Eddie’s voice penetrated the intercom, and Henry buzzed him up.
Enjoying the novelty of having both a guest and something to serve him, Henry boiled water for tea and spiraled windmill cookies onto a plate. “I’m turning bourgeois,” he said over his shoulder.
“Henry, there’s no crime in a little caffeine and nourishment. You’re not exactly pigging out like Balzac, and even his sharpest critic was known to eat, drink, smoke, and fuck.” Eddie paused for Henry to catch the reference. “But for godsake don’t start devoting whole paragraphs to describing the corners of your apartment and the slant of your blinds.”
“Curtains,” Henry said. “I don’t have blinds. I have curtains.”
“I was just making a Robbe-Grillet joke. What’s this, The New Literalism?”
Henry laughed. “Never fear. Something else. Something, well, something open.” He lifted his arms over his head, then spread them wide. “Yet contained,” he added, pulling his arms closer a fraction of an inch.
“Open, yet contained.” Eddie eyed him, then walked over to claim a cup of the tea and three biscuits. “Sounds tricky.”
Henry felt a delicious panic. “Maybe,” he called out, “maybe the solution lies in variation.” He played Ravel’s piano trio, one of his several new CDs, on the cheap, portable player he’d bought. He listened standing, eyes closed, mentally book-marking the different treatments of the seventh note. By the time Henry opened his eyes, Eddie had finished the cookies and drained his tea.
“Terribly sorry,” Henry said.
“Don’t sweat it,” his friend smiled. “It’s part of your charm, and it beats staring at the blank screen.”
“I’m terribly sorry, but I’ve got a book to start.”
“I came all the way up from Murray Hill,” Eddie said. “I just got here.”
Henry felt like a heel. “I appreciate it, I really do, and you can hang out if you want, but I need to work. You know how it is.”
“I used to,” Eddie said. “I remember feeling how you feel.”
“Why don’t you stay and hang out?” Henry asked, sensing that his friend was in some sort of writerly crisis, some version of what people mean by the generic term ‘writers’ block.’ “I like the idea of working with someone else in the room. That’s a neat idea actually: a series of stories all written with other people around. Could be very interesting to see the subtle effects of that, see if the presence of different sorts of people would influence tone and style.”
“You’re starting to sound like a poet,” Eddie said, adding quickly, “which I mean as a compliment, not how Jack means it.”
“What’s your opinion of the word ‘splay’?” Henry clamped a clean sheet of paper onto his typewriter and turned the canister, comforted by its familiar clicks. “Is that a word we can still use?”
Chapter forty
It didn’t take long for Jackson Miller to become accustomed not merely to success but to having his opinion solicited. While he had not enjoyed the travel itself, he had relished the long lines of people wanting his signature on Oink, the laughter his puns elicited, the attractive women who lingered at the end of the evening. Now that he was back home, it was a rare day when he wasn’t contacted by a journalist or editor or nonprofit group asking for his thoughts on the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, the quality of Adam Richards’ radio book reviews, or, for that matter, the best sushi in New York or the political landscape in Afghanistan. National Public Radio interviewed him about his adventure submitting the Chekhov story, and, as he’d promised Amanda, he named the editors who’d not only failed to recognize but had deigned to criticize one of the finest short stories ever crafted.
After his triumphant book tour and swift rise up The Times’ list of bestsellers, he increasingly associated with a circle of other writers — men in their thirties, all possessed of some version of Jackson’s own name: Jack, Jake, Johnson, John, and Jonathan. These Jonathans often dined at Grub, in combinations of two or three, or occasionally the whole council. Jackson was gratified to observe that they were noticed, watched, eavesdropped upon.
Jackson had become who he’d planned to become on his ninth birthday — a vow he had renewed looking over the North Carolina mountains — and he never wanted to give it up. And so, with Amanda’s encouragement, which was often flirtatious but sometimes quite strict, Jackson began in earnest to write about Meindert Hobbema’s abandoned life of art. In mind of the small human forms the artist tucked into his landscapes, Jackson tentatively titled the new book Hide and Seek.
“Don’t read too much, just the basics,” Amanda had advised. “The important thing is to stack up some pages.”
He wondered if Amanda was making him her project because she’d given up on Eddie ever being the great man she could be the great woman behind. He knew better than to vocalize this thought, and the truth was that he was glad for the extra guidance and motivation. Amanda wouldn’t let him fail; he believed that.
Elegant variation was effortless work for Jackson, and, as always, the sentences came easily. He soon realized, though, that the sardonic tone that came to him more naturally than intentionally, and had worked so perfectly in Oink, was inappropriate for the new book. So he worked more conscientiously with his ideas, creating full-blown on the page the beautiful female main character for whom his artist-protagonist forsakes art for a desk job, and then used the events of his plot to blame her for the world’s loss in paintings. Jackson presumed this was a much better story than Hobbema’s actual biography. More than likely, the man had lacked artistic commitment from the get-go, was lazy, or had succumbed to the dull pressure of a new father-in-law or small-pursed uncle. Some people needed schedules dictated by others, or maybe the man hadn’t really cared for the smell of paint. Whatever the historical truth was, Jackson penned a romantic tragedy, delivered with a droll cynicism moderated by empathetic diction.
After turning down several invitations because he was busy with the book and with the Jonathans, Jackson at last agreed to have dinner with Doreen and her abominable fiancé. He figured he owed it to Doreen, and Whelpdale’s doings might provide fodder for an article and, possibly, a bit of amusement. Besides, even without formal training, Doreen was a great cook.
His former roommate did not disappoint: she served a first-rate Insalata Caprese, pepper-encrusted lamb shanks with a mint salsa, perfectly roasted potatoes and parsnips, and a simple custard-filled cake studded with pine nuts.
Jackson was struck by the genuine fondness Whelpdale exhibited for Doreen. He would quickly hoist up his large body whenever she approached or rose from the table.
“Southern upbringing,” he said apologetically.
“It’s charming,” Jackson said, as he considered recovering his own manners. “But aren’t you from Toledo?”
He briefly considered a column about the table habits and general levels of politeness of well-known authors — who’s a gentleman at dinner and who’s a real boor, that sort of thing — but dismissed it because it would likely get him in trouble with the Jonathans, one of whom had never encountered an entrée he didn’t consider finger food, and another who guarded his plate with his forearm as though he’d spent long years in maximum-security lockup. Instead, he offered the idea to Whelpdale, who pulled a small stack of index cards and a pen from his inside coat pocket and jotted down a note.