All of which goes to explicate my great, my utter surprise when I was pulling apart the various typewritten pages of one particular typed draft of Heliotrope Convertible, reading a sentence here, a line there to confirm it was that book and no other, and also to confirm for myself this particular version’s placement among all the other drafts (or sections of pages that never made it into the finished book but eventually found their way into, say, both the Pastiche and Leaving Riverside Drive) and there, in front of me, in several neatly printed pages, in a typeface I’d never come across in the perhaps 3,000 pages so far that I’d placed around myself in the large dining room, written in a style that only a glance was needed to confirm was neither early, middle nor late Von Slyke, indeed not to be confused with even ‘experimental’ or the freewheeling ‘diversions’ of Von Slyke, but unlike anything that I’d been checking through and reading, was the following: a single, seemingly complete manuscript, without title, without author identification, without pagination, without apparent provenance, indeed without any reason for existing at all.
I’ve gone back in my memory again and again to that moment of discovery. As though within it I can find some clue, some hint, some inkling of what was to come.
I recall the exact time of finding the manuscript not only because of my surprise but because just a few seconds before the total and utter strangeness of what I held in my hands had made an impression on my consciousness, I’d been momentarily startled out of my concentration by a sudden noise, a little thud, something hitting one of the many panes of the great dining-room window wall above my head. I don’t know what I thought caused the noise. One of the small, hard-skinned lemons dropping off a bough and somehow blown by the wind, perhaps. I don’t know if I even thought that far. All I know is that I had been concentrating on the papers in front of me, had already espied and laid one tentative finger upon the first page of what would constitute the manuscript, and suddenly I was distracted.
I can visualize the scene, and often have: I was sprawled out on the tiled floor, amidst the dozen or so lines of manuscripts snaking more or less evenly along the floor, and I was riffling through the MS version of Heliotrope Convertible when I suddenly found these alien papers and I stopped, put the thing down and began to separate them, looking to see how many sheets were out of place, inspecting them carefully in the hope that this would produce instant identification, noting the lack of upper-right-hand pagination, common to all of the MSS so far.
In my mind, in that ongoing internal monologue we all possess, it went sort of like ‘What is this? This doesn’t belong here!’ with a soupçon of something else, something like, ‘Where does this belong? Hell, I’m going to have to search through all of it until …’ Then I heard Conchita coming, the by now familiar soft splat splat of her dance slippers against the tiles approaching along the corridor suddenly also strange: strange because the normally so dignified, even staid Conchita was clearly running, running along the corridor, up the stairs and onto the balcony along one side of the upper part of dining room, running, breathless, then she was standing there saying in a voice in which she didn’t at all attempt to hide panic, ‘What do you know about birds? A little bird flew into the window. I don’t think it’s dead.’ And when it took me a second to respond. ‘Please!’
Her fear and her urgency impelled me into motion. Even so, some instinct told me this was a time to be especially careful. I grabbed the pages of that strange little manuscript I’d just happened on and I carefully placed them far away from all the other papers, on the seat of a dining-room chair against the opposite wall, where I was sure to find them again. Then and only then did I run up the stairs and follow Conchita along the corridor and outside into the hacienda’s central courtyard.
At first I didn’t see anything, even though Conchita kept pointing and saying, ‘There! There!’ Then I did see: about three feet away from the dining-room windows, on a section of tile outlined by overgrown grass. The minute she’d said ‘bird’, I’d assumed it would be a bluebird, since they were so prevalent around the front of the house, and sitting in the wickerwork chaise the previous afternoon I’d noticed bluebird parents teaching fledgelings to fly. What I saw now, however, was a much smaller bird, not three inches tall, a sort of finch, with dark green, almost military green, feathers, a contrasting golden-gray vest front and yellowy-green feet.
