‘I don’t for a second doubt you. It’s no wonder St George adores you,’ Von Slyke said. ‘Do you do other favors for him? Personal ones?’
Before I could register what he’d asked, Von Slyke answered himself, ‘Of course you don’t. You’re probably terribly insulted I brought up the subject. What you must think of me! I’m such a ditz sometimes. I blame it on all that cocaine I sniffed at Studio 54. I’m certain now it forever stripped my brain cells of common sense. Not that I ever was a member of the place, like Dom and Mark of course.’ He meant other Purple Circlers, Dominic De Petrie and Mark Dodge. ‘I was far too unattractive to be a regular of that, or indeed any of the really select clubs in the ’70s. Whereas they, especially Mark, virtually lived at Flamingo! But, you know, one of the things that no one seems to get anymore about we Purples was that we were buddies. And the others were always were so sweet, the way they’d go out of their way to make certain I wasn’t left out of their reindeer games. Every year like clockwork I was invited to the White Party and the Black Party, the opening party and the closing-for-the-season party. The Leo-McKewens would call me a week before New Year’s and say, “Don’t breathe a word, but we’ve got tickets to Studio One for the big night, two suites at the Chateau Marmont and at least one high-priced hooker slash porn star apiece for the weekend.” And when I’d ask, “But how, darlings? I can’t afford to pay my Balducci’s account, never mind fly to LA and buy hustlers!” Mitch would reply, “It’s taken care of. Don’t ask how.” And Frankie, listening in on the other phone line, would add, “Assume it’s an anonymous admirer. That’s always my policy.” Rowland thought our jaunts were paid for by “burning” credit cards stolen by some of the Leo-McKewens’ more louche African-American boyfriends! Whereas Cameron’ – Cameron Powers, another member of the Circle – ‘we were still going together at the time – was certain it was all thanks to some Mafia connection they’d made staying every fall at Mitch’s family place on the Jersey coast. But Cameron was from the hill country of Mississippi and from the minute he hit Manhattan he claimed to see mafiosi everywhere. He used to tell me that when he first moved to New York as a hustler himself, his biggest-tipping customers were what he liked to call “Massapequa Tonys and Staten Island Vitos”. While we lay in bed, Cam would recall each encounter and describe his Johns’ bodies in extensive detail. Although he may have merely done that from boredom … or even to titillate himself. Whatever am I thinking? You don’t want to hear any hundred-year-old gossip, do you?’
Before I could protest that it was exactly such gossip I wanted to hear, that everyone who was in any way interested in the Purple Circle wanted to hear, Von Slyke stood up, pushed down to either side the shirt that had ridden up his middle and swept off his hat to ruf-flingly hand-comb his hair. ‘Serious as you surely must be, doubtless you’re bored to distraction by an old queen nattering on, and far too polite to ask me to gather my wits and show you into the library, where your real interest in being here lies. You have to forgive me! Puddles’ – Peter? Patrick? What was the name of his current lover? – ‘says I’ve grown so used to those idiots we call fans, and so accustomed to the attentive vacuity of the media always nosing around, I’ve come to assume everyone’s equally grasping and shallow.’ Before I could say a word, Von Slyke had taken off, headed back to the house.
I followed. At one point followed so closely I almost tripped on the surprisingly tightly rooted ground cover of gray-green stems and tiny blue flowers I only at that moment recognized from their overpowering odor must be fresh rosemary. Until now, I’d hadn’t a clue where the herb came from, how it grew, what it looked like, never mind that it had such strong roots and pretty flowers.
We were at the other side of the house, hidden until now in hedges, and Von Slyke stopped and scratched his head. ‘I’m wondering if I locked the library door. Yes, I think I did,’ he replied as I caught up to him, and he lurched off again, this time onto the concrete path that led – as I’d earlier guessed – to the entryway. The whole front of the house was a sweep of adobe laid on so thick it looked like solidified peach ice cream sculpted to scoop up and slide down, to be hollowed out by a doorway here, a window there, a chain of columned nooks and niches. We went under an overhang into a partly covered-over terrace, overgrown with ferns that flourished tempestuously in the abundant coolness. A half-dozen tiny windows gated in wrought-iron abutted on either side a double door; the dark wood carved in arabesques accented by oversized wrought-iron knockers and handles.
