The idea that they might have to move not to one of the brownstones on the now-gated Sniffen Court or to an address further up the East Side but to something that represented a step down in prestige twisted into resentment as it grew. Amanda could not quite forgive Eddie for suggesting that they move to Jersey City. It was as inconceivable that she should ever say “New Jersey” when detailing her address as it was that she would move back to Wilkes-Barre and ask for a job in the bar where her brothers worked off their tabs. She had always believed in destiny — and that hers was fairy-tale golden. But now, as when she was a child looking up at the cracked plaster ceiling that dropped paint flecks on her favorite stuffed animals, she worried that she’d somehow been switched, that someone else was living the good life that had been marked for her.
On Sunday afternoon, she declined Eddie’s invitation to walk in the park. “It’s a beautiful day,” he offered. “Hints of fall in the air. We could stop at the Pierpont Morgan on the way and wind up at the Met?”
She insisted that she had tasks to complete, but that was a lie. The apartment gleamed, she’d finished the shopping, and their paperwork was up to date. “Besides,” she said, “you know I hate to go to museums on pay-what-you-want-day. They fill up with all kinds of people.”
“The Met is always pay what you want.”
“I know, but it’s Sunday. People with boring jobs like mine will be there.”
After Eddie sulked out, she sat on the sofa and tried to read a novel that had been favorably reviewed in The Times, but she had no real interest in the book. Indeed, her interest in reading fiction had become almost exclusively practicaclass="underline" what was selling, what was new or old, in or out, what was being noticed. She put the book down and rounded the shoji screen to check its Amazon ranking and used-copy value. While she was on the website, she checked the numbers on Sea Miss and then on the books of every writer she knew. A woman that she, Eddie, and Jackson had been in graduate school with had written a memoir about living with an epileptic child. Amanda felt the old, anxious tightening of her stomach when she saw that the book had a considerably higher sales ranking than Eddie’s. Any Sea Miss royalties would be paltry next time. She vowed to call his agent, see if she couldn’t drum up some more foreign-rights interest. The Spanish and Dutch rights had been sold early on, but French and Japanese would be better, worth maybe several thousand dollars.
She silently cursed Eddie for not thinking to make the call himself. She hadn’t minded working more than the year they’d agreed upon, but she certainly couldn’t go on forever working for the idiot who was her boss — a man who expected her to drum up publicity and reviews for four textbooks all titled Literature. When she’d begged him to let her give the anthology she’d acquired a more interesting title, he told her not to mess with the formula. He didn’t even seem to understand that all their anthologies were competing with each other for market space.
She realized more fully than before that she was going to have to take charge of things, take charge of her own life, at least, if she wasn’t going to wind up an underpaid under-editor and the wife of a penniless man whose only claim to fame was that he once wrote a pretty good book that a thousand people read some number of years ago.
Eddie was from a nice middle-class family, neither rich nor poor. They were midwesterners who never bought anything they couldn’t pay for in cash. He didn’t understand what she knew: poverty is a learned meagerness of spirit as much as it is a number on a ledger. Eddie didn’t know what it was to clean coffee grounds off the floor every week because another off-brand trash bag had split at the seams. While his parents read Consumer Reports before purchasing a television that would work well for years, her mother spent twice as much making lay-away payments on several cheap sets that never showed clear pictures. Amanda remembered the smell of her mother’s house as the smell of petty aspirations, failure, and emotional stinginess. Because Eddie didn’t understand what she was afraid of, he couldn’t save her from it. He had no conception of how far they could fall.
When the obvious solution struck Amanda, it came with the energy to enact it. Instead of badgering Eddie about his excuse of a career without any indication that he himself was interested in that career — and against evidence that he thought she actually enjoyed nagging him — she should launch her own. After all, she’d been one of the best writers in the workshop.
Unlike Eddie, Amanda had not spent her childhood imagining other lives and scribbling stories and fantasizing about the writing life. She’d read what was necessary to be a good student, knowing that a scholarship was her one-way ticket the hell out of Wilkes-Barre. She’d planned, from an early age, to attend law school, marry a fellow student, and practice law part-time while running a perfect household filled with quality things that worked like they were supposed to and were under warranty in case they did not.
After a torrid affair with the English professor who helped her pronounce her ‘G’s — and motivated partly by anger that he’d heard her drop them in the first place — Amanda had started a novel about a beautiful twenty-year-old woman having a torrid affair with her Henry-Higgins-like history professor. For reasons Amanda could no longer reconstruct, she’d sent off thirty pages of He Should Have Listened, together with the application form to the Iowa MFA program, while she was studying for her LSATs. When she’d opened the letter offering her the program’s most prestigious fellowship, she’d laughed out loud.
She had performed well enough in workshop, mainly because she was a sharp critic and possibly also — she knew this — because her professors were male. When Amanda looked in the mirror, she saw the tall and crooked girl she’d been at Wilkes-Barre Junior High School. But she knew that men saw something else; repeated experience had allowed her to trust the fact that she was beautiful even though she couldn’t see it herself.
In Iowa, she’d set aside her misguided novel to write her thesis: a series of short stories about attractive young women and the men they dated. She’d flirted with both Eddie and Jackson, but she’d been strict with herself. Until word broke about the sale of Eddie’s novel, she’d carefully followed her most important Iowa rule: never date a writer. Then, caught up in the excitement of her friend’s success, she’d wavered. She was young enough that she thought it meant something that they were both left-handed and gazed at the world with green eyes.
They’d graduated, married modestly in the backyard where Eddie had made mud pies and learned to catch, moved to New York, basked in the glowing reviews. She clapped louder than anyone when Eddie read at the CIA bar with none other than Jonathan Warbury.