Of course the manuscript was a mess, full of many ordinary sentences and lines of dialogue that were mere filler for the more interesting, stylized dialogue he would weave in during revision. It needed to be curried with a very fine-toothed comb.
Though Eddie had finished the draft of Conduct and Amanda celebrated with him that evening, in general she seemed no happier with him. She was silent more often than not. Eddie knew that silence was reproach and that Amanda used it to conserve energy. “Just because you’re unproductive,” she’d once explained to him, “doesn’t mean you can drag me along for company.”
But now that he was productive, it seemed unfair of her to pout because his book needed revision. “Every book needs revision,” he said.
She tried to explain her mood away, to blame it on the fact that she was now preoccupied with her own work. But then one day he rounded the blue shoji screen and saw that the stack of his pages was gone. He sat, his hand resting on the spot where his novel had been, until he heard the door to their home open and the tips of Amanda’s heels clicking softly on the wood floor.
“Where is it?” he asked, projecting his voice over the screen but not shouting. “Where is it?”
He heard her sigh, soft and tired. “I gave it to your agent.”
Amanda knew that the book wasn’t ready for his agent. He had overheard her at parties and on the phone telling not just Jackson Miller but also Henry Baffler and Whelpdale, whom she loved to loathe, that her husband had written a book he would be unwilling to read. Should his agent accept the novel and then sell it — both events seemed far-fetched — everyone he knew would greet the publication date with private scoffing or a sad shake of the head.
Sitting there, his hand still where his pages had been, he imagined for the first time what his life without Amanda would be like. Not the vague fear of abandonment — that muted hollow terror he’d experienced before — but an actual conjuring of the days, some of them lonely, but all of them free of the tightness in his stomach, the creeping guilt of failure, the extra pair of eyes always on his work.
What he said was this: “Thank you. That should expedite things.”
She rounded the screen and looked at him as though his face was new to her. “I thought you might react differently. I’m pleased that you’re pleased.”
She smiled, and in that smile Eddie read recognition: they both knew that something had changed between them.
Over the next several days, Amanda’s willful defiance of his wishes — and her apparent disregard for his long-term best interests — cemented a transformation in Eddie’s feelings toward his wife. He loved her as madly as ever, but what had once given him joy now gnawed and festered. He felt wronged by her.
She sensed it, he could tell, though he couldn’t identify anything particular she said as specific evidence. But they no longer talked about books or music; they didn’t even gossip about their friends and acquaintances. Indeed all of their conversations, which became increasingly brief, centered on money, publishing, and the necessary quotidian details of shopping and errands and mail. For the first two years of their marriage, their relationship itself had afforded them many happy conversations in which they reviewed moments of their days at Iowa, their courtship, their honeymoon, their late nights during Eddie’s first book tour. Now their relationship was too dangerous to mention, as if naming it aloud would call forth its destruction. They had sex perhaps once every three weeks — a situation Eddie considered an abandonment of their vows.
Amanda was forever typing, typing, typing. When he finally reached the point where he had to confront her about it, in anguish accusing her of taking a cyber lover, she confessed that she was well into a novel — a fact Eddie knew should please him but instead frightened him. He fretted that her novel would be bad or would be very good — better than his — and he worried most of all that it would bring her enough money to buy her way out of not only their debts but their marriage. On the bleakest days, he told himself that would be for the best. He’d procure another copyediting position and marry a nice waitress with no materialistic tendencies or unbounded ambition.
While he waited for his agent to read Conduct, he idled away many of his days at the NYU library. Though he wasn’t able to read with much concentration, he preferred sitting among strangers than under Amanda’s resentful gaze or hearing her fingers clacking away on the keyboard. As he browsed the stacks, he began to think about writing some nonfiction — a magazine piece or a review, perhaps. Something to keep his name in circulation. Anything other than a novel. He started a piece on the phenomenon of being ‘post cool,’ thinking he might place it with one of the magazines marketed to men moving into and through their thirties. In a better mood, he could have written up the piece happily and easily, could have written with the light touch that had made his column in the University of Wisconsin paper such a hit. But pressure had ruined him; he belabored every word and abandoned the essay by the fourth paragraph like the sinking ship that it was.
It was that night, the very moment he crossed the threshold, that Amanda showed him Jackson Miller’s new essay, which had just come out in The Monthly. Eddie dropped his backpack and sat at the dining-room table to flip through the magazine. The piece chronicled Jackson’s brushes with famous authors, including the time he’d “borrowed” Denis Johnson’s swim trunks and the time Norman Mailer extinguished a cigar on the toe of his shoe. The litany of literary misbehavior concluded by describing the drunken night Jackson had felt up the chunky wife of a Pulitzer-winning novelist in a diner booth and later had agreed to tackle Richard Ford for twenty dollars but had managed only to fall at his feet.
“I remember that guy’s wife,” Eddie said, hoping to catch Amanda’s attention. “After her husband won the Pulitzer, she made him introduce her as ‘also a novelist’, though I don’t think she ever wrote anything for adults. He even had to put it in his bios. Now that’s whipped.”
“Did I tell you about Jackson’s piece in next Sunday’s The Times?” Amanda asked. “He got hold of the iPod lists of well-known writers and analyzed them in relation to their work. He sent me an advance copy. It really is hilarious. You won’t believe what some people listen to!”
“Greasing the wheels in anticipation of his publication date.” Eddie heard the gloom in his tone and tried to lift it. “Actually, I’m working on an article, too. For a glossy, I should think. It’s about being post-cool.”
“I’ve been wondering what you’ve been up to.”
“I figured you weren’t interested. Why didn’t you ask?”
“I was afraid to, Eddie. It would have seemed like reminding you that, well, you know.”
“That we’re still broke and facing another crisis? That I’m a failure as a provider?” He pushed back his chair with intentional drama, moved into the living room, and sank into the sofa. “At least you’d have appeared interested in me.”
Amanda started to reply but waited. After she sat down, facing him across the coffee table, she asked, “Do you think you can place the piece? There was that book last year, you know, written by that journalist, on how you can’t be cool after you have kids.”