He stole a glance at the invoice. Jesus! Returning to his desk, he scribbled “employee uniform” and dropped it in his tax drawer. Why not? He wrote off her bedroom, even though she slept in his.
“What if somebody drops in? What would your wife say?”
“What she’s saying now, probably, is ‘Ooh, Raoul, do it some more!’”
That was his fantasy. Tippi was lying on the beach by herself, reading Margaret Drabble and regretting that her husband wrote schlock. If she tried to wear a swimsuit like this, some merciful person might throw a blanket over her.
“I’ll try it on, okay, and think about it?”
“Suit yourself.”
She was one of the few persons amused by his puns, and the only person who called him “shithead” affectionately. She ambled off, twirling her gift by the strings. She even stood up straight: he had miraculously cured her stoop. Was his recent lust for girls taller than he a quest for a mommy to his second childhood?
He returned to the bar for his fanzine, but he made himself feel virtuous by getting a second coffee instead of a fourth beer. The book fell open to a piece called The Providence of Hal Kane’s Horrors. He winced. The author, one W.B. Ford, apparently meant provenance. Left out on the coffee table, the fanzine would impress no one but his fans, and they never made it through the front door. Beckford shimmered into focus as a brainy adolescent who relaxed from the labor of publishing fanzines and assembling plastic Frankensteins by jerking off. Hal could even hear his voice, since so many young men today sounded like their chattiest early role-model, Kermit the Frog. Julian talked like that.
Of course he had no need to be told who had influenced his work: Jack London and John D. MacDonald, guys who knew how to spin a yarn. But it was Ira Levin who had made him a horror writer. Flipping through Rosemary’s Baby at The Newark Evening News office on a slow day, he had told himself, “I can write better shit than this.”
He was shocked into re-reading the last few paragraphs with full attention. Politely calling it hommage, the author accused him of ripping off “The Dunwich Horror” for his fourth novel, Sunless Midnight. The way he summarized the plots, Lovecraft’s seemed painfully close to his own.
W.B. Ford went on to quote a passage: “ ... monstrous oak trees whose foully bloated boles sucked noisome nourishment from the unhallowed earth of the graveyard.” He remembered enough Lovecraft to know that was typical: an inverted libido sucking nourishment from phallic symbols. More adjectives, Howie!
His laughter stuttered to a halt when he read the source of the quote: Sunless Midnight, p. 426. What the hell were they trying to pull? He was incapable of writing such drivel. Anyone who owned the book could turn to the page cited and see that it was a lie. The fanzine had to be a practical joke. Tippi was the obvious suspect, but why would she bother printing a magazine to drive him nuts when she could do it with a lifted eyebrow?
Itching to nail them down with chapter and verse, he spun his chair to the shelf of fat volumes behind him. Their gaudy, mutant offspring, comic books and videos and audiotapes, held carnival along a lower shelf. The U.K. paperback of Sunless, with a naked bird flaunting her non-Priestly bum as she knelt to a Pan-faced priest, came most easily to hand. He riffled quickly toward the climactic cemetery scene he had crafted: “monstrous ... bloated ... noisome....”
The joke was not Beckford’s, then. Some Brit copy editor who despised Yanks had torpedoed him. W.B. Ford had based his piece on this spurious edition, this goddamn libel. He shot the paperback across the room, its pages twitting him with a riffle of applause before it slapped a portrait of Poe, Tippi’s sardonic gift.
He pulled down the first American edition of the novel and flipped to page 426, where he found the passage in all its purpureal putrescence.
This was Rod Serling’s cue to stroll from a corner and rap his lockjawed spiel about Hal Kane, middle-aged novelist, who has learned that his book is a best-seller in.... Nonsense. Perhaps he had flavored the boiling pot with a pinch of Lovecraft. He had finished this novel in frantic haste to meet a deadline, not even re-reading the last chapters before shooting them to his agent.
