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D
espite her height, or lack thereof, Margot was easy to spot among the sparse herd waiting for the ferry. She wore a slim, orange tank dress, sandals in place of her usual canvas sneakers, and an armful of wire-thin silver bangles. Next to her, the other women in the crowd looked coarse and vulgar; the men, grotesque.

“You look beautiful,” Jackson said. He kissed the side of her head and breathed in her smell: unscented soap and baby powder.

The midday crowd was light—tourists and couples and old people and one or two down-and-outers, instead of commuters bumping shoulders. Jackson and Margot found a place on a bench.

Margot looked at her lap, where her hands neatly gripped a brown paper bag, then away. “I figured I’d bring lunch,” she said to the air on her left as Jackson, seated to her right, strained to hear. She handed him a sandwich. “Is pimiento cheese okay? It’s kind of kitsch, if nothing else.”

“Pimiento cheese is perfect,” he said, and it was. He ate the sandwich and the crisp apple Margot offered next. “That’s the second pimiento sandwich you’ve given me. I’ll never forget either of them.” He unfurled his height, wiping his hands on his jeans. “I’ll get us something to drink, and we can go out on deck.”

Summer had lingered into fall and the day was warm. The movement of the boat generated a perfect breeze. Jackson and Margot gazed at the Manhattan skyline, glanced at each other, then looked back at the city’s squares and rectangles, the buildings with flat roofs and those with pointed hats. The sun glanced off the water, making the rising scene look two-dimensional—a façade or stage set rather than a place where people lived out real lives.

“A free ride and less than two dollars for a German beer. Best cheap date in New York City.”

“Date?” Margot asked, then swallowed a small, quick gulp of her beer, her hand oddly high on the neck of the green bottle, her bangles tinkling as they slid up and down her arm with its movements.

“Not that you don’t deserve the most expensive date in Paris.” Jackson, knowing that he was speaking into the wind, spoke loudly.

“Paris?”

“Look at that skyline. Isn’t it wonderful to see what the city looks like when you’re still in it but not quite?”

Neither of them mentioned what was missing from the skyline, and Jackson was relieved that enough years had passed to render that conversation optional. He wanted to keep things light with Margot. She was a serious girl—he admired that—but he wanted her to have a good time. A good time with him.

“So have you finally admitted that what you’re writing is a book?” he asked.

“I’m afraid so, afraid that it is a novel.”

Margot tipped her head from side to side in a manner that Jackson found at once goofy and thoroughly disarming. She was serious, but there was nothing pretentious about her, nothing practiced. This was a girl who had never smiled for the mirror, whose facial expressions were natural and unlearned. He wanted to wrap her up in his arms, throw himself between her and anyone or anything that meant her harm.

“That’s fantastic,” he said. “It’s terrific that you’re writing a book. I won’t ask you what it’s about—isn’t that the worst question always?—but I will ask you how it’s going.”

She smiled a girl’s smile. “I don’t know how I’ll ever finish. I’m only through my second draft.”

“You have an entire second draft?”

Her nod was barely perceptible, and now it was her shoulders moving in awkward jerks.

“Spell-check it and send it out.”

“Oh, no, it’s not ready.” She sipped from the beer as though just remembering that she held it. “This is good. Nice and cold. You tell me about your writing.”

“I’m aiming to write a big book, you know, splashy. I plan for my first novel to be my break-out book. It’s not the literature that I’m sure you write. I’m moving around attractive stockbrokers, cocaine, gigolos, a dash of deviant sex.” Noticing that Margot was again glancing away, Jackson paused. “But it’s really kind of a morality play,” he continued. “A pinch of
Macbeth
in the mix.”

“Sounds ambitious.” She touched the tip of her nose with her finger and quickly lowered it, sending the bangles sliding down her forearm in a musical collision.

“According to one definition of the word, yes, it is ambitious.”

Together they watched the Statue of Liberty approach as though it and not they were moving. Jackson felt the momentary coolness of its shadow.

