Elise Blackwell - Grub

“Have you read it yet? My wife’s book club loved it.”

The doctor left, and Andrew soon found himself absorbed by a depiction of the sexual antics of the French court. It wasn’t the kind of book he would ordinarily open, but the prose was competent and, despite himself, he was caught up in the romantic quandaries of the main character. He closed his eyes and conjured up the buxom Libertine in a tightly laced corset, batting her eyelashes at him and whispering provocations, practically begging to be spanked for her saucy behavior.

He woke up when the doctor opened the door. “All right, Mister Yarborough. Please collect your hat and keys and return to my office.”

Andrew stood in the center of the faux apartment. He was sure he was in New York, but where and when he had no idea.

“Where am I? Where’s Felice?” he asked, looking around for his college sweetheart, a lovely girl from Lyon.

“Do you remember where you put the keys, Mister Yarborough?”

Andrew looked helplessly around the room.

Henry Baffler settled happily into the Harlem apartment given to him, for a luxurious year, by the mysterious benefactor he still hoped might be J.D. Salinger. Though the size of the place made the possessions he’d acquired with the book advance seem all the more sparse, Henry believed that the airiness and light from the apartment’s nine large windows would do wonders for his writing. He was formulating the idea of an open book. Though he had yet to discover precisely what ‘open’ meant, or how it would translate into a literary form, he was certain that he’d found his next direction.

His concern was that the hunger he had loathed for all the months it had taken him to compose Bailiff was actually a creative necessity. Now that his pantry was reasonably well stocked, he worried that he would lose his momentum, that his edges would be blunted, that he’d become soft and corn-fed, fit for little more than hacking out legal thrillers or sea adventures. It was good to be eating well, but he vowed to restrict his calories should he find his sentences growing flabby.

Such were his thoughts when his doorbell sounded for the first time since he’d moved in. Despite promises of visits, none of his acquaintances had trekked up to Harlem, not even when the Museo del Barrio hosted an exhibit of Rivera, Kahlo, and Seranno — an event that lured quite a few lower Manhattanites into higher street numbers than they tended to frequent.

Eddie’s voice penetrated the intercom, and Henry buzzed him up.

Enjoying the novelty of having both a guest and something to serve him, Henry boiled water for tea and spiraled windmill cookies onto a plate. “I’m turning bourgeois,” he said over his shoulder.

“Henry, there’s no crime in a little caffeine and nourishment. You’re not exactly pigging out like Balzac, and even his sharpest critic was known to eat, drink, smoke, and fuck.” Eddie paused for Henry to catch the reference. “But for godsake don’t start devoting whole paragraphs to describing the corners of your apartment and the slant of your blinds.”

“Curtains,” Henry said. “I don’t have blinds. I have curtains.”

“I was just making a Robbe-Grillet joke. What’s this, The New Literalism?”

Henry laughed. “Never fear. Something else. Something, well, something open.” He lifted his arms over his head, then spread them wide. “Yet contained,” he added, pulling his arms closer a fraction of an inch.

“Open, yet contained.” Eddie eyed him, then walked over to claim a cup of the tea and three biscuits. “Sounds tricky.”

Henry felt a delicious panic. “Maybe,” he called out, “maybe the solution lies in variation.” He played Ravel’s piano trio, one of his several new CDs, on the cheap, portable player he’d bought. He listened standing, eyes closed, mentally book-marking the different treatments of the seventh note. By the time Henry opened his eyes, Eddie had finished the cookies and drained his tea.

“Terribly sorry,” Henry said.

“Don’t sweat it,” his friend smiled. “It’s part of your charm, and it beats staring at the blank screen.”

“I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got a book to start.”

“I came all the way up from Murray Hill,” Eddie said. “I just got here.”

Henry felt like a heel. “I appreciate it, I really do, and you can hang out if you want, but I need to work. You know how it is.”

“I used to,” Eddie said. “I remember feeling how you feel.”

“Why don’t you stay and hang out?” Henry asked, sensing that his friend was in some sort of writerly crisis, some version of what people mean by the generic term ‘writers’ block.’ “I like the idea of working with someone else in the room. That’s a neat idea actually: a series of stories all written with other people around. Could be very interesting to see the subtle effects of that, see if the presence of different sorts of people would influence tone and style.”

“You’re starting to sound like a poet,” Eddie said, adding quickly, “which I mean as a compliment, not how Jack means it.”

“What’s your opinion of the word ‘splay’?” Henry clamped a clean sheet of paper onto his typewriter and turned the canister, comforted by its familiar clicks. “Is that a word we can still use?”

It didn’t take long for Jackson Miller to become accustomed not merely to success but to having his opinion solicited. While he had not enjoyed the travel itself, he had relished the long lines of people wanting his signature on Oink , the laughter his puns elicited, the attractive women who lingered at the end of the evening. Now that he was back home, it was a rare day when he wasn’t contacted by a journalist or editor or nonprofit group asking for his thoughts on the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, the quality of Adam Richards’ radio book reviews, or, for that matter, the best sushi in New York or the political landscape in Afghanistan. National Public Radio interviewed him about his adventure submitting the Chekhov story, and, as he’d promised Amanda, he named the editors who’d not only failed to recognize but had deigned to criticize one of the finest short stories ever crafted.

After his triumphant book tour and swift rise up The Times ’ list of bestsellers, he increasingly associated with a circle of other writers — men in their thirties, all possessed of some version of Jackson’s own name: Jack, Jake, Johnson, John, and Jonathan. These Jonathans often dined at Grub, in combinations of two or three, or occasionally the whole council. Jackson was gratified to observe that they were noticed, watched, eavesdropped upon.

Jackson had become who he’d planned to become on his ninth birthday — a vow he had renewed looking over the North Carolina mountains — and he never wanted to give it up. And so, with Amanda’s encouragement, which was often flirtatious but sometimes quite strict, Jackson began in earnest to write about Meindert Hobbema’s abandoned life of art. In mind of the small human forms the artist tucked into his landscapes, Jackson tentatively titled the new book Hide and Seek .

“Don’t read too much, just the basics,” Amanda had advised. “The important thing is to stack up some pages.”

He wondered if Amanda was making him her project because she’d given up on Eddie ever being the great man she could be the great woman behind. He knew better than to vocalize this thought, and the truth was that he was glad for the extra guidance and motivation. Amanda wouldn’t let him fail; he believed that.