Amateurs

by Dylan Hicks

  So she had been surprised—shocked might be employed without hyperbole—when Archer called a month later to tell her he’d been short-listed for inclusion in “20 Under 40,” the New Yorker’s forthcoming honor roll of notable young and youngish fictionists. “They do it every decade,” he had explained, superfluously, since Sara remembered when the first list came out in ’99, “except the first list came out in ’99,” he added, “so it’s more like a baker’s decade.” He was mainly calling to prepare Sara for extra work. He didn’t sound excited, and she couldn’t tell if his neutrality was self-protective, as it would have been for her, or if he really didn’t care. It seemed more like the latter, but why would someone orchestrate a man-of-letters sham if not to reap honors, awards, and status markers? (Archer’s options for such things were restricted, since as a matter of principle, or to avert bad PR, he didn’t apply for grants and fellowships and had made a vow, thus far hypothetical, to refuse any award that came with a cash prize.) She knew he did care—she remembered him asking if she thought the first book would be a hit, his intonation related to the one children use to ask about Santa’s methods and reliability—but either his interest was waning or he was getting better at hiding it. At times, she understood him well enough to write as him, through him, but she had never unraveled precisely what he was after, why he had hired her. Was he just too lazy to put in the years it takes to maybe get good at something, and was it especially embarrassing to be a rich novice, a smooth talker without the chops to silence jealous skeptics? Could he only imagine himself as a fully formed minor genius, all semi-intellectual sprezzatura and sidelong euphony? Given his means, why didn’t he tap someone with stronger credentials? Because he wanted her around?

  Those on the short list had been asked to submit something for consideration in the special “20 Under 40” issue, so Archer’s agent and Sara qua Archer refashioned what they agreed was the strongest section from The Second Stranger. Sara wasn’t convinced that the excerpt stood on its own, an opinion she hoped would cushion the predictable slap of rejection. Her pessimism helped her preserve some degree of sanity while waiting for the magazine’s response, but only some. Normally still-bodied, metabolically conservative, she was now full of nervous energy; by summer she’d lost six pounds by twitching alone.

  Archer squeaked in as a dark horse. When he called with the news, Sara said “wow” several times in a row, and he responded with contrapuntal yeahs; it sounded as if they were rehearsing a piece of experimental theater. She asked if she should fly to New York to celebrate. “Sure,” he said discouragingly. She stayed in Buffalo, treated herself to a massage, redoubled her commitment to surfing the internet. She’d become a master of vanity searches by proxy, someone whose most humiliating insomniac hours involved spelunking to search-results pages well into the triple digits. She saw everything the internet had to offer about Archer and his, which is to say her, work. When the New Yorker list was announced to the public, at least seven internet commentators seemed to share her initial surprise at Archer making the cut. Most who went beyond mentioning his name were supportive or agnostic, but a few were unapologetically acrimonious. The pseudonymous wag who tweeted “Archer Bondarenko? Really? #agentblowseditor” is a fair representative of this second group. Sara spent several days trying to puzzle out Archer’s position on the list. Drawing on her own perception and three or four hours killed on Google Analytics, Googlefight, Amazon, and other sites, she guessed that he was the list’s eighteenth most famous honoree, his numbers trumped even by a woman with a debut novel still months away from publication. Nor was he at home with the prestigious obscurities. There were others on the list whose critical reputations were insecure, but they were among the comparatively popular writers; Archer was the only commercial laggard without a compensatory succès d’estime, reviews for Eminent Canadians having been divided, with praise never coming from critics of the first tier. Going over these facts, Sara started to think that Archer’s inclusion was in some way capricious, that he didn’t really belong on the list (which of course he didn’t), and that the real, if widespread, honor would be exclusion, the premise and purpose of the list being too crass and bourgeois for the serious to take seriously.

  And then, come June, there were her words in the New Yorker, there was the preening diaeresis over the second o in coöperation (a word she’d added to the excerpt only to see it so rendered), there, it could be imagined, was Ruth Bader Ginsburg perusing her words in the bath. It was a lonely sort of pride, pride that gave her a few days of renewed joy, then deliquesced into anger and anxiety. The magazine’s imprimatur raised her regard for The Second Stranger, but now, maddeningly, she feared that her talents had reached their scale-model Everest while she was writing the book, that her artistic degeneration had started the moment she sent Archer the manuscript, and that if she ever got around to writing again under her own name, the results would be so inferior to her deputative work for Archer that, were the secret to get out, everyone would think she had truly been a proofreader and research assistant rather than an unusually autonomous ghostwriter.

