Elise Blackwell - Grub

Amanda stroked the fine hairs on her arm. After a long silence, she said in a quiet, resolute voice: “I won’t allow it.”

“Either I take this job or we move to New Jersey.”

“To me, it makes no difference. Either option is intolerable.”

Eddie’s anger, pent up so long by his fear of annoying his beautiful wife, swelled into something he couldn’t contain. “Amanda, are you my wife or not?”

“I am certainly not the wife of a copyeditor of romance novels. That’s not why I’ve been working for idiots for two years.”

“You were the one who told me the Hobbema story. What was I supposed to gather from that?” His rage now full blown, he was bellowing.

“Hobbema? My God. You are so thick. I wanted you to write a book about something interesting, something with a bit of human drama in it, not to abandon your talent!”

“But all that talk about how he quit painting at my age and got a job and supported his wife.”

“Was it lost on you that Hobbema could have gone on to be a great painter? Instead he’s a footnote about what might have been. He spent over four decades — forty fucking years — weighing bottles of imported wine that he couldn’t afford to drink. He and his maid of a wife are buried in a paupers’ cemetery. Is that what you want for yourself? For me?”

“I notice you didn’t say ‘for us.’” Eddie paused, force draining from his words even as they grew more harsh. “Whatever you think of me, you’re my wife. Now you are the wife of a copyeditor as well as a novelist. If I see fit for us to move to Jersey City, you’ll come with me.”

Eddie saw now what he’d never noticed before: the four years they had passed together were starting to appear on his wife’s face. A line marked the width of her forehead and the corners of her eyes crinkled just slightly. He couldn’t call them laugh lines, though, as she glared at him with a fierceness he’d never seen.

“Do as you see fit? You’re out of your fucking mind.”

She’d never before said such horrible things to him, never yelled at him with profanity. He wanted to grab her arm, yank her to her feet, and then shove her back down to start the conversation over again. He held his hands in fists on his thighs, choking down anger, and felt his tears come. As Amanda looked away in scorn, Eddie wished that he had grabbed her, shaken her up. She would have at least recognized him as strong. She would have been the one crying instead of sitting there coolly. Finally, they both stood, facing each other across only a few feet.

“You won’t move with me then?”

“If a copyeditor commuting from New Jersey is the life you offer me, then no, I think I’ll pass. I’ve been working to support your writing. I’m certainly not going into the business of offering subventions to copyeditors.”

“You would be more ashamed to share my plight than to have everyone know that you’re a heartless wife?”

“Look, Eddie, you have one more chance to save us from degradation: finish your goddamn novel. Yet you refuse to do the work and instead embark on this ridiculous course of action. You want to drag me down with you. I can’t and won’t do it. The disgrace is all yours. Everyone I know thinks I’m a martyr, but I don’t want to be a martyr just because I was unlucky enough to marry a man with no ambition, no fortitude, and certainly no regard for my feelings.”

“No regard for your feelings? Everything I do is for you!”

He stepped closer to her, but he could see in her face no vulnerability to him at all.

“If you leave me,” he said, “that’s it. I won’t take you back.”

“I’m afraid that’s likely.” She shrugged her shoulders.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’re bored with me and looking for a reason to leave. Maybe the copyediting was a bad idea, but the absurdity of our situation made it seem plausible. Amanda, you’ve given me no hope. You insist on staying in this ungodly expensive apartment. And you’ve never given me any reason to believe that you’ll stand by me if the worst happens.”

“Eddie, I don’t want to argue anymore. Call that publisher and tell them you don’t want the job. Finish your book. Then we’ll decide what to do about the apartment. And our marriage.”

He yelled: “Decide what to do about our marriage?” After a few audible breaths, he continued, in a softer tone, “See, I always know that leaving me is an option for you. It kills me. It’s probably the reason I can’t write well anymore. If you only realized, then maybe you wouldn’t be so heartless. Instead of confirming my worst fears, you could be trying to prove that I’m wrong about them.”

“And you might try proving that you’re willing to do your utmost to save me from humiliation.”

“Humiliation is a pretty strong word. Jesus. And I am doing my utmost. It’s hard, though, when I get so little encouragement from the woman who is supposed to love me, from the one person who is supposed to be on my side.”

“Eddie, I know that you’ve had to work in the face of repeated rejection. I feel awful for you, I really do. But you need to work in a better way, to write smarter. Until you really give that a try, you have no right to give it all up and no right to drag me down with you. I want to lead a big life, not a pathetic one. And as for encouragement, well, what the hell have I been doing if not encouraging you by working so you can write?”

“Would it be such a disgrace to be the wife of a copyeditor? And if it became full-time, maybe you could quit your job and write that novel you were thinking about in Iowa.”

“A copyeditor of romance novels? I’m ashamed all the way down that you would sink to this. You’re an author. You’re Eddie Renfros, author of the critically acclaimed novel Sea Miss .”

“Amanda.” Eddie choked on her name. “Maybe you could take an ad out in The Times , letting everyone know that you are in no way connected to my failure. Like those people who distance themselves from their spouses’ debt. You could let it be known that you married a success who wound up a failure. Through no fault of your own, of course.”

“Don’t be a simp, Eddie. It’s, well, it’s repulsive.” She paused, and he could see her posture relax just a bit. “Look, you’re having a bad day, and that could happen to anyone. Call the place back and turn down the job. Then finish your book, and we’ll go from there.” Her words formed a command, yet they weren’t harsh. She was all business, dutiful parent to tantrum-prone child. “But call right now so we can put this behind us and never speak of it again. Call and tell them that you couldn’t dream of being a romance-novel copyeditor. Tell them you’re on pain pills or sleep deprived, that it was a mistake they need to forget about. Call right now, Eddie. This moment.”

Now a frantic edge entered her matter-of-fact tone, and Eddie feared that she might lose control. He feared it even as he longed to witness it.

“If I do as you bid,” he said, testing, “I’ll only look weaker in your eyes. And then you’ll never sleep with me again. Is that your goal? To despise everything about me, to have an excuse to sleep with your back to me forever?”

“My goal here is to be your friend and save you from yourself. Call right now, and then get back to work on your book. I can see that the financial worries are making it hard for you to work, so I want you to try and forget about money for now. I’m going to demand that raise, this week, and that’ll help until you finish your book. And I can cut back on some expenses, cut some corners. All you have to worry about is finishing your book.”

She held out her arms to him and stroked his hair as she allowed him to rest his head on her shoulder. He leaned into her touch, breathing in the subtle citrus of her bath powder.