Elise Blackwell - Grub

She sat on the chair nearest him and thanked him as he handed her the wine. The tannins stung her tongue slightly, and the familiar pepper-and-cherry taste spread across her palate. “Eddie, as soon as Christmas has passed — the day after, even — let’s go away somewhere warm, somewhere where we can gaze at water and dig our feet in the sand and you can start a book you can really be proud of.”

“Amanda, if only I thought I could write such a book, I’d brave the creditors and fly south with you.”

“But you could, Eddie, with a change of scenery. This just can’t be your fate, after such a bright start. I won’t believe it. You’ve got to make one more real effort. If you fail in literature — I mean give up on it — then what?”

“Amanda, do you love me? Say that you love me.”

“Of course I do. That’s why I’m proposing that we go away somewhere warm, somewhere you can work. I hate being poor, Eddie. I detest it. I promised myself that when I was an adult I would never be poor again. A person shouldn’t have to be poor as a child and an adult.”

“Grown-up poverty for rich kids?”

“Absolutely, let them take a turn. But it’s not just that. It’s the idea of you becoming an ordinary man.”

“Even if I never write another line, that won’t undo what I’ve done. I know I haven’t been prolific, but you can’t condemn my entire self.”

“When I suggested the trip, I was being generous. I wanted to give you another chance to write a truly great book. I wanted to give us another chance.”

“You say that as though the one is dependent on the other.” Eddie roused himself from his slouch, knelt before her, and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’ve been so cool to me lately.”

“I’ve been distracted, and busy. I have writing of my own now.”

“Or course you do, and that makes me happy.”

“Does it?” She urged a smile, stroked her husband’s hair. “I believe that we’re both going to be famous, at least a kind of famous. People will know our names if not our faces.”

Eddie kissed her hair, her eyes, her mouth. As she imagined him as a three-and then four-book author, getting reviewed, giving readings, being photographed, she found that, for the first time in awhile, she desired her husband.

The mood was not dispelled by early morning, if only because she rose before he did. When she slid from bed, he slept on his side, his profile turned against the pillow. His breath was smooth, and he seemed composed in a way he rarely did when awake.

As was the case nearly every morning of late, Amanda found an email sent from the West Coast late the night before. It was from the editor of Swanky , begging Clarice Aames for anything. “Spit in a bag and we’ll use it,” he wrote.

When she searched the web for Clarice Aames, she found not only the link to the Swanky table of contents, but two websites with pages devoted to the mysterious author of “Bad Dog Séance.” She typed out a reply to the editor, “I’ll give you something better than spit. Un beso, Clarice.” For the next three hours, while Eddie slept away the morning, Amanda wrote Clarice Aames’ second story: “Sex Kitten Leaps from the Bleeding Edge.”

When she was done, she checked her own messages — she was now using her maiden name, Amanda Yule, for correspondence — and saw that two of the agents she had queried wanted to read the entire manuscript of The Progress of Love . What she felt as her smile spread was not so much happiness as well being, the sense that things were right in the world, that she was at last living the life marked out for her.

There had been a time in his life when Andrew Yarborough considered himself an affluent man. That was before the literary world had gone to pot and before he had fathomed what the life he had grown accustomed to living would actually cost over time. Although at long last his wife was making some money with her goddamn healing workshops and assorted fru fra, she gave away more than she made to organizations buying cosmetics for war refugees and saving obscure species of invariably cute animals.

“Why don’t you save a snake?” he’d asked her once, to which she’d replied, “Snakes are very potent symbols in our unconscious life, and I would be proud to help any species in danger. Certainly no snake is more venomous than you’ve become.”

And, no great surprise, she spent even more than she gave away: a thousand dollars on the contraption that allowed her to bend upside down for hours on end — against gravity, she said — and who knew how much on her ridiculous clothing and the horrible things she hung on the walls of what was supposed to be his home.

They’d helped Margot with school some. Janelle had argued that they should give her a full ride, but Andrew had countered that it had been good for him to make it on his own and that he hoped his daughter could feel at least some of that pride. It was true — he’d admitted as much — that college cost a lot more now than in his day, but that was the reality of her times. His retirement fund held some money, but the stock market had seen to it that it wasn’t as much as he had expected. There was the house, of course, which had cost five figures and was now worth close to seven. But they had to live somewhere, and he was too old to be thinking of moving. Plus, it was the only insurance he had against the nursing home should something happen to dear Margot. She’d take care of him, he knew, but he didn’t trust her mother farther than he could smell her sandalwood perfume.

And so, as much as Andrew would have liked to launch a new literary publication, a journal that would be in every way superior to what Chuck Fadge had turned The Monthly into, it hadn’t seemed possible before the sale of Margot’s novel. Andrew was man enough to admit that it was a little humiliating that his daughter’s modest advance was equal to his own, but that was the way of the publishing world — always insulting older talent in the pursuit of youth.

Eyeing Margot’s advance, Andrew told himself he was not merely being selfish. No, Margot was young enough to take the financial risk that he could no longer afford, yet old enough that she should invest in her career rather than frittering away her money. It was in her best interest to use her bit of good fortune to start something worthy, something she could be proud of and eventually take over when he and Quarmbey retired.

Margot had always been a wonderful daughter — almost all a father could hope for despite the unfortunate DNA inherited from her mother — and he promised himself to be more obvious in his displays of paternal affection. And so, for several weeks after Margot finished proofing his galleys, he made a point of joining her at breakfast and of inquiring about her welfare and her work over dinner. He called her into his study several times a week to tell her a joke someone had sent him or to solicit her opinion on some book or other. Once, he asked her what she intended to do with her advance. She shrugged and said that she had put the money in the bank. She was pleased to know where it was, she said, and she’d be glad to have it when she was ready to take her next big step in life. Andrew took this to mean that she was at least agreeable to his proposition, though he worried when brochures for MFA programs began to arrive in the mail.

Taking advantage of the holidays as an excuse for entertaining, he invited Quarmbey over for some good cheer. “We must convince Margot that the time is ripe,” he told his old friend over the phone. Next he called a younger man, Frank Hinks, who had published a novel that had met with mixed reviews but of which Andrew approved. Hinks was just the kind of writer Andrew hoped to publish in his new journal — and the sort despised by Chuck Fadge because of his solid, old-fashioned craftsmanship. Andrew believed that Hinks’s presence would help Margot see the value of the undertaking. He also thought he’d be pelting two birds with a single stone if the young man happened to be good-looking enough to bump the horrid Jackson Miller from her affections.