And so it was that the following week found him examining his clothes with a more critical eye than usual. Every stitch fit easily into a single bureau drawer in the efficiency apartment leased by his absentee roommate: a wealthy NYU student who didn’t want his Mississippi Baptist parents to know that he really lived with his girlfriend. In exchange for his cut-rate rent, Henry had only to relay messages from Mississippi across town and learn to parrot phrases such as, “Sorry, you just missed him” and “He’s at the library again — always studying so hard.” Though he was ultimately willing to excuse these fibs as one of the costs of his survival as a writer, Henry despised lies and never told them to anyone other than the disembodied drawls on the other end of his phone line.
In fact, his general refusal to lie was in part responsible for his economic predicament. If he’d articulated any interest in selling dinette sets, he’d have inherited some money. Instead his family’s small wealth was given in its entirety to his older brother, who had feigned an interest in running the family furniture store in Bakersfield. The brother promptly sold the business and bought the condominium in which he snorted away the rest of the Baffler assets in the form of powdered cocaine. Everyone in the family admitted that Henry was the one who had imagination.
Henry wished there was some money to tap. He didn’t need much and was happy enough without even a computer. It was just as well that he had no email at home and so could limit his experience of electronic rejection to his twice-weekly visit to the bank of free computers at the public library. The written rejections — often a single sentence on a small square of paper — found him easily enough.
He knew he should take Jackson Miller’s advice and submit each of his stories simultaneously to a dozen journals and magazines. But even with the cheap box of envelopes he found at a thrift store, submissions were precious; each required at least the cost of copying the pages, the better part of two dollars to mail the story, and thirty-seven cents for the stamp on the self-addressed envelope that would carry the rejection note. That was the true indignity: to have to pay to transport your own rejection.
Often the spurning editors repeated what he had been told by former teachers and classmates: his scrupulous honesty hindered his storytelling, swamping his plots with too many details from real life, some of them implausible on the page. But that’s what he knew how to do: to record.
When he turned his Realist’s eye on his wardrobe, he found a bleak situation. Both pairs of jeans and the khaki pants had been patched multiple times by Henry’s uneven hand sewing. By this point one pair of jeans had split beyond repair through the crotch and down the inseam, and Henry kept them only as a source of patching material for the other pair. He owned three tee-shirts, all of them washed thin. He had two shirts with collars, one of them wool, plus a corduroy jacket that was mostly too warm in the fall and not warm enough in the winter. He also owned a single glove, one pair of socks that he wore only in cool weather, and a pair of disintegrating brown shoes. He would soon have to visit the thrift store for new shoes and fresh tee-shirts. His best hope was to attract a girlfriend who lacked sartorial sense. It wasn’t a good idea, he suspected, to hook up with another fiction writer, but sometimes, late at night, he imagined a vague-faced poet or painter or musician; a girl composing music in a minor key, thin fingers poised to strike a chord.
Though he was broke and lonely, Henry was not unhappy. He had placed two new articles advocating his version of New Realism. It was true that one had appeared in the final issue of (A)Musing Aloud, a now-defunct journal with minimal circulation edited by a former instructor. But the other piece was being published in the new issue of Swanky, and people actually read Swanky. Henry viewed today’s work as the experiment that could tie his ideas together and prove with finality that his literary theory worked at the practical leveclass="underline" he planned to stalk the bailiff during his lunch hour.
Excited by this scheduled adventure in eavesdropping, Henry put on his wearable pair of jeans, one of the flimsy shirts, and his shoes. At the apartment’s single sink, spaced midway between the faucetless kitchen and bathroom, he brushed his teeth and wet down his hair. It was already close to noon, so he rushed down the stairs. As he stepped onto the street, he was comforted as always by the bright light and fresh air that never penetrated the interior-facing room where he slowly constructed his paragraphs.
Though his studio flat was dark and cramped and smelled of dust and mold and things he didn’t care to register, Henry reveled in his neighborhood. It was the setting of a real writer; it kept him in touch with real people. Henry loved his perennially unfashionable block, which the Irish gangs of decades past had abandoned to the Dominican families who were now Henry’s neighbors. The only evidence Henry could see of the Gaelic thugs who had once ruled Hell’s Kitchen were the large, friendly cops who smoked cigarettes and ogled attractive women in front of their tiny brick-front station. This was a part of Hell’s Kitchen too charmless to have succumbed to gentrification, and the stores that Henry passed were functional places. These were businesses not dependent on walk-in traffic but stores that certain sets of people had to visit, once a year or so, from other parts of the city: vacuum repair, saltwater aquarium paraphernalia, dry-cleaning supplies, industrial kitchen wares. The only places of note were the Hit Factory, where in one great rock-and-roll week, David Bowie and Lou Reed had both recorded iconic albums, and the peculiar plaza that was the area’s one futile effort to lure the theater crowd further west. The plaza now boasted little more than a wholesale pet-food store, empty store fronts, and a mediocre movie theater where shooting occasionally broke out. Henry’s favorite local spot was a comical French restaurant decorated with varnished jigsaw puzzles of the Eiffel Tower and Edith Piaff, staffed by laconic old women, and known for having boiled celery on the menu. He’d eaten there only once, a seal-the-deal meal paid for by the roommate he hadn’t seen since. He touched the restaurant’s wrought-iron window box, which held only dry dirt and a few straw-colored weeds, as he trotted past it toward the courthouse.
He’d long argued the superiority of character-driven fiction over the tyranny of plot, though Eddie Renfros’s amorphous plots were not, he was convinced, the right way to go. Though exquisitely written — all the editors who rejected it said so—Vapor was basically unreadable. You could read the same page over and over like a lovely poem, but there was no reason whatsoever to turn to the next page. What Eddie had gotten away with in his first book, he’d taken too far in his second. Even Eddie himself seemed to realize this now, and the poor chap was now trying to develop iron-handed plot.