Elise Blackwell - Grub

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.”

Henry Baffler said, “You should try the snowflake method.” His dingy shirt, washed so many times that Amanda couldn’t discern its original colors, hung from his rectangle of a torso

“Henry, do get something to eat and sit down. You’re so skinny you make me nervous.” Amanda handed him a napkin.

Eyes on the floor, streaks of red climbing his neck, Henry accepted the napkin and helped himself to some food. “I saw it online. Some guy who writes Christian sci-fi or some such. He tells you exactly how many plot turns and character reversals you need and on what pages to put them. Claims you can draft a book in a month.”

“That jackass Whelpdale wishes he’d thought of it first, no doubt,” Jackson said.

Now Henry looked directly at Amanda. “It’s everything that New Realism opposes. It’s plot over character, the fake over the real.”

Enjoying the opportunity to play hostess and amused by her effect on Henry Baffler, Amanda waved everyone to bring their drinks into the living room.

“I feel quite guilty,” she said, “for pushing Eddie toward a more plotted novel. I think it’s what he needs, but, well, I hate to think of him rushing through something just because I chided him for writing too fastidiously. It would be fatal to his career, I think, for him to hurry through something and have it be weaker than his last book.”

“Do you mean Vapor or Sea Miss ?” Jackson asked.

Unsure whether the absent-minded tone in which he murmured this question was real or feigned, Amanda backtracked: “I only meant that Sea Miss will be hard to top with a stronger book. He’s such a great talent and all.” She reached for her drink and sipped it, barely opening her lips.

“By the way,” Jackson asked, “did you all read Quarmbey’s review of Fadge in The Times ?”

Though he’d spaced out the words ‘you’ and ‘all’, Amanda could still hear the accent that Jackson had carried to and all but abandoned in Iowa.

“Harshest review I ever read,” said Eddie.

“Delicious, wasn’t it?” Amanda spun out. “When I heard about it, I thought it was too good to be true until I read it myself.”

“Still,” Jackson said, “I suspect that Fadge is more of the future than Quarmbey and his ilk. I met him recently — Fadge, I mean — at a party, and we had a pretty decent chat. But he’s the funniest-looking guy you can imagine. Huge head on a short body. He asked me to send him something for The Monthly —preferably an essay on some aspect of the writing life or a profile of a writer, that sort of thing.”

Amanda looked at Eddie to see if he was bothering to look interested. A profile in The Monthly could generate a little interest in his work, but he just didn’t think that way. Eddie popped a roll into his mouth and ate it whole. In his ballooning cheeks, she could see what he might look like if he really let himself go to rubber.

“I sent him a piece ten months ago and am still waiting to hear,” Henry said quietly. “On the New Realism.”

“He only reads the solicited stuff. It’s a waste of time to submit over the transom there.”

“Then it hardly seems fair, does it,” Henry mumbled, “to say that they accept unsolicited manuscripts and to forbid simultaneous submissions. They’ve tied up my essay for almost a year.”

“I certainly hope you don’t abide by that simultaneous-submission thing,” Jackson said, sounding truly alarmed. “You should have every story and essay you’ve ever written out to twenty places at once. You can even hire someone to do it for you so you don’t have to face all the rejection slips.” He drained his glass and allowed Amanda to take it for a refill. “Oh, get this. I was checking out the publication, and who do you think had an ad in the back? He’s selling ‘services for writers’, including submissions like I was just saying and of course manuscript triage. Any guesses?”

“Don’t tell me it’s Whelpdale!” Amanda handed Jackson the new drink.

“None other. He’ll even be your ‘nag’. For a fee, he’ll phone you weekly or monthly — or daily if you pay enough — and scold you into writing. You have to pay extra for the ‘overbearing mother’ version of the service.”

“And to think,” Amanda said, “that I could have been charging Eddie for my services all along.”

“But what would that make you?” Eddie said quickly, not meeting her eyes and instead turning to Jackson. “I suppose you’re right about Whelpdale. He sounds shameless.”

“It’s the ‘manuscript doctor’ that gets me. A man who didn’t get a penny for his book and hasn’t written another one, trying to make a living by telling other people what to write. He claims that he recommends the books he likes, post-improvement no doubt, to agents.”

“I suppose anyone can recommend anything to anyone — whether he knows him or not.” Amanda smiled at Henry, whose neck blushed again.

“It’s a swindle,” Eddie said. “I suppose that’s what it’s coming to. Soon we’ll need an agent to get an agent.”

The men finished the food quickly, leaving only a green smear of wasabi paste and a few pieces of pickled ginger on the plate.

“I would have made more if I’d known there’d be four of us,” Amanda said. She returned to the kitchen, where she fanned crackers and cheese onto a white serving platter. Slicing an apple, she said over her shoulder, “Seems as though we all have new prospects of one sort or another. I did some writing myself today. I’m thinking of a whole book now.”