It was tipped on its side, like a toy that had fallen over, and though it seemed to be stiff as a board, it also appeared to be shivering. At first I thought its wing was broken, which would have spelled doom, but as I bent down – trying not to scare the tiny thing too much by my huge looming presence and as I edged all around for a better look, it appeared as though no wings were bent. Sensing my presence so close, the bird seemed to go totally still.
Conchita gasped, ‘Es muerte!’
‘I don’t think it’s dead. I think that’s a protective reflex. Should I pick it up? It seems to be cold.’
‘It’s a baby,’ she said. ‘I heard that sometimes if people touch them, the parents reject them.’
The little bird began shivering again. I, meanwhile, felt conflicted. If I picked it up, would that help? I intuited that just holding it warm in one hand would convey caring and health somehow. If the bird were merely in shock, that would even help. On the other hand, I didn’t want it rejected once it was well enough to return to its nest because of what I’d done and perhaps starve to death.
‘I’m going to pick it up,’ I announced and turned to Conchita for encouragement.
She looked pained and maternal. Suddenly I found that I could understand what I never had before: the attractiveness of all those suffering Madonna paintings and statues. ‘Yes, help it. It’s so small, just a baby,’ she whimpered.
Calming it with my voice, I picked up the bird and held it loosely but securely in my cupped, partly open hands. It stopped shivering, and I thought it was playing dead. I held it for what seemed ten minutes, until the long muscles along the sides of my calves began to feel stiff and I slowly began to rise. Just then I felt motion in my hands, and I hunkered back down again and slowly partly opened up fingers to look.
‘What?’ she asked.
The little bird was trying to stand up. It was still shaky on its legs and fell back again. I cooed and calmed it with my voice. ‘I don’t think anything is broken. It may be in shock. It’s so amazingly smooth and soft,’ I added.
The little finch was still trying to stand up and falling against the giant geography of my hands and fingers. Its feathers were minute, amazingly iridescent. Its little beak was bright yellow and quite hard-looking. Its eyes were dirt brown, ringed with a vague pale blue, the way a full moon is held within a milky corona the night before rain. They were perfectly round eyes, open, staring ahead: unfocussed. At last it found its balance. I could feel sharpness and pressure from its claws as it grasped onto the loose skin of the palm of my hand as though it were a branch.
‘It’s alive. It’s getting better,’ I said.
The little bird’s head half swiveled for the first time. Then its little beak bent down and rapidly preened its chest feathers, making quick little dives under its wings to groom there too. The wings opened a bit, closed again, which must have thrown it off balance, as the little bird fell over onto my fingers. But it got up again right away, and did its grooming and checking once more, in the same order as before. Then it looked at me, first with one eye, then turning its head around, with its second eye. It was intensely active, intensely alive. I found myself thinking how in olden times people referred to those living as ‘the quick’. As in the ‘the quick and the dead’. This tiny bird was undeniably ‘quick’. Another shuffle of the wings, then so fast I didn’t see how, it darted out of my hands.
‘Wow!’ I fell backward onto the courtyard tiles.
‘There!’ Conchita pointed.
The bird had flown only a few feet away to a sill of the stone fountain, where it sat continuing to preen itself, then turn
ed to take tiny sips of water.
‘I think it’s all right.’ I hoped to convey relief.
‘Look!’ Conchita pointed to the lip of the fountain.
Two larger birds of similar if slightly lighter colored shades of plumage had arrived. The parents? They hopped nearer, seemingly chatting with inquiring chirps, then, as identification was confirmed, nearer, and at last began nuzzling the little bird, alternately grooming it and themselves. Yes, the parents. With the sudden, darting movement I’d recognized as finch-like, all three suddenly flew off together. It seemed as though they’d gone in the direction of some nest hidden within the grape-arbored pergola at the back of the courtyard.
I’d regained my balance and stood up, dusting fallen leaves and garden pollen off my shorts.
‘Mission accomplished!’ Now I really did feel relief. The bird was fit again and it had not been rejected.
We stood in the hot courtyard sunlight a few seconds more, not looking at each other, listening to birds.
