Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  And as for those anticipated losses, no such luck. He said he made a profit every year without fail. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a publishing company.

  Raise your hands. Who, besides Kelly, didn’t see that collusion coming?

  He told me a stupid joke.

  “Hey, how do you make a small fortune in the book publishing business?” goes the wiseacre.

  “Start with a bigger fortune?” Holy mackerels in a barrel.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. His rivals wished they could marginalize him. But they couldn’t, because he totally killed in the book market. Editorial advisory: he totally rejected a book with extreme prejudice, he didn’t care if it was cobbled together by the ghost of William Fucking Faulkner, if he caught one single totally. I myself did read one Southern Aggravationarian page, over and over, yearning for the peace that passeth understanding that was not to be and knowing why man will not only endure he will prevail. Con seder this re: Myron Beam’s predispositions: unlike the Yokfuckingcounty author, Twain and Nabokov and Joyce and Proust never won a Nobel Prize. The bomb-maker’s selection committee got Proust right, I will say that.

  Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them editing.

  To finish off the point earlier adumbrated (ooh la lah, fancy dancy word, get me the copy desk!) vis-à-vis tail pursuit on his celibate, or whatever, part, or whatever:

  First of all, don’t use flaccid French turns of phrase anywhere in Myron’s zipper code, or use the word “flaccid” at all around him, and before you trot one out, find out how to pronounce flaccid, as in not flas-sid, but flak-sid. If you are a grad student, you now have all you need to win a bar bet. But maybe think about hanging out next time in a real bar.

  Whenever I hear Zou Bizzou Bizzou French, I want to go guillotine on the beret-bearing, Gauloise-puffing, The Metro Is Much Cleaner Than the Subway boy or girl. But Calypso O’Kelly’s rogue déclassé in her notorious email that fucked him up earned a Myrulligan. The first ominous sign, if you ask me, of his lapsing judgment.

  And B, as for flaccid, I might as well let you in on something else he intimated since you’re going to find out much more compromising information about Yours Hardly, or not hardly at all. His limp ageing ilk was the target demographic of a certain genre (I know it’s French, merde) of the prissily denominated “erectile dysfunction” gang, but when he saw those TV commercials (featuring manly men galloping on steeds, stoking California beach sunset campfires, cocking firearms and I don’t know what else while touting come-hitherish pharmafuckingcological advances), he yawned. His evolutionarily curious prostate existed nostalgically in his rearview (poor choice in images, I rant, but let’s move on), and he was proudly, defiantly, ecstatically, exuberantly unable to answer any call to duty.

  Did his plumbing’s delimitation depress him? You might think so, but wait, there is more. The side effects of a lifetime sentence of detumescence without possibility of parole were mixed. One unfortunate proctological byproduct was a byproduct he experienced hardship producing: his—and I am sorry I must mention this, too—urination. Oh, the sluggish struggle before the public or private pissoir. (Who’s going to edit this book anyway? I’m praying it’s species-nonjudgmental Murmechka.) That was when his entire day and night seemed consumed by the gallant attempt to void his bladder, an activity occasionally interrupted by meetings, dreams, not taking phone calls, and nutritional intake at Carmine’s or Avenue. But the other other byproduct—now that he had slide ruled out the old ruling passion—was that he had more time and energy to compose and not send out rejection notes. And not only that.

  Because, you see, finally the gift of celibacy and/or impotence demuscled up my Jewish Catholic monk publisher to withstand the sallies (and the sashas and the cassandras) of feminine wile and The Strunk and White Elements of Guile, which redounded ultimately to his advantage, most especially the financial. Herr Doktor Freud, he a Hall of Shamer from the dead ball era, effectively struck out every at bat during his entire shameless career, but Buddhist priests and plein air painters and Myron the publisher would put in a good word for the sublime powers of sublimation. With that diagnosis, my work here is almost done.

  Now, Sibella, may we finally leave this subject, umm, behind?

