Once at the leper colony, her hero is wrongfully mistaken for a diagnosed leper and interred. After fifteen years — years that see increased understanding of leprosy as Hansen’s disease — he finally proves to a doctor that he is not infected with the bacterium responsible for the disfiguring condition. Then on the eve of his release, he realizes that he has lost sensation in his fingertips: he has finally contracted leprosy from a decade and a half of living in close quarters with lepers. No one knows, so he is free to leave. Yet inspired by the memory of the virtuous Creole girl, he chooses to stay and live out his life among an eccentric cast of lepers. He dies an obscure but happy man, sustained by his outcast friends and his love for a woman he met only once, never slept with, and has not seen in years and years.
After two weeks, the novel was only a line edit away from completion — though what completion might mean or bring, Margot could not conjecture. Her father’s book, on the other hand, was still not fit for consumption and was taking every bit as much time as she had expected it to. Not that his book didn’t contain astute observations about the history and practice of literature — it did. But Margot was sadly unsurprised to find numerous faulty quotes, dates, and other facts. Worse, some of her father’s “place markers” represented mere glimpses of undeveloped ideas. Most of the missing material pertained to women writers. One trick she needed to perform was to provide opinions on Willa Cather and Virginia Woolf in her father’s voice but in such a way that would keep feminist critics from eviscerating him. The thing was to write like her father — with flare and expansiveness — only tightened and given more clarity, grace, and compassion than he generally mustered.
Margot finished her work on The Reluctant Leper early on a Sunday morning, which left her able at last to foresee the completion of her work on her father’s crowning literary accomplishment. At breakfast, she watched her father — his mouth full of freezer-to-toaster pastry — again laughing at the enormous banner over Fadge’s page-long defense of his history of literature: “I’m Not Really an Idiot.”
Instead of announcing her good news, she retreated to her room and savored it privately. I just wrote a novel, she told herself. I just wrote a novel. Her misgivings gone, at least for the moment, she felt almost giddy.
When she went online and found several new messages from Jackson — all brief but increasingly pleading — she realized she’d let the rest of her life go while she completed her book. Just like a real writer. She hit reply to his latest email and typed: “I just wrote a novel. Can you celebrate?”
Chapter fourteen
Jackson Miller ignored the pile of clothes, some clean and some dirty, sprawling on his unmade bed. He ignored the dust animals congregating in the corners of his room. He ignored the stack of unopened mail. As he had every morning since he’d started his novel, he wrote. He was two chapters from finished.
All fall he’d been living off ongoing rent extensions from Doreen and a new credit card from a bank he’d never heard of, as he typed away at his tale of greed and drugs but mostly sex on Wall Street. His working title was Pig-Male-Ion, though he knew he’d have to come up with a serious title soon. He routinely reminded himself: I am writing a young man’s book, but I am writing it for women more than for men. They’d buy it in droves, he believed, because women want to understand men, because women do not understand that men fall into two categories: those who are inexplicable and those too dull to require explication. That’s what he planned to say in the interviews — that men are either inexplicable or too dull to bother with.
Jackson wanted to appeal to young readers, to hipsters, so he played with every trick he thought he could get away with: letters written in alternative typescripts, diaries that trail off pages with the suicides of their authors, the inclusion of small illustrations and visual puzzles, the occasional blank page signifying moral bankruptcy. There would be stuff to talk about, texture to make his readers feel clever.
He’d cleaned up as he went along, so there’d be no need for a second draft. The story was the story, and, font tricks aside, it told itself. He’d worked well and quickly, and the end was within a week’s reach.
He spent the afternoon crafting the query letter he planned to send to twenty agents whose names had recently appeared in the “Hot Deals” section of Publishers Weekly and then checked his email. Plenty of new messages, but none of them were from Margot. He’d been so sure, that day on the ferry, that she was falling for him. And once a week she sent him a long email — or sometimes an actual letter by post — detailing her life or discussing some idea she was pondering. But she often went days without contacting him, and she never mentioned missing him or suggested that they might get together. Jackson, used to being chased by women, wondered if she was playing by some old-fashioned rule book, if she’d found an etiquette book in some used book store on courting for girls fresh out of finishing school. He wanted to see her but couldn’t very well knock on her father’s door, and he didn’t have the money to take her out. He’d have to invite her down for a night in, he decided, which would require getting Doreen out of the house.
Despite their lack of forwardness, though, Margot’s letters were intimate in their own way, and unless he was a poorer judge of character than he had reason to believe, Margot wasn’t playing at anything. She wasn’t calculating. He sent her another email, this one containing a corny joke about a writer who comes home to find his house on fire. His wife explains that she’d been lighting the fire when his agent called and the curtains ignited. His every possession charred or consumed, the writer asks, with uncontained excitement, “My agent called?”
“I’d rather have you call me,” he concluded the email, and signed Love, Jackson, though Margot continued to close her notes Fondly.
He was constructing a well-deserved sandwich when Doreen came home. “And how are the luminaries at Grub?” he asked, spreading spicy mustard on a slice of rye. “Overhear any agents wooing bestselling authors or hammering out hardcover-softcover deals?”
“I did cook for those tennis sisters and their editor.”
“Editor? You mean coach.”
Doreen shook her long ponytail. “Editor. They’re writing a series of young adult novels.”
“I keep telling you, Doreen. That’s exactly what you should be doing.”
“Jackson, you’ve said this kind of thing yourself. It’s like that actor who wrote the novel about the retarded kid. Their books are being published because they’re already famous. I’m not. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be a writer.”
“You like to read.”
“Yes, but I don’t like to write. Part of your problem is that there aren’t enough readers who aren’t also trying to be writers. I don’t want to be a writer. I want to be a chef, have my own restaurant, and have all those editors and agents and big-time writers and tennis stars lunching on my roasted beets.”
Jackson cut his sandwich in half and opened a bottle of beer. “Say, Doreen,” he said, “think you could get me a discount if I have lunch at Grub in a while?”
“Not with your credit history,” she laughed.
Jackson awoke the next morning with a title, which he pasted into his query letter. To save money as well as time, he emailed the letter, together with the first three chapters, to those agents who accepted electronic queries. He printed out the other queries, addressed the envelopes, and walked to the post office. In the crisp air, Jackson felt the energy of fall, of school in swing and people back to work, of productivity and success. The day was going his way. The line at the post office was short, and the clerk was young and pretty. The bagel he picked up on the way home was still warm, and that afternoon the sentences came easily. Shortly before five, he received two emails and one phone call from agents interested in representing the book now titled Oink.