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“Eddie, why? Why?”

“It’s the best I can do right now. Don’t you love me enough for that to be okay?”

“If I didn’t love you that might be okay. But it’s terrible to think of the reviews. You’re Eddie Renfros, author of
Sea Miss
. I married a man of talent.”

“Fuck the reviews!” Eddie headed for the bourbon, which Amanda had left out on the kitchen counter. He suspected her of leaving it in view because she wanted him to fail, wanted him to be weak. The bottle taunted him with imaginary spousal recriminations:
Go ahead and give me a good excuse to leave you. Better yet, drink yourself to death and make quick work of it.

His voice trembled when he said, “Promise me right now, I insist, that you won’t read a single review. Not one. Not ever. Promise.”

“Sure, fine, but other people will be reading them.”

“Fuck other people. It’s your opinion I care about. I don’t want you to loathe me just because I’m not in top form just now. If I can get this book finished and out, I’ll develop a really good idea, something I can feel passionate about. Then I’ll write my big book, one that you can be proud of, one that will make the reviewers swoon and secure a permanent reputation. Then I’ll be able to work steadily but without some ridiculous, arbitrary quota in my head.”

“Maybe you should stop this book. I’m not sure you should be writing at all if you aren’t writing well.”

“Jesus, Amanda! Have you forgotten whose idea this book was?”

In the early days of their marriage, such harsh words from him would have made her cry and he would have apologized and comforted her. The argument would have ended in bed, first with tender affection and then raucous sex.

Now, though, Amanda sat stonily, her face set and her eyes dry. “I’m going to ask for a raise, and I’ll look into getting a new card so that we can move over the other debt to a lower interest rate. Maybe I can sell a painting.” She gestured to a framed piece hanging across from the bookcase. “That guy just got a one-man show at that new gallery in Chelsea. I’m sure I can sell it for more than we paid for it, and that’ll tide us over so you can take a little more time with the book, make it better.”

Eddie watched her from the living room as she washed her glass. Her body twisting left and right with the motion of her hands, shaking only with the movement and not from any deep emotion. He wondered what they had left, if he couldn’t even wound her anymore.

Before walking into the bedroom, she said, “Keep in mind that Flaubert plotted that novel to the half page before he wrote it. To the half page, Eddie.”

F
or several days after their harsh words, Amanda Renfros avoided her husband as much as she could, ducking quietly around the apartment and declining to join him on walks. She did not want to distract him from his work—that was part of it. It was urgent that he finish the book. Then they could see what would happen, and she could decide what she needed to do.

Amanda had grown up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, among brothers who would have become coal miners if they’d had any work ethic, but who chose instead an existence of knock-off Steelers merchandise and part-time bartending. Her mother hadn’t been able to scrape together enough to buy Amanda a thesaurus or a prom dress, but she always found the down payment for yet another cheap stereo, video player, or microwave oven. Her mother, often as not, couldn’t figure out how to hook them up or program them and just assumed they didn’t work.

“Cheap buys cheap,” the young Amanda warned her, knowing that in mere weeks the discount warehouse would advertise another electronics sale. Awake in the middle of the night, Amanda’s stomach would clench as she thought of the drawer full of warranty and rebate cards that had never been filled out and mailed in. She visited home her first Christmas in college because her dorm closed for the holiday, but she had not returned to Pennsylvania since.

Now she wanted to enjoy her apartment as much as she could. She and Eddie had done well to find the place, and Amanda had spent long mornings walking from flea market to flea market, store to store, to fill it up. It wasn’t easy to put on the façade of a successful couple of letters on the kind of money they had, but she’d done it. The apartment was a walk-up, but Amanda reasoned that the four flights of stairs were the only reason her increasingly sedentary husband hadn’t packed on more than the ten pounds he’d gained since their wedding. The building was an old tenement, but no one could flinch at the address. A well-known stage actor lived in the building, as did a songwriter who’d been briefly famous in the seventies and was now experiencing a cult revival. Plus, it could properly be categorized as a real apartment and not a studio or loft. The rectangle of kitchen was fully visible from the living room, yet it was clearly a separate room, with tile flooring instead of the wood of the rest of the place. The living room served as dining room and study, but comfortably so, and the bedroom was removed by a small hallway past a bathroom stocked with plush towels.

