Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “Nope, I just snuck on the course after we ate.”

  George motioned to the TV. “The French seer.”

  John nodded.

  “They say he knew about the French Revolution and Hitler.”

  John stood watching for a while. If you foretold a revolution back then, he figured, you’d be right eventually. “He would’ve made a helluva stockbroker,” he said, trying to play to George’s interests.

  “I don’t believe they had stockbrokers in those days.”

  John still liked George, but not as much as before, and he was getting tired of these out-of-sync exchanges. He considered his own loneliness to be a product not of inadequate company but of incomplete solitude.

  “Did you get in eighteen?” George asked.

  “I just played a few.”

  George returned his attention to the TV.

  John let him watch for a minute, then said, “So I reminded Kristen Hanson today about looking after things while I’m away at the wedding.”

  “That Greek’s wedding?”

  “’Member how we went over that? He’s Ukrainian. Half. So she’s all set to fix your meals and keep things shipshape.”

  Austerely: “It won’t be necessary.”

  “Sure it will. It’s—”

  George, wanting to hear the show’s conclusion, held out a hand like the Heisman Trophy. A plane flew overhead, and John bent down to see the wing lights through the window. “Osama bin Laden,” George said.

  They could pick up this discussion tomorrow. “I reckon I’ll hit it,” John said. “You have clean pajamas on your pillow.”

  “Would you put them in the dryer for me?”

  “Your pajamas were just washed and dried this afternoon.”

  “I like how they feel fresh out the dryer.”

  “I understand, but isn’t that a winter thing?”

  “Thank you, John,” George said, and closed his eyes again.

  After warming the pajamas, John closed himself in his room. He had a sewing table tucked in by the window, and, since he wasn’t really tired, he shortened a pair of canvas trousers by a quarter inch and moved a sport coat’s sleeve buttons so they would properly kiss. He used to lean toward jacket sleeves with functioning buttonholes, but now he thought that was pretentious. Next he took inventory of his closet. Though he was sentimental about the shepherd’s-check jacket he had worn on his first date with Sara, it was overpadded in the shoulder, and he decided to relegate it to storage. A dog-legged staircase led from his room to the attic. John pulled on the light and found his way to the garment rack containing some of Mrs. Crennel’s old coats and dresses, now scrunched by John’s second string. Still not sleepy, he found himself inspecting a stack of three boxes he’d never bothered with before, one filled with aluminum containers, another with extra bathroom tiles and what was either a candlesnuffer or something religious, though the Crennels weren’t.

  The bottom box held a pair of bell-bottom cords, a deteriorating newspaper—B-52s BOMB HAIPHONG—three paperbacks, and, most interestingly, a typewritten manuscript. He leafed through it for a half minute. There were 278 pages, but the last sentence didn’t seem like an ending. He returned to the title page—God’s Good Side by Marion Crennel—then to page one:

  The house was a white one-story with a gray, barky roof. Its trim had been painted the purplish green of the claws that climb toward and cover asparagus tips.

  He read on for a few pages. A novel, it seemed. Sara had told him that her aunt Marion had been inspirational to her, but she hadn’t explained why, really, or mentioned any abandoned novels. He figured he should ask George about the manuscript, or find out how to get it to Marion’s surviving partner. More than that, though, he wanted Sara to have it. He could mail it to her Buffalo address with a concise note—“Something you should have—John”—but it would be better, he realized, for Sara to find it herself. The thrill of discovery. She could happen across it at the Thanksgiving reunion, or think she had.

  January 2007

  There was only one shade tree on the beach, a beefwood tree with foliage like puppet hair and woody fruit like miniature grenades. Sara sat under the tree in a padded, straight-backed chair, eating peanuts, reading a book, sometimes looking up at the water. Ugly brown pelicans dived precipitously when they weren’t soiling the docks, boobies hunted farther off and from higher up, and tiny silverfish, now only faintly seen but remembered from Sara’s last swim, jumped in schools like protractors of Seven-Up mist. The Caribbean was a shade lighter than travel-brochure aquamarine, the view compromised or completed by two yachts, the larger one owned by a German hardware tycoon—the Screw König, in Sara’s christening—who, to judge from a chronology pieced together on the internet, had purchased the boat as a reward for overseeing a mass layoff.

