Allis was holding my legs.
“Was I—er—ah running again?”
Wordlessly she released me. It hurt where she had held me.
“Sorry. Was it bad?”
She turned over on her side, still breathing hard, her voice catching as if at snags in the air. “Yes. Bad! And Cate,” she said, peering at me in the dim light, “they are coming more frequently. Almost every night now …”
“Aw, hell,” I said. “I’m really sorry, honey. I’ll take one of Hank’s pills.”
I rose, took the pill and came back to bed. I closed my eyes and thought of books bleeding from Gullian, books with dials on them. That made me think about the lunch and how much I feared having it with her. Bad things were going to come out of that lunch, very bad things.
I imagined Gullian’s voice with its phony enthusiasms: Yat, yat, yot.
* A Samurai with a roast Peking duck?
15
On that Thursday evening then, the funeral over, Betsy straightening out things with Paul’s estate, thus leaving us for the time being without her head on our shoulders, I went to keep my appointment with Nan Tyce. I felt like a sneak thief, since all was now ended with TCFP, but I also felt like a man intent on revenge, a man who had to know in order properly to shape that revenge. For there was nothing else left.
I took a cab partway downtown, then walked the rest of the distance toward the building where TCFP had its offices.
When I was a young man and had first come to New York, I loved, yes loved, walking around midtown, still emptying of people and slowly refilling with the dinner and theater crowds, gliding (I told myself) between those great architecturally insane structures all lighted for the silent armies of cleaning people who nightly just appeared, pails, mops and brooms in hand. Although fractured then as now by race and class, there was at that time an ambience that spoke of greater possibilities. Like so much else, that is now gone.
But I am no longer young, except perhaps in a wrath that, like my shadow in bright sun, keeps pace with my years. Why is that? They tell me that the wrath, the anger, goes with time, that it melts away before the compromises and the evasions of collisions that become patterns of behavior. I do not know why that has not happened to me.
I approach the building of my publisher, which is all glass and chrome-brightened steel even in darkness. The building is one of the newer insanities produced by modern architecture. I enter. The guards move slowly. They are gray-haired, insecure men who have made their bargains with the times. They could not guard a pile of week-old dogshit. Their ragged and shiny serge uniforms bespeak their forlorn stations. But now they are sharp-eyed, for they are in the early hours of their four-to-midnight shift. They pay me little attention. I do not look like a member of the FALN nor a Black Panther late to the fad; I look like a gracefully aging token editorial Negro, is what I look like.
I sign in: Porcius Greenberg—a phony name that, should they ever have reason to check it, would render havoc with their preconceived ideas. My destination—for it is on the same floor as my publisher—Uekusa Electronics Corporation, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi, which once made good planes. I walk down the long lobby into a corridor on whose walls is a listing of the building’s tenants. The list is endless. The names remind me of the battle lists from the Somme or Stalingrad. The newsstands are closed and most of the elevator banks have been shut down. In all this polished, funereal emptiness only the guards shuffle about, speaking in soft, bored voices. I punch the indicator and wait, noticing the chrome finishing everywhere. We must have our chrome, our gleaming silver substitute, and South Africa must sell it and all the people and all the miles between the buying and the selling, all the laws of high and low morality, are as nothing. We must make nearly everything gleam.
The car comes and I step in and press the button for my publisher’s floor. The doors close silently and there is an almost motionless moving. I stand wide-legged and think of a coffin, on end, speeding up to heaven, and I think of all the space growing under my feet, filled only by quietly moving steel cables.
Once I got off on the wrong floor and, deciding not to wait for another elevator, opened a door and walked up the flight to my publisher’s office. The door was locked. I walked back down. That door was locked, too. I walked several flights down and up. At each landing the door was locked, and I concluded that the twenty doors above me and the fifty-six below me were all locked. I pressed my ear against the door to my publisher’s office. I could hear voices, laughter, typewriters, people talking. I pounded at the door and shouted. My voice plummeted downstairs and back up the stairwell like a ghostly rubber ball. “Let me in! Open up! Help! I’m trapped!”
Inside, the voices fell in pitch. They were at least pondering the situation. Was I a trapped arsonist? A monster from the lower depths? A madman, who, on the way to the roof to fling himself off, had changed his mind?
I sat down on the cold steps. People would find my skeleton there years later. It would have mold on it from the dankness that seeped through the stairwell. They would find my out-of-style Bally shoes and Supp-Hose and the tatters of my modestly cut Pierre Cardin suit; they would find my PEN and Authors Guild membership cards, my driver’s license and the third overdraft notice from the bank. My date book would have a notation in it for an appointment with Maureen Gullian.
I didn’t even lift my head when someone finally opened the door and without a word held it until I’d risen and passed through it into my publisher’s office.
The car stops with a slightly squeezing sensation. The doors slide open and I step out. Nan is there. She pushes the office door open and I slip inside. She can lose her job for this; she could be banned from publishing forever.
Hi, I say when we are in a tight, darkened hallway, moving fast.
Hello, Mr. Douglass. This way.
Through the art department. Editorial. Sales. Executive. Publicity. Advertising. Committee room. We slow.
