The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  What could I say to her? First there was the problem of privacy: I didn’t want to talk to her in the presence of her parents. Her father, who was a self-employed electrician, expressed a great interest in my Silvia, and I allowed him to take the Range Rover for a drive, and then I asked Denise if she’d like to ride with me for a little while, and thus I was able to get her away from her parents for not more than an hour, during which I told her I was “investigating” Travis Coe for a state agency and wanted to ask her some questions about him.

  “What’s he done went and done now?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “The question is, What had he already went and done when you knew him?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “He was pretty cool and sharp for his age, and he had a real mouth on him, but he never got on anybody’s shit list…except Bobby Joe’s.”

  “How did he get on Bobby Joe’s shit list?” I asked.

  “Bobby Joe is real jealous,” she said. “I mean, he gets just crazy with jealousy if some other dude even looks at me.”

  “What did Travis do with you?”

  The question made her blush, but she recovered and protested, “My gosh, ma’am, he was two whole years younger than me!”

  “I know,” I said, trying hard to conceal my own jealousy. Then I requested, “Tell me about the time you played I-draw-a-snake-upon-your-back.”

  When she was able to close her mouth after her gasp, she said, “Well, for crying out loud, somebody must have already told you everything we done!”

  “Yes, somebody did,” I said. “But I want to hear your side of the story.”

  When she finished narrating as chastely and colorlessly as she could the story of her “carrying on” with Travis, I had only one more question: “Would you tell me the names of the other games you played?”

  And afterward, instead of going back to Stick Around, I returned to Arcaty, where the next morning I finished my short story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” and Joni Lynn Miller typed it up, and I sent it off to Liz Blaustein, who sold it shortly thereafter to Playboy, the same magazine that had inflamed my first American lover, Kenny Elmore.

  Denise McWalter deserves almost as much credit as Travis for having provided the inspiration for the work that would keep me busy the rest of that year, the writing of the stories that would constitute my collection The Names of Seeking Games, including also “Come-to-Coventry,” “Man-Hunting,” “Kiss-Chase,” “Relievo,” “Gee,” “Tin-Can-Tommy,” “Whip,” “Sardines,” “Buzz-Off” (the second-most-anthologized story), “Hunt the Keg,” and of course “Hide-and-Seek,” as well as the three stories that were not the names of games but of cries therein: “All In, All In,” “Ready or Not, Here I Come” and the collection’s concluding piece, “All Hid, All Hid,” which Shannon Ravenel called “the best American short story of the eighties.”

  IV

  Once I thought I saw Travis, and it was not with Silvia’s help. Having Silvia and her all-terrain mobility sometimes left me feeling lazy and flabby for having abandoned my regular habit of hiking up and down the myriad mazes of Arcaty’s stairsteps. So I made a conscientious decision to leave Silvia in the parking lot while, at least once a day, I went off on foot to explore the town.

  Directly below the Halfmoon on the east slope of Halfmoon Mountain is Saint Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, famous because years before it had been featured in “Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not” as the only church in the world that one enters through the top of the belltower, owing to the steepness of the slope. But despite this ballyhoo, one does not actually descend the belltower to gain entrance to the church; rather, one walks down a long, gentle ramp affording a view of the church and of, directly below the ramp’s parapet, the rooftop of the rectory, upon which tourists cast their spare change, like throwing coins into a wishing well. At any given time the rooftop is covered with perhaps fifty dollars in quarters, dimes, and nickels. The distance from the parapet to the rooftop is at least ten or twelve feet. Approaching it one morning, I discerned that somehow a boy, whom I took to be Travis, had leapt across this distance, landed on the roof, and was busy collecting the coins when I came along; and, spotting him, I called out, “Tray-vis!”

  He disappeared instantly over the other slope of the roof, perhaps dropping to the ground from its far eaves. I ran down the ramp and attempted to find him, exploring the cramped grounds of Saint Elizabeth’s, but he had disappeared. I knew at least this much: he had not left Arcaty, and he had apparently used up the hundred dollars I’d given him and was reduced to stealing change from the roof of the rectory. My heart ached anew for him, and I lost the rest of the day by redoubling my efforts to find him.