  It was late afternoon and only two other guests were left on the beach: the fifty-something producer of a TV show Sara hadn’t heard of and the producer’s elderly husband, a renowned painter. Making his way from the bathhouse to the water, the painter stopped to ask Sara one of the few questions she consistently welcomed. “I’m reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion for the first time,” she answered. Well read and still two years shy of thirty, Sara was seldom vulnerable to criticism over having inordinately put off a book, but all the same she would sooner be caught rereading a classic and was proud of herself for telling the truth this time, explicitly and without a suave mea culpa. Ever since overlooking that moronic misspelling of Austen’s name (the publisher never rehired her, but big whoop), she had become a penitent and more dedicated fan, though not yet dedicated enough to reread Emma or Pride and Prejudice. She rarely reread books, possibly owing to the same dispositional defect that kept her from eating leftovers, though she went on refrigerating them and apparently considered it more economizing to discard a forgotten, half-eaten slice of meatloaf and its mold-dotted Tupperware than to dispense with all food scraps straightaway. It was another thing—reading a book just once, forgetting almost everything therein—that made her feel like a fraud. The writers she looked up to seemed to view the first pass through a worthy book as merely the ruminal stage toward an absorptive understanding born of multiple readings. Probably they were right, but she found the unknown more seductive than the forgotten. She would embrace the pleasures of rereading in her miraculously prosperous senescence.

  “Wonderful book,” the painter purred, “wonderful book.” His accent was as worldly, as borderless as air. He was an American but didn’t seem like one, though he didn’t seem like anything else. He had been one of the thirty-two artists in Clement Greenberg’s epochal Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition, and while he hadn’t reached the fame of Frank Stella or Ellsworth Kelly, he was famous enough for Sara to know his name. She’d seen a few of his giant rainbow canvases in museums, had seen another reproduced on the cover of an early seventies poetry anthology called The Sound Inside. An honor to have him sanction her reading material, a relief that he hadn’t been too bored to remark on a fairly ordinary, if unimpeachable, choice. The other books she’d brought to the island were more esoteric, though not what you’d call difficult (she didn’t want her beach reads to seem self-satisfied or anhedonic), and she hoped that someone closely observing her would surmise a reader neither endlessly returning, like some cardiganed spinster, to canonical crowd-pleasers, nor unmixedly devoted, like some wallflower rebel, to outré small-press paperbacks, but instead someone at home in many worlds and genres, someone who simply swept up the far-flung books stacked on her nightstand and tossed them into her rollerbag.

  After a while the no-see-ums descended, and the painter was driven up to the resort in a golf cart while Sara and the TV producer, Linda, walked together to the foot of the steep hill, past the cracked tennis court, the flamingo pond, the grove of palm trees. Some of the palm trunks leaned drunkenly while others were as straight and gray as concrete lampposts. For part of the way up the hill, Sara and Linda took a coiled dirt path, their voices and fo
otfalls sending rock iguanas rustling out of view. Linda gossiped about the island’s owner, a Swiss-born investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and chess grandmaster (“though they give out those titles more liberally than they once did”) who might arrive any day by helicopter with a retinue of lawyers and sex workers. “One of the guys from our group plays chess,” Sara said, adding that she didn’t think he (Lucas) could provide much competition to a grandmaster even of the new, debased standard. Gemma had beseeched Archer to invite Lucas, who was trying to be gallantly courteous when he wasn’t openly salivating over Gemma and her collection of brightly colored rompers.

