The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  ‘Damon, dear,’ he corrected me.

  ‘Damon … I’m the youngest. My sisters are eight and seven years older. Dad worked for Big Blue, so there were computers in the house from the beginning. He left IBM during one of their ’90s upper-management “downsizings” and opened his own software firm. He’s done well. Mom was a housewife until I was in junior high, then she went back to school for an MA in education. Went to work for the local Board of Education, and ended up heading the County Board, and now she’s angling for the top position at the Connecticut State Board. My older sister has a baby-clothing partnership, Melissa Jane. She’s Melissa. It’s quite successful. My other sister, Judy, married Bart Vanuzzi, the Forty-Niners quarterback. She’s his professional and financial manager, and his publicity agent.’ Before he could say anything, I now interrupted myself to add, ‘I know what you’re thinking, they’re all overachievers. While I –’

  ‘While you, according to Irian St George, you are the great white hope of American literature scholarship. Does that sound racist? I never seem to know what’s correct anymore. And here, always at exactly the right time, is Conchita with our coffee.’

  Given her name and what I’d gotten from Von Slyke, I guess I expected the maid to be someone small, dumpy, wide as she was tall, swarthy, middle-aged and uxorious, wearing a bandanna and floral housecoat. Conchita turned out to be at most thirty-five years old, with an absolutely striking head as though off an Amerindian carving: shapely oval face highlighted by almost triangular cheekbones, small nose, Siberian hazel eyes, large lower lip, thick black hair cut short. She wore no make-up on her clear, dusty-olive complexion, and I know this was Hollywood but Conchita was dressed less like a housemaid than like an unemployed actress: an oversized charcoalcolored knit sweater that barely reached her hips over a skin-tight black leotard that did everything to accent her slim figure and Rockette legs before ending in what looked to me like expensive silver-black Capezio slip-ons.

  She’d brought in a delicate wooden Japanese tray onto which she’d placed a silver and Pacific-blue hand-thrown ceramic coffee pot, mugs, and plates, with a half-dozen almond-studded Italian anisette cookies.

  Von Slyke introduced us. Conchita’s hand was small, soft-skinned, firm and quickly withdrawn. I remembered what my ever-horny Tipton pal Wayne used to say about Latin women: how, with a few modest glances, they could size you up and let you know they were available. Maybe Wayne would have been able to tell if Conchita was flirting. I couldn’t.

  ‘See what I mean,’ Von Slyke was saying, ‘ask for a simple cup of coffee and this … marvelous, really … is what you get.’ He’d begun pouring the steaming coffee and sniffed its fumes. ‘This is the Dominican I brought back from Grand Caicos, isn’t it? Perfect for mid-afternoon.’ He was handing me a cup and one of the loaf-like cookies when the phone rang.

  It rang twice and the machine answered, Von Slyke’s taped voice sounding higher-pitched and even more archly inflected than in life. Then the beep. A live voice: male, bass, in a bad mood. ‘Damon! Ron Preston here. What in the hell do you mean by that message you left on my phone?’

  Von Slyke almost fell off his perch reaching for the receiver. ‘Ron? Damon! Can you hold a sec?’ To me, ‘My publisher. I’d better take it. Why don’t you let Conchita show you to the guest wing?’

  As I hightailed it out of the room behind Conchita, I heard Von Slyke’s voice take on an totally new iron edge. ‘Ron, I don’t see what you’re steamed at. I’m the one who’s just been stilettoed in the back.’

  I admit it, I was so fascinated by Von Slyke, had I been alone I might have lurked in the corridor and listened. Instead, all I could do was follow the swaying hips of Conchita past the dining-room balcony and down the stairs, to where the corridor achieved ground level, its left side full-length windows and glass doors opening to the large interior courtyard with its happily splashing Mexican fountain even more ornate than its matching frontyard bird bath. To the right was the kitchen, also in Spanish style and dark wood, opening to a lawn. I could make out a patio under a rectangular umbrella protected by a bougainvillaea-enlaced fence, the breakfast room and finally, at the end, perpendicular to this wing, two dark, cool-looking bed-sitting rooms.

