!Click Song

by John A. Williams

  He laughed. “Good luck, Cate. Say hello to Paul and Mark for me, huh?”

  And he was gone.

  I didn’t have time to stew or to curse or to be angry. The phone rang again and I snatched it as though it were Kass coming across the ring to start the second round. I snarled, “Hello!”

  There were startled sounds on the other end. “Hey, down boy. It’s me, Maxine. Christ! I guess that was Bob Kass who just hung up, right? Your line was busy. He just called me. Said he wanted to talk to you personally. What kind of deal does he want? Which books? You didn’t agree to do any screenplays, did you? Why are you pissed?”

  “Hold it, Maxine, hold it. We didn’t talk any deals. You know what he said to me? You wanna know what that cocksucker said to me?”

  “Of course I want to know.” The bouncy expectancy had disappeared from her voice.

  “They’re not doing anything black. Which was not news, but also seemed to indicate there wasn’t much chance in the future either.”

  Her voice was incredulous. “He said that?”

  “Yeah, he said it.”

  “Well, Cate, there’s been a lot of talk—not talk—because no one wants to be quoted; no one wants to be ridden on rumor. But it’s in publishing too, to a larger extent than you want to think. I mean people—they don’t seem terribly interested in us after we leave Twentieth Century Forum Publishers. Darling, frankly, it’s gonna be hard to sell you when you finish with Maureen and—”

  “Wanna quit?”

  “No, no. Just want to let you know up front. The business is changing. Remember, I told you—”

  “Listen, Maxine, I may write shit, but I don’t knowingly write shit and think it is art, and besides all your neat little formulas only work if you’re writing that silly white- blue-collar shit; even that nigger-in-the-projects crap has run its course, so there you are. If you write what you know, the first law of writing, and what you know is what I know and some frightened people in New York and Hollywood don’t wanna know what I know, then you’re right where you should’ve been all the time: writing for yourself.”

  “Cate, Cate,” she was saying, trying to interrupt.

  “What the fuck, Maxine. I’ve probably got more out of it already than I should have, given the chickenshit situation. Listen. I’m goin’ fishin’—”

  “Is Allis there? Let me talk to Allis.”

  “She’s not here. She’s in the city with Mack. Something he wanted to do.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yep. I’m fine. Bob Kass just put things back in perspective for me. I am A-O-K, as the super-honky moon-walkers say.”

  “One more thing,” Maxine said. “I’ve started another book.”

  She sounded embarrassed.

  “What’s it about?

  “Same thing. Sex and old age.”

  “Sex and Old Age Two.”

  “If you want. I got this tremendous advance. Fabulous.”

  “I know you won’t tell me how great. I don’t wanna know how great. I suppose you’ll be spending more time with that now, huh?”

  “Yes,” she said quickly—almost too quickly, as though she’d been waiting for an opening. “I am dropping some clients, but you’re not one of them.”

  “Shit, I didn’t think I was. Loyalty. Longevity. All that.”

  She laughed. It was a thin laugh. “Sorry Kass had nothing to offer,” she said. “Call me when you get back to town.”

  I bolted a few drinks before, during and after my dinner, then put on a jacket and went outside. I lay down and watched the night slide over, bringing with it a gibbous moon. As I lay, my mood shuffled from one of unspeakable sadness to one of dread. Perhaps the sameness of the conversations, the persistence of attitudes, the shallow ways of things, people. The joyful pursuit of hypocrisy by hordes of guisards. Back down the ribbons of tarmac and concrete that led to New York, there, in the city, editors and agents had trampled each other to death to be the first to offer that platoon of confessed Washington criminals obscene amounts of money for books (that would be ghosted) detailing nothing more than their deeds, victims and accomplices. There was no end to the books. Frank Wills had been shuttled into the obscurity reserved for his kind. In the big shell game of our time he had become the goat, the victim, Francis the Obscure, and those he had discovered had become the contrite heroes; aw! the continuum of bullshit was of course unbroken. I was sad. And I was afraid. I wanted out of this warp.

