by KUBOA
Knowing my early arrival was rude I rapped lightly on Cecilia’s door. It took some ninety90 seconds or so—an eternity—before the door was opened and there stood Dame Quisby herself. I had, of course, expected Lurch and was embarrassed to find Cecilia at the door dressed only in a housecoat, albeit a sheer, sparkling housecoat. The shins which showed beneath the elegant hem of her garment, though aged, shone like ambergris and her toenails were painted a pale shade of lavender, which made my heart do a sad drumroll.
“I’m so sorry I’m early,” I sputtered.
“Nonsense,” she said, waving me in.
I shuffled in, a child, a nullity in her reflective radiance.
“I’m afraid Noah is off for the evening, so if you could just make yourself comfortable while I dress,” she said gesturing vaguely toward all that was hers.
“Certainly,” I said.
She wafted away toward her bedroom and I spent some time examining the art on the walls. All the names were familiar. All the paintings were authentic.
“We’re not having much luck with Jim’s book,” she called from the recesses of her apartment. It was a statement, almost, but not quite, a challenge.
“No,” I admitted. I began my rant about the unappreciated prophet, the overemphasized profit, etc. She cut me off with a reverberating contralto.
“La di da, Todd,” she sang. “You underestimate yourself. You have literature in your veins.”
I let a few moments pass. I had no answer.
“Is that not true?” she asked, this time the challenge more clearly delineated.
“Well, I’ve tried all I know. I’ve called in all my markers. I’ve—”
“Todd. Todd, come here,” she spoke, as if I were her stubborn spaniel.
I walked slowly toward the doorway to her bedroom. I didn’t want to go there. I was sore afraid.
I stood in the doorway but my eyes were on my shoes.
“Look at me, Todd,” she commanded.
I raised my face, knowing what would be there. Cecilia Quisby sat on the edge of her bed putting her stockings on. They were the kind that stayed up only by the magic of their darker top halves. I was looking at quite a bit of the fifty-year-old Cecilia Quisby and I was thoroughly impressed by what she was showing me. Her body, covered here and there with bits of lace and whalebone perhaps, was a wonder, for all its wrinkles and extra flesh. The places of extra flesh seemed derived from Elysian Ffields, fruit from the garden Adam was born in. I could not help but survey it.
Cecilia Quisby smiled like a ring-dove. Her remonstration was temporarily halted so she could address this new question, the question of what she was going to do about the lust she had engendered in me.
“You don’t think I’m too old and used,” she said, a hint of insecurity in her voice, but a voice that quavered like a taper. She lightly spread her arms and revealed herself all the more. She was an aged Delilah, but the temptations were nonetheless irresistible.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” I said. And I meant it.
“Come here, Todd,” she said, and, of course, I did.
I stood next to the bed and she wrapped her arms around me and put her cheek on my zipper and held me there like a queen making time-honored use of some hierodule. I ran my hands over what parts I could reach—shoulders, her slightly furry cheeks, her still- glossy though graying hair, the tops of her bare breasts—but I felt as if I were straightjacketed.
What happened between Cecilia Quisby and me should not be made public knowledge. Things occurred in that plush and mirrored bedroom which I will forever want repeated, will forever be tortured for wanting them repeated. She was a remarkable woman.
After our athletic endeavors Cecilia Quisby begged off on the remainder of the evening, citing fatigue, headache, surprise, new things she would have to digest.
“Could we do this tomorrow night?” she asked from amid her pillows and silks.
I hoped for a moment she meant, well, at any rate, she meant the dinner/meeting.
“Of course,” I said. I bent to kiss her on the cheek as I left and she turned slightly, I thought away from my lips, but perhaps it was just an awkward parting. I left feeling wrung out. I had at least, for the first time in a while, if only for an hour or so, forgotten Animus and the pledge that hung over me like the sword of Damocles. I forgot it until I arrived at Sherri’s and found her in tears, her clothing torn, a bruise swelling up under her left eye like an ugly toad.
When she lifted her face to me it brought a more frantic flood of tears. She sobbed like a nun with stigmata, my name spewing from her blubbering like a curse.
“Wh-where were you?” she asked.
“Picking up Cecilia—what the hell happened?” I sat down by her and put my arms around her only to be pushed away.
“He tried to rape me, you shit,” she managed to get out.
“Who?” I said, automatically, though I knew. Of course I knew.
“That beast, you selfish jackass. That goat-footed author of that horrid, horrid book. I never want to see him again. I never want to see you again.”
“Sherri, you don’t mean that,” I started.