Maybe he really was expecting Rod: a shadow passing through the dazzle from the pool set his nerves a-jangle. It was only Stephanie, but only was blasphemy against her youth and beauty in that phantom swimsuit as she padded past the glass doors without deigning to glance his way. Her ass, shifting and sliding in a “T” of floss, branded with the white patch of her conventional bikini, stirred a painful mixture of desire and regret.
His fame was fucking her, not he. She was gathering anecdotes to spice her dormitory chatter, she would use her inside dope for a thesis to be called, Pop Goes the Culture: Sex Techniques of an Aging Hack. Maybe she would become the next Joyce Carol Oates, haunted by the secret that she had been sleep-in secretary to the preposterous Hal Kane. “What in God’s name did she ever see in him?” her admirer, an ancient Tippi, would wheeze when The New York Review of Books broke the scandal.
He thought of getting another beer on his way to join her, then thought better of it. He would buy that bike today. The improvement would hardly show before Stephanie left in six weeks, but he could drop in on her at mid-term.... No. She wouldn’t want to know him in her own element. Her presumptive boyfriend would put him down in Kermitic. Her English professor, Dr. Ahab, would lure him to the surface with his non-Aristotelian barnacles and syntactical seaweed and the rusted lances of his clichés streaming money, and smite him with harpoons of sarcasm. The summer was all they had.
Another shadow startled him, this one flickering across her bare back as she lay broiling her oiled hide. He thought it was the shadow of a leaf from one of the bloated oaks that sucked their noisome nourishment from the unhallowed chlorine of the pool, but she sprang up and swatted at it with a look of loathing.
“Just a leaf,” he said as he came up to stand beside her.
“Leaves aren’t ... slimy.”
“You’d be slimy, too, if you’d been lying out here since last fall.”
He searched for the offending leaf, but not very hard. She had forgotten undoing the clasp of the vestigial bra that now lay at her feet like a pair of red leaves, and her nipples stared at him like those rosebuds ye must gather while ye may.
* * * *
Sitting on the toilet at three in the morning, paying for all the beer he had witlessly hosed at his innards, stirred dark thoughts. Without his reading glasses, Hal contemplated the bookshelf like a wistful chimp. He usually improved each shining hour of his lately expanded toilet time by catching up on the competition, the dread Koontzenkinger Kids. All over the world, this was where his own books found their level. He should pace his novels to the needs of the average reader and persuade Wittol & Ingle to promote him as Hal “Chapter-a-Dump” Kane.
But could those vermin actually weasel out of their contract and reject his novel? And recoup his advance from royalties owed him? Perry said they could, but he was the moron who had negotiated the contract. How much had they paid him off?
These were the thoughts he avoided, as a leper might avoid his silvery spots, but he couldn’t escape them when he was stuck with nothing to drink and no way to read. He had no religion, but he cringed before the visitation of a very real God: Pan, bringer of panic, old goat-face on the British paperback, who thrust a cold spear in his heart to match the hot iron already up his ass. He clenched his fists and whimpered.
Wittol & Ingle wasn’t the only publisher in the world, nor was Perry Larkin the only agent, far from it. Useless parasites, anyway, where had Perry been when he was unknown, when writing had been like gibbering in a mirror? In the future he would get a bloodthirsty lawyer to handle his contracts.
His ordeal was finished, Pan banished. Get a lawyer, first thing. And a bicycle. He might as well buy a carton of Camels while he was improving himself, for he seemed to have snuffed out his talent with his last cigarette.
Slipping into his robe, he glanced with pretended indifference at
the toilet he’d just flushed. No blood. But what was that? Imperfectly digested spinach, a blackish-green lump, but he’d eaten no spinach lately. He had only glimpsed it, but it had seemed to move counter to the vortex. A fragment of a forgotten dream threatened to stir, but it lay still.
He failed to elude the mirror and instantly disguised the shock of baggy eyes and pulpous jowls with a gargoyle’s grimace. The real me! He would use that face on his next book jacket. If he ever got one.
In his study he recovered Beckford’s envelope from the wastebasket. The corner with the logo, torn off when he’d opened it, was nowhere to be found. He’d hoped it might jog his memory of the dream.