Von Slyke flung open the doors and gestured me over a worn alabaster lintel. ‘Welcome to Casa Asunción Maria Estrella Herrera y Lopez,’ he said grandly, adding in a lower voice, ‘That was the name of the Tijuana whore it was originally built for.’
A single long, cool, low-ceilinged corridor floored in blood-red tiles led in either direction to brightly sunlit, high-ceilinged rooms: a venous artery connecting two huge organs. Like the exterior, the interior walls also sported irregular little cave-like openings: one could peer through them into the upper level of a two-story, thick-raftered dining room, approachable only via wrought-iron railed stairways at either end of the corridor.
We headed right, and Von Slyke stopped, turned and stood while I caught up. Still playing tour-guide, he pointed toward the huge dining room with its open-brick fireplace, enormous refectory table, score of chairs along either wall, Viking-ship sideboards dappled in sunlight from multipaned windows with French doors leading to a central terrace.
‘Although this house has seen in its day, I was assured, many, many orgies,’ Von Slyke began, ‘it is said that at one particular party given by the actor George Peppard, now deceased, in the year 1964, when he had leased this house and was possibly the handsomest man in the land, some twenty-two underaged girls from the San Fernando Valley were simultaneously deflowered on that very table, at least five of them personally by their host, wielding, besides his allegedly formidable member, his hands, feet and a variety of garden vegetables, several of which were never recovered.’
He smirked and we ended up laughing together. ‘The house doesn’t look half this big from the outside,’ I said.
‘Like the Peppard petard! But in truth it’s hu-uge! You’ll probably never end up using the wing opposite.’ He pointed beyond the fireplace, where, through an open doorway, I could just make out the pale furnishings of a sitting room. ‘Although naturally you’re welcome to. The West Wing, as we call it here at Casa Herrera y Lopez, contains the formal living room, my sitting room and bedroom – in a tower I languish like Mélisande! The East Wing’ – we’d stopped again and were now looking down another lengthy, dark-tiled corridor which ended, apparently, in mid-air – ‘contains the library, maid’s quarters, closets galore, two lavs and, down those steps, a kitchen, breakfast room, laundry, pantry, and at the end a suite of two guest bedrooms and bath. You’ll probably live there. It opens onto the courtyard, close to the food and the garage. You won’t have to traipse through all this.’
‘I know it’s rude to ask,’ I began, ‘but you bought this house from your royalties, right?’
‘Aren’t you a doll to say that. But the truth is, I couldn’t earn royalties enough to buy this heap if I’d written day and night, lived in a garret and never spent a dime – none of which is even remotely true. No, the very sizable downpayment that allowed me to move in was thanks to the film rights some utterly crazed producer paid for Heliotrope Convertible. What?’ He looked shocked. ‘You didn’t see the movie based on my fourth novel?’ He smiled. ‘Well, sweetie, neither you nor the rest of the universe. But do I care?
‘And this,’ he continued in his tour-guide voice, stopping at the doorway, ‘will be your domain. Or is it demesne? One’s never certain of the usage. Fortunately, here’s a dictionary handy. Several, in fact, in several languages, all of which I profess to know and none of which I really do know, including, unfortunately for my readers, English.’
There are photos of Von Slyke’s library on the back of
his last three books, all of them purposely, somewhat campily, in allusion to author shots of earlier times. On DOS: Manuscript in Distress he’s dressed in tweeds and cravat, standing on one book-wall ladder, halfway up, holding open a volume, facing the camera. On the back of Epistle to Albinoni he’s on the corner of his huge Craftsman’s desk, some old album across his lap, his open-necked white shirt and still-blond hair all but glowing in the backlight of the huge window behind. On the cover of Canticle to the Sun he’s upon the Mission-era fainting sofa, his costume satiny black to contrast with the strong patterns of the Lloyd Wright upholstery, one arm languid behind his head, his eyes hooded, his lips puckered in a pout.
