The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Twelve hundred and fifty cartoonists according to the phone numbers on my kitchen wall, Wendy said.

  Gabby loved this cool and casual peninsular city without any underground network of tunnels. And sitting with her artist in the Trieste, shopping at City Lights and just circulating through the heart of San Francisco, staying at her favourite downtown hotel, it made her want to make art more often.

  At last she asked Wendy how she was doing, After all, that’s why I’m in town. Life? Boyfriend or not? How’s Hick? You look gorge, by the way, your hair is insane, it’s iconic. And what is that you’re wearing, a blouse top and a man’s blazer over it, tight black denim pants, riding boots? All those accessories for your hair, wrist, ankles? You’re a self-made trend, you are San Francisco incarnate.

  No reason to make a big display of disagreeing with Gabby then having to tell the editor of her comic strip how far away in her mind she was from this meeting and that on a deep, totally nauseating level, she felt like absolute shit. The first sips of the espresso hit her sideways, the right half of her abdomen folded in on itself as involuntary clenching of her colon released a thankfully odourless gas bubble. She was still shaken from seeing Hick; his face was often grossly superimposed over Gabby’s. Making an effort to appear present was a task—she asked what brought Gabby to San Francisco this time, a family occasion or what?

  I’m here for you, you, Wendy, my god. No, I didn’t even tell my parents I’m in town. This is business, dear, okay? She stiffened up her posture. Where to start? Okay, first off, Wendy, I want to ask you a question, and no matter what, I need you to answer honestly. It’s just that sometimes your comic strip arrives late, the syndicate gets on me, or the panels are crooked and the newspapers complain to me, I know you always have a good excuse but—but after a while I start to wonder if maybe you’re maybe—distracted. I mean, you look distracted right now.

  I am.

  Because it’s important I know how committed you are to Strays.

  Is that the question?

  That’s the question.

  The answer is no, I don’t know, said Wendy and twitched her glasses up her nose.

  Gabby whistled a note through her lips and brushed away a figment that was not on her blazer.

  A funny thing, Wendy said without smiling, I was thinking about this exact question on the drive here. I was thinking how afraid I get about my fragment of a fragment—of time, I mean, on this planet, and if I don’t put my life to some good use then—then what?

  Obviously you’re young, Wendy, so you don’t realize this is an opportunity of a lifetime to have a syndicated strip.

  I do.

  Then what’s the problem.

  Not good enough.

  Commitment is the secret. It’s the key to freedom and to talent. Don’t confuse this with a prison sentence or a limiting of your horizons.

  No, it’s my talentless existence that’s limiting. I am the flake you just called me, I’m late, my crooked lines are a shame, I blame bad fingers, weird eyeballs, odd sense of humour, inconsistent, unfunny jokes. It’s so true. Everything you tell me is true. I’m not at the level of unpunishable mediocrity, I make a hack laugh. I came here all set in my head to quit. My friend Hick, he’s—

  Oh, don’t compare yourself to Hick. You should move out of that place. He’s a bad influence, he’s so outrageously talented. He’s preternatural. He’s from the mysterious deep where stars and galaxies are made. Some talent is so pure and whole it exists outside the realms of time. That’s Hick. He’s a fable. Your talent exists in the tumultuous now and you will be defined by the changes your genius undergoes.

  Right, okay, thanks, but—

  I’m serious. You’re great. Why do you think I snatched you up? You deserve this. Listen. Do you have plans for dinner tonight? Gabby tossed back the dregs of her espresso and excitedly chewed the grinds. Are you free?

  No, I mean, rice and … on the side with a fishsteak (she lied) and then I’ve got a comp to see Thee Hangnails and Biz Aziz live at The Farm, maybe I’ll go … I designed the poster.

  Heard of junk bonds? Gabby tried.

  Wendy hesitated only out of politeness before saying no.

  That’s okay, said Gabby. You know Frank Fleecen, right? No? Really no? Uh, tall, stony stare, toupée, rug, hairpiece, no? Rings no bell?

  What toupée are you talking about? Junk what? Who is this?

