BEA MOTIONED TO GARRIE and he came over with more coffee and placed the bottle of Jameson’s next to her cup. She saw him eye her notes and then quickly look away. He’d overheard enough of her whining to Tuck over the years about the novel that never appeared to know better than to ask her about work, which made her feel even more pathetic, if that was even possible.
Leo had loved—and published—her first story because it was about him. The character she called Archie was a thinly disguised version of a young Leo, a funny, self-absorbed, caustic Lothario. The Paris Review published the second Archie story. The third was in The New Yorker. Then she landed an agent—Leo’s friend Stephanie who was also just starting out and who secured a two-book deal for so much money that Bea felt faint and had to sit in Stephanie’s office and breathe into a paper bag. Her story collection (the highlight of which, the critics agreed, were the three Archie stories—“delectably wry,” “hilarious and smart,” “whether you find yourself rooting for or against Archie, you’ll be powerless to resist his dubious charms”) sold quietly.
“It’s fine,” Stephanie told her then. “This is all groundwork for the novel.”
Bea wondered if Stephanie and Leo were in touch anymore, if Stephanie even knew what was going on. The last time Bea spoke to Stephanie was well over a year ago during an uncomfortable lunch downtown. “Let’s meet somewhere quiet,” Stephanie had e-mailed, alerting Bea to the difficult but not surprising conversation to come about her long-delayed, laboriously overworked novel.
“I can see the effort that went into this draft,” Stephanie had said (generously—they both knew not a lot of effort had gone into the draft in quite some time). “And while there’s much to admire here—”
“Oh, God.” Bea couldn’t believe she was hearing the stock phrase she’d employed so many times when she couldn’t think of a single thing to admire about someone’s prose. “Please don’t much-to-admire me. Please. Just say what you have to say.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Stephanie looked frustrated and almost angry. She looked older, too, Bea was surprised to note, but then she supposed they both did. Stephanie had fiddled with a sugar packet, tearing it a little at one corner and then folding the end and placing it on her saucer. “Okay, here it is. Everything I loved about your stories, their wit and ingenuity and surprise—everything that worked in those pages—” Stephanie broke off again and now she just looked confused. “I can’t find any of it in these pages.”
The conversation had plummeted from there.
“Are you breaking up with me?” Bea had finally said, trying to joke and lighten the mood.
“Yes,” Stephanie said, wanting to leave no doubt as to where she and Bea stood. “I’m very sorry, but yes.”
“I want my novel to be big,” Bea told Stephanie and Leo the night they celebrated her book deal, a long, boozy evening when her ebullience was so uncorrupted that she could shift a room’s atmosphere when she moved through, like a weather front.
“That’s my job,” Stephanie had said. “You just write it.”
“I’m talking about the canvas. I want it to be sweeping. Necessary. I want to play a little, experiment with structure.” Bea waved at their waiter and ordered another bottle of champagne. Leo lit a cigar.
“Experimenting can be good,” Stephanie said, tentatively.
Bea was very drunk and very happy and she’d leaned back against the banquette and put her feet up on a chair, took Leo’s cigar and blew three smoke rings and watched them float to the ceiling, coughing a little.
“But no more Archie,” Leo had said, abruptly. “We’re retiring Archie, right?”
Bea had been surprised. She hadn’t been planning more Archie stories but she hadn’t thought of them as retired either. Looking at Leo across the table, clearing her throat and trying to focus her vision through the smoke and champagne and those tiny spoonfuls of coke in the bathroom some hours ago, she thought: yes. What was that Bible verse? Time to leave childish things behind?
“Yes,” she’d found herself saying. “No more Archie.” She’d been decisive.
“Good,” he said.
“You’re not that interesting, anyway.” She handed him back his cigar.
“Not anymore he isn’t,” Stephanie said, and Bea had pretended not to notice Stephanie’s fingers moving higher on Leo’s leg and disappearing beneath the linen tablecloth.
How many pages written since then? How many discarded? Too many to think about. Thousands. The novel was big all right. Five hundred and seventy-four pages of big. She never wanted to look at it again.
She poured a little more Jameson’s into her cup, not bothering with the coffee now, and looked again at the new pages nobody had seen or even knew existed. It wasn’t an Archie story. It wasn’t. But it had energy and motion, the same lightness of language that had come so easily to her all those years ago and then had seemed to vanish overnight, as if she’d somehow unlearned a vital skill in her sleep—how to tie her shoes or ride a bike or snap her fingers—and then couldn’t figure out how to get it back.