Notes Toward The Story and other stories

by KUBOA

 

  ***

  Through Cecilia Quisby I set up a meeting with our author for the following day at a coffee shop near Ardent and I asked Sherri to join us. My reasons for doing this were a bit confused, but it’s safe to say, I wanted a witness. I wanted backup. And I counted on her to be true to her pseudo-lover and I counted on her unique capacity for organization, something this situation was in desperate need of.

  I sketched the situation for Sherri and throughout my extravagant tale she looked at me wide-eyed, her moist mouth forming a series of variations on ohs and ovals. At the end of my recitation—and I told her almost everything, including my reticence about seeing this work of literature go through the mill which was vanity publishing—her doe eyes blinked once or twice and then she was all business. I told you she was the glue that held Ardent together and that professionalism took over and she immediately began making notes and gathering together a file, a file that would remain a secret between her and me, under the name “Anima, Nozoufist.” The Anima, Nozoufist file. I believe she felt that this secret was further cement to our “understanding,” though, for the time being, the personal was a back burner for me.

  We arrived at the coffee shop about fifteen minutes early, such was our excitement and nervousness to set this thing into motion, whatever this thing was to be. With Sherri’s encouragement our plan was simple, at least as far as Sstep Oone went. Beyond Sstep Oone was a haze of possibility, a scrim over the future which seemed murky and confusing and even perhaps a little dangerous, though I didn’t at the time have anything to be afraid of. We sat over our dry bagels and weak joe and our conversation was scant and clipped, airy like a tattered flag. The fifteen minutes passed and then another fifteen and Sherri looked at me with an anxiety in her boyishly resplendent features which was overflowing with sympathy and concern. I believe she might have, for just a moment, believed I had made up Jim Nozoufist out of whole cloth, however exotic that cloth would have to be. I admit that I even had the passing notion that I had imagined the man, something from some primitive consciousness welling up like a bad dream, something unreal, a bit of undigested beef perhaps.

  Just as exasperation began to take over I saw through the shop’s wide glass window the madman author striding our way, crossing against traffic as if he were indestructible, walking almost totally erect. To say he burst into the coffee shop is to resort to cliché, but Nozoufist practically thrust the door off its hinges, so exaggeratedly violent was his ingress. Sherri jumped in her seat as I stood to beckon the Yeti over. Jim wore the same outfit I had seen him in earlier. Sherri wore a look of what might be described as professional doubt, mixed with, I think, bemusement.

  The waitress eyed us askance now but took our order for another cup of their dishwater coffee and a round of eggs and toast for our guest.

  “Jim,” I began, “This is Sherri Hoving from our office.”

  “Pleased,” Jim grunted and put a hoary hand out, which missed Sherri’s delicate attempt at a handshake and ended up gripping her forearm as if this were a meeting of two Vikings.

  Step One was this: we were going to convince Jim Nozoufist to make us his independent agents. Sherri had sketched out a contract that gave us full power to place Anima where we thought best and make what demands we could, reaping only a measly 15 percent% of whatever profits befell us. The important thing, the only thing, was to get Anima into bookstores, onto library shelves, into the right critics’ hands, to get the damn thing recognized. The inchoate contract also gave full editorial decision -making to Todd Brackett, but with final say on any changes to the author.

  Nozoufist seemed to chew on these terms at about the same frenetic and unwholesome way he dug into his toast and eggs. We could not look at him and spent those tense minutes looking at each other with, for want of a better word, affection. Our eyes may have been dewy.

  “Ardent doesn’t want it,” he said, finally.

  “No, no,” I quickly corrected him. “Ardent would publish it in a heartbeat. Cash Cecilia’s check and throw Anima out there. But, you have to understand Ardent would publish the ravings of any lunatic who could muster the money to pay their fees. They would publish that surly waitress’s love poems to her trucker boyfriend. Ardent is not about editorship. Ardent is about taking money from people who are desperate to have something, anything, in print. Anima on the other hand is a life-changing work of the imagination. We can take it just about anywhere we want and get some real attention generated. We can make you famous, if that’s not putting an inappropriate slant on it.”

