Swill’s clientele all gave the impression they weren’t aware of anything but their own projects—novels, short stories, poetry, screen and TV treatments, or pilots for new sitcoms, written on spec. But they were aware, maddeningly and jealously, of success.
So when Ned and Saul walked in, Freida and b.w.—although they tried to make a leisurely job of leaving—made sure to vamoose. They could be ostracized. To be ostracized in Swill’s was a novel experience since (as stated) no one wanted to be thought to care what the other guy was doing. The novelty arose from the low-key fashion in which the ostracizing was carried out. You could hardly put your finger on it; indeed you couldn’t put your finger on it if you were not the object of it. There would be that ever so slight push or a back turning at the bar, that hard to be seen curl of the lip, that minutest raising of the eyebrow or flicker of the lid.
So Frieda and b.w. hopped it and Saul and Ned sat down.
Saul looked the room over and saw the same two men he’d seen in the park, now without the suits. The suits had been swapped for jeans and leather jackets. They were still carrying the books. While he was watching them, Ned came in.
Ned Isaly they recognized from both the photo in Michael’s Restaurant and the dust jacket. He was at a table in the window now back-lit by the blue and green top of the Chrysler Building. He was sitting with the fellow Karl thought he remembered from the park. There was also a tall dark-haired girl standing by the table, looking as grim as a process server, the one who’d been putting the coins into the jukebox, playing that ear-splitting song again and again.
“Look at him,” said Candy, nodding in the direction of a nearby table. “Fuckin’ everybody in here’s writing a goddamned book, it looks like.” This one was a man probably in his early thirties seated with several notebooks spread out across the table, writing in one.
“Novelist wannabe?” said Karl. He lifted his shot of whiskey, said, “Cheers.”
“Likewise,” said Candy, lifting his beer, watching the moisture condense on the glass.
Karl said, “I wonder what it’s like to write a book.”
Candy was quiet for a moment, thinking this over. “Well, look, it can’t be that hard if everybody in here’s doing it. I mean the ones that aren’t into art, you know, painting. Hard thing about writing a book is you’d have to think up something to write about. Enough it’d take up a whole book, couple hundred pages. That’s a pretty tall order.”
“Couple hundred? You must be joking. This”—he tapped Ned’s book—“is three hundred eighty-four pages. And Giverney’s must be over a hundred more. Nearly five hundred. That’s a hell of a lot of pages to fill.”
“Well, yeah, if you’re talkin’ novels. These are novels. Made-up fiction.”
“I know what fiction is, C. I’m talking nonfiction.”
“If it’s only facts you got to report, then that’d be a lot shorter. You wouldn’t have to put in all this description and the, you know, insights. Still, it’d be hard, looking up all that shit . . .” Candy took another pull at his beer. Then he leaned back, chair tilted, and watched the ceiling fans creaking circles.
“Even so, you’d still have to put in the small stuff,” Karl said.
“What small stuff?”
“Like the fly up there,” said Karl. “Two flies. You’d have to put them in.”
“You wouldn’t have to put the flies in.”
“Yes, you would. It’s how you describe something like this room so people would see it. They ain’t gonna see it if you don’t put in the flies. No way.” Karl grabbed the Giverney book, leafed through it, scanned a page, and read:“It was an old-fashioned pharmacy, the sort she might have gone to as a kid and had a strawberry shake or chocolate soda or cherry phosphate. Before drugstores, big, impersonal, crowded with goods. The different glasses that lined the shelves behind the counter—ribbed glasses for shakes and sodas—
“Or here:“The window was stuck; she could open it only a few inches. The air that entered was as warm as the air inside. It felt heavy, exhausted. She would have shut the window but thought, ‘Why bother?’ She thought, one enters and one leaves. Between these two events, nothing happens. Outside, in the still tree sat a bird, an ordinary wren or—”
Candy thought about these passages. “I don’t see any small stuff in it.”