  As occasionally happened during my college games, the crowd…goes…wild!

  You can never count on a junior editor for a fancy prose style.

  “The cow chewing on its cud in the green meadows of timelessness cannot paint a picture of itself,” as Murmechka might say. And often did.

  How moo, how fucking moo.

  “Sibella, want to hear another joke?”

  “Not really?”

  “Who did the blonde star of the movie based on a book fuck on the casting couch?

  “The publisher, and it’s whom, and are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t make that non-joke anymore, buster. You living in a vacuum cleaner, Myron?”

  “We should go to Frankfurt next year. Good beer, man?”

  Let us turn the page, mental reader.

  But before we do, let me insert a qualification to everything Myron said about writers and their books. Sometimes, very rarely, comes along a writer with a gift he or she can barely control and a book issues forth that changes lives of book lovers forever. That was when Myron’s brilliance shone forth. He knew that he had discovered a writer who writes because there is no existential alternative to writing and we will all bow down in awe before the performance because it seems like anything but a performance. It feels like genius, and we don’t know how we got along without it. Call Myron sentimental if you must, or call Myron an outrageously lucky publisher, that’s coolio. Because a great book is nothing less than a miracle. Don’t believe in miracles? Myron and/or I would have felt semi-sorry and/or -sad for you. I suppose you never heard of Hard Rain Publishing. And you have never known a publisher like Myron Beam. Don’t trash yourself. Nobody else has either.

  This takes us all the way back to the debacle about to take place, overwrought by the improbable Calypso O’Kelly.

  A Streetcar Named Sibella

  Here we go. Lights, camera, faction.

  Visualize if you will the misery en scène that morning. We were still in the day after Myron’s marathon reading the night before and Myron had dragged me into his office and we had been talking in his office for hours. I say we had been talking but I was mostly listening. I was taking gnotes, struggling to track, acquiring TMI about Myron and the house I never would have suspected before, and I wasn’t altogether sure I was liking it, and I continued to prefer not to. At the same time, I could feel the staff tension building outside his door. What was some junior editor doing meeting so long with the publisher? What tricks was the tall, scheming girl up to?

  Finally, somebody cracked. I guess YGB couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Myron,” said YGB upon entering Myron’s office, and he spoke with genuine emotion and urgency as he audaciously touched Myron’s shoulder. “You all right?” Myron deplored physical contact, especially on the part of the editor in chief, and you could see him about to rise up and poke YGB on the bridge of his perfect, delectable nose, which would have been very upsetting for a number of reasons.

  Two wit:

  You see, Young Goodman Brown truly was a handsome and rakishly sincere Rhodesashish boy, and Dear Bleeder, I couldn’t help it: I liked him. You might say my affection rose to the level of what used to be called in school a crush. That tender regard might explain why I would catch myself smiling idiotically whenever my Teddy Boy was near. Watch out, though. Here comes Folsom Prison disclosure: he reminded me of Junior. That might be way TM of TMI even for the unlikes of me. Yet the truth is that YGB flirted with me all the time, and despite being a slow if tall learner, I deduced that my altitude didn’t sicken or intimidate him. Of cours
e, I thought Junior wasn’t fazed by my towering over him, but then again, his current Greenback Squeezette isn’t elevated enough to gain admittance to the big kid Matterhorn ride at Disneyland.

  “Is Myron stroking out?” called out a senior editor once she saw his office door was open. That senior editor was the one named Kelly, and she feigned concern for Myron the way she also feigned intellectual competency.

  That was Myron’s cue. He told me he and I would take a break for now, continue our conversation later. I realized what he did not state: he had some reflecting to do about Calypso’s book.

  As I walked across the office, my head was pounding from listening to that Myronathon and from smiling at YGB. I could sense Kelly staring at me from across the way, on the other side of Murmechka. She was sporting a buttercup polka-dot yellow retro sweater set, which was clinging like Saran Wrap upon B-Cups of Lemon Jell-O. Her bra size probably matched her grade point average—as honestly, fair enough, did mine. The real reason she was pretending concern for Myron is that she probably had big plans today that involved the publisher (pointlessly pitching a loser of a book he would ultimately reject, if her track record and her outfit were any indication). These designs might fall through if, say, he were intubated in some ICU.

