Elise Blackwell - Grub

She returned his smile, and Jackson realized that he did indeed like the look of her. Her pale skin looked cool and fresh, fine pored and slightly watery, like the inside of a radish. And there was a slight goofiness to her facial expressions and the way she tipped her head from side to side when she talked that he found endearing. She looked smart and sweet at the same time, which was an increasingly rare combination among the women Jackson encountered. Simpatico, that’s what that jackass Whelpdale would say about her.

She insisted that Jackson get some chips and a drink with his sandwich and that he take a twenty-dollar bill in case he needed more gas later. “It’s fine,” she said. “Just pay me back.” She swiped her card in the pump and waited while he filled his tank.

“Tell me something,” he said. “If you don’t want anyone to read your work, what do you write it for?”

She shrugged and tilted her head sideways. “It’s just what I do. I started writing stories when I was five.”

He found it so peculiarly charming when she shook his hand that he didn’t register the significance of her name until she was gone.

“Margot Yarborough,” she had said.

She must be Andrew Yarborough’s daughter. Jackson cursed his idiocy and vowed to develop a more diplomatic character. Once, when Amanda had asked him about his family and why he never set foot in Charleston, he’d told her, “I haven’t burned many bridges in my life, but when I do burn one I use kerosene and fan the flames.” He hadn’t merely taken a risk with Andrew Yarborough; he’d been downright foolish. It might well hurt his career when he would least expect it, and it had probably cost him a chance with a really great girl.

Still, two hundred miles later, eating a slightly stale pimiento-cheese sandwich while stopped at a railroad crossing, he cheered considerably. It was a freight train that whooshed by, disappearing around a bend in the tracks well before its sound faded, but it nonetheless reminded him of the train he’d first taken to New York. He hadn’t napped or read on the trip but sat straight, full of conviction that he was one of the men who succeed in life.

He drained the bottle of sweetened tea and crossed the tracks, accelerating hard, eager to get home and get to work.

Andrew Yarborough had built an old-fashioned literary career and was one of the few people at the conference who had found some success as both writer and editor, though considerably more as an editor. He’d spent most of his career at a single publishing house. He knew he was no Max Perkins — he couldn’t claim a Fitzgerald of his own — but he had been a real friend to his writers and a truly fine editor. He had discovered and published many young writers, ushering them through the thrill of literary debut, nursing them through a disappointing second novel, nurturing their ascendance into a sturdy career as a mid-list writer or, on occasion, celebrity.

After decades of good work, he’d been squeezed out following a merger. He’d tried a few stints at other houses, but was always asked to leave or left on his own accord after a few months or perhaps two years. It wasn’t so much that he’d lost his taste for his work but that the work itself had spoiled. In his last position at a major house he had been called a list-builder, and his work had been defined not as editing but as acquisition. There was little good will there toward talent that didn’t sell well, small tolerance for the sophomore slump, no willingness to risk a quiet novel that might prove a sleeper.

What bothered him most was the shift to decision-by-committee. No doubt it prevented some truly horrible books from being published, but it was clear that it overemphasized market concerns and selected for lowest common denominators. He’d had to write rejection letters for several brilliant but peculiar novels he’d badly wanted to publish. Those letters had eroded him, but he always wrote them himself, always took the time to provide a good reading of the work and suggest someone else who might find a way to publish it.

He couldn’t say whether he’d quit or been fired, but he remembered the shaking anger with which he’d argued with one publisher over a nine-hundred-page labor novel that was as dazzling and important as it was desperate for substantive editing. “It’s the writer’s job to have the book ready for the copyeditor,” was the line that had infuriated him and started the fight that ended in unemployment.

After that, Andrew had managed to survive as a critic and the nearest thing to a pundit that literature would take notice of. Though he had punctuated his editing career by writing novels that were kindly, albeit sometimes lukewarmly, reviewed, he couldn’t find another novel in himself, and he no longer had the patience he once had. He planned to return to fiction eventually, but meanwhile he reviewed books widely — for a while as editor of The Monthly —and made himself felt among the overlapping circles frequented by writers. Even though he was no longer populating the literary landscape with his own discoveries, he at least felt like he was, as he put it, fighting the good fight. He championed worthy books, called attention to new talent, and spoke out against trends that diminished literature. And so his professional life continued to offer an anodyne for — or at least an alternative to — his miserable home life.

While it was true that his wife had written some good poems early in her career and also that he defended her to strangers, it was decidedly not the case that he liked her. He was embarrassed by her ridiculous pursuits, and what he felt for her crossed into disdain. After a health scare that proved to be hypochondria and after discovering and putting an end to her husband’s only prolonged extramarital affair, Janelle Yarborough had embarked on a long, shallow spiritual journey whose stops included Tarot cards, sweat lodge ceremonies, and the local Buddhist temple. If it was indigenous anything or if the hawker of the religion du jour used the word healing , she was a firm believer.

This would have been horrible enough in itself, but she doubled the punishment inflicted on her husband by allowing her sage-scented mumbo jumbo into her poetry. First there had been the book of poems exploring Jungian archetypes. Next came the creation-myth poem cycle, and things just got worse. Now she led personality-based writing workshops in their home and accepted poetry prizes given not by literary foundations but by women’s centers and environmental groups. The phone rang for her all day, making it hard for Andrew to get his own work done now that he had to work out of the house.

What he didn’t know was whether all this nonsense was the product of an irritating but blameless stupidity or rather a calculated form of vengeance made more cruel by its subtlety and longevity. His uncertainty on this point, together with her family money, his own Catholic guilt, and their shared experience as Margot’s parents, accounted for the duration of a marriage that most men would have run from, alimony costs be damned. Instead of seeking a separation, Andrew resigned himself to his fate — penance for marrying and then cheating on a younger, not particularly intelligent woman who happened to have perfectly blue eyes.

After cutting out of the reading at the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference — the book-club woman had been abominable and then the fat kid had droned on and on in prose that could only be described as, well, prosaic — Andrew allowed his wife to take the wheel. Janelle insisted that she was the superior highway driver and, furthermore, that he needed to take a nap because he was grumpy. He let her drive to quiet her, regretting it when she put on some horrible cassette of chanting and water sounds. At his insistence, they had agreed long ago that the driver always picked the music, so he had no recourse. She aggravated her crime by jerking the car faster then slower then faster in ways seemingly designed to flare his chronic neck pain.