Elise Blackwell - Grub

Now that he had his manuscript in hand, Henry’s courage receded. Watching the flames now engulfing the door to his apartment, he contemplated death by fire — the ultimate melodrama — with a nauseous mind. He had no choice but to climb through his little window and onto the ledge. There should be a fire escape, he thought, and wondered why he had never noticed its absence until now. He looked down the five stories to the street. A crowd looked up, cheering in a mix of Spanish and English.

Two fire engines had arrived, and a man in yellow slickers called to him on a megaphone. “You need to jump. Just push off and point your feet toward the trampoline.”

Henry looked down at the inflatable pad, grasping his novel to his chest. Already pinned to the wall by vertigo, he was sickened further by the nightmarish fantasy of the hundreds of pages of his pure example of New Realism fluttering through the neighborhood, white rectangles scattered the length and breadth of Hell’s Kitchen to be stepped on, snowed on, picked up for scrap. His ideas could be pilfered or mocked. Lines could be read out of context and misunderstood.

The front of his body was cold, but his back was hot from the heat mounting in the building. Spotlights scanned his face in bright flashes as the crowd chanted for him to escape. Holding the manuscript gently against one forearm, he worked to better secure it with the jacket, the shouts of “Jump, jump, jump!” and “Saltese, saltese, saltese !” pounding in the canals and drums of his ears. He grasped Bailiff tightly and leaped, willing his legs toward the trampoline. At the instant he jumped, he heard a firefighter call out: “I think he’s got a baby!”

He opened his eyes before he stopped bouncing up and back into the embrace of the plastic, taking in the swarm of faces and cameras and flaring light as images from an Ezra Pound poem.

“The brave man saved a cat!” a child called.

A woman firefighter with a beautiful face leaned over him and lifted her hand toward his bundle. “Is it all right? Is it a baby? A pet? It was a crazy thing for you to do, but it was courageous to run in.”

A television crew filming the scene still pointed its camera at Henry. He grinned at them and unwrapped Bailiff . “I saved my manuscript,” he said. “It’s a novel of New Realism.”

The look on the beautiful firefighter’s face sharpened, and she crinkled her nose in what even Henry could not mistake for anything but disgust. “You risked your life for an unpublished novel?”

“I guess I do it every day,” he muttered, wondering if something was wrong with him and, if so, whether a doctor could treat it.

With the exception of the horrible night her father got drunk with Quarmbey and Frank Hinks, Margot had found his demeanor greatly improved since they’d turned in his book. Everyone in the house had been relieved when his editor accepted the manuscript. No doubt her father’s pride was hurt because it had taken the woman two months to get around to reading it and because she’d told him that the modest advance initially mentioned had been further reduced after in-house discussions. The editor had promised her father, though, that they “would make money.”

Margot was unsure whether it was a sign of softening or weakening that her father had agreed to this. He even said that it was better this way, better to have some of the money up front and the bulk of it later. She didn’t doubt that the speedy publication schedule was keeping him in better humor than he might have been in otherwise, and she’d smiled when he told her that the book needed only the lightest of copyedits, that it was virtually without error. In her work on the galleys, Margot found only three small mistakes, and one of those had been introduced by the editor.

Since that awful night with Quarmbey and Hinks, her father had been reasonably nice around the house, even to her mother, and one Sunday after reading the ongoing dispute over Quarmbey’s review and Fadge’s response in the letters page of The Times , he apologized, in his way, for his comments about Margot’s writing.

“Of course I know you wouldn’t really write a novel about syphilis sufferers in Birmingham,” he said.

“Actually, Dad, it’s not such a bad idea.”

Such extreme alarm overtook his face that Margot immediately admitted that she was kidding. “No, actually, I’ve started a novel set on the coast of Maine. There are only three characters: an elderly man, a boy, and a seagull.” She watched her father carefully to see if he was remorseful enough over his cruel remarks to let this opportunity for sarcasm pass.

“Margot, there’s something I haven’t wanted to mention but which you will eventually need to know.” He folded his paper and removed his reading glasses.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I’m beginning to forget things.”

“You’ve always been forgetful.”

“No, Margot, I haven’t.”

“Well, eventually one’s brain is so full of facts that a few of them have to go.” Margot lifted the corners of her mouth, tried to lighten her words. “But you should go see a doctor, just to reassure yourself.”

“Do you think I could have saved more money over the years? I mean, in one way I might have been able to, but it’s hard when you’re self-employed. I’ve had to buy our health insurance, save for my retirement, pay for your college.”

Margot flinched at his suggestion that he had paid for her education. She’d won and kept a full academic scholarship in her undergraduate years and had had a research assistantship while getting her Master’s. Throughout, she’d paid most of her living expenses — all but a few hundred dollars here and there when her father remembered — by working, likely at the expense of her learning. Because of this, there were holes in her education — books she should have read but had not.

“We haven’t much but this house,” her father continued his lament, “and it would kill your mother to leave it.”

“Dad, I honestly don’t think it would. She often talks about moving into a place that requires less work. She says she’s planted enough flowers and cooked enough meals for the rest of her life. She’d like to move to the southwest, the harmonic convergence place or somewhere like that.”

“I assure you that that would kill me. Besides, your mother just says that. Despite all her crystals and what-not crap, she couldn’t stand to live more than an hour from New York. Just tell her she’ll wrinkle up in the dry desert air, and I guarantee she’ll never mention New Mexico or Arizona again. Anyway, my point is that I don’t know what will happen to us if I’m no longer able to make a living with my pen. And that’s why I want you to think long and hard about the journal we discussed.”

“Oh, Dad, it’s just that there are so many of them.” Margot heard new maturity in her voice — she was talking not as adolescent to parent but as adult to adult, writer to writer. Fatigue tinged her even tone.

“Not one of them worth its salt, though, not one of them with the right editorial vision.”

Margot stood behind her father, wrapped her arms around his thickening neck, and kissed his cheek, smelling his most recent cigar and the one before that. “I promise I’ll think about it.” Again her voice sounded older to her, older and a little tired.

“That’s all I ask, and I appreciate it. I know that I’ve made you something of a martyr, but I want you to know that much of my literary life has been drudgery, scribbling words to make ends meet. It’s not something I can keep doing, and it’s not a life I want for you. A writer should only have to write when he feels like it, when he actually has something to say. And I’m ready to really edit. If it goes well, we can add a small press, so we can publish our friends.”