  “Ardent is for the odes or autobiographies of retired doctors and lawyers, who have nothing better to do with the money they’ve made grinding the noses of the poor,” Sherri put in. I squeezed her knee.

  “Hmm,” Jim Nozoufist said, maybe through his nose.

  “We’ll take full responsibility,” I added. “If we fail to produce anything greater—but there is little chance of that—we can always fall back on Ardent.”

  “Okay, then,” the mammalian author said, rising quickly from his seat. This time his handshakes hit their marks and he was gone, seemingly carried out by a gust of wind from the reek of New York, a wind up from the subways, smelling of urine and lost dreams and the foul decay of a once- great city.

  Sherri and I looked at each other. She couldn’t suppress a tight giggle.

  “Well, we got what we wanted,” she said. “What next?”

  “I’ll make some calls,” I said. “You make up a formal contract and we’ll get it to Mr. Nozoufist and get this ball rolling.” I smiled with a confidence that was the confidence of a child becoming an adult. I was making it.

  ***

  Sherri and I walked back into the office holding hands like Hansel and Gretel, cooing at each other, snickering like schoolchildren. We were met by the grim countenance of our plenitudinous boss.

  “Hello, Mr. Quillmeier, “ Sherri said, seriously suddenly, with more aplomb than I could have mustered.

  “Early lunch?” he asked.

  “Meeting with an author,” I said, but from Sherri’s darting eyes I knew I had blundered.

  “We don’t meet with authors,” J. Quillmeier firmly informed me. “We publish their shitty books and cash their checks and move on.”

  “Is that on our logo?” I asked, sarcasm borne of this newly acquired and foolhardy confidence.

  Mr. Quillmeier glowered. He placed a chubby hand on a chubby hip and looked us over as if he didn’t quite know what we were up to, into mother’s cosmetics, perhaps, or sneaking out back with the airplane glue.

  “Who is this author who demands such attention?” he asked.

  It was a fair question. Unfortunately, it caught the two of us, answerless. We stared straight ahead. My armpits filled with moisture.

  J. Quillmeier had us and let us run, cruelly, like hooked fish, which he only wanted the barb to dig deeper into. He stood before us like the Colossus of Rhodes for a few minutes while we fidgeted and cleared our throats.

  “Was it perhaps James Nozoufist?” he asked.

  We were stricken. We looked stricken.

  “How—” was as far as I got.

  “Cecilia Quisby is a very old and dear friend, my compatriots. She phoned me at home to find out how long until we could expect to see her man’s book in the bookstores.”

  “Cecilia Quisby told me she tried to talk Nozoufist out of publishing with Ardent,” I said, floundering, fighting for my life.

  “A blind. She sent the book in through the regular channels, but, still was not above a phone call to an old admirer to grease the works. Seems she had a visit, a peculiar visit, from our chief editor who did nothing but confuse her about our intentions. Quite inappropriate. Hence, the call.”

  “Ahem,” I believe I said.

  J. Quillmeier waited.

  “Mr. Quillmeier, this book, by this friend of your friend, is, well, it’s quite a book.”

  “And?”

  “And I thin
k, maybe, it’s just, sort of, not for Ardent.”

  J. Quillmeier waited another painful heartbeat, looked at me, looked with not a little disappointment at Sherri, and then spoke, with decisive finality.

  “You’re fired,” he said, poking a sausage-shaped finger at my sternum.

  “And you,” he said, hesitating as he turned toward the soul of his publishing house, and in that moment of hesitation, Sherri Hoving, God bless her, moved in my direction and slipped her frabjous arm through mine in a show of confederacy. “Well, you’re fired, too,” he was forced to add.

  He then rolled into the inner recesses of his private den, a bear that must certainly go into hibernation, at least temporarily, with no Sherri Hoving around to keep his affairs in order.

  “Well,” I said, exhaling for the first time in ten minutes.

  “We’re out on the street,” Sherri said, with brave calm.

  “But we have Anima,” I said. And I think I really believed it was a charm, a shield, a mojo against the perilous future.

