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A
fter reading the how-to books he’d ordered, most of them written by marginally successful literary agents or blatantly unsuccessful novelists, Eddie Renfros decided that he might as well make the final stop before he hit rock bottom and try his hand at poetry.

Thanks to Amanda’s out-of-control success, they no longer needed what money his fiction might bring in, and it was clear to Eddie that he had lost his wife’s respect for him as a novelist. He assumed that he was going to lose her fully, in feeling, probably in deed, but he harbored a small hope that he could win back her affection with the very thing that had driven her away: his commitment to language rather than the literary marketplace. Besides, he reasoned, he might more easily manage verse since his concentration was too soggy to sustain an entire novel. It would be good for him, too, to move away from the computer screen and work again in pencil. He’d always loved the sound of soft graphite moving across paper.

He waited for Amanda to inquire, or at least to notice what he was doing, but it had been weeks since she had last asked him about his work. What had once seemed like aggressive nagging, he now yearned for as evidence of wifely interest. Amanda was always coming in or going out—rarely in the apartment except to sleep and write. More and more, though, she left each morning with her new laptop, saying it was easier for her to write in public than at home.

One Saturday afternoon she breezed in with several shopping bags. Eddie recognized the names of expensive department stores, women’s boutiques, and a lingerie retailer. It had been months since he’d seen Amanda in anything other than full street clothes or her oversized bathrobe and hair towel. It seemed as though a decade had passed since the early days of their marriage, when she would rush in from shopping and then materialize in the living room wearing a corset and garters, or adorable panties and ankle socks, or something cake-like with layers of white lace.

He wanted to ask her to model whatever it was that she’d just bought, and he hated her because he could not. “You’re spending a lot of money lately,” he said instead. “The advance may not last forever.”

“I’ve got another one and it’s going to last a long time.”

“Another advance? I didn’t know you’d even finished the new book.”

“Yep,” said Amanda from the bedroom. Eddie could hear the rustling of bags and tissue paper. “Last week. Sorry, I should have told you.”

Eddie walked slowly to their bedroom. “You weren’t going to have me read it?”

“I’ll give it to you when I get the galleys. You’ve seemed busy—writing letters or whatever it is that you’ve been up to with all that pencil sharpening.”

“Not letters. Poetry.”

She turned and cocked her head, her smile not unkind. “Poetry?”

“I’d really like to read your new book.” He moved behind her and stroked her back tentatively, wincing as her body tensed against his touch.

“Capital,” she said. “I’ll print you a copy. Meanwhile, can I see a poem?”

Eddie sat across the room on the sofa while his wife read three of his poems at the dining room table.

She looked straight at him when she finished. “These are good. Especially the sonnet.”

“Really?” he asked.

She nodded. “Really good. You might consider applying for a fellowship or grant of some kind.”

“The kind where I go away for a few months and leave you alone?”

She pushed the pages away and stood. “No, Eddie, for once I wasn’t thinking of myself. These are really good poems, and I’d like something good to happen for you.”

Two days later, working through a blunt headache and a slow breakfast of coffee and toast, Eddie realized that Amanda still hadn’t given him a copy of her new manuscript.

“Print me a copy right now,” he said to his wife as she checked her purse to go out. “Or don’t you want me to read it?”

“The truth is that I do and I don’t. I haven’t quite recovered from your remarks about the point-of-view scheme in
The Progress of Love
.” In jeans and a white turtleneck and no make-up, she looked very much like the graduate student he’d courted and married.

“May I remind you that your responses to my work have occasionally been less than sensitive?” he said.

Amanda sat down across from him, nodding slowly. “Fair enough, and I’m sorry for that. I guess I understand better now how it smarts. But I really can’t bear to field any snide comments about what’s literary and what’s commercial. I write what I write, and frankly that’s what pays the bills.”

“I’m sure that if I forget that, you’ll remind me.”

“It’s just that you make me feel like I’m a bad writer, and I’m not. I’ve just made a decision to try to write things that people are interested in reading.”

“Then let me read your new book. I’ll bite my tongue about that other stuff.”

“The truth is that I kind of wish I hadn’t written this new book, that I’d written about something else instead.” She chewed her bottom lip a little, her face clouded by a rare shadow of uncertainty.

“I’m sure it’s really good, Amanda. Really, I’d like a copy to read—just as a reader. You know I’ve always admired your prose, the way you can end a paragraph with a punch that doesn’t feel like a gimmick.”

She walked around behind the sofa and folded her arms around his neck. Her sleek hair slid against his cheek, and he breathed in the clean, sharp smell of citrus.

