Henry was formulating an alternative. Plots exist. Plots are real-life. People do things, and things happen, and those things result in still other events. The trouble comes when the writer forces plot onto character like, depending on your world view, God or fate or the randomly cruel universe. Jackson Miller was wrong with all his talk of life and fiction as one big farce to which the individual can respond with no weapon save mocking laughter. Henry’s idea was to treat life and the destiny of individual lives with absolute impartiality and respect. He would not be the omnipotent author but rather the chronicler who sets it down. He would spread his hands and say, “Look, this is the kind of thing that happens.” He was going to let his protagonist determine his own plot.
As he rounded the corner, he slowed, keeping close to the storefronts he passed. He stalled entirely when he spotted his bailiff eating lunch with his outsized lady friend in a small shaded park. Henry crept his way behind them, choosing a bench where he was partly hidden by a spindly ash but could hear the conversation that would be his novel’s dialogue.
Henry told himself that he would never have to write a big dramatic scene. Real drama happens so rarely in life, and, even when it does, real-world melodrama happens in ways useless to the novelist, who must, at the least, strip it from its circumstances and render it convincing. His prescription for fiction was a return to ordinary events and people: the head-cold that interrupts the would-be love scene, the pretty girl’s prom night ruined by a large pimple, all the numerous repulsive features of common decent life — presented coldly, with great seriousness and no hint of the facetious.
“Take that pigeon,” his bailiff was saying. “It just takes what it wants. I see his kind — in human form, mind you — all day long.” He paused and then huffed out, “Sure do. All day long.”
Henry tuned out all the jangling sounds of the small park, concentrating on the surprisingly high pitched voice of his protagonist as the man told his squinting girlfriend about a landlord seeking damages from a tenant who failed to replace a light bulb. “More gall than a gall bladder,” the voice scraped.
Henry touched the fingertips of both hands to his cheekbones. The muscles of his face lifted against his fingers as he pictured himself putting quotation marks around the bailiff’s lines. Yes, his character was going to provide him with all he needed.
Chapter twelve
Amanda Renfros was more dispirited than her husband when the final rejection of his novel Vapor—a form letter from a tiny press — arrived early in the week’s mail. She had enjoyed being married to a man of distinction. “My name is Amanda Renfros,” she’d tell clerks. “I see you have several copies of my husband’s book, but after last week’s review in The Times, you might want to consider a table display.”
Now that Sea Miss was out of print and the laudations were cold, Amanda was as likely as not to offer what she considered to be her more interesting maiden name: Amanda Yule. Her worry that Eddie had lost his talent had developed into an anxiety that gnawed her stomach like her childhood fears. Above all, she was angry with herself. She knew that she should have been more circumspect, thought more carefully about the future and what it meant to grow older before committing to, of all things, marriage to a writer. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so terrible if Eddie was at least fighting back, but it seemed as though he didn’t much care if one or both of them wound up working in an office for the rest of their ordinary lives. The worst thing she could imagine was leading an uninteresting life, working the same hours as all the other drones. Every month she felt the doors to her future narrowing.
It was with such thoughts running through her mind that Amanda, on a whim, called in sick. The call was easy; she’d always been a good liar, knowing, as most fiction writers know, the precise amount of detail with which to decorate the untruth. After she hung up, she deleted the name “Amanda Renfros” from her silly first attempt at a popular book. She replaced it with “Amanda Yule” and then, for no real reason, with “Clarice Aames”. She sent the file containing “Bad Dog Séance” to Swanky, one of the magazines that both accepted electronic submissions and had a circulation worth counting.
After showering and drying her hair shiny straight, she dusted herself with verbena powder and dressed in good underwear, slinky gray pants, and an interesting shirt. She couldn’t be running around the city looking like she wasn’t even trying. She admitted this: if Eddie refused to do what was necessary to make things work out for them, she’d need to look her best wherever she went. “What women should do,” she told herself, “is choose a man after he’s old enough for it to be clear whether he’s made it for good or not.”
This thought troubled her, because it suddenly made the future unpredictable. She pictured the Eddie of old — boyish in his animation over every positive review, every “best of” short list — and felt melancholy wash away whatever had sparkled inside her.
Feeling sad and newly hollow, she completed the task of packaging herself well. She put blush on her cheeks, gloss to her lips, and diamond studs in her earlobes before easing her feet into pumps that made her six-feet tall. When she looked in the mirror, she saw again the awkward girl with the off-center mouth, but when she softened her frown and centered her lips, she glimpsed what she was after: the woman most men found beautiful.
Thus readied, she struck out for the Frick to find a painting begging for its own novel. She rode her high heels well, walking quickly past the old firehouse. Looking up at the inexplicable relief of a bulldog’s head that crowned the building, she wondered if that had planted the subliminal idea for “Bad Dog Séance” and vowed that her future literary choices would be conscious. At Third Avenue, she rounded the corner where Carmen Gigante had been shot, everyone said by Gotti, fifty years after Gigante murdered the editor of Il Progresso just down the street. She walked down 36t? Street, slowing to look at the much-coveted apartments of Sniffen Court — now gated and fully gentrified and looking much cleaner than it did on that Doors album cover that her brothers probably still listened to.
She walked uptown on Lexington, away from what she considered her neighborhood’s most dispiriting landmarks — the former Rutledge Inn where the Tylenol killer once stayed and the silly bar that had finally taken down its “first baseball game played here” plaque under threat of lawsuit from civic boosters one river and eight miles away. Now she strolled by anachronisms she found charming: the weird little police outpost that had guarded the Cuban embassy since Castro’s platform-shoe-era visit and the subterranean pool hall still called the ‘Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen Club.’ Maybe she’d put them in a book someday.
Not many women could walk much of Manhattan’s length in the shoes Amanda wore, but her stride was unchanged as she approached the Frick. After paying fifteen dollars, she flipped open her notebook and moved methodically through the small museum’s various rooms, reassured by the feminine click of her heels on the floors, imagining what it would be like if the Frick was a house — her house.
She’d always been calmed by the presence of great art, almost as though she knew the painters themselves and had not grown up in a house where the only art in evidence was a paint-by-numbers covered bridge and her brothers’ black-light posters. The point of pain in her stomach, which had been nearly constant for weeks, disappeared.