Karl said, “Well, what about the bird in the tree? Or the ribbed glasses and so forth?”
In his annoyance and impatience, Candy pushed back his chair. It collided with one behind him. A woman in big horn-rimmed glasses looked over her shoulder.
“Hey! Watch it!”
Candy had to smile. People just didn’t know that a Watch it! to either of them could get you a choice site in a cemetery. Oh, well, when in Rome. He mumbled an apology, repositioned his chair. “All I’m saying is, who’d want to read about some dame going mano a mano with a fucking bird?”
“That’s not mano a mano, for Christ’s sake; that means a face-off, one-to-one’s what it means.”
“So, yeah.” Seeing his glass was empty, Candy lost interest in the bird. “You want another one?”
“Yeah.” Karl picked up Solace. While Candy was at the bar, Karl checked on Ned’s table, where the jukebox-playing, the “Cry”playing woman was sitting down. She had dark hair done in that crazy curly way that was popular. Or maybe that was just the way it came. Christ, but her hair was black; it shone black as licorice. She wore designer jeans and a white silk shirt and a lot of jewelry. He couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; he could only see her profile. Her hands were clasped on the table, fingers heavy with rings. He would recognize her now anywhere, just as he would Ned Isaly and the other guy. If one of them turned up off a tramp steamer in Port Said, he’d know him.
“That guy over there,” said Saul, “three tables back, the one staring at you—no, don’t look. Wait . . . now you can look; he’s reading.”
Jamie looked. “Yeah, he’s kind of cute.”
“He and his buddy over there at the bar were in the park a few hours ago, sitting on that bench under the maple.”
“So?”
Ned said, “I saw them, too. You”—he nodded at Saul—“were sitting across the walk from them.”
Jamie said it again. “So?” She dragged out the syllable to register impatience.
“For God’s sakes, Jamie, don’t you have any imagination?” asked Saul.
“No,” said this writer of sinister sci-fi, this hacker of violent mysteries and hot romances.
Saul said, “Go over and talk to them. Make up some excuse.”
“You go over; you’re the one who thinks they’re so weird.”
“I didn’t say weird. Out of place, maybe.”
Jamie said, “That’s only because you’ve never seen them in here before. And don’t trouble yourselves. I’ll get my own beer.” Her tone was testy as she rose.
Ned always tried to be at least half a gentleman. “I’ll get—”
Jamie waved him down and went to the bar.
Saul said, his eyes still on the familiar duo, several tables away, “The thing is, I don’t think they’re a couple. Do they look Chelsea to you?”
Ned shook his head. “No. That’s almost the last thing they look.”
Eyes not moving, Saul drank his beer. “What’s the first thing?”
“Mob,” said Ned, leafing through his pages.
“Oh, come on. Mob guys don’t frequent this place. Maybe they’re terrorists.” Saul frowned. “They could be terrorists.”
“Sure. A couple of Italian terrorists in black leather.”
“But they’re reading fucking books.”
“You don’t think any made guys can read?”
“How do you know they’re made?”
“I don’t. It was just something to say.”
“Like ‘mob.’ ”
“No, I meant that. ‘Made’ was something else to say.”
“Jamie’s walking by their table.”
“Good for her. Are they announcing the jihad on Swill’s?”
“Ha, very funny.”
Jamie appeared at the table again. “Here’s something you might find interesting about these two. The tall guy’s reading your book.” She smirked, for no discernible reason, at Ned, as if she’d won a bet.
Ned looked over at them, narrowed his eyes, but couldn’t see enough through the fretwork of Swillians who kept moving like sea grasses, back and forth, rising up from tables, sinking down into chairs. The cover of Solace was easy to make out since it was white, totally white except for the word in black and his name in smaller black letters. (Tom Kidd had said, “It’s crap, but what else would we expect from Mamie Fussel?”)
“Tell him,” said Saul, “to come over and Ned’ll sign it.”
“They’re looking this way,” said Jamie. “Maybe they’ve figured that out for themselves.”
