“I love you,” Jackson told her as he put her into a cab. “For years now, I think.”
Traffic was fierce, and Amanda was happy for the long ride. She replayed the afternoon in her mind, holding her hands to her face to breathe in Jackson’s lingering smell.
As the taxi neared her block, though, she felt unsure of herself and embarrassed at the thought of being seen by Eddie. Relieved when she found he wasn’t home, she showered and set to work. By the time her husband had returned to drink and read in their living room, Amanda had complicated the plot of her new novel.
Her protagonist, Amelia — the female writer married to a marginally successful writer — launches an affair with an ambitious writer named Jaspar, who becomes wildly successful after writing a book about a moderately-known painter, an idea he gets from Amelia. His reputation further skyrockets when he refuses to appear on a popular television book club. The talented lovers meet over tiramisu. Unable to resist each other’s fabulous good looks and irresistible charm any longer, they romp in the good linens and over the chairs and ottomans of a near-by luxury hotel. Discussion of the Proustian madeleine ensues. It needed refining, Amanda knew, but the draft read:
Jaspar traced the conspicuous yet feminine vertebrae that delineated Amelia’s perfect back. “Whenever I taste espresso-soaked ladyfingers/ladiesfinger,” he said, “I will be permeated by the tender nostalgia that so overwhelmed Marcel Proust’s narrator, Swann, when his lips tasted the petite madeleine.”
“Oh yes,” replied Amelia, nearly purring, “that famous literary pastry of fond memory.”
Amanda’s warm sense of wellbeing drained as she thought about Eddie, and she put on a cardigan against the chill. There was ugliness and hurt ahead — it couldn’t be avoided — and she wished she was already on the other side of it, already leading the life that would permit no further stain.
After reading the how-to books he’d ordered, most of them written by marginally successful literary agents or blatantly unsuccessful novelists, Eddie Renfros decided that he might as well make the final stop before he hit rock bottom and try his hand at poetry.
Thanks to Amanda’s out-of-control success, they no longer needed what money his fiction might bring in, and it was clear to Eddie that he had lost his wife’s respect for him as a novelist. He assumed that he was going to lose her fully, in feeling, probably in deed, but he harbored a small hope that he could win back her affection with the very thing that had driven her away: his commitment to language rather than the literary marketplace. Besides, he reasoned, he might more easily manage verse since his concentration was too soggy to sustain an entire novel. It would be good for him, too, to move away from the computer screen and work again in pencil. He’d always loved the sound of soft graphite moving across paper.
He waited for Amanda to inquire, or at least to notice what he was doing, but it had been weeks since she had last asked him about his work. What had once seemed like aggressive nagging, he now yearned for as evidence of wifely interest. Amanda was always coming in or going out — rarely in the apartment except to sleep and write. More and more, though, she left each morning with her new laptop, saying it was easier for her to write in public than at home.
One Saturday afternoon she breezed in with several shopping bags. Eddie recognized the names of expensive department stores, women’s boutiques, and a lingerie retailer. It had been months since he’d seen Amanda in anything other than full street clothes or her oversized bathrobe and hair towel. It seemed as though a decade had passed since the early days of their marriage, when she would rush in from shopping and then materialize in the living room wearing a corset and garters, or adorable panties and ankle socks, or something cake-like with layers of white lace.
He wanted to ask her to model whatever it was that she’d just bought, and he hated her because he could not. “You’re spending a lot of money lately,” he said instead. “The advance may not last forever.”
“I’ve got another one and it’s going to last a long time.”
“Another advance? I didn’t know you’d even finished the new book.”
“Yep,” said Amanda from the bedroom. Eddie could hear the rustling of bags and tissue paper. “Last week. Sorry, I should have told you.”
Eddie walked slowly to their bedroom. “You weren’t going to have me read it?”
“I’ll give it to you when I get the galleys. You’ve seemed busy — writing letters or whatever it is that you’ve been up to with all that pencil sharpening.”
“Not letters. Poetry.”
She turned and cocked her head, her smile not unkind. “Poetry?”
“I’d really like to read your new book.” He moved behind her and stroked her back tentatively, wincing as her body tensed against his touch.
“Capital,” she said. “I’ll print you a copy. Meanwhile, can I see a poem?”
Eddie sat across the room on the sofa while his wife read three of his poems at the dining room table.
She looked straight at him when she finished. “These are good. Especially the sonnet.”
“Really?” he asked.
She nodded. “Really good. You might consider applying for a fellowship or grant of some kind.”
“The kind where I go away for a few months and leave you alone?”
She pushed the pages away and stood. “No, Eddie, for once I wasn’t thinking of myself. These are really good poems, and I’d like something good to happen for you.”
Two days later, working through a blunt headache and a slow breakfast of coffee and toast, Eddie realized that Amanda still hadn’t given him a copy of her new manuscript.
“Print me a copy right now,” he said to his wife as she checked her purse to go out. “Or don’t you want me to read it?”
“The truth is that I do and I don’t. I haven’t quite recovered from your remarks about the point-of-view scheme in The Progress of Love .” In jeans and a white turtleneck and no make-up, she looked very much like the graduate student he’d courted and married.
“May I remind you that your responses to my work have occasionally been less than sensitive?” he said.
Amanda sat down across from him, nodding slowly. “Fair enough, and I’m sorry for that. I guess I understand better now how it smarts. But I really can’t bear to field any snide comments about what’s literary and what’s commercial. I write what I write, and frankly that’s what pays the bills.”
“I’m sure that if I forget that, you’ll remind me.”
“It’s just that you make me feel like I’m a bad writer, and I’m not. I’ve just made a decision to try to write things that people are interested in reading.”
“Then let me read your new book. I’ll bite my tongue about that other stuff.”
“The truth is that I kind of wish I hadn’t written this new book, that I’d written about something else instead.” She chewed her bottom lip a little, her face clouded by a rare shadow of uncertainty.
“I’m sure it’s really good, Amanda. Really, I’d like a copy to read — just as a reader. You know I’ve always admired your prose, the way you can end a paragraph with a punch that doesn’t feel like a gimmick.”
She walked around behind the sofa and folded her arms around his neck. Her sleek hair slid against his cheek, and he breathed in the clean, sharp smell of citrus.
“I don’t know how we ever let things get so difficult,” she said in a tone he couldn’t parse.
“It’s not too late, don’t you think?” He tried to turn his head to face her, but he didn’t want to break the embrace. “I hope it’s not too late.”
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