by KUBOA
“Your resume,” Quillmeier spurted.
I fumbled in my cardboard briefcase, which I tried to keep partially concealed between my knees. I pulled out a copy of my freshly printed resume and in so doing wrinkled it. I began an apology and a quick search for a second copy but Quillmeier snatched the proffered first copy from my sweating hand.
“Fine, fine,” he said. He read it the way a child reads a history book. His concentration appeared to cause him pain as his face squinched, his left arm shot out involuntarily in spasm; he squirmed in his seat. It was an uncomfortable ten minutes before another word was spoken. I thought, flowers and petals?
“Starts at twenty20 a year,” Quillmeier said, finally.
I hardly knew what to say. That was the interview?
“I hardly know what to say,” I offered.
“Take it or leave it,” Quillmeier said with a not- unfriendly, but somehow greasy smile.
“Can I sleep on it?” I asked, sheepishly.
“Nnn,” he said, settling back into his well-broken- in chair. I thought I was almost dismissed. I thought to Mr. Quillmeier I was already a former applicant.
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t have to sleep on it. I’d be proud to work for Ardent,” I said. I don’t know where it came from.
“Fine, fine,” Quillmeier said, rising ever so slightly from his seat and giving my hand one more fat pump. “Monday at nine9, then?”
“Yes, surely,” I said, backing out of his office.
In the anteroom Sherri Hoving was standing next to her desk, the whole, dark, willowy length of her, presented to view. She wore a smile that said I knew you would get the job.
A momentary queasiness overtook me. Sherri Hoving took a step toward me and put her arms around me, the way an aunt might hug a troubled nephew. I placed a tentative hand on the sweet, slick material over her lower back. Here was warmth, succor. Everything was going to be all right.
When I stepped out into the big city sunshine elation welled up inside me and I said to the lizard which lives inside us all, “I have a job in publishing.”
***
When I left Ardent it was still only 10:30 a.m. I first went to the bookstore and told Pat that I had found another job and would work out the remainder of the week if that was what he wanted. It was Thursday. It wasn’t much notice. But Pat looked at me through his herbal haze and smiled a beatific smile and said, “Blessings on you, Brackett. Go out there and find the best damn authors you can. Make them write books that will shake the foundation of our constipated society. Draw from them their best work. Draw from them the words inside themselves that they are unaware of, words which lie dormant like an illness of rage. Publish, Brackett. Do good."
Well, I was somewhat taken aback. Part of me knew I wasn’t exactly indispensable to The Book Inglenook, but I didn’t expect such a divine sanction, such a heartfelt fare-thee-well.
“Well, dDamn, Pat,” “ I said. “I will try to live up to your expectations. I will do my damnedest.”
“I know you will, Brackett. Which publishing house has the good fortune to have picked up your worthy services, if I may ask?”
I hesitated. A foreboding came between us.
“Uh, a small concern. You might not know them. Little house called Ardent.” I started to throw off a couple of their titles as if I had heard of them prior to my visit to their Lilliputian offices but Pat’s expression was one of consternation, dismay, perhaps qualmishness.
“Ardent,” he said like a book dropped on a dusty floor. He looked down at his desk in embarrassment.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing, Brackett. I thought, you know.”
“I don’t,” I assured him.
“Well, it’s just that they’re a, a vanity house.”
The words hit me in the solar plexus. The dreaded words hit me like being asked, “Can we just be friends?”
“Shit,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Pat said. “Rain on the parade, that’s me. Look, go there. Get started. Do the best you can and look for greener pastures. It won’t be bad. It is publishing. Sort of.”
I carried that “sort of” with me for the next couple of weeks. After leaving Pat (he said, go ahead, he really didn’t need British Fiction re-alphabetized again) I treated myself to a real deli sandwich and an egg cream. I felt very New Yorkish, though that “sort of” sat in my stomach heavier than the sauerkraut on my Ruben. I called my parents that evening and told them I got a job in publishing and tried to make it sound lively, consequential, promising. I think it worked. My parents wouldn’t know Alfred Knopf from Cima Academic & Language Media.
