It was almost, we told ourselves and each other, as though De Petrie were holding back for a reason, almost as though he were letting the grass grow under his own reputation so Von Slyke could come forward more completely, to become Purple Circler Supreme; at least take the role of grand old fag of American literature. Despite other contenders scrambling for places around that throne, the only other real competition Von Slyke might possibly accept besides De Petrie was Aaron Axenfeld, and he’d dropped out of the race years ago, decades ago, perhaps before there was a race.
I couldn’t get over an associated feeling that Von Slyke also knew, indeed all too well realized, De Petrie was holding back something and allowing Von Slyke to pull into the lead. And while he must have secretly feared when that held-back masterwork would be released, Von Slyke was intelligent and ambitious enough not to let anxiety stop him from moving forward toward and up onto the throne his fellow Purples seemed to either disdain or ignore. Doubtless, as he’d done so, Von Slyke must have come to increasingly worry that because it had been ignored or disdained by the only competitors who in his mind really counted for anything, it was therefore a somehow false eminence he was clambering onto, a height his pals Axenfeld and De Petrie had in effect and for their own reasons abandoned to him. That could do nothing but rankle, no matter how high his status rose: the sense that he dominated because Axenfeld had far too little self-esteem to dream of such a place for himself, and because De Petrie had another aim, one possibly higher or more tuned to immortality, to attend to.
I’d have to proceed slowly with St George. Let him into the information I’d already gathered about Spurgeon slowly enough so that he might for himself see how important he was, despite seeming to be a side issue to the Purple Circle. Tanya Cull had instantly grasped the beauty of my growing discovery of Len’s vita et opera. She’d quickly grasped their psychological validity as they referred to her famous uncle, and sensed their criticality beyond Leo’s life’s and their relationships. If she could, with, her own necessarily biased perspective, see their scholarly importance, surely the equally slanted St George might too.
Once again, St George was in conference, so I opened his letter and read:
Reuben Weatherbury is teaching in the area this fall term. He has already arrived at the U Cal Campus at Irvine, has settled into a place in nearby Contra Mesa, and is even proctoring a seminar there during the summer session. His phone numbers are enclosed. It’s a half-hour away via the Hollywood Freeway to the 5 to the 65 to the 405. Call him immediately. We’ve spoken by phone. He’s expecting you.
I was startled, and a bit taken off guard. I knew that eventually I’d have to see Weatherbury if I were to make anything of my thesis. He was one of the experts on the Purple Circle I could not choose to ignore. I’d need if not his blessing then at least not his enmity if the project were to get off the ground. Among the other experts, Fleming was in England these days, at Manchester University, and, according to my Internet sources, deeply involved editing the letters of Oscar Wilde’s lover Bosie, following the discovery of a batch of them in an old scullery of a small estate being converted into luxury flats in Kent. Cummings was still in Gainesville, Florida, where he was allegedly editing what he believed would become standardized volumes of Rowland Etheridge’s works. He was known to be a sweet old man, delighted anyone would share his interest in queer writers of the past, only truly testy (if passionate) about nineteenth century Italian opera. But Weatherbury, well, he was anything but sweet-tempered, and while he was still in Austin, Texas, I’d thought it prudent to keep a distance, until it proved absolutely necessary to enlist his aid.
I couldn’t forget that encounter at the MLA conference a few years back at Columbia. I was asking him something quite innocuous about the Purple Circle’s period and he’d suddenly sputtered out, ‘Why ask me? There are texts that tell all that. Dozens and dozens of texts!’ As he’d stormed off, two other grad students had told me of their own, not dissimilar, run-ins with him. Not that I expected to gain much from him anyway. Even so, like St George, Weatherbury not only met the fabled Nine, he’d staked out his claim to one of them early on, Cameron Powers, whom in Weatherbury’s brilliant doctoral thesis emerged from obscurity to stand in some relief.
