Elbowing the Seducer

by T. Gertler

  he flipped to the last page to see if there was any hope, any reason to read all nineteen pages.

  “It’s beautiful, Mom,” Jessica whispered, “but I don’t think my new religion allows earthly vanities.”

  Mrs. Prescott nodded sadly. “I suppose,” she said, “you’re right.” Then she knew what she had to do. She announced, “I will sell it when I get home and send the money to you and Jim.”

  Looking at the beautiful pearl ring, Mrs. Prescott remembered how happy she and the Doctor had been. It was only right that she sell the ring now. The happiness did not live in the ring, but in her memory. As long as she had that, she had everything. She had come to Lancaster to rescue her daughter, but she was leaving after rescuing herself.

  He packed “Earthly Vanities” into the stamped, addressed envelope accompanying it. Between the first and last pages there was nothing he could rescue with his black-ink fountain pen or a carving knife or a blowtorch. He had given more time than he owed to—he checked the envelope—Frank Driesch of Richmond, California. How old was Frank Driesch? Did he have acne or a beer belly? Did he teach botany or wash cars, and if he washed cars did he charge twice as much for a Caddy as for a Chevy? Was he a pederast or a cyclist? Did he breed chinchillas in his garage for fun and profit? Howard licked the envelope and, after speculating about a syphilitic Frank Driesch, made a note to get a moistener, a rotating china cylinder half submerged in a saucer of water, for sealing flaps.

  He hastened too through stories quivering with sensitivity on onionskin sheets and stories titled “Untitled” beginning “Downdeep backward from halfheart yearning in the green and golden almostautumn of nobody’s starlong youth where lionstrided Boy and blackeyed Girl befrill the crazydaisied meadow with moantossing yes yes rapture.” He was equally severe with poetry.

  How must this love of mine compete with tears,

  Completely in your presence I do wait

  To estimate the value of your fears,

  The loss of which I bid you contemplate…

  was as far as he got on a sonnet, and of the six-page single-spaced “Verdure and Ordure” he managed only

  It doesn’t

  Matter

  What you tell

  The New York

  Times when

  Caliban’s

  Becrapped and lost

  Beneath the furnace

  Of the smoking mouth

  That was the Camels

  Sign on

  Narrow Broad-

  Way. Synchronize

  Your watches. Here

  Comes Times

  Square.

  No Einstein theory…

  He slogged through critiques and book reviews, the quicksand of footnotes. Who cared about symbolism in Emerson’s poetry or about Jane and Rochester’s sex life? What about the question of whether or not Emerson’s poetry was poetry? What about Charlotte Brontë’s sex life, a portrait to be called “Lottie Panting”? For that matter, what about the sex life of the person writing about the sex lives of fictional characters? For that matter, since he’d dreamed up “Lottie Panting,” what about his own sex life?

  He wanted to read words that connected to something true. He wanted to be disarmed, he wanted to be aroused. He was listening for a voice that unmistakably, stubbornly insisted on itself, couldn’t be anything but itself, faithfulness as instinct or, if instinct failed, faithfulness as an act of courage.

  He was searching for something beloved. It wouldn’t arrive in a neat package. He expected bile and bowels, entrails of dismay, false clues, field days for maggots. He was prepared, eager even, to dirty his hands birthing it. The emergence wouldn’t be pretty. He admired his own cynicism. It never occurred to him that his search for this beloved, his belief in its existence, proved his idealism. He captioned himself “Facing Facts at Last.” Some nights he fell asleep on the new sofa in his office. He woke with a bruised coccyx and a rush of joy at the sight of daylight.

  —

  Among the submissions to Sam were several tolerable pieces, two derivative from Kerouac, one a fair Cheever likeness, a few decent poems by a Wallace Stevens clone, and a story about a French soldier in Saigon, which he’d seen mentioned somewhere else, in Malraux or the Times. He wrote an encouraging note to each of the authors, asking for more “of your best.”

  Next he went to the university bookstore and with his food money bought an issue of every literary review and journal it carried. That week he had a cream cheese sandwich on stale white bread for his nightly dinner. On Monday he propped an open Southern quarterly with surrealist undertones against a stack of other magazines and read about serpents laying eggs of despair while he ate. On Tuesday a California review dedicated its issue to Stephen and Ichabod Crane. By the weekend he wished he’d had enough money for a tomato. His budget, devised by Margery’s lawyer, Smiling Bob McGrath of McGrath & Feinstein, had no allowance for a toaster, which in the separation agreement would have been “hereinafter to be called ‘Toaster’ ”; and he’d already spent his “hereinafter to be called ‘Household Furnishings Allowance’ ” on his office. If the kids needed Buster Browns and Yankee Doodles, he’d forgo a tomato. But he choked on cream cheese at the thought of keeping Margery in coral lipstick and stockings.

  After reading the competition, he selected the few writers he liked and wrote to most of them in care of the magazines, inviting contributions to Rosemary. If the usual biographical statement accompanying a piece said the writer lived in New York City, Howard called Information for the number. The spy for literature fooled the operator. Where could he buy a decoder ring? He tugged off his wedding band and threw it out the office window before dialing.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, may I speak to Newman Sykes, please?”

