Elise Blackwell - Grub

“What are you doing?” Jackson asked when he returned.

Henry closed the browser.

“Never mind,” Jackson said. “I just got off the phone with my agent and asked her if she’d heard about the writer who saved his book from the fire on New Year’s Eve. She actually saw your jump on late-night news.”

Henry shrugged.

“She loves the story.”

“But she hasn’t read it,” Henry said.

“Not the book, the story. She loves the story. Fantastic publicity, she said. Anyway, she wants to read your manuscript. Right away — an exclusive. We can take it over so she can read it while you’re waiting on the other queries, which you are going to let Amanda write for you. No ignobly decent crap, and we’re certainly not going to call extra attention to the title.”

Henry smiled at the idea of an exclusive; he wouldn’t need to borrow the money to copy the manuscript.

Jackson walked him through the cold, sunny day to a large office building in midtown, joking that he should take an ad out, à la Whelpdale, as “fiction security” or “the novel guard”. Jackson laughed at his own tag line: “Call him when it’s your only copy.”

After Jackson delivered his name to the security desk, they were issued clip-on badges and allowed to cross the shiny-floored lobby and board the elevator for the eleventh floor.

Though the building was grand, the office had been subdivided with cheap screens to accommodate all four agents who formed the agency. Jackson introduced Henry to Suzanne Reznick, a middle-aged woman dressed in the print skirt and tinkling silver-and-bead earrings of a younger woman. She had interesting eyes, somewhere between green and hazel. Henry tried to invent a word for the color.

“Call me Suze,” she said, shaking his hand. She wrote down the Renfros’ telephone number and Henry’s email address and told him she’d be in touch.

She hugged Jackson, kissed him on both cheeks, and told him to phone the next day. “We have so much to talk about. First serial rights, for starters, and our foreign rights person is working on the Asian markets now.”

“Can you find your way back to Casa Renfros?” Jackson asked when they were back outside.

Henry grinned. “You know me, man on the street.”

That night, Jackson returned with pizzas and bottles of Chianti. His high spirits infected everyone but Eddie.

“I just can’t believe,” Eddie said to Henry, “that you have had to struggle so hard and in such squalor only to lose everything.”

Amanda glared at her husband. “But of course, to every man of mettle comes an opportunity, and Henry’s has arrived. I have a superstitious faith in Bailiff . Henry, I only hope you won’t forget us when you’re famous.”

“I’ll never forget my friends,” Henry said, enjoying the pleasant sting of young wine on his tongue.

Jackson set down his third piece of pizza crust, refilled his glass, and crossed his legs. “So then, Amanda, you’ve read about the days and joys of our bailiff?”

Amanda smoothed her hair and held her smile. “I haven’t yet had the pleasure. I’m sure that when I do my faith will no longer be superstitious.”

“Well, Henry,” said Eddie, “I hope that your success will be long lasting. That’s what I wish for you, that your book will stay on the shelves. To have had even a small reputation and to have outlived it, that’s the worst. It’s like anticipating your own death.”

“Slow down on the grape juice.” Amanda spoke sharply to her husband.

“Thinking about my recent adventure,” Henry said, “I find it funny as hell to picture you guys at the morgue identifying my charred body. Imagine the news stories then: ‘Deluded and poverty-stricken writer overestimates the value of his unpublished novel’ and so on.”

“That’s horrible,” Amanda said, but she laughed.

“You’d have even ranked a cartoon in The City and been memorialized on the ulcer website,” said Jackson.

“What’s ulcer?” Henry asked.

“A bunch of bad writers who’ve chosen to blame the literary establishment rather than their own shoddy prose for the fact that they’re unpublished. Their name stands for the Underground Literary Coalition for the Elimination of Revision or Reification or some such.”

“It is true, you know,” Eddie meted out his words, “that many very fine books go unpublished. It’s not always a function of shoddy prose. It’s the market. The chain stores control everything now.”

“I hope it isn’t Realism that they want to eliminate,” said Henry, “unless they mean Realism in the old sense of the word.”

“Anyway,” Jackson continued, “these ulcer guys — and it is mostly guys, surprise, surprise — did put me on to a terrific short story by someone I’ve never heard of. Clarice something.”

“Clarice Aames,” Henry said. “Is there a new story?”

“You like her, too?” Amanda removed the empty pizza boxes to the kitchen.

It struck Henry that her smile carried some sort of riddle. He’d enjoyed the domestic calm her ordering of the apartment had yielded, and it had been long enough since his last girlfriend that her presence aroused him. But she most definitely wasn’t his type. In her enigmatic smile, though, she seemed more interesting than the glossy what-you-see-is-what-you-get female he’d always taken her to be. She still wasn’t his romantic type, but he suspected there was something more under the surface. He suspected that she might be worth writing about.

Amanda Renfros enjoyed having Henry Baffler in their home for a few weeks, in part because she was touched by his blind devotion to her alter ego. It was also a relief — she could admit this to herself, though of course she would never say it aloud — to have a writer in the house who was an even greater failure than Eddie. She had worried, though, that they might be stuck with Henry forever, but as it turned out, his little news splash did indeed bring salvation. Not only had Jackson’s agent taken on and quickly sold his novel for a modest advance, but someone had anonymously donated a year’s rent on a decent apartment on Lennox near 110t?.

“Maybe your anonymous donor is some reclusive genius,” Amanda suggested, “moved by memories of his own lean early days.”

Henry rubbed his hands together and asked if they thought it could be Salinger.

Eddie, dishrag that he’d become, lectured Henry on why that was unlikely and why it was much more likely that his benefactor was a hack thriller or horror writer who describes his characters in terms of television and movie personalities.

But Amanda saw no harm in letting Henry believe that the reclusive author of “For Esme, with Love and Squalor” was taking a personal interest in saving him from squalor and furthering his literary career. “Sure,” she’d told him. “It very well could be Salinger. He’s using you to try out the New Harlem. I’d almost be surprised if it wasn’t the kind of thing he’d do.”

The day after Henry moved out, Eddie’s agent called. Even across the room, Amanda could hear her voice, nearly breathless, streaming from the receiver. She’d called to tell Eddie that the editor-in-chief of a large house loved his book and saw it as the perfect novel for her assistant, newly promoted to editor, to cut his teeth on. “They may ask you about the autobiographical angle.”

“But my narrator’s a woman and a musician. She has a deaf child. Her lover died in a plane crash.”

The agent’s voice rasped through their living room. “A client of mine wrote a novel about a battered wife. The publisher assumed it was autobiographical. When she refused to go on a talk show and talk about her nonexistent experiences as a battered wife, they killed her marketing.”