Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  We went out of the ruined place, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light I saw no shadow of another parting from him.

  The Red Badge of Sibella

  Back at Hard Rain’s office, Myron’s email inbox and voice mail were overflowing. The Times. The Post. Publisher’s Weekly. Library Journal. Booklist. Shelf Awareness. NPR. Journalists seeking comment for an obit. All the influential blogs. But don’t be intimidated by Myron’s half-vast knowledge of the blogosphere, as he didn’t know what anybody was talking about. As Caprice reminded him, with Twitter and Facebook using up most of the oxygen, a lot of blogs were on life support, thereby uttering three or four things in a row whose import neatly eluded Myron, and thereby also keeping intact her thus far unbroken record of incomprehensibility as far as he was concerned.

  Myron was reeling. What I mean is, he was pouring himself shot after shot of Midleton’s, his chosen Irish whiskey purchased at two hundred bucks a bottle. He kept a case of the world-class stuff under his desk. Everybody at Hard Rain presumed his downbeat mood was all about Fontana.

  ✴✴✴

  While Myron and YGB huddled, I hastened to my crates to have a gander at the $600+K Gold-plated Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Unstreamedline Adventures of Calypso O’Kelly.

  I was not forty pages in before I felt the upswell of nausea—the book didn’t narrate such an upswell, the upswell was tickling my throat. I realized that Myron was going to throw six hundred thousand bucks into a litter box of a book. It was a criminally repetitive tale told by a blockhead of a narrator signifying nothing who found herself so very clever or clevah and who would give Nicky Narcissus a run for his money. Lover after lover. Luvah after luvah. Dinner after dinner. Dinnah after dinnah. Thrill killing after thrill killing. Ferrari after Ferrari. Silk sheets after silk sheets. Betrayal after betrayal. Villa after villa. Or viller after viller. Diamonds after diamonds. More betrayal after more betrayal. Incest after incest. Lafites after Lafites. Baccarat after baccarat. Yacht after yacht. Picasso after Picasso. Bon mots after—well, there were no bon mots that bonmottled me. Her singularest accomplishment? She gave decadence a bad name.

  If this was considered writing, I didn’t know what reading could be. And vice versa.

  I ran cold water over my head for ten minutes in the women’s room, and I concluded the manuscript was not, strictly speaking, worthless. That is, it wasn’t simply a worthless book, or a bad book, or a failed book. It was a fucking Tour de France of an un-book. It was a non-book. Maybe not you, Kelly, but Murmechka herself could see that.

  I’d wait for my opportunity to be alone with him to break the news. We could unwind this whole deal if I was half a sibyl, a sib or an yl.

  The retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, not resting.

  Wolf, it’s me, Sibella, here. The ICBMs have lit up the night sky, wherever we are. Wolf, what are we doing, why are we always at war, what do we know that is true, Wolf? Back to you, Wolf?

  ✴✴✴

  As for Figgy Fontana, hey now, wasn’t everybody jumping the gun? We had not received confirmation that the man’s corpus was cold. When Myron called the reclusive author’s home number, nobody picked up. Not a promising sign, though not a definitive one either, as Double F, in Myron’s recollection, had never once picked up the fucking phone—which was one thing he and Myron once had in common. He would have called the author’s office, but he said Figgy did not have a phone there. Reviewers and critics and scouts and event coordinators and bookstore owners and PR people were scrambling everywhere, Calling All Hemispheres, from California to Santiago, London to Milan, Paris to Frankfurt. And also Oh Canada and India and Australia, big buyers of Fig’s books. Myron’s social media girl, Caprice—just hold on a second. That’s what she called herself, a girl, so don’t get mad at Myron. Caprice noted that her world was blowing up. This, I take, would qualify as a significant development.

