Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Bishop

  “Months remain before that is possible, and I hardly intend to heed your recommendations about what my last wish should be.”

  Waldemar, his eyes flaring, exclaimed that tonight would serve as well as her anniversary day. If she did not agree, he went on, he would slay the unnatural Don Ignacio in his ready-made coffin and thereby eliminate the possibility of her making any wish at all. To carry out this threat, he rushed from Cathinka’s room and down the open corridor toward the garden. Despite the tropic heat, Cathinka wore a short-sleeved frock with a long embroidered train. She could not hope to catch or struggle successfully with Waldemar in such a garment. Instantly, she shed it. Then, wearing only an ivory-colored chemise and matching pantalettes, her long hair flying, she sprinted off in pursuit of the duplicitous young man.

  In the garden she found Waldemar in a posture of resolute strain, his back bent and his fingers curled to prise the canopy from the pirogue. His arms came up, and the transparent cover flipped into the knotted weeds as if it weighed no more than a jellyfish.

  In later years Cathinka recalled that instead of daunting her, this sight sent a thrill of imminent combat surging through her, an energy that may have sprung from the heroic suppression of her natural longings. Or perhaps this energy was the force of righteousness asserting itself at the dare of bald-faced iniquity.

  As Waldemar reached for Don Ignacio, Cathinka plunged through the snaky vines and luscious equatorial flowers, seized him by his hair, and hurled him aside as easily as he had flung the dugout’s crystal lid. He caught himself against the thorny bole of a tree and charged Cathinka, howling.

  They grappled, Waldemar and Cathinka, standing upright and moving so little that an uninformed observer might have thought them spooning. Their individual strengths were isometric. Monkeys gathered on the tiled roofs and thatched breezeways to watch the combat, but the combatants merely swayed in each other’s arms. Puzzled by this behavior, the Moon (upon which people had lately walked) looked down with its mouth open. A bird screamed, and the hush of the jungle became the bated breath of Cathinka’s own briefly recurring uncertainty. Did she love this man or hate him?

  She hated him.

  Summoning the resources of outrage, Cathinka shoved Waldemar away. As he sought to reinsinuate himself into her arms, there to squeeze her ribs until they cracked, she struck him in the mouth with her elbow. He reeled away, his lip bleeding. She butted him in the shoulder with her head, stepped aside, cuffed his ear with her fist and forearm, received an answering blow to the temple, staggered, delivered an uppercut to his abdomen from her crouch, stood upright, ducked a battalion of knuckles behind which his angry face shone almost as bright as the Moon’s, shot both hands through his routed defenses, levered her thumbs into his Adam’s apple, and tightened the tourniquet of her fingers around his neck. He retaliated by kneeing her between the legs as if she were a man. A host of capuchin spectators scampered from roof to roof, lifting a babel of ambiguous encouragement above the compound, or falling eerily silent whenever one of the combatants seemed on the verge of dispatching the other.

  The fight lasted hours. It swung from this side of the garden to that, now in favor of Cathinka, of Waldemar next, and of neither in the gasp-punctuated intervals. Don Ignacio slept through it all as a baby sleeps through family arguments, thunderstorms, air-raid sirens. Cathinka had done no horseback riding or archery exercises since her departure from her father’s estates, but she had substituted walks about the monastery maze and the juggling of small weights to maintain her muscle tone, and she had had more time to adjust to the élan-sapping mugginess of the tropics than had Waldemar—thus, toward morning, the grunting young man had utterly exhausted himself. His masculine pride had offset his imperceptible pudginess for as long as it could. Cathinka, clasping her hands and swinging them into his chin like the prickly head of a mace, put period to their monomachy. Among the needles of a flattened succulent Waldemar lay bruised and torn, still marginally aware but unable to rise. Cathinka stood over him in the tattered white banners of her chemise, greatly resembling the central figure in the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People.

  Disappointed that the fight had concluded, the capuchins took no interest in the stark symbology of Cathinka’s appearance. They returned to the jungle or to the more dilapidated cloisters of Alcázar de Cáncer to rest. It would take them a day or two to recover from what they had witnessed.