  Conchita left and I wandered, sipping coffee, into and around the two rooms, noting that they were separated by a bathroom with a stall shower big enough to hold a basketball squad and a closet the size of my bedroom back in Westwood. One bedroom had floor-to-ceiling doors that opened to the breakfast patio, while the other led to the interior courtyard and fountain, the superior view.

  I stepped through the French doors to the central terrace, admiring whomever had laid out and planted it. Later that summer, when he visited, someone into architecture told me Fewling designed, landscaped and built the place in 1932; he’d seen photos of it in a book on West Coast residences. The six-foot overhanging roofs of the two long wings provided loggias bordering areas shaded by large trees, including two forty-foot-high Washingtonia palms that must have been planted when the house was first built. Several chaises and a low table had been placed where the sun was most constant during the year, yet so anyone sunning would be cooled by fountain spray. In the far corner, near the high dining-room window-walls, a table and two chairs had been set up, half hidden behind succulents: a good lunch or outdoor work spot. I ambled toward another little courtyard set deep between the bedrooms and the garage, where another sitting area was arranged beneath a vine-covered pergola dripping a mini-jungle of vines that would in mid-August be heavy with grapes. There, in the nook formed by the West Wing – Von Slyke’s bedroom – and the eight-foot fence hiding the motor court, set amidst succulents and bamboo, was an outdoor whirlpool bath.

  I could picture myself with the laptop under the pergola, could picture myself outside the dining room stretched on the chaise by day listening to my headphones and reading, could picture myself warmed and soothed in the Jacuzzi by night as constellations glittered in the dark skies overhead, and I couldn’t help but compare it all to the two tiny, airless, thin-walled, overpriced rooms I’d taken off campus to be near UCLA. ‘Don’t flub this!’ I warned myself. ‘You’ve got to be here this summer. You simply have to. And not just because St George expects it of you, or because Von Slyke needs the cataloguing done, but because you need it. Desperately. If only to prove you don’t need Chris!’

  I didn’t let myself think more about the personal disaster that had seemed to accompany my slow, steady ascent in the academic world; although I knew that I also somehow hoped that all this might become the magical setting of some new love to come my way. Come and remain, this time. Talking to Von Slyke of my family, I’d not been able to forget how I’d managed to alienate each of them, one by one, even those who’d loved me the most: either by my big mouth or by my lifestyle. That fellowship to UCLA had appeared just in time for me to achieve my long-overdue independence, with Irian St George taking on the role of fairy godfather and engorging the amount further by dipping into some until then unknown to me departmental fund, so I was able to make the coast to coast move and take the position, study under him, write that book on the Purple Circle, whatever it would turn out to be (I had ideas but nothing specific) which would solidify my status and launch me in academia for life. What better place to start than in Damon Von Slyke’s garden, near his manuscripts and letters and …

  ‘More?’ Conchita at the glass door leading into the kitchen, holding a Chemex pot. When I said no, she said, ‘He’s done,’ with less of an accent than I’d expected, before she vanished back in the kitchen.

  When I’d reached the corridor outside the library I wondered how to announce myself and hesitated. Good thing, because it turned out while he wasn’t shouting, Von Slyke was still on the phone. ‘… never have two dimes to rub together,’ he was saying plaintively, ‘and you can’t i-mag-ine the squa-lor!’

  I backed off and stood indecisively. I was wondering if he were talking about himself – did he honestly consi
der himself to be living in poverty and squalor? Did he honestly think that a publisher who paid out what I’d heard were six-figure advances would believe it? -and if not himself, then whom was Von Slyke talking about?

  I counted to five hundred and knocked on the adjoining wall. A second later, Von Slyke’s face appeared, enlaced in phone and wires, still listening. He smiled seeing me, quickly mouthed the words ‘One more minute’, vanished again, talking loudly so I could hear he was trying to sign off.

  Finally he was done. ‘What did the old lady call them in that Henry James novella? Publishing scoundrels? She couldn’t have been more precise. You’re fortunate: whomever you find at whatever university clever enough to print your work probably will not be motivated by, on the one hand, vanity about your literary stature, and, contrarily, dependent on some accountant’s bottom line. Come in, sit down, have more coffee, another anisette. I will. After all the pain I’ve endured with that dragon of egocentricity, I’m entitled to some smidgen of pleasure!’

