“Where’d you get that line? And what are you talking about?” Henry asked. Still he watched the snow, falling harder now.
“Oh my God. I sound like Jackson now, heaven help me.”
“It’s impossible to really describe all the kinds of snow in words, isn’t it?”
“Unless you speak Inuit or Norwegian or one of those languages with three hundred words for snow.”
“That’s not really true about those languages,” Henry said. “Nowhere near three hundred, and a lot of them are just compound words. You know, like wet-snow. Anyway, I think maybe our highest calling would be to develop and write in an entirely new language. Pure invention.”
“Highest calling? Ask yourself what the coarsest man would do, and do that. That’s the only safe way to live.”
A shift in wind changed the pattern of the snow against the street lights. Ice-edge, Henry thought, were words that paired nicely. Icedge, a word like a blade scraping on ice. He grabbed a notebook and wrote it down. Later he would find a way to build a paragraph around it. Further down the page he wrote wetsnow, wets-now, wet-snow. He was on the brink of something, he could feel it, though he didn’t know what.
Chapter fifty-four
The first time Jackson had slept with Amanda, the event was as emotionally rich as he thought it would be. The next time, later that same blue afternoon, had been as deliciously depraved as he had hoped it would be.
It was true that Amanda lacked Margot’s girlish quality. On the contrary, she looked a little older than she was. But hers was a beauty independent of age, and it was clear that even at forty, at fifty, at sixty, she would be attractive and elegant, even regal. Every lilting line she uttered suggested just enough deliberation to give it the value of considered opinion without sounding either opinionated or, worse, indecisive. Her smile was at once playful and intelligent, and her glance suggested that no subtlety would slip past her unnoticed.
And all this, despite the fact that her origins were humble in the extreme. She was a self-made woman, and if it happened that the occasional smutty word or trailer-inflected phrase rolled off her tongue in bed, then so much the luckier was the man who possessed her. In the living room, at parties, during her television appearances, she sounded as though she’d been born and raised by Ivy-educated, martini-drinking, Connecticut Episcopalians.
It was as he had expected: she was the perfect woman, and she belonged at his side. So Jackson continued the affair with no thought to morality and little to the unpleasantness of being caught and confronted by her husband, his once best friend. The sooner, the better, really, though he realized he could not appear to seek that eventuality. Amanda was not a woman to be pushed, and, besides, the deception and danger would provide them with an exotic memory of how they got together.
At any rate, it could be only a matter of time before Eddie read her book, and only an idiot could read her book and not come up with four for two-plus-two. Eddie wasn’t stupid. Even without reading the book, he must already know. After all, Amanda spent three afternoons a week with Jackson and sometimes attended dinners and parties at his side. A snapped photograph at one such dinner had appeared in the society page of The Times. Another showed up on the party-poop page of a glossy.
“What happened with that sweet girl you were dating?” Amanda asked one day as they rested after making love.
“Are you jealous?”
“Jealousy isn’t a productive emotion,” she said, “but I am curious. You were quite keen on her. I wonder if I seem shallow in comparison.”
“There’s nothing second-place about you, Amanda. You’re my blue ribbon.”
“Did you love her?”
“I guess I was most of the way there. The truth is this: I would have made her a terrible husband. With you, I’m not such a detestable guy.”
“Watch out, or I might decide to take that the wrong way.” Amanda stroked his arm with cool fingers.
“Happiness is the nurse of virtue. I read that once.”
“And who was it who said that independence is the root of happiness?”
“I don’t know, Amanda, but the world is ours.” Jackson rolled to his side so he could kiss her with his hand on her waist.
Their affair continued through the winter and into early spring. As Jackson had long imagined, Amanda was willing to try anything in bed, and their adventures kept him content while he waited to have her on paper and forever. If she had the upper hand in their relationship, he held power in the bedroom. It was an arrangement that pleased them, an arrangement that worked.
Now a year after the release of their first novels, their publication dates were again with weeks of each other. “Better than simultaneous orgasm” is how Amanda put it when they were alone.
One evening, shortly before the publication of Hide and Seek and The Writers, Amanda phoned.
“Eddie got hold of an advanced reading copy from a friend. He’s reading it now.”
“Come over,” Jackson said.
“No.” Amanda’s voice was remarkably even. “It’s time to finish up here. I have to do this myself — I owe him that. I am his wife. I’ll let you know when it’s over.”
Jackson worried that Eddie would trick her into a reconciliation, that he would forgive her and convince her to stay married. But even as he fretted, he didn’t believe in the unpleasant scenario. He and Amanda were too perfect a couple not to come true.
Chapter fifty-five
For months, Henry Baffler struggled with his “open” novel, refusing to admit, even as page stacked upon page, that the book was going nowhere. With Bailiff, he’d intended the plot to go nowhere, for the book to circle back around to where it began and leave his plump protagonist unchanged. But that was not a formula he wanted to repeat. Repetition was death to art — that is what he’d read and what he believed. Besides, while he wanted this novel to unfurl rather than to move linearly, he certainly did not want it to be circular or static. The winter months were elasticized agony, as the very meaning of open raced away from him each time he pursued it.
When the phone call came, he had not yet conceded defeat, had not yet admitted that this might be the novel that he would always want to write but never would. The call was from a curator at MUCA, the Museum of Ultra-Contemporary Art, who wanted to gage his interest in being part of an exhibit on living novelists.
“Exhibit of living novelists,” the man corrected himself.
Three novelists were being invited to live in the museum — on display — for one month, during which time they were each to compose a novel of at least fifty thousand words. The idea that this event might attract the attention of Clarice Aames, or at least the officers of ulcer, occurred to Henry, and he agreed to the small stipend and other terms.
“Let us know what you need in terms of typewriter or computer. To prevent the emailing or downloading of work-in-progress, there will be no internet access. You can bring no notes or books, only yourself, a few changes of clothes, and your toiletries.”
“Even better,” said Henry. “I won’t even come with an idea.”