  What to do about the Fontana tour—in case the worst turned out to be true? As for jumping the gun, I call your attention to Exhibitionist A: the editor in chief. A little too enthusiastically as well as precipitously, YGB ventured a gruesome suggestion: that he and the publisher and the junior editor keep to the schedule, publicly read from the book, and celebrate FF’s lifetime achievements. Myron thought about it long and hard and gave the out-of-the-bandbox idea all the consideration it merited, let’s say thirty seconds, and determined: No way, too cheesy. For one thing, Myron might have suspected what designs YGB had up his sleeve: privileged access to and face time with me, because YGB had to know Myron wasn’t going with him on any tour, not even if it included a reading in the Playboy Mansion. In the meantime, the Fontana fears were boroughing like Staten Island down into Myron, right there in the chasm in his chest, where his heart once skipped an adolescent beat as he penned verse that did not do the job a teenager’s poetry intended—unlike Junior’s verse, which did the fucking trick to his unbemused Muse’s everlasting regret. After reciting his verse to some cheerleader or prom queen runner-up, did Myron manage to reach second base? He struck me as the kind of poor guy who got picked off on first.

  I cringed to imagine the journalese treatment that Fontana was destined to receive if he were indeed past tense. Figgy Fontana, prodigious cult writer cut down at fifty-five in the prime of his career. Prolific and trendy author the micro-bespectacled younger demographic had wrapped their spindly tattooed arms around and sucked into their sootily T-shirted or braless beau zooms. Our own company website was overtaxed with consoling lamentational commentary and it seemed to have gone down temporarily. Caprice herself was going to blow up, I feared. God bless America, land that I love.

  I must admit I did check Amazon, and I would ask everyone’s forgiveness for my callousness and insensitivity if it weren’t for the fact that that callousness slash insensitivity is my second calling. His books were bunched up in the top hundred in sales. What a boon for Myron’s conscientious company and unconscionable me. The snooty critics had long ago lined up to worship Fontana as a natural-born, untutored genius, and the lackademics were probably already dusting off their book proposals for the elbow-patched university presses that would ultimately sell six copies of their tomes to the professors’ immediate families and groupie grad students.

  Figgy Fontana. I could see it, how the scholars would package and distort him. They would say the man was a Pynchon for the common folks. A Salinger for all the little people, who by definition resided beyond the Hudson. A Stephen King for the Rush Limbshockandaugh addicts. A Hemingway for the white collared. A Rowling for the post-adolescent. A Bolaño for the Nortoamericanos. A Morrison for people who won’t read Morrison if their life depended on it. An F. Scott Fitzgerald for the non–polo pony set. A Roth for the uncircumcised.

  Double F.: Talking about Figgy Fontana. Yes, he had a formula he could rightly claim as uniquely his own: spousal battery cum the earth moved post-coital gasping for breath; crystal meth cum “Can I get a witness?” revival meeting; hideaway country stills cum squeal like a pig; UFO sightings cum Serpico-like backwoods law enforcement corruption; Irvingesque endlessly italicized wrestling in the muddy river cum apparitions of the paranormal; alligator stew cum prepubescent pageant competition; rich whoring daddies in Cadillacs cum impoverished saintly mommas on the county dole; legless Iraq vets cum high school Biology teachers and their extortionist honors student friends with benefits; white-shirted Mormon missionaries cum black-moustache foreclosure artist bankers; bounty hunters cum serial killers; marijuana farmers cum DEA agents and priests packing heat and crucifixes. All in all a heady brew, a strong concoction absolutely devoid of intentional humor. And I say as much admiringly.

  Too many writers these days go for the easy joke, or the self-distancing and paradoxically self-referentializing gesture. Like me, for instance, you are thinking. That’s about as far as they go, their raisin-debt. But you know, Just Kidding could serve for the subtitle or sell-line
of any number of big books. But in FF’s whole body of work there was not the slightest whiff of irony, nothing that smacked of “Come on, I’m merely writing a book after eating my dino kale and working out in the tony gym, don’t take me seriously or I will cry.” One thing I could say about the Figgy Fontana books was that he always meant it, every single chapter and hearse. If you didn’t like it, his attitude seemed to be, fuck off and have a nice life. Readers did like it, and they signed up in droves, bored by the desexualized, politically correct, high-concept stylizations that clutter up the publishing marketplace. No wonder no New York publisher would initially take a chance on him. For which Myron gave thanks multimillions of times, and Fig should have, too.