“Not a lovely face on her at all.”

“You’re not the first to so say,” Margot replied.

Jackson winced at the accusation of unoriginality, but, when he replayed Margot’s comment, detected no rebuke in her tone. “I once knew a fellow,” he said, “named Chuck Wood. By the time he was ten, he’d heard the woodchuck tongue twister so many times that he’d just grin this huge grin and say ‘never heard that one before.’”

“I suppose it’s fitting that the symbol of independence wouldn’t be soft or pretty in an easy way. But I do think she’s rather handsome.”

“There’s only one face I can see right now.” He cupped her cheek, her face small in his large hand, then retreated. “So, anyway, what will you do now that The Shadow of the Valley of Books is closing? You taught once, right? Do you have an
MFA
?”

Margot twirled one of her short curls with her middle finger. “An ma in literature. I wrote a thesis on the destiny of coincidence in Thomas Hardy, mostly in
Far from the Madding Crowd
and
Return of the Native
but I touched on
Jude
also. A lot of people have written about destiny and coincidence in Hardy, but I’ve searched everywhere and I think I’m actually the first person—I know, it’s hard to believe—to address the destiny of coincidence in his work.”

“I knew you were a more original thinker than I am. Say, Margot, you could probably still get a teaching job. The Metropolis Workshop thing is always hiring. There’s lots of online stuff now too, the low-residency writing programs and all that. I don’t mean become a teacher—I think so much more highly of you than that—just something to do for awhile. Of course, if you liked teaching, you could pick up an
MFA
.”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head very slowly but with great emphasis, like a little kid resisting vegetables. “I could never show my writing like that. I hear it’s like baring your veins to wolves.”

“It’s not so awful, really,” Jackson said, even as he recalled some of his harsher workshop statements and the time he’d told a first-year student that workshop was a blood sport and to high-tail it back to Florida if she couldn’t take it. “Besides, you’ll be baring your work for reviewers.” The word ‘baring’ seemed almost lewd said in proximity to her exposed arms, whose perfect creamy tone made Jackson want to both run his hands down them and leave them unsullied by his coarse touch.

“If it ever comes to that, which I doubt, I suppose you’re right. But that’s different. At least you’re not in the same room. You can read your reviews or not. Or read them when you feel up to it.” She gripped her almost-empty bottle in a way that resembled the wringing of hands, then added, “Maybe I’ll use a pen name if I ever publish.”

Jackson sucked the fresh breeze. “Margot, I realize it’s no coincidence that your last name is Yarborough. I should think your father could get you an agent, of course, but he could also help you get a job in publishing, a good one that would pay quite a bit better than a bookstore. An editorship or a staff position as a reviewer or something. I think the publishing world would really benefit from the views of someone like you.”

“I would never do that. I want to make my own way in the world, get whatever I get on my own merit.”

“Margot, no one does that any more. If they ever did.”

As the boat sounded its horn and closed the distance to Battery Park, Jackson wished he could slow its progress, make the first half of their ride last forever. Margot wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d spent time with, but her sweet earnestness pulled at him. He loved her mix of unpracticed elegance and childlike gestures.

“Let’s ride straight back,” he said. “I don’t want to get off the boat. Ever. Maybe we’ll ride back and forth all day. I know this will sound silly, but I feel like we’ll both be okay if we just never leave this boat. We’ll stay on the boat forever, and no one will know where to look for us.”

Margot smiled as the ferry docked on the Staten Island side. “I like that, but I’m pretty sure they make you get off. But we’ll be back on in just a few minutes.”

While they waited to re-board, Jackson noticed the line of Margot’s slender thigh under the thin fabric of her dress and felt disproportionately happy when she leaned against his arm for a moment. This must be what falling in love feels like, he told himself. They said little until they were back on the ferry’s deck, again in motion, this time heading back to the city of books and papers.

Margot turned to face him straight on, balancing with only her hip on the boat’s rail. “Jackson, can I ask you something?”

