by Daniel Klein
Duke? Duke Edward Kennedy Ellington, Dad’s absolute favorite? Digby’s mind remains a bit messy from trying to contemplate Time, the dimension. He remains standing in the same spot after Madeleine and her posse have already headed for the hills. Then it comes back to him—Duke University Press, publishers of wooly monographs and clearly Cogito’s main source of advertising revenue. Flying from the coop because Goldenfield and MacLane ratted out his heaven. Well, Digby thinks, Duke was probably wise to do so. Instead of selling two copies of their book, Deflationism and Paradox, they will now probably only sell one. But how much difference could Duke’s withdrawal make to the magazine’s financial picture anyhow? Felicia has made it very clear that Bonner’s trust fund is what keeps Cogito in four-color covers and slick bond paper. The hell with them.
As Digby approaches his happy new home, he spots two middle-aged workmen on the sward of grass and wildflowers just beyond his office window. One of them is holding a clipboard, the other stands behind a transit on a tripod. Seeing Digby, they both chuckle. It occurs to Digby that perhaps he has been playing to the wrong audience in this town.
“You must be Professor Maxwell,” the man behind the transit says, grinning.
“Minus the professor,” Digby replies. This elicits an even heartier laugh. “What’s up?”
“Just updating,” the transit guy says.
“We get time and a half for working on a Sunday,” his partner adds.
“Doing a survey?” Digby asks.
“Yup. Not that anything’s changed in the last fifty years, but that just makes our job easier,” replies Transit Man. He seems to find his own remark hilarious too. It is then that Digby observes the cap of a pint of bourbon obtruding from his pants pocket. In bourbon hilaritas.
“Work for the college?” Digby asks.
“Yeah, well, sort of,” he replies with diminished heartiness. “The Hastings Towers thing, you know. Land lust, my old man calls it. They must have surveyed this plot a hundred times on his watch.”
“Who’s lusting for it?”
“The college for this dinosaur,” Transit Man says, nodding toward Digby’s office and abode.
“Well, what do you know?” Digby says, wondering what they know that he doesn’t.
The workmen give him a weary look and go back to their work.
Digby now takes his first good look at the coveted Hastings Towers. It certainly is a fine example of Empire fantasy, constructed out of handmade crimson bricks with white wood details, a mansard roof covered with patterned shingles and punctuated with oriel windows, one of which juts out from Digby’s bedroom. On its north side is a silo-sized turret with a conical roof topped with an ironwork lion growling, or possibly yawning—undoubtedly the Hastings coat of arms.
“Well, have a happy day!” Digby says, hoping to reanimate their budding friendship. “Have a happy day” is a phrase that Digby never dreamed would pass his lips unencumbered by irony.
Upstairs in his Hastings Towers digs, Digby strips off his Sunday best, pulls on his lucky silk robe, sits down at the kitchen table and rolls himself a blunt the size of a corona. He lights up. Then he grabs a handful of Cracker Jacks and pulls out the Styles section of the Times. He skims an article about the ubiquity of Twitter gossip—apparently Martha Stewart tweeted glowingly about her lovely lunch with Ludacris at Michael’s between courses of said lunch—and turns to his favorite column, Vows. Chaitali Bopori and David Siegel were wed yesterday in an interfaith ceremony at Landmark on the Park. She wore a sari, he wore Hugo Boss, the Hindu priest sported an ersatz skullcap, and the rabbi fingered a lotus. Chaitali and David met in a chat room for Jane Austen scholars, God bless them.
Digby realizes that he has uttered these last three words out loud and this realization confirms for him that his Buenos Aires Red is already working its magic, so he stretches out on his featherbed. “God bless them?” Exactly what is the nature of this softening of his brain?
He reaches for his Bose remote and clicks on the local NPR outlet which, for the Sabbath, is airing his favorite love-to-hate program, Hearts of Space, an hour’s worth of New Age Muzak. Truth to tell, the repeating trills and long-held minor chords are only a gurgling waterfall away from the minimalist offerings of the sophisticates’ darling, Philip Glass. A stunning observation, Digby decides. No, he is not going brain dead up here in Vermont, he is finally seeing through the Manhattan fog.