  Originally, Archer’s thirtieth birthday party was supposed to happen at his parents’ place on Dominica, but it came about that his stepfather needed the house that week for a friend, or rather for a venture capitalist he was partnering with in a scheme to convert long-haul diesels to run on liquefied natural gas. So the party was moved to the small resort on this thousand-acre island, whose most deluxe and secluded cabin sometimes attracted movie stars; a chiseled, inexpressive British actor and his presumably gorgeous girlfriend had checked out of that cabin only days before Archer and Gemma checked in. At other times of year the island was the site of ongoing botanical and entomological studies, which must have provided tax advantages for the owner. The meals at the resort were sophisticated if rarely adventurous, the facilities elegant if usually rustic, the beaches pristine, the grounds beautifully landscaped. But mostly you paid for what you didn’t get: crowds, noise, television, music, children, Jimmy Buffett fans, and middle-class tourists, aside from occasional tagalongs such as Sara and maybe half of Archer’s other guests. “An interesting thing about rich people,” Archer had once said, “is that most of them aren’t interesting.” On the party’s first night—many of the guests still woozy from puddle jumpers, boat exhaust, and the inefficiencies of Caribbean airports—it was announced over a late dinner that Viking had acquired Archer’s debut novel, making the week doubly celebratory. Lucas, pushing the gratitude act too far, initiated a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” and was taken aback when people actually joined in. Gemma sang the “and so say all of us” version and was flirtatiously teased.

  “Now, I’m sorry,” Linda said, “are you and Archer together”—Sara felt a simultaneous sting and flutter at the question—“or is he with . . . what’s the Brit’s name?”

  “Gemma. She’s been in the States since she was twelve. But yes, they’re together. Archer and I are just friends. And I do some work for him—little things, proofreading and occasional research. When you saw us the other night we were just looking over something he’s writing for the Believer.” Sara had to take care to make her work for Archer seem inconsequential, lest anyone question the totality of his artistic commitment or the individuality of its yield. In fact her work for him was full-time, though by contemporary standards the hours were undemanding. Of course, it was hard to say where a writer’s work ended and where her leisure and procrastination began. Reading was part of the work, after all, as was pausing from one’s reading to think; and walking pensively through Delaware Park; riding the bus with a notebook in perpetual readiness; using television to monitor the demotic zeitgeist; being a person on whom the posturings, contretemps, and misadvised sandals of Fourth of July barbecues were never lost. Really, Archer was buying all that, though more practically and currently he was asking her to write book reviews, “think pieces,” light essays on the writing life or medium-light essays on other lives—anything that might raise his “platform.” He paid her an annual salary of $170,000, a figure well in excess of the advance that came with his book contract. Nice work if you can get it: all the remuneration of a tenured upper-tier literary novelist without the horrors of teaching, self-exposure, public speaking, and insincere blurbing. Archer also sent her thoughtful, often expensive premiums and perquisites: a first edition of Barbara Pym’s A Glass of Blessings; a print from Tom Phillips’s A Humument; a signed Bobby Hull photo for her dad; a surprisingly uncomfortable Aeron chair with a slight yet vertiginous wobble.

  “And are you a writer as well?” Linda asked.

  “I’m gathering material.” This was another thorn of her situation, knowing that people took her to be an odd-jobbing literary wash-out or rudderless trust-funder when in truth she was a self-made, improbably deep-pocketed Geppetto. “I haven’t had much time for my own stuff lately,” she told Linda, “but I hope to get back to that soon.” She hoped to get back to that on this trip, in fact, but so far she’d added only nine words to her notebook (“birds roosting on airport beams, dust falling like molt”), and this afternoon’s writing session had morphed quickly into a nap, her body logy from the sun, her adobelike cabin cool with the punningly green jalousie blinds shut, her pen slipping from her fingers as she reminded herself that two rested hours were often more productive than four tired ones.

  Now they were on the paved road, grooved in the interest of traction like a freshly raked sand trap. The hill was at its steepest grade, and Sara was breathing heavily, feeling each step in her thighs. A light-footed gardener weeded on the side of the road in a conical straw hat. Sara and Linda didn’t talk again until they reached the ridge, where the resort had its main building and its original white-washed cabins, built in the thirties by Newport merchants with distant family ties to Benjamin Franklin. “Will I see you at cocktail hour?” Linda said.

  “Unless the cocktails impair your vision,” Sara answered.