  Strange he made no impression on you. Well, Frank says he knows you. Works for this century-old investment bank based back in Manhattan called Hexen Diamond Mistral, but he practically runs the place from here in the Bay. Put it this way—he’s a businessman’s businessman. Face on the front page of the business section and financial magazine covers? I don’t suppose you read the papers you’re in, do you? Or any for that matter? Headlines?

  Wendy said that someone once told her if you read the entire Sunday New York Times front to back it’s the equivalent of a degree at Harvard. Is that true?

  You’re crazy, Wendy, up-a-tree crazy. I don’t know when to take you seriously. Frank Fleecen invited me to California. In fact you’re the first person I’ve told. No one at the syndicate even knows I left Manhattan. Can you believe it? I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a prank. Some of the guys at the syndicate, Farraway or Ivanov or … never know with those chauvinist jokers what’s funny and what’s real. A secretary of Frank’s secretaries called me to set this up. I flew out on the first flight, can you believe it? My chance to meet this Wall Street mogul operating out of my old neck of the—. And I’m the one slugging away in hard Manhattan? What if he’s eligible? Ooo, Gabby Scavalda don’t you dare, I said and slapped my own hand as if I would ever date someone just for their money … I’m telling myself: not another affair, not another affair … Then, get this, a Hexen chauffeur waiting at the airport took me straight to my hotel and even gave me a bump of cocaine. I can’t go to sleep. The whole night, livid with horniness, the bastard. Then yesterday morning, bright and early, we meet. And it’s all business. He gives me this amazing pitch. That’s it.

  Wendy dropped her espresso cup with a clatter, roll, and bang; having trouble following Gabby’s train of thought. He’s a what you say, a banker?

  You really don’t know Frank Fleecen? He was emphatic that he’s met you. Through Jonjay is what he told me.

  Jonjay knows everybody.

  Jonjay knows him or the other way around, could be through Jonjay’s gallery, I’m not sure. Regardless. He and Jonjay go way back, something Frank said maybe with animosity. I didn’t pry. Can’t you recall him? Tall man, fiercely stonelike gaze. Rug on top. A black rug? A ridiculous accessory, you can’t miss it. No? Strange. Yes, turns out there’s a wife. His high school sweetheart of all syrupy stories. Gabby asked her cartoonist if she was still seeing that one, Jonjay?

  Oh gosh, I never dated Jonjay.

  I thought last time we met you were crying about breaking up with him.

  No, I was bemoaning the fact we’d never dated.

  I must meet this one, he sounds like a real treat.

  So this Frank guy invited you all the way out here just to tell you he’s met me?

  Well, I am your editor, Wendy, not your sister. Don’t worry, you worked your Ashbubble charm on him somehow and now he’s obsessed with Strays. Says he loves your little homeless critters and their adventures in the vacant lot. Says it’s the theme of his entire career. Reads them in his local paper, laughs out loud, gets the whole concept. He wants to invest in them. He’s what you call a Moby-Dick, Wendy, a whale, a rainmaker with a billion-dollar Rolodex, a hustler at heart, plugged in to all sorts of businesses desperate for the exact boost you need. He lines you up with makers of toys, pretty boxes, candy, clothes, kazoos, slap your characters on all those sorts of things and would also almost certainly add something like a tenfold increase in your subscriptions overnight. Forget forty-two papers, how about four hundred and twenty-two? And no more community freebies—real national papers. You came here ready t
o give up? I’m asking you to give in. And make a go of this comic. Showtime.

  Excuse me for a second? I need to use the ladies’ room. Wendy left Gabby to sit alone at the table among the rest of the patrons and the hundreds of former patrons pictured on the walls while she took a moment to collect herself in front of a dirty mirror.

  What’s going on? Don’t freak out. Be professional. This is normal, this is a routine part of a job, she told her reflection dripping with water. Normally a coincidence like Hick’s serious advice coming right before an auspicious business meeting would please her, please anybody, but today when Hick told her she should commit more to her comic strip, she knew somehow he was mistaken and she should do something else. Love, not the truth, motivated him to say what he did. He gave her these encouragements from the vantage point of someone who believed he was perched at the crumbling cliff of an eternal abyss. She turned to the open toilet and coughed up her espresso.