In a trice, he is at one with the trills and gurgles of Hearts of Space and he drifts off.
In Digby’s dream, he is pacing the rim of a crater—a volcano? the moon?—and peers gingerly down into it. The thing is bottomless. If he were to tumble in, he would never hit the ground, just float downward for an eternity. And in that dream moment, that is exactly what he wants to do. What he needs to do.
But suddenly he feels nauseous. Terrified. Holy Moses, this is it! The Void! Eternal nothingness! The raven is quothing, “Nevermore!”
Dreams being inexpensive independent films, he is abruptly flashed back to his desk at New York Magazine where he is perusing an array of clippings and handwritten notes spread out before him. He is asking himself, What is the very next thing? His deadline is looming. He needs to make a pick. But then a whirlwind lifts the scraps into its funnel and all that is left is that crater again. The very next thing is The Void!
He crashes awake in a sopping sweat. An ethereal voice is calling his name. “Digby? Digby?” Jesus, his day of reckoning has come. He is being summoned to the other side. He sits up in his bed, banging his head against the brass bedstead. “Digby? I know you’re in there.”
Winny. In the instant, he is relieved that he can avoid the void, at least for now, even if, in another sense, his moment of reckoning has arrived.
“I’m indisposed,” Digby calls weakly toward the door.
“Is somebody else in there?”
“No,” he says. “Well, in a way. I’m communing with my Maker.”
“You are not being nice,” comes Winny’s winsome reply. “I’m feeling a little, you know, lonesome.”
“I know that feeling,” he says. “But it does have its rewards. You get acquainted with your inner self.”
“And I’m also feeling used,” Winny says.
Oy, as they say in Manhattan. Judging by the clench in Digby’s stomach, it appears he is not beyond feelings of mere mundane guilt. He supposes this is a good sign spiritual-wise, a suitable starting place for ascending to cosmic guilt, which clearly is only a stone’s throw away from redemption. He opens the door. Winny steps in, all smiles.
“I’ve been lounging,” Digby says, gesturing toward his newspaper-and-Cracker-Jack-strewn bed.
“Oh, is that what they call it these days?” Winny intones superciliously.
“How’s that?”
“You can smell the weed all the way down to the bottom of the stairway,” she says.
“Oh, that. I only use it for medical reasons.”
Winny giggles. It has a surprisingly pleasant sound.
“I’m feeling a bit sickly myself, Doctor,” she says.
Clearly this is Digby’s cue to offer her his blunt, but he hesitates. Not out of drug covetousness, mind you; when it comes to pot, he has always been a good sharer. But because he can see where this will lead, as surely as lies lead to more lies. He does not wish to bed Miss Winifred today or, almost certainly, any future day. Call him fickle. Possibly, even call him callous. But on the other hand, it may be that his reaction time is improving; in his full-immersion shithead years, he would continue to sleep with a woman even as he read their affair’s expiration date on her naked torso. He is absolutely positive that he does not want to spend any long term quality time with Winny, so this freshly minted vow of his will preemptively quash a lot of sorrow down the road for both of them. Actually, he believes he is being considerate.
In fact, Winifred’s designs on Digby are far more sketchy than he presumes, proving once again that guilt-prone men usually have an exaggera
ted idea of their impact on women. Not unlike the narrators of The Unmade Bed, Winny has a variegated palate when it comes to sex and sexual partners. She has even toyed with the idea of committing some of her amatory experiences and observations to print in the form of a modern romance novel. She certainly enjoyed her little tumble with Digby and would enjoy another tumble or two with him, but her future plans go no further than that.
“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Digby says. “What’s all the to-do about this building? Hastings Towers. I mean, apparently the college covets it.”
“Are you going to offer me a toke or not?” is Winny’s reply. It is a reasonable question, actually.
Digby retrieves the joint from the ashtray on his bed table and hands it to her, along with a pack of matches. Winny lights up, holds the smoke in her lungs for a count of ten like a pro, and then exhales through pouted lips. The pouted lips are exactly what Digby was afraid of.