Of all of the Purples, Cameron Powers’s life and work was undoubtedly the tiniest of fields to claim, but it turned out to be a half-acre Weatherbury so prudently farmed as to gather for himself most of the other Purple Circlers too. No wonder then that he’d quietly taken on the job of editing the Reader of their works, and when that proved to be a much class-adopted text, that he’d edited a second volume. The publicity the second volume received in the media had come at a key moment in the rediscovery of the Purples and had pushed their fame. Almost at the same time Weatherbury’s ‘discovery’ (there for the discovering all the while) of Cameron Powers’s posthumous stories was published. Together they were responsible for whatever scholarly status he’d achieved.
Still, if St George said to call him, I’d call. Who knew if Weatherbury would remember me.
Thus was I musing when my attention was grabbed by another summer-session substitute lecturer who had a question about some paperwork we had to cope with. As she kept repeating the question I’d already answered, and I grew bored, I began edging out of the office and into the corridor, attempting to make good my escape.
We’d gotten so far down the hall, in fact, that I was able to notice Irian St George’s outer office door open and a tall, lanky, darkhaired young man step out. At first I thought he might be one of my students as he had a vaguely jock look, but as he came closer to where we were, I noticed he was too old to be an undergrad, early to mid-twenties, with a striking yet not handsome face: long, filled with planes of relief; sharp cheekbones; overhung brow; big, triangular, bony nose; a rather unendearing dimpled chin. I could barely make out the color of his slitted eyes, but I suspected they were brown or dark blue. He’d dressed to be stared at in a shaggy palomino vest with western-style long-sleeved shirt, close-fitting jeans cut cowboy style, and overdecorated, steel-tipped Western boots. He seemed deep in thought as he passed us, yet when my companion said hello, he nodded before throwing me the oddest look.
After he’d gone into the English Department, I asked who he was.
‘I thought all of us PhD candidates had met,’ she said. ‘That’s Waterford Machado.’ And when I looked stunned, she went on, ‘He’s striking enough, but he plays up the Native American bit a little much, the way he dresses and all.’ And when I still must have looked baffled, she went on, ‘You know, Water Ford!’
‘Oh!’ I replied, and got out of there before I could show how disturbed I was by seeing him exiting St George’s office.
An hour later, I was calmer. There were a dozen perfectly logical, departmental-related reasons why Machado had been in St George’s office, and I’d found them all. Even so, I was still a little shaky, sitting in the garden, at my favorite spot under the pergola, in the strangely moist heat and humidity of the afternoon, clad in only a baggy light pair of Egyptian cotton shorts, drinking a Mocha something or other that Conchita had thoughtfully whipped up for me, when I picked up the phone to dial Reuben Weatherbury’s number. I was immediately shocked not to get a dialtone. I checked the buttons. No, everything was tuned correctly. What now? I began pressing them again. Oh, great, the phone was dead! I went inside again to see if the problem was only with the cellular or if the entire house was out. As I arrived in the library, the desktop computer was signaling that it had incoming e-mail. I moved the icon to display what was being received and read:
Regarding the little manuscript. I won’t help you. But I won’t stand in your way, if that’s why you’ve phoned me and what you’re asking of me. I believe I know whom the author may be. Also I believe there are more little manuscripts floating around in Axenfeld’s Fibber McGee room, among Cameron Powers’s unsorted papers, and among Camden Phoenix’s stuff.
The icon on the upper left s
aid the caller was ‘DDPet’, whom I immediately assumed was De Petrie, and the next icon said that he was currently on-line. I activated a ‘flash session’ to talk to him in ‘real time’ but held off a bit, waiting to see what else he would write.
Nothing for a second. He must be aware I was on-line. So I typed in:
I think I have a pretty good idea of the author myself.
Really?
Yes. And while I don’t know your own relationship to the author, since it appears all of you had some kind or other of relationship to him, still I think you won’t be surprised or even too displeased to hear that he’s going to be the nub, the core, the very center of my PhD thesis on the Purple Circle.
