Amateurs (24 page)

In the dining room, Donna sipped her abstemious half cup of coffee while Sara plowed through two large mugs, explaining that she would need to stay up late to meet her deadline.

“Not an all-nighter, I hope,” Donna said.

“No.”

Donna stood up. By the coatrack she canted her head to the right. “I'm sorry if I offended you about your friend.”

“It's fine.”

“I just wonder sometimes if proofreading these wishy-washy books is the best use of your talents.”

“Mom, you just offended me a second time.”

Donna picked up her purse. “Well, I guess I can't win with you.” She called to apologize again as Sara was checking her e-mail. Sara hoped her mouse clicks wouldn't be heard over the phone as she assured her mother that there would be no hard feelings, by which she meant (and she didn't mean it) that feelings wouldn't be harder than before. There were two new e-mails: a photo of the Crennels'
reunion badly framed by John Anderson (“You were missed”), and a note from Archer:

Quick Turnaround?

FROM
Archer Bondarenko

TO
Sara Crennel

Hope good vacay. Hey, my friend Matt(hew) asked for an endorsation a few months ago and I totally spaced. If you could bash one out in the next coupla days that'd be fantastic. I haven't read the whole book yet but I gather it's a Long Island family drama delicately fused with tales of Hatian revolutionaries and the French aviator and inventor Louis Bleriot, all adding up to a panoptic story of hope and betrayal. (For that summary I delicately fused my own words with a few from the publicist's email—working from memory!) I know Matt wsa kind of douchey the time you met him but his mom had cancer then (now in remission). Anyway, good guy, debut novel, should be fun. I'd do it myself but we're skibobbing. PDF attached.

Thx,

AB

It was only the second blurb Archer had been asked to write, an infrequency suiting Sara's high critical standards, or parsimony of spirit, though she wished Archer were more in demand. To deter him from late notices in the future, she tried to craft a response to his e-mail that would read like an affectionately tolerant sigh, as if she were obliging an interruption. In the second graf she passingly mentioned a friend who had studied Haitian Creole; she had no such friend, but it seemed like a believable way to work in the correct spelling of
Haitian,
though Archer was apparently ineducable in
that area (“i find spellcheckers fallable [sic!] & hostile to experimentation,” he had explained once by text). She promised to submit the blurb for his approval by midweek.

In truth she was more than open to an intermission from tinkering with
The Second Stranger.
At this stage in her revisions, she was spending a good amount of Tuesday morning reinstating commas that had been expunged after much deliberation on Monday afternoon. Archer knew little of the new book and had contributed less to it (mostly unheeded advice and some helpful notes on bullion speculation), but a few weeks ago she had told him the manuscript was nearly ready for revelation, asked if they could schedule a time to discuss it at his apartment. His philanthropic, touristic, and venture-capital commitments, however, prevented a meeting for an undetermined while. Ever since their hookup on the beach, he had been reluctant to be alone with her. In a way she admired his restored fidelity to Gemma, and she was flattered to think she presented a temptation strong enough to demand strict distancing measures. A temptation too strong to be resisted would be better, but this was something. She thought about him all the time. It was like being in love with the pebble in your shoe.

Too activated for sleep, she decided to read the book in need of hasty blurbing,
This Overhanging Firmament,
in a single stretch, taking whatever skimming course was needed to be done by three in the morning. It turned out to be a better book than her one interaction with Matt led her to predict, notwithstanding its frequent banality, du jour time leaping, and laughless comic relief. She read until dawn, even found herself shedding tears near the end, tears that didn't just pool in her eyes but streamed down her face. It was then that she broke to draft the blurb, hinting at those tears (“deeply moving”) and hazarding a cool-sounding if not strictly apposite reference to Nietzsche's eternal recurrence. As she added the manuscript's last page to the messy stack on her hard-cushioned sofa, she
wondered if her own work's avoidance of unabashed heart tugging betokened timidity more than sophistication.

With that question in mind, she spent a week making more substantial changes to
The Second Stranger,
revising the plot and casting the book more bluntly as a restless hammock dream of longing and unrequited love. It was a short book, and its brevity seemed to her very refined. If it made it to print, the publisher would need to employ compact pages and various tricks of spacing, margining, and pagination to fend off accusations of novelladom. The book eschewed the first novel's tone—“so
proud
of its cleverness”—in favor of an introspection that, she hoped, dodged lugubriousness. Its narrator, a young woman, name withheld, lucks into a landscaping sinecure on a privately owned Caribbean island, then starts an affair with a corrupt official from a larger neighboring island. Though Sara didn't fully understand it at the time, she saw now that she had written the book in a state of bristly independence, trying for something as removed from Archer's sensibilities as she could get without being completely removed from her own (because really their sensibilities weren't so far afield). Stylistically, the latest draft furthered this uncoupling from Archer, but with its heightened intimacy, she felt she was reaching out to him. She wished she could watch him read it, watch him react to every sentence, at least furtively glance at his reactions from another room.

A part of her hoped he would reject the manuscript and facilitate the change she couldn't initiate on her own. His rejection, however, would in fact be an embrace; he would fall in love with her as he read the book and in doing so realize that it, the book, was unquestionably hers. His newfound duty, he would see, was to help her publish it as her own. From there they would work side by side on the next Archer Bondarenko novel (a romp, quickly written, easily adaptable for the screen).