***
I wouldn’t have thought it possible that they had room for me in the offices of Ardent Publishing, but when I went in that Monday morning, my cheap case stuck self-importantly under my armpit, they had cleared a corner of the anteroom (I can’t imagine what was there before—I had no memory of a filing cabinet or couch or potted plant). There now was an old oak desk, the surface of which was as bare as a stone. Sherri Hoving gestured toward it like Vanna White toward a new SUV, and I returned her friendly smile. We were roommates.
“Wow,” I said. “My own desk. It looks so pristine, so uninhabited. It appears ready to transact some majestic and transformative legerdemain. I hardly know how to become worthy of it.”
“Well,” Sherri said and bent her—have I already said willowy?—five- foot- nine-ish- frame over her own desk and fetched from it a stack of what I immediately recognized as manuscripts. There were a dozen or so of them. They were printed on various qualities of paper. Most were typewritten, if not composed on a word processor and printed in dot matrix or laser jet, but there were a couple copied in long hand on hundreds and hundreds of legal pad sheets, neatly stapled together. I sighed.
“Yep,” Sherri Hoving said, relinquishing the burden to her new co-worker, the sap. She practically washed her hands in Pilate’s bowl.
I weighed them in my hands for comic effect, as if in so doing I could determine their value.
Sherri Hoving laughed. It was the sound of snowflakes falling on a harp. I was enchanted. I suddenly knew something new: Sherri Hoving enchanted me.
“Read them. Write up a page of synopsis and critique for the boss and then type a letter of acceptance to the author,” she said, and was betrayed by a slight blush.
I wavered. “We accept them all?” I asked, though my pride was already an area of deep despoliation.
She opened a drawer in her desk and produced a fistful of checks.
“Fifteen checks. Fifteen manuscripts,” she smiled, sheepishly. “We accept them all.”
I sighed, set the stack on my desk, set myself down in the chair at my desk, which suddenly threatened to throw me around a bit, spinning like a dervish, its ancient spring so loose and disconnected. This bit of pratfall, perhaps, erased the tension of the moment.
Sherri tinkled again, again like the music of a harp, and I smiled a big, goofy grin.
“Welcome to the fast lane,” she said and laughed again.
“I’m here to do my best,” I said, a little too earnestly. And, then because that felt awkward I compounded the awkwardness. “Would you have dinner with me tonight?”
It was a complete surprise when to my unexpected question she barked out a quick yes, and was herself embarrassed by her enthusiasm.
So, my stint at Ardent Publishing began with mixed blessings. Sherri Hoving moved like a spring-borne fairy around that tiny room and every time she did my heart played the anvil chorus. And, meanwhile, I amused or depressed myself with the worst prose ever committed to paper. Ever, beginning with the Egyptians. It was mixed blessings all right.
***
That night I arrived at Sherri Hoving’s apartment in one of the nicer buildings in the same area of uptown where Ardent was also housed. She answered my buzz and when I found her on the third floor she was standing in the doorway to her apartment. She was we
aring a sleeveless, short black dress, which set birds loose in me. Her long, bare legs were lightly tanned and sprayed gently with freckles, as were her delicious and pronounced shoulders. Her knees were brown biscuits. Her limbs were exquisite.
“Hello,” she said, and I thought I detected a slight purr.
“Hello,” I answered back. We moved into her rooms that were shockingly well-appointed. How much was she making at Ardent? Tasteful doesn’t begin to describe how divinely laid out her apartment was. Interior decoration to me had always meant, “Wwhere do I put the bookcase?” But, here, well, here was art.
“This is lovely,” I said. And even though that sounded a tad fey my sincerity won the point.
“Thank you,” she said.
We stood awkwardly near each other for a moment and I was about to ask for a restaurant recommendation when she stepped into my personal space and put her mouth against mine. The kiss—warm as life and moist enough to make its prolonged hold unbearably exciting—lasted until she turned her cheek slightly and exhaled as if she were overwhelmed.
“I’ve been wanting to do that since the first day you walked through the door at Ardent,” she said.
“You haven’t been alone,” I said. It was almost right.
“Kiss me again,” she said. I did.
