“Slow down on the grape juice.” Amanda spoke sharply to her husband.
“Thinking about my recent adventure,” Henry said, “I find it funny as hell to picture you guys at the morgue identifying my charred body. Imagine the news stories then: ‘Deluded and poverty-stricken writer overestimates the value of his unpublished novel’ and so on.”
“That’s horrible,” Amanda said, but she laughed.
“You’d have even ranked a cartoon in The City and been memorialized on the ulcer website,” said Jackson.
“What’s ulcer?” Henry asked.
“A bunch of bad writers who’ve chosen to blame the literary establishment rather than their own shoddy prose for the fact that they’re unpublished. Their name stands for the Underground Literary Coalition for the Elimination of Revision or Reification or some such.”
“It is true, you know,” Eddie meted out his words, “that many very fine books go unpublished. It’s not always a function of shoddy prose. It’s the market. The chain stores control everything now.”
“I hope it isn’t Realism that they want to eliminate,” said Henry, “unless they mean Realism in the old sense of the word.”
“Anyway,” Jackson continued, “these ulcer guys — and it is mostly guys, surprise, surprise — did put me on to a terrific short story by someone I’ve never heard of. Clarice something.”
“Clarice Aames,” Henry said. “Is there a new story?”
“You like her, too?” Amanda removed the empty pizza boxes to the kitchen.
It struck Henry that her smile carried some sort of riddle. He’d enjoyed the domestic calm her ordering of the apartment had yielded, and it had been long enough since his last girlfriend that her presence aroused him. But she most definitely wasn’t his type. In her enigmatic smile, though, she seemed more interesting than the glossy what-you-see-is-what-you-get female he’d always taken her to be. She still wasn’t his romantic type, but he suspected there was something more under the surface. He suspected that she might be worth writing about.
Chapter thirty-three
Amanda Renfros enjoyed having Henry Baffler in their home for a few weeks, in part because she was touched by his blind devotion to her alter ego. It was also a relief — she could admit this to herself, though of course she would never say it aloud — to have a writer in the house who was an even greater failure than Eddie. She had worried, though, that they might be stuck with Henry forever, but as it turned out, his little news splash did indeed bring salvation. Not only had Jackson’s agent taken on and quickly sold his novel for a modest advance, but someone had anonymously donated a year’s rent on a decent apartment on Lennox near 110t?.
“Maybe your anonymous donor is some reclusive genius,” Amanda suggested, “moved by memories of his own lean early days.”
Henry rubbed his hands together and asked if they thought it could be Salinger.
Eddie, dishrag that he’d become, lectured Henry on why that was unlikely and why it was much more likely that his benefactor was a hack thriller or horror writer who describes his characters in terms of television and movie personalities.
But Amanda saw no harm in letting Henry believe that the reclusive author of “For Esme, with Love and Squalor” was taking a personal interest in saving him from squalor and furthering his literary career. “Sure,” she’d told him. “It very well could be Salinger. He’s using you to try out the New Harlem. I’d almost be surprised if it wasn’t the kind of thing he’d do.”
The day after Henry moved out, Eddie’s agent called. Even across the room, Amanda could hear her voice, nearly breathless, streaming from the receiver. She’d called to tell Eddie that the editor-in-chief of a large house loved his book and saw it as the perfect novel for her assistant, newly promoted to editor, to cut his teeth on. “They may ask you about the autobiographical angle.”
“But my narrator’s a woman and a musician. She has a deaf child. Her lover died in a plane crash.”
The agent’s voice rasped through their living room. “A client of mine wrote a novel about a battered wife. The publisher assumed it was autobiographical. When she refused to go on a talk show and talk about her nonexistent experiences as a battered wife, they killed her marketing.”
“So what am I supposed to say?”
“Something vague maybe, a hint of a great loss that you don’t like to talk about. A mention of your long-suffering wife.”
That call was followed, an hour later, by a long call with Dan, the up-and-comer. Eddie was in a fully manic state by the time he hung up, talking rapidly, going back and forth on whether this was a sure thing. He repeated the young editor’s phrases: ‘mainstream crossover’ and ‘commercial potential.’ “That means it’s a question of how much, not if? Right?”
Amanda nodded. “Sounds like it.”
“Why do you say that?” he demanded.
“It’s going to be hard, Eddie, but you’re just going to have to wait this one out.”
All evening he bounced and paced, sitting with a book or magazine only to abandon it minutes later, opening and closing the refrigerator a dozen times without taking out anything to eat, lying on the rug to do a few sit-ups then popping up to check his email. Amanda felt more sympathy for him than she had in months, and she was comforted by the probability of a happy ending. Unless publishers had devised new methods of tormenting writers, then surely a book deal was the certain outcome.
“They don’t call you if they don’t want the book. That would be beyond the pale even for them.” Amanda tried to knead his tense shoulders, but he kept looking over his shoulders asking “Really?”
Amanda waited for him to go out the next day before phoning her agent, Patrice, for a second opinion.
“Funny,” her agent said, “because Dan still answers her phones. Still, sounds like a sure thing, a question of how much and not if.”
When the bad news came seventeen torturous days later, Eddie, who by that point was never more than a few feet from the phone, fielded the call. “How can they do that to me?” he asked over and over. “Couldn’t they have just kicked my teeth out? Why’d they have to set me up? What did I ever do to them?”
Amanda watched her husband, wanting to help but knowing there was nothing she could say to change the horrible, hard fact. From behind, she wrapped her arms around his neck and chest, kissed the back of his head. She said that she was sorry and promised that someone else would buy his novel. What she did not tell him was that she had given notice at work — and in language that ruled out ever asking for her job back.
She wondered if Eddie was supposed to have slept with someone — the editor-in-chief, or maybe Dan — and had missed the hint. She didn’t think it worked like that, not in publishing, where transactions are done at a distance and anyone can be made to look good in an author photo, but there had to be some explanation. Something had to have gone wrong.
“This is all I found out,” Patrice told her the next day. “The editor-in-chief says it was never a done deal. She claims that it’s great for a writer to come close, to at least talk to an editor interested in his work, that lots of writers would think that’s an honor. She actually said that the next best thing to having serious mainstream crossover appeal it to be told that you might have serious mainstream crossover appeal, though perhaps only in another life.”
As Patrice paused, Amanda could hear her own husky breathing. She leaned against the brick exterior of an apartment building down the street from her own, the cold spreading across the seat of her jeans and her upper back. She said, “Only someone who has never written would ever say such a thing.”