It was the most percolating week of creation she'd had in a long time, maybe since ghosting Archer's first essay, but she finished only
exhausted, not reinvigorated. She imagined spending the rest of her life in this loop: working alone at strange hours with neglected hair, drinking many-times-microwaved coffee, eating Styrofoamy stragglers from yesterday's popcorn, trying to enamor Archer by alienating him, sending off these missives with a dry-mouthed caduceus of pride and fear, convinced that she'd at last struck the thing that would either dissolve their relationship or make it infinitely richer. She couldn't go on like this forever, but that's what scared her: that she probably could.

June 2011

When George and John were called by a male bank teller, George turned to the workman behind them in line and said, “You go on ahead, I need to talk to Brianna.” This wasn't true in any sense having to do with banking. George needed to flirt with Brianna, and be flirted with in a well-meaning but condescending way to which George was either oblivious or, more likely, resigned. John disliked these transactions and on previous trips had tried to wait in the corner that passed for a lobby while George got the money. George couldn't drive anymore, but he could still walk okay, slowly but without regular need of support (his walker's tennis-ball trotters were still bright and whiskered in a broom closet, and he usually rebuffed John's solicitously crooked elbow). At the bank, however, he always managed to keep John close at hand. John got his monthly salary of one thousand dollars by check, but for routine expenses—groceries, household supplies, alcohol—he was given cash (also a thousand dollars, but paid biweekly), supposedly necessitating these withdrawals every other Thursday afternoon. George could have simply written John a biweekly expense check. Or John might have been given a credit card. Most people in positions like his were given credit cards, John had argued, just guessing. The statements would
go to George's financial planner; everything would be double-checked and accounted for. George objected. With a cash system you knew exactly where you stood, he said. Any system other than a cash system (he kept saying “system”) would encourage overspending, lead to spotty bookkeeping. John was supposed to save every receipt, and if the two weeks outlasted the thousand dollars, he was to document and justify the shortage. If there was money left over, it was given back to George and put in a safe hidden behind an oil painting of three bloodhounds surrounding a bleeding stag. George periodically tapped this slush fund for expensive wine and steaks, over which John tried to share in some of George's pretended oenophilia and honest carnivorous ecstasies, though John preferred beer and the cheaper meats.

Brianna complimented George's red Lacoste cardigan. “He”—George indicated John with a shake of his forearm—“says it makes him hot just looking at it.” She smiled, counted the hundreds, the fifties, the twenties, and gave the stack to George, who smugly handed it to John. “We'll see you,” George said, winking.

After George had settled into the Olds, John said, “While we're in town, we need to stop at the dry cleaners and Jewel.”

“No, I'm too tired,” George said, and let out one of those loud, phlegmy coughs that provoke gerontophobia in restaurants and waiting rooms.

“It won't take but a minute,” John said. “I at least need to get something for dinner.”

“Planning ahead, I see.”

“It won't take but a minute.”

“You said that, but it's taken but a minute for us to leave this parking lot.” He coughed again. “It's your job to get provisions, John, not mine.” John felt he was close to ripping the steering wheel Hulk-style out of its socket. They parted without words when John dropped George off at the house.

Every visit to the dry cleaners affronted John's belief in home care, but his employer's often invisibly spilled-on woolens were smorgasbords for moths; judicious to burn off the larvae before they migrated to John's closet. Though a far cry from Jeeves on Madison, Very Best Cleaners did capable work in the strip mall it shared with a tax preparer, a jeweler, a Thai restaurant, a medical supplies shop, the obligatory nail salon, and an ice creamery that John doubted would survive the fall. After buying and not finishing a sympathetic cone, John picked up two days of groceries, then idled in Jewel's parking lot with the easy-listening station turned up, eating a cayenne-infused chocolate bar and watching a bare-chested man trim a hedge across the street. John had separated the candy bar's twenty tiles and arranged them in even rows on an
Esquire
he'd thrown in with the groceries. He sometimes forgot to reimburse George for impulse buys, which was wrong. As a wedding present, he was going to ship 100, maybe 150, chocolate bars to Archer and Gemma. It was best to buy rich people consumables, he thought, his only misgiving here being that Archer probably wouldn't know how to properly savor the chocolate, wouldn't understand that every tile, eaten mindfully, was life itself. More and more John understood that the legacy of his days as a math hopeful was an aptitude for fathoming the spiritual, for seeing that God was immanent, accessible not only through prayer, love, friendship, and math, but through the satisfying click of a smoothly hit golf ball, the slightly asymmetrical dimple in a well-knotted necktie, the feel of cool grass on your palms, the perfect coating of sea salt.

When he returned from stage two of his errands, there was a rented sedan parked under the rusty, netless basketball hoop.

August 2010

Sara ate a juicy pear over her chipped kitchen sink, trying to inhale the fruit deeply enough to veil a stench entering its fourth day,
something to do, she guessed, with the inaccessible carcass of a recently deceased mouse. She wiped her hands on her jeans, did a quick standing forward bend, and tapped out Archer's number before she had time to dissuade herself.