So even though I thought I knew the room – and of course Dr St George had spoken of it as ‘possibly the ur-library, the ideal author’s work room’, even so, I wasn’t prepared for how high the bookcases rose to the ceiling on three sides, how rich and fine and how beautifully stained the dark-grained wood was, how many volumes were on those shelves, how their sheer mass managed to dwarf the huge desk, the sofa, almost dwarfed the huge pane of glass flooding it all with sunlight.
While I stood in awe, Von Slyke was already at one wall, going through what I assumed were reference books, muttering, until he looked up. ‘Perch anywhere.
‘Aha! Under “demesne” with an “ee” and an “es”, it says “in law, possession, as of one’s own. But formerly” – a second definition – it meant “the land or estate belonging to a lord, and not rented or let, but kept in his hands”. While domain with an “o” and no “s” means a land under a single ruler or government.’
‘So technically,’ I summed it up, ‘neither word is correct. Since the house belongs to you, not me. What dictionary is that?’
‘This,’ he patted the worn carmine cover, ‘is my all-time favorite and, it turns out, the oldest dictionary here, and the one I use most. The College Edition of Webster’s New World, copyrighted 1962. A college graduation gift. Not that all of them aren’t good. Oh, except the Random House defines love – the word I use checking out any new dictionary – as quote “a strong passion between those of the opposite sex” unquote.’
‘A little homophobic?’ I suggested. ‘This place is … well, as described, truly something. Your papers are …?’
Von Slyke stood up, put down the Webster’s, went to the wall of books opposite the window. Reaching behind a few volumes, he must have pressed a button because the entire thing suddenly swung open.
‘Can you believe it!’ he exulted. ‘The moment the real-estate agent showed this to me, I creamed in my jeans! A secret panel behind the bookcase. Every moment of my recent life was as though nil, and my true existence as Nancy Drew could pick up again where I’d dropped it, aged nine and a half, in that humid Midwestern suburb where it is perpetually three o’clock on an August afternoon!’
A little hallway behind the hinged book-wall showed two doors: one led to another – by comparison to this chamber – more modestly sized, inexpensively paneled inner library, maybe eight feet by six, its shelves up to the dropped ceiling filled with ancient long-playing records, peeling paperbacks and, on one wall – I noticed instantly and instantly wanted to get my hands on – dozens of manuscripts inside of and partly peeking out of their rubber-band-shut cardboard boxes, all strewn haphazardly on the shelves amid plastic bags spilling open with letters and envelopes. They didn’t appear to be in order, nor did the scores of hard- and soft-covered notebooks among them, not to mention the stacks of old newspapers, magazines and quarterlies in which I assumed Von Slyke’s work had first appeared excerpted. Equally unarranged seemed the boxes on the floor in front of and blocking the shelves, cartons originally used for Chablis and Volnay and Margaux, now filled to their cracked cardboard brims with what even the most cursory glance told me were typesetting manuscripts and unbound galleys released from the printers.
The other door led to a dainty powder room, with old-fashioned standing porcelain sink and toilet. One odd note: a poster for Ivory Soap, circa 1919, featuring sailors taking a bath onboard some destroyer.
‘Perfect for a sudden whiz,’ Von Slyke said, adding, ‘There’s a full bath with tub and stall shower directly behind this. It opens onto the maid’s room. I seldom use it.’
‘The maid is here all day?’
‘When I’m staying in the house Conchita is in from noon to eight as a rule. She cooks and does light cleaning. For any heavier cleaning she calls in her sister or her daughter to help. I’ll leave checks on the desktop for her to pick up weekly. That’s the way she prefers to be paid.’
‘Then she goes home at night?’
‘To Bell Gardens. It’s only forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on freeway traffic. Occasionally, however, she’ll sleep over. She usually asks if it’s okay beforehand. But there are times she’s asked and I’ve forgotten, and she’s so quiet I don’t remember she’s even in the house until the next morning I wake up and she already has coffee made for me. She’s an absolute doll, and speaks a lot more English than she lets on. I once caught her reading a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel, and when I suggested she might like to read one of mine she said, “I appreciate that, but, Mr Von Slyke, your books are all on the Pope’s list of No.” Isn’t that heaven? I dined out on it for a month!
