Elise Blackwell - Grub

“Make room,” he heard her say. “Our next most important writer has arrived. Make room.”

He heard a male voice parse the double meaning of next most important . Emotionally winded from the encounter with the Yarboroughs, he was relieved to have such weak competition.

He shouldered through, and Amanda popped up, patted the stool. “Take my seat while I lengthen my legs. I need to stand.” And there she was on full display. She had the long blonde hair and green eyes of the it-girls of his teenage years, impeccable posture, and a waist curve that gave Jackson an uncomfortable misty feeling that he preferred not to examine. Doreen, his ex-girlfriend and current roommate, always said Amanda had perfect bone structure, but Jackson saw in her face an endearing asymmetry. Her smile reached a little further on one side, and her nose, while straight, pointed just slightly to the left. A modern girl, he thought, though there was something regal about her that transcended contemporary style. He couldn’t quite see her as an ancient Greek beauty or a Victorian aristocrat, but he could easily imagine her cast as one. Someone should write her a screenplay, he thought, wondering if her beauty would translate into two dimensions.

“Bartender, get this man some gin.” Amanda leaned over him to place the order, pressed her hand on his shoulder, let him smell her hair — grapefruit clean despite the visible smoke in the bar. “Throw in a twist while you’re at it.”

“I could use a double,” he said to her ear. “Do you think I’m turning into an asshole?”

“Turning into one?”

“Aren’t you the wit. But seriously, I think I made two women cry today. In any event, I’ve gone from ‘next-most-important’ to ‘most-likely-to-be-blacklisted.’ And I’m a fraud. I can’t even think of a new way to describe those mountains outside.”

“Of course you can, Jack.” Her voice was bright as she swirled the ice cubes in her glass. “If anyone can think of a new way, you’re that guy. You may not have timeless beauty and profound themes and unobtrusiveness of plot going your way, but you’re nothing at all if you’re not a man of your day.”

Eddie Renfros awoke feeling as though his forehead was wrapped in rubber bands. It was going to be one of the major hangovers of his life. Top ten, he thought, perhaps even top five. He opened one eye, closed it, then reluctantly opened both, wincing from the already full light. Lying on his side, he took in the brown acrylic blanket, the cabin’s glossy faux stucco walls, the artwork painted by someone untrained in perspective, the white resin table holding last night’s final empty bottle. This is what it’s going to be like, he thought, once we lose the apartment.

He’d suspected, even at twenty-three, that his early success was a jinx. Still in Iowa, his MFA a semester away from completion, he’d been granted an advance that sounded like the beginning of wealth and prompted him to propose to Amanda, whom he’d always figured would wind up with Jackson if she didn’t abandon them both to marry a rich guy.

Now, indulging in a little hangover-earned self-pity, he resented his early fortune. It would have been better to have had his first novel go unpublished, to have placed Vapor modestly but with a good house, and to be on the eve of his breakout book. That’s how it used to happen for writers, how it’s supposed to happen. If Eddie couldn’t finish and sell his new book soon, they’d lose the Murray Hill apartment where Amanda said she could live happily until they really made it. She had already worked in a publishing office a year longer than the year they’d agreed upon, and Eddie knew all too well that Amanda wasn’t the kind of person who could work indefinitely for a boss who wasn’t as smart as she was. He contemplated what it would take to keep her if they had to move somewhere cheaper, but that was too dreadful to consider even when he was feeling well. He could barely admit to himself and certainly had not admitted to Amanda that he had nothing of a third novel beyond a thrice reworked thirty pages.

He turned to reach for his wife. He would pledge undying love, show remorse, beg her to find the vending machine and buy him a coke. “I’m ready to get home and really write. Tomorrow I go back on a schedule,” he rehearsed. “Once we’re back in the city, things will be better than normal. I’ll finish my book by winter. I’m not even going to revise the first chapter again.”

His fingers grasped only cool, thin sheet, and he turned over to find himself alone in a room that smelled like mold. Sometimes when he awoke to find Amanda already up and about, he feared that she was really gone, that she hadn’t even stuck around to make sure that he would indeed become the failure he seemed capable of being.

When Jackson had asked him if it was wise to marry someone ambitious, Eddie put it down to jealousy. Yet he’d also taken the question seriously; it was something he’d weighed. The simplest answer was that he loved Amanda. He loved her looks, of course, but he also loved her because she was funny and interested in the world. He admired the strength of imagination and the determination with which she had reinvented herself at the age of eighteen. He thought, even, that she could lend him some of what he lacked, that perhaps he could write while she managed his career. And feeling like a success with a book under contract, he hoped he would satisfy her desire to rise in the world.

Now, wretched, he fell back into sleep.

When the creak of the opening door wakened him, he was both grateful and aroused to see his wife, coke can and ice bucket in hand.

“I don’t deserve you. You’re perfect. You’re stunning.” He could barely speak through the headache squeezing the width of his forehead.

She poured the coke expertly. The fizz rose through the ice just to the rim of the glass and subsided before she topped it off. “Drink some cold caffeine and find the courage for a shower. The reading is in an hour, and then we need to hit the road.”

The reading was held inside the faux-chalet Outlook Bar, the sight of which brought back embarrassing memories from the previous night. Eddie could be obnoxious when he mixed liquors. Now he remembered ranting about the drafting of his first novel, telling Henry Baffler about the blurb from Jonathan Warbury that had arrived too late to go on the jacket, and letting Jackson know he’d had sex with Amanda that morning. He vowed that in the future he would stick to the same cocktail all night, alternate drinks with glasses of water, and keep his big mouth shut.

The beer-on-carpet smell unsettled his stomach, and his headache hadn’t let up. He’d only been able to get down about half the coke. His goal now was to not vomit on stage. They took a side-front table, and he concentrated on the view of the mountains through the wall-sized plate-glass windows as the room filled with hundreds of people.

“This will be the most people you’ve ever read to,” whispered Amanda, her hand comforting on his thigh.

The reading of published past participants was the final event of the week-long Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. Eddie was slated to read third, following a woman who’d written a novel about the yearnings and losses of the members of a book club and Jeffrey Whelpdale, a basically amiable fellow forging a literary career in the absence of evident talent.

Whelpdale had not gone so far as to self-publish, but he hadn’t received an advance for his book. It had been printed by a West Coast house whose publisher was an old chum of his, and the son of a man with a wad of expendable capital. Whelpdale had generated sales by placing each of the stories in the book of interconnected short stories — he called it a novel in stories — in assorted youth and other writer-targeted magazines such as Swanky . He’d also sold thousands of copies to writers themselves through his “writers’ resource website,” whose features included “hot agent of the month” and “creating a literary prize.” It could only be a matter of months before he penned a how-to book about writing and publishing.