That evening we spent on her plush, off-white couch, our tongues intertwined like the caduceus. And, while the making -out (forgive the seventh- grade terminology) was erotic and moist and stimulating, it went no further. Oh, at one point, I believe, I cupped her small, bird-belly breast and she sighed and we kissed and kissed some more. I remember thinking, Wwe have all the time in the world. We never did eat and I left around 2 a.m., my head spinning, my mouth refreshed as if I had drunk at Tantalus’ pool, and my heart full of love, oh, overflowing love, for Sherrifa Hoving.
***
Over the ensuing months I was responsible for publishing numerous books under the Ardent imprint. My name appeared on them all as editor, though, in truth, my only addition to the stream which is literature, was to make subjects and verbs agree (sometimes when they stubbornly seemed unwilling to, fighting like Kilkenny cats), clean up any language that strayed from the somewhat rocky path which is English grammar, take out the names of famous people in far-fetched tales of sexual misconducts (to stave off lawsuits, obviously) and substitute names of my own invention. This was at least creative and, at times, diverting. For instance, for John Kennedy I substituted Matt Chinoi, Snake Charmer. I replaced a particularly ugly reference to Calista Flockhart with the ridiculous name Sysipha Van Grubelhoffer. I turned Johnny Carson into Mungo Park. Etc. It was the only thing that made me feel as if I were not scooping up hot dung with my own well-trained hands and flinging it out the window onto the passersby below.
Some of the titles that left our offices with my name printed in garish Franklin Gothic on the copyright page were: The Battle of the Bulge as Witnessed by Me and Tom Rasking by Lt. Col. Gerald “Flip” Craig, Senior Citizens Aare Sexy, Too by Jenny Vookles (that Jenny rankled, for a woman in her eighties80s), Liposuction and You by Dr. Vance Partridge, Diddy-Wah-Diddy by Resole McRey (surely a pseudonym—I wonder what he was hiding), Tambourines, Pig-Wwhistles and Daisies in Gun Barrels: A Nomocanon of Poems by Camel Jeremy Eros, Huckleberry Finn, Racist by Janet Grimace, Love Gained, Lost, and Regained by Anonymous (hmm), Southern Jewism and the Delta: A Prototype by Shlomo Einstein, I Fought the Gulf War by Mmy Own Damn Self by Larry “Renegade” Yates, and on and on.
***
And, in truth, some of these dogs sold. I imagine what happens is the author’s hometown bookstore, some mom- and- pop place called Book Land, or The Book Rack, orders a couple hundred for a signing, and the author’s friends and family feel obliged to come and actually purchase a copy. At least our books are inexpensive, comparatively. But, of course, we can afford to be. We are totally subsidized up- front. And our author’s contracts, well, I can’t even discuss them. They are the special province of J. Quillmeier and J. Quillmeier alone. Who, by the way, is rarely in the office, the official statement being that he is having lunch with a client, or meeting with Japanese businessmen about overseas rights, or some such nonsense. But, those contracts, which are kept in locked files in his office, are as secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola. Very fishy, but I suspect our authors, for whom we promise to work very hard, pumping product out to the media-drenched society that awaits such drivel—we send out a single press release to a select group of bookstores and trade publications, total cost about $43—our poor deluded authors, I suspect, never have made a penny from their Ardent contracts. This is just supposition on my part, but it is not without some basis in evidence. But, that’s another story and not this one, and, to be honest, what the hell do I care? These schnooks knew they were buying their way into authordom. What did they expect? Had they ever seen an Ardent title on the bestseller lists? Had an Ardent author ever been on Oprah? No, they knew the pond they were fishing in was stocked and the catch was a cheat, and they knew that in the end even the water in that pond would prove to be a sham, like the water under Casanova’s boat in Fellini’s film. I didn’t care. Sorry.
***
The absence of the boss in the incommodious space of Ardent Publishing made for a sexual tension between Sherri and me, a delicious, daily sexual tension. Many days we spent with our respective tongues in each other’s mouths, hands wandering the curvy landscapes that are the human body, heat rising like fervor from the dDevil’s kitchen. But, beyond experiencing how lovely Ms. Hoving felt through her midsection, or where her hip gently swayed into her tender thighs, or circumnavigating the sweet meat of her upper arms, and down her choice lower back which effortlessly tipped into her incredible hindquarters, and all this mostly through whatever silken material covered her winsome body that day, nothing else happened between us. Every time the caloric vigor rose to danger levels—she could feel my need through the front of her brief skirts I am quite sure—we swayed away, we danced into a joking middle ground where there was only close friendship, companionship, flirting. It was frustrating, of course. About equally as frustrating as wading through those irksome manuscripts, feeling myself dipped in bad prose as if in machine oil, or a particularly adhesive oleo.
