Early Work_A Novel
Page 21
Their third night in town, they’d sat, still somewhat stunned to be there, in collapsible camping chairs on the porch of their sublet. A group of people who looked to be in their sixties ambled past them, men and women in fleeces and polo shirts, drinking from Solo cups and plastic wineglasses.
“The ghosts of Christmas future!” a tall woman with close-cropped white hair yelled in Leslie and Peter’s direction, raising her glass in a toast, and her friends cheered her.
“Jesus,” Peter muttered.
“Don’t worry, you won’t live that long,” Leslie said.
He turned to her, eyes suddenly wide with sincerity.
“You really think that?” he said.
“What?” she said. “No! I mean, I don’t know. I guess the law of averages says you will, if you stop drinking so much.”
“I’m not going to be stupid and reckless forever,” Peter said. “Just until it stops being good material.”
Leslie kept herself from the obvious rejoinder: When was it going to start being good material for you, exactly? She was drawing deep from her well of mistakes for her own work lately, focusing mainly on the things she’d broken. She saw no other option for the time being, though getting hold of decent subject matter would be useful eventually. If she calmed down and focused enough, she wanted to try journalism. It would be cool to get paid to be the straight man, for once, around people more deluded and worse off than she was.
It did seem possible lately, though, that there was a chance she was what she’d long imagined herself to be: one of the chosen few to whom the task of chronicling the inner life had been given. There were hours—single hours, sometimes just minutes—when her thoughts moved down into her hands and transformed into something different on the screen in front of her, an eloquent translation of what had been in her head into something smarter, more substantial. She was chasing that now. If she could get a few more of those hours, that might be enough.
There were external, if still muted, signals, too. A young acquiring editor had emailed her, wondering if she was working on a book; a college friend who worked for a literary agent asked if she was interested in sending in a sample. She was under no delusions that these things would lead to immediate glory, but she was pleased that the world was starting to vibrate lightly at her frequency. If it turned out she wasn’t crazy to think she could be paid to write, it might turn out she wasn’t crazy about all kinds of things. She hadn’t shared news of these developments with Peter yet. It was bad, but she couldn’t stand the thought of slowing her creative roll to manage his feelings. When—if—something important happened, she would tell him. Probably.
These thoughts occupied her as she approached the bar. She hoped her coat wasn’t ruined. Under the streetlight at the corner of Higgins and Broadway, she saw more clearly how insane she would look, even in the neon shadows of the Rose, splattered all over in yellow. Having to talk about it would be the worst part—keep it light, but acknowledge the misogyny. Make it stand up as a wacky episode in the single-camera autobiographical sitcom of her life. She’d rather be stoned and writing. Barring that, she’d rather be the boy in the car, hollering into the dark at some tall bitch in a nice coat. His night’s work had at least yielded, what, a tangible outcome: she’d been forced to think some more about what exactly she was going to do with herself.
Her friend Yvette was smoking in front of the bar, staring into her phone. Leslie felt the dull pressure of repetition, the familiarity of accumulated scenarios. She didn’t want to have to drink enough to make the rest of the night interesting. Yvette spotted her and brightened.
“Hey, we were wondering if we’d see you tonight,” she said.
“I’m here!” Leslie said. “But shit, I forgot my ID.”
“Are you high?” Yvette said. “Nobody cares about that. And what’s all over you?”
The exhaustion hit her again, a throbbing between the eyes, a desire to be struck mute. She exhaled slowly. She thought of plausible lies—she’d taken too much of something, her brother needed to be talked down from a crisis, whatever—but she knew it would get back to Peter, and anyway, she was supposedly an adult.
“I’d rather not get into it,” she said. “Can you … can you just pretend you didn’t see me?”
“Really?” Yvette said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Leslie said. “Yes. I really am.”
“Are you doing something sketchy? If so, can I join you?”
“I swear I’d invite you if I was.”
Yvette gave her a thorough once-over, weighing, perhaps, the likelihood that Leslie’s condiment situation was the result of an activity she should press harder to be included in.
“Okay, I haven’t seen you,” she said. “But you owe me. Preferably in the form of drugs. You owe me drugs.”
“Absolutely,” Leslie said. “Thank you.”
“Nothing exciting’s happening, anyway,” Yvette said. “Peter’s being funny, though. I like him.”
“He’s fine,” Leslie said. “Give him a kiss for me. But not from me.”
She took a different route back toward her house, cutting through the middle of town on Broadway, where college kids clustered in front of bars that she’d never been inside of. She was very glad she was no longer twenty years old. She thought about the book she wanted to read when she got home, a thin new novel about coming of age in Havana in the 1990s. It was a couple hundred pages long and she’d only just started. She might be able to get halfway through it before Peter came home. She had to finish the section of the story she was writing first, though. It wasn’t good, but maybe it was getting better. She’d stick with it for a little while longer, at the very least, do some reading, then go back. If it still wasn’t working when she went to bed, she could start something new in the morning.
Acknowledgments
I’m grateful to all of the friends, institutions, and industry professionals who helped shape this book, especially: Molly Atlas, Jeremy M. Davies, Joy Deng, Maris Dyer, Laird Gallagher, Lee Johnson, Laura Kolbe, Amanda Korman, Sara Martin, Lorin Stein, Nick Tenev, the Ucross Foundation, and the writing communities of Charlottesville and Missoula. I’m very grateful, too, to my parents and my sisters for their love and support.
About the Author
Andrew Martin’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House’s Flash Fridays series, and his non-fiction has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and others. Early Work is his first novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Last Part
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Andrew Martin
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Martin, Andrew, 1985– author.
Title: Early work / Andrew Martin.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017047947 | ISBN 9780374146122 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | Interpersonal attraction—Fiction. | Novelists—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3613.A77777 E17 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017047947
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