Elise Blackwell - Grub

Feeling devastated for the poor fellow who had written the book, Margot vowed to buy a copy, read it, and write a fan letter to Henry Baffler.

That night she dreamed she was naked in a room, surrounded by crumpled sheets of paper: all viciously negative reviews of Pontchartrain . “It’s not my title!” she tried to scream, choked by newsprint. “They made me call it that!”

But the reviewers were much kinder to Margot than they had been to the unfortunate Henry Baffler. A half-page review in The Times , no less, argued that her novel was a brilliant pastiche of the eighteenth-century American naturalist novel and applauded Margot’s satirical use of the present tense as the cleverest of anachronisms.

Upon her initial read of the review, Margot smiled, nervous but pleased. Lane and Lana both called her, effusive with their congratulations. Yet after successive readings of the review — three and then four — Margot was seized by self-doubt, by the fear of being uncovered as a poser, an imposter. Margot knew that her book was not so much a pastiche as written in the tradition of — even in imitation of — the old-fashioned novels she loved. She had chosen the present tense not as an act of subversive genius but simply because it made the book, with its cumbersome back story, easier to write. It had allowed her to write the lengthy flashbacks in simple past tense, thereby avoiding all those messy participles.

Margot’s lack of confidence in her own good fortune was soon validated. One Friday, exactly a week before her regional book tour was to commence, Lane phoned.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” her editor said. “But one of the large chain stores — I won’t say which one — says it over-ordered first fiction for the spring. They’re cutting quite a few books, and unfortunately yours is one of them.”

“Why mine?”

“Capricious, arbitrary decision on their part. Maybe it’s the southern setting, or maybe some buyer doesn’t like the name Margot.”

“Is it an unpopular name?” Margot asked, trying to understand what the conversation meant.

“It’s a lovely name. I’m just saying that you can’t take it personally.” Lane paused, then went on when Margot didn’t say anything. “I won’t pretend it’s not bad news. At least one copy of your book was slated to go to every one of their stores, and they’d ordered half a dozen copies for a good number of stores in the south and some larger cities.”

“How many are they taking now? Will it still be in most stores?”

“Darling, you don’t understand. They cut your title.”

“Cut?”

“They aren’t ordering any.”

“But the review in The Times was so good.”

“All of your reviews have glowed, and that’s wonderful. It’s not only wonderful, it’s deserved. If only reviews translated into sales, you’d be a wealthy young woman, but that’s just not the case any longer.”

“People don’t want to read good books?”

Margot realized how naïve she sounded, but she couldn’t believe that her good reviews — however much she doubted their wisdom — didn’t mean anything.

“Don’t worry; all is not lost. We’re still sending you to Vermont next week, and Renate booked you into the fiction series at the CIA Bar. You’ll be reading before someone named Clarice Aames. She doesn’t have a book out yet, but she’s gathered quite a following. The turnout should be great.”

Margot had been to a reading at the CIA once, and her stomach shifted at the idea of reading to a large, inebriated crowd.

“I believe in your book. The indies are going to hand-sell, and word will get out.”

After she put the phone down, Margot continued what she’d been doing: heating tomato soup and melting butter in a skillet to grill a cheese sandwich. But when she sat down with the meal that had constituted her winter comfort food since childhood, her appetite was gone. She chided herself for being disappointed by expectations she had never held. It’s not as though she’d ever thought she was writing a bestseller; she was happy just to be publishing a book and garnering a few readers and reviews. It was still a dream come true. Pushing away the image of books stacked high in large, well-lit bookstores, she dipped a corner of sandwich into the scarlet soup.

Amanda Yule’s novel parked on every bestseller list in the country. It was hailed as a literary crossover book — a book club favorite praised by critics for the magic realist elements that so captured the mood of the paintings on which it was based. At the same time, Amanda’s alternative career as Clarice Aames soared, with more stories published and more websites devoted to her work appearing online.

Amanda kept a color-coded calendar, using blue to mark her publicity appearances for The Progress of Love and red for Clarice Aames’s readings. Her even script crowded the calendar, blurring into purple. When Amanda was scheduled for a television appearance in Los Angeles, Clarice gave a surprise reading at an Orange County community college. When Amanda signed books at A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, Clarice read at an art bar in Oakland. When Amanda appeared in Denver or Minneapolis, Clarice showed up in Boulder or St. Paul. They drew different constituencies, and no one picked up on the pattern. Yet Amanda was careful to keep her two authorial identities distinct, and Clarice always appeared in disguise — a face powdered white, too much black eyeliner, and a long black wig with bangs covering her forehead. Amanda also limited Clarice’s appearances in New York, though she had finally succumbed to pressure and vanity, agreeing to appear at the CIA Bar.

Her biggest problem in maintaining her double identity was her husband, who asked detailed questions about her itineraries and hotel room changes. In the spring, when she changed her drink of choice from red wine to white and from Irish whiskey with a splash of soda to a salty dog, Eddie grilled her. They’d once figured out that a friend of theirs was having an affair with their professor because the friend, out of the blue, had started ordering Makers Mark. And she’d heard of a man whose infidelity was discovered after he acquired his mistress’s mispronunciation of the word macadam , a verbal tick whose origin was not lost on his wife. Amanda confronted Eddie one morning as he was busy not-writing. “You think I’m having an affair.”

He stayed hunched over his computer, eyes on the blank screen. “Are you?”

“No,” said Amanda, “I’m not. You have no appreciation for how hard I am working. And despite all the publicity and phone calls for quotes and travel, I’m a lot further along on my new book than you are.”

“That’s a cruel thing to say.”

“The truth hurts.”

Eddie pushed out his chair and swiveled sideways. “You’re really not seeing someone else?”

“Not yet.” She softened even as she said it. “Really, Eddie, I’m not having an affair. It’s all work. And I always change my drinks with the weather, you know that.”

Amanda came close to telling Eddie about her black-wearing alter ego, but she stopped herself. She could not articulate why — she wasn’t sure whether she was trying to protect herself or Eddie or perhaps even Clarice — but she didn’t want him to know. It was a secret she wanted to hold close, a marvelous thing that was all her own and didn’t have to be shared. Some people, she knew, only enjoyed good things — from sexual relationships to compliments at work — if and when they could tell someone else. She wasn’t like that, and she wondered if it meant she was self-sufficient or that there was something askew about her, something related to her childhood, that made her comfortable with complete privacy.