“You aren’t still picking on that sweet pixie-looking girl from the bookstore, are you? Jackson, are you?”
“She has a name, too, just like your Dolomite. And I’m not picking on her. She’s not helpless. She happens to be publishing a novel, I’ll have you know. I admire the hell out of her. At least I’m a good enough person to recognize she’s a much better person than I am. I should get some kind of credit for that.” He squeezed the back of Doreen’s neck, working his way up and down.
“You are serious, aren’t you?” Doreen pulled forward, out of his grip, and turned to look at him. “I guess I’d better check the temperature in hell and the flight path for pigs.”
Jackson took the vodka from the freezer and refilled his small tumbler. “I was serious about you, too, you know.”
Doreen rolled her eyes. “I’ll stay over at my beau’s tomorrow if you promise not to have a hangover for your big date. And don’t call your agent until she calls you.”
“Of course, you’re as right as ever.” Jackson smiled at his pretty roommate, pleased to realize that he was no longer interested in anything other than her friendship. “Oh, and Doreen, ask Mr. Dolomite if he’d buy a book about cut-throat, bed-hopping, ecstasy-taking Wall Street types. Say if he saw it in an airport bookstore near the magazines and it was titled Oink. For instance.”
“For instance,” she repeated.
Chapter twenty-one
The ringing phone annoyed Henry Baffler. He had tried to ignore it, but whoever it was kept calling back and Henry worried that the bell’s rhythm would disrupt the cadence of his prose. Across the fall, he had pressed at his glacial pace, working with great patience and affection. It wouldn’t be a terribly long novel, but it would be a book without a single discordant word choice. Every phrase, every punctuation mark would be essential. He believed he was making a perfect thing. And that’s how he thought of it: as making something, rather than writing it. He was constructing a piece of visual art with words. It was a long poem, really, he sometimes thought.
But on other days, he thought, no, it’s a mosaic — and each word is a small colored tile.
“Yes,” he said harshly into the receiver of the old phone.
“Yes, Henry, dear, is Patrick there?” It was the syrupy drawl of his absentee roommate’s mother.
“I haven’t seen him today,” he said, and then caught himself.
“Because I just got in. Should I have him return your call when he gets back?”
“That’d be lovely. You know how a mother worries.”
Henry returned the phone to its cradle, then picked it back up, dialed the number of Patrick’s girlfriend, and left the dutiful message. He could not afford to lose this living arrangement. He’d already cut back on the number of students he tutored so that he could give himself more fully to his book. To survive during this particularly lean stretch, he’d sold everything of value he had and was down to his last three CDs, his signed first-edition of Naked Lunch, and his grandfather’s pocket watch, which his brother hadn’t wanted. These might have to go, too — a sad conclusion he accepted as the price of art. Such was the life of the writer, now as much as ever in history. Burroughs would have understood, even if his grandfather wouldn’t have forgiven him.
Henry knew that most people would have little sympathy for him, and he was keenly aware that those who passed him on the street — people in new clothes, people on their way to and from jobs and spouses and mistresses and stores — would view him as inert, weak, foolish, socially mutinous. They’d see him as an affront to every industrious person who bustles about, producing things people actually want to buy. They’d tell him that if he must write at all, he should take a page from Jackson Miller’s book.
But Henry believed what his friend Eddie Renfros wanted to believe but doubted: the fact that his talent was incongruous with the circumstances into which he had been born made that talent no less valuable. Had he been born rich, his literary labors might have seemed noble to others. Because he was poor, he was more likely to be scorned. And his beautifully honed book would most likely go unpublished or, at best, be published in a small way, its few reviews deriding it as too quiet, perhaps even tedious.
Of course Henry would have preferred to take a job and buy back his CDs and get new clothes. He would like to eat well, go out for drinks, attend movies. But that was not his fate. He accepted his destiny as a starving artist with humility and a sense of responsibility. That was the hand he’d been dealt, and he would play it. If God or Harmony or DNA wanted in him a starving artist, he would be the finest one he could. And by doing justice to his noble bailiff, he would honor all the people out there leading their simple lives as best they could.
He had been at work for more than eight hours, interrupted only by the phone call, when he typed the hundred and twentieth page of Bailiff. More than halfway, he thought, and decided to reward himself by walking down to the market for a day-old bagel and a can of beer. When he returned, he would put in another two hours before allowing himself some sleep.
Chapter twenty-two
Margot Yarborough shifted from foot to foot, using up a few minutes in front of the storefront that used to house The Shadow of the Valley of Books. She didn’t want to arrive at the restaurant too early.
Because of her eye for color balance — and because she was smaller and more agile than anyone else who had worked there — it had been Margot who had composed the store’s displays in the large plate-glass window. Working sometimes around a color and other times around a theme, she’d stack books, arrange them in fans, or space them like dominoes waiting to be felled. Once she’d built a playground of children’s books, using a fan to send eight of them around like a merry-go-round. Another time she filled the window with books whose covers were every shade of blue, arranging them from a novel whose blue cover was so faint it looked white, through the azures and the ceruleans, the cobalts and the royals, the cyans and the navies, ending with a history of whaling in a midnight-blue wrap. The previous spring, over the weekend that launched daylight savings time, Margot had moved into the window every book in the store whose title contained the word ‘time’, from a horror novel titled Killin’ Time to a romance called Time of Destiny.
Other than a poster educating consumers about shade-grown beans, the window was now empty, allowing passersby and patrons of the new coffeehouse branch to see and be seen by each other. Margot remembered that one of the other titles from the spring display had been Time Changes Everything, and she indulged in a moment of melancholy before spinning on the heel of her only pair of tall shoes and smiling at the sign across the street. Its letters were painted in an ornate floral calligraphy that belied the simplicity and homespun connotation of the word: GRUB.
Though she had made sure she was on time to the minute but not early, she was the first of her party to arrive. During her ten minutes under the watch of the maître d’, who had handled her coat as though it were wet, Margot grew dissatisfied with what she was wearing. Surrounded by a sea of dark solid fabrics — black and gray and brown and olive — she felt like a schoolgirl in her print dress. At least she had worn her pumps. She rearranged her curls with her fingers and was just about to ask directions to the bathroom so that she could put on lipstick when two women pushed into the foyer. Both were tall, wearing slinky black slacks and muted silk blouses. One had darker hair than the other, but they had the same blunt-ended shoulder-length cut.