Elise Blackwell - Grub

After Burlington, the so-called book tour got worse, and Margot could feel something sour expand in her stomach with every stop. In Montpelier, she read to an audience of two: both bookstore employees who had been called in on their day off under threat of dismissal. In Stockbridge, she read to an audience of one: a very tall woman who, unlike most Vermonters, wore a full face of makeup. Margot offered to skip the reading and instead take the woman to coffee and discuss the book.

“I like readings.” The woman folded her arms. “The flyer said it would be a reading. I’m here for a reading. Read.”

When Margot halted after twenty minutes, the woman said, “More. A reading is supposed to be at least thirty minutes. I want you to read for thirty or forty minutes. That’s what a reading is.”

At a small college in Rutland, her reading got off to a more auspicious start. It was held in a room that looked like a chapel, and the audience grew to more than a handful, then to over a dozen. The setting sun shone through a round stained-glass window and washed Margot in red and blue light. Though exhausted, she read well, and it seemed that the jewel-colored light lent extra depth to her sentences.

At the reception after the reading, a buxom redhead with a tilted glass of wine cornered her. “It must be awesome to be a writer. I think it would be really cool.” The girl guzzled the wine, getting most but not all of her gulp in her mouth and wiping away the rest with the back of her hand. “I’ve got three books in my head. All I’ve got to do is write them down.”

“That’s the hard part.” Margot heard something new and sharp in her voice.

The young woman shrugged and said, “Maybe next summer.”

Margot arrived in Shaftsbury to find that the bookstore that invited her had gone out of business the day before. Its glass door was papered over — blank white except for a sign reading, “Sorry, but you’ll have to buy your books online like everyone else.”

In Bennington, Margot was again handed a manuscript at the end of her reading, this time by a young man who claimed to have been a leper in Louisiana in one of his past lives.

“But my book is about a different life,” he explained. “It’s about one of my female lives. I was Louis the Fourteenth’s lover for twenty years.”

“My editor is handling less and less fiction,” Margot explained.

“It’s non-fiction,” said the young man. “I know that memoir is where the money is these days.”

By the time Margot crossed the southern state line into Massachusetts, she was glad to be leaving her book tour behind. She drove through the Berkshires exhausted but proud of herself for surviving the appearances. What had been demoralizing — the slow death of her first novel — had turned comic. And she was pleased to observe that she thought of Jackson less and less. Let him have his fame, she thought, because that’s what he wants.

Fame wasn’t what she wanted. What she wanted was to rise after ten straight hours of sleep in her own bed and write a short story while sipping a hot cup of tea. That, and to hand off to her father the manuscript by the old man with the horrible eyebrows, so she didn’t have to look at it anymore.

Andrew Yarborough did not divulge the details of the doctor’s diagnosis to his wife or daughter. Knowing that he would have to depend upon them for money as well as any kindness, that he would all too soon be reduced to playing with teddy bears, his dignity subject to their mercy, he could not bring himself to treat them with anything but disdain. While secretly hoping for its financial success, he continued to deride Janelle’s launch of a line of New Age gift books. Each book was only three-by-four inches large and contained a short story illustrating some dumb-ass Buddhist or Taoist saying. They had names such as Be Here Now, Light a Lamp for Another, The Strongest Man, One Moon/Many Pools , and What You Already Have .

“You’d be better off selling hypochondriacs those hypoallergenic blankets,” he said. “Those jacket colors are appalling. And if you’re going to hand out inane advice, give the people what they already know. You know: This is the First Day of the Rest of your Life and Nothing Tastes as Good as Thin Feels . People want to be told what they already think. First rule of publishing.”

“That’s half the point of Being Unto Yourself ,” Janelle said in her pseudo-benevolent voice. “Besides, sometimes the strongest man is invisible and when you light a lamp for another, your own path is lit.”

Stricken by the idea that all speech would eventually sound as incomprehensible to him as his wife’s mumbo jumbo, Andrew screamed.

When his daughter returned with horror stories from her book tour, he was unable to muster more than a few versions of I told you so. If only she’d have started up the journal, they could have worked together as father and daughter. He would have had a chance to make one more mark before descending into his pathetic future. But now he could only view his daughter with the loathing of the dependent. It would be she, he knew, who would wipe the drool from his chin and change his soiled linens. For a man who valued dignity above most things, it was too awful to think about.

A few weeks after her return, Andrew found Margot crying at the kitchen table.

“Forget him,” he said. “What kind of man wears those sweaters anyway?”

Margot shook her head. “I don’t cry over Jackson. It’s this obituary.” She lifted a finger toward the paper she had pushed away. “You remember Hinks?”

“Hinks is dead?”

His daughter nodded. “By his own hand.”

“Jesus! That’s awful.” Andrew picked up the phone and called Quarmbey.

His friend confirmed the news. “And what’s really horrible is that he did it for literature.”

“How do you mean?” Andrew asked.

“Before he shot himself, he wrote me a letter saying that he couldn’t get his novel published. He’d read about that kid who sold that godawful novel about a bailiff based on the publicity he got for risking his life to save the manuscript from a fire. And he talked about how John Kennedy Toole’s suicide helped get Confederacy of Dunces sold. His letter said that he was killing himself so that The Great Adirondack Novel would find a wide readership.”

“Jesus,” Andrew said, this time in a whisper, remembering poor Hinks with his turtle shape and solidly crafted short stories.

“I’ve asked a couple of the editors I know to take another look at the book now.”

“Then maybe his suicide wasn’t such a bad idea. Maybe it will work.”

After he hung up, Andrew sat in his yard, smoking a cigar and watching the Hudson drowse its way downriver. Even as he pondered suicide as a solution to his own problems, he knew he’d never do it.

Sipping Grub’s fennel bisque from an absurdly large spoon, Jackson Miller listened to his agent for ten minutes without interjecting. While Suzanne spoke her predictable words, he analyzed her face, trying to guess her age from the depth of the horizontal lines across her forehead. Passing for thirty, he figured, but pushing forty in a business that was increasingly controlled by the young. Her long silver-and-blue earrings shimmied as she spoke, and she drank water before swallowing the food in her mouth.

Finally she concluded her lecture: “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing.”

“I’m not going on the show,” he said, reaffirming his decision to decline an appearance on the country’s most popular talk show.