Elise Blackwell - Grub

It had been a mistake, of course, to sleep with her — all the more so because she wasn’t his type: absurd leather pants, limp carrot-colored hair and ironic glasses that made her look like a cub reporter out of DC Comics. He would never have made a pass at her, but he wasn’t a man to turn down an offer. She’d spent an eternity calculating the tip, over-tipping the attractive waiter by about as much as she generally under-tipped good-looking young women. “I want you to screw me,” she’d said as she signed her name, looking up with an expression picked up from a movie.

He’d laughed and said, “You sure do have a way of asking that’s hard to turn down.”

What had followed were a handful of assignations at a Lexington Avenue boutique hotel, each a more disappointing version of the previous. The day Jonathan Warbury came over to her agency, Andrew knew she would end the affair she’d asked him to start. She still phoned him occasionally, pumping him for inside news, until he told her that sex was the price he charged for information. “I’ve already got a wife,” he said, “and at least she’ll cook for me.”

He should have found a new agent, but inertia — or something he couldn’t quite define — had taken hold of him. And truthfully, he hated the other agents he’d met, and he hated most of their loathsome clients. Chuck Fadge was the worst of them all. In Andrew’s mind, Chuck Fadge stood for them all.

In a horrible journal called The Balance —the name itself was a joke — Fadge had published two reviews of Andrew’s second most recent novel, one positive and one negative. The positive review had damned with faint praise, while the negative review had been biting, smart, funny, and vicious. Andrew suspected that Fadge himself had penned both reviews, which had been published under the ridiculously pseudonymous bylines Gabriel Schlipper and Cormandy Page. And a suspicion held long enough functions as certain knowledge.

Andrew was convinced that his new work, his critical overview of fiction, could raise his stature. At the least, it should ensure sales of all his books on college campuses for the next decade. If he could get the editor to handle it right, the book could return him to prominence. It had been a misfortune that Fadge had published his similar book first, but surely at least college professors and old-school editors would prefer Andrew’s more learned offering. There was no chapter on Brett Easton Ellis; there were twelve pages devoted to Ralph Ellison. He’d omitted that snot-nosed Yalie who’d ripped off the finest literary ideas to have emerged from the shambles of postwar Germany, but he was including thoughtful analyses of Günter Grass and the exquisite W. G. Sebald. Now Quarmbey’s review of Fadge offered the possibility that even the hoi polloi might half understand why these choices mattered.

Andrew was man enough to acknowledge that Fadge had a style considered attractive by many, though it continued to shock him that glib and acrobatic were so often conflated with well-written these days. He’d once overheard Quarmbey calling his own prose bloodless, though certainly professional jealousy, the large snout-full of booze Quarmbey could be counted on to drink, and the fact that the confirmed old bachelor no longer had much success with young ladies were at least partially responsible for the nasty adjective slung at his friend. Though Andrew was certain that his prose was not at all bloodless, he was aware that some graceful editing of a kind once but no longer performed by an actual editor might be in order.

So he received the news of Margot’s imminent return home with even greater joy than parental affection alone might have accounted for. Her careful pen had improved more than one of her father’s reviews and articles. She’d joked the last time she lent him an edit that even a graduate-school professor would have to credit her as co-author for the amount of work she’d done — that’s how good-natured she was. She was a fine daughter, always helpful. She was humble and kind and naturally intelligent, in short, everything that her absurd mother was not.

Andrew held one worry about Margot’s return home: Janelle might infect the bright child with her worsening nonsense. He vowed to separate them as much as possible and to keep Margot so busy with the copyediting of his manuscript that she’d have no time for any of her mother’s mush-headed archetype workshops. He planned to complete the book draft before Margot returned home at the end of the month.

When the doorbell chimed one Wednesday morning, Andrew had long since put down his pen in order to indulge his usual forms of creative procrastination: de-alphabetizing his CDs to arrange them by genre and year; moving correspondence from pile to pile; sneaking quick looks at a mildly pornographic website before deleting his browsing history. “Goddamnit!” he shouted. “How am I expected to get any work done, ever, with these constant interruptions?!”

He waited for his wife to answer the door, but instead the doorbell rang again.

“See what I mean? I can’t win.” He shoved his chair back in a great drama of exasperation, as though he actually had an audience, and walked heavily through the house. He paused at the living room, where his wife stood before a dozen middle-aged, middle-weight, shockingly unattractive women, who apparently thought it was beneath their intellectual dignity to make any effort whatsoever to doll themselves up. The cloying smell of vanilla candles seeped from the room. Andrew was positive he’d have a headache inside five minutes.

“What I want you to think about next,” Janelle said in her false-honey voice, “is your inner warrioress. She is who I want to feel on the page.”

“I’m going to be ill,” Andrew said. “I’m actually going to vomit.” He swung open the door and was relieved to see a man standing there. “Quarmbey. Thank God. Come on in if you can manage to ignore that nauseating scene.” He gestured to the living room as they passed and led Quarmbey out to the back deck, stopping off in the kitchen for a bottle of vodka and two tumblers.

“What’s the redhead’s name?” his friend asked, awaiting his host’s pour.

“Trust me, you don’t want anything to do with any of them. Big underwear on all of them except Janelle, and, in her case, who the hell cares.”

After Quarmbey downed two quick shots, he said, “Andrew, I’ve been set up, and I need to hear it wasn’t you.”

“Of course it wasn’t me. What the hell are you talking about?”

While sipping his third and fourth shots of vodka, Quarmbey told Andrew the bad news. “Normally an aggrieved author’s only recourse is to write a letter to the editor, but those assholes, those traitors at The Times , are giving Fadge an entire page to respond to my review. Not in the letters section. A real page.”

“That’s an abomination.” Andrew refilled both their glasses. “Clearly Fadge used his connections, pulled some strings, made some calls. Believe me when I say that nothing is beneath him. He has no pride.”

“I thought The Times was the one paper left free of that sort of back-scratching, log-rolling crap. Apparently it’s fallen into the gutter with everyone else.”

“I wonder if they planned this all along — set us up — or whether Fadge marshaled his forces after the fact.” Andrew remembered that he’d been asked to write the review himself and was proud of himself for not snapping the bait. He searched his memory for everyone he knew who still worked at The Times . “I’m going to make some calls of my own,” he said.

His workday completely screwed, he allowed himself to get tipsy before calling his old friend a taxi.

“Really,” Quarmbey said, “ask Janelle if that redhead is single.”