  I thought of the revolver, upstairs in a desk drawer. I thought of its heft, its blunt kind of beauty, surcease. But I did not move. I stared at the moon and thought of the men who had walked upon it, men ten generations removed from the “human débris anxious for any adventures, psychologically armed with new facts,” who had sailed rockets instead of ships and who, for a time, had garnered acclaim instead of anonymity. Only the machines had changed; only the ritual had been altered. Did I see an American flag listlessly drooping near the Oceanus Procellarum crater?

  The chorus of peepers began to give way to the hoot of owls. Don’t call my name, I thought; don’t call my name yet; and then I heard an eerie howl, human but not, off in the distance, which distance at night brought all sound within cup of the ear. Big Foot? Poor Big Foot. How could there not have been a Dr. Zarkov or so who had impregnated female baboons with human sperm in the quiet corner of a lab here and a lab there, and had unwittingly chosen the right time when human and primate chromosome bands precisely matched and at that time, that exact time, overcame the two-chromosome difference between man and that beast because of sun or moon spots, falling stars or some other cosmological occurrence?

  The sound fell into silence. Ancient Egyptian women of high birth were sometimes mummified with baboons, !clickers; and in the Papyrus of Ani is: her, homage, all, peoples, thee, upper, within, through, upon, face, over, at, for … Ra! preposition, noun, proper noun, collective noun. The first. Of course the ancients knew. I felt better. Now I thought of the gun in abstract, having nothing much to do with me, just an object to do my bidding, like, perhaps, a hoe commanded to work while I rested in the shade.

  I was thinking of the glyph when I saw, topping what I knew was the twin peak to the one I now lay upon (the start or end of a long-gone water channel), the lights of a car moving slowly but surely through the night. Allis, I thought, drives like that, and I longed for her so sharply that I knew when I went inside I would call. The car lights dipped out of sight and came back into view again, radiating lines 360 degrees off into space through my astigmatism.

  Then I thought of a friend who had gone scuba diving with his son and daughter off La Tortuga. One moment they were swimming in sun-bright water and the next minute they were inside pitch-black submerged caves, one opening on another. He found daylight and surfaced, waiting for his children. He waited. He waited, squelching panic, fending it off. Time was running out. He submerged carefully. They were his children, and he entered the dark again, every neuron in his brain electrified, alert, screaming. The panic began chewing up his air and he knew that theirs too was short, about to go stale, about to be of no use whatsoever. They bumped into him as they were speeding breathlessly back to the entry point. They surfaced in the sunlight and drifted back to the boat, safe.

  I got to my feet, assuming that the car would veer off into some valley, be swallowed by forest walls and limestone ledges, but it kept lancing light, brighter and closer, until I could hear the car itself, the pulsing of its engine, the mashing of its tires against the road. It rounded the curve down the road; the engine noise dropped off and then the lights swung up the driveway and spilled all the way down to the lake, and even before the car stopped, I realized that my wife and my son were calling:

  “Cate!”

  “Dad!”

  And I ran to them. Somehow they had heard me and returned.

  7

  I think I was okay by the time we got back to the city and hauled all the luggage up on the elevator. Mack was eager to return to school
and to see the friends who had not come to the country on a visit. (He does not appear to delight in the country the way we do.)

  Allis was planning reluctantly to crank up her accounts; I was going to finish The Pushkin Papers—though Gullian did not seem to be eagerly awaiting delivery. I felt I had gained a second wind, as Glenn had described it from his running days, and gone right through the wall, scattering bricks to hell and back. I was more eager to work than I had been when I first arrived in New York.

  I think I was better; the apartment seemed to be bigger. Usually, after I had been away and returned, it seemed smaller. Also, I no longer caught Allis or Mack or Glenn staring at me when I turned quickly.

  Without waiting to put away the luggage, we attacked what mail had come since Allis’ last trip down. (That had been when, having herself had this malady whose name is never called, this deadly dysfunction, and coming into view of the squared stalagmites of Gotham seared over, glucked with steam and grime, she somehow made Mack understand why they had to go right back, had returned to find me in the embrace of night, glyphs, fear and dread. “I heard you,” she had said later as we held each other.) Allis seized all the interesting-looking stuff—the air letters and striped airmail envelopes from distant places and the important-appearing envelopes made of fine paper and bearing copper- or steel-engraved return addresses. Mack had grabbed his soccer ball and was already leaving, his voice resonating in the hallway in conversation with Julio. (“Is Tim home? Eric? Aldo? Billy?”)