  She would have been a good woman, I say, if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

  She and I were a study in contrast. I was the non-Kelly. Myron called me a living breathing Mixed Metaphor, and said that I had him at fuck. Street urchin Spence debutante face-metal Ivy League potty-mouthed Upper East Side sonnet-writing Valley fist-fighting nonZen Girl Starting at Center Number 44. If I may quote my curriculum fucking vitae.

  Little wonder that the meager wonder named Kelly hated me. Take a number along with most of the other senior editors, except for YGB and Murmechka. She had cause. This junior editor could take her off the dribble and posterize her senior editor ass anytime I wanted, and I could edit the final fuck out of a manuscript before she finished perusing a first draft. And she knew it.

  Soon as I took my place at my milk crates, the moment I became a stationary target, she took aim and fired off her volleys, boom boom boom. “This morning when you saw Myron you said what fuck the fuck, which makes no sense and which means that every other word out of your mouth is literally fuck.”

  Chomp chomp, chew chew.

  To which I could reply: “You are Kelliterally a literalist and also a devoted word counter?”

  “Why is every other word out of your filthy Valley Girl mouth fuck?”

  Admittedly, a not unreasonable question. Don’t you hate it when unreasonable human beings do the unexpected?

  “Fuck if fucking I fucking know?” said I, and meant it.

  “You know, when you’re sitting down, it looks like you’re standing up,” she added, an ad Sibellum remark if I ever heard one.

  Chomp chomp, chew chew.

  “I can’t help it if you’re a fucking dwarf, Kelly. But I take that back, because there’s nothing wrong with dwarfs?”

  “You’re a height-ist and you’re seven feet tall.”

  Chomp chomp, chew chew.

  “I told you a million times to stop exaggerating?”

  Yes, middle school and a publishing house do have a lot in common, and I’d been intolerating that sort of put-down all my life.

  “Why you gussied up like a fucking lollipop?” I said.

  “Why you costumed like a publisher?”

  “I was going for assistant professor?”

  “More like Myron suck-up.”

  “Don’t you have a Norton Anthology you can sit on to give you greater stature around here since you can’t read it?”

  “Dumb jock.”

  “English minor?”

  She’s never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now! Sibellude the Obscure gets the last collusive word.

  ✴✴✴

  Kelly’s pointillist In Seine sweater told a man like Myron two things. One, perhaps he had been hasty if not rash when he opted for his sex-life-destruction derby. Yowza, more creepy and lots more to come, FYI, but what’s a harmless man without a DOA dream? And day ux, Kelly had shown up at work planning to pitch him a book that had come in on that damned transom, which apparatus unfailingly seemed to hum along, barely keeping up with the literary production taking place in this great land of ours where everybody and his or her incestuous or adulterous or Scientologistic partner has a literary agent and a whirling dervish of a word processor.

  Kelly and my catfight now temporarily over, why don’t you take a break and go Goloogle up how many hundreds of thousands of books are published each year.

  I’ll wait.

  You’re back already?

  Amazing, ain’t it? Now imagine how many more are written that aren’t published or self-published by anybody. I recommend a cold cloth to your forehead. These are the haunting, daunting numbers primarily responsible for packing writing conferences along with writers’ medicine cabinets and wet bars.

  The armature of Kelly’s sweater notwishstanding, he appeared to be in no mood to be pitched by anybody, and despite being anything but a whip smart editor, she sensed this and would beddy bide her time. For a change, and unquestionably in order to irritate me, she took it upon herself to answer the fucking office phone. And next I heard her speaking to Myron across the way.

  “Phone call, Myron, says it’s urgent,” she called out. She turned her attention to Murmechka: “You do something with your hair? I like it.”