He put Vivaldi on the stereo, nothing like a bit of frenetic tooting and fiddling to chase the shadows, and settled in his lordly chair with his fanzine. Like a centerfold, praise was best savored in private.
He began reading in the middle of an interview: “I always thought of my father as one of those kings in a fairy tale, who have no duties beyond giving their children a hard time.” Oh, bullshit! He never said that. “He would raise hell if we made any noise while he was working. All we had to do was talk, and he’d come storming out of his room, roaring at Mom to shut us up.” What the hell was this? “Whenever he left the house, I could feel a knot untying in my stomach.”
By now he knew what it was, and he verified this by turning to the first page. It was an interview with his son, Julian: The Mark of Kane. “Maybe I could understand him being so touchy if he was Shakespeare,” Julian raved on, “but then I discovered what garbage he wrote, sex and violence and really evil superstitions. Every time I hear about some woman exorcising her baby with a blowtorch, I can’t help but think Dad is to blame.”
It sounded as if young Julian, between sniffing chickens and squeezing avocados, or whatever it was a market researcher did, had gotten himself born again. He was so ill-informed about his father’s work that he confused him with Richard Priest. One of Rick’s novels had popularly been blamed for that blowtorch-exorcism.
If he had spent more time talking to his son, maybe he would have grown up to understand him, but there had been no time. One day Julian was a baby sleeping in the bureau drawer, because they couldn’t afford a crib. Four published novels and a couple of spent fortunes later he looked for the baby in the bureau and found a sullen teen eying him mistrustfully. Buy him a Porsche, send him to college, send him a check: had it been too much to ask for all that, a little quiet when he tried to write? How sharper than a Kermit’s tooth!
He opened the fanzine again, to an interview with Justine, The Mark of Kane II. His baby girl would not let him down. He had never seen Julian reading anything more demanding than The Incredible Hulk, but Justine was his biggest fan.
His darling said: “I could never bring any girlfriends home, because Daddy would put the moves on them.”
The magazine sliced edgewise across the room to derail a Pacific 4-6-2, which hurtled from its shelf into the gorge behind the Wurlitzer. A piece of it broke free and wobbled away into the shadows. Beckford would pay for that locomotive, too.
Having switched on his Mac to look up the quote from King Lear, he stared uncomprehendingly at his QUOTES file: “Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter”—Is. 8:19. Where the hell had that come from? He often pillaged the Bible for verses that might be used to dress up a novel, but this one was unfamiliar. According to the date, he’d entered it yesterday. A drunk’s home was a bottomless bag of surprises: where did I get that bruise, what happened to that twenty in my wallet, have you seen my wife and kids?
He left the island of light around his chair to find the fanzine, but his steps began to slow in the dark end of the study. He went to the bar and snapped on the overhead tubes. Jesus, that was worse, they clogged the room with the flat lighting of TV sitcoms. The Beefeater’s he splashed over ice filled his stomach with a similarly pitiless fluorescence.
The book he retrieved from behind the jukebox was real, ninety-two pages of heavy stock between glossy covers. The picture on the front was his own, not his recent grimace in the bathroom mirror, so it seemed unlikely that he was hallucinating. But nobody, not even a teenage horror fan, could be stupid enough to suppose that these appalling revelations would please him. Why did Bill Beckford hate him? Maybe he was jealous. Take it, Bill, see how it feels. You tell the vampires and thieves that you used to be, and will be again, a Big Name.
The details of the weighty locomotive he had derailed, headlight and bell and cowcatcher, were intact, it still had all its wheels. He could swear he saw something fly loose. He set it back on its display-stand and studied it, sipping. He could no longer remember the name of the rich kid who’d owned an engine like this. The rich kid had invited eight-year-old Hal over to see his trains, but that was all he had let him do.
“Rosebud,” he giggled, and he was shocked when his eyes stung.