  Cocktail hour was a simple operation held in the lounge of the main building, which guests were encouraged to call the Great House. Two trays of hors d’oeuvres—including, to widespread puzzlement, deep-fried grapes—and a few dishes of hot nuts were brought out and placed on a teak buffet. Guests mixed drinks or grabbed beers and sodas for themselves at the honor bar a few steps down from the lounge. At present there were only sixteen guests at the resort: the Bondarenko party; Linda and the painter; a DC lawyer and her Defense Department husband; and an aged English couple, he a former Labour MP, she a versatile hobbyist with the look of someone constantly processing lorry exhaust. Sara found the swirl of wealth, power, and status intoxicating, arousing, tiring, and sometimes nauseating, as though she were experiencing all the effects of alcohol at once, or all the effects except relaxation; for that, she was turning to alcohol. Her piña colada rested on a table whose glass top displayed seashells identified by sallow, typewritten labels the size of cookie fortunes. The lounge had a high ceiling with exposed wood beams, bamboo and rattan furniture with muted floral cushions, moldy guest books, watercolors of local scenes painted by a daughter of the founding family, and a framed coral leaf of a purplish brown much like the Plymouth Reliant Sara’s parents owned when they were still married.

  She sat at the end of a sofa next to John Anderson. He wore a seersucker jacket, salmon shorts, camp moccasins, and his leonine beard. She hadn’t seen him in two years, and his presence stirred up suppressed guilt over how passively she’d dumped him. The guilt might have engendered a cautious, expiatory tenderness toward him. It didn’t. It made him twice irritating: first, for being himself; second, for stirring up her suppressed guilt. Another of Archer’s college friends, a photographer of rising reputation, was now describing her latest series, for which she traveled the country photographing local semicelebrities, basically nonhomeless eccentrics known for spending a lot of time out of the house in odd clothes. “I know I keep coming back to this,” Archer said to Jessica, the photographer, “but we really need to work on something together; my text in response to your photos, or vice versa, anything.”

  “Yes, we have to,” Jessica said with what sounded like legitimate enthusiasm, though her choice of words was telling; Archer must have been her top patron; an attempted collaboration of some sort was probably as voluntary for Jessica as a sneeze. Sara liked books in which prose was augmented by photos—Breton, Woolf, Berger, Gass, Ondaatje, Marías, Sebald—though the practice seemed dissuasively faddish of
late, and perhaps she didn’t like all those books as much as she had once professed. “The only thing,” she ventured, looking at Archer, “is that so many writers are using photos right now. There’s a risk.”

  “A risk of what?” Archer said.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “Jessica’s photos are incredible.” The compliment was unpretending—well, “incredible” overstated the case—but unnecessary, since Jessica’s attention had been pulled elsewhere. “But a risk of seeming late to the party, you know? Like a rock band adding sitar to its sound in 1971.”

  “The ISB made brilliant use of sitars,” Archer said reverently.

  “But earlier than ’71, right?” Sara said, trying to salvage her illustration, not as artfully pandering as she had hoped.

  “There’s no expiration date on sitars,” he said.

  “So, Archer, tell me,” said the lawyer, who’d been listening in, “are you already into your next novel, or is it too soon for that? A friend of ours is a novelist—political thrillers, mainly, quite polished—and he literally starts the new one the morning after finishing the last.”

  “I wish I could do that,” Archer said. “I . . . I have a few things brewing,” he added, waving his fingers around his head. “Nothing solid yet.”

  “Are you an outliner?”

  “Well, I make them, yes, but I grow quickly heedless of their directives.”

  “Men and maps, eh?”

  “I suppose,” Archer said. “This last book—how to put it?—it’s fastidiously plotted, but the plotting came about gradually and organically.” Sara tried not to roll her eyes while Archer swept a hand through his wispy hair. “It’s a matter,” he said, “of listening, very attentively, to what your characters want.”

  “What they really, really want,” Sara said, referencing the Spice Girls.

  The lawyer shook her head approvingly at Archer. “I so admire that kind of creativity.”