  “I’m Newman Sykes.”

  “Well, hello. Mr. Sykes?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Howard Ritchie. I’m the editor of a new magazine, Rosemary? I saw the Continental Quarterly. Your story? Wonderful, your story. Flawless, brilliant.”

  “Thank you.”

  “…Like to see more of your work…meet…if you have time.”

  “Fine.”

  “…A story of yours in Rosemary.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Hope…not disturbing you.”

  “No, no. When should we meet?”

  “…Drink coffee?”

  “Coffee, beer, apricot nectar.”

  “We could have coffee.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s…coffee.”

  “Fine.”

  “Where?”

  “What’s convenient for you, Mr. Ritchie?”

  Nothing was convenient for him because he couldn’t afford anything, but he couldn’t have anyone come to the office, either. He’d been sleeping there for a week, and though his dirty socks and briefs and shaving kit were filed under H, for House, in his new oak filing cabinet (his new desk was a narrow slate-topped table with a single shallow drawer suitable for pencils and a dagger), he didn’t feel up to conducting the business of art in what was by default—and McGrath—his bedroom. He met Newman in a bar on Hudson Street and paid for their drinks with a five-dollar bill he’d borrowed from a Creative Typing I student, a cryptorchid premed who expected to be repaid and to get an A and was, for the second and third times in his life, disappointed.

  —

  Rosemary’s maiden issue sold the same modest number of copies as the Review always had. “Good work,” the chairman said on line in the faculty cafeteria one morning to Howard or the stewed plums.

  Howard had never seen the chairman standing. “Did you like the story about the collie puppy?” he asked.

  “Yes, excellent, very enjoyable.” Without casters, the chairman rolled over to the tapioca.

  There wasn’t any story about a collie puppy. Which explained the absence of controversy about Rosemary: no one had read it. Howard put a cup of fruit salad on his tray and snatched a maraschino
cherry from another cup. He pocketed several cellophane-wrapped servings of crackers though he wasn’t having soup. What would the chairman say about the story on orgasm, “Wrench House”?

  The next issue sold better, and the next. For the fourth one, Howard increased the printing. “You’ll have a ton of them left over,” the printer predicted over the phone. In the background machines gnashed their teeth. With the diplomacy of a man who can’t afford to pay in advance, Howard agreed while confirming the order. The issue, dedicated to Lennie and Sir David Bruce, was a runaway success, at least for a literary magazine, with all copies sold and bookstores requesting more. Newsstand suppliers in several big cities expressed interest. By then the chairman and others at the school had looked at Rosemary to see what the fuss was about, but by then it was too late. The magazine had done something unprecedented: it was showing a profit.

  —

  Felix said, “Money talks. Can’t argue with success. A better mousetrap. The buck stops at the bottom line. In cash we trust.” He was trying to cheer Howard up. “Can I have your pickle?”

  Howard pushed his plate toward Felix.

  “Hey, buddy pal, we’re celebrating here, remember?”

  Howard nodded.

  “Then act, like, happy.”

  “Margery filed for divorce. I got the notice today.”

  “Well, no big shock. Can I have your tomato?”

  “She’s divorcing me on grounds of adultery.”

  “So?”

  “Mine, not hers.”

  “Buddy, it’s a technicality. You can’t get divorced unless you say somebody cheated, and it’s nicer to say the guy did.”

  “I’m getting a raise.”

  “Great. There’s something we can celebrate.”

  “That means Margery gets more money.”

  “Spread the wealth.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Hey, hey, hey, negativo on displays of hostility there, prince.”

  “You could’ve kept your goddamn hands off her.”

  “C’mon, man, she practically raped me.”

  “You and Ferlinghetti.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “Sometimes I think up ways to get even with you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Set your bass on fire.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Beat you up.”

  “I can take you.”

  “I know. Hire a goon to break your fingers.”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “You can’t afford it.”

  “I told you, I’m getting a raise.”

  “I love you like a brother, How.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Hey, you’ll do better than Margie, you’ll see.”

  Oh the poor lost babies.

  —

  He moved into a one-bedroom apartment with his own name on the lease and the doorbell. He snowblinded it with Arctic White and Arctic White Enamel. On a rainy Sunday he sanded the floor twice, cleaned it up with Felix’s mother’s Hoover, and applied varnish. Humidity prevented the finish from drying within the four to six hours claimed on the can. His feet in old wool socks stuck to the floor. He walked to his shoes at the door with a mime’s exaggerated steps and slept at the office that night, for the last time. The next day he furnished the apartment with a sleeping bag and a dying philodendron he’d found outside his sublet door a month earlier. It was still dying.

  Margery divorced him, naming as co-respondent in her suit Miss Rosemary Smith. She must have thought that was hilarious. He had his lawyer, Tim Rudkin, a recent graduate of the university’s law school, correct the name to Mrs. Rosemary Smith. What made Margie think Rosemary was single? “After all, Marge,” he told her when he stopped by to see the kids, “we all know about some married women.” Paul said, “Hi, Howard,” and when Howard gently reminded the boy to call him Daddy, Paul answered, “See you, Howard,” and left the room. Howard wondered if smacking his kid on visiting day, one Sunday a month, would damage their future relationship. Ilene, chubby and damp, with a new, crooked smile, settled in his lap while Margery explained how the trauma of divorce had made the baby forget her toilet training. Howard said he hoped Margery hadn’t forgotten hers.

