Grub (5 page)

E
ddie Renfros did not launch his new writing schedule the day after he and Amanda returned from the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. Yet within a week, he found himself regularly at work on an entirely new book, ticking off his three or four pages every twenty-four hours. For the first time, he had, as Amanda suggested, outlined the plot of the novel before he started. He told himself to think of it as an experiment. It might even be fun, he’d decided, to make his characters do what he needed them to do. It was a form of power he mostly lacked in the unimagined world he inhabited. He found, too, that knowing what was coming—both what scene he’d face the next day and how the story would end—eased the floating anxiety he felt whenever he was writing something long. His chest didn’t feel as tight, and it was easier to moderate his drinking. Thinking of the next morning’s work, more often than not he was able to stop after a couple. And sometimes he avoided the booze altogether by going to bed early. There were those nights that he sipped late and too much, but these seemed to serve the writing. He’d read back over those late-night paragraphs the next day and, despite the lurking typos, be relieved to find good writing.

Amanda’s suggestion of a historical novel had appeal—something he might make a name for himself with—and he planned to write one next, when he had more time. But it was too late for that now; the research necessary to write a fine literary novel with a historical setting would take months. Instead he conceived a novel about music. The book centered on a viola player in a string quartet: a married woman with two small children whose lover—a famous conductor—dies in a plane crash. If he’d started writing it a year earlier, he might have spent most of his time spinning images of grief and crafting evocative descriptions of the musical pieces he mentioned. Instead, he tried hard to write a plot of human interaction. He gave his protagonist a deaf daughter eligible for a surgical implant that mimics hearing, as well as a promiscuous best friend who may or may not be sleeping with most of the other characters, including the violist’s husband. About midway through the book, Eddie planned to bring in the lover’s widow to blackmail the narrator into working on the dead man’s compositions, resulting in a strained friendship between the romantic foes and an unhealthy fascination with the conductor’s son, who happens to look just like his father. In short, Eddie had almost more plot than he knew what to do with.

He admitted to himself that he was writing for a particular demographic. He was writing to predetermined plot rather than discovering the story via hundreds of deleted paragraphs and pages. Yet the book was by no means a potboiler, and his sentences were careful. He played with the interesting motifs of sound and its absence, and found the novel addressing serious themes of artistic as well as marital fidelity, including the negotiations that artists make with their audiences and the costs they impose on art. He wasn’t selling out, he told himself, but rather examining the idea of what it means to sell out.

It would be a short book, written in the first person Eddie found most natural. In late September, with sixty usable pages, he calculated that he could compile a full draft by mid-December if he did not take a day off and did not overthink matters. He could polish the manuscript across the holidays and deliver it to his agent in January, just as the editors were returning from vacation.

Yet this calculation gave him less encouragement than he needed. The New Year sounded absurdly far away. And while he felt that his prose itself was as capable as ever, he carried no great passion for the book as a whole. On many a morning, the novel struck him as simultaneously too domestic and too melodramatic. While it was the sort of book that might make the rounds of a few women’s reading circles, the advance it could garner would not be sufficient to clear all of their debt.

Besides, Eddie knew himself well enough to foresee that he would not work away for months without a day off. Of course, if he wrote six pages one day, then he could afford a Saturday off. Perhaps he’d do that next week, or even this week, and take Amanda to the park and to see some art. She always glowed in the presence of great paintings, holding his arm and talking about ideas instead of things.

After laboring over two paragraphs on Tuesday afternoon, Eddie rose to make another pot of coffee with the new machine that Amanda had, as threatened, purchased. He wondered how much it had cost, but he knew that asking would invite discord. Their financial worries had nibbled at his sleep, and he’d been able to rest no more than four or five broken hours for several nights running. He’d learned to mark the small hours by the sounds of the city’s nocturnal necessities: the one o’clock grocery delivery truck with the grinding brakes, the two-thirty sidewalk construction crew, the three o’clock street cleaning machine, the five o’clock building garbage trolley.