We-ell-lllll.
Will you help me? Support my … thesis? I can’t say I will do anything for or against your thesis. What do scholarly pursuits have to do with me? Or I with them?
Before I could reply, he added:
What – exactly – is your request? What – precisely – is it you want? That any of you wants from us. Can you tell me that?
More than you want to give. And not because we’re so selfish, but because we need someone to look up to, someone to admire.
Ahhh! I wish I could even remember what it was like to look up to another.
So you’ll consider seeing me? Talking with me.
About the past? The past is another country, someone said. L. P. Hartley to be exact. But it’s worse than that.
The past is … if there weren’t all those journals of mine in the collection, I would have no proof at all that it even happened. Everyone dead. Everything changed. All of us altered. No proof at all, you see. That’s what the past is. And what it’s worth.
But you do have proof. You have all your journals as proof.
And that’s the very, very worst of it.
I couldn’t think of any rejoinder.
Dame said you were good-looking. If you really want to meet me, send me something to look at.
Like what? A photo?
Or nude photo?
Or nude video? I had to wonder.
In my youth, I used to see this written on men’s lavatory walls all the time – ‘Show hard, make date!’
De Petrie clicked off.
Around me the entire cast of the day had altered. Where there had been almost oppressive heat, a brilliantly sun-glinting garden, was now clammy cold grayness. I recognized this as the marine layer that caused the strong morning fog moving back unexpectedly early. In the few minutes required for me to go back outside to gather my laptop, notes and coffee mug together, I discovered I was shivering uncontrollably. And even after I was inside, windows closed, me wrapped in a sweater and sweat workout pants, I still found myself chilled, and I huddled on my bed with a blanket cover for a surprisingly long while, watching mist filter into the central court looking like stage fog in a theater, appearing oddly, depressingly appropriate.
I found myself returning to De Petrie’s last words, after I’d said to him that having his journals he had the proof of the past, and of his response: ‘And that’s the very, very worst of it.’ What had he meant by that? Shouldn’t it have been a triumph that he had proof that their glorious past existed? Wasn’t that the entire idea of art? To exist beyond time? As the Purple Circle’s best books did continue to exist and to communicate, decades after they were written. Why then did he see it as a defeat? It reminded me of what had happened the last time I’d spoken to Axenfeld on the phone and he’d remembered in such detail that snowy night at Etheridge’s flat. That had left a bitter, frozen feeling behind. Why?
It began to depress me so much that I forced myself up and out of the bedroom, along the corridor, past the kitchen and into the dining room. More than half of those lines of MSS I’d laid out weeks ago were picked up, packed away: proof of the work I’d already done on the morass of Von Slyke’s papers. Why not do more now? In fact, why not put a little fire in the huge fireplace to heat the place up. There were logs, kindling.
A half-hour later, a fire was roaring, and I was comfortably sorting and filing away, sitting Indian fashion on the now warmed blood-red tiles, when Conchita looked over the balcony. ‘It’s Mr Von Slyke.’ She held up a phone receiver. ‘You look warm! It’s like January out there!’
‘Come join me. It’s great here.’
She did in a few minutes, carrying sewing and a mug of herbal tea. Von Slyke was still going on about an outdoor production of The Abduction from the Seraglio he and Puddles had seen the previous night in some Hamburg platz. ‘It was the Goosemarket Theater’s production, but all but one of the cast members were American, which neither of us could figure out, until he said maybe they were summer replacements, but no, the program claimed they were regulars. The soprano’s “Marten alle Marten” was stratospheric. She sounded like Caballe in her heyday, although of course I was a mere child at the time.’
He went on for the longest time, until I was convinced he had no real reason for calling. When he provided a minute break in the endless chitchat, I managed to tell him the work was going well, and being there doing it, I could be both truthful and precise.