“The president wants it for himself,” she says.
For the life of him, Digby cannot remember what they were talking about.
“Louden’s official house for its president is tiny,” she goes on. “Apparently the first president was a bachelor with tidy habits. One bedroom, one bath. So this building would be perfect. But it’s belonged to the Hastings family forever and they don’t want to give it up.”
“Not even now that Bonner is gone with no descendents?”
“Nope. Not while Cogito is still in business. Bonner thought the Towers had philosophical vibes. He loved this place. His great grandfather built it and three generations of Hastings were raised in it, including Bonner himself. Yankees have a thing about their family homes. They grow up getting more love out of their banisters and mantels than they do from their mothers. Do you mind if I have another toke?”
“As long as you don’t intend to operate any heavy machinery,” Digby says.
He should have known better. Winny immediately morphs into fleshpot mode, cupping in both hands her sizeable breasts through her Sunday frock. “Were you referring to this heavy machinery?” she simpers.
This woman teaches creative writing to Louden students? What are her kids composing—bodice-rippers? Soft-core porn? Then again, Digby’s only child is not only writing erotica, but earning a fine living at it.
But what is Digby to do in this moment, which is beginning to feel eternal? His other favorite pragmatic philosopher, along with Nelson Algren, was Zorba the Greek, and Zorba insisted that it was a sin to refuse a woman who wants to make love to you. Digby, of course, is against sin.
There is a loud, frantic-sounding knock at the door. Digby prays that it is God, come to perform an intervention.
“I better get that,” Digby says to Winny, leaving her with heavy machinery in hand. He opens the door to Rostislav Demidov who immediately steps inside, a look of Dostoyevskian despair on his pointy face.
“I donut eat at Norman’s peas,” he says. At least in Digby’s present state, that is what he thinks the Russian says, so he makes a move toward the kitchenette where he hopes to find something to feed the poor fellow.
“A moment’s peace,” Winny says, by way of translation. “He doesn’t get a moment’s peace.”
“Oh? What’s the problem, Professor?” Digby asks.
“I am followed here and also there,” he replies. It occurs to Digby that during the Cold War, while over here we were watching films about double-crossing commies, over in Leningrad they were watching films that featured sneaky Americans not giving innocent Russian citizens a moment’s peace, or Norman’s peas, for that matter. Cultural paranoia knows no boundaries.
“By whom?”
“Woman with binoculars.”
Aha.
“That’s Madeleine Follet. You know, from the magazine. She’s worried about you. She thinks you’re lost.”
“I am nothing lost,” Rosti says, sounding like a petulant dyslectic child.
“She is the maternal type. Madeleine, you know,” Digby offers.
“It may be more than that,” Winny pipes in, her hands, mercifully, now dangling at her sides.
“What?” Digby asks.
“I think Miss Follet has a thing for you, Professor,” Winny says.
“You think a thing? That is a what?” Professor Demidov asks.
Digby has been told that Rosti Demidov, Louden’s premier visiting scholar, has an international reputation in something called extensional logic, an application of logic to semantics. Digby is now quite certain that he will not steer any of his friends’ children to Louden College.
“She wants to cuddle with you,” Winny says. Digby admires her choice of words.
“Coddle?” Rosti asks.
“That too,” Winny says.
“She has love for you,” Digby adds. Actually, he rather enjoys talking in the Russian’s disordered syntax; it makes him feel closer to him.
“I have no place for love,” Rosti declares emphatically. It appears to be a point of pride for him. In any event, it is the clearest sentence Digby has heard him pronounce.
Rosti turns to leave and Digby panics. He has just remembered where Winny and he left off.
“Listen, Professor, I was just about to make some lunch and we’d be honored if you’d join us,” he says.
“I will eat,” Rostislav replies.
Divine intervention.
CHAPTER 8
Chuck Jones was once Digby’s go-to smarty-pants for things African-American and ideology left of left. Although Chuck is a bona fide academic—he teaches at NYU—his prose is rhythmic, even jazzy. At New York Magazine, Digby often assigned him a piece about, say, break-dancers, black cross-dressers, wiretapping of cell phones, and the like. Chuck never disappointed. And so Digby is not surprised to find that the article Chuck sent him in an email attachment this fine Monday morning, a mere five days after Digby gave him the assignment, is absolutely first rate.