  Publisher’s Advisory: The next time the publisher gets a call that is not urgent will be the first. But here comes the suspenseful part. Would Myron, on this august occasion, take a phone call in real time?

  Kelly kept talking conspiratorially to Murmechka: “This pushy biach on the phone says Myron will want to talk with her? Calypso O’Kelly? Jesus Christ, what a name. Sounds like a loose chick somebody met on a bad spring break trip to Aruba. Calypso Oh Plagiarizing My Name—she sounds like a good pal for the giraffe girl. Hey, giraffe girl,” she directed her remark to me, “you need a friend?”

  I did, and that was a subject for another time. Besides, Kelly and my dustup was producing immediate dividends in adjusting her attitude if not her buttercupitude. Do you see this, too? I was having a salutary fucking effect on her, and I was proud. As for Kelly and Murmechka, Her Lollipopness was always trying to forge alliances against me, but I had my doubts her strategy was working, since Murmechka safely hovered—considering her stature, a fantastical image—above the office politics fray, preoccupied as she was all day long on her personal projects, at least a few of which had to involve Hard Rain, no? Or was Mr. Coyote continually filling up her ear with words of wisdom emanating from Mr. Rabbit?

  “Myron,” Kelly tried again, “she says to tell you it’s Calypso O’Kelly.”

  Though the calls to the publisher were predestined to be cast into the purgatory of his voice mailbox, Myron wanted us to inform him promptly when he received a call so he could promptly not take it.

  “I’ll take the call,” Myron said weakly. And incredibly.

  “What fuck the fuck?” I said again loud enough for the whole office to hear. He was taking a fucking call? Did he have a brain tumor?

  Cue the Kellygian: “Again with the what fuck the fuck, again?”

  And he waved me back into his office. Being a keen observer of human and giraffe nature, Kelly fumed toward Murmechka, and he closed the door, and turned on the unspeakablephone so I could overhear.

  In his excitement, he fumbled for the receiver, which he dropped and scrambled to retrieve from underneath the desk. He bent over and reached down and when he rose up he banged his skinhead on the knife edge of the desk and yelped like a kitty cat.

  “You?” he surfaced, mewing.

  “You killing
yourself?” said his caller.

  “Not yet, thanks for asking.”

  “You seem to be in an agreeable mood this morning for a man who didn’t sleep a wink. Which is how I prefer my men.”

  My breath was taken away. I could have used some handy cannulae. She had a voice like the wind in the trees, first autumn day, but don’t trust me—in all the excitement, my head was pulsing like with the techno beat maintained by Eurotrash bands in clubs roped off to keep out the likes of me.

  “You’re tuned in to my sleep patterns?” Being at a loss for words was a relatively new experience for him, like helping a blind lady cross the street I hope may one day be for me.

  “How could you conceivably stop reading a book like mine?”

  “Wait, you’re Calypso O’Kelly? I thought he…”

  “Plus, your office lights were on all night.”

  “You were watching my windows?”

  “This is not material to our ongoing relationship, Myron. I will see you at Avenue for lunch at one o’clock. Don’t keep me waiting, time is of the essence. You didn’t have lunch or dinner yesterday. You must be famished.”

  She hung up. He probably was famished, and not only for food.

  You know what got to me? Not the ambiguity of the authorship or the identity of the caller. Not the fact that she knew he had been up all night or that Avenue was his hangout. Not that she instructed him to meet her. Not that she knew he had skipped lunch and dinner yesterday. It was that she said she and Myron already had a relationship. She was correct, not that I understood why at the time.

  “What are you doing for lunch?” he asked me.

  “I’m looking forward to my nice organic apple—”

  “Good, I’m not taking this meeting alone.”

  “Shouldn’t I stay here and read her book?”

  “That’s exactly what you shouldn’t do. I need you with me. Don’t tell anybody.”

  Don’t tell anybody he needed me with him?