  My seeking of Travis was more intense than any of the searches in any of the seeking games of my stories, although, as in each of those stories, there was a moment or two or three during which the quarry was spotted, as if to prove its existence, as if to tantalize the hunter with the elusiveness of the quarry, as if to give the game, the game of life, its zest. I became convinced, in time, that Travis was still a dweller in Arcaty, and my search for him continued long enough for me to forgive him entirely for his no longer being a virgin, and to want desperately to know him again, in all the meanings of know. The novelist who overcomes the chagrin he feels because the story has already been told by someone else can be content to make the hand-me-down story fetching, alluring, even unique.

  But my springtime mornings in the tower of my Halfmoon penthouse were not spent brooding over Travis. Liz continued to send me galley proofs or finished copies of foreign editions of my books, and although I did not know the languages I appreciated seeing Georgie Boy translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Serbian. I was especially thrilled to see the vertical columns of characters in the Japanese. Wistfully I told myself, If only it were possible to have a Georgiy Malchik…but I knew that my book would appear in Russian, if at all, only in samizdat: typewritten or handwritten pages of a hasty translation circulated endlessly from one eager reader to another, virgin readers all, but readers who would appreciate the experiences of the heroine and readily identify with her. I had no way of knowing that at that very moment a secretly printed edition of Georgiy Malchik was being pirated in Leningrad to replace the customary typewritten samizdat with thousands of softcover copies, one of which would find its way almost immediately into the outraged hands of Bolshakov himself.

  There were two other distractions that spring, one pleasant, the other not. The disagreeable interruption came in the form of a letter from my old mentor Ingraham, who was still trying unsuccessfully, he said, to find a publisher for the nonfiction book he was writing about ghost towns. Let us not be coy, he said. I have heard rumors from some of my Arcaty acquaintances that you have taken over most of the top floor of the Halfmoon, something you couldn’t have done unless you are indeed V. Kelian, as I have suspected all along. I will not dwell upon how envious I am of your enormous success (I spend enough time in the privacy of my own resentful dignity dwelling upon the good luck of other writers). I did truly enjoy reading Georgie Boy, possibly the only novel I’ve been able to finish in many a year, and I think you deserve every accolade that comes your way.

  I have not published a book in almost a decade. The failure of my last novel continues to puzzle its editor long after he has withdrawn from the crazy business of publishing. It doesn’t puzzle me so much as it intensifies my burning desire to write something that cannot be ignored by the fickle public of readers.

  But my ghost town project, which conceivably could do for these destitute villages what James Agee did for destitute people in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continues to make its rounds of ever-lesser publishing houses without finding anyone who likes it, and even my so-called agent presumably has abandoned me.

  I do not wish to appear to be calling in a debt, but if you feel any gratitude whatsoever for the help I gave you in the early stages of writing Georgie Boy, I beseech you, I beg you, please p
ut in a good word for me to your editor.

  By coincidence, I had just finished arranging the collected hardback volumes of Ingraham’s novels on a shelf in my library, and in the process had dipped into his last-published novel, that awkwardly titled The Archaic Bulwarks of the Bodarks, a comic history of Stick Around that had been dismissed as a “spoof” (a word the great John Barth in turn dismissed as sounding like “imperfectly suppressed flatulence”) by many reviewers when it appeared in 1975. To my surprise, Ingraham had made no attempt to disguise or pseudonymize the Ingledew name and had even, toward the end, mentioned Sharon, Vernon, et al., by their actual names. But I’d read enough to convince myself that he was a good writer, as undeserving of his neglect as I was perhaps undeserving of my fame, and I did, as he hoped, feel some thankfulness and obligation toward him.

  So I took the trouble to write, rather than call, Wölfflin on his behalf, with the result that Publisher Z became Ingraham’s publisher and, two years later, brought out his ghost town nonfiction, to the same scant reviews and general disregard that his fiction had suffered. It was widely remaindered.