  ***

  Of course, in the following days, there was a back- and- forth wrangle between myself and J. Quillmeier about who indeed did own the rights to the wondrous Gordian knot which was Anima. It was the most conversation I had with the man in the nearly thirteen months since I had come to work for him. He was a surprisingly savvy combatant. I say surprisingly, because, one must ask, what is he doing running this shill game for suckers if he has the smarts to do better work.

  It was my, our, contention that the author had signed a binding contract with us (he actually had not at this time, but the contract was professionally drawn up by my amorous conspirator and awaited only a meeting with the author for the proverbial eyes to be crossed, etc.) and that he had no such contract with Ardent Publishing. It was J. Quillmeier’s retort, as one might expect, that the check, which he had quickly cashed, from Cecilia Quisby, constituted a contract and one which he had already made moves to justify by putting the manuscript through the motions of getting into shoddy print and between two glued-together cardboard covers and hence turned into a proud Ardent book. I doubted this contention, simply because we had both copies of the manuscript, and though it was possible he had obtained another from Cecilia Quisby, J. Quillmeier had neither the means nor the wherewithal to get the whole process rolling by his own rolling self. At least, this is what Sherri and I fervently hoped.

  We believed, though, that we had to move quickly.

  We set up another meeting with Jim in the coffee shop (as we now began to call him whenever we referred to him, the familiarity meaning—what?—a confidence that he was ours, that we were going to ride his raggle-taggle coattails into literary stardom). We anticipated trouble arranging said meeting, but Cecilia betrayed no loyalty to her old friend JQ, and readily set us up with our author but she also did not offer his address. It was an unspoken part of the dealings that everything would be funneled through the glamorous and ladylike hands of Cecilia Quisby.

  Jim was late again. Sherri and I sat in worried silence, holding hands lightly, fingertips to fingertips, across the tabletop, casting strained, grim smiles at each other as each additional five minutes ticked away. Finally, Jim was blown in, by that same ill wind, leaves and detritus seemingly swirling around him, his hair a tangled mass, full of birds’ nests and insect larvae and perhaps the missing body of James Hoffa. He threw himself into the booth on Sherri’s side, fairly slamming against her but not upending her tight smile.

  “Okay,” he began, as if he had called this meeting. He was all at once in charge and it momentarily upset me.

  “What you got for Old Jim?” he asked, a piratical jolliness inflecting his voice, unlike anything we had heretofore witnessed.

  “A contract,” Sherri said, briskly, whipping it out from her briefcase and laying it on the yolk- stained Formica.

  Jim looked down at it the way first man must have looked at first fire.

  “It says, basically, what?” Jim said, quickly, as if to hide his embarrassment at not understanding the legal jargon before him. “You own me. You own Animus. You get all the money.”

  I didn’t know if he was kidding or not. I didn’t know if he was capable of kidding.

  “Of course not,” I said. “Just as we discussed. We will do everything in our power, everything to see that Animus gets the publishing contract it deserves, including all foreign rights, paperback rights, etc. at the best house possible and for the most money available. We vow to do this not only on this piece of paper in front of you but, here, to your face, with honest and heartfelt integrity. We will get your book the attention it deserves and for that we get 15 percent% of all profits.”

  “15 percent%,” Jim said.

  “That’s fairly common, low even. Understand, Mr. Nozoufist, we have given up all other work to pursue this. We have no other job but getting this book out and reaping the rewards it deserves. We have, you might say, put all our eggs in one basket, laid our whole lives on the line,” Sherri put in.

  Nozoufist looked at me with what I thought was a twinkle in his eye—he resembled briefly a deranged Santa Claus—and then at Sherri the same way. Suddenly he leant over and kissed my compatriot full on the mouth, pulling back like a drunkard who has just taken a large draught of a rich ichor. A smile opened up the box of snakes which was his visage.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  I was taken aback. But then I smiled just as quickly and took his callused hand into mine and gave it a hearty shake. Fellow-feeling flowed.