“Anything at all. Anything.”

“Do you really think of this as a date?”

“I was hoping that it was a date, that you were thinking of it that way. I hope that it is a date, that it counts that way to you. We’re so different—my God I have a foot of height on you—but I really like you, Margot. I like you a lot.”

Margot tilted her head toward her shoulder. Her chest and throat blushed pink against the pretty orange dress.

“The thing about me, Margot, is that I
would
use any connections I had in a second. You need to understand what kind of person I am. I’m not so good a person as you are.”

“I think you’re a fine person, Jackson.” She said his name tentatively, as though trying it out, imitating the way he used her name when he talked to her. “A very fine person.”

“Really?” The sun soaked his head as they neared the Statue of Liberty on the return pass, this time missing its shadow.

Margot nodded vigorously. “That’s what makes this all the more awful. I’m moving at the end of the month, up to my folks’ place in Annandale-on-Hudson. I’ll get to the city once in a while, but I’m a homebody, I really am, that’s something you should know about me. And besides, I want to finish my book, make it something perfect and beautiful. But you could visit. It’s a nice place, really, a very good place. And you can get there on the train.”

“Oh, Margot,” was all Jackson could muster for the moment. After a long swig of imported beer, he inhaled sharply and told her, in edited form, about his unfortunate encounter with her parents.

“That’s terrible,” she whispered when he’d finished. “It really is terrible.”

She let him draw her into a hug, her hands trapped between them. He squeezed as tight as he could trust himself to, afraid of crushing her. When they pulled away, he saw that the plastic button on his shirt pocket had left an imprint on her cheek: a red circle on her small, pretty face.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said to himself as well as to her. “I promise that we’ll figure something out.”

Margot cocked her head. “Hey,” she said, “did you hear the one about the writer who died?”

“Tell me,” he said, thinking her downright brave.

“St. Peter offers him the option of heaven or hell and the writer asks to see each one before deciding. As they descend into the fires of hell, the writer sees row upon row of writers, all chained to their steaming-hot desks and being whipped by demons. ‘Show me heaven,’ the writer says. They ascend to heaven and there’s row upon row of writers chained to steaming-hot desks and being whipped by demons. ‘But it’s just as bad as hell,’ the writer says. St. Peter shakes his head, and says, ‘No, because in heaven your work gets published.’”

Jackson reached out and softly pulled one of her short curls. “Margot, I really do promise that we’ll figure something out.”

She smiled and nodded, her head still tilted.

T
he impromptu party at the Renfros apartment had provided Henry Baffler with more minutes of companionship than he’d had since returning from the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. It had left him both hopeful and lonely. Amanda wasn’t his type—he’d always preferred beauty that was flawed and names with soft centers—but being around her made him long to live with a woman. At the same time, that Eddie Renfros, a struggling novelist, could claim the affection of such a wife as Amanda suggested that the starving artist’s life need not be dismal and solitary.

Henry did not romanticize writers’ poverty, nor did he feel as though he had chosen it. If anything, his role had picked him, or, perhaps more accurate, it was simply what he was. Though he’d grown up in a middle-class home with three televisions and no bookcase, he’d forever been the kid lurching around the playground—walking because sitting was not allowed at recess—trying to read Samuel Beckett or Diderot without tripping. He’d been too peculiar for even the least powerful bullies to bother with and indeed would have avoided socialization altogether had not a few poetically minded girls noticed that unusually lush eyelashes fringed his large, gentle eyes. He remembered each of them, those girls who’d sent him lines from Keats and Shelley on pages torn from notebooks and who had offered him his sexual education in a series of kind acts. These girls with soft names were, he realized, the sort who in another time would have carried care packages to consumptives at the sanitarium. He wanted a female in his life again, but this time, he thought, he’d like a girlfriend with a bit more blade and a little less charitableness.

