Elise Blackwell - Grub

“I believe you’ve already asked me that. I hope you aren’t slipping? Anyway, those aren’t the exact words I would use first. She’s soft-spoken and sincere. She appreciates a good sense of humor, but she’s more sweet than witty.”

“So you’re giving up your old social ambitions for love. I admire that.”

“Just like you did.” Jackson held her gaze steadily in his own.

Amanda held still and was careful to give nothing away. She waited for Jackson to speak first.

“Just like you,” he continued, “I am at last claiming the success that is mine, and I want to share it with someone who can appreciate what it means.”

Amanda ran a section of her hair repeatedly through her thumbs and forefingers, bicycling her hands as she smoothed the width of hair. She dropped her hands when she realized what she was doing. “Sorry, old habit.”

“I remember it from workshop, but I never knew if it was a calculation or a compulsion.”

“Sometimes one becomes the other, doesn’t it?” She smiled, feeling back in control as her cup was refilled by a dyed-blonde poured into black stretch pants and a sweatshirt.

“You’ll like this,” Jackson said when the waitress had moved on. “I submitted one of Chekhov’s finest stories to twenty literary journals under the name Anthony Chernesky. It’s for a piece for The Monthly .”

“You’re a very bad boy.”

“I’ve only got a few responses back so far, but I can already tell it’ll be a hoot. The City and the other glossy I submitted to sent immediate form rejections. The Adirondack Gazette , which must have a circulation smaller than its contributors list, sent a handwritten rejection saying that the editors did see some merit in the story but were concerned that the characterization was a bit thin and the characters’ motivations didn’t seem rooted in their back stories.”

“And no one has recognized the story?”

“Not yet. Not one. I’m dying for some editor to say that it’s too Chekhovian.”

“Will you name names in your piece?”

“Of course.” Jackson pulled a small spiral notebook from his bag.

“Don’t tell me you’ve become a note taker or — worse — a journal person.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I thought we might compare cities.”

As they finished their coffee, they mapped out the crisscrossing flights of their author tours.

“We’re bad,” Jackson said, drumming rhythm and blues on the formica with both hands. “We’re nationwide.”

“I wonder why you’re being sent to Cleveland but not Kansas City,” Amanda said as a long-haired girl in tight jeans passed their table. Amanda watched to see if Jackson’s eyes would follow her.

Still looking directly at Amanda, he said, “Who knows. But most of our cities are the same. You’re going to look great in L.A.”

“Next time we meet,” Amanda said, “I pick the restaurant.”

During the year between the acceptance and publication of Sea Miss , Eddie Renfros had savored the process as if each event were a course in a long, delicious meal. Early on, there were days on which he would forget he was on the verge of authorship. Then he’d remember, smile mid-street and think author, authority, authorship, my ship has come in. Calls from his adoring editor were like fine chocolate in his mouth. The week the check came, he’d drunk the most expensive wine of his life: a 1982 Croizet-Bages Pauillac he may have been too young to appreciate.

The author-photo session had taken place in the studio of a Tribeca photographer, whom his publisher had paid to shoot seven rolls of color and black-and-white film. “We want you to look accessible yet mysterious,” his editor had cooed. “Friendly but foxy.” He still remembered the photographer’s dog: a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Chester.

After the emotional ransacking of submitting Vapor serially and without success, Eddie looked forward to having the new book in production regardless of his ambivalence about the novel’s worth. He also saw the impending publication as a chance to renew his marriage and his friendship with Jackson: three graduate school friends all with books coming out around the same time. Even if he didn’t quite approve of the kinds of books Amanda and Jackson had chosen to write, they were capable writers. And if their advances dwarfed his own, he could take comfort from the thought that the critics were more likely to give him the nod. And if he didn’t always like the way that Amanda peered at Jack sideways, he could tell himself that a little outside flirtation only brought energy to a monogamous relationship.

And yet, despite his honest efforts, the months ahead did not hold the pleasures that the year of Sea Miss ’s production had. You’re only as good as your next book —a phrase whose origin he couldn’t place — played over and over like some one-track eight-track in his head. There was no Tribeca shoot this time, either; the editor argued for “brand consistency” and bought extended rights to his old author photo. Eddie worried that people would think he hadn’t updated it because he was trying to look younger than he was.

Still, other steps in the process did offer small pleasures. The assistant art director came up with a terrific cover on which the body of a faceless woman and the body of her viola mirrored each other’s shapes in ways that suggested the story’s sensuality. The presence of a small shell in the corner hinted at the themes of sound and hearing, and of the pivotal conflict over the daughter’s deafness, in a manner that would be obvious only after the book was read. The flap copy was pretty good, given that it was flap copy. It made the book sound interesting to a general readership without pandering, and the editor had agreed to Eddie’s few small changes, agreed to change the word ‘promiscuous’ to ‘adventurous’ in describing the slutty Scandinavian violinist and the word ‘tragic’ to ‘disturbing’ in mentioning the lover’s demise by air accident.

Eddie had heard the horror stories of books orphaned by editors’ mid-life-crisis trips to the Amazonian rainforest. He’d heard about psychotic jacket designers and illiterate copyeditors, and so he was pleased with the production of his book — so long as he didn’t think about the advertising or marketing plans. Perhaps it was this repressed concern that made him sulk. Because, despite his real attempts, he just couldn’t be as wildly happy as Amanda and Jack appeared to be.

“It’s like sex with a condom,” he told Jack one day as they walked through the park on their way back from a movie Amanda had had no interest in seeing. “It’s better than nothing, but it doesn’t feel the same.”

“It’s just that you’re no virgin,” Jack overextended the metaphor. “You know what it’s like to wake up with the girl morning after morning, watch her turn to soap operas and donuts and trade in those tight jeans for sweat pants.”

“Charming,” Eddie said. “I don’t know if I’d be madder if I thought you were talking about my novel or my wife.”

“Neither of course. I hold Amanda and Sea Miss in the highest regard. I’m just trying to show you how absurd you’re being. I doubt either of us will ever see Amanda don sweat pants — not unless the fashion mavens dictate it a must and then we know she’ll look fantastic in them.”

“You can stop right there.” Eddie stopped walking as he said it, light snowflakes cooling tiny circles of his nose and cheeks. Those that touched the ground melted with the contact. Eddie didn’t think the snow would stick.