“I’m sorry, here, come sit.”
“First, one question. Are you in love with me?”
“Oh, Margot, you know I’m crazy for you. You’re pretty and good and talented and sweet.”
“Are you in love with me?”
He held his forehead. “Margot, I don’t even know what it means to be in love. You find me an accurate definition, and I’ll let you know if that’s what I feel. But I do know that if it’s in my power to make you happy, I’d like to. You deserve to be happy.”
“Deserve? I don’t want you to be with me as some kind of reward for good behavior. Do you love me?”
Whether out of perverseness or the belief that he was doing her a favor — most likely from a jumbled combination of these motives — he merely shrugged.
“But I guess that’s not a fair question, is it?” she said, looking down, her voice dropping. “Because the real problem is that I don’t love you.”
Leaving her broken umbrella in the joke of a frog stand, she pushed out of his apartment and into the rainy city. From his window, Jackson watched her make her way through the heavy storm, running in spurts from tree to tree, awning to awning, getting completely drenched.
“Yes,” he said to his streaming window pane. “I do love you. God, I do love you.”
But he understood now that she didn’t love him, and his ego wanted to resist that knowledge. Already he was altering the memory of what his relationship with Margot had been, protecting himself with the story of a match not fated, of his generous concern for a girl who was better off without him.
Late that night, sulking in a deep rut, yet warm with good single malt, he wrote his farewell emaiclass="underline"
Allow me to help you remember me with indifference. Remember me as a man who was reckless with the affections of a fine and pretty girl, a man who wanted to make himself proud among fools and idiots. Remember, too, that you are the one who broke things off with me — and wisely so. I have always been too much at the mercy of vulgar ambition to make any kind-hearted girl happy. Soon you would have despised me thoroughly, and, even though I would have known that I deserved your disapproval, I would have revolted against it. It’s the kind of man I am. I’m sending you a new umbrella, and it will be my loss, not yours, that I will never share it with you.
There was no quick reply from Annandale-on-Hudson, and Jackson fell asleep telling himself this new story of failed love.
Chapter forty-four
It was like a sore Eddie Renfros couldn’t resist picking. But at least he set limits: Amazon checks no more than twice per hour, internet review searches no more than twice per day, and attempts to infiltrate his wife’s email accounts — she seemed to keep several — only when he knew she was out of town or, at a minimum, out of the apartment for at least several hours. He came to see the latter as a test: if he couldn’t crack her password, how well could he claim to know her? He was certain that Amanda was the sort of person who would choose her own password as she determined her own life; she would never accept a random combination of letters issued by someone else.
He had tried various combinations of her name (first, last, married, maiden, middle) and important dates. He’d tried his own name and, in one of his most pathetic moments, Jackson’s, as well as the name of the professor he was sure she’d slept with at Iowa. He’d tried various words associated with her novel, including anagrams of its title, the name Fragonard, and the word Frick.
Frick had come to him in the middle of the night and seemed so perfect that it was difficult to wait for his wife to leave the house so that he could try it. It was so very Amanda in its bridging of high and low, its innocently crude innuendo, that he was stunned to receive the “incorrect password/please retype your password” message in the annoying red triangle.
This was one of the ways he passed the time in which he was supposed to be writing. He had alternatives: he had taken up baking and computer solitaire and was doing his utmost to keep up his prodigious and growing tolerance for alcohol in several of its varieties. In response to the expanding waistline that accompanied his increased consumption of homemade baked goods and cocktails, he assigned himself a hundred crunches and two longs walks daily. He was much less likely to give himself permission to forego the crunches than the page-a-day minimum he had also set for himself. A long paragraph covering the better part of a page could easily be rounded up, and sometimes a single sentence could be considered a good day’s work if it promised momentum for the next day. And, of course, sometimes Eddie wrote nothing at all.
“How can I be expected to write a book I wouldn’t want to read?” he had asked when Henry Baffler called to confirm their plans to see Clarice Aames at the CIA Bar.
“Do you think that matters?” Henry had asked. “If it’s a book you really want to write, does it matter if anyone wants to read it?”
So Eddie had begun to ponder the meaning of writing a book he wouldn’t want to read. He’d written one already, but not on purpose. Conduct hadn’t been the book he’d hoped, but it wasn’t a book he’d hurl into the fireplace. Now he imagined following his wife’s advice: he would write just the sort of novel he always cursed for its very popularity.
After checking the Amazon ranking numbers for his book, Jackson’s, and Amanda’s one more time, he ordered a copy of Whelpdale’s How to Write a Novel. He perused the “customers who bought this title also bought” list and added to his shopping cart Give the People What They Want, How to Write a Damn Good Book, and Scribble Yourself to Wealth. Maybe he’d gather the wisdom in these jewels and hack out a bestseller. Probably not — he wasn’t that desperate yet — but it was important to know what the enemy was up to.
He shut down his computer and contemplated the liquor cabinet, wondering how much Irish whiskey he’d have to drink to actually vomit.
Chapter forty-five
Margot Yarborough drove her mother’s sedan upstate toward the first reading of her author tour, skirting the Adirondacks as the area awakened to economic life after a winter’s hibernation. The car’s CD folder contained a large selection of non-classical instrumental music and assorted people singing or chanting in Gaelic, Native American languages, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Butanese, and Hungarian. There was not a single English-language lyric in the lot, and Margot decided that it might be a good thing that her drive would not be intruded upon by other people’s words — at least not by any that she could understand.
She could be alone with thoughts, could figure out what had happened with Jackson. The story she wanted to tell herself was that she was nursing a broken heart and it would make her a real writer, would infuse her future work with depth of feeling, with pain. But it wasn’t true. She hadn’t loved Jackson, though she’d wanted to and he’d wanted her to. For whatever reason, he’d convinced himself that she could give him some form of authenticity, that she could make him a better person, a more serious writer. That meant, of course, that he’d idealized her, saw in her something that wasn’t there. When she asked herself why she hadn’t been able to fall in love with Jackson, she had no answer, and worried that she was missing some capacity she was supposed to have. She hadn’t been in love with the guitar player either. She’d never really been in love, unless she could count the overwhelming crush she’d had on her eleventh-grade literature teacher, which she knew she couldn’t. She always wound up with boyfriends she liked. Maybe that was supposed to be enough — maybe that’s what people called love — but her definitions of love came from novels, and real-life had never come close.