Meanwhile, Sherri was the most professional secretary/jackie-of-all-trades I’d ever witnessed or worked with. She literally did everything for Ardent, from mailing out the many letters of acceptances, to keeping the books (and cashing those mendacious checks), to acting as go-between between the elusive Mr. Quillmeier and anyone else. I composed my own letters of acceptance (oh, sorry, lies! oh, loathsome soft-soap!) and for that, and for my two-hundred-200- word synopses, I called myself an editor. I collected a paycheck that allowed me to live in the hub of the publishing industry, the city that never sleeps.
***
It was around my one- year anniversary at Ardent (my parents in their frequent phone calls and letters were fond of repeating to me the gloating and inflated remarks they made to their septuagenarian friends about their big-shot son), after a particularly dispiriting evening at Sherri’s (we had actually unzipped a couple of pieces of clothing, almost touching various body parts through only one sheer layer of undergarment), I arrived about thirty minutes late to the office.
“Hey, hHotshot,” Sherri said, a shy, almost- frightened smile tempting the corners of her syrupy mouth.
“Hey, Sherri,” I dropped.
“You okay? You look a little bedraggled. Maybe bed-raggled, eh?”
This was sexy banter to her, I suddenly realized. She thought what we had done the previous evening was highly erotic, would garner a couple of Xs at least. Were there really young women this innocent living in New York City? The notion seemed ludicrous and I admit I was a bit cross.
“Not raggled enough, perhaps, lover?” I practically snarled.
Her face retreated like a beaten cur. She turned to her desk and made a show of shuffling the papers. She turned with a snap and held out a
slim stack of telltale, ecru 8 ½ x 11 envelopes.
I groaned.
“Mail’s here already,” she said, throwing a slight lilt into her speech, a pitiful attempt to cajole me into our old style.
“Thanks,” I said and took the stack as if it were a flattened and exenterated piece of road kill.
I sat at my desk and stared at the return addresses for many minutes, stalling, trying to gather what wits I had left. The work came from all over. America was awash in wannabe writers. There was Abe Peters, Lincoln, Nebraska; Rory Canseco, Wind River, Wyoming; Lauralyn “Laurie” Enos, Fidelity, Georgia; Lamar Negri, Page, Washington (a writer’s town, surely!); Kenny the Snake Girardi, Somerville, Tennessee. It was all so—debilitating. I was tired just holding these monstrosities. I punched them aside, dismissively. I couldn’t do it. Not that day. Maybe never again.
I don’t know what caught my attention, what about the envelope made it stick out—maybe it simplye stuck out, lay uncovered in the cast- aside heap. The envelope itself was smudged, as if handled by a car mechanic. Were it evidence in a police investigation the culprit’s prints were readable with a naked eye—there was no need to send these babies to the lab in Washington. And the return address said, simply, “City.” Presumably, this meant this labor of love came from somewhere within the confines of our sprawling megalopolis. It was addressed “Ardent Publishing. Fiction Editor.” And our address. Written in blurry pencil, as if from inside an aquarium. It was a wonder it made it to us, so indecipherable was the penmanship, so childlike the scrabble.
It was an exotic enough piece of communication that I slit it open right away. The yellow ledger-pad paper tumbled out as if enchanted, as if the pieces of foolscap were fey genii released from their bottle. They made a mad pile on my desk, papers from hell, or some suburb of hell reserved for the work of the crazed, for the products of contaminated minds. They scared me somehow, covered as they were with that same penciled scrawl, which seemed alive on the page, like some particularly loathsome form of insectivore, one which found its way into your bedclothes at night, one which entered your body through the soles of your feet and lodged someplace vital and vulnerable, slowly poisoning you, slowly fusing or liquefying your entire inner self. They were chthonic.