  Her flight to New York was delayed by a faulty backup transformer rectifier that concerned Sara’s first-class neighbor not at all (“Let’s take our chances!” he yelled). As a result, she didn’t arrive at Archer’s apartment till early evening. Something Indian was simmering on the stove, but Sara hadn’t been invited to stay for dinner.

  “What I’m leading up to,” she was saying, “is that the work—really the work is mine, mainly mine.” Already she was lapsing into the equivocation she had warned herself against. “And I don’t think I can go on much longer not getting credit for it.” Though they had always sat together on the sofa when they worked here, this time she sat across from Archer on a plywood chair swathed as a point of design in bubble wrap.

  “I can appreciate that.” He rubbed his patchily progressing beard. “I was planning to really highlight you this time in the acknowledgments.”

  “That’s not what I had in mind.”

  “But I might say that, you know, I fed you all sorts of strong material for TSS, and you pretty much pissed on everything.”

  “I did no such thing.” The words had come out too primly. “I tried to use what the book needed, and its needs evolved with its topos.”

  “Its topos, yes. Well,” he sighed, “we’re in the same boat.”

  “That’s just it, though: we’re not.”

  “We are in that this isn’t the collaboration I had in mind either.”

  “Archer, it’s not a collaboration.”

  “It is, Sara.” He partially concealed his disgusted expression by leaning over to tie his bootlaces. He was dressed in his full “heritage brand” costume, ready to chop wood in a catalog. He stood up and walked to the kitchen. The domesticity of the scene made it harder to stomach, made her pine to talk instead about some happily mundane thing: whether forks should be placed prongs up or prongs down in the dishwasher, whether Tucker and Clare had been bickering or just teasing each other at dinner the other night. “You say you don’t get enough credit,” Archer said while stirring the curry, “and I’m sure that’s true—”

  “I don’t get any credit,” she said, raising her voice to reach the kitchen.

  “And yet you give yourself way too much.” He paused, filed the edges off his tone. “There’s this team of translators, Richard Pevear and Laura Volokhovsky. They’ve been doing all the great Russian—”

  “You don’t have to fill me in, Archer. They’re extremely famous.”

  “I wasn’t condescending to you,” he said, bringing the tasting spoon to his lips. “I didn’t know how famous they were.”

  “Very famous, and it’s Larissa, not Laura. Larissa Volo . . . You have the last name wrong too.”

  “But what is it?” He was adding a pinch of turmeric or something to the sauce.

  “I can’t remember. You’re close, but off.”

  He walked back to the sofa. “If they
were extremely famous, you’d know the name. When you see the vice president on TV, you don’t think, Oh, yeah, what’s his name again, Bolden?”

  “But it’s a bad—”

  “Biddle?”

  “I get it. But it’s a bad analogy because I have trouble with Russian names. When I’m reading a Russian novel I often don’t consider how the names should be pronounced. I just remember what letters they include and keep track visually.”

  “Your Russophobia is secondary to your skewed sense of who’s famous.”

  “Fine, they’re famous in literary circles, though their Anna Karenina was an Oprah pick, so it’s a big circle. The point is that you don’t need to explain them to me.”

  He leaned forward, held his mouth open, and widened his eyes to ask silently, sarcastically, if she was done. Then he said, “And the point I was about to make is that Pevear, according to an article I read, has an impressive facility for languages but doesn’t have a full command of Russian. Laura—Larissa—does the initial line-by-line translation, and then he refines the English.”

  “Without gravely compromising its fidelity to the original,” she said.

  “Yes, right, good. And they consult, argue certain words, whatev.”

  “Again, I know this.”

  “I’m saying it’s supposed to be like I’m Larissa and you’re Richard. I give you the raw material, a kind of literal translation, and you refine my wheat into flour.”

  “You’re mixing metaphors. And I thought you said you were the director to my screenwriter. Which is completely different.”

  “This is a new analogy,” he said. “And it was kind of like that at first, but then with TSS you went rogue. And fine, great, it’s starting to work out; Gemma, my parents, they’re all stoked. But it’s not as if you’re the only one with a grievance.”

  Sara’s chair popped when she recrossed her legs. “Haven’t you had this stupid chair for, like, two years?”

  “It’s not stupid.”

  “How is it that some of the bubbles are still unpopped?”

  “They just came by to rewrap it.”

  “They?”

  “Yes. If you anticipate a lot of fidgeting, maybe choose another seat.”

  She took a deep breath. “Look, I think things would be better for both of us if we—what I want to propose is that we share credit for the books.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “In what way?”

  “In the most conventional way. Gilbert and George, Lennon and McCartney, Sacco and Vanzetti.”

  “So . . .”