Throughout this painful nightly roll of the clock numbers, Amanda slept soundly by his side. Her even breathing and the warmth from her limbs saturated him with dread. He could not believe that she loved him with the old love, and he feared that only the greatest of publishing luck would be sufficient to hold onto her. Soon, he thought, she won’t even sleep with me. And it was that terrible idea that prompted him to rise on the roughest mornings—those mornings when he was most exhausted—and face the inscrutable computer screen.

He tried to convince himself that sleep deprivation was good for his creative process—being closer to the dream space and all that crap. But he knew that fatigue was not conducive to a book-length work, and he often found himself fundamentally stumped by such logistics as getting two characters from house to car or moving an object out of his protagonist’s left hand and into her right. Unintentional rhymes slipped into sentences that were becoming tortured: “A revision of her decision would have made her an object of derision.” He wanded whole paragraphs for deletion and endured a gnawing anxiety when he imagined other people reading his most deplorable lines. The reviewers would ignore him if he was lucky, but excoriate him if they noticed. It would have been better if they had not loved
Sea Miss
. They might go easier on him now, refrain from using that damning word: disappointment.

The writing went better, generally, in the evening, when Eddie managed to remember and take encouragement from the fortunate years when his fine writing style had come as easily as typing itself and Amanda had loved him without restraint. Still, even late in the day, the elaborate description of a setting that was thematically meaningful or the subtle revelation of character motivation often seemed beyond his powers as a writer. He stuck to as much dialogue as he thought he could get away with. Dialogue had been all but missing from
Sea Miss
, a tale in which the characters seldom encountered one another and rarely spoke when they did. Now Eddie found that dialogue filled up pages quickly. And when he didn’t know how to round out a necessary scene, he could always have his characters discuss something or other. On this Tuesday afternoon, with the newly brewed coffee boosting his keyboard speed, the viola player and her promiscuous violin-playing friend were conversing about deaf culture. Their dialogue was stilted, he knew, but he could fix it later.

He called for Amanda to come into the study they had separated from the living room with a pale blue shoji screen, pretending that the long, narrow space was indeed another room.

“I’m busy,” she answered.

He waited. “Come when you’re done?”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

When she appeared twelve minutes later, her face—cautious eyes but clamped jaw—looked apprehensive but hard. “I hope you haven’t called me in here to tell me how badly your work is going. You used to agree with me that writer’s block is just mental laziness.”

He flinched, visibly he feared; this was not the mood he’d hoped for. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m a third of the way through. I just wrote the hundredth page.” The exaggeration approximated truth, and Eddie nearly believed his words.

“Thank goodness. That’s really good, Eddie.” She smiled at him for what felt like the first time in days, her mouth pulling slightly wider on one side. “Are you going to write some more tonight?”

“I wasn’t planning to, not if you’ll come sit with me. We don’t talk enough these days.”

“I’m kind of in the middle of something. In awhile, though, okay?”

Eddie followed her around the screen, resisting his desire to still her slightly swiveling hips between his hands. Instead he veered into the galley kitchen attached to the living room that also served as dining room. Amanda liked to say, “We’ll know we’ve made it when every room has only one purpose.”

He poured himself two fingers of bourbon and pressed his novel from his mind. Leaning against the counter despite its uncomfortable metal edge, he sipped his drink and watched his wife at the dinner table, which she had covered with stiff foam. She was cutting mats for two drawings she’d bought at a gallery across town.

“I know we can’t afford works by artists who have already made it big,” she’d said, “but I hate bare walls and I’m certainly not going to hang posters like a college student.”

Not wanting to anger her, Eddie had refrained from asking the price of the original drawings. He’d let the table she was working on go unmentioned, too. Right after they moved into their Murray Hill apartment, she’d convinced him that they could furnish it better and more cheaply by scouring the local flea markets than they could by ordering through catalogues as did most of the people they knew. Amanda soon developed an eye for quality, age, and authenticity. Now their apartment sat impeccably furnished, and they had the credit card bills as evidence.