Why are you doing this? I ask. There’s always a price, it seems to me. A fuck, a favor, a fix of some kind. But I would have sensed that and I did not, so I am puzzled and must ask. I do not feel that time to work out all the answers is on my side anymore.
Why not? She stops and stands aside to guide me into a room. I brush against her breasts, a contact as meaningless as a dentist’s nurse pressing her pudenda against you while helping to relieve you of your teeth.
Nan closes the door and pushes the light switch; the light seems to drift reverently down upon the machine. It is like being in a shrine. Why does a room with only a machine in it need such rich drapes? Why the vast print of Guernica on the open wall? Why such soft, rich carpeting? Nan locks the door and draws the drapes.
You can’t see the light outside the room, she says, and, There it is, BOOK.
So this is it? I ask with a tremor in my voice which has become suddenly a whisper—just like hers. She does not answer. Her expression reminds me of the way some women look when they have suddenly come on a snake. Nan sidles to the machine. We stand together looking at it the way we might find ourselves before La Pietà.
Yet it is an innocuous-looking object, tastefully colored in shit-storm brown and rather futuristically molded. A display screen is centered on its top. It has gleaming racks and rubber rollers at the sides or near the bottom, and stainless steel slots. It feels comforting to the touch, giving the sense of being able to ward off all attacks, like the ridgeless turret of a tank.
Nan watches me study it, her hands folded just beneath the young swell of her stomach.
So, I say. This is the gadget that tells whether or not you’re a writer.
No, Mr. Douglass, she answers. That’s not what the gadget tells.
Her smile is exquisite. This gadget tells the business people, the company, only what they program it to tell, and no machine can tell about writing. They can’t feel or be moved.
I say, I know. Yes.
What I mean, she says, is that what this machine seems to sa
y about writing or writers is of no consequence to a lot of people. I’m quitting tomorrow because I’m one of those people. And for another reason, too.
She is so young. Whence came all this knowledge and what does such knowledge win?
I understand. Thanks. How does it work? Have you worked it before?
I can work it. I can work the hell out of it.
She steps directly in front of the machine and removes a key from her bag, then a plastic card. She inserts the key, and a low hum comes from the computer. She jams in the card and the display begins winking bright green blips, the kind of blips you see in kids’ electronic football, basketball and soccer games these days. The machine begins to smell faintly of oil and chemicals.
Making sure it’s cleared, she says. Clicking sounds inside. The blips blip silently on the display.
These—she starts punching—O eight five five zero: click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip)
—O eight four four one: click click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip blip)
O, she says, nine four five five two: click click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip blip)
And o o six seven six: click click click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip blip blip)
—these are the account numbers for the books you’ve done with the company. What they all add up to, really, is your name, Mr. Douglass.
Everywhere, I think, they’d rather you give them your number instead of your name.
Nan says, Now, if I switch to this bank of keys—daintily, she poises a finger over a triple row of buttons and presses—they give me your name.
And there it is, blipped in green, Douglass, Cato C.
Click clickety clickety click click clickety.
She points to the green-and-white-striped printout sheet just coming into view at the top of the computer. She says, This thing’ll give you both a printout and a reading in the display. See? With your name your account numbers come up. It’s a double-check.
Yes, I see.
Now, she says, let’s see o eight five five zero. She presses a button marked Advance, another, Print Order, another, Sales and still another, Subsidiary Rights.
Nan glances at me and says, They’ve refined this gadget to include reviews. See? She presses a button marked Reviews.
They’re rated from one bad to five rave.
She presses Returns and then Items. This, she says, gives the breakdown on subsidiary rights, paperback, movies, television, foreign sales, first and second serial rights—
Yes, yes, I say.
click click click click click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip) click click click click click click click click click (blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip blip)
The printout sheet edges tremblingly upward. The clicking stops; the blips quiver like Jell-O.
Okay, she says. Now, oh! She studies the figures. You didn’t do too good with this one. She looks apologetic.
Well, let’s try o eight four four one.
While she jabs the keys with a remarkably controlled viciousness, I walk around the machine, absorbing the softness of the carpeting through my shoes. I wonder if Nan ever made love on an office floor or if she would care to. The shrine is now filled with clicks; silvery-green blips devour each other, then overwhelm the neutrality of the display screen once again, BOOK smells more strongly of oil and chemicals and now, too, of heated wires. A kind of incense. Should we light candles and fall to our knees? Nan is reciting the correct litany for this place—endless arrangements of numbers that, translated, are but names, themselves translatable back into numbers, which possess as much meaning as the number of kilometers to Sinus A and B. What do all those numbers have to do with me, what I am, where I came from or where I’m going? Does an idea request numbering? A verb? How many numbers does onomatopoeia demand? Could I describe Paul’s life with numbers?
The ages by which we tell ourselves are flooded with sweat and the dead reckoning of our generations. I return to BOOK again and stand beside Nan, watching.
Watching me. A sympathetic smile plays across her face. I think of the man she lives with. Gleason? I hoped he was nice. She says, Okay? Enough?
I nod.
She says, as she cuts off the switches, her mouth turned down in disdain, They pull the printouts, go into their offices and study them, and I think you know what happens after that.
