Recognizing the name, she interrupted. “I loved Sea Miss.”
“Well, Eddie can’t get his second novel published to save his life, and it’s certainly no worse than Sea Miss. But the first one didn’t sell as well as it was supposed to, so he’s history. If Warbury had written Sea Miss, it would’ve won the National Novel Award or some PEN prize, and they’d be lining up the Pulitzer for the second book that poor Eddie can’t even get published by the University Press of Southern Alabama or Alaska or whatever it is. Instead, Sea Miss was lost in a flood of that year’s books. With computers, anyone who can type three hundred pages can claim to have written a book.”
A pigeon landed a few feet from them and scooted from brick to brick, scrabbling but finding no trace of the stale bread crumbs sometimes tossed out by old men with dogs and children minded by nannies.
“Eddie couldn’t help being born into an obscure Wisconsin family, of course, but he made a mistake in not marrying money. Then he compounded his agony by marrying a woman who loves success. Poverty and failure are disasters for any writer, but all the more so to him.”
Margot resisted the urge to bend down and feel the coolness of the moss again. She looked at Jackson. “And what about you? Do you need to be rich and successful to be happy?”
“Well, Margot, I don’t plan to find out if I’d be unhappy poor.”
Margot tilted her head from side to side, shrugging her shoulders to work out a kink.
He massaged the back of her neck and upper back with his large hand, and she closed her eyes. He was good at touch, strong and unhesitant but not too hard. She slumped a little, relaxing, feeling lines of energy move down her back. Finally she pulled away and stood up, knowing it was time to get back to work.
“I’ll toss that for you.” Jackson pointed to her empty cup, but he looked across the courtyard. “I think I know that guy, you see the skinny one in the brown tee-shirt? I think that’s Henry Baffler. He’s a writer, too. Everyone’s a writer, it seems.”
She raised her cup with two fingers, comparing their hands — hers small and white and unmarked, his large and tan and dotted with freckles and moles — as he took it from her. They both looked up at the same time. He opened his mouth and then closed it without speaking, and it seemed like a full minute before they broke their gaze. He crumpled her cup and threw it to the trashcan, making it easily though it seemed far away to Margot.
“I won’t be looking to marry money. I plan to make my own so that I don’t have to.” He walked away, then turned back, hands stuck in his front pockets. “I haven’t ridden the Staten Island ferry in months and months. Want to go sometime?”
Margot smiled and nodded, wondering why she was attracted to someone even more jaded about the literary life than her father was. Perhaps it was simply because he was tall and good-looking and it had been a while since she’d broken up with the guitar player. But she knew there was more to it. She liked his fluid voice, his abundance of self-assurance, the way he folded her opinions into his own. Anyway, it was just a ride on the ferry and she was fated to head up the Hudson soon enough.
She looked at her hand, the moss now a thin green crescent like an ordinary dirty fingernail. She thought about the chapter she would work on that night, in which she would describe a bayou through the eyes of her protagonist.
Back inside the store, she found a book of black-and-white photographs of southern Louisiana and imagined how they would look in color, trying to evoke the exact hues of brown and green.
Chapter seven
Eddie Renfros did not launch his new writing schedule the day after he and Amanda returned from the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. Yet within a week, he found himself regularly at work on an entirely new book, ticking off his three or four pages every twenty-four hours. For the first time, he had, as Amanda suggested, outlined the plot of the novel before he started. He told himself to think of it as an experiment. It might even be fun, he’d decided, to make his characters do what he needed them to do. It was a form of power he mostly lacked in the unimagined world he inhabited. He found, too, that knowing what was coming — both what scene he’d face the next day and how the story would end — eased the floating anxiety he felt whenever he was writing something long. His chest didn’t feel as tight, and it was easier to moderate his drinking. Thinking of the next morning’s work, more often than not he was able to stop after a couple. And sometimes he avoided the booze altogether by going to bed early. There were those nights that he sipped late and too much, but these seemed to serve the writing. He’d read back over those late-night paragraphs the next day and, despite the lurking typos, be relieved to find good writing.
Amanda’s suggestion of a historical novel had appeal — something he might make a name for himself with — and he planned to write one next, when he had more time. But it was too late for that now; the research necessary to write a fine literary novel with a historical setting would take months. Instead he conceived a novel about music. The book centered on a viola player in a string quartet: a married woman with two small children whose lover — a famous conductor — dies in a plane crash. If he’d started writing it a year earlier, he might have spent most of his time spinning images of grief and crafting evocative descriptions of the musical pieces he mentioned. Instead, he tried hard to write a plot of human interaction. He gave his protagonist a deaf daughter eligible for a surgical implant that mimics hearing, as well as a promiscuous best friend who may or may not be sleeping with most of the other characters, including the violist’s husband. About midway through the book, Eddie planned to bring in the lover’s widow to blackmail the narrator into working on the dead man’s compositions, resulting in a strained friendship between the romantic foes and an unhealthy fascination with the conductor’s son, who happens to look just like his father. In short, Eddie had almost more plot than he knew what to do with.
He admitted to himself that he was writing for a particular demographic. He was writing to predetermined plot rather than discovering the story via hundreds of deleted paragraphs and pages. Yet the book was by no means a potboiler, and his sentences were careful. He played with the interesting motifs of sound and its absence, and found the novel addressing serious themes of artistic as well as marital fidelity, including the negotiations that artists make with their audiences and the costs they impose on art. He wasn’t selling out, he told himself, but rather examining the idea of what it means to sell out.
It would be a short book, written in the first person Eddie found most natural. In late September, with sixty usable pages, he calculated that he could compile a full draft by mid-December if he did not take a day off and did not overthink matters. He could polish the manuscript across the holidays and deliver it to his agent in January, just as the editors were returning from vacation.
Yet this calculation gave him less encouragement than he needed. The New Year sounded absurdly far away. And while he felt that his prose itself was as capable as ever, he carried no great passion for the book as a whole. On many a morning, the novel struck him as simultaneously too domestic and too melodramatic. While it was the sort of book that might make the rounds of a few women’s reading circles, the advance it could garner would not be sufficient to clear all of their debt.
Besides, Eddie knew himself well enough to foresee that he would not work away for months without a day off. Of course, if he wrote six pages one day, then he could afford a Saturday off. Perhaps he’d do that next week, or even this week, and take Amanda to the park and to see some art. She always glowed in the presence of great paintings, holding his arm and talking about ideas instead of things.