“I don’t wanna be pushy,” said Karl.
“Christ’s sakes, K, that’s one of the reasons for coming in here with the book, to get him to sign, so we can talk to him.”
Candy got up, then Karl did. They shouldered their way through the crowded room, stopping at Ned’s table, which was in a nice window position. Beyond the window, it was raining. A Mayflower moving van was parked across the street, the two moving men unhappy with the rain.
“You’re Ned Isaly, aren’t you?” Karl opened the book to the inside back jacket and the small square picture of Ned that Ned still couldn’t remember ever having been taken.
Ned smiled. “That’s right. And you’re—”
“Larry Blank. Pleased to meet you. This is—”
“Uh, Paulie Givinchy.”
Karl glared at Candy, who went on to say, “Almost like this guy, Giverney?” He held up the book he was carrying. “Only, I can’t write worth a double damn.” Candy laughed.
They smiled. Jamie said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before. You live around here?” She pushed out the two empty chairs. “Come on, sit down.”
Karl and Candy sat. “We live over on Houston,” said Karl. This, actually, was the truth. The two had gone together and purchased an old warehouse in the Village and taken on an extra assignment or two to pay the extravagant sum needed for the remodeling. (Candy was fond of saying that Tony Giovanni and Fats Webber had died for that window treatment and that arrangement of Japanese screens.)
“How do you know?” said Ned.
“What? That we’re over on Houston?”
“No. That you can’t write.”
Surprised and, for some reason, pleased, Candy modestly waved away this suggestion. “Oh, please.”
“You don’t know unless you try.”
Karl and Candy looked at each other. “You’re sayin’ anyone tries can do it?”
“No. I’m just saying you don’t know whether or not you can.”
To get them off the subject of Candy’s potential as a writer, Karl went back to Solace. “This is a pretty sad story, you know? These two just don’t get the breaks, do they?”
“I guess not,” said Ned.
“Me,” said Candy. “I’m reading this. It’s a best-seller, right?” He held up the book, front out.
“The new Giverney book,” said Saul. “It’s a best-seller, all right; all of his books are.”
“It’s number three on the list. I saw it in Barnes and Noble,” said Candy. “And it’s only just been published. Now, that’s impressive. How many books’d you say are sold any given day? Thousands?”
“More like hundreds of thousands,” said Ned.
“To be three from the top. Makes me wonder what the first two are, all right.”
Saul said, “The Bible, Shakespeare. Giverney’s a little melodramatic for my tastes.”
“No kiddin’?” said Candy. Feeling slightly abashed, as if it were personal, he looked down at his book. “To me, it’s got a lot of suspense in it.”
Ned said, “He’s a much better writer than he gets credit for being.”
Already, Candy liked him. He moved his chair a little closer.
Saul laughed. “Come on, Ned.”
“He is. He’s been locked into the thriller genre—”
“Because he writes fucking thrillers, that’s why,” Saul said. He relit his cigar. Swill’s lax smoking policy favored just about everybody except those whose tastes leaned toward crystal meth.
“I’ve read the first half of this,” Ned said, nodding toward Don’t Go There. “It’s not a thriller.”
Candy’s forehead crinkled like a fan. “It ain’t? It’s this woman lost her memory, no, more her memory, it’s not telling her what it should. So nothing looks familiar to her, not even her house. I mean, it’s creepy stuff. That says thriller to me.”
Ned shook his head. “It’s something else. It’s way outside genre.”
Karl said, “You know him, Giverney?”
“I’ve talked to him a couple of times at publishing parties. But I wouldn’t say I know him.”
“Oh, well, look,” Candy opened the back flap to the biographical note. “He’s from Pittsburgh. It says so here.”
“So are you,” said Karl. Then, realizing his tone might be slightly accusatory, he smiled and added, “Some coincidence, I guess. So we thought maybe you guys might have known each other like in high school or something.”
“Nope. At least not as far as I remember. I suppose I could have run into him and not remembered.”