  During the phone conversation, Von Slyke must have moved the mahogany captain’s chair from behind his desk, because he now turned it to face me, sat down and began to loudly and happily munch, dropping crumbs all over himself yet not seeming to care. He periodically washed it down with a swipe at his coffee mug.

  I got up the nerve to say, ‘Is all this about a new book?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied tonelessly. ‘I’m not sure whether it’s a memoir, a novel, a meditation or simply an affront! It’s called – are you ready, dear? – The Gulls! Everyone hates the title. My publisher. My agent. My editor. Everyone hates the book. Everyone hates me for writing it.’

  ‘I like it,’ I said, truthfully. ‘It’s different. Although I will admit it’s not very Von Slykean.’

  ‘Bless you for good sense. That was exactly my point. Although try to tell that to these idiots …’ He took another swig of coffee and suddenly asked, ‘Before you embarrass me by asking me what it’s about … how it is that you met St George? And are you aware of what an utter tramp he used to be?’ Another sip, then, ‘Obviously you’re not. But in the bad old days of the Club 8709 – one of the great bathhouses of our time – your very own mentor, Dr St George – at that time still a stunner – would actually take up residence weekends at a time in one of the upper-floor cubicles, where he would entertain gentleman callers by the baker’s dozen, lying supine and naked on his little cot with the door left ajar. How such an unregenerate bottom could survive la peste is completely beyond me. But there are those who insist he’s actually a fifteenth-century sorcerer, able to command time and space, who decided to take up residence in Holmby Hills as a diversion, and woe to whomsoever questions him on any of the Elizabethans, all of whom he personally knew and by whom he was most assuredly buggered.’

  ‘Those rumors periodically sweep through Rolfe and Royce Halls,’ I admitted. ‘But I thought they only went back to Queen Anne’s time.’

  ‘No, no, it’s the little things that give St George away. Saying “tup” when he means to say screw and his constant surprise at the efficaciousness of indoor plumbing.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’ I dared ask.

  ‘We all met him together. Wait, no, it must have been Mark Dodge who first met him. St George was infatuated with Mark – as who wasn’t in those days? Yes, that’s right, I believe Mark met St George on Mark’s book tour for Keep Frozen. That book, you surely already know, was the Purple Circle’s first success, and, I must say, it didn’t at all hurt that Mark possessed godlike beauty and male-model poise. Everyone wanted to meet him, to know him, to be fucked by him. For years, I’d go out on my own tiny tours, to dreary gay clubs on third-string campuses in the sticks, and the first half-hour of any encounter was always spent fielding questions about Mark Dodge. “What’s he really like?” Meaning, what and whom did he really like in the sack? I faked it of course, because I didn’t know a thing, never having had the pleasure myself. Dom did, though, but then Mark and De Petrie both were in the innest of in crowds in the Pines-Flamingo set and I believe for one year they were more than lovers, they were that most intimate of all gay relationships: dance buddies!’ Von Slyke giggled at his witticism. ‘There was someone else who slept with Mark in our group. Who could it have …?’ He thought, seemed to remember, didn’t like the memory and moved on. ‘At any rate, St George met Mark at a reading at the old Walt Whitman bookstore in San Francisco when it was located on Sutter Street and that wonderfully lemon-mouthed Charles was running it. Way before your time, I’m afraid. I suppose St George was teaching at Berkeley then. And when Mark came back to New York sporting hickeys, carrying a case of the clap the size of a steamer trunk, he said we should meet St George, we’d love him. And we did!’

  The phone rang again. Von Slyke cast it a dirty look but went on eating his cookie, saying, ‘We’re not talking to that beastly man again. Now tell me. You read my novel in prep school. And then what?’

  I was about to reply when the machine picked up and it was not Ron Preston but instead a woman’s voice, saying, ‘Damon, are you there? It’s Midge. I just spoke to Preston and I know you’re there. Sulking. Attempting suicide. Doing something irretrievably messy. Please pick up, we’ve got to –’

  ‘My agent!’ Von Slyke held his head with both hands. ‘I’d better take it. Why not get a refill?’ handing me the empty cookie plate.