  Allis tossed bill after bill in my lap, unashamedly, until we had two stacks of mail. She had also given me the books whose bags were uniformly vomit brown. I opened the one from Amaya, wondering. They were not scheduled to publish anything of mine soon. The bag contained a thin volume of poetry by one Alejo Cato Donoso, entitled El Sol Sobre Una Colina Azul. He was, the jacket copy advised, Un Lorca contemperano. I felt that I had been hit with roundhouse padded by a sixteen-ounce glove. “Look!” I said to Allis. “Look, and he’s only fuckin’ eighteen!”

  Startled, she looked up from her greedy perusal of the mail. “Oh!” she said, taking the book. “Oh, your son!”

  “Yeah, Alejo …” She ignored my outstretched hand and thumbed through the book.

  “My God,” she whispered. “Eighteen. Glenn and now this one. Jesus.” She leaned over, the book opened to the title poem. “What’s it say?”

  I looked at the Spanish. “Uh, ummm—

  I crept up behind the sun

  resting on a blue hill,

  laughing down in time.

  I’ll have to study the rest of it.”

  We sat motionless, staring at the book. “A poet in the family,” she finally said, seeming to taste the words, “and another novelist.”

  “I’m not sure Glenn plans to write anything more when he’s finished Jumper.” Jesus, I thought, he’s a baby yet.

  “Why not?” She was torn between going back to the mail and digesting this information. “You’ve talked about it?”

  “He feels bad about Jed. Thinks in some psychic way he caused it all to happen. He didn’t say this, but maybe he feels guilty for being jealous of Jed.” I was sure we were both thinking of Paul once those words were out. “He’ll finish the final draft this fall,” I said, “and then quit Office Temporaries and take off.”

  Allis was still looking at and fondling Alejo’s book. “You really ought to go back to your poetry,” I said.

  She closed the book softly and shuffled halfheartedly through the mail. Then, almost fearfully, she said, “I have. But I could never come up with lines like Alejo’s. I just don’t think that way.”

  “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  She was back at the mail.

  “You know there’s no special way any writer should think, baby. You know that. You just keep forgetting. And it’s what I’ve been discovering. I thought I was writing differently from all those other turkeys, cutting closer to the bone. But shit, you get sick, there’s a kind of sickness, before you can really understand anything—the business with your father—you’ve written about him?”

  She nodded, her eyes showing something I could not define.

  “And Mr. Storto?”

  Her head snapped around. “How did you know?”

  I gripped her hand. “It’s that that lets you figure out whether you’re in a pit or on a peak; it’s when you find your place in some dimension where you can function. It’s like after the temptation of Christ, Jacob at Peniel, Buddha far from his pipal tree, suffering temptation, Mohammed on Mount Hira, see? That’s why poets in Arabic are called Sh’ir; the poet is ‘the Knower,’ and how can a poet know unless she knows? And how can you know if you’ve not been sick with the way you were? How about that, Momma, some rap, huh? Sh’ir. Isn’t that some fuckin’ name? And here we’re all saddled with names that don’t mean a goddamn thing, over here, I mean.”

  She was looking at me in the way she used to look at me when I read to her a story I’d written, as though she was seeing something about me that she hadn’t seen before.

  “So you have no business being afraid or shy or even of letting me be the only writer in this house.” I paused. “When I think of all you’ve come to know since Bread Loaf—”

  I hefted Alejo’s book. A finely crafted book has a very special feel to it, none of the sleaze that comes from handling tapes or film; a book is a bound essence, or should be, of something special. “I do get to read your new poetry, don’t I?”

  She smiled a pretty smile, all dimples, and said, “I’d be the fool to say no, wouldn’t I, after all that?”

  “Quite right, my dear.”

  She passed her stack of mail over and smiled at the floor in some inner happiness. I had an enormous sweep of pride. And then I said, “So look—what’s for dinner?”

  We both laughed.

  I remember that autumn with amazing clarity. The weather had been remarkably good—dry and temperate. It went well with the feeling that people were trying to recover from the most recent series of debacles around the country and the world, the corruptions in high and low places, the merry-go-round of wars, small and bitter. I was over half a century old then.

