Elise Blackwell - Grub

He should be grateful to her, he thought. Many wives would push their husbands to get a job, any job, but Amanda understood that all he’d ever wanted to be was a writer. “I’ll make the call,” he said, but for a moment he didn’t let go.

Henry Baffler typed away the fall on the electric typewriter he’d received his freshman year in college — his only legacy from his entrepreneurial grandparents. One Friday in November, after several hours of work on Bailiff , Henry made one of his bi-weekly treks to the library, checked his bag with the woman at the security window, and sitting down in the computer area, was relieved to find his inbox empty of rejection emails. After he had deleted all the penis-enlargement and night-cream advertisements, he was left with two messages. The first was a note from a Canadian poet, an intriguing installment in their ongoing correspondence on the overlapping boundaries of fiction and poetry. The second was even better: a message from the editor of Swanky , which read, “Just received your first fan letter. Will publish next month and mail copy.”

When he went to retrieve his bag, the woman who’d given him a square number 19 was gone. “Nineteen,” he said to the stocky man who had replaced her.

The fellow had subdued his spreading body with the navy blue pants and blazer of his uniform, but his acne and the gold-plated skull hanging from his earlobe suggested that he usually wore black tee-shirts stenciled with the names of heavy metal bands. The kid pushed a leather briefcase at him.

“This isn’t mine,” said Henry.

“Nineteen,” the kid said and lifted his chin to the person waiting in line behind Henry.

“The woman working earlier must have made a mistake. That’s my bag, one up from nineteen.” Henry started to explain the ease of the mistake, how it might appear that the number marked the cubbyhole above rather than below.

“We’re professionals here,” the kid said. “We attend a training session. We know which way the numbers go.”

“Whatever the case,” Henry said, perplexed more than annoyed, “That’s my bag. And this is not my briefcase.”

The kid folded his arms and straightened his shoulders — a no-nonsense gesture of skepticism straight from an action movie, if Henry wasn’t mistaken.

“Look moron,” said the girl behind him. “Why would he say that crappy bag was his if it wasn’t? If he was dishonest, wouldn’t he take the leather briefcase? Looks expensive.”

The kid chewed his lip, his own gesture, a chip in the tough-guy persona. “Depends what’s in the bags,” he said, thrusting out his chin, proud of himself.

Henry observed these gestures, thinking the kid might make a more interesting character than he’d assumed on first glance.

“They may have training sessions but they clearly don’t have screening tests.” The girl spoke out of the side of her mouth but loud enough for anyone nearby to hear. She was a bony girl with long hair, frizzy blonde roots coming in under the black. “Anyway, the inside of the bags brings us to a solution. Why don’t you just ask him what’s in his bag? If it’s his, he’ll know what’s in it.”

The kid paused, his eyes moving with his thoughts, as if to prove he wasn’t the sort to fall for fast tricks. “Okay,” he said, patting the briefcase. “What’s in here?”

“Not the briefcase, you moron. His bag.”

“His alleged bag.”

She poked Henry in the back. “What’s in your bag, guy?”

“There’s a large red comb with two teeth missing. In the outside pocket, in with a subway map.”

The kid unzipped the pocket and nodded. He re-zipped it, returned it to its cubby, and spread his hands on the counter. “Yeah? What else?”

“What else? Are you a fucking moron?” The girl jumped and slammed her boots into the tile. “A red comb with two teeth missing?”

“Those kind of combs always break.”

“You so small in life you gotta find this way to feel a pathetic iota of power?”

“I can call security on you, too.” The kid pointed to a sign reading no profanity.

“Profane,” Henry whispered. “You are profane.” He turned to gaze into the wide library, the place that held all that he most loved, the place that allowed his first novel, despite its terrible flaws, its own slot on the top row of a middle case on the second floor, as though it had been written by Dostoevsky or Diderot or Calvino. Sudden violence surged in him: an unpremeditated desire to leap on the counter and bury his thumbs in the kid’s eye sockets — like Cornwall on Gloucester or like Sophocles blinding Oedipus, his own character — to take away forever his right to look upon the sacred place where he was allowed to work.

Henry inhaled as fully as he could, swallowing the surge of anger, feeling the effort of composure as pain in his temples. When he could speak calmly, he said, “Open the main compartment. You’ll find a copy of last spring’s issue of Swanky and a large manuscript titled Bailiff . Trust me on this: it’s not worth anything to anyone else.” He waited while the kid returned the bag to the counter and opened it, seeming almost surprised to find that Henry was right, as though Henry were prophetic or clairvoyant rather than the bag’s rightful owner. “Give me my fucking novel right now,” he hissed at the miscreant.

As Henry left with his bag, he heard the girl tell him that she read Swanky . Still quaking with anger as the words swirled in his ears, he only registered them later, when it was too late to ask her name.

Discomfited by the encounter over his bag and his missed opening with a girl, Henry hurried home. He was late to meet Matt Baker, a client he was tutoring for college admissions: the least disagreeable job he could find whose schedule wouldn’t decimate his real work. He’d done what he could to ready the kid for the sat and was now helping him with his application essays.

Matt Baker was waiting on his stoop, gaze cast down, avoiding eye contact with the group of amused-looking Dominican men two buildings down.

“Sorry I’m late. Come on up.” Henry’s stomach rumbled, and he hoped Matt’s mother had remembered to send along payment for this session and the last.

The two set up at the small table. The apartment’s low ceiling made it seem all the more cramped. Henry could move around with enough ease when he was home alone, but Matt was a robust kid with black hair raised 1950s style. His huge hands seemed to absorb free space.

After reading over Matt’s essay draft, Henry said: “You’ve got to learn to write in shorter sentences, at least some of the time. The content isn’t bad — not bad at all. But you’ve worked it all into three appalling sentences when you should have written at least a dozen. You need some elegant variation, and don’t even get me started on the comma splices. The admissions committee is going to keel over from sheer fatigue.”

“That’s the problem exactly,” Matt exclaimed, working a hand over his pomaded ducktail. “That’s the problem. I know it, but I can’t help it. The thoughts come in a big clump.”

The sound of the doorbell surprised Henry, but he was glad when he heard a friend’s voice through the intercom. He buzzed up Eddie Renfros and Jackson Miller. “Come on up, but I’ve got another fifteen minutes with a student.”

Sitting on shabby floor cushions, Eddie and Jackson chatted over Henry’s few magazines, including the issue of Swanky in which his essay on New Realism had appeared.

Henry moved his pen across Matt Baker’s essay, breaking sentences in two, reclaiming dangling modifiers for the nouns they belonged to, banishing wrong-headed adverbial clauses, noting places where added details served to bog down the prose and other spots where specificity would bolster Matt’s vague claims to collegiate worthiness.