  He took the receiver, moaning ‘Mid-ddge’ into it as I once more left the room. This time, I did stay close enough to the open doorway to hear him say, ‘I’m not committing suicide because I’m not changing one fucking word, not one fucking comma, not one fucking semicolon of that manuscript. Who does that editor think she is? Demanding changes? When we all know she got the position by giving Preston blowjobs under his desk and she couldn’t spell if her life depended on it, for Chrissakes!’ Followed by silence. Then, ‘I know, I know, I know.’ Followed by, ‘Mi-id-dge, you surely know the advance money is spent already … How do you think I took the summer place?’ I noticed the dark head of Conchita just coming up the corridor stairs and decided I’d heard enough.

  When I handed her the plate, she said, ‘I just washed the floors. It’s all wet. We’ll have to go the long way.’ She led me past the open doorway, where Von Slyke was moaning into the receiver, ‘Never! … Never! … Never!’ Back through the front corridor and outside, around the house, toward where I’d met him before, detouring at the bougainvillaea-filled fence I remembered lay outside the breakfast patio.

  ‘You wait here.’ It felt to me as though Conchita dismissed me, but maybe I was just being oversensitive. In the bright sunlight, among the proliferation of plant life, as she walked away, Conchita’s jet hair had a red sheen and she looked more vulnerable than indoors.

  The meeting was going well, despite my forebodings and anxieties. Von Slyke seemed far too distracted by his own life to test me with as much rigor as he’d probably planned. So, thanks to the interference of unrelated external events, I’d probably manage to slip by. Once again slip by in my life. If I could just keep my side of it going a little while longer, these interruptions might end up being helpful to me. But I had to admit they were anxiety-producing. When I went inside again and Von Slyke asked what of the Purple Circle I’d read, what should I do? Tell him I’d read all their books, as well as the two volumes of the group Reader and Thaddeus Fleming’s study of their works. Yes, sure, of course. What else? The Erling Cummings biography of the Purples? Hadn’t that been dished to filth by Jasper Goodstern in some book review, the Washington Post Book World? And hadn’t Jasper been one of Von Slyke’s proteges when he’d taught at Stanford in the late 1990s? Someone had said that. So surely that meant Von Slyke also hated the group biography. Too bad those two planned bios of him hadn’t been published yet. And Irian’s own full-length study of Dominic De Petrie, but that only touched on Von Slyke’s work. I’d felt so sure coming here today, so on top of all the material, so certain. And now …

  I became slowly awar
e that I was hearing a regular noise. I turned around where I stood and there was Von Slyke banging on the inside of the big library window to get my attention.

  ‘You’re probably already ruing that unhappy day you chanced upon my novel in prep school,’ was how he greeted me when I got back into the library. ‘But then what can I say, except that you possibly now understand better than most what a dreadfully wasteful and ridiculous life we poor authors are forced to endure and why it is a far, far better thing to forgo completely and remain in the comfy groves of academe.’

  ‘Here,’ he thrust them into my hands all a-jingle, ‘are the keys to the house. They’re vaguely marked. If you can at all make it, try to be here and sleep over tomorrow night. I’ll need a little help getting all of my bags into the Trooper fairly early the following morning. You wouldn’t want to waste your precious time driving me to the airport? You would? You are an angel. Make a list of what you like to eat not already in the fridge and Conchita will buy it. She shops at Mayfair Mart every Friday. She changes the beds every Monday. You know where the laundry is. Just dump stuff there. Or do it yourself. Anselmo comes twice a month and the electric leaf-blower makes a frightful noise, but he appears to be physically attached to it, and whines awfully if he can’t use it, so what is one to do but bear it? I’ll call or fax once a week to check up and I’ve left numbers where I can be reached.’

  By now, in addition to talking fast, Von Slyke was quickly walking me out the library to the front door. ‘I hope you won’t be too utterly bored here. Don’t have wild parties. Or at least don’t have loud ones so the neighbors complain. And whatever you do, don’t let in some tall skinny number named Hector when he rings the bell at three in the morning. Unless, that is,’ he added as we now reached the driveway and he rushed me to the Celica, ‘you don’t mind paying a C-note for the privilege of being called a sick perverted maricon while you suck a short, unwashed dick.’