And so it was that the following week found him examining his clothes with a more critical eye than usual. Every stitch fit easily into a single bureau drawer in the efficiency apartment leased by his absentee roommate: a wealthy
NYU
student who didn’t want his Mississippi Baptist parents to know that he really lived with his girlfriend. In exchange for his cut-rate rent, Henry had only to relay messages from Mississippi across town and learn to parrot phrases such as, “Sorry, you just missed him” and “He’s at the library again—always studying so hard.” Though he was ultimately willing to excuse these fibs as one of the costs of his survival as a writer, Henry despised lies and never told them to anyone other than the disembodied drawls on the other end of his phone line.

In fact, his general refusal to lie was in part responsible for his economic predicament. If he’d articulated any interest in selling dinette sets, he’d have inherited some money. Instead his family’s small wealth was given in its entirety to his older brother, who had feigned an interest in running the family furniture store in Bakersfield. The brother promptly sold the business and bought the condominium in which he snorted away the rest of the Baffler assets in the form of powdered cocaine. Everyone in the family admitted that Henry was the one who had imagination.

Henry wished there was some money to tap. He didn’t need much and was happy enough without even a computer. It was just as well that he had no email at home and so could limit his experience of electronic rejection to his twice-weekly visit to the bank of free computers at the public library. The written rejections—often a single sentence on a small square of paper—found him easily enough.

He knew he should take Jackson Miller’s advice and submit each of his stories simultaneously to a dozen journals and magazines. But even with the cheap box of envelopes he found at a thrift store, submissions were precious; each required at least the cost of copying the pages, the better part of two dollars to mail the story, and thirty-seven cents for the stamp on the self-addressed envelope that would carry the rejection note. That was the true indignity: to have to pay to transport your own rejection.

Often the spurning editors repeated what he had been told by former teachers and classmates: his scrupulous honesty hindered his storytelling, swamping his plots with too many details from real life, some of them implausible on the page. But that’s what he knew how to do: to record.

When he turned his Realist’s eye on his wardrobe, he found a bleak situation. Both pairs of jeans and the khaki pants had been patched multiple times by Henry’s uneven hand sewing. By this point one pair of jeans had split beyond repair through the crotch and down the inseam, and Henry kept them only as a source of patching material for the other pair. He owned three tee-shirts, all of them washed thin. He had two shirts with collars, one of them wool, plus a corduroy jacket that was mostly too warm in the fall and not warm enough in the winter. He also owned a single glove, one pair of socks that he wore only in cool weather, and a pair of disintegrating brown shoes. He would soon have to visit the thrift store for new shoes and fresh tee-shirts. His best hope was to attract a girlfriend who lacked sartorial sense. It wasn’t a good idea, he suspected, to hook up with another fiction writer, but sometimes, late at night, he imagined a vague-faced poet or painter or musician; a girl composing music in a minor key, thin fingers poised to strike a chord.

Though he was broke and lonely, Henry was not unhappy. He had placed two new articles advocating his version of New Realism. It was true that one had appeared in the final issue of
(A)Musing Aloud
, a now-defunct journal with minimal circulation edited by a former instructor. But the other piece was being published in the new issue of
Swanky
, and people actually read
Swanky
. Henry viewed today’s work as the experiment that could tie his ideas together and prove with finality that his literary theory worked at the practical level: he planned to stalk the bailiff during his lunch hour.

Excited by this scheduled adventure in eavesdropping, Henry put on his wearable pair of jeans, one of the flimsy shirts, and his shoes. At the apartment’s single sink, spaced midway between the faucetless kitchen and bathroom, he brushed his teeth and wet down his hair. It was already close to noon, so he rushed down the stairs. As he stepped onto the street, he was comforted as always by the bright light and fresh air that never penetrated the interior-facing room where he slowly constructed his paragraphs.