She drew a line with a pencil and then followed with the Exacto knife.

Eddie refilled his whiskey before scanning the living room bookcase.
Madame Bovary
—now that’s a book with fine style and a juicy plot, he thought. It was also a novel that was not written under a daily quota system, not written with a timer ticking in a writer’s ear. He pulled it from the shelf, wondering whether he could restructure his new book into a contemporary retelling of Flaubert’s quotidian tragedy.

Amanda rose from her precise work, poured herself a drink, and sat back down at the table.

“Remember when we read this for ‘Form and Theory’?” He scooted to the end of the long sofa so that her back would not be fully to him.

“I remember it well enough.” Her voice reminded Eddie of a string of beads, an impression he found soothing. She laughed, shook her head. “Poor Jackson barely got through that course.”

“I suppose,” he said, “that the study of Flaubert isn’t going to help me now. Sometimes I worry that I’ve read myself into paralysis. Maybe I could write something decent if I stopped reading altogether. Or maybe I’m reading the wrong sorts of things. Maybe I should read only books completely unlike what I’m working on. Or perhaps just poetry. Maybe I should quit reading all prose until I’m done with the book. Or maybe just stop reading fiction?”

“Eddie, you passed the hundred-page mark, and here we are having a nice time. So naturally you have to turn morbid.”

He wanted her to turn to him, to celebrate his small triumph of page count. More: he wanted to know that she loved him no matter what he wrote, or how little. He watched the changing angle of her elbow as she followed her pencil line with the tilted blade of the exacto knife. Her slices were precise, and when she lifted the mat, the rectangle she’d cut from its center fell out clean, making the smallest plop as it hit the table. When she turned to him from this victory, her hair slinked across her back, revealing her profile, chin slightly lifted.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling the whiskey stubbornness solidify, “but you knew when you married me that sanguine isn’t my basic nature.”

“Fair enough, but you weren’t in full gloom all the time either. It’s like you think my only job in the world is to cheer you up through one existential crisis after another. I hate to say this, Eddie, but it’s time you developed a little stoicism if nothing else. You should feel good. You’re a third of the way through the new book and starting to work at a real clip. And you have an outline. This time you actually know where you’re going. That should give you some hope.”

He wanted to stop, to spin the conversation from the bad direction it was headed. He could almost come up with the words to save the evening, but something perverse—not anger but some smaller, rarer animal—took him over. “Hope? Don’t delude yourself about the size of the advance I’ll be getting even if I manage to place the thing.”

“No more depressing talk tonight, Eddie.” She used his name as though it belonged to a child. “It’s tedious. Just finish the new book, and let’s see what happens. Why don’t you read something to me like you used to? Read some
Madame Bovary
.” She sat on the other end of the sofa, twisting her drink audibly on her open hand.

So he read, his voice tight as he controlled his windpipe and esophagus, afraid of the thing that would fly out if he opened wide. Amanda listened, her smile serene, like a person who faced no difficulties in life whatsoever.

Eddie read the agricultural speech and then Flaubert’s exquisite description of Emma Bovary’s variegated eyes before sliding the book back into its slot between
Tender is the Night
and
The Good Soldier
. “Amanda?” he asked, his voice gaining volume across the few syllables of her name. “Do you still love me a little?”

“Much more than a little.”

With her answer, his throat relaxed a little, the Adam’s apple softening. “Even though I’ve sunk to painting by numbers? To writing some rush-job, plot-driven book?”

“Is it so bad as all that?” She crossed her legs and leaned forward, the body language of interest—real or feigned.

The book that had earlier seemed like it was going reasonably well now turned horrid in his mind—an embarrassment. He wanted her to understand, to console him, to love him anyway. “Confoundedly bad,” he said. “I don’t even want to put my name to it.”