‘You’re a good man,’ Conchita said, startling and a little embarrassing me.
We went back to the house. I’d just resettled into the dining room among the papers when I recalled the manuscript I’d found before. I got up and looked at it and once more thought, ‘It doesn’t belong here.’ So I left it where it was on the chair seat, and returned to the work I’d been doing, the hard sorting, the pulling apart of irrelevant dross to arrive at Von Slyke gold. I was there another five minutes or so when Conchita appeared again on the dining-room balcony. This time she was holding a large cup.
‘I made chocolate,’ she said, pronouncing it in Spanish and making it seem much more exotic. ‘You need a break.’
As I took the cup and sipped the rich and deliciously semi-sweet liquid, I thought I saw admiration in her eyes.
It was only much later that evening, after I was sure I’d gone through all of Von Slyke’s library papers and had pretty much located and fairly much to my satisfaction laid out various versions of his novels and stories, that I went back to that manuscript. I’d put it off, the way a child puts off what he knows will be the most delicious piece of candy in a large selection.
As I picked it up again, something inside me rolled and spun with excitement, telling me that what I held, what I was about to read, was something special, incredibly special, perhaps unprecedented. I don’t know what I expected to come upon. Certainly not that old cliché of scholars and bibliographers: a manuscript of a masterpiece even the author himself had lost, forgotten. As I said before, I already strongly suspected it wasn’t written by Von Slyke … but of course it could have been written by someone else famous, another one of the Purple Circle, for instance, or even … Well, Von Slyke knew so many writers.
Now, of course, I know with far more certainty what that tight, hot little knot of excitement roiling my stomach was: it was a more intelligent, better subconscious self warning me off.
Or is that also hindsight?
This is what I found and what that night I read for the first time:
‘Now you boys better stop that, or your dad is going to stop the car and give you both a good spanking.’
‘I’m not doing anything,’ Francis pouted.
‘Yes, you are!’ Paul declared. He was younger by two years and the constant butt of his brother’s unwanted attentions.
‘Well, you started it!’ Francis now defended himself, unaware that he’d just admitted guilt.
‘You started it first,’ Paul insisted. ‘You started it this morning, back at the house.’
‘You started it before then. You started it last week!’
‘I don’t care which one of you started it or when,’ their irritated mother said. ‘I want both of you to stop it. Right now. Do you hear me, Francis?’
‘Yes, Ma’am.’
‘Paul?’
‘Yes, Mamma.’
She turned around and they were once again face to face, with the boredom of looking at the back of the front seat, by now endlessly stared at, yellow threading through darker brown material, or with looking outside at the highway, where the sides of the road on either side appeared identical to what they’d been looking at a half-hour before, and an hour before that, and an hour before that. At least hitting each other had been something different.
‘I don’t know why you boys can’t play nice games!’ their mother now said. ‘What happened to that Parcheesi set?’
‘We’ve played that already,’ Francis spoke up.
‘Play it again!’
‘Don’t want to,’ he mumbled.
‘What did you say?’
‘How about counting cars?’ their father suggested. ‘You did that a lot the last trip we took.’
‘That was different,’ Francis said. ‘There were more cars.’
‘Yeah!’ Paul added. ‘And better ones!’
‘More foreign models. Not all Fords and Oldsmobiles!’
‘Well, I don’t care what you boys play, just so long as you keep quiet!’ their mother asserted. ‘And don’t fight!’ she added. ‘How much longer do we have, Bill?’
‘Can we stop?’ Paul asked.
‘We just stopped a short while ago!’ their mother said.
‘He’s gotta go again,’ Francis sneered.
‘No, I don’t!’
‘Didn’t you do number one and number two back there?’
‘Yes, Mamma.’
‘He did not. I was watching. He only did number one!’
‘I’m hungry!’ Paul whined. Being youngest he could get away with occasional whining.