  Later Cathinka provisioned Waldemar and sent him away in the company of those of Don Ignacio’s cousins who had not slunk off to sleep. She and the young man exchanged no words either during the preparations for his trek or at the final moment of his sullen decampment. Parrots and cockatoos flew aerial reconnaissance missions to insure that Waldemar did not attempt to double back. Cathinka was alone again.

  A transcendent peacefulness descended on her spirit. She took off her ruined chemise and stepped out of her pantalettes. She bathed her wounds in well water. She replenished her strength with fruits. She slept naked in her apartment under the gaze of a blue-wattled lizard. That night, and the night after, and so on for every night until the third anniversary of her marriage to Don Ignacio, she visited her husband’s bier in this prelapsarian attire. His scrunched body appeared to straighten, his scrunched features to unwrinkle. He slept on, of course, but a modicum of health was his again and the dreams flickering through his slumber softened his monkeyish face without making it a whit more human. Cathinka did not care. She attended Don Ignacio as often as an experimental animal visits its food tray. Far from dulling the sensibilities of their prisoners, some habits are vital and sustaining. Or so Cathinka slowly came to believe. Now that nakedness was her habitual raiment she felt herself an inalienable part of Cancer Keep.

  During the last few days before the third anniversary, a tuft of beautiful white hair began to sprout on Cathinka’s breastbone. It ran by degrees from her throat to her cleavage, spreading over her breasts the way frost furs sun-bleached boulders in a winter stream. This fur gleamed on her opalescent body, and, curling a forefinger in the tuft at her throat, she sat gazing on the magical creature in the pirogue. Finally, on the day that Don Ignacio had told her to make her last wish, Cathinka clasped her husband’s paws and softly spoke it. . . .

  XLI

  Stevie sat back from the electromanuscriber—the Exceleriter, rather—exhausted. At one o’clock, shortly after the telephone call from David-Dante Maris, she had come upstairs and started a short story. A glance at her watch revealed that it was now about ten minutes after three, almost time for Marella to come stomping through their tall front foyer from school. After having wasted nearly the entire morning, Stevie had finished “The Monkey’s Bride” in a little over two hours, an accomplishment she could scarcely credit, for she had written at the rate of nearly a thousand words every fifteen minutes. Never in her life had she written with such speed. Never in her life had she been so totally immersed in the subject matter flowing through the synapses of her imagination onto paper. Never in her life had she tried to translate her own experiences into the uncanny runes of myth. Wow. A short story of over seven thousand words in two hours!

  “And it’s good, too,” Stevie said, rubbing her arms. “For a first-timer, it’s bloody marvelous.”

  Where would she send it? She had no idea. Atlanta Fortnightly never used fiction, and she could not recall ever having read stories of this peculiar stamp in The New Yorker or Esquire. Most periodicals featuring fantasy, she knew from close consultation of market listings in writers’ magazines, paid execrable rates and had limited readerships. The high-paying men’s magazines, on the other hand, would probably not touch a story with a female protagonist, especially one who soundly drubs her no-goodnik boyfriend in an all-night brawl. Nor did Cathinka seem the sort of heroine to make the editors of Redbook or Cosmopolitan do happy somersaults, although, given a flexible and discerning editor at those places, her story might stand half a chance there. . . .

  Where had the drolly so
mber tales of Karen Blixen, better known as Isak Dinesen, first appeared? Stevie wondered. Or had they been forced to await book publication to see the light of day? What about the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde? The ghost stories of Coppard and Montague James? Or should she try a science-fiction magazine like Asimov’s or Omni? The latter publication, in particular, paid well, and in its pages she had read interesting fantasies by Harlan Ellison, Walter Tevis, Ray Bradbury. . . .

  Well, she hardly had to decide in the next ten minutes. Why not sit back and enjoy the first lovely flush of accomplishment? It would dissipate soon enough, probably when she extracted the page still in the machine and inserted a sheet of watermarked bond and a carbon set on which to begin her submission copy. She had never been able to afford a typist for final drafts and did not trust anyone else to make sense of her hand-corrected roughs. What kind of triumphant sign-off would an experienced typist put at the end of a work of fiction? Newspaper reporters and feature-article writers often used the old telegrapher’s symbol—30—as a sign of completion.