  Before the final decree Tim Rudkin was arrested at a draft-card burning in Foley Square and had to remove himself from Howard’s case to attend to his own. Howard signed whatever Smiling Bob McGrath gave him. The day the divorce became final he went to Sloane’s and bought a sale bed, the floor sample of a plain beech style from Sweden. The idea that several hundred strangers had sat, bounced, and lain on his bed comforted him; he wasn’t alone. He was sure they hadn’t dragged their shoes across the mattress on purpose.

  The seventh issue of Rosemary brought him notice from the Times, a paragraph in an article headed “Renaissance of the Small Presses.” He didn’t remember saying what the article had him saying. (“My commitment is to new writers.”) What he couldn’t leave uncorrected was his name, reported as Harold Ritchie. He wrote a letter to the paper on the importance of names generally and his own in particular. (“That how in Howard has stamped me as no har in Harold could do….”) The Times published it, and he had to take his office phone off the hook for a few days to get any work done.

  He began to hear from established writers seeking to publish stories that their editors at Esquire and the New Yorker and Harper’s and the Atlantic had rejected for being too far out or too shut in or too overtly sensual.

  “What’s ‘overtly sensual’?” one of these writers asked Howard in exasperation.

  “When you say fuck in a story.”

  He didn’t care if they said fuck in their stories, he didn’t care what they said as long as he liked the way they said it and they weren’t advocating murder or unkindness to little children. For that time and with the respectability of the university behind him, his attitude surpassed arrogance: it was revolutionary.

  He championed free speech for himself too. His remarks about other editors and various writers were broadcast uncensored from bars and the wine tables at literary gatherings.

  “Would you like to meet the author?” a public-relations presence tending toward the female asked him at a publication party.

  “No, but where’s the Chivas?”

  He made enemies, always a sign of ascendancy. A New Yorker editor lunching with an agent at the Algonquin referred to him as “a drunken boor tripping toward the sensationally obvious.” The characterization enraged another New Yorker editor, who heard about it at a dinner party where the agent’s husband’s agent repeated it after the salad. In a cab stalled in traffic on the ramp around Grand Central Station, the two editors, former lovers, had a screaming fight about Howard Ritchie’s integrity. The third passenger in the cab, a current lover of one or both of the editors, witnessed the fight and reenacted it from time to time, on request, during lulls in editorial meetings at the fashion magazine she supplied with breathless statements on the A-line in jet and plum. A month later three jolly paragraphs about Howard and Rosemary appeared in the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town.” To be written about in the Times was certification; to be written about in the New Yorker was apotheosis. The university awarded him an American Express card and one-third interest in a secretary.

  He went to Bloomingdale’s and bought two reproduction rod-back Windsor chairs and a plain beech table for his apartment. They weren’t on sale.

  “My commitment is to new writers,” he told the audience at a Connecticut liberal arts college where he delivered a lecture, “Brand X Literature,” for a fee that could have purchased half a leather sofa. He stayed overnight at a Holiday Inn with a bidet in the bathroom, all expenses paid, and flirted solemnly with senior faculty wives at a cocktail party in his honor. A student, a blond beefy boy who was driving to New York, gave him a ride home in a VW Beetle with shearling seatcovers and made several allusions to the Movement, which Howard in his post-flirtat
ion decline chose to ignore.

  The night after his return he killed a bottle of thirty-year-old brandy with Felix, then told him to get the hell out and stay out.

  “Whaddya mean, How?”

  “No more How. No more buddy pal.”

  They were on their feet, swaying. They might have been doing a courtship dance, if they’d been birds. The beech table was a well-designed solid between them. In the harsh light of the standard ceiling fixture Howard kept meaning to replace, Felix’s face greened. Why would a woman want a man like that?

  “Get out.” The thrill of fear as Felix passed him, close enough to touch, close enough to punch. The door closing quietly. Didn’t know Felix could be so quiet.

  The next morning, with a hangover and an intense stare—if he stared hard, his ears didn’t hurt—Howard limped into Creative Typing I in Room 390-B. His red-threaded eyes rested on each of his female students. He’d been celibate too long, not counting a hooker (a mistake: on learning he was an editor, she unreeled her life story in long sentences strung with ands and and sos), a woman he’d met in a bar with Felix, a divorced friend of divorced Margery he’d run into at a wall of hammers in a hardware store, and a PR woman at a publication party for a cheese book, who’d introduced herself as a hell of a lay and was. But these had been accidental, solitary couplings generated by liquor or sadness or boredom. He watched a thin girl with the requisite scapula-length straight shining hair parted in the middle. She was reading aloud her latest story drowning in menstrual symbolism. When she finished, she turned to him, her pendulous silver and turquoise earrings, also requisite, flashing, and he nodded thoughtfully. Nice tits.