  “So the new book would be released under both of our names. Your name would still come first.” Her voice wasn’t as unwavering as in rehearsal.

  “Sara—”

  “That’s alphabetical anyway.”

  “You’re serious?”

  She nodded.

  “An excerpt has already come out under my name in the fucking New Yorker!”

  “I know! And that was my work. How do you think it feels to get that kind of recognition, the kind I’ve wanted since I was in high school, but not really get it?”

  “You don’t even respect the other writers on that list, so why should the recognition matter to you?”

  “Of course I respect them!”

  “No, it’s all resentment and jealousy and competition with you, never respect or goodwill.”

  “If any of that’s true, it’s because I don’t get the credit I deserve,” she said with hard-won evenness. “Anyway, let’s not get hung up on the excerpt. Maybe that section was your work, but the book as a whole was jointly composed.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I should have to explain to you how impossible this is.”

  “It’s not impossible. It’s a good publicity angle.”

  He laughed. It was one of his gummy laughs that brought her back to when she found him unattractive.

  “Just this one, Archer.” She was pleading now. “Take most of the credit. Say that when you were going through the pages after a two-month break, you realized that my contributions were more than editorial, that it was only right to acknowledge that, belatedly. It’ll make you look magnanimous.”

  “Sara.” There was, at least, some tenderness in his voice. If he gave in, he would also invite her to stay for dinner, and until Gemma or whoever arrived, they could be together less combatively.

  “Just for this book,” she said. “I just want this one. I’m good at what I do.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “I want people to know it. Maybe that’s shallow, but I want it. Just this one. The next will be all you, and I’ll stick to your ideas and it’ll be great, a great book.”

  He seemed to be studying her face. “It’s like”—he delayed for a moment; that glimmer of tenderness had passed—“it’s like all of a sudden you don’t grasp the nature of the deal. You’re basically asking for a change from employment to patronage.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I said basically. You understand, right, that you’re making a lot more money than you could otherwise make writing?”

  “Duh.”

  “And frankly a lot more money than you could make at anything.”

  She sniffed away tears. “You don’t know that.”

  With smiling asperity: “It’s an educated guess.”

  She stood up.

  “You’re not a genius, you know. You’re smart. There’s millions of smart people.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “You’re leaving?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Are you leaving in an ‘I quit’ way, or just leaving?” He hadn’t even risen to his feet.

  “I’m not quitting.”

  A minute later she palmed open the door to the sidewalk as if she were in urgent need of air. She had sneakers on and decided to walk back to the hotel. She wasn’t crying, but there were tears in her throat. There’s millions of smart people. There are millions.

  She won no concessions, though her next check reflected a generous raise. She returned to The Second Stranger’s last round of revisions somewhat richer, but in a spirit of aggrieved recklessness.

  June 2011

  John looked back one more time at the rented sedan, walked slowly through the mudroom, and set the groceries on the kitchen counter. He stood still for a moment, listening to the sounds coming from the family room, keeping one hand poised inside a grocery bag so that if someone were to approach, he could quickly return to a reasonable action. His bowels roiled when he recognized Chick Crennel’s distinctive quack. Chick lived in Redwood City, California, and hadn’t been expected.

  The planks of the dining room floor seemed wider and waxier than usual as John made his way to the family room. Chick stood up. He was wearing chinos and a red candy-stripe dress shirt of light broadcloth. His handshake would sooner be called abusive than firm, though John’s hands were bigger. George was sitting on the sofa, crushing mint leaves into his drink and fiddling with his hearing aid. Fuzzy Zoeller was being interviewed on the muted Golf Channel while a scratchy jazz record played softly on the stereo.

  Looking out on the garden, John saw that Sara was getting up from one of the Tamiami chairs. “Oh, Sara’s here too,” he said, which served as a greeting as she slid open the screen to the family room. “Hi, John,” she said. She made his name sound like an accusation. She was holding a paperback at her side, marking her place with her pointer finger. She sat down on the long sofa, not quite within reach of her grandfather.

  “One of my old records,” Chick said, jutting his chin toward an LP jacket resting on the dining table. “Three eighty-nine at Hoke Brothers. They had preview booths where you could listen to anything in the store.”

  “Nice. Who is it?”

  “Toots Thielemans,” Chick said.

  “The Belgian harmonicist and siffleur,” Sara inserted.

  “You still making ten-speeds?” Chick asked. “I keep meaning to put my order in.”

  “No, not hardly much,” John
said. “I don’t have the equipment.”

  “I thought you were going into business with a guy from around here.”

  “He moved,” John said, then asked about Chick’s work.

  “You didn’t hear? I’m suddenly retired.”