  That autumn, Elliot Huysmans published an article in Ebony—rather a surprise, for the publication was not known for its devotion to anything other than the popular arts—about himself and Norman Mailer.

  Two years earlier he had been asked by “a major publication” to go to Zaire to cover the Ali-Foreman fight. Huysmans had been to Zaire when it still bore its “slave” name, the Congo. He had been, in spite of his host of literary coronas, the 372nd Regimental middleweight champ during the war in Italy. He had never written about boxing until the Ebony piece, but he knew it, from Jackson and Johnson, through Ketchel, Risko, Levinsky, Kid Chocolate, Louis, Armstrong, Graziano, La Motta, Zale, Robinson, Sadler, Pep, Gavilan, Basilio, Fullmer, Turpin, Cerdan—when it all seemed to fall apart until Ali howled and punched himself into the spotlight. Huysmans had the credentials, the savvy, and he packed his bags for Zaire. But then, through the “industry,” came word that Playboy, ole supercrotch, had signed Mailer to cover the fight. Huysmans’ “major publication” (it could only have been Esquire) canceled his assignment, an act that implied with an obvious heaviness of hand that white was right, indeed, yes indeedy, even in Zaire, even if Huysmans had a tarnished old 372nd Inf. Reg. 92nd Div. AUS championship belt somewhere behind his awards. That fall Huysmans stopped being a Negro and became Black.

  We learned that Paul, like me, had delivered a new novel to his publisher and that it would be published at about the same time as mine, late spring. (I’d delivered Pushkin to Gullian over lunch at Lutece. She made all the proper sounds, the proper promises, the wham-bang predictions of success. I’d heard the litany before, and besides, I was well, so I enjoyed the lunch.) Paul appeared regularly in notes and items, snips and snaps: he trundled a pushcart through Central Park with other well-known authors to help protest the high cost of b
ooks (high because publishers often made big—that is thick—books out of thin ones by using high-bulk paper, large type, wide margins and chapter pages begun halfway down); he got a double off George Plimpton at the big game between Writers and Artists in East Hampton; was a signer of various PEN and Writers Guild and Authors Guild proclamations protesting the imprisonment of writers in Uganda, East Timor, South Africa, Russia, Bolivia, Chile; he was the scheduled keynote speaker for the coming MLA meeting …

  That was the autumn we bought Amos’ mountain house. The city’s sickness was deepening; perhaps it was a national and world sickness, the scrambling, scuffling, the scratching, the lack of even the most elementary graces or courtesies. People were killing each other over parking spaces; cops, scared witless, were now being killed as often as they had witlessly killed. In the gas lines, where the gas pumpers exercised their new-found power in a fashion that would have made Captain Bligh blush, drivers killed each other for places on line. Repairmen of cars, television sets, door jambs, etc., were no longer capable of repairing anything; they simply took your money. At least twice a month we had to return tainted meat or soured milk to the supermarket, and everywhere, everywhere, people waited on line to give sellers who no longer even pretended to provide service, let alone decent products, their money, and did it without too much grumbling, like cattle being led through the chute to slaughter. We bought Amos’ place because something had changed, swiftly, it seemed, and irrevocably, and if people were aware of it, they did not show it. We wanted a place we could run to when Vesuvius finally buried Pompeii again, when Rome fell, when Dilmun died, when Memphis ceased to exist.

  Most of all that autumn I remember that my family moved closer together, appeared to be on the verge of becoming larger. This was all the more underlined when Maxine Culp called to trade gossip and told me that Paul and Betsy had broken up.

  About Alejo, I had made inquiries through my Spanish editor. The critics in Spain had treated him well; he was now “established,” as they say over here. He lived, wrote my editor, in an old house up near Tibidabo that had a marvelous view of Barcelona away to the south. (I imagined that it was like gazing down on Hollywood from the hills above it.) It was rumored, said my editor, that Alejo’s frequent house guest was Dolores Montefrio y Lucena, the flamenca dancer and Andalusian nationalist. Perhaps I had read of her? (I had not, but on, son, onward—and only just nineteen!) Alejo was also a candidate for the City of Barcelona and the Boscan poetry prizes. These were, I’d heard, awards for the Catalan clique, but hell, he was a Catalan!