Elise Blackwell - Grub

“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.”

“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.”

For 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.