“I don’t know how we ever let things get so difficult,” she said in a tone he couldn’t parse.

“It’s not too late, don’t you think?” He tried to turn his head to face her, but he didn’t want to break the embrace. “I hope it’s not too late.”

She pulled over and went to the counter to retrieve her purse. “If you really want to read the book, ask me next week, and I’ll print you a copy. But remember that it’s not what I wanted to write. I wish I could have written something else.” She sought his eyes and gave several small, earnest nods before leaving.

By the time Eddie remembered to ask her where she was going, she was already out the door. At the window, he watched for her to appear on the sidewalk below, saw her step into the street and hail a taxi to wherever it was that she was heading.

S
tanding by one of his nine windows as night sank into Harlem, Henry Baffler argued with Eddie over the difference between flash fiction and prose poetry. His inebriated friend claimed that the two were synonymous and could be used interchangeably, only that poets were more likely to use the term prose poem, while fiction writers and most readers tended to say short-shorts or flash fiction.

“That may be the case, but it shouldn’t be the case,” Henry insisted and laid out the case for flash fiction as a distinct form.

“Fine,” Eddie said, with a stretched sigh. “To go on debating this might lead you to believe that I actually care about this particular issue.”

“How can you not care?” Henry asked, more bewildered than indignant.

On the other side of the glass fell a slow, steady snow—distinct flakes visible against the lighted store signs and streetlights.

“The art of living is the art of compromise or, in my case, of not giving a damn, which amounts to compromise. Who are we to foster our precious sensibilities and act like the world gives a rat’s ass about our petty ideals? Ideals lead to misery for others and ourselves. That’s true in politics, so why shouldn’t it be true in literature and in life? You and I need to learn to cultivate genial vulgarity—that’s what we need—if we’re to get anywhere at all in life. What right do we have to make ourselves and others miserable for the sake of our stubborn idealism? We must make the best of circumstances. Why cut bread with a sharp razor when a serviceable bread knife is at hand?”

“Where’d you get that line? And what are you talking about?” Henry asked. Still he watched the snow, falling harder now.

“Oh my God. I sound like Jackson now, heaven help me.”

“It’s impossible to really describe all the kinds of snow in words, isn’t it?”

“Unless you speak Inuit or Norwegian or one of those languages with three hundred words for snow.”

“That’s not really true about those languages,” Henry said. “Nowhere near three hundred, and a lot of them are just compound words. You know, like wet-snow. Anyway, I think maybe our highest calling would be to develop and write in an entirely new language. Pure invention.”

“Highest calling? Ask yourself what the coarsest man would do, and do that. That’s the only safe way to live.”

A shift in wind changed the pattern of the snow against the street lights. Ice-edge, Henry thought, were words that paired nicely. Icedge, a word like a blade scraping on ice. He grabbed a notebook and wrote it down. Later he would find a way to build a paragraph around it. Further down the page he wrote wetsnow, wets-now, wet-snow. He was on the brink of something, he could feel it, though he didn’t know what.

T
he first time Jackson had slept with Amanda, the event was as emotionally rich as he thought it would be. The next time, later that same blue afternoon, had been as deliciously depraved as he had hoped it would be.

It was true that Amanda lacked Margot’s girlish quality. On the contrary, she looked a little older than she was. But hers was a beauty independent of age, and it was clear that even at forty, at fifty, at sixty, she would be attractive and elegant, even regal. Every lilting line she uttered suggested just enough deliberation to give it the value of considered opinion without sounding either opinionated or, worse, indecisive. Her smile was at once playful and intelligent, and her glance suggested that no subtlety would slip past her unnoticed.

And all this, despite the fact that her origins were humble in the extreme. She was a self-made woman, and if it happened that the occasional smutty word or trailer-inflected phrase rolled off her tongue in bed, then so much the luckier was the man who possessed her. In the living room, at parties, during her television appearances, she sounded as though she’d been born and raised by Ivy-educated, martini-drinking, Connecticut Episcopalians.

It was as he had expected: she was the perfect woman, and she belonged at his side. So Jackson continued the affair with no thought to morality and little to the unpleasantness of being caught and confronted by her husband, his once best friend. The sooner, the better, really, though he realized he could not appear to seek that eventuality. Amanda was not a woman to be pushed, and, besides, the deception and danger would provide them with an exotic memory of how they got together.

At any rate, it could be only a matter of time before Eddie read her book, and only an idiot could read her book and not come up with four for two-plus-two. Eddie wasn’t stupid. Even without reading the book, he must already know. After all, Amanda spent three afternoons a week with Jackson and sometimes attended dinners and parties at his side. A snapped photograph at one such dinner had appeared in the society page of
The Times
. Another showed up on the party-poop page of a glossy.