  “ ‘The End,’ ” Stevie advised herself. “Put a big, fat Warner Brothers ‘The End’ at the bottom of the page.” She centered the Exceleriter’s typing disc, backspaced a few units, depressed and locked the shift key, and started to type. But the machine abruptly took over from her:

  YOURE WELCOME.

  Stevie clasped her hands and brought them down on the typewriter’s casing like the prickly head of a medieval mace. The machine shut off. Still aquiver with frustration and anger, she struck the Exceleriter three more times, blows of diminishing strength that left the heels of her hands aching.

  “I’m welcome, am I? What the hell am I welcome for? What do you think you’ve done for me?”

  The typewriter did not reply, and Stevie yanked the last page of her narrative from the cylinder, placed it flat on her desk, struck through YOURE WELCOME with her ballpoint, and block-printed THE END in large uneven letters. It was her story, not the goddamn Exceleriter’s!

  But you’ve never written that many words that fast in your life, Stevie reflected, a traitor to her own indignation. You certainly never wrote a short story before, and in “The Monkey’s Bride” you’ve somehow contrived to turn ’Crets into a figure of sympathetic romanticism. Is that something you would have done, functioning totally on your own? ’Crets is a foul little beast, but Don Ignacio has heroic attributes that eventually win Cathinka over. Stevie, you could not possibly have cast Seaton Benecke’s bloodsucking pet as your husband and lover without the meddlesome intervention of the demon inhabiting your typewriter.

  Not so! After all, last night I dreamed that Ted was wearing a monkey suit resembling the capuchin—so, you see, I’d already made an identification similar to the one that seems to structure my story.

  You think that’s what you dreamed, Stevie. Lately the edges between dream and reality have strangely blurred.

  Well, today is Monday, thank you, and I haven’t had any trouble telling the real from the, well, unreal. I had a rotten morning, a redemptive telephone call, and a stunning two-hour stretch at this glory-grabbing machine. “The Monkey’s Bride” came out of my heart and guts, Mrs. Crye. I wasn’t sitting here snockered taking high-speed dictation from a demon. The call from Maris set me off. Or I would never have even thought to try anything so audacious.

  Look at the sheet of examination-table paper you set aside before beginning your story, Stevie.

  Annoyed, Stevie rummaged beside her desk for the long strip of paper on which she had tried to write a semihumorous essay on the rewards of widowhood. Picking it up, she saw that it was covered from margin to margin with typewritten dialogue. It began, “This is David-Dante Maris, editor-in-chief at the Briar Patch Press in Atlanta,” and it concluded, quite succinctly, “Sweet dreams.” In between, Stevie’s perusal soon revealed, the transcription held every word she remembered speaking to Maris and every word he had presumably said to her.

  “What the hell does this mean?” Stevie asked the ceiling, rubbing her arms. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Nothing, a part of herself responded. More of the same. Take your pick. In either event, your conversation with David-Dante Maris never happened. The typewriter made it up. It let you help it with “The Monkey’s Bride,” but the long-distance call from Maris it spun out unassisted to fill the emotional vacuum of your inability to work this morning. You wanted an interruption, so the Exceleriter gave you one. Between eleven and one, you suffered a fugue of pathological incapacity that this self-contained extract neatly explains away. It’s a brazen piece of wish-fulfillment, courtesy of the Demon in the Machine. Or else you’ve gone over the falls in a manic-depressive dugout of your own design.

  The telephone rang! Stevie insisted. I got up to answer it. I caught it on the sixth ring.

  The telephone did ring, but you got up as soon as you heard it and rushed downstairs to put as much distance between you and the Exceleriter as possible. That’s why it took six rings to catch it. You were lucky not to break your neck.

  I talked to Maris. He wants Two-Faced Woman. He read excerpts from my article “The Empty Side of the Bed.”

  It was a wrong number, Stevie. The caller never even said hello. Whoever it was breathed into the receiver for a few moments—twenty seconds, say—and hung up. You went back upstairs believing you’d left the bedroom phone off the hook. Finding out otherwise, you came down again and fixed lunch. You dallied over this unappetizing meal for two hours. If you daydreamed the talk with Maris during this time, maybe the Exceleriter merely transcribed your fantasy. Whatever may have happened, Stevie, your chummy chat with a big-cheese Atlanta book editor didn’t. That’s just what you wanted to happen.

