Elise Blackwell - Grub

“Margot!” His voice, even from down the hall, was large.

“Telephone! Please do tell your friends never to phone here before noon. You know I can’t work with these distractions.”

Margot couldn’t imagine who would be calling — she’d let all her school acquaintances fall away — and chided herself for hoping it was good news. On the other end of the line was the agent who had agreed to represent The Reluctant Leper provided she kept her expectations in check.

“The money’s not great, but it’s not too bad for so literary a first novel.” The agent then named a senior editor at one of New York’s most prestigious imprints.

Margot made her repeat the name, dug her fingernail into her fingertip to ensure that she was awake, and then said thank you nearly a dozen times. She promised to come into the city to have lunch with the agent, whom she had never met, and her new editor. Her editor! It seemed too good to be true. She would have to remember which woman was named Lane and which was Lana.

“By the way,” Lana intoned as a calculated afterthought. “One thing we’ll want to discuss is the title, so give it some thought. Make a little list.”

Margot explained that she had made a list, that she’d thought very hard about the title and decided that The Reluctant Leper was exactly right.

“Just think about it,” her agent said. “I’m sure Lane will have some ideas to bounce around as well. Lane’s super busy, but I’ll try to schedule us a lunch next month.”

At the good news, her mother hugged her. “You believed in yourself, set yourself free, took real ownership, and look what happened! This belongs to you, Margot, and no one can ever take it away.”

“No one can ever take it away from me? Why would you say something like that?” But Margot accepted her mother’s hug and grinned.

Her father looked momentarily stricken, though she couldn’t discern whether it was her news or her mother’s affirmation-speak that had sickened him. His recovery was quick, and then he seemed happy for her.

“Wonderful news, my dear, wonderful. I always knew you had a real talent. Now someone else has finally noticed. Wonderful. Let’s all go out tonight. Hell this news is even good enough that I don’t mind eating out with your mother if we can find a restaurant that doesn’t serve fois gras or milk-fed veal or swordfish or oppressed broccoli stalks or God knows whatever else your mother isn’t eating these days.” Despite his mini-tirade, his laugh was warm. “Say, Margot, what kind of advance did your agent mention?”

“Not bad,” he said when she named the sum. “Very respectable.”

Though her news was large enough to warrant a phone call, Margot, as ever, felt more comfortable expressing herself through written words. She emailed Jackson about the acceptance of her novel for publication, wrote that she was certain that his would be next — and in a much bigger, more impressive way. And she told him that she was finally coming down to New York. “I have wanted to see you,” she said. “It’s just been an odd stretch.”

For dinner that night, Margot’s parents settled on a Japanese place where her mother could have green tea and sushi and her father could order steak, pan-fried noodles, and sake. He talked Margot into a glass of wine with her dinner and then into a second one for dessert. Her thoughts had an audible buzz as she rode home in the back seat, her parents up front squabbling over whether or not the heater should be on.

Back in her room, she opened an email from Jackson. His note congratulated her heartily and thanked her for thinking of his book in her moment of triumph, mentioning that it was now in possession of a top agent.

“There’s something I must be honest about,” his words continued. Reading them, her chest tightened and yet she also felt giddy, flattered by his intimate tone, his seriousness of purpose. “I must tell you something, because you are one of the few people I respect. I don’t know you very well, it’s true, and you certainly have made yourself scarce lately. But I know quite enough to respect you, and so I feel that I have to warn you that I’m a selfish person. Not brutally selfish, and the thought that I’m at all selfish does trouble me. If I were rich, I think I would be generous. I would be a good person. I’m civilized, if nothing else. Because I’m not rich, though, and because I am selfish, I’m likely to do ugly things to make some money and make a name for myself. Or at least I’m willing to do them. I tell you this in case you read my book and despise it, which you may. I cannot afford to live as I would like to, to write the literature I might aspire to if I could touch the family money or if I won the lottery. That is, simply, one of my facts.”

Margot smiled, thinking that someone really living an unworthy life and writing unworthy books wouldn’t declare it so plainly as Jackson had.

She read on. “I hope you really will come to see me soon. And maybe because I don’t trust you to, I’m wondering if that invitation to visit up there might be possible. Perhaps enough time has elapsed since I met your father that it might now be all right if I spent an afternoon on the Hudson. I think we need to see each other. Otherwise we’ll never know, and we might as well know, don’t you think?”

For the next day and a half, Margot’s mood alternated between elation over the sale of her novel and anxiety over broaching the subject of Jackson’s visit with her father. Long possessed of the ability to work under any circumstances, she concentrated on completing her father’s manuscript. Its delivery, she knew, would improve his mood. Meanwhile, her mother did little to help the atmosphere at home and had inflamed her father by advertising — in the local paper as well as the bulletin board at the health food store — a new workshop based on an ancient system of personality types. To make matters worse, the new workshop was not limited to poetry, about which Andrew cared little, but included fiction, about which Andrew cared deeply, and memoir, which Andrew actively loathed. Memoir was fifth on her father’s “enemies list”, a page topped by Chuck Fadge, The Monthly , the editor who had granted Fadge a full page to respond to Quarmbey’s review, and an agent in Manhattan who had once rejected Andrew’s single attempt at a postmodern novel and who now accepted only clients under the age of thirty-two.

Margot decided to approach her father about Jackson’s visit when she handed him the completed and copyedited manuscript. She convinced herself that, as stubborn as her father could be, he would not be able to ignore the hard work she had donated to him. And if she could make him understand her affection for Jackson, then surely he would be happy for her. Perhaps he could even understand Jackson’s ambition and grudgingly respect the success that she believed was about to come to her friend.

One of the few rules her mother had succeeded in enforcing in their home was the no-smoking rule. So when Margot finished her work on the still-untitled manuscript, late in the afternoon after working practically through the night, she was unsurprised to find her father outside, in a lawn recliner, in the midst of one of the year’s first snows.

He puffed angrily at a cigar. “Damn thing’s rolled too tight. They’re making cigars for people who don’t actually smoke them, that’s what’s happening.”

Margot rolled a sympathetic sound from her throat and refrained from making a comment about people with real problems.

“So we should put word out about your book, line up some reviewers sympathetic to the Yarborough name.”

Margot’s purr caught in her throat like hair. She’d given no thought to reviews, and almost no thought to the idea that publication meant that people would read her novel. She pictured the shelves at The Shadow of the Valley of the Books, the short queue of buyers with a twenty-dollar bill or a credit card. She pictured her pretty hardcover — imagining Spanish Moss tangled with the long dark hair of the Creole girl on the cover — and realized that people would be asked to spend more than twenty dollars to read what she had written alone in her room.