کتاب 01-09

9

A couple of nights later she poured herself a glass of red wine and read the first page of Jakob’s book. She told herself if his novel was any good at all, the next time she talked to him she would admit she had looked at some of it and tell him how much she loved it. He couldn’t be angry at her for breaking her promise never to look at the manuscript without permission. She had a fatal illness. That had to change the rules.

But after one page she knew it wasn’t going to be any good and she left it, feeling bad again, as if she had wronged him somehow.

A while later, after a second glass of wine—two weren’t going to do any harm to the baby—she read thirty pages. She had to quit there. She couldn’t go any further and still be in love with him. In truth, maybe thirty pages had been three too many.

The novel was about a former philosophy student, J., who has an unfulfilling job at the Department of Public Works and an unfulfilling marriage with a cheerfully shallow blonde who can’t spell, reads YA novels because she lacks the mental rigor for mature fiction, and has no sense whatsoever of her husband’s tortured inner life. To assuage his existential disappointment, J. engages in a series of casual affairs with women Harper had no trouble identifying: friends from college, teachers from the elementary, a former personal trainer. Harper decided these affairs were inventions . . . although the lies J. told his wife, about where he was and what he was doing when he was really with someone else, corresponded almost word for word with conversations Harper remembered having.

Somehow, though, the clinical reports of his affairs were not the worst of it. What she detested even more was the protagonist’s contempt.

He hated the men who drove the trucks for Public Works. He hated their fat faces and their fat wives and their fat children. He hated the way they saved all year to buy tickets in nosebleed territory for a pro-football game. He hated how happy they were in the weeks after the game, and hated the way they would tell the story of the game over and over as if recounting the battle of Thermopylae.

He hated all of his wife’s girlfriends—J. had no friends of his own—for not knowing Latin, drinking mass-produced beer instead of microbrews, and raising the next generation of overfed, overentertained human place-fillers. This did not stop him from fucking them, however.

He did not hate his wife, but felt for her the kind of affection a man usually reserves for an excitable puppy. Her immediate acceptance of his every opinion and observation was both disheartening and a little hilarious to him. There was not a single criticism he could offer that she would not immediately accept as true. He made a game out of it. If she worked all week to throw a dinner party, he would tell her everyone had hated it—even if it had been a wonderful time—and she would cry and agree he was right and immediately rush out to buy some books so she could learn to do a party right. No, he did not hate her. But he felt sorry for her and felt sorry for himself, because he was stuck with her. Also, she cried too easily, which suggested to him, paradoxically, a shallowness of feeling. A woman who got teary over commercials for the ASPCA could not be expected to wrestle with the deeper despair of being human in a crass age.

There was all this—his derisive rage and self-pity—and there was bad writing too. His paragraphs never ended. Neither did his sentences. Sometimes it could take him thirty words before he found his way to a verb. Every page or two he’d drop a line in Greek or French or German. The few times Harper was able to translate one of these bons mots, it always seemed like something he could’ve said just as well in English.

Harper thought, helplessly, of Bluebeard. She had gone and done it, she had looked in the forbidden room and seen what she was never supposed to see. She had discovered not corpses behind the locked door, but contempt. She thought hatred might’ve been easier to forgive. If you hated someone, she was at least worthy of your passion.

He had never told her what the book was about, not in any concrete terms, although sometimes he would say something airy-fairy like, “It’s about the terror of an ordinary life” or “It’s the story of a man shipwrecked in his own mind.” But the two of them had shared long postcoital discussions about what their lives would be like after the novel came out. He had hoped it would make them enough money so they could get a pied-à-terre in Manhattan (Harper was unclear on how this was different from an apartment, but assumed there had to be something). She had eagerly and breathlessly talked about how great he’d be on the radio, funny and clever and self-deprecating; she had hoped they would have him on NPR. They talked about things they wanted to buy and famous people they wanted to meet, and remembering it now, it all seemed shabby and sad and deluded. It was bad enough that she had been so utterly convinced he had a brilliant mind, but much worse to discover he was convinced of it, too, and on such thin evidence.

It amazed her, as well, that he had written something so appalling and then left it in plain sight, for years. But then he had been sure she wouldn’t read it, because he had told her not to, and he understood she was inclined to obedience. Her entire self-worth depended on doing and being just what he wanted her to do and be. He had been right about that, of course. The novel would not have been so awful if it did not contain within it a certain degree of truth. She had only looked at Desolation’s Plough because she was dying.

Harper put the novel back on his desk, cornering the edges of the manuscript so it stood in a neat, crisp pile. With its clean white title page and clean white edges, it looked as immaculate as a freshly made bed in a luxury hotel. People did all sorts of unspeakable things in hotel beds.

Almost as an afterthought, she put a box of kitchen matches on top of it as a paperweight. If her Dragonscale started to smoke and itch, she wanted to have them close at hand. If she had to burn, she felt it only fair that the fucking book burn first.