Henry hit return and rolled the final page off the cannister. He placed it face down on the stack of its predecessors, lifted the whole manuscript, and carefully tapped its four sides against the tabletop. He made a mental note to be on the lookout for a large rubber band or a clean, manuscript-sized box.
He was hungry as well as anxious to celebrate his accomplishment and toast New Realism. Though he knew his refrigerator was empty, he opened the door anyway and pondered the bare shelves. He didn’t have to examine his money either — he knew exactly how much he had — but he counted and tabulated the same figure: two dollars and sixty-eight cents. There was an all-night market about nine blocks up that sold single bottles of beer, tax included, for a dollar and sixty-nine cents. Six blocks in the other direction, toward Chelsea, he could buy a bag of day-old rolls for a dollar flat. He threw off the sofa cushions and, as if fate rewarded art, found a single shiny penny. He shouldered his way into the corduroy jacket that had been too warm in the fall but was now only thick enough keep him from freezing, setting out quickly, as the store that sold the rolls would soon close. One floor down, he had to step around his only English-speaking neighbor, Martin Briggs, who sat on the landing next to a half-gone bottle of gin, wearing a filthy tuxedo jacket and jeans and using one cigarette to light the next.
“I wish I were dead,” the man said. “I mean, you don’t dump someone on New Year’s Eve. It’s just not done. It’s just not right.”
Henry navigated around him, dropping two steps at a time to get by on the narrow staircase. Despite his growling stomach and the cold snapping through his thin jacket, Henry’s stride was springy as he made his way through clots of Dominican revelers and then past the trendy couples on Tenth Avenue. A new year was moving in, his book was done, and he was about to drink the first beer he had allowed himself in weeks.
The owner of the bodega was just lowering the window armor, but the old man opened the door to Henry and sold him the dollar bag of torta rolls. Half an hour later, Henry was on his way home with a bottle of beer and his bread, thinking about how he might submit his manuscript. He could use the library computer to query agents and editors by email and then hand-deliver the manuscript to the first person who seemed interested. But he’d eventually need to make a copy or two. He shouldn’t have bought the beer, but he told himself that since he had, he shouldn’t let regret spoil the taste.
Two blocks away from his apartment, the sidewalks grew heavier with people. He heard sirens close by. At the smell of smoke, he broke into a run. “Let me get through!” he shouted, looking for gaps in the crowd and shooting narrowly through.
Smoke billowed from several windows on the upper floors of his building. Henry sliced his skinny body between two policemen and raced up the steps of the burning tenement.
“Hey you! Stop there!” called one of the cops, but he made no move to chase or restrain him.
“I live here! I’ve got to get something!” Henry called behind him, dropping bread and beer as he ascended the exterior steps three at a time. At the entrance, he had to push by Martin Briggs, who was exiting the building gripping the pack of cigarettes that had likely set the fire. Inside the building, the smoke swarmed the stairwell, but Henry pushed up, holding his jacket sleeve over his mouth and nose and closing his eyes for as long as possible. He was desperate with the dread of losing Bailiff—his great work and reason for waking each morning. On the verge of unconsciousness, he pushed his key into his lock and tumbled forward into the fresher air of his apartment. His manuscript lay on the table, where he had left it. Despite the fire raging above and below his flat, the realist felt relief, even joy, as he rested his hand on the undamaged stack of pages. He removed his jacket and used it to wrap the manuscript, bundling it to his chest like a baby.
Now that he had his manuscript in hand, Henry’s courage receded. Watching the flames now engulfing the door to his apartment, he contemplated death by fire — the ultimate melodrama — with a nauseous mind. He had no choice but to climb through his little window and onto the ledge. There should be a fire escape, he thought, and wondered why he had never noticed its absence until now. He looked down the five stories to the street. A crowd looked up, cheering in a mix of Spanish and English.
Two fire engines had arrived, and a man in yellow slickers called to him on a megaphone. “You need to jump. Just push off and point your feet toward the trampoline.”
Henry looked down at the inflatable pad, grasping his novel to his chest. Already pinned to the wall by vertigo, he was sickened further by the nightmarish fantasy of the hundreds of pages of his pure example of New Realism fluttering through the neighborhood, white rectangles scattered the length and breadth of Hell’s Kitchen to be stepped on, snowed on, picked up for scrap. His ideas could be pilfered or mocked. Lines could be read out of context and misunderstood.
The front of his body was cold, but his back was hot from the heat mounting in the building. Spotlights scanned his face in bright flashes as the crowd chanted for him to escape. Holding the manuscript gently against one forearm, he worked to better secure it with the jacket, the shouts of “Jump, jump, jump!” and “Saltese, saltese, saltese!” pounding in the canals and drums of his ears. He grasped Bailiff tightly and leaped, willing his legs toward the trampoline. At the instant he jumped, he heard a firefighter call out: “I think he’s got a baby!”
He opened his eyes before he stopped bouncing up and back into the embrace of the plastic, taking in the swarm of faces and cameras and flaring light as images from an Ezra Pound poem.
“The brave man saved a cat!” a child called.
A woman firefighter with a beautiful face leaned over him and lifted her hand toward his bundle. “Is it all right? Is it a baby? A pet? It was a crazy thing for you to do, but it was courageous to run in.”
A television crew filming the scene still pointed its camera at Henry. He grinned at them and unwrapped Bailiff. “I saved my manuscript,” he said. “It’s a novel of New Realism.”
The look on the beautiful firefighter’s face sharpened, and she crinkled her nose in what even Henry could not mistake for anything but disgust. “You risked your life for an unpublished novel?”
“I guess I do it every day,” he muttered, wondering if something was wrong with him and, if so, whether a doctor could treat it.
Chapter thirty-one
With the exception of the horrible night her father got drunk with Quarmbey and Frank Hinks, Margot had found his demeanor greatly improved since they’d turned in his book. Everyone in the house had been relieved when his editor accepted the manuscript. No doubt her father’s pride was hurt because it had taken the woman two months to get around to reading it and because she’d told him that the modest advance initially mentioned had been further reduced after in-house discussions. The editor had promised her father, though, that they “would make money.”
Margot was unsure whether it was a sign of softening or weakening that her father had agreed to this. He even said that it was better this way, better to have some of the money up front and the bulk of it later. She didn’t doubt that the speedy publication schedule was keeping him in better humor than he might have been in otherwise, and she’d smiled when he told her that the book needed only the lightest of copyedits, that it was virtually without error. In her work on the galleys, Margot found only three small mistakes, and one of those had been introduced by the editor.