Elise Blackwell - Grub

“Your book sounds beautiful, Margot, and I love the few pages you’ve shown me. You’re a master of the perfect word choice, that’s clear.”

Jackson rose and Margot’s gaze followed him into the clean, almost professional looking kitchen. He pulled a bottle from a horizontal wine rack, carefully turning it upright before removing the foil with a small knife and the cork with the attached screw. “Your point about topic is good. I certainly take heart from a review I saw recently — get this — for a hundred-page novel — they’re actually calling it a novel and not a novella — about the siege of Leningrad. Has no one heard of scale? Sounds awful, but the reviewer was nice about it and it certainly gives me hope.”

Jackson Miller was closer to one of Henry James’s urbane charmers than the men who populated Margot’s fantasies: composites of Thomas Hardy’s stolid, fate-battered heroes, Heathcliff, the Swann of the earliest volumes, and the occasional sincere-eyed European movie star. Yet as she watched the sure movements of his hands, she thought that she could love him if that’s what he wanted from her.

Jackson put two glasses of the red wine on the chest that served as coffee table and sat on the sofa next to her. “Margot, I understand your father doesn’t hold me in great affection, but I hope that’s no reason that you and I can’t continue our friendship.”

“It’s the same for me. The way I feel, I mean.”

“Not that my friendship is any great prize. I am what I am, and I’ll go on struggling for the good life that I’ve always wanted. But your friendship, well, it’s worth a great deal. If I were sure of that friendship, I would at least be within sight of loftier ideals.”

Margot accepted the wine he moved from the table to her hand, and they toasted the acceptance of her novel.

“Hey, I know. You can call it Stumps . You know, cypress knees and those literary leper parts.” He held up his arm with his hand balled and twisted.

Margot swallowed her mouthful of wine quickly so that she wouldn’t laugh it across the front of her dress.

“So you have a sense of humor.” Jackson looked down into her eyes, smiling into his cheeks, his good looks boyish despite his height.

“Do I seem so very dull?” Margot tilted her head and tucked her curls behind the ear closest to Jackson, wondering if she was flirting well or poorly.

“Not dull, not at all. But smart and quiet and reticent. Serious. Those qualities are exactly what I like so much in you — and what I find so different from myself. But all the better that there’s a generosity and sense of humor beneath it.”

“And many of your qualities are attractive to me, because they’re so foreign to who I am. You’re self-confident and charming and determined to succeed.” She felt a smile grow. “And tall.”

As he took her glass from her hand, she noticed she’d drunk most of its contents. He set both glasses down and turned to her, wrapping her shoulders in his strong arm.

“I promise to be careful with you, Margot. I wouldn’t hurt you for anything.”

When he said that, his stature seemed more protective than intimidating, and she leaned into him. When he stroked her face with his free hand and kissed her mouth with just the right amount of pressure, she warmed with such pleasure that she thought the feeling might be love. It was like standing in a strong summer breeze, a welcome wind on a stagnant day. It was like the promise of change.

That night, lying in Jackson’s bed listening to his slight snore, she believed that love might indeed be the word for what she felt.

As winter stepped into the city, Amanda Renfros discovered something: she liked to write. Social by nature, she generally felt anxious by herself, with no one to react to, banter with, or enchant. Now though, she found that she didn’t mind being alone at her computer, that actually, she wasn’t quite solitary when she worked. She had for company a cast of attractive, witty, and highly promiscuous French aristocrats and their hangers-on. She befriended her heroine, Libertine, a buxom young woman of common birth who’d used her natural charm and ambition to wedge herself into a place at court. It helped, of course, that men found Libertine uncommonly pretty — all the more so because her humble background suggested that she might not be particularly skillful in deflecting the sexual advances of the well-born.

Amanda had begun The Progress of Love with an outline. She reminded herself to be open to the muse, though, and made some alterations along the way: folding two characters into one, twisting the plot an extra time or two, tucking in or eliminating scenes as she was moved to. Still, she stayed close to her plan, and it was a much more efficient way to work than the waiting-for-inspiration technique that everyone had espoused in graduate school. She’d heard interviews with novelists who spend a year or two “with their characters” before a four-year period of drafting and exploring, ever hoping to enter the “dream space” or be visited by some creative power from above or without. It was ridiculous, really, and it certainly explained why so many otherwise good books were thrown to the floor by readers hoping for a story. All a writer really needed was a good plot, a plan for its execution, a facility with sentences, a work ethic, and a copyeditor’s eye. There was nothing magical about it. She even taped small signs to her computer to remind herself to stay on track: “Tell the story” and “No hocus pocus.”

Once, while working on Vapor , Eddie had been nearly paralyzed, vexed by the vagaries of point-of-view: how close, how central, how reliable, whether temporal omniscience was cheating. “It’s simple,” Amanda had told him. “You’re the writer. Tell the readers what you want them to know.” Now she wrote her story of lust, longing, libido, and ambition among the eighteenth-century French aristocracy with an utterly unselfconscious omniscience.

At three in the afternoon on a Friday in early December, she typed her first novel’s ultimate sentence. It was a line of dialogue mouthed by the comely Libertine: “All for love, and love for all.”

Amanda planned to spend the next two weeks line editing, while waiting for her queries to agents to be answered. She had already decided she wouldn’t even approach Eddie’s agent. What she needed was a human piranha, a beast to be unleashed. What she needed was a bidding war.

She decided to celebrate the completion of the first draft by having a glass of wine somewhere posh and pleasant. Before leaving, she checked her email. First she accessed the dummy address she’d set up to submit “Bad Dog Séance.” Among the spam was a message from the editor of Swanky , who said that he was holding a hundred fan emails and a dozen letters for Clarice Aames. He asked her if he could forward them to her, and he begged her for another story. Amanda grinned at the notion of being famous as two people, of having two names and two writing styles, of working two wardrobes. It could be almost like those people who have two separate families that never find out about each other. Already, she could see Clarice as a brunette: powdery skin, a bit goth, lots of bracelets, a husky voice comfortable with a sailor’s vocabulary.

Five weeks after his wife carried the draft of Conduct to his agent, Eddie Renfros received the response by telephone. After sleeping late and lingering in a steamy shower until the water ran cool, he was washing his cereal bowl when the call came.