Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  “But you’re still doing some work for him?” Donna said.

  “For Archer? Not too much at the moment; some research for his next novel. The Second Stranger, it’s called. Pretty good title, I think.”

  Donna shrugged.

  “It’s a weird little sophomore novel; I told him it should be called The Second—comma—Stranger.”

  “I don’t think that would work.”

  “Well, no, I was joking.”

  “You were joking just now or to him?”

  “To him,” Sara said.

  “I finally got around to reading the first one.”

  Sara waited a moment. “Oh?”

  “I didn’t see any mistakes.” Alas, two were known to have slipped through; corrected, at least, for the paperback. “So you must have done good work, no surprise.”

  Here was a time to change the subject. “But . . .”

  “I’m sure it’s very clever,” Donna said, “but that’s all it is, you know.” She wrinkled her nose. “And so proud of its cleverness. I want to read books with . . . with some soul.”

  “But, I think”—trying to keep a tremble out of her voice—“I think that develops toward the end, you know, as Bowman matures.”

  “Tacked on,” Donna scoffed. “The scene by the old church, the hole where the stained glass used to be.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “The void!”

  “That’s not what it’s supposed to mean.”

  “I’m sorry, honey; I know he’s your friend. And of course I’m glad he’s giving you work. But I just don’t see it.”

  Sara stood up, tried to relax her neck muscles. “Should I make coffee?”

  “I might survive half a cup,” Donna said, and excused herself to the bathroom.

  Though some readers were more taken with Eminent Canadians than Donna Crennel was, the novel fell sacks short of earning back its advance and was remembered, in suspicious company, on only one year-in-review list. The book, as goes the old joke, made quite a ripple. About six months after its publication in early 2008, Sara had tried to work that ripple line into an interview, a protracted interview conducted over e-mail with a man whose questions were written in a slurry, free-associative prose that Sara hoped stemmed from actual drunkenness. Archer, in one of his rare executive mandates, nixed the joke. Perhaps the ultrarich have to be especially on guard not to overindulge in kvetching and self-depreciation, or perhaps he was punishing Sara for not finding a home in the novel for his gather-my-singular-thought witticism.

  It was probably for the best: self-depreciation about the book’s reception would be, like the bulk of Archer’s money, unearned, since a chasm roughly the width of three dozen press clippings and four thousand books sold in the United States and Canada separated Archer from truly overlooked novelists. And maybe, as Archer contended, he and Sara were indeed building a strong foundation. In his mind, EC—his penchant for initialism drove her nuts—was the kind of book that hip collegians, MFA candidates, and freelance graphic designers would want to be seen reading on quadrangles and subways, while eating paninis in Canadian museums. An accretion of fans would follow from these tastemakers, setting up a breakout second or third novel. “Diffusion of innovations,” he had proclaimed, settling the matter. Signs that this pattern was in progress, however, were more hunchy than empirical.

  The good news was that Archer’s contentment with the book’s performance indicated contentment with hers. Probably his thinking was off on that head too. She knew there was more she could do to advance his career, more than the journalism she wrote competently but unspectacularly in his name or the Twitter and Goodreads accounts she managed for him spiritlessly and erratically. At the start, they had produced a quartet of personal essays, each infused with sociological musings and undemanding historical research, but Archer tired of that before they had enough material for a collection, and Sara never came up with ambitious essay ideas on her own—or she did, but rejected them as unoriginal, untenable, and uninteresting. Her big managerial idea—a thicket of underdeveloped ideas, really—was that Archer should be launching literary journals, micropresses, film festivals, boutique record labels, pop-up galleries, medicine shows—it didn’t matter what, just that he spearhead and bankroll a few presumably money-losing ventures that might generate feature articles, “get his name out there,” establish him as a Renaissance culture baron of the firing-on-all-cylinders type. She left these ideas undivulged, fearing he’d cotton to one of them and delegate all the work. He wasn’t, after all, the firing-on-all-cylinders type; the metaphor would rarely fit even if one had in mind the engine on a small pressure washer.

  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.

  “Crimean War,” he answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Third novel. On the Crimean War. I’m thinking 560 pages, swinging for the fences.”

  “Well, we could talk about—”

  “Florence Nightingale in there somewhere, but unnamed; she’s just ‘the Nurse.’ That’s all I’ve got so far, but, you know, mustard seeds. So what’s shakin’?”

  “I’m calling to demand an audience with you.”

  “Just a head’s up, I’m about to drive into a tunnel.”

  “But you can hear me?”

  “For now.”

  “I need to see you in person.”

  “Hey, anytime.”

  “Well, would—”

  “Sorry, losing you.”

  She expected “anytime” to mean something more like, “Anytime after we’re back from Bali and the kitchen remodel’s done,” but two mornings later she was on a flight to La Guardia. Everything had changed, a little, and she wanted everything to change a lot.

  He had called early one afternoon in January, about three weeks after receiving the manuscript of The Second Stranger. Sara, microwaving a naanwich, had answered with a breathy, unsteady voice, as if winded from weeks of preparing her greeting’s cheery nonchalance. Outside her kitchen window’s linty screen and spotty glass, snow was falling in fat, wet flakes. “It’s odd,” Archer had said, “I like this much less than the first book, but I absolutely know it’s a better piece of work.” It wasn’t the warmest praise he could have given her, but it was sincere, and his sincerity was, as always, validating. They talked more about the book, though not as much as she had hoped; his brevity, as far as she could tell, didn’t arise from discomfort. She had expected him to allude to the novel’s personal subtext, to acknowledge, if only indirectly, that the lovesick narrator was her surrogate. There was none of that. At one point it became clear that he had missed something key to the book’s conclusion and interpretation, and they entered an unresolved debate as to whether the book was too subtle or Archer’s reading too inattentive, both parties taking the humbler and more diplomatic side, though perhaps without full conviction. He had practically nothing of substance to say. He intended to let the editor request any changes and had already passed the manuscript on to his agent, who was reportedly approving. “I mean, I don’t think anyone’s eyes are turning to dollar signs with this one,” Archer said, “but I think she digs it.” Sara hung up feeling heartened that Archer recognized the book’s quality, but the about-face she had previsioned obviously wasn’t forthcoming. He wouldn’t gallantly surrender credit and copyright, nor would he pursue the status quo with enthusiasm. The book would sell even more limply than the first, and soon he would lose interest in the whole undertaking. Decades in the future, when his latest social-media enterprise or seawall-manufacturing concern was about to go public, or he was one of three futuristically tuxedoed producers accepting the Academy Award for Best Documentary, his early literary career would be little more than color for the late paragraphs of a business-section profile, a badge of youthful idealism.