‘Here’s two Pecan Sandies for each of you.’ Their mother handed the big luscious cookies over the backseat wrapped in fluffy pink napkins already oily from the dessert.
‘I’m going to eat one and save the other,’ Francis said smugly.
Paul tried to do the same, but after he’d finished the first one, his resistance broke down and although he only nibbled at the second cookie, soon it too was gone.
They tried playing the car game, but the most exotic model either of them saw was a Studebaker.
In the front seat, their mother was napping, her head flung against the car seat, snoring quietly. Their dad took advantage of her being asleep to open his window vent and to light up one Salem Menthol after another, free of her nagging that he was going to end up in an iron lung like her cousin Warren. Dad even hummed a tune that Paul recognized, as an occasional plume of smoke flew back into the car for Paul to thread his fingers through, still amazed smoke had no density.
Paul saw what looked like a foreign car and quickly said, ‘Left window! Volvo.’
Francis craned his neck to see. ‘Where?’
‘There. Just went past. Dark green.’
‘That was no Volvo. It was some old American car. Wasn’t it, Dad?’
‘Looked like a ’39 Mercury coupe to me,’ Dad said.
‘Cheater!’ Francis said.
Paul refused to play the game anymore. To make matters worse, he was still hungry and Francis continually assailed him with the fact of his own uneaten cookie. He would open up the napkin and sniff at the Pecan Sandy, saved by his selfcontrol, and even more so, Paul was sure, by Francis’s love of needling his younger brother. Mnn! Francis would go, just like they did on TV commercials. Paul would think how much he hated Francis and wished he had another brother -any other brother!
After a long, irritating silence, Francis suddenly said, ‘Bentley!’ He sounded genuinely excited. ‘See it, Dad?’
‘Shh. Don’t wake your mother!’
‘Did you see it?’ Francis whispered.
‘Sure did, son.’
‘I’ll bet that’s the most expensive car in the world!’
‘Close to it.’
‘That means I win,’ Francis exulted to Paul, who was already sulking. ‘I win the game and probably the next ten games we play.’
Francis stared up over the seat next to his mother’s ear, obviously trying for a faster look for
more Bentleys on the road ahead. Paul was furious.
Only Francis had made a mistake. He’d left his Pecan Sandy on the car’s back seat, and Paul now saw a way to both satisfy his hunger and get revenge on his brother.
Quietly, sneakily, he opened the napkin, took out the cookie, fluffed up the napkin so it almost looked as though it was still full, then he leaned across the back seat as though he too were now searching full-time for rare autos out the back windows – meanwhile eating and savoring every crumb and morsel of the Pecan Sandy.
‘Hey! Where is it?’
Francis pulled at Paul, who fell back onto the seat, laughing, the last crumbs from the cookie still clinging to his lips.
‘Where is it?’ Francis demanded.
‘I said,’ their Dad warned, ‘don’t wake your mother!’
‘Where is it?’ Francis whispered angrily.
‘Where’s what?’ Paul stage-whispered back.
‘My Pecan Sandy?’
‘All gone … joke’s on you!’
‘I’ll show you a joke!’ Francis punched at him. Paul fended off the blow, though it fell on his wrist and hurt.
‘Francis! Leave him alone. There are plenty of cookies up front,’ their dad said.
‘Yes, Dad,’ Francis said.
But Francis didn’t leave him alone. Instead he began to pull Paul down between the front and back seats. And Paul fought back. And while their father now didn’t hear anything, because it had become a silent, earnest, deadly match, the boys were now aiming to really hurt each other, working silently away at twisting arms and ears, rabbit-punching each other, in almost totally silent fury.
Paul was smaller and naturally he was getting the worst of it, but he wasn’t about to make a peep. Until Francis covered Paul’s mouth with a hand and then punched him hard where he shouldn’t have. Once, and before Paul could even react, once again.
‘That’ll show you to steal from me,’ Francis whispered, his face contorted in anger.
The Book of Lies Page 7