Margot had made herself hungry toting books back and forth, but at this her appetite retreated and her neck felt cold. Her shoulders shuddered, a movement she tried to contain, keep small. Perhaps it was at this moment she first contemplated her father as mortal. “What did you have in mind?” she asked, risking this mistake.
“Just a bit of copyediting. My new book is finished. Finally finished!”
“Congratulations,” she managed. “Has your editor seen it?”
“Just needs a bit of copyediting, you know, a fresh pair of eyes.” Her father’s smile was wide, his voice louder than necessary. “I’d do it myself but my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and of course my time is our money. It’s not like your mother pays the bills around here.”
Margot rested her palm on the tall stack of her own draft pages. “Sure, Dad. I’d be glad to help out with a little proofreading, but I’ve got my own project to finish as well.”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Proofreading. Maybe just a little fix here and there, if you see a sentence that could be more elegantly worded. Of course, there are a few spots that need a dash of filling in. You know how the process goes. Every writer leaves in a phrase here or there that’s really just a marker. I mean, all I’m saying is that I may not have caught them all.”
Margot nodded slowly. “When were you thinking? I’d be happy to get to it just as soon as I finish—”
“The sooner the better, really, given that your dad’s not getting any younger. Plus Fadge already has his book out.” He brightened, his smile transforming into something genuine. “Did you see that review in The Times? Got what he deserved.” He stepped toward her and set an awkward hand on her shoulder, something like a pat, before retreating to the door.
That night, Margot slept fitfully, dreaming shallow nightmares in which she floundered in a sea of green ink and copyediting marks. Faulkner whispered words she couldn’t discern; not another language but not quite English either. Fitzgerald laughed uproariously and pointed. James Dickey pinched her bottom. The pages of the marked-up Balzac manuscript she’d seen at the Pierpont-Morgan library flew at her like road signs in a 1950s movie. Though she was still exhausted, waking was all relief.
Abiding by Miss Manner’s admonition that a robe, brushed hair, and clean teeth are the minimum requirements for a breakfast appearance, Margot arrived in the kitchen ten minutes after waking to find her father talking at her mother’s back.
“Guess what!” he exclaimed, turning his entire body to follow his perpetually stiff neck. “I just received the best email I’ve ever started the day with. It’s too good to be true.” He paused for encouragement but continued without it. “Fadge has actually made things ten times worse for himself. Ordinarily an abused writer’s only recourse is the letters page, but Fadge pulled his dirty little strings and was granted an entire page — in the goddamed Times! — to defend himself like the helpless little boy he is. Quarmbey was livid, let me tell you. But now! Now! Now the employees this was forced on got in the last trick. Fadge’s response will be printed under a huge banner that says ‘I’m Not Really an Idiot.’ It’ll be in this Sunday.”
Although Janelle had purchased two electric juicers, she had since declared them too loud, saying there was too much noise pollution in the world already. Now she squeezed oranges by hand, her waist twisting with her work. Without disrupting her rhythm, she said, “It seems cruel.”
“That’s right! Cruel indeed.” Her father laughed at full volume. “And there’s nothing Fadge can do now. He’ll have had his unprecedented page. They can’t give him more, and he’ll look babyish enough as it is. He won’t even have grounds for complaint, because he actually says those words—‘I’m not really an idiot’—in his response. Can you imagine writing such a thing? Knowing it was to be published with your name on it? You can just shoot me the day I ever so much as think of writing such a line. I mean, if you have to tell the world you’re not really an idiot, the world is going to catch on to that one. People are stupid, but they’re not that stupid.”
Margot was slowly growing accustomed to eating breakfast with others after several years of doing so alone more often than not. And she felt better watching her mother wince at her father’s sausage and freezer pancakes, catching her father make faces at her mother’s raw oats in yogurt.
“It’s like the good old days.” Margot worked a spoon into her berry-laced cereal. “All of us together but different.” Still at the table, she devised a schedule for alternating work on her novel with the copyediting of her father’s mess of a manuscript.
And thus her days passed: after spending three morning hours on her father’s book, she turned to her own work, pausing only for an afternoon snack and, if one of her parents was home to remind her, a bit of dinner. Though she was mostly happy during these weeks, she felt slight alarm whenever she thought of Jackson Miller. His emails to her were much shorter than the long paragraphs in which she elaborated on the movement of the river outside her window, on her worries about sending her book into the world, on the way the books she read changed her moods the way colors shift in a kaleidoscope. Though brief, his emails were frequent, and in them she detected fondness and possibly a good deal more. If she forgot to check her email or failed to write to him for a couple of days, she read both worry and pouting in his tone. The first time he closed a note Love, Jack, she wondered if it signified a new intensity in his feelings or something more ephemeral, an affection sliding sideways like a cloud’s shadow.
He continued to sign his name with the term of endearment, but of course he couldn’t very well stop once he’d started. Perhaps it had become a habit, even a way of limiting rather than deepening their friendship, like a kiss on the cheek or a routine hug goodbye. She remembered that he was from Charleston, and she understood that social codes were different in the south.
She remembered a visiting writer she’d chatted with during a sparsely attended signing at the bookstore. Sitting behind a large, unsold stack of his novel about baseball reenactors, he’d said, “The problem with a Yankee is that he’ll tell you everything he knows in the first hour you know him.” The man had spent the next hour telling her more than she wanted to know about southern ball leagues while she, northern born and disinterested in sports, had said next to nothing. He’d given her a vigorous hug when he left, as though there were old friend. And so she decided not to put too much stock in the warmth of Jackson’s coda.
Despite stray thoughts about Jackson Miller, Margot thought more about writing than about any person. There were days on which she had little confidence in her novel, concluding that her self-delusion about its quality was total. In the main, though, she was smitten with The Reluctant Leper. It told the story of a man traveling though nineteenth-century Louisiana. After a few misadventures in The Crescent City, an encounter with a relatively plain but pure-of-heart Creole girl living in the marshes near Lake Pontchartrain inspires the protagonist to perform a good deed. He agrees to carry supplies to the leper colony at Carville, an institution that Margot had researched painstakingly. If she’d had the money, she might have flown to Louisiana, but, truth be told, she preferred to study books — representations of places, people, and things — over the things themselves. And ultimately writing was, after all, an act of imagination.