  She went back and sat down again with wet hair feeling determined but not at all refreshed. If you think this is for the best for us then I trust you, Wendy said. But I could just as easy call it a day.

  You might need to finally get a bank account, my dear, Gabby said and playfully slapped her cartoonist’s shoulder bag on the pouch. She leaned in conspiratorially and whispered into Wendy’s ear, Would you believe me if I told you our banker Frank Fleecen is waiting for us down the block? He wants to buy dinner and seal the deal.

  4

  Café Niebaum-Coppola occupied a deluxe corner on the ground level of the landmark Columbus Tower, its oxidized copperplate cladding the eight floors. A dinner menu and of course a wine list, and just like the Trieste, all sorts of memorabilia on the walls, in this case devoted to behind-the-scenes of a decade of films by the owner, Francis Ford Coppola. A corner booth was cordoned off with a red velvet rope, permanently reserved for Coppola, not presently dining. All the other tables were occupied. There were two men seated alone, one in a brown corduroy blazer eating fettuccine, the other in pinstripes and an obvious toupée, talking into a plastic brick. He waved as he saw them come in. He said Bye for now and put aside the brick.

  Cute walkie-talkie, said Wendy. Didn’t know they came in beige.

  He told them a local company called Motorola had taken out a five-million-dollar line of credit with his bank to invent it. It’s the latest greatest prototype for a cellular phone. I carry mine everywhere. Works all over the Bay Area. It’s my prediction that one day we’re all going to be carrying these.

  Oh great, I can see it now, said Wendy gamely, a whole society of Ignatz mice carrying bricks around to crack some kat craniums.

  Frank, this is Wendy Ashbubble, our favourite cartoonist. Gabby took the canewood chair facing them and called for the wine list absent from their table.

  Yes, never mind my exciting new phone, please, have a seat, tell me about yourself, Frank said and eased himself into the chair next to Wendy.

  Never mind the department store suit and tie or the chunky wedding band. Don’t stare, Wendy kept saying to herself, don’t laugh, don’t look at it, tell yourself there’s nothing on his head but normal human hair, not that hypnotic, diabolical beetle-black rug. What were its follicles made of? Nylon? Might as well be a Beatles moptop from a Halloween costume he went and styled with handfuls of hair product and glued down. And don’t look at his eyes either, she told herself, because he was staring back at her intensely as if trying to drill through her with his gaze. The women, the waiter in his penguin suit, no matter who Frank stared at he was never first to break eye contact, and if she took a gulp of wine, the moment she looked back he was still trained on her as though his face was made of stone with all-seeing eyes, and he talked a mile a minute to keep you paying attention to him. He’s trying to bore through your brain and back out the other side of your skull, Wendy thought, he seeks to prey on your indivisible vulnerability. What made the man attractive and assertive also made him repugnant and tasteless—ambition; ambition crouched there on top of his head.

  I’m such a big fan, he told her. Dogs and cats living together. Rabbits and snakes. A raccoon single mother raising three on the wages of a barmaid. Vacant lot. You’re comic is so Californian.

  Shucks, thanks.

  Where are you from, here in the Bay?

  No, uh, actually outside Cleveland.

  At last something good’s come from the mistake on the lake, said Frank.

  What’s that? Oh yes, of course, ha ha, yes.

  Anybody who’s ever tried to draw kid gloves on a rodent or a cape on a muscleman has lived here. San Francisco is a cartoonist’s mecca, said Gabby as her finger sang around the rim of her wineglass.

  When did you learn to draw? Frank leaned in close.

  He looked genuinely curious, so she told him the story. Wendy said she’d drawn on her bassinet as a baby and by the time she was in the first grade she had started passing comics around behind Miss Reeve’s back to get popular, single-panel gag strips about the lives of a warren of gophers. Frank thought that sounded cute and appropriate considering she still drew rodents. She took a Rapidograph pen from her purse and started drawing on her menu the kind of Snoopy-lookalike gopher she used to draw in elementary school. Gophers lasted her up to the sixth grade, when she switched briefly to horses and princes. Then in the ninth grade, it dawned on her that if she drew pictures of what her friends wanted to see, they would pay her for them.