  ✴✴✴

  She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

  I missed my apple that day, and eating it would have spared me the encounter with bat shit at Avenue. When I returned, it was missing from my crates’ top, too. I was disheartened to see the core in the garbage can near Murmechka’s realm of the ridiculous. In her defense, we didn’t compost, however. Editors are always selling somebody out. Murm had boundless boundary issues.

  I heard that. Yes, I should talk.

  Breaking protocol here, with your permission, I would like to observe that Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (colluded a few grafs above) is essentially without qualification my fave novel. Everybody should go read it as soon as possible, and if you leave for a while to do that, I’ll bid you an Au Revoir Dogs (a great if brainless movie), and maybe things will work out with Fig and Calypso by the time of your return of the native. I saw something nasty in the woodshed. That is one of the finest non-non sequiturs ever decomposed. And my second-favorite novel is Fifth Business by Robertson Davies, the cranky Canuck with the ZZ Top slash Solzhenitsyn beard whose other novels were for me, way to go eh, more beside the point than a wine list at the White Castle, which I sometimes indefensibly feel about the Yukon Territories and denture-dependent ice hockey worshippers in general. But his Deptford Trilogy: go figure, sometimes a guy writes a book that takes off the top of your head and you don’t see the scythe coming, like some sorry character in a Washington Irving story and nobody reads him anymore or James Fennimore Cooper ever since Mark Twain has his way with him, but I digress.

  “Fontanists”: that was a term cleverly coined by cagey Caprice, and I kind of liked the label, but it proved to have the all the traction of ball bearings on a greased pie pan. The people spoke, or texted, and Fontaniacs instead proved to have the sticking power of Velcro, and the name brand Fontaniac and Fontanamania stuck instead. Don’t bring up this defeat with Caprice if you happen to belong to one of her seven book groups, none of which she ever invited me to join, which kind of hurt my feelings. Maybe she had heard of my reputation in my old book groups, all of which terminated me with extreme prejudice.

  That afternoon Myron did what any publisher worth his salt and even Myron Beam would do under the circumstances. He instructed Young Goodman Brown to order massive reprints of all Fontanas and have them shipped stat at whatever cost. That decision would preclude printing in China (he couldn’t afford six inert weeks being transported on a book boat cruise). Meanwhile, he settled into waiting for the big distributors to come begging with their Fontaniac hats in their hands. And what do you know? It didn’t take long before they did exactly that.

  Sibella Revisited

  USA Doh Day reported “reliable sources” to the effect that Fig had been suffering from some unnamed terminal cancer and committed suicide. There was supposedly a note left behind. This rumor naturally gave rise to speculation within Myron as to the implication of such a depressing deed. If you needed any more evidence to loathe the Hard Rain founder and publisher and president, let me peel this organically grown banana. As this rumor pertained to Fontana, Myron was pondering if suicide was a career-enhancing move or the opposite? Romantic, tragic gesture on the part of a tortured artist? That could be sold, of course. But was that good for business? Could be, definitely could be.

  But suicide? More he reflected, Myron wasn’t buying it. It was not long ago he had concluded negotiations with him on the new three-book deal. Myron would say that he hardly sounded self-destructive or despondent in his transactions with himself, but what did he know? Truth was, he had never met the man in the flesh. The banal author photo, taken by his son, which Myron couldn’t talk him out of using on the jackets, was responsible for his visual assumption. All of which was fine by him. As long as the books kept appearing on time and in more than decent-enough shape, he didn’t care. In fact, the freelance copyeditor said she regretted billing Myron because she added or corrected essentially nothing. Don’t agonize for her, as she always managed to get over her pangs of guilt and shoot over the padded invoice anyway.

  Most of Myron’s exchanges with FF took place via email, he said, a medium that evidently challenged the author, if the AWOL spell check and the glaring deficiency of standard syntax in his messages were any indication. Which kind of surprised me, the chosen one who had been typing and reading all his emails, or so I had assumed—therefore I seemed to have been wrong about Myron’s email tension deficit, too. But then there actually was, as Myron recalled, one strained and odd phone call.