“Huh,” said Candy, not knowing how far he could take this. He looked at Karl, who nodded. Candy didn’t know why. “Man, when I think back . . .”
All the while Candy had been talking, Karl had watched Ned. He was searching out some reason the world would be better off without him. Arrogance? Isaly had plenty of reason to be, being a published writer who’d won prizes and all. But he didn’t seem to be arrogant.
Well, it was too early to tell, wasn’t it? Through the window, he watched as the movers dropped what looked like a valuable piece of furniture, a small, delicate table. He saw at least one leg snap off. Fuckheads. Karl disrespected anyone who couldn’t do his job 100 percent.
“What do you two do? What line of work are you in?”
Candy and Karl were so taken aback by the question that Candy almost slipped and told him. “Uh—”
Karl’s eye flicked to the movers across the street. “We’re in removals.” Candy smiled. Karl wished he wouldn’t. “You know, like so—” He nodded toward the window. “Sort of like them.”
Ned and Saul turned to look. Saul said, “Moving furniture.” He turned back. “Funny, but you don’t seem the type.”
Karl laughed. “There is one? A type that moves things around?”
Saul said, “Not exactly. Or maybe you have your own company.”
“We’re strictly independent,” said Candy. “We don’t work with nobody else. Then they can’t get in the way.”
“They also,” Karl said, eyes still on the moving van, “can’t drop stuff. They also can’t leave evidence—see that table leg?” (He caught himself.) “Lying all over the bloody street.”
Saul said after he’d sucked in on his cigar again, “Evidence. Interesting way of putting it.” He smiled.
Karl cut a look toward Saul. He wondered if maybe that asshole Mackenzie was interested in putting out a contract on this guy, too. Here was arrogance. Saul got right up Karl’s nose.
“So you pretty much work for yourselves?” Ned said.
“That’s it,” said Karl, who looked at the tablet under Ned’s arm. “You could say—though I don’t want to sound too arrogant”—he sent a quick look Saul’s way—“our job is kind of like yours.” He held up both hands, palms out, as if staving off potential criticism. “I mean because we work alone.”
“Yeah, we’ve had enough weird experiences to write a book. Right?” Candy shoved his fist into Karl’s shoulder.
Karl nodded. “It’s a thought.”
NINETEEN
Jimmy McKinney
sat at his desk in the Durban Agency eating a cheese sandwich (how anachronistic could a person be?) and wondering (for the gazillionth time) why he kept on working for Mort Durban, a man who was a complete prick, not to mention a bandit. Most of his writers didn’t earn back their advances half the time, and that meant they were in danger of having their publishers drop them; but Mort still went on insisting on big advances because it was such a coup to be able to get a quarter-million advance for a debut (God! but Jimmy hated that word!) novel from a writer who had never, until now, tested the publishing waters. The undertow took a number of them down, leaving Mort himself splashing in the shallows. Mort managed never to endanger himself.
What Jimmy had done before he married and had a kid was write poetry—good poetry, too, though there wasn’t much of it: one book he’d published ten years before; he hadn’t turned out enough good poems since then to make up another collection. He was still managing to place a poem here and there in the quarterlies, though.
But how many times had Lilith—“with her famous hair ”—( Jimmy couldn’t help it; lines of poetry—Frost, Robinson, Dickinson—were always popping into his mind, one to fit nearly every thought he had)—said, “We can’t live on air”?
“No,” Jimmy had said, “not if the air is being funneled in from Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman’s.”
That had earned him an abrasive look. Most things did, coming from Lilith (“not even Lilith, with her famous hair . . .” ).
He found the lines comforting. He always found poetry comforting. And prose, too, words, even. Jimmy supposed it was one of the reasons he’d taken this job—just to be around words.
As he ruminated on this, finishing up his sandwich, the outer door opened and Paul Giverney walked by Jimmy’s office, tossing him a wink and a salute.
Foul Matter Page 13