  Ah, business-minded, too? I love this, by the way, seeing you draw, amazing, he said. Go on. What kind of pictures did you friends buy from you?

  So began Wendy’s juvenile career in pornography. Oh yes you heard right. Thirteen, still a virgin, Wendy assured Frank and Gabby, she started to print her own naive concept of what went into a Tijuana bible. She stapled together little scandalous booklets of eight or more graphic Xeroxes brimming with clumsily drawn fantasies about what sex might be like, acted out by well-known cartoon characters. Tintin, Minnie, Yosemite Sam, Panacea, Cruella De Vil. She reduced the drawings to wallet-sized and sold close to a hundred in the span of a semester, plus she did a swift side business selling off originals. Wilma solo. Garfield and Odie in flagrante delicto. Fornicating X-Men. Spider-Man and Lois Lane entangled in a web of betrayal. Tarzan meets Wonder Woman and Vampirella for a ménage à trois. The Jetsons’ maid Rosie in a drossy Hanna-Barbera gangbang. Choquant, Wendy! Si lubrique, tellement lascif, et gross! in the words of her grade ten French teacher, a strict young blonde who wore leather skirts and strappy heels and confiscated a stack of Wendy’s porns.

  Frank was grinning. Gabby’s eyes dilated wider and wider. Wendy was drawing on napkins some examples from this era of her work. I’m keeping these, please, said Frank. I’ll pay handsomely.

  She drew on commission, indifferent as to the cast, so the perviest kids could tip her upfront to see their choices go at it. She learned to draw a lot of different characters this way in a short amount of time and it was a fair little business while it lasted, Wendy admitted. Until she got expelled. That’s when things went downhill, meaning delinquency, boys, and drugs. She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with her mother who meanwhile made an intermittent living as a stage manager for small, local theatre productions. Most of those paycheques went to cigarettes, observed the child Wendy, who never knew her father, a man her mother claimed had been a television actor in town for one night on a speaking engagement at a hydroelectric dam. It was her mom’s gig to organize the crew, strike the stage, hire the lighting technicians, and so on. Wendy liked this story well enough to tell it now. But she left out the important part about that actor being Ronald Reagan and instead mentioned a grandfather with a kosher butchershop.

  My father was a kosher butcher’s accountant, Frank told her with flirtatious pride. He admitted a lot of her origin story sounded familiar, except instead of comics, for Frank it was high-stakes poker and a ten-thousand-dollar win that got him expelled and sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. Best thing that ever happened to
him, for living in Pennsylvania focused Frank so that he was able to turn his teenage gambling problem into a mature and responsible career.

  When the food arrived, Frank ordered more wine. And as they ate, Frank tried to explain in lay terms what he did for a living. Wendy polished off the other half of the muffuletta her editor ordered but was too stuffed to contemplate, then sucked back a plate of linguine alle vongole all to herself. The table emptied a third bottle of the house Cabernet Sauvignon, and that did the trick. Opening up now to the situation in front of her thanks to it, the detailed visions of a grand future that sounded so definitive as Frank Fleecen described them, but purposefully vague in the overall, kept Wendy at a distance from the actual mechanics of how he would bring about their success, as if everything he said about his business was excitingly beyond their ability to grasp. Put it this way: Frank provided investment opportunities for middleclass entrepreneurs who wanted to go big.

  Sounds super, said Wendy.

  When Reagan gave that talk about the economy earlier this month, I remember his quote from the poet Carl Sandburg, said Frank. The Republic is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream. I guess I’m what you call an American dreamer.

  Me, too, said Wendy. Plus I love President Reagan.

  Me, too, said Frank and unconsciously clawed the table.

  Gabby pinched her shoulders up near her ears. Isn’t she the cat’s meow? she said.

  At this point, for no particular reason Wendy could see, Frank beckoned to the waiter and asked if the kitchen could provide him with one apple. Without a moment’s hesitation, the waiter, no doubt a consummate professional, saw to the request.