“What happened with that sweet girl you were dating?” Amanda asked one day as they rested after making love.

“Are you jealous?”

“Jealousy isn’t a productive emotion,” she said, “but I am curious. You were quite keen on her. I wonder if I seem shallow in comparison.”

“There’s nothing second-place about you, Amanda. You’re my blue ribbon.”

“Did you love her?”

“I guess I was most of the way there. The truth is this: I would have made her a terrible husband. With you, I’m not such a detestable guy.”

“Watch out, or I might decide to take that the wrong way.” Amanda stroked his arm with cool fingers.

“Happiness is the nurse of virtue. I read that once.”

“And who was it who said that independence is the root of happiness?”

“I don’t know, Amanda, but the world is ours.” Jackson rolled to his side so he could kiss her with his hand on her waist.

Their affair continued through the winter and into early spring. As Jackson had long imagined, Amanda was willing to try anything in bed, and their adventures kept him content while he waited to have her on paper and forever. If she had the upper hand in their relationship, he held power in the bedroom. It was an arrangement that pleased them, an arrangement that worked.

Now a year after the release of their first novels, their publication dates were again with weeks of each other. “Better than simultaneous orgasm” is how Amanda put it when they were alone.

One evening, shortly before the publication of
Hide and Seek
and
The Writers
, Amanda phoned.

“Eddie got hold of an advanced reading copy from a friend. He’s reading it now.”

“Come over,” Jackson said.

“No.” Amanda’s voice was remarkably even. “It’s time to finish up here. I have to do this myself—I owe him that. I am his wife. I’ll let you know when it’s over.”

Jackson worried that Eddie would trick her into a reconciliation, that he would forgive her and convince her to stay married. But even as he fretted, he didn’t believe in the unpleasant scenario. He and Amanda were too perfect a couple not to come true.

F
or months, Henry Baffler struggled with his “open” novel, refusing to admit, even as page stacked upon page, that the book was going nowhere. With
Bailiff
, he’d
intended
the plot to go nowhere, for the book to circle back around to where it began and leave his plump protagonist unchanged. But that was not a formula he wanted to repeat. Repetition was death to art—that is what he’d read and what he believed. Besides, while he wanted this novel to unfurl rather than to move linearly, he certainly did not want it to be circular or static. The winter months were elasticized agony, as the very meaning of
open
raced away from him each time he pursued it.

When the phone call came, he had not yet conceded defeat, had not yet admitted that this might be the novel that he would always want to write but never would. The call was from a curator at MUCA, the Museum of Ultra-Contemporary Art, who wanted to gage his interest in being part of an exhibit on living novelists.

“Exhibit of living novelists,” the man corrected himself.

Three novelists were being invited to live in the museum—on display—for one month, during which time they were each to compose a novel of at least fifty thousand words. The idea that this event might attract the attention of Clarice Aames, or at least the officers of ulcer, occurred to Henry, and he agreed to the small stipend and other terms.

“Let us know what you need in terms of typewriter or computer. To prevent the emailing or downloading of work-in-progress, there will be no internet access. You can bring no notes or books, only yourself, a few changes of clothes, and your toiletries.”

“Even better,” said Henry. “I won’t even come with an idea.”

“Perfect!” the curator said, with a glee that was either genuine or convincingly faked.

Two weeks later, Henry arrived at MUCA with a small suitcase boxing all his clothes and bathroom items. The other two novelists waiting in the museum foyer were not such light packers. The first was a woman of about fifty, wearing silk parachute pants tucked into some sort of cross between a sneaker and a knee-length boot. Her white tee shirt was weighed down with a dozen silver necklaces, and she was standing next to three very large suitcases. “It looks like a lot,” she said, “but I have to carry my own bedding and towels. Chemical sensitivities.”

The other novelist was a much younger woman, probably not even twenty-five. She was so drained of color that Henry inspected her to determine whether she was actually albino, but he discerned a trace of blue in her irises and the occasional blonde hair in her white eyelashes. She was as thin as Henry and her cowboy boots looked enormous under cinched up jeans and a man’s dress shirt.

“They don’t exist,” she said. “Those New Age magazines try to get you to obsess about gluten and dust mites and simplicity so that you won’t notice that the corporations who publish them are destroying our culture.”

“Hmm.” The older woman quivered a smile and fingered one of the silver medallions on her sternum.