  Figgy liked to brag in interviews that he had no formal schooling to speak of, that he was self-miseducated, and Myron believed him, because writers—especially wildly successful (thanks to Myron) writers like him—come in all sizes and packages. Of course, Myron didn’t get into the business in order to starfuckingly cultivate personal relationships with his authors. And thankfully, Figgy wasn’t inclined that way. He didn’t need Myron’s personal validation to write. This is what Myron termed a match made in publishing heaven. In fact, when it came to business arrangements with the Fontana camp, he said he usually dealt with his son and occasionally his wife, who both served in the shifting and interchangeable roles of manager and agent and in-house worrywart. (That constituted yet another shocker for yours coolly: Myron used the phone for Figgy.) His son struck Myron as an embittered-by-existence sort whose acerbic sensibility he regarded to be queasy and quasi-congenial. He liked that Figgy was fundamentally a hermit, living in the California hill country hours away from San Francisco, far from an airport, not to mention a highway, with no neighbors within miles—as his son informed the publisher in an unguarded moment. That’s why Myron was stunned when Figgy consented to do a book tour, which would have been a first for him. He had always considered that kind of thing to be bullshit. Whatever you could say about the author, he wasn’t stupid.

  This is what Fontana explained during one particular phone conversation with Myron, which I render with dubious confidence as to the infallibility of Myron’s self-serving memory: “Peoples kin buy my books, I don’t care if theys fuckin read thems, long as theys buy thems. Which is wheres you come in, Moron, if’n you does your job.” As you can determine, his sort of drawl played unflattering havoc with Myron’s first name. “And I don’t need to trot my fat ass out in public so’s peoples kin’ve the eye lusion they knows me or cares what the fuck I think about the prospects of world peas or the winner of the Stupid Bowl and who the fuck all I may or may not be.”

  When a man makes as much sense as that, who is a publisher to argue? All to say, what had changed his mind in the first place about the book tour and all the related nonsense? No idea. And while we’re off the subject, here’s another thing.

  I understand a writer’s persona and the real-life human being who created that persona don’t necessarily neatly overlap. There’s often a swaying rope drawbridge over a gorge between the two, much like on the campus of the college I attended and where I led my basketball team to loss after glorious loss, and the drop to the rushing waters below is a stone-cold killer. The sweet-tempered creator of sympathetic characters can be a dick and a sloppy drunk at the cocktail party, and the dominatrix in her bedroom ca
n send her royalties to Catholic homes for runaways and orphans. Yes, writers are as complicated and unpredictable and as mixed-up as—well, some publishers and editors I have known. What makes writers different, it seems, is that opposed to the rest of us who simply have different sides to our impersonalities, their whole job is to live inside the heads of characters they have created. I can imagine that it could be tough for some writers, listening to all those jabbering voices, not always knowing which one is your own and which one is of your creation.

  I had one other concern, trivial given the latest, but I was curious. When I thought about Figgy’s speech patterns and the raggedness of his emails, I was compelled to wonder how such a writer produced manuscripts finished and polished such that a copyeditor barely lifted a pencil, and yes, I know, they don’t use pencils anymore, buzz off. I feared that mystery seemed destined—along with his corpus delecti—for the grave.

  Bonfire of the Sibellas

  I stuck my smartly betoweled head inside Myron’s office door. I smirked and rolled my eyes, noxious practices I once exploited with coaches and summer camp directors and math instructors and parents to anything but my lasting advantage. Little children, don’t get started. It’s a slipp’ry slope on a graph straight out of Trigonometry for Losers. You might end up one day a lowly but tall junior editor making confrontational remarks to your boss like this:

  “Been reading, though that’s not the word, the Calypso Catastrophe?” I said. “How many shots of Irish have you had?” I pointed to the evidence of glasses on his desk blotter in case he had forgotten.

  “What are you wearing?”

  Now he was noticing my appearance? Now? But he was referring to the towel I stashed in my gym bag and had wrapped around my head, which was sopping from the cold water that cooled my brain after being overheated by that foe book.