‘And how’s your love life going?’ he suddenly asked me. ‘Did you make it with that cute boy chasing you? You know,’ he prodded, ‘the one in your class?’
I waffled so much in not answering Von Slyke that he finally said, ‘You know of course that there’s a historic erotic legacy to the house. You’ve got a responsibility …’
‘You told me. George Peppard …’
‘And it’s up to all of us to make sure we make some erotic history there. No arguments. Get laid! That’s an order.’
‘Yes, sir!’ I replied, with mock obeisance. But while he was in this playful mood, I decided to try something.
‘My thesis is moving along well too. But you know I’ve come across somebody I wasn’t aware of before. Maybe you’ll be able to tell me more about him. Guy named … where is it …?’ I play-acted looking for the name, all the while aware Conchita was watching me. ‘Here we go! Len Spurgeon. His name seems to keep coming up. You must have known him.’
‘A little. Long time ago. He knew the others better than me. Rowland before he met Chris. I think Dom after that. Axey a bit. He’s dead, right? What is it, fifteen, sixteen years?’
‘Something like that. From what I gathered, he and Mark Dodge dated, then he and Jeff Weber, and then he and the Leo-McKewens were tight. Cameron Powers too?’
‘I think they dated a while. Or … I don’t know how long. It was before whatshisname, that little English lit. professor, moved in with Cammy. Weatherbug or …’
‘Reuben Weatherbury?’ I asked. ‘He lived with Powers?’
‘That’s why he got all of Cammy’s papers,’ he said casually. ‘Look, I just wanted to check in and …’
I wasn’t ready to let him go yet, long-distance or not. ‘So tell me, Mr Von Slyke, who was this guy? This Len Spurgeon?’
‘A number. A Woman of No Importance, as Wilde put it.’
‘How come his name keeps coming up? In letters, diaries?’
‘Does it? I wasn’t aware …’
‘It comes up constantly. According to my calculations, all of you knew him.’
‘He was a very hot number, if you must know.’
‘Did you have an affair with him?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘But you slept with him?’
‘Well … it wasn’t like that. It was … how can I put it, a lot less romantic than it was … sleazy, if you know what I mean. I was in my experimental phase and he was known as top … Why don’t I tell you this when I’m back?’
‘Yeah, sure, okay,’ I said.
We ended the link a few seconds later. I closed the phone and sat back on my haunches. I couldn’t help but think Von Slyke was hiding something, or at least not telling me something important about Len. How quickly his tone had altered from the casual to the studied-casual-but-in-reality-defensive had given the fact away
. What he’d let slip already about Reuben and Cameron Powers was a choice enough item to allow unexpected leverage when I met with the scholar. But I now knew Len Spurgeon and Powers had had an affair, and that Len and Von Slyke had been into S/M practices. That only left out … whom? Frankie McKewen? Well, maybe not. Rowland? The more I probed, the more it was beginning to look like Len Spurgeon was involved with all of them, every single one. My thesis was going to be great!
I dialed Reuben Weatherbury and although he seemed distracted, he agreed to see me two days later, at his school office. He gave elaborate directions I carefully copied. When I hung up, I couldn’t help noticing Conchita looking at me. With a question or …
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘I’m confused,’ she shrugged. ‘I thought you were like … a librarian. But the way you’re looking for this guy and the way you sounded on the phone, it’s more like you’re a detective.’
‘A little of both,’ I admitted, not for one instant liking her question.
The following morning’s mail contained a standard-sized business envelope from Aaron Axenfeld, stuffed to bursting. The cover page in his rather elegant handwriting said, ‘I found this in my Fibber McGee room last year while looking for something else. I don’t remember it. But if I didn’t, then … [eerie Celesta music on the soundtrack] who did? It’s doing me no good. You might find it amusing. If you’re still thinking of visiting, bear in mind that the hurricane season has already begun.’
The Book of Lies Page 22