Elise Blackwell - Grub

Over the next several days, Amanda’s willful defiance of his wishes — and her apparent disregard for his long-term best interests — cemented a transformation in Eddie’s feelings toward his wife. He loved her as madly as ever, but what had once given him joy now gnawed and festered. He felt wronged by her.

She sensed it, he could tell, though he couldn’t identify anything particular she said as specific evidence. But they no longer talked about books or music; they didn’t even gossip about their friends and acquaintances. Indeed all of their conversations, which became increasingly brief, centered on money, publishing, and the necessary quotidian details of shopping and errands and mail. For the first two years of their marriage, their relationship itself had afforded them many happy conversations in which they reviewed moments of their days at Iowa, their courtship, their honeymoon, their late nights during Eddie’s first book tour. Now their relationship was too dangerous to mention, as if naming it aloud would call forth its destruction. They had sex perhaps once every three weeks — a situation Eddie considered an abandonment of their vows.

Amanda was forever typing, typing, typing. When he finally reached the point where he had to confront her about it, in anguish accusing her of taking a cyber lover, she confessed that she was well into a novel — a fact Eddie knew should please him but instead frightened him. He fretted that her novel would be bad or would be very good — better than his — and he worried most of all that it would bring her enough money to buy her way out of not only their debts but their marriage. On the bleakest days, he told himself that would be for the best. He’d procure another copyediting position and marry a nice waitress with no materialistic tendencies or unbounded ambition.

While he waited for his agent to read Conduct , he idled away many of his days at the NYU library. Though he wasn’t able to read with much concentration, he preferred sitting among strangers than under Amanda’s resentful gaze or hearing her fingers clacking away on the keyboard. As he browsed the stacks, he began to think about writing some nonfiction — a magazine piece or a review, perhaps. Something to keep his name in circulation. Anything other than a novel. He started a piece on the phenomenon of being ‘post cool,’ thinking he might place it with one of the magazines marketed to men moving into and through their thirties. In a better mood, he could have written up the piece happily and easily, could have written with the light touch that had made his column in the University of Wisconsin paper such a hit. But pressure had ruined him; he belabored every word and abandoned the essay by the fourth paragraph like the sinking ship that it was.

It was that night, the very moment he crossed the threshold, that Amanda showed him Jackson Miller’s new essay, which had just come out in The Monthly . Eddie dropped his backpack and sat at the dining-room table to flip through the magazine. The piece chronicled Jackson’s brushes with famous authors, including the time he’d “borrowed” Denis Johnson’s swim trunks and the time Norman Mailer extinguished a cigar on the toe of his shoe. The litany of literary misbehavior concluded by describing the drunken night Jackson had felt up the chunky wife of a Pulitzer-winning novelist in a diner booth and later had agreed to tackle Richard Ford for twenty dollars but had managed only to fall at his feet.

“I remember that guy’s wife,” Eddie said, hoping to catch Amanda’s attention. “After her husband won the Pulitzer, she made him introduce her as ‘also a novelist’, though I don’t think she ever wrote anything for adults. He even had to put it in his bios. Now that’s whipped.”

“Did I tell you about Jackson’s piece in next Sunday’s The Times ?” Amanda asked. “He got hold of the iPod lists of well-known writers and analyzed them in relation to their work. He sent me an advance copy. It really is hilarious. You won’t believe what some people listen to!”

“Greasing the wheels in anticipation of his publication date.” Eddie heard the gloom in his tone and tried to lift it. “Actually, I’m working on an article, too. For a glossy, I should think. It’s about being post-cool.”

“I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to.”

“I figured you weren’t interested. Why didn’t you ask?”

“I was afraid to, Eddie. It would have seemed like reminding you that, well, you know.”

“That we’re still broke and facing another crisis? That I’m a failure as a provider?” He pushed back his chair with intentional drama, moved into the living room, and sank into the sofa. “At least you’d have appeared interested in me.”

Amanda started to reply but waited. After she sat down, facing him across the coffee table, she asked, “Do you think you can place the piece? There was that book last year, you know, written by that journalist, on how you can’t be cool after you have kids.”

“Well, this is ‘post-cool with no kids’, not ‘uncool with kids’. Different thing, and, anyway, it’s not like things don’t get published just because they’re not thoroughly original in every way.”

“Maybe Jackson could hook you up with Chuck Fadge, help you place something in The Monthly ?”

“This isn’t right for Fadge. And I’d rather do things on my own, without begging anyone for help.”

“Jack’s not ‘anyone’. He’s our friend. That’s one of your problems, Eddie.” Though her words cut, there was no edge to her voice. “Only the very strongest men are self-made. You should use any means of help possible.”

“Because I’m weak.”

“Don’t be offended. That’s not how I meant it.” Exasperation tinged her words now, but, still, she didn’t seem angry.

“You’re right. I’m the sort of person who needs all the help I can get. But, really, this piece isn’t right for The Monthly .”

Amanda smiled a victor’s smile and said, “Because it’s unfinished or barely started?”

Eddie didn’t want to answer. The article was barely begun and would never be finished, and they both knew it. He groped for another angle to direct their fight. “Amanda,” he said at last. “Are you always regretting that I’m not more like Jackson? If I had his peculiar talent, we’d likely be coming into a lot more money, I don’t doubt. But then I wouldn’t have my talent. And, frankly, I wouldn’t trade the one for the other.”

“That’s ridiculous. And just to prove it, I’ll never mention Jackson Miller’s name again.”

“Now that really is ridiculous.”

“Then let’s just drop this whole subject. Anyway, my book is nearly done, so maybe I’ll save us both.”

“You say ‘us both’ instead of just ‘us’. As though we aren’t a unit, as though our fates are separate.”

“Really, Eddie! I might as well have married a goddamn poet.” Now obviously furious, she left the room.

Eddie knew that their union was chewing its own foundation, even that it was for the best, in the way that the inevitable often seems like it’s for the best. Yet he also believed that money, if he was the one who earned it, could still save the marriage. He believed that if he could publish a successful book, he could win back Amanda’s love. He gave up the short-lived idea of writing articles and began to consider ideas for a new novel. As much as Amanda would like to be rich, she valued prestige above wealth. She would choose Eddie over Jackson, even if Jackson’s book was a bestseller, so long as Eddie had the more important reputation. If he could be short-listed for a major prize, Amanda’s heart would be back on his side. Again he weighed a historical novel. Maybe the Hobbema book wasn’t a bad idea. He vowed to read the literature from the Frick the next time Amanda was out of the apartment.