Henry backed away a few steps and was relieved to see a man approaching. Though dressed like someone in his twenties, he looked to be in his late thirties. He tucked his hair behind his ears before shaking Henry’s hand.

“Pete,” he said, “I’m the curator of the exhibit.”

“The exhibit,” Henry repeated.

The writers were, indeed, an exhibit, though not an especially popular one—and considerably less popular than the fecal art show whose patrons they could hear through the temporary wall separating the two sections of the museum. Each writer had a platform with a twin bed, dresser, desk, and chair. Henry had asked for a computer, since it was free. The women had opted for manual typewriters—Maia on the grounds that metal was less allergenic than plastic and Rhiannon because typewriters used fewer of the world’s dwindling petrochemical resources.

They were not allowed to leave the museum, though they were given regular food and bathroom breaks during the day. After hours they were allowed to use the employee areas, including the showers and lounge, but their contracts required them to sleep in the exhibit.

“I know that writers often sleep late,” said Pete, “and there’s no reason for you to get up before the museum opens. In fact, I think some of our patrons might find sleeping novelists more interesting than novelists-at-work.”

Maia lasted three days before breaking her contract on the grounds of eye strain due to florescent lighting and the presence of more artificial materials in her living space than had been represented to her.

“I guess it’s just you and me now,” Henry said to Rhiannon that evening.

“What page are you on?” she snapped.

“We have the whole month,” Henry replied. “I don’t think it’s a competition.”

“When your parents name you after a shitty pop song, everything’s a competition.” Her pale eyes glared at him through the black eyeliner.

Unsure how to respond, he tried: “Do you like Clarice Aames?”

The brightening effect was immediate. “I love her. Have you read ‘Lethal’ yet?”

Later that night, over the millet and tempeh that Rhiannon had requested for their dinner, she told him the story of her childhood guinea pig. “If you don’t breed a female guinea pig before she’s about seven or so months old, you should never breed her, because her pelvic bones fuse.”

Henry nodded, noticing that her nose was perfectly straight, evenly dividing her not unpleasant face.

“We didn’t know, and I let the male into the pen one day. Evangeline got pregnant and I was all excited about the cute babies she would have. But her bones wouldn’t open and the babies couldn’t get out and she died.” Rhiannon grinned. “Leave it to Clarice to top that guinea-pig story. ‘Lethal’ was incredible.”

“That’s a terrible story. Yours, I mean.” He added that he was sorry, but it sounded like a question.

She shrugged. “My parents gave the male to a pet store, which probably sold him to some snake owner. We kept cats after that.”

“Do you write about your family?”

She shook her head grimly. “Autobiographical fiction should be killed if it’s not dead already.”

“I agree.” Henry resisted the compulsion to touch her colorless hair.

Their friendship grew across the weeks, though Rhiannon remained competitive about page counts and wouldn’t tell him what she was working on. “It’s kind of a labor novel,” was the most she would say.

Henry worked away on his tale of a blind child—probably a boy though he refrained from using a gendered name or pronoun—living near a landfill with an alcoholic, deaf parent, probably the mother. He thought of it as meta-fiction: a comment on the state of the contemporary novel.

While the exhibit was not popular, it drew a handful of viewers, including a repeat visitor who never took off his Yankees cap and tried to taunt the writers into talking to him, which they were forbidden to do.

“I feel like a zoo animal,” Rhiannon said to Henry one night.

“No,” said Henry. “We’re museum pieces. The novel itself is a museum piece. How can we deign to write long narratives in this fractured world? It’s fitting that we are an exhibit. We’re history. Long live the death of the novel.”

“I have a confession,” she said after a pause. “I’m writing a novel-in-flash-fictions.”

“That’s a brilliant idea.” Henry reached for her bony hand.

“Except,” she smiled, “they don’t really go together. It’s really not a novel at all.”

That night they made love in both of the twin beds they’d been issued. Rhiannon was bone and joint and fiber and hair with no fat and not much muscle. Lightly, with just his fingerpads, Henry touched her jutting hipbones, traced her ribs, thinking how like him she was. He was struck by the idea of a series of erotic flash fictions, each piece dedicated to an angle of the skinny body during sex.

“I suppose Pete would like us to do that during museum hours,” he said after they finished.

“Would that be a bigger draw?” his new lover asked, “Novelists fucking instead of novelists-at-work?”

Henry winced at the verb. “Making love,” he offered.

“Making love is dead,” Rhiannon answered, but she backed closer into him and pulled his arm over her while she fell asleep.

Henry watched her from that angle, thanking fate for bringing him together with a literary girl with a serrated edge.