Murray Hill to meet up with Eddie and Jackson at Eddie’s place. He made his way past the miniature police post that had sat outside the Cuban embassy in this wasp and East Indian neighborhood since Castro’s bell-bottom-era visit, and waited with Eddie for Jackson to show up.

“My book’s reviewed in there?” Henry reached for the paper folded on the Renfros’ coffee table before Eddie could snatch it away.

Not only had he not been reading his reviews, it hadn’t even occurred to him that his book was being reviewed until he saw his name on the newsprint.

“Don’t read it, Henry. It’s better not to read your reviews ever, even when they’re good.”

“So it’s a good review?” Henry asked.

Eddie shook his head as Henry read:

“I certainly didn’t mean to risk my life,” Henry said. “What a way to die: in a fire started by some mawkish drunk. That’s not how I want to go.”

“How would you like to go? Not like that poor writer Hinks, I hope?”

As a man who owned neither television nor computer, Henry was accustomed to not understanding cultural references, and continued, “At home, I think. I mean a real home. A cabin in the woods. That’s what I’d like to have, and then die there.”

“Is that where you’d be living if you’d never come to New York?”

Henry tried to recall his mother’s face while avoiding the image of his brother’s. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe I could have taught school somewhere—maybe on Lake Superior or somewhere like that. Just teach and write by the fire. What about you?”

Eddie scratched the stubble on his cheeks. “I should have lived a quiet life, working some day job and married to some unambitious girl who’d never even been to New York. But I made the mistake so many of us make. We think we’re writers and so we have to live in New York. The art, the libraries, the concerts, the museums, the plays. The truth is that I never go anywhere but the bar. Hell, I might as well live in Idaho or somewhere. I mean if I wrote specifically about New York, it might matter. Otherwise it’s a disaster. Writers come here to be degraded or to perish. It would make a lot more sense to live somewhere remote if you want to write.”

Henry nodded. “And somewhere cheaper.”

“We should go be expatriate writers somewhere.”

“The Midwest?”

“No, a real other country. Hemingway in Paris. But somewhere less expensive and warmer. We should all move to Greece!”

Henry was about to ask Eddie if he’d already started drinking, when Jackson’s voice boomed through the intercom.

“Get your asses down here and let’s get that curry in a hurry.”

By the time they’d eaten Afghan food and made their way down to the CIA Bar, a young, black-clad, and mostly bespectacled crowd had gathered.

“Don’t worry.” Jackson patted Henry on the back.

In a few minutes, he returned with the manager, who led them to a table near the front and took their drink orders.

“You slip him a hundred?” Eddie asked.

Jackson shook his head, his bangs flopping to the side. “Much higher price. I have to read here next month.”

Eddie folded his arms and looked over his shoulder at the bar.

The three writers sipped their way through a few rounds of drinks as the room filled, seemingly past capacity, and grew loud with conversation. Several people came to the table to introduce themselves to Jackson, praise
Oink
, or solicit an opinion about this or that agent. All of them made comments about the bar’s Cold-War-era spy décor. Jackson consistently introduced his friends and plugged their books, a gesture that Henry appreciated but seemed to annoy Eddie.

“They aren’t here to schmooze about
Conduct
,” Eddie snarled, “so just leave me out of it.”

“Oh no,” Jackson whispered as a slight girl with hair like a cap wisped by the table. He watched her as she moved away, toward the podium and microphone.

Butterflies rose in Henry’s stomach. “That’s not Clarice Aames?”

Jackson shook his head. “Warm-up act, I guess.”

The manager slid behind the microphone and thanked the crowd for coming. “Welcome, welcome to this great line-up. Yes, it’s true, we do have Clarice Aames, and I guarantee she’ll flatten this room.”

The crowd whistled and clapped. The atmosphere was like that of a rock concert. Henry realized that Clarice would never even make eye contact with him, that he certainly wouldn’t get to talk to her.

“But first, first, I’ve got a terrific new novelist for you to hear. Any writer here would die for the reviews she’s been getting.”

The crowd stayed noisy, but its sounds returned to conversation.

“Reading from her novel
Pontchartrain
—Margot Yarborough.”

A few people, including Jackson but not Eddie, offered subdued applause, but most continued talking, drinking, and bustling to the bar for more drinks.

The writer was small, her face barely clearing the podium, and Henry strained to hear her over the crowd and the feedback from the microphone. He couldn’t make out all her words, but she seemed to be reading about a man confined to a leper colony somewhere in the deep south.

“So am I to understand that leprosy isn’t too quiet?” Eddie said under his breath.

Jackson kept his gaze on the writer, who didn’t look up from the book she was reading from.

Henry closed his eyes. Unable to hear whole sentences, he concentrated on picking out words. Even the shortest ones seemed rare and faceted, like poems unto themselves: moss, glide, muskrat, pirogue, heartache.

Her reading lasted only fifteen minutes and was followed by brief, polite clapping. The young woman, who was quite pretty, slipped through the crowd. As the crowd grew restless waiting for the very tardy Clarice Aames, Henry glanced around to see where Margot Yarborough was sitting, but he never saw her again.