She was suddenly, fiercely calm. She looked at me with the face of an unrepentant killer about to be electrocuted.
“I do, though. I mean it. He attacked me. He thought it was part of the deal. God knows what goes on in that beastly mind of his. And you, while you were sporting with that rich—” Hhere tears took over again.
“He told you that, that I was bedding Cecilia Quisby?” I sputtered in mock outrage, my face coloring with shame.
“Get out, Todd. That animal tried to put his thick, dirty prick into me and I will never forget that and never forgive you for it. Get out.”
I started another weak protest but I was beat. I was beat all to hell. I didn’t know who I was, where I was from, who was on my side or who wasn’t, or even if I was on my own side. I wandered out onto the rebarbative sidewalks and meandered around for a few hours. I was as loose as the trash blowing up Fifth Avenue. I was as pointless.
***
What had happened was this:
Jim Nozoufist and Cecilia Quisby, apparently in frustration over our impotence, our ignorance, our inability to get Anima published, had re-established contact with Ardent Publishing and J. Quillmeier and had signed with him (in apparent disregard for the contract Nozoufist had with us, but we were weak as kittens afterwards—we were cowed, subjugated—and they knew it) to bring the novel out as the sole offering from Ardent in the fFall of that year. They also, coincidentally, had made a more personal, more vindictive pact to humiliate us, use us, show us that power in the circles they frequented had to do with who had whose dick. In the case of Cecilia Quisby’s seduction this amounted to a fairly memorable and aristocratic, almost feline, display of how a woman controls a man, how she has him like a leopard on a leash.
In the case of the less sophisticated Jim Nozoufist this amounted to a savage attack on Sherri that included tearing her blouse and blackening her eye. Sherrifa Hoving would never press charges, for her own personal reasons, which I can only guess at. Shortly, after this, I heard she moved out west and was working for one of those fancy- book houses, the ones that makes a living publishing books of immaculate glossies of baby -boomer memorabilia, books for Architectural Digest coffee tables, gorgeous books, empty as skulls. I never heard from her again.
Ironically, sadly, Anima, was never published. Either Cecilia Quisby and J. Quillmeier made their own secret concordat and shelved the book for reasons of their own or they came up with a better plan.
Six months later there appeared on the literary horizon a new publishing house, Quillmeier Books. Its sole first offering was a potboiler entitled Run for It. You know the story. It went into multiple printings, launched the publishing house making James and Cecilia Quillmeier the toasts of bookdom, sold to the Book of the Month club, went to NAL for a cool million mass- market rights, and the movie
version, starring Bruce Willis and Natalie Portman, was said to be filming in Chicago, where they were having script problems which was to delay the actual release of the film until the fall of the following year.
Run for It, the book, was seemingly everywhere at once: in every chain bookstore window, in every glossy magazine’s book review section, no matter how perfunctory (People called it “John Grisham with extra adrenaline.”), in the laps of every commuter. Its author, a James Skald, had his handsome kisser spread across America like a new brand of cereal. Or a new hostage crisis; he practically had his own theme music. He was on Oprah, he was on Charlie Rose, he was on NPR.
And James Skald, household name, with a face now as familiar as Dan Rather’s, seemed to have come from nowhere. He had a burnished, prizefighter’s mug, somewhat ruddy, perhaps freckled (it was hard to tell through the makeup and TV lights), and his clean-shaven jaw was as chiseled and well -cornered as a bank building. Still, if you squinted and held up Time’s cover to the right light you could see a bit of wildness there, underneath the well-groomed and artificial map. Somewhere beneath the sleek surface of that face, that had been configured for television to consume and disseminate, there was something almost sinister, almost feral. It’s the beast inside man, I guess. We all have it.
***
But, some nights, here in Pittsburgh, where I moved and got a job at another bookstore, some late nights, when I’m lonely and I’m thinking about the snake-like shapeliness of Sherri Hoving or the delights of Cecilia Quisby’s venerable body, I’ll pull out Anima and read sections of it to myself. Or aloud if I’ve had a couple of drinks. Or sometimes even over the phone to family or friends back home, who wonder why I’ve called after all these years just to spout some baffling jabber into the plastic receiver they clutch to their ears as if they expect real communication from it.
And I marvel, still, still I marvel, at the magisterial sentences, at the distilled but cockamamie wisdom, at the fantastical, magical, misbegotten, empyrean otherness which is this novel, Anima, destined to die with me, to know only the life which I bring to it.
