This should have made their choices seem more heroic—they had simply opted out of conspicuous consumption—but for Lil it only made them seem less so, a childish pretense, their convictions mere self-righteousness. And Tuck’s infatuation all the more galling, particularly when he held Lil up to their model for comparison—and, of course, found her lacking. “Everything is in its place,” Tuck liked to say, almost angrily, after visiting the Green-Golds. “Their apartment is small, but they’ve made the best of it. They use every bit of space.” Or “They don’t have piles of shoes and books lying around. Did you see Caitlin’s desk? There was nothing on it.” Lil’s own desk, at any given time, was covered in mounds of papers—Xeroxed articles, drafts of her own papers, student essays, coupons, receipts, Post-it notes with scrawled reminders on them, gum and candy wrappers, dog-eared legal pads containing her copious notes for her dissertation proposal, grocery lists, to-do lists, recipes clipped from the Dining In section.
“I would have run out of there screaming,” said Emily.
“I did, kind of.” Lil pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “I was so tired, I just felt like I couldn’t stay awake another minute. It was kind of crazy. I told them I had to go home, I had all these papers to grade, but Caitlin, of course, was like, ‘I have papers to grade, too. We can go to the L tomorrow and just plow through them.’”
“As if you can’t grade papers alone,” said Beth, contemplating the remains of their cookie. “That’s just weird.”
“I know! It was too much”—she paused, unsure whether her friends would think her actions deranged—“and I just kind of left.”
“You didn’t say good-bye?” asked Sadie, starting to laugh.
“I couldn’t! I just had to get out of there.”
“Wow,” said Emily. “Good for you.”
What she didn’t tell them was that Tuck had come running after her, furious, shouting her name down the block. At the corner of Marcy he’d caught up with her and made to grab her arm. “Don’t touch me,” she’d shouted, in a voice she didn’t recognize, low and tear-choked. “Don’t talk to me like that,” he’d shouted back. “I’m your husband. Do you not love me anymore? Because it doesn’t seem like it.” But before she could answer, an electronic ring pierced the air between them: her new cell phone, obtained for her, against her wishes, by Tuck, who’d become umbilically attached to his own since starting at Boom Time. She fished it out of her pocket and pressed the talk button. “Hello?” she said, the word emerging more as a question.
“Hey!” came Sadie’s voice, hollow and distant, with a slight echo. “My long-lost friend. Is this the only way to reach you? You’re never at home.”
“Hey,” said Lil, stunned with relief. “I was going to call you earlier.”
Who is it? mouthed Tuck.
“Really?” said Sadie, her voice rising with curiosity. “Why didn’t you?”
Tuck’s angry mien was breaking, senselessly, into a smile.
I love you, he mouthed, and pulled her to him, lifting her off the ground like a child, the cold air slapping against her cheeks. “Hang up,” he shouted.
“What’s going on?” asked Sadie. “Who is that?”
“Nothing,” Lil shouted, squealing a bit as Tuck began to spin her around. “No one.”
five
Lil and Tuck were having a party. It was to be their first big party in the loft—other than the wedding—which they’d now been living in for the better part of a year and which was, everyone agreed, absolutely made for parties. And now, after five dark months, they had a reason to celebrate: Tuck was writing a book.
It was Sadie who’d engineered the project from start to finish. One blustery day in March she’d called Lil and said, without her characteristic preliminaries, “Listen, I have an idea.” Why, Sadie posited, didn’t Tuck write a book about Ed Slikowski, or maybe not directly about Ed Slikowski, maybe a kind of first-person narrative nonfiction, six-months-at-the-world’s-hottest-magazine sort of thing. “Kind of Gay Talese–ish.” Sadie, who was still slaving away as an editorial assistant (none of them could understand why she hadn’t been promoted, or jumped to another publisher, or written her own book), could put Tuck in touch with an agent who did that sort of thing. Tuck would have to write a proposal and some sample chapters—that was it—which the agent would then send to editors, one of whom (undoubtedly, Sadie said) would give Tuck a contract. He’d then have a year (or maybe six months, if they wanted to get the thing out quickly to capitalize on Ed’s current, though waning, fame) to write the book itself.
And—to Lil’s shock—that was exactly what happened. Even more amazing was the fact that Sadie herself was to be Tuck’s editor. Her geriatric boss had allowed Sadie to acquire the book in her own name, which made it her first real acquisition, to use the publishing parlance. So they were celebrating for her, too, really.
Lil had almost died when she heard the amount of Tuck’s advance: $30,000, but then Tuck’s agent—a pudgy, goggle-eyed fellow who bore the odd name of Kapklein, with whom Sadie had worked, a zillion years ago, at Random House—explained that it was actually pretty modest. And, worse, that Tuck wouldn’t receive a check for that amount at the outset. A third would arrive upon the signing of the contract (still being worked over by Kapklein “so they don’t screw you over”), another third upon the completion of the manuscript, and a final third on publication of the book, with Kapklein’s fifteen percent commission deducted from each installment. But Kapklein wasn’t worried about the small advance, because, he said, Sadie’s house, the elegant, literary division of a huge publishing conglomerate, would lavish Tuck with “real, old-fashioned editorial attention” and the reputation of the publisher would add “luster” to the book, ensuring that it would be reviewed in all the right places, and so on. “And besides,” Kapklein told Tuck and Lil and an uncomfortable Sadie, when they went out for a celebratory drink, “There’s film potential here, too.”
But the money part didn’t really matter so much. The point was: Tuck was really a writer now. In a year or so, his book would be displayed in the window of the Union Square Barnes & Noble and reviewed in the Times. He’d have no trouble getting freelance work—in fact, magazines would ask him to write for them—and they’d travel around the world, on interesting, important assignments. On the subway, she’d see people bent over Tuck’s book and restrain herself from saying, “That’s my husband.” All of this was more important than their immediate financial crisis, which the first chunk of Tuck’s advance would only barely resolve. And the happy prospect of Tuck’s success went a good ways toward deflecting her worries about her own research, which had been giving her trouble lately, since Tuck had started staying at home.
In point of fact, it wasn’t the research itself that was giving her trouble. She could happily spend hours poring over source materials. But she seemed to have lost the ability to write, or, rather, to formulate her own ideas. When she sat down at her old enamel desk, her mind went everywhere but to Mina Loy—whom she was writing about for her modern poetry seminar, though in truth she found Loy’s life more interesting than her poetry—and she caught herself examining her cuticles, wondering if she ought to run out and spend seven dollars on a cheap manicure, or what she should wear the following night to one of Sadie’s book parties, or whether she should get her hair trimmed or continue to grow out the last cut, with its overzealous layering. And it wasn’t just her dissertation proposaclass="underline" she’d taken incompletes in two of her three spring classes, due to the fact that she had been, frighteningly enough, truly unable to write her final papers for them. Her professors had been kind and accommodating, but made it clear that she had to get the papers in soon, and start thinking seriously about her orals.