  The one good diversion that spring came after a phone call from Liz Blaustein informing me that Trevor Kola the Hollywood filmmaker was getting ready to plan the shooting of Georgie Boy and that Kola was very eager to have my views on how the film should go. Kola, Liz told me, had been exceptionally faithful to all the novels he had converted to movies, and he wanted to do everything he could to make this great best-seller into a box-office smash. But of course Liz could not put me directly in touch with him without violating the agreement that my identity and my sex be kept secret. Would I, she asked, be willing to write a letter, signed by V. Kelian, that she could forward to him? Perhaps with a treatment?

  “What is a ‘treatment’?” I asked.

  “Just a few pages to help the development,” she said. “Just write a kind of short form of the story line.”

  “How many pages?”

  “Twenty or so. Not more than fifty. Be sure to write it in the present tense.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the way it’s done. It helps you visualize the picture: ‘George wants Princess. Princess wants George but doesn’t want to get pregnant. George must find rubbers. George steals rubbers from Bolshakov.’ Et cetera. Get the idea?”

  “I think,” I said, and I began at once to write a treatment of the story, only mildly disturbed at having to drop everything else in order to work on it. It was easier for me to expound upon general principles for converting the novel to the screen than to write the specifics of abbreviating its story from the twelve or fourteen hours required to read it to the two hours allotted for watching it, even in the present tense, but I amazed myself by finishing the job within a week and writing a long covering letter to Mr. Kola from V. Kelian.

  The result was, Liz laughingly told me, that the great Trevor Kola was insisting that he should meet and talk with V. Kelian, “on Kelian’s own turf,” if need be. “Wouldn’t you rather just fly out to the coast?” Liz asked me.

  “In drag?” I said. I had, I confess, been giving many of my idle thoughts to the contingency of having to meet or talk directly with Kola and wondering how, if need be, it could be arranged without giving away my identity. It had not occurred to me that he would want to come to the Bodarks in search of V. Kelian.

  Liz sighed. “I’m thinking,” she said, and there was a long moment of silence on the line. Then she said, “Hey. How about if you took a boyfriend with you and pretended to Kola that you were the interpreter for the boyfriend, Kelian, who can’t speak English?”

  My mind quickly examined and rejected the few males I knew: Ingraham, Day Whittacker, Vernon Ingledew, Jim the manager of the driving school, Lenny Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery (tempting but too old), Bob the porter of the Halfmoon, and even Larry Brace. “What boyfriend?” I said to Liz. “My only boyfriend is, as I told you, a twelve-year-old hillbilly named Travis Coe, and he hasn’t been around for some time now.”

  Liz sighed again, and again there was a long silence on the line while both of us were wracking our brains. Then she said, “Well, I suppose I’ll just have to tell him that the mysterious V. Kelian refuses to have any contact with anybody…”

  “Wait,” I said. “Yes, tell him that, but tell him that if he wants to come to the Halfmoon, even if Mr. Kelian refuses to see him in person, I’ll be glad, as Mr. Kelian’s secretary and lover, to ‘relay’ the discussion to him.”

  Silence from Liz for a long moment, and then she said, “Brilliant.” “Tell him that I’ll meet his plane at Fateville, the nearest airport, and drive him the fifty miles to Arcaty. When he knows his flight, he should call the Halfmoon’s desk and leave a message for ‘Kat.’”

  Thereafter it became part of my routine to stop by the desk at least twice a day and ask Lurline, “Any messages?”

  “Nope,” Lurline said, day after day. I was beginning to wonder if the very busy Trevor Kola had found another “property” that was more bankable than my novel, or if he had been disappointed to learn that V. Kelian was residing in the unknown and inaccessible Bodarks, not on Park Avenue in New York or some exotic hideaway in Costa Rica.

  One day when I asked Lurline if there were any messages, she said, “Yep. It’s this. You oughta take Travis back. He’s hopeless wicked and caint be saved. You might as well finish up the job of ruining him.”

  “What?” I said. “Who’s that message from?”

  “Me,” she said.