Aftermath
Right after the crash Ralph went around talking about it as if he were the ancient mariner. “The guy came out of nowhere,” is a phrase I remember from numerous renditions. It was soon reported that there was trouble at home, his still- young wife was spotted at Arby’s with Jack Diamond from the church choir. Later Ralph would say he could have predicted it all, the dirty affair, the acrimony, the loss of his self-respect, and then his job. Ralph really went downhill. “The only thing I didn’t see coming,” Ralph was saying, “was that goddamned Plymouth.”
***
Acknowledgements
“Monster” in Gargoyle
“Punk Band” in In Posse Review, and a piece of it in Listen: 29 Short Conversations (Brown Paper Publishing, 2009)
“The Door” in Mid-South Review
“Blunge” in Muse Apprentice Guild
“Supermarket” in Orchid
“Killer” as an artist collaboration at Forty Forty Press
“My Friend, Bob Canaletto” in The Edward Society and Southern Voices 2
“Delitescent Selves” in Potomac Review
“Strangers in Love” in Soupletter
“A Small Fire” in Ghoti Magazine, and was also nominated by them for a Pushcart
“Harry Styrene and the Holy Virgin” in 3711 Atlantic
“The Boy who Used up a Word” in The Melic Review
“Notes Toward the Story” in Cranky
“Mike and Doris Hhad Everything” in Cordite
“Publisher” in Eclectica and Southern Gothic, and as a chapbook from Workers Write Press
“Aftermath” in Quick Fiction
“Character” in Mannequin Envy
“Mystical Participation” in Cellar Door
“Haunted” in Thirst for Fire
“Shadow Work” in The Pinch
Also, “Blunge” and “Aftermath” appeared in the chapbook Short Story and Other Short Stories (Parallel Press, 2006)
***
The Afterword Gratitude: Thanks to my big brother, Mark, The Storyteller. Uncle Shlomo the Magus. To George Singleton, Dave Markson, Rick Barthelme, The Redoubtable J. Grisham, Selah S., Miles Gibson, Bob Butler, Suzanne Kingsbury, Cynthia Shearer, Debra Spark, Mark Cunningham, Tom Dyja, John Barber, Greg Downs, Pinckney Benedict, Marly Youmans, Tom Piazza, Tom Franklin, Marshall Boswell, Marshall Chapman, Lee Smith, and Richard Powers, who all made me feel welcome at the adult table. Elea Guru. Wardo the Magnificent. Special thanks to David at Blue Cubicle Press. The Gang at Burke’s. My mother, Sadie Mesler, who has saved my hash too many times, and everyone else who continues to be nice to me while I roil on my own spit. And, perpetually, Cheryl, Chloe, and Toby.
And a special thanks to Erin McKnight, who made me sound smarter than I am.
Other Books by Corey Mesler
Poetry
For Toby, Everything for Toby (1997) Wing & The
Wheel Press
Ten Poets (1999) (Ed.)editor, only Wing & The Wheel Press
Piecework (2000) Wing & The Wheel Press
Chin-Chin in Eden (2003) Still Waters Press
Dark on Purpose (2004) Little Poem Press
The Hole in Sleep (2006) Wood Works Press
The Agoraphobe’s Pandiculations (2006) Little Poem
Press
The Lita Conversation (2006) Southern Hum
The Chloe Poems (2007) Maverick Duck Press
Some Identity Problems (2007) Foothills Publishing
Pictures from Lang and Fellini (2007) Sheltering Pines
Press
Grit (2008) Amsterdam Press
The Tense Past (2010) Flutter Press
Before the Great Troubling (2010) Unbound Content
The Heart is Open (2011) Right Hand Pointing
To Writing You (2012) The Origami Poetry Project
Our Locust Years (2013) Unbound Content
Prose
Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) Livingston Press
We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2005) Livingston
Press
Short Story and Other Short Stories (2006) Parallel
Press
Following Richard Brautigan (chapbook) (2006) Plan B
Press
Publisher (2007) Writers Write Journal Press
Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009) Brown Paper
Publishing
The Narcoleptic Therapist and Other Stories (2010)
Achilles Chapbook Series
The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010) Bronx River
Press
Following Richard Brautigan (full length novel) (2010
Livingston Press
I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011) Queen’s
Ferry Press
Gardner Remembers (2011) Pocketful of Scoundrel
Diddy-Wah-Diddy (2013) Ampersand Press
COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published four novels:, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010), and Following Richard Brautigan (2010);, two2 full -length poetry collections:, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2010);, and two2 books of short stories:, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009) and Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2010) . He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written, “The Martian Hop.” With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.
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