It was increasingly obvious, though, that they weren’t making it. When they’d married, Eddie’s advance for
Sea Miss
had seemed like real wealth, and neither of them doubted that royalties and another book contract would follow soon enough. With the advance petering out two years into their marriage, Amanda had offered to work for a year. Eddie had resisted at first, telling her that she should write a book and that he’d get a job. “I don’t want you to get a job,” she’d told him. “I married a critically acclaimed novelist. Besides, I have nothing to say and I’m getting bored at home.” She’d found a job as an assistant to an acquisitions editor at a textbook publisher, and Eddie had agreed to let her work for exactly one year. “If I don’t have a new advance by then, it’ll be my turn to work while you write.” But one year had become two, and Amanda now held the job of the man she used to work for. The publisher had found out she could do the same work for two-thirds of the salary. It certainly wasn’t enough money for them to live on in the manner she already considered slumming. Now that the advance was long gone, the credit-card debt was mounting.

The idea that they might have to move not to one of the brownstones on the now-gated Sniffen Court or to an address further up the East Side but to something that represented a step down in prestige twisted into resentment as it grew. Amanda could not quite forgive Eddie for suggesting that they move to Jersey City. It was as inconceivable that she should ever say “New Jersey” when detailing her address as it was that she would move back to Wilkes-Barre and ask for a job in the bar where her brothers worked off their tabs. She had always believed in destiny—and that hers was fairy-tale golden. But now, as when she was a child looking up at the cracked plaster ceiling that dropped paint flecks on her favorite stuffed animals, she worried that she’d somehow been switched, that someone else was living the good life that had been marked for her.

On Sunday afternoon, she declined Eddie’s invitation to walk in the park. “It’s a beautiful day,” he offered. “Hints of fall in the air. We could stop at the Pierpont Morgan on the way and wind up at the Met?”

She insisted that she had tasks to complete, but that was a lie. The apartment gleamed, she’d finished the shopping, and their paperwork was up to date. “Besides,” she said, “you know I hate to go to museums on pay-what-you-want-day. They fill up with all kinds of people.”

“The Met is always pay what you want.”

“I know, but it’s Sunday. People with boring jobs like mine will be there.”

After Eddie sulked out, she sat on the sofa and tried to read a novel that had been favorably reviewed in
The Times
, but she had no real interest in the book. Indeed, her interest in reading fiction had become almost exclusively practical: what was selling, what was new or old, in or out, what was being noticed. She put the book down and rounded the shoji screen to check its Amazon ranking and used-copy value. While she was on the website, she checked the numbers on
Sea Miss
and then on the books of every writer she knew. A woman that she, Eddie, and Jackson had been in graduate school with had written a memoir about living with an epileptic child. Amanda felt the old, anxious tightening of her stomach when she saw that the book had a considerably higher sales ranking than Eddie’s. Any
Sea Miss
royalties would be paltry next time. She vowed to call his agent, see if she couldn’t drum up some more foreign-rights interest. The Spanish and Dutch rights had been sold early on, but French and Japanese would be better, worth maybe several thousand dollars.

She silently cursed Eddie for not thinking to make the call himself. She hadn’t minded working more than the year they’d agreed upon, but she certainly couldn’t go on forever working for the idiot who was her boss—a man who expected her to drum up publicity and reviews for four textbooks all titled
Literature
. When she’d begged him to let her give the anthology she’d acquired a more interesting title, he told her not to mess with the formula. He didn’t even seem to understand that all their anthologies were competing with each other for market space.

She realized more fully than before that she was going to have to take charge of things, take charge of her own life, at least, if she wasn’t going to wind up an underpaid under-editor and the wife of a penniless man whose only claim to fame was that he once wrote a pretty good book that a thousand people read some number of years ago.

Eddie was from a nice middle-class family, neither rich nor poor. They were midwesterners who never bought anything they couldn’t pay for in cash. He didn’t understand what she knew: poverty is a learned meagerness of spirit as much as it is a number on a ledger. Eddie didn’t know what it was to clean coffee grounds off the floor every week because another off-brand trash bag had split at the seams. While his parents read
Consumer Reports
before purchasing a television that would work well for years, her mother spent twice as much making lay-away payments on several cheap sets that never showed clear pictures. Amanda remembered the smell of her mother’s house as the smell of petty aspirations, failure, and emotional stinginess. Because Eddie didn’t understand what she was afraid of, he couldn’t save her from it. He had no conception of how far they could fall.

When the obvious solution struck Amanda, it came with the energy to enact it. Instead of badgering Eddie about his excuse of a career without any indication that he himself was interested in that career—and against evidence that he thought she actually enjoyed nagging him—she should launch her own. After all, she’d been one of the best writers in the workshop.

Unlike Eddie, Amanda had not spent her childhood imagining other lives and scribbling stories and fantasizing about the writing life. She’d read what was necessary to be a good student, knowing that a scholarship was her one-way ticket the hell out of Wilkes-Barre. She’d planned, from an early age, to attend law school, marry a fellow student, and practice law part-time while running a perfect household filled with quality things that worked like they were supposed to and were under warranty in case they did not.

