Jackson and Amanda loathed Whelpdale, but Eddie liked him despite himself. Whelpdale was so frank, so utterly honest about what he was doing and why, that you couldn’t fault him for ulterior motives. And his happiness at the success of other writers seemed genuine. Whelpdale seemed to think he was doing what he was doing for all of them. Besides, he was one of those big guys who actually is jovial, and Eddie generally enjoyed talking to him.
Jackson, looking incredibly fresh and as annoyingly tall as ever, approached and took a seat at their table. “Great crowd. Capital.” He looked around. “They serving coffee?”
“Downright uncivilized, isn’t it?” Amanda swung her hair over her shoulder. “Who are you looking for?”
“Have you seen Andrew Yarborough here?”
“Nope,” Eddie said, wondering if Amanda’s rearranging of her hair signified a change in mood.
The conference host — an elderly, spry woman with sterling silver hair and a reputation as a master of the short story — stepped on stage and welcomed the crowd.
“This is both the saddest and happiest day of every year. Saddest, because our fabulous week is over. Happiest, because this reading is the proof in the pudding that our hard work and effort, not to mention our faith — yes, our faith — can and will be rewarded.” She punched her fist into the air.
Amanda and Jackson snickered a little. Eddie feared that Amanda would be stricken with the giggles. In Iowa, they’d once had to leave a poetry reading because she couldn’t stop laughing and the poet had hated them both ever after, even though Amanda had tried to apologize, tried to explain that it wasn’t the poems but an association they triggered that had caused her laughing fit.
“Does she think she’s preparing troops to march to their death to save Paris?” Jackson whispered.
The woman at the microphone continued. “Not only that, but our work will reward the world with more great writing to lift the human spirit.” And with that, she introduced the author of The Book Club.
Amanda snickered again, and Jackson coughed into his hand.
The writer ascending the stage was a woman Eddie had heard earlier in the week telling a group of young admirers, “Now that I’ve done the novel thing, I’m not sure what I’m going to try next. Some kind of catering business, maybe, or perhaps just a screenplay. And I’ve always wanted to paint.”
Eddie figured she deserved the disdain of his wife and best friend. He hated the idea of writing as midlife hobby, the idea that writing isn’t a lifelong commitment to an art form but just one more skill to acquire, one more activity to check off your list. Still, he glanced left and right to silence Amanda and Jackson, and the three alumnae of the country’s most prestigious writing program braced themselves to hear the paisley-wrapped novelist read about the small loves and large disappointments of the members of a women’s book club.
“She’s brilliant, really,” Amanda said when it was over, no longer bothering to whisper. “Write about your target audience, and they will buy.”
Whelpdale took the stage next with a swaying gait that moved his formidable body from side to side. He tucked his hair behind his ears, adjusted the microphone with confidence, and cleared his throat into it. What followed was characteristic Whelpdale: slews of sentences containing “as though” and “as if” in which the two parts were identical rather than analogous. “He walked quickly into the room, as though he wished to move fast,” he read in a lilting voice. “The house’s owner had hung a Mets cap and an original Picasso, as though he believed the two belonged at the same level.”
Jackson snorted.
“She put on her sweater, as if she were cold,” sent Amanda back to giggling.
Even so, all would have been fine, except that Whelpdale read for fifty minutes. The entire session was supposed to have lasted an hour — twenty minutes per writer. People were leaving. At first only those in the back slipped away. Then around the room whole tables rose noisily and left.
Whelpdale read on. “He found her appearance simpatico, as though she were agreeable and sympathetic to him.”
“Get off the fucking stage,” Jackson finally hissed, his southern accent leaking.
Whelpdale looked as though he’d been struck across the face and finished with haste.
Eddie stood quickly and read for seven minutes to those who remained. Amanda had pleaded with him to read from the second book or the new one — there were often agents and editors present at these things — but Eddie was more comfortable reading from a published book than from a manuscript and in his condition he wanted to read something familiar. Avoiding eye contact with his wife, he read the emergence scene from Sea Miss. The room was well over half empty when he shut the book with a soft clap.
Amanda cursed Whelpdale for the first hour of their trip home. “I’m so angry on your behalf!” She drummed the dashboard of the rental car with both fists, holding the steering wheel straight with her knees.
“I don’t deserve you, Amanda. To defend me when everything is my own fault. If I could be more disciplined, I’d be out on my own book tour now instead of third billing at some conference for would-be writers.”
“You just need to get back home and on a schedule. Maybe a timer would help.”
“I wish I was good at something else, or had a family business I could go into. Then I could give you more. It’s stupid to try to write for a living. I’m an idiot for doing it.”
“Don’t be dramatic,” she said. “Writing is as good a business as any. But since we aren’t independently wealthy, you might try a little harder to think of your work as your business. You could do good work and work that would sell if you could only look at it a little more practically. I know we always make fun of Jack, but he’s not altogether wrong. I won’t be surprised if he sits down and writes a bestseller someday.”
“Well, I’m not Jack. He’s naturally optimistic, and I’m not. I know you’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean I can actually do what you suggest.” He watched the blur of trees through the passenger-side window. “I need your sympathy more than your advice.”
“Eddie, it’s just that romantic poverty sounds good when you’re young, when it seems noble to write beautiful, obscure work. But it gets old fast. I liked reading your reviews, hearing you on the radio, having people recognize us at the bookstore. And now I know what good things cost. I don’t want to go back to living like I did as a kid. That’s not why I got the hell out of Wilkes-Barre on my eighteenth birthday. If I had to choose between literary reputation and contemptible popularity, I think I might take the bestseller.”
“No you wouldn’t, Amanda. You’re not like that.”
“But you’re so talented, Eddie, I want you to have the audience you deserve. Wouldn’t you rather be read by more people than less? Don’t you want people to hear what you have to say?”
“What I have to say, yes. Not what they want me to say. Not at the price of writing crap. Have you tried to read some of the books that are out there?”
“But you write beautifully. Your book wouldn’t be crap. It would just be more accessible, more the sort of book you can’t put down because you want to find out what will happen.” Amanda always used her hands when she talked, and now, even as she used one hand to drive, her right hand fluttered. “This is what I propose. Take a week and plot out a short book — one with a good story to it. Then write it out, but with the classic Renfros style. You’ll see that you can tell a good story and write well.”
“Don’t forget that it takes a particular talent to write that sort of story,” Eddie continued. “Plot has always been the hardest but also the least important thing to me.”