Her second realization was less pleasant. She was on the verge of losing the only non-disagreeable job she’d been able to obtain — without her father’s help, which she had refused — with nothing but an NYU literature degree. She would have to return to her parents’ bicker-filled house on the Hudson until she could make a better plan for her life.
As distressing as this situation was, at least it would give her more time to write. What she felt every morning and every evening as she neared her computer could be described only as pleasure. All day the store was filled with writers shopping instead of writing, writers complaining of writers’ block, writers lecturing each other about the agony of creation or the fickleness of their muse, writers browsing the shelves and griping that they had no time to write. Her days were filled with writers not writing, and she had told more than one of them go home and write.
“No one’s making you be a writer,” she’d told a regular one afternoon, “You shouldn’t do it if you don’t enjoy it.”
Many of her happiest hours were spent alone with sentences, trying them out in different forms, leapfrogging words and phrases across each other, finding combinations of adjectives and nouns never before placed in proximity. She knew that she mystified her friends whenever she turned down an invitation to a party or out to hear music, but, well, she was who she was.
She reminded herself that her room at her parents’ house — which she would have to reclaim from her father, who had been banished there for snoring — offered a serene view of the Hudson. She’d set up her computer before the window and finish the work on her book. Then she could figure out how to make her way in the world.
Margot finished shelving ten copies of a new novel about a group of women in a sewing club, each, according the flap copy, coping with her own threads of tragedy. It was time for her break when she finished, and she stepped out to get a little sun on her face.
It was still summer, still hot, but the mugginess had subsided, and Margot could feel and smell fall in the drier air. She sipped a cup of tart lemonade from the bookstore café as she walked the block to a courtyard where she liked to sit.
“Miss Yarborough!” a man called out as she was about to slip through the iron gate.
Margot turned but saw only a swarm of indistinct bodies and faces.
“Miss Yarborough, I’m glad to run into you.”
Now Margot recognized the voice. She found it charming that Jackson Miller called her “Miss Yarborough” as though she were a character in a Victorian novel. He was accompanied by the pretty girl who worked at the restaurant across the street and sometimes stopped by to browse the cooking magazines.
“My roommate, Doreen Maud.” Jackson swept his hand from Doreen to Margot and back. “And my agreeable and most kind new acquaintance, Margot Yarborough.”
After they had exchanged greetings, Doreen excused herself to get to work. “You people of books must wonder how I exist in a world of dishes and food,” she laughed.
“On the contrary,” Margot answered. “I kind of envy you.”
Doreen stretched her mouth into a long line, then said, “Because of all the agents and editors who ‘lunch’ at Grub?”
“I didn’t mean that. I envy you because you seem to live a real life among real people.”
“If you can call waiting tables real life and Grub’s patrons real people, you may have a point. But that’s all debatable.”
“I’m telling you, Doreen, you could be a writer.”
Jackson’s comment finalized Doreen’s departure.
“Funny you should envy her for not writing,” he said to Margot, “because I’ve been trying to convince her to try her hand at it.”
“Would that be easier for her than waiting tables?”
“Likely harder, wouldn’t you say?”
He held the gate wide and ushered her into the courtyard. She chose a shady bench, and they sat, Jackson moving closer to her as they talked.
Margot drained her lemonade and set the cup beside her feet. She brushed her shoes lightly over the moss that grew between the bricks, then leaned over to touch its velvety texture. “It depends, I suppose, on several things.”
“Of course,” Jackson said. “And I’m not claiming that Doreen has any particular inclination to write. But I’m not sure she’s got any for cooking either, and there might be more money in writing if she went about it the right way, wrote the right kind of thing.”
Jackson’s gestures were large and easy, and he touched her arm frequently, but in a way that seemed natural. Margot appreciated the way that he gave momentum to the conversation, not seeming to mind that she was soft-spoken. The trait had annoyed her last boyfriend, who’d told her that he was tired of asking her to repeat herself. He’d said that during their break-up fight in the bar where she worked, where his band played, and where they’d met. She’d started to suggest that maybe all the feedback had damaged his hearing, but she let it go. She’d already accepted the job at the bookstore and was happy to leave that particular boyfriend behind with the bar.
“And, well, money matters, doesn’t it? I should know, because I haven’t got any to speak of, though I do have this for you.” He proffered the two twenties.
“Was it this much?”
“Well, maybe if you have a five in change…but, no, keep it. You were kind to have saved me from the Wattleborough debtors’ prison.”
Margot folded the bills into eighths and pushed them into her dress pocket. “I do like a man who pays his debts promptly, but is money still so very important, in this day and age?”
“Without it, you spend most of your life working for the first rung of the ladder. It’s increasingly important to start a writing career with money. Otherwise you wind up teaching five composition courses and never writing a word.”
“I suppose.” Margot leaned over her knees again, this time scraping at the moss with her fingernail. “But don’t you think that really good work will eventually gain attention? Even in this day and age?”
“Later rather than sooner, I’d argue. The quantity of books being written makes it impossible for all but the luckiest and most heavily marketed to get any attention. Take Jonathan Warbury. He isn’t a friend of yours, is he?”
She sat up and looked at the bright green under her nail, saying somewhat absently, “I don’t mix in those kinds of circles.”
“Well, I wasn’t going to run him down, but my question is this: is there anything that makes his work any better than that of twenty other similar writers I could name? Not at all. He’s reasonably clever, yes, and he’s certainly prolific. But so are plenty of others. The reason we’ve heard of his name — the reason you think of him mixing in circles you don’t mix in — is because he started with money and moneyed friends. He went to Harvard, and his father is tied in with the editor of The City and all kinds of people who have pull.”
Margot noticed that he’d woven her comment into his words, that as much as he loved to talk, he was also listening to her. Her voice registered with him.
“Warbury’s first book was reviewed before anyone had read it. No one cared what was in the thing.”
“Is that true?”
“I am a blowhard, but it’s true. My prediction is this: soon writers won’t publish books to make a name for themselves; they’ll make names for themselves so they can publish their books. I’ve got a friend named Eddie Renfros—”