After a torrid affair with the English professor who helped her pronounce her ‘G’s—and motivated partly by anger that he’d heard her drop them in the first place—Amanda had started a novel about a beautiful twenty-year-old woman having a torrid affair with her Henry-Higgins-like history professor. For reasons Amanda could no longer reconstruct, she’d sent off thirty pages of
He Should Have Listened
, together with the application form to the Iowa
MFA
program, while she was studying for her
LSAT
s. When she’d opened the letter offering her the program’s most prestigious fellowship, she’d laughed out loud.

She had performed well enough in workshop, mainly because she was a sharp critic and possibly also—she knew this—because her professors were male. When Amanda looked in the mirror, she saw the tall and crooked girl she’d been at Wilkes-Barre Junior High School. But she knew that men saw something else; repeated experience had allowed her to trust the fact that she was beautiful even though she couldn’t see it herself.

In Iowa, she’d set aside her misguided novel to write her thesis: a series of short stories about attractive young women and the men they dated. She’d flirted with both Eddie and Jackson, but she’d been strict with herself. Until word broke about the sale of Eddie’s novel, she’d carefully followed her most important Iowa rule: never date a writer. Then, caught up in the excitement of her friend’s success, she’d wavered. She was young enough that she thought it meant something that they were both left-handed and gazed at the world with green eyes.

They’d graduated, married modestly in the backyard where Eddie had made mud pies and learned to catch, moved to New York, basked in the glowing reviews. She clapped louder than anyone when Eddie read at the
CIA
bar with none other than Jonathan Warbury.

One of her mistakes, she realized now, was that she had trusted Eddie’s talent over her own. She’d quit writing not because she wasn’t good at it but because she thought she had little to say and that a writer needed something to say. Eddie had never discouraged this decision. Now that she had decided to write again, she still didn’t have much to say to the world. But she no longer believed that having something to say was necessary.

And so that Sunday, alone in the apartment she feared losing, she found herself pondering what she could write that people might want to read. Nothing too light or vapid—this was, after all, the post 9/11 world—but nothing too complicated either. From studying bestseller lists and reading the book reviews in women’s magazines, she knew that the most popular trends were telepathic or at least empathetic animals, themes of loss and emotional restoration, and novels about people in paintings or the painters who painted them. These waves were heading back to sea, she understood, and would be replaced by the next thing. But there was still time to ride one, particularly if she could come up with a new twist and work quickly.

Thinking that she might write a book blending all three motifs, she sat down with a postcard of the painting of dogs playing poker. Jack had sent it to them from Charleston, where he’d spent a month between Iowa and moving to New York—a stretch of time he’d begged them not to ask about. Amanda smiled at the bad art and typed, centered and in italics,
Bad Dog Séance
.

The going was harder than she’d imagined. For twenty minutes, she couldn’t figure out who had died. Yet four hours later, she’d written an entire story. She read through it, the piece’s two central problems glaring at her. First, the tone was unabashedly sarcastic, and you can’t sell books to the masses without playing it straight. And second, there was the length: only twenty-two pages long. Nevertheless, she saved it to her
USB
drive while vowing to get to a museum to find a more appropriate painting on which to base her book.

She was singing to herself and trying to roll sushi with a bamboo mat when she heard Eddie’s footsteps ascending. Her spirits grew higher when he walked through the door with Jackson Miller and Henry Baffler.

“Look what the cat drug home,” Jackson said cheerfully and gave her cheek a loud kiss. He handed her a bottle of bourbon. “For the cause.”

Though they weren’t as tight as they were supposed to be, Amanda sliced the sushi rolls and plated them with wasabi paste and pickled ginger. She emptied trays of pineapple-shaped ice into the nifty copper ice bucket she’d found in a retro housewares store. She set out glasses and a pitcher of water together with the bourbon, gesturing to the table with a stack of napkins. “Help yourself.”

Jackson popped a roll in his mouth and plunked two cubes of ice in a glass. “I’ve started a novel,” he announced. “I’m filling it with stuff that the book-club and college crowds will eat up. Different typescripts, the occasional blank page, a hodgepodge of diary pages and letters.”

“That sounds awful,” Henry said absently.

“The idea is to make the reader feel clever, as though any chimpanzee or eighth-grader couldn’t figure out what I’m up to.”

“That’s a one-of-a-kind plan,” said Eddie, quickly following Jackson in the cocktail mixing. “How far along are you?”

Jackson laughed. “You’re on to me. I’m on page seven. But, really, this is the book. It will be in stores in eighteen months tops.”