The title is, “St. Peter’s Immigration Policy” and Digby is already smitten by the first line: “Keep them darkies outta here!” In the two thousand words that follow, good old Chuck manages to name drop Herbert Marcuse, Chris Rock, W.E.B. Dubois, William James, Snoop Dogg, St. Augustine, and Malcom X. Heaven as an elitist, racist culture. Bull’s-eye! Pop-cult meets social philosophy spot on! Digby has tinges of yet another unexpected feeling: hopefulness.
Raised as he was by a woman who found hopefulness as Man’s ultimate delusion, Digby found himself curious as to whether other metaphysicians had anything to say about it. He was not disappointed. In Bonner Hastings’ personal, leather-bound library of philosophy classics stashed behind the glass-paneled doors of the bookcase to the left of his desk, Digby discovered Leibnitz’s flinty optimism in his famous ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’ shtick. It was a tricky argument that could ultimately be summed up by a refrain Digby had frequently heard in New York City, “Could be worse”—that is, it could be worse in other possible worlds. However, a footnote in Bonner’s translation of Théodicée led Digby straightaway to the Prince of Pessimists, Schopenhauer, whose counterargument catalogued all the evils in the universe and concluded, “If this world were a little worse, it would be no longer capable of continuing to exist. Consequently, since a worse world could not continue to exist, it is absolutely impossible; and so this world itself is the worst of all possible worlds.” Clearly Arthur Schopenhauer was Mrs. Cynthia-Marie Maxwell’s kind of guy.
Arthur and Cynthia-Marie notwithstanding, Digby does feel a buzz of optimism, so much so he even feels brave enough to open an old email in his inbox, the one from Duke University Press. Happily, it turns out to be tamer than expected, in large part because it is written in the weasel words of academia. They are “puzzled” by the theme of the new issue of Cogito and are “concerned about confusing readers with ambiguous structures.” Ah yes, ‘ambiguous structures’; Digby can relate—he is confused already. Finally, the Duke folk are withholding judgment until they see the issue to follow and will th
en reconsider advertising their books in the magazine. This last is the only indication that they are actually pulling their ads. Fuck ’em.
Next up in Digby’s inbox is the spreadsheet he requested from Madeleine, the hard numbers of Cogito Inc. It is to laugh. Total circulation comes in at a jaw-dropping 2,100 per annum, ninety-five percent of it in subscriptions, the other five percent from newsstand sales. (“Excuse me, sir, do you have the latest issue of Cogito magazine? It’s right there between Christian Cowboy and Barely Legal.”) The subscription rate for all six annual issues is thirty bucks including postage—$7.50 a copy at the newsstand—and ad revenue amounts to $2,900 per issue. Altogether, an annual income of a little under $45,000. And that’s the good news. That bad news is that it costs $25,000 more than that just to produce and mail it, and that’s not counting salaries, writer fees, and overhead. But that, happily, is where the Hastings trust picks up the slack to the tune of two hundred and fifty grand a year.
Thank you, Bonner. And I have it on good authority that you can hear me up there.
Hello, what’s this? A new email has appeared while Digby was reading the spreadsheet and it is from Ms. Mary Bonavitacola, subject line: “Let’s talk.”
Does Digby feel like doing a little dance? Nothing too gymnastic, mind you, something stately and behooving his age, like a few steps of a Morris dance. But, yes, he does indeed feel like doing a little dance.
“Dear Digby,
Let’s talk eternity.
Say over lunch.
Mary”
Digby works on his reply feverishly for the next ten minutes, writing and rewriting until he feels that he strikes a fine balance between adolescent alacrity and measured maturity.
“Dear Mary,
I’m free today.
Digby”
Then he sits by his Mac waiting for Mary’s reply, checking the inbox every minute. When there’s no reply after ten minutes, he feels an urge to assume the fetal position under his desk. He resists. At the thirty minute mark he is rewarded:
“1 PM at Louden Clear?