Elise Blackwell - Grub

“Oh, Eddie, let’s skip this and talk about anything else you wish.”

“Your way of talking isn’t much to my taste just now. It comes with a price tag, you know.”

“Price tag? What do you mean?” Jackson watched his once-easygoing friend.

Eddie thrust his hands deep into his pockets and leaned forward at the waist, as though observing something on the floor. He straightened and said, in a thick voice, “Your way of talking glorifies success at the expense of quality — as though success is the only goal. If you’d talked this way in front of just me, we could have just argued and it wouldn’t have mattered. But you know as well as I do that there’s usually someone else in earshot. Frankly, I’m guessing she’s your real audience, so you’ll be glad to hear that your words have had their effect. Where Amanda once saw talent, now she sees only failure.”

Jackson summoned his anger for a protest, but Eddie looked so wretched that he could muster little emotion other than pity. “That’s an astonishing thing to say, Eddie. I have no idea what’s going on with you and Amanda, but I assure you that it’s more about you than me.”

“Your words, your words have turned Amanda against me. I shouldn’t have implied that that’s what you intended. Maybe it’s just my bad luck.” Eddie looked up and finally made eye contact. “She can hardly stand to look at me, Jack, and we almost never have sex anymore.”

“I always figured you two were after each other like rabbits.” Jackson smiled, hoping to turn the conversation. Seeing that his attempt at levity failed, he said, “Look, Eddie, you shouldn’t tell me about that. But do you remember what I told you when you got engaged? That your success would make her happy?”

“So you’ve always guessed that Amanda wasn’t a for-better-or-worse kind of girl. You think she married me just because my book was being published?”

“I’m not going to answer that. Look, I’m your friend, but if we can’t talk like friends, we’d better not talk about this sort of thing at all.” Jackson paused. “I will say this: what you’re thinking isn’t true. My words don’t have that kind of influence on her. If you two are really having serious trouble, maybe you should see a counselor or something.”

Both men concentrated more on drinking than talking for the next half hour. Jackson mentally replayed his meeting with Amanda at the Frick, their talk about Hobbema, the drink after, imagining how Eddie would view that encounter. Jackson knew that he sometimes said things to Amanda when they were alone in a room that he wouldn’t say in Eddie’s earshot, things wrong in tone more than in the words themselves. It stemmed from his vanity, from his own form of weakness. Yet he was convinced that any troubles in the Renfros marriage had little to do with him and likely much to do with Eddie himself. If a marriage can’t withstand a little harmless outside flirting, it isn’t much of a union in the first place.

Finally Jackson said, “If you love her, talk to her. Work it out.”

“Work it out,” Eddie repeated dully.

It took only one more glass of wine to put Eddie to sleep in his chair, granting Jackson his chance to escape.

Late on New Years Eve, Henry Baffler was a single paragraph away from completing Bailiff . He toyed with the idea of waiting until morning to finish. Or perhaps he should take the entire day to get the final few sentences just right. Ultimately, he told himself that would be silly — he’d planned the paragraph for weeks now — and he was quite fond of the idea of finishing the novel in the same year he had started it.

And so he composed the last paragraph, noticing that the ink was growing pale, that he needed a new ribbon. He typed The End . He took pleasure in the fact that the novel concluded essentially where it began: his bailiff, unchanged despite his brief love affair, still fed pigeons on his lunch hour while contemplating the ways in which the stout birds represented the human types that made their way through petty-claims court.

Life had proved art and theory right. Henry’s real-world bailiff had illustrated a key tenet of New Realism, which debunked the popular attitude that novels were stories of character change. Henry believed that novels should reflect human character. And people rarely change; they only become more themselves. In his final paragraph, his bailiff was precisely the same as he was in the opening sentence — only more so.

Henry hit return and rolled the final page off the cannister. He placed it face down on the stack of its predecessors, lifted the whole manuscript, and carefully tapped its four sides against the tabletop. He made a mental note to be on the lookout for a large rubber band or a clean, manuscript-sized box.

He was hungry as well as anxious to celebrate his accomplishment and toast New Realism. Though he knew his refrigerator was empty, he opened the door anyway and pondered the bare shelves. He didn’t have to examine his money either — he knew exactly how much he had — but he counted and tabulated the same figure: two dollars and sixty-eight cents. There was an all-night market about nine blocks up that sold single bottles of beer, tax included, for a dollar and sixty-nine cents. Six blocks in the other direction, toward Chelsea, he could buy a bag of day-old rolls for a dollar flat. He threw off the sofa cushions and, as if fate rewarded art, found a single shiny penny. He shouldered his way into the corduroy jacket that had been too warm in the fall but was now only thick enough keep him from freezing, setting out quickly, as the store that sold the rolls would soon close. One floor down, he had to step around his only English-speaking neighbor, Martin Briggs, who sat on the landing next to a half-gone bottle of gin, wearing a filthy tuxedo jacket and jeans and using one cigarette to light the next.

“I wish I were dead,” the man said. “I mean, you don’t dump someone on New Year’s Eve. It’s just not done. It’s just not right.”

Henry navigated around him, dropping two steps at a time to get by on the narrow staircase. Despite his growling stomach and the cold snapping through his thin jacket, Henry’s stride was springy as he made his way through clots of Dominican revelers and then past the trendy couples on Tenth Avenue. A new year was moving in, his book was done, and he was about to drink the first beer he had allowed himself in weeks.

The owner of the bodega was just lowering the window armor, but the old man opened the door to Henry and sold him the dollar bag of torta rolls. Half an hour later, Henry was on his way home with a bottle of beer and his bread, thinking about how he might submit his manuscript. He could use the library computer to query agents and editors by email and then hand-deliver the manuscript to the first person who seemed interested. But he’d eventually need to make a copy or two. He shouldn’t have bought the beer, but he told himself that since he had, he shouldn’t let regret spoil the taste.

Two blocks away from his apartment, the sidewalks grew heavier with people. He heard sirens close by. At the smell of smoke, he broke into a run. “Let me get through!” he shouted, looking for gaps in the crowd and shooting narrowly through.

Smoke billowed from several windows on the upper floors of his building. Henry sliced his skinny body between two policemen and raced up the steps of the burning tenement.

“Hey you! Stop there!” called one of the cops, but he made no move to chase or restrain him.

“I live here! I’ve got to get something!” Henry called behind him, dropping bread and beer as he ascended the exterior steps three at a time. At the entrance, he had to push by Martin Briggs, who was exiting the building gripping the pack of cigarettes that had likely set the fire. Inside the building, the smoke swarmed the stairwell, but Henry pushed up, holding his jacket sleeve over his mouth and nose and closing his eyes for as long as possible. He was desperate with the dread of losing Bailiff —his great work and reason for waking each morning. On the verge of unconsciousness, he pushed his key into his lock and tumbled forward into the fresher air of his apartment. His manuscript lay on the table, where he had left it. Despite the fire raging above and below his flat, the realist felt relief, even joy, as he rested his hand on the undamaged stack of pages. He removed his jacket and used it to wrap the manuscript, bundling it to his chest like a baby.