  Sherri, recovering from her bestial buss, pointed a red-nailed finger at the line on the contract where Jim was to put his John Hancock and brought out a pen from her lap with which he would sign. Jim gripped the pen like it was a Louisville Sslugger. Just for a second I thought he might make a crude X on the space provided, but he signed with a flourish, his name a dance of curlicues and embellishment, ending with a singular paraph.

  “Good,” he said. And he was gone.

  ***

  Although tangential to the tale, now might be the time to discuss the nature of the relationship so recently born between the lithe Sherri Hoving and your humble narrator. After that unexpected office manipulation of my membrum virile, I supposed, naturally, that we had embarked on that journey that takes a couple of ordinary human beings and transforms them into the coniunctio spirituum; in short, that we were now a fully feathered couple, free to partake of each other’s intimacies, privileged to feel the human warmth and moisture at the heart of the creature called man (and woman). I thought, bluntly put, that we would be fucking, and soon.

  It was not to be. Instead we regressed. That workaday pizzle-pull was not repeated and when our tongue- sucking grew too intense Sherri again began that coy retreat that had initially signaled to me that we were not to be, couple-wise. It was frustrating and may or may not bear on the frustrations to follow. I am not a Freudian disciple and do not pretend to possess the ability to explain human endeavor in terms of inner chemistry, misfiring neurons, bad potty training, want of breastfeeding as a child. So what follows followed. My flesh-loneliness is, most probably, only a not-so-interesting sidebar.

  The truth was we couldn’t place Anima. Much to my chagrin and shock, even when we were able to get the thing into what I would have supposed to be sympathetic hands, we got kind dismissals, compliments galore, but no takers. Roger Giroux himself penned a quick note, calling the book a “spiritual cousin to Confederacy of Dunces,” but his house passed on it, seemingly against his wishes, but it’s hard to tell. And, besides, I thought, Jim Nozoufist could write rings around that poor dead Louisianian. If he were alive, I guess I mean.

  I was flummoxed. I was confounded and astonished. We tried half a dozen major houses, both Sherri and I calling in whatever tenuous connections we boasted, and received little or no encouragement. Could it be that I was wrong about Anima, about its place in the line of literature which went from Homer to Rabelais to Sterne to Joyce and then, unerringly, I b
elieved, to our own beloved dement. No, I was not wrong. This was a hell of a book, a world-beater. It was the times that were to blame. I was not the first to decry the shallowness that had overtaken the culture, from idiotic TV, to bright, shiny, big-spectacle movies as empty as raided graves, to art which only imitated art which had self-consciously imitated art before it but at least for a laugh, right up to and including the now conglomerate-controlled publishing houses, where there were only acquisitions editors, where there was the search for the next Bridges of Madison County ongoing, but not the next Thomas Pynchon. I knew it. I knew it all. Maxwell Perkins was dead, as dead as Marley. I knew it but I still hoped. Surely, there was a place for genius still, a place for something as fresh and new and invigorating as Jim Nozoufist and his cracked, portmanteau tome.

  Six months passed in this way. Increasingly frantic phone calls, faxes, letters, cold-call visits to houses we only knew the names of. We worked out of Sherri’s apartment, where it was comfortable and clean and she cooked wonderful meals of couscous and exotic vegetables. She told me to stop worrying about money and I did, for minutes at a time, but things were not going well. Soon we would have to admit that we had to look for work—continue our ceaseless search for a home for Anima—but, at the same time, do something, however menial, to pay the bills.

  It was about this time when I got a call from Cecilia Quisby. She was concise on the phone, but not unfriendly, and she wanted the four of us to get together to discuss the future of Jim’s book. I was to pick her up at half-past seven and proceed to her private club, where a dinner would be waiting for us, over which we could make some plans on what to do next. It sounded good. It sounded wrong. But, what choice did we have?

  Also, she added, could Ms. Hoving pick Jim up, and she rattled off a quick address.

  I arrived at Two Towers at seven- fifteen, dressed in my best suit, which was a poor imitation of good grooming, nervous as sunlight. This time the doorman parted the waters for me immediately and I proceeded up to Cecilia Quisby’s wondrous place of residence, feeling like a kid on a first date.