Amanda had begun The Progress of Love with an outline. She reminded herself to be open to the muse, though, and made some alterations along the way: folding two characters into one, twisting the plot an extra time or two, tucking in or eliminating scenes as she was moved to. Still, she stayed close to her plan, and it was a much more efficient way to work than the waiting-for-inspiration technique that everyone had espoused in graduate school. She’d heard interviews with novelists who spend a year or two “with their characters” before a four-year period of drafting and exploring, ever hoping to enter the “dream space” or be visited by some creative power from above or without. It was ridiculous, really, and it certainly explained why so many otherwise good books were thrown to the floor by readers hoping for a story. All a writer really needed was a good plot, a plan for its execution, a facility with sentences, a work ethic, and a copyeditor’s eye. There was nothing magical about it. She even taped small signs to her computer to remind herself to stay on track: “Tell the story” and “No hocus pocus.”
Once, while working on Vapor, Eddie had been nearly paralyzed, vexed by the vagaries of point-of-view: how close, how central, how reliable, whether temporal omniscience was cheating. “It’s simple,” Amanda had told him. “You’re the writer. Tell the readers what you want them to know.” Now she wrote her story of lust, longing, libido, and ambition among the eighteenth-century French aristocracy with an utterly unselfconscious omniscience.
At three in the afternoon on a Friday in early December, she typed her first novel’s ultimate sentence. It was a line of dialogue mouthed by the comely Libertine: “All for love, and love for all.”
Amanda planned to spend the next two weeks line editing, while waiting for her queries to agents to be answered. She had already decided she wouldn’t even approach Eddie’s agent. What she needed was a human piranha, a beast to be unleashed. What she needed was a bidding war.
She decided to celebrate the completion of the first draft by having a glass of wine somewhere posh and pleasant. Before leaving, she checked her email. First she accessed the dummy address she’d set up to submit “Bad Dog Séance.” Among the spam was a message from the editor of Swanky, who said that he was holding a hundred fan emails and a dozen letters for Clarice Aames. He asked her if he could forward them to her, and he begged her for another story. Amanda grinned at the notion of being famous as two people, of having two names and two writing styles, of working two wardrobes. It could be almost like those people who have two separate families that never find out about each other. Already, she could see Clarice as a brunette: powdery skin, a bit goth, lots of bracelets, a husky voice comfortable with a sailor’s vocabulary.
Chapter twenty-four
Five weeks after his wife carried the draft of Conduct to his agent, Eddie Renfros received the response by telephone. After sleeping late and lingering in a steamy shower until the water ran cool, he was washing his cereal bowl when the call came.
Her voice modulated like a radio stock-market report, his agent said, “The prose isn’t quite on par with that of Sea Miss, but you’re writing well. I’m worried that the plot is a bit quiet, but there is a plot this time. Still, after the last disaster, we don’t want to set ourselves up to be accused of being too quiet.”
“Quiet?” Eddie asked. “There’s a plane crash, death, adultery, bribery, surgery on a child’s ear, a world premiere, a drunken cellist, and a beautiful shameless slut of a violin player.”
“Eddie, I’m on your side. I want to sell this book even more than you do.”
“I seriously doubt that.”
“But you do believe I’m on your side, so let me finish. It’s true that you have events in the book, and I’m going to emphasize them when I pitch the book. But your style does have a way of understating even the plane crash. It happens off the page, and the response of the violist to her lover’s death is so muted.”
“The plane crash can’t be on the page. You can’t kill off a point-of-view character. And the novel isn’t about the plane crash; it’s about what happens after the plane crash.”
“I didn’t say I couldn’t sell the book. I think I can. I think a lot of educated women could want to read it. If nothing else, they’ll think they’re learning something about classical music. And the violin slut is good, particularly that one scene. Heterosexual sodomy is very in, after that dancer’s memoir and all. And it’s great that she’s Scandinavian.”
“So one plane crash is enough?” Eddie tried to suppress the sarcasm he felt surfacing like sweat.
“Is the music stuff accurate?”
“As far as it goes, yes.”
“Eddie, I’m worried about you. You’re starting to sound bitter. You’re my writer, my artist, and I need you to stay calm. I do think I can sell this novel, but I don’t want your expectations to be too high. This isn’t an auction project. I want to send the manuscript one at a time to a few special editors — there aren’t many editors who can really appreciate what you write.”
“That could take forever. Can’t you send it to those same editors simultaneously, like with Sea Miss?”
“Very young writers were in when I did that.”
“They still are.”
“But you’re not twenty-three this time out, so it’s not really the same situation, is it? Look, if I submit one at a time, the book will arrive with the patina of the exclusive. You’re a boutique writer, and that’s how I need to pitch this. I’m going to get you an advance, but I’m also going to let them know we aren’t looking for body parts here. I know you’re not in it for the money.”
“I just want it published,” Eddie said softly before adding, “but I do need some money.”
“Of course. And this book is going to sell by word of mouth, by hand selling. I have a really good feeling about this one, Eddie. The only thing is, and this is important, if an interested editor wants to talk to you about creating a little more drama — around the events you already have, of course, I’m not talking a second plane crash — don’t dismiss it out of hand.”
“Right,” said Eddie. “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
The phone call left Eddie in a peculiar mood, jittery and a bit deflated. At least, he told himself, she was going to try to sell the book. After Vapor, that hadn’t been a given. Still jumpy, he was unable to sit and read. The refrigerator held nothing much beyond Amanda’s fat-free yogurt, fruit, skim milk, white wine, lettuce, and blueberries. It wasn’t any great wonder that she was so goddamn thin.
He scanned the apartment, which evoked unpaid bills, and decided to take a long walk. What he needed was to see a friend who expected nothing from him. A few months ago, Jackson would have been his first choice, but he didn’t have the energy for him now and wasn’t certain he even liked his old pal. He sure as hell didn’t want to be around when Jackson got the call Eddie knew was coming. He pictured the new, big-time Jackson, talking about his enormous advance and the foreign-rights deals and the film-option nibbles. Eddie didn’t want to hear about the rewards soon to be heaped upon Jackson’s so-many-pages-a-day, plot-before-all regimen. This conclusion was not guilt-free — he remembered that Jackson had cheered him through every bottle of champagne after Sea Miss was accepted — but they were older now, living grown-up lives, playing for more complicated stakes.
He grabbed his jacket and headed out into the overcast day, walking the long cross-town blocks toward Hell’s Kitchen, stopping for a bag of bagels on his way. He lumbered through the theater streets, relatively still in mid-afternoon, except for a few waiters setting out the placards announcing prix fixe dinner specials and some out-of-costume performers carrying bags to their back-stage entrances. Eddie wondered if being in theater was as awful as trying to make it as a writer. This was likely, though no doubt that line of insanity held its own set of problems and annoyances: height taking precedence over talent in casting, temperamental associates, falling sick ahead of an audition. At least writers get to work alone, he concluded, and have their nights free for drinking.