Yes.
I didn’t know you were a friend of Paul Cummings. Maureen told me. Sorry about his death.
I shrug. What can I say? I wasn’t of his immediate family. Or was I?
And you don’t want to do a book on him?
No, I say. It’d be a pretty boring book. He worked very hard. He had success, that’s all. That’s all there ever is, I guess, unless you have failure instead.
We go out. She checks the door while I punch the elevator.
Where’ll you go now? Nan asks when we are riding down to the street. It’s all so bad these days.
Don’t know. I’ll land somewhere.
Of course it was bad. We knew it first; we always know it first, and few people ever draw the relationship between what happens to us and what happens to them. Now it had caught up to them. It always has. As slavery was still catching up; as no one listening to Selassie at Geneva in 1936, that was still catching up; as George Washington Carver’s peanuts and warehouseman Jimmy Carter were still catching up. Fuck them. They never want to learn, never wish to know about the connections.
We were out on the street. I checked the time.
I say, Nan, TCFP, every publisher, can use people who feel about writing the way you do. So you ought to stay. Maybe you can help to do something.
She laughs. That’ll never happen. I can’t go anywhere at TCFP. They never allow Jews past a certain inconsequential level.
Oh, I say.
Teichman, she says.
Yeh. Some things never change.
G’night, Mr. Douglass, she says.
She clicks prettily off into the night, unafraid. I like it that high heels have come back. Never liked those thick ugly things the fellas pushed into style.
Night. Thanks again.
It takes a long time before a cab stops for me. No, nothing’s changed. In Barcelona the cab drivers would be fighting each other to get me, as, maybe, they were doing for Glenn and Maija.
A cab comes. Amos wanted to eat in the Village. Yes, I think, the ambience has gone, the possibilities dead. No more possibilities. The roster of dead and missing writers who informed those possibilities seems to wink from every neon light. No ceremonies for them. No marching bands. No flags. Better dead than read. Only machines like BOOK click and blip off the death tread of the marchers. Here today, gone tomorrow. Business. No hard feelings. America’s excuse: business. We give the people what we want ’em to have. This year and last year and maybe the next, it’s shit a la carte. Prefer the prix fixe? That’s shit, too. Soup du jour? Ummm, that too, shit. Well done, of course.
I wonder how Amos likes Unmarked Graves. I want him to like it. Allis likes it, but she’s my wife; she frames her judgment in other knowings. I don’t expect him to publish it. I don’t think he can. Anyway, we’re survivors. But I do want him to maybe like it a little, maybe even love it. Twenty-odd years ago we were too young for each other. If we suspected ethnic conspiracies in high places, we believed in our own strengths more. We were too cocky. We had not really digested history. Life had not yet got around to shaping us completely. A time came and went. We never stopped knowing what we knew; would never stop. Nor would we ever be able to stop doing what we thought we did better than most. It was different now.
The restaurant looks familiar. Yes. That Spanish place we’d gone to when I came home from that first trip and Amos had found me newly installed in Mr. Storto’s and had taken me for a drink.
Amos is sitting all sprawled back in his chair. A bottle of wine is already chi
lling. There is no manuscript on the table. Amos looks sly. I lift out the bottle. Champagne. I sit and order a martini up. Super-seco.
Bring him another, Amos says, and me too.
The Segovia is being chased by flamenco music. Clicking taps and castanets. I wonder where they are, where they can be.
Amos looks at me. I look at him.
Well, Cate. What’s new?
Same ole, same ole.
Everybody okay?
Yep.
Betsy not bugging you again about why?
Nope. I look around the restaurant. It hasn’t changed. That’s comforting. Changes do not seem to be for the better.
I attack the second martini and say, So, how did you like Graves?
Watching me closely, he slides to the table, folding his hands, and says, How much you want for it?
I start to say something. He has surprised me.
He interrupts. Can’t get you no white-boy money. Can’t even get you what you been getting. But it’ll sure beat TCFP.
We’ve always known that white-boy money was different money, just the way black-boy money would be different, which means better, or more, if we were in charge and pretending to be fair.
You can do it?
He is somber as he nods. Yeah, he says, and knocks back his drink, signals for another one.
Contract? I say.
He laughs and he snorts. Better get Maxine. They’re printing up new contracts every other month these days, nibbling away, fucking you everywhere you’re fuckable. Get Maxine.
What do they want me to give up?
Hey! What do they always want niggers to give up? It! All! Everything! Name it, they want you to give it up, like they know you supposed to eat, but don’t really give a damn. You know how white boys are—in a two-dollar whorehouse they want it every whichaway and more than one time.
He looks down at the tablecloth. He seems to be debating something. He raises his head and smiles. Ready to eat, man? I’m starving.
Everything tastes delicious. It is as though my taste buds have been scraped clean and fresh and are now quiveringly alert to every microcosmic flavor of food. I am in love with chorizo again, the hard chorizo. The taste of it carries me back to Monica’s kitchen. But, why do I have such proletarian tastes? Why do I possess no urge for pheasant under glass, nonvenomous snake chops, wildebeest wimples in wine sauce, bees’ butts in butter?
!Click Song Page 47