Chapter twenty-seven
Amanda Renfros prepared for the holidays as though she and Eddie had no money problems, reasoning that their financial woes were near their end. She was hanging a plush wreath on the door to their apartment when her husband came home from the library one Wednesday evening.
“Only two people live above us,” Eddie objected. “Who are you trying to impress?”
Amanda followed him inside. “I don’t need to impress anyone but myself, and you should give me some credit for trying to pretend this is a home. I’m not going to just let things slide. You know aesthetics are important to me. Don’t underestimate what dreary surroundings do to a person. Take poor Henry; he lives in that squalid place, and it follows naturally that he lets himself go to hell. I can only imagine that his book will necessarily be grim and ugly. That will, in turn define — and by define I mean limit — his readership. And that, in turn, will further dampen his outlook on life. And so on and so on, and I worry he’ll wind up selling used books on the street.”
Eddie emptied an ice tray and fixed himself a drink. “He’s a better writer than I am. Want something?”
Amanda suspected that her husband was saying this so that she would protest, and there was a time when she would have jumped in to reassure him of his great talent. But she was tired of his pleas for ego stroking. Often his efforts to awaken her sympathy were followed by clumsy efforts to stir her desire, and she wondered if he knew her at all. There were women, she knew, prone to caretaking and attracted to weakness, but she wasn’t one of them, and Eddie should know that by now.
“Look,” she said. “If the wreath on the door cheers up the upstairs neighbors, it’s been worth the effort.”
“You’re talking about the Levines, Amanda. I bet their December would be just fine without our Christmas wreath.”
“Anyway,” she continued, “we may decide to have some friends over for a bit of holiday cheer.”
“Which friends?” The edge to his voice was unmistakable. “I really can’t stomach Big Time Jack until I hear word on my book. Last chance on that drink.”
“Don’t be morbid, and don’t be ridiculous.” Amanda dragged a chair across the room so that she could reach the high closet that held their holiday ornaments. “Yes, pour me a glass of wine. I’m thinking all natural materials on the tree this year. You know, straw animals and raffia bows and the like. Maybe we have some trimmings from Christmas past that we can carry over, to save money.”
She waited for Eddie to lend her a hand before climbing off the chair with the box in hand, gracefully, really, given the awkwardness of the maneuver. She started to make a comment about chivalry. But the sight of him slid halfway between sitting and laying on the sofa he had pretended to love when she bought it, combined with her certainty that at least one new book contract was in their very near future, swelled her generosity. There he was: the man she’d married, the author of the critically hailed Sea Miss, which couldn’t have been completed without her.
She sat on the chair nearest him and thanked him as he handed her the wine. The tannins stung her tongue slightly, and the familiar pepper-and-cherry taste spread across her palate. “Eddie, as soon as Christmas has passed — the day after, even — let’s go away somewhere warm, somewhere where we can gaze at water and dig our feet in the sand and you can start a book you can really be proud of.”
“Amanda, if only I thought I could write such a book, I’d brave the creditors and fly south with you.”
“But you could, Eddie, with a change of scenery. This just can’t be your fate, after such a bright start. I won’t believe it. You’ve got to make one more real effort. If you fail in literature — I mean give up on it — then what?”
“Amanda, do you love me? Say that you love me.”
“Of course I do. That’s why I’m proposing that we go away somewhere warm, somewhere you can work. I hate being poor, Eddie. I detest it. I promised myself that when I was an adult I would never be poor again. A person shouldn’t have to be poor as a child and an adult.”
“Grown-up poverty for rich kids?”
“Absolutely, let them take a turn. But it’s not just that. It’s the idea of you becoming an ordinary man.”
“Even if I never write another line, that won’t undo what I’ve done. I know I haven’t been prolific, but you can’t condemn my entire self.”
“When I suggested the trip, I was being generous. I wanted to give you another chance to write a truly great book. I wanted to give us another chance.”
“You say that as though the one is dependent on the other.” Eddie roused himself from his slouch, knelt before her, and wrapped his arms around her waist. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you’ve been so cool to me lately.”
“I’ve been distracted, and busy. I have writing of my own now.”
“Or course you do, and that makes me happy.”
“Does it?” She urged a smile, stroked her husband’s hair. “I believe that we’re both going to be famous, at least a kind of famous. People will know our names if not our faces.”
Eddie kissed her hair, her eyes, her mouth. As she imagined him as a three-and then four-book author, getting reviewed, giving readings, being photographed, she found that, for the first time in awhile, she desired her husband.
The mood was not dispelled by early morning, if only because she rose before he did. When she slid from bed, he slept on his side, his profile turned against the pillow. His breath was smooth, and he seemed composed in a way he rarely did when awake.
As was the case nearly every morning of late, Amanda found an email sent from the West Coast late the night before. It was from the editor of Swanky, begging Clarice Aames for anything. “Spit in a bag and we’ll use it,” he wrote.
When she searched the web for Clarice Aames, she found not only the link to the Swanky table of contents, but two websites with pages devoted to the mysterious author of “Bad Dog Séance.” She typed out a reply to the editor, “I’ll give you something better than spit. Un beso, Clarice.” For the next three hours, while Eddie slept away the morning, Amanda wrote Clarice Aames’ second story: “Sex Kitten Leaps from the Bleeding Edge.”
When she was done, she checked her own messages — she was now using her maiden name, Amanda Yule, for correspondence — and saw that two of the agents she had queried wanted to read the entire manuscript of The Progress of Love. What she felt as her smile spread was not so much happiness as well being, the sense that things were right in the world, that she was at last living the life marked out for her.
Chapter twenty-eight
There had been a time in his life when Andrew Yarborough considered himself an affluent man. That was before the literary world had gone to pot and before he had fathomed what the life he had grown accustomed to living would actually cost over time. Although at long last his wife was making some money with her goddamn healing workshops and assorted fru fra, she gave away more than she made to organizations buying cosmetics for war refugees and saving obscure species of invariably cute animals.
“Why don’t you save a snake?” he’d asked her once, to which she’d replied, “Snakes are very potent symbols in our unconscious life, and I would be proud to help any species in danger. Certainly no snake is more venomous than you’ve become.”