  A wrong number?

  Well, it could have been Seaton Benecke, I suppose. He knows your number, doesn’t he? He’s got it, you could say. He called you here one evening last week. Maybe he was calling to ask if you’d seen a runaway monkey.

  Why didn’t he, then?

  It might have been somebody else. I don’t know. I’m only trying to help. Don’t turn these hostile feelings against yourself. That’s what the Exceleriter—Benecke, the Demon in the Machine, whoever—that’s what they want. I’m not your enemy. I’m another part of you.

  He gave me advice. He gossiped about Rhonda Anne Grinnell. He said he was sending me a contract to look over.

  Your imagination, Stevie. Only your imagination.

  It was real!

  You sent the Briar Patch Press your book proposal on Saturday morning. Today is Monday. Do you really think your packet reached their offices over the weekend? Do you really think that, if it did, a man like David-Dante Maris would tear it open, read every word, and call you long-distance with an offer of three thousand dollars on the very morning it arrived? Come on, kiddo.

  “No,” said Stevie aloud. “The odds against that are astronomical. Any editor who did that would be shot full of blue lead by a firing squad of publishing executives at the next booksellers convention.”

  Exactly, thought Mrs. Crye. Bang, bang, bang. Bang!

  Stevie clutched her forehead. Whereas formerly the Exceleriter had confined most of its puerile inventions and script revisions to the hours between midnight and dawn, it now deliberately intruded on the time she spent working and taking care of her family. It was rewriting her experience, anticipating the future, converting her wish-fulfillment fantasies into mocking, short-lived “realities.” It was screwing around with the microscopic symmetries of her life, the Do-Not-Appropriate moments with whose fragile substance, every single day, she sought to recreate herself. She could not keep tolerating the typewriter’s appropriations. She had tolerated them too long. Soon she would have to exorcise or destroy the demons arrayed against her by the twists in somebody else’s convolute and heartless plot.

  Still, she and the Exceleriter had collaborated on “The Monkey’s Bride,” and she was proud of the story, even if also a little frightened by it. Don Ignacio was a portma
nteau character combining, as she had already noted, the physical appearance of ’Crets with the death-in-life qualities of her late husband Ted, who had surrendered so easily to intestinal cancer. Waldemar appeared to represent Seaton Benecke. Cathinka, of course, was a shamelessly heroic version of herself. Teddy and Marella had no counterparts in the tale at all. Was this omission significant? Did she secretly wish to slip every responsibility or encumbrance but that of finding a man who would relieve her of still others?

  No.

  Stevie rejected this reading as too simplistic, too static. Cathinka was a noble character, but nobility becomes a smugly statuesque, pigeon-dropping-befouled virtue—no virtue at all—when bereft of its ties to human institutions and values. In making her final wish, Cathinka was not repudiating the desirability or the possibility of female self-sufficiency. She was acknowledging Don Ignacio’s, and hence reaffirming her own, humanity. That this acknowledgment and reaffirmation involved an acceptance of the dying animal in their makeups was not too comforting, but it was necessary. . . . Maybe Ted, in seeming to desert her, had merely been making similar accommodations with his fate. On the other hand, maybe he’d gone too far to make them.

  This uncertainty was one of the reasons that “The Monkey’s Bride” frightened Stevie. She could not come up with an interpretation that revealed a precise one-to-one correspondence between the events of her own life and those in Cathinka’s fictional one. Maybe no such correspondence existed. Again, she felt, the Exceleriter had mocked her.

  “Mama!”

  The cry startled Stevie. She stood, bracing herself with both hands on her rolltop. It was Marella, who had just entered the foyer beneath Stevie’s office.

  “Mama, I’m home!”

  XLII

  “ ‘. . . Cathinka sat gazing on the magical creature in the pirogue. Finally, on the day that Don Ignacio had told her to make her last wish, Cathinka clasped her husband’s paws and softly spoke it. . . .’ ”