Though his studio flat was dark and cramped and smelled of dust and mold and things he didn’t care to register, Henry reveled in his neighborhood. It was the setting of a real writer; it kept him in touch with real people. Henry loved his perennially unfashionable block, which the Irish gangs of decades past had abandoned to the Dominican families who were now Henry’s neighbors. The only evidence Henry could see of the Gaelic thugs who had once ruled Hell’s Kitchen were the large, friendly cops who smoked cigarettes and ogled attractive women in front of their tiny brick-front station. This was a part of Hell’s Kitchen too charmless to have succumbed to gentrification, and the stores that Henry passed were functional places. These were businesses not dependent on walk-in traffic but stores that certain sets of people had to visit, once a year or so, from other parts of the city: vacuum repair, saltwater aquarium paraphernalia, dry-cleaning supplies, industrial kitchen wares. The only places of note were the Hit Factory, where in one great rock-and-roll week, David Bowie and Lou Reed had both recorded iconic albums, and the peculiar plaza that was the area’s one futile effort to lure the theater crowd further west. The plaza now boasted little more than a wholesale pet-food store, empty store fronts, and a mediocre movie theater where shooting occasionally broke out. Henry’s favorite local spot was a comical French restaurant decorated with varnished jigsaw puzzles of the Eiffel Tower and Edith Piaff, staffed by laconic old women, and known for having boiled celery on the menu. He’d eaten there only once, a seal-the-deal meal paid for by the roommate he hadn’t seen since. He touched the restaurant’s wrought-iron window box, which held only dry dirt and a few straw-colored weeds, as he trotted past it toward the courthouse.

He’d long argued the superiority of character-driven fiction over the tyranny of plot, though Eddie Renfros’s amorphous plots were not, he was convinced, the right way to go. Though exquisitely written—all the editors who rejected it said so—
Vapor
was basically unreadable. You could read the same page over and over like a lovely poem, but there was no reason whatsoever to turn to the next page. What Eddie had gotten away with in his first book, he’d taken too far in his second. Even Eddie himself seemed to realize this now, and the poor chap was now trying to develop iron-handed plot.

Henry was formulating an alternative. Plots exist. Plots are real-life. People do things, and things happen, and those things result in still other events. The trouble comes when the writer forces plot onto character like, depending on your world view, God or fate or the randomly cruel universe. Jackson Miller was wrong with all his talk of life and fiction as one big farce to which the individual can respond with no weapon save mocking laughter. Henry’s idea was to treat life and the destiny of individual lives with absolute impartiality and respect. He would not be the omnipotent author but rather the chronicler who sets it down. He would spread his hands and say, “Look, this is the kind of thing that happens.” He was going to let his protagonist determine his own plot.

As he rounded the corner, he slowed, keeping close to the storefronts he passed. He stalled entirely when he spotted his bailiff eating lunch with his outsized lady friend in a small shaded park. Henry crept his way behind them, choosing a bench where he was partly hidden by a spindly ash but could hear the conversation that would be his novel’s dialogue.

Henry told himself that he would never have to write a big dramatic scene. Real drama happens so rarely in life, and, even when it does, real-world melodrama happens in ways useless to the novelist, who must, at the least, strip it from its circumstances and render it convincing. His prescription for fiction was a return to ordinary events and people: the head-cold that interrupts the would-be love scene, the pretty girl’s prom night ruined by a large pimple, all the numerous repulsive features of common decent life—presented coldly, with great seriousness and no hint of the facetious.

“Take that pigeon,” his bailiff was saying. “It just takes what it wants. I see his kind—in human form, mind you—all day long.” He paused and then huffed out, “Sure do. All day long.”

Henry tuned out all the jangling sounds of the small park, concentrating on the surprisingly high pitched voice of his protagonist as the man told his squinting girlfriend about a landlord seeking damages from a tenant who failed to replace a light bulb. “More gall than a gall bladder,” the voice scraped.

Henry touched the fingertips of both hands to his cheekbones. The muscles of his face lifted against his fingers as he pictured himself putting quotation marks around the bailiff’s lines. Yes, his character was going to provide him with all he needed.