Free All Is Vanity by Christina Schwarz

about writing a novel?”
    The rampart I’d constructed collapsed under his touch. “No,” I protested, “I’ve just been thinking the opposite.” I turned to face him. “From now on, I’m going to approach this in a businesslike fashion. No more phone calls. No more waiting for the muse. I’m going to leave the apartment with you in the morning, as if I had a real job. I’m going to produce ‘deliverables.’ Five pages per day.”
    I knew Ted would appreciate this plan. He was practical, a characteristic I admired in him, although I didn’t covet it for myself.

    Ted and I had met in our sophomore year at Penn at an October charity smorgasbord, during which students were supposed toexplore avenues for “giving back” to the community to which we so comfortably did not belong. Ted was manning the Philadelphia Reads! booth, an organization he’d founded himself the year before, after he’d discovered that one of the cafeteria workers couldn’t decipher the menu.
    Technically, this was where we met. But I knew who he was. I’d noticed him in Poetry from Spenser to Yeats, even before the professor had pointed out, to our great embarrassment, that we’d been the only two to receive A’s on the
Paradise Lost
paper.
    Ted was a big believer in first things first. While I whirled from Life Drawing to Astrophysics 101 to Studies in the New Testament, lighting on whatever seemed interesting as I paged through the catalog, he slogged dutifully through courses like Marx and Engels, Victorian England, and The Novel from Eliot to Hardy, as if he were laying down bathroom tiles. I admit I’d disdained this approach. I liked to tell myself that I was a Renaissance woman, but this was not entirely accurate, since, as I’ve mentioned, I’d yet to do one thing well, let alone a varied handful.
    By doing first things first, Ted had moved on to seconds and thirds. His success thrilled me. I was proud of his steady rise from research assistant, to researcher, to program officer, to program director, and the trail of exhaustively researched, gracefully written reports that followed him. Still, it was galling to think of how we’d started out just the same, each with a superior interpretation of Satan’s fall, when I saw how he’d lapped me, lapped me again and again, while I reeled among the starting blocks, not sure even which lane I’d been assigned.
    But no more. I would take a page from Ted’s book. I would advance in a methodical fashion. The primary goal was neither to prepare to write, nor to think about writing, nor to talk about writing;it was to get words on the page. Therefore, that was where I would begin. As soon as I found a place to work.

    On Monday evening, I’d promised myself I’d produce five pages a day. By Friday at three, after a weeklong search for rent-free “office” space, including trial runs in several cafés in which a nagging awareness that I appeared either pretentious or pathetic and probably both tended to subvert my concentration, I figured I was running a fifteen- to seventeen-page deficit, depending on how many of those daily five pages I could reasonably expect to complete in the last few hours of the afternoon. The summer heat had been radiating off the sidewalks and buildings all day and my bare shoulders were sizzling in the sun. As I waited to cross Eighth Street, smothered by a sidewalk vendors incense, I felt like a roasting fowl, flavored with vanilla and basting in my own sweat.
    My last hope for an office was the Jefferson Market branch of the New York Public Library. From the outside, it had romantic charm, with its turret and its reputation for having housed women prisoners in the nineteenth century (although that may have been a building behind it—the facts were difficult to pin down). Inside, beyond the nifty circular staircase and stained glass windows, it was really two linoleum-floored rooms with an unimpressive assortment of books, their covers grayed and