  23

  I

  Travis Coe’s return to the Halfmoon delighted and comforted me so much that I forgot about Trevor Kola…Or, rather, I continued to think about Trevor Kola only long enough to wonder at that similarity in the sounds of their names: Travis Coe, Trevor Kola (a similarity that would eventually grab journalists, who in turn would make allusions to cocaine, Travis’s and Trevor’s apparent substance of choice, or to the beverage “Coe-Kola.”) After a tearful exchange of apologies (and, later, I would shamelessly use Travis’s words verbatim, but without the Bodarks accent, in the so-called “Apology for Waywardness” section of the popular story “All Out Come in Free”), I took Travis to the Plaza restaurant for dinner, and then, both of us drunk with wine and lust and the excitement of reunion, we spent much of the rest of the evening in my Jacuzzi until, exhausted by our erotomaniacal acrobatics in the hot water, we tumbled into bed for a long private talk, during which he told me all about his experience with Lurline.

  Of course Lurline (whose last name I never learned) is the “Lucille Renwick” of my prizewinning story “All Hid, All Hid,” and, as Larry Brace has shown in his essay “Formidable Heroines in the Shorter Fiction of V. Kelian” (Studies in Modern Literature), she was “only a little like the typical Kelian heroine, who has the sort of innocence that God also protects in fools and drunks.” Lurline was ultraconservatively religious, and although I do not identify her membership specifically as with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I give enough hints to make the affiliation unmistakable. She was required to give a tithe of her Halfmoon salary to her church and to spend time equal to a tenth of her working hours each week out on the streets, ringing doorbells and attempting to sell tracts and convert unbelievers. Travis was the only unbeliever that she had succeeded in converting, but only to the extent of helping her in the work of selling tracts.

  She had taken him in when I evicted him. Twenty-two years old and a native of Arcaty, although both her parents had “moved on” in different directions, primarily westward, she had an apartment on Ojo Street, just a short distance from the Halfmoon, and it was there that Travis had been staying since I threw him out.

  As anyone who has followed his rise to stardom is all too aware, Travis Coe has always been an opportunist, willing to do anything in order to survive and succeed. (I am reminded of what he said to me in our first meeting: “If you got the money, I could do anything you pay me for.”) In order to have a roof over his head, Lurline’s roof
, he was willing to go along with her desire to convert him to her faith, to correct him (he stopped smoking cigarettes in her presence), and even, in the beginning, to banish from his mind and loins whatever lustful itches he might have acquired from Denise and Ekaterina. But gradually, inexorably, he insinuated himself into her bed, against her will but not against her pleasure. I have freely utilized their relationship in those two stories of the Seeking Games collection.

  “She never did mind just plain ole fuckin,” Travis explained. “Matter a fact, she got herself a real hankerin fer it. But she just didn’t like to do all them other things you taught me. She wouldn’t even let me touch her butthole.”

  Taking Travis back, I had the satisfaction that the novelist feels when she realizes that although her story is secondhand, twice told, she is giving it twists and fillips that no other novelist would have imagined. Travis came to love Silvia and confessed that he’d seen me driving her around town and was dying to go for a ride in her. I took him, and even, eventually, in deserted places, let him try his hand at the wheel.

  Lurline remained on polite terms, if not cordial terms, with me and even with Travis, who continued to flirt with her each morning when he went down to get the daily flowers and paper. One morning he returned with a slip of paper in Lurline’s childish scrawl: You got a call. A Mr. Kola says pick him up at the F ’ville airport at 2:00.

  “Now, listen, Travis,” I said, “Here’s what I want you to do…” and I presented him with an elegant white three-piece suit, of the sort that Tom Wolfe was beginning to wear in those days, and a white straw hat, dark glasses, a wig, and a mustache. I told him to stay in my tower bedroom and not show himself to our guest until I asked him.

  Then I drove alone in Silvia to Fateville’s Drake Field to pick up the famous director. He deplaned from a commuter prop craft out of Dallas, and I was able to recognize him from pictures I’d seen in newspapers and magazines: a big man, bushy black hair and heavy eyebrows, and a look (not wholly intentional, I learned) of holding in suspicion or contempt everything that came within his purview. The hills surrounding Drake Field were in the full lush greenery of late springtime, and the air was the fragrant Bodarks ozone that is found nowhere else on earth, but he sniffed it as if it came from a sewage plant, and he looked around disdainfully at his surroundings until his eyes came to rest on me, and he gave me a look as if sizing me up for the casting couch and finding me not worthy of it.