‘Do you want to meet her?’ he suddenly asked. ‘You will sooner or later anyway.’ He went to the desk and hit the buttons of an angled unit that I’d earlier supposed was merely a telephone-answering machine, and now had to assume was also an intercom. ‘Conchita. Soy yo, El Jefe.’
Before I could tell him not to bother, Von Slyke said, ‘I could use some coffee. You?’ Then, in response to my nod and a squawk from the intercom, ‘Coffee for two. Coffeemate and sugar substitute. We’re in the library.’ Turning to me, ‘Now that you’ve seen the mess in there, shall we discuss what you’re to do? Maureen – that’s the woman who’s taking the papers – says her people at the Henry Timrod Collection have a particular method of accounting for every item. She said they could make a list when they get the papers there, but St George and what little bit remains of my own good sense say I should have a list made before it all leaves.’
‘A master list, it’s called,’ I explained. ‘You definitely ought to have one made, if possible listing each item, its length, its genre and form, where it’s been published, if it’s unpublished, what draft number it is. A copy of that list should go to your agent and your executor.’
‘I feel better already about your coming here today,’ Von Slyke said. ‘I seem to live – to thrive, if you must know – in an amount of chaos others find unacceptable. It does me good to know there are sweet, smart lovelies like yourself able and willing to take charge and elicit order out of this –’ His hand traced curlicues in the air. ‘At any rate, Maureen sent a copy of the collection’s guidelines.’
He’d placed himself on the edge of the desk as in one of his photos and I’d sat, as he’d gestured for me to do, in a slatted wooden chair opposite. I looked at what he handed me. ‘This is pretty standard,’ I said. ‘I took a course in Primary Sources and Bibliography in grad school. We used something similar. If I can I’ll input it into my laptop, augmenting the program I’ve already set up.’
‘You have your own computer? I don’t have to rent one?’
‘I’ve got a new Toshiba. Nine ninety-six MB. Six ports for two faxes, two modems, a Net line and a satellite TV hook-up. It’s on the seat of the car. If you want, I’ll show you the program I intend to use – I’m sure I can interface it with these parameters in a few minutes.’
Von Slyke’s eyes had grown alarmingly large. ‘Not altogether necessary, dear. In fact, I’m completely computer illiterate.’
‘I thought you did several on-line appearances every year. I’m certain I downloaded one LesBiGay lit chat room off the Net last year.’
‘I sat there and talked. Someone else typed in the words,’ Von Slyke said. ‘I’m not proud, but the truth is it scares the willies
out me. I’m even a lousy typist.’
Keyboardist, I mentally corrected.
‘In fact none of we Purples ever … what am I thinking? Dom’ – De Petrie, he must mean – ‘had a word processor as far back as the early ’80s. I remember him showing it to me, and us laughing and laughing over “word processing”. What else do writers do but process words?’
‘Without a computer’ – I was unable to hide my mystification – ‘how do you write?’
‘With a pen! On paper. You must think I’m some stone-age throwback! But it’s worked for years. I write in a big notebook. When I’m done with a section, or chapter, or a complete piece, Puddles inputs it into his computer and prints it. I correct it, he does a copy and I send that. Now,’ he added with a sort of wink, ‘the really fabulous part about this extremely antiquated method of composition is that it produces a great deal of what librarians of rare-book collections refer to as “autographs”. Which is nothing but handwritten stuff but is worth a great deal more cash than typewritten manuscripts, never mind computer-printed ones.’ Von Slyke smiled. ‘And when one spends money as I tend to … My mother, a woman who said whatever was on her mind, told me when I was boy – among many stupid and useless things – two that were utterly practical, for which I daily thank her. She said, “Damon, you’re a sloppy boy. When you grow up you’d best find an occupation that allows you to afford one servant to clean up after you.”’ Von Slyke paused, and pouted. ‘The other thing she told me was that I was lazy, and I’d better find a line of work that didn’t require much effort. Well, that took a while.’ He laughed. ‘She couldn’t have been more correct. Tell me’ – a sudden change in direction, tone of voice, a sudden leaning forward – ‘about your own family, Ross.’
Another little test. Calm me down, let me think I have the job, then ask me something personal and possibly crucial. Okay, I’d play the game. ‘Nothing much to say, Mr Von Slyke –’
The Book of Lies Page 3