Margot twirled one of her short curls with her middle finger. “An ma in literature. I wrote a thesis on the destiny of coincidence in Thomas Hardy, mostly in Far from the Madding Crowd and Return of the Native but I touched on Jude also. A lot of people have written about destiny and coincidence in Hardy, but I’ve searched everywhere and I think I’m actually the first person — I know, it’s hard to believe — to address the destiny of coincidence in his work.”
“I knew you were a more original thinker than I am. Say, Margot, you could probably still get a teaching job. The Metropolis Workshop thing is always hiring. There’s lots of online stuff now too, the low-residency writing programs and all that. I don’t mean become a teacher — I think so much more highly of you than that — just something to do for awhile. Of course, if you liked teaching, you could pick up an MFA.”
“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head very slowly but with great emphasis, like a little kid resisting vegetables. “I could never show my writing like that. I hear it’s like baring your veins to wolves.”
“It’s not so awful, really,” Jackson said, even as he recalled some of his harsher workshop statements and the time he’d told a first-year student that workshop was a blood sport and to high-tail it back to Florida if she couldn’t take it. “Besides, you’ll be baring your work for reviewers.” The word ‘baring’ seemed almost lewd said in proximity to her exposed arms, whose perfect creamy tone made Jackson want to both run his hands down them and leave them unsullied by his coarse touch.
“If it ever comes to that, which I doubt, I suppose you’re right. But that’s different. At least you’re not in the same room. You can read your reviews or not. Or read them when you feel up to it.” She gripped her almost-empty bottle in a way that resembled the wringing of hands, then added, “Maybe I’ll use a pen name if I ever publish.”
Jackson sucked the fresh breeze. “Margot, I realize it’s no coincidence that your last name is Yarborough. I should think your father could get you an agent, of course, but he could also help you get a job in publishing, a good one that would pay quite a bit better than a bookstore. An editorship or a staff position as a reviewer or something. I think the publishing world would really benefit from the views of someone like you.”
“I would never do that. I want to make my own way in the world, get whatever I get on my own merit.”
“Margot, no one does that any more. If they ever did.”
As the boat sounded its horn and closed the distance to Battery Park, Jackson wished he could slow its progress, make the first half of their ride last forever. Margot wasn’t the prettiest girl he’d spent time with, but her sweet earnestness pulled at him. He loved her mix of unpracticed elegance and childlike gestures.
“Let’s ride straight back,” he said. “I don’t want to get off the boat. Ever. Maybe we’ll ride back and forth all day. I know this will sound silly, but I feel like we’ll both be okay if we just never leave this boat. We’ll stay on the boat forever, and no one will know where to look for us.”
Margot smiled as the ferry docked on the Staten Island side. “I like that, but I’m pretty sure they make you get off. But we’ll be back on in just a few minutes.”
While they waited to re-board, Jackson noticed the line of Margot’s slender thigh under the thin fabric of her dress and felt disproportionately happy when she leaned against his arm for a moment. This must be what falling in love feels like, he told himself. They said little until they were back on the ferry’s deck, again in motion, this time heading back to the city of books and papers.
Margot turned to face him straight on, balancing with only her hip on the boat’s rail. “Jackson, can I ask you something?”
“Anything at all. Anything.”
“Do you really think of this as a date?”
“I was hoping that it was a date, that you were thinking of it that way. I hope that it is a date, that it counts that way to you. We’re so different — my God I have a foot of height on you — but I really like you, Margot. I like you a lot.”
Margot tilted her head toward her shoulder. Her chest and throat blushed pink against the pretty orange dress.
“The thing about me, Margot, is that I would use any connections I had in a second. You need to understand what kind of person I am. I’m not so good a person as you are.”
“I think you’re a fine person, Jackson.” She said his name tentatively, as though trying it out, imitating the way he used her name when he talked to her. “A very fine person.”
“Really?” The sun soaked his head as they neared the Statue of Liberty on the return pass, this time missing its shadow.
Margot nodded vigorously. “That’s what makes this all the more awful. I’m moving at the end of the month, up to my folks’ place in Annandale-on-Hudson. I’ll get to the city once in a while, but I’m a homebody, I really am, that’s something you should know about me. And besides, I want to finish my book, make it something perfect and beautiful. But you could visit. It’s a nice place, really, a very good place. And you can get there on the train.”
“Oh, Margot,” was all Jackson could muster for the moment. After a long swig of imported beer, he inhaled sharply and told her, in edited form, about his unfortunate encounter with her parents.
“That’s terrible,” she whispered when he’d finished. “It really is terrible.”
She let him draw her into a hug, her hands trapped between them. He squeezed as tight as he could trust himself to, afraid of crushing her. When they pulled away, he saw that the plastic button on his shirt pocket had left an imprint on her cheek: a red circle on her small, pretty face.
“We’ll figure something out,” he said to himself as well as to her. “I promise that we’ll figure something out.”
Margot cocked her head. “Hey,” she said, “did you hear the one about the writer who died?”
“Tell me,” he said, thinking her downright brave.
“St. Peter offers him the option of heaven or hell and the writer asks to see each one before deciding. As they descend into the fires of hell, the writer sees row upon row of writers, all chained to their steaming-hot desks and being whipped by demons. ‘Show me heaven,’ the writer says. They ascend to heaven and there’s row upon row of writers chained to steaming-hot desks and being whipped by demons. ‘But it’s just as bad as hell,’ the writer says. St. Peter shakes his head, and says, ‘No, because in heaven your work gets published.’”
Jackson reached out and softly pulled one of her short curls. “Margot, I really do promise that we’ll figure something out.”
She smiled and nodded, her head still tilted.
Chapter eleven
The impromptu party at the Renfros apartment had provided Henry Baffler with more minutes of companionship than he’d had since returning from the Blue Ridge Writers’ Conference. It had left him both hopeful and lonely. Amanda wasn’t his type — he’d always preferred beauty that was flawed and names with soft centers — but being around her made him long to live with a woman. At the same time, that Eddie Renfros, a struggling novelist, could claim the affection of such a wife as Amanda suggested that the starving artist’s life need not be dismal and solitary.
Henry did not romanticize writers’ poverty, nor did he feel as though he had chosen it. If anything, his role had picked him, or, perhaps more accurate, it was simply what he was. Though he’d grown up in a middle-class home with three televisions and no bookcase, he’d forever been the kid lurching around the playground — walking because sitting was not allowed at recess — trying to read Samuel Beckett or Diderot without tripping. He’d been too peculiar for even the least powerful bullies to bother with and indeed would have avoided socialization altogether had not a few poetically minded girls noticed that unusually lush eyelashes fringed his large, gentle eyes. He remembered each of them, those girls who’d sent him lines from Keats and Shelley on pages torn from notebooks and who had offered him his sexual education in a series of kind acts. These girls with soft names were, he realized, the sort who in another time would have carried care packages to consumptives at the sanitarium. He wanted a female in his life again, but this time, he thought, he’d like a girlfriend with a bit more blade and a little less charitableness.