The supernumerary piece had disappeared under the drapes, and he batted at them with Hommy-Beg to reveal the strip of floor beneath. It had probably been a piece of metal thrown by the impact, but it had seemed to move furtively. He stopped swatting the drapes, disturbed by the snaky shifting of their shadow along the floor. A mouse had been at the throttle, that was all.
He freshened his drink before returning to his chair, where he meant to make a systematic study of the book before trying the phone number on its masthead. The itching of his bare feet distracted him. It could be a mosquito, but he suspected that the elusive piece of locomotive, suggesting the scuttling thing in his dream, had given him a phantom itch.
This was typical of Fred B. Bock, who pretended to like his work: “Kane’s stream-of-consciousness seems to take us inside the hearts of his characters until one realizes that all their interior monologues include the same bad jokes and catch-phrases, the same lines from pop songs and old movies.” He cited an appalling list of repetitions—including, painfully, “Rosebud”—that went on for two pages.
“What Kane is actually revealing to us,” Bock wrote, “is the secret heart of a genius who hears the multitudinous babble of America and, with subtle selectivity, plays it back. When we read Hal Kane, we are indeed reading Hal Kane. More than a mere chronicler, he is a living repository of our culture’s detritus.”
This was praise? The arrogant snot was saying he could create no characters but himself. He was calling him a human garbage can. Pan capered from the darkness, chanting, They’re onto you! You don’t know shit! They’ve found it out! That apparition was like a boring old friend, easily ignored.
He snapped to the next page and snorted with approval at the picture of a nude girl. Kelly. The caption smirked: Hal’s secretary. So she had been, five years ago. He had found her in a local diner and been charmed by the irony of a waitress too engrossed in a book to notice that its author waited for service.
He had known she would not be the best secretary, but how much brains do you need to pick up the mail and take telephone messages? More than Kelly. If Tippi hadn’t given him an unremitting barrage of shit about her, and if Kelly had been less adept at oral sex, he would have fired her when she dumped three chapters of Laughter When We’re Dead from the computer. He wrote the chapters over again, but the book bombed.
Studying her image, remembering her tastes and textures, he felt nothing worse than fond exasperation. She had tried to save part of her salary to get a new tattoo, but her budget had been undermined by her innumeracy. He had finally bought it for her, amazed to learn how much it cost nowadays to look cheap.
He studied that butterfly on her ankle. It looked different. People could have tattoos changed. Like hell, they could: not in a picture that he himself had taken with the old Speed Graphic that lounged in a corner on its lopsided tripod and fixed him with a louche stare. Beckford was apparently as crazy as he was malicious. He had changed the tattoo in the picture to resemble his logo. Hal could still make no sense of the symbol, but its dim evocation of his drea
m made him resume scratching his ankle. He put an angry stop to that.
Had he carelessly enclosed this picture with the batch he sent Beckford? No. He had kept no prints for Tippi to snoop out. Beckford must have tracked Kelly down and persuaded her to part with one. His diligence was scary.
In the accompanying article under his own byline, Beckford at last dropped his pretense of admiration. The piece described Hal’s visit to a convention in New Orleans.
“Not even the charms of the ancient city nor the importunings of admirers could tempt the Great Man from single-minded devotion to his Muse,” Beckford wrote. “After caucusing with cronies, he disappeared into his suite with his secretary, Ms. Kelly Pickering, and remained closeted with her until he checked out three days later, looking drained and limp from long sessions with his lap-top processor. Guests in the adjoining room testify to the ardor of his amiable amanuensis, frequently overheard urging him to write ‘faster, Hal, faster!’
“When your correspondent tapped at his door, the Polidori of our age burst forth in high dudgeon, but little else, and suggested that he seek ophidian companionship.”
His Mac had never heard of Polidori, but it told him that ophidian referred to snakes, and that brought back the moment. He had been ready to deck the intolerably persistent tap-tap-tapper, readier still when he saw that it was the creep who had clung like cancer since the convention started.
“Go back under your rock and find another snake to fuck!” he’d screamed before slamming the door.
That was Bill Beckford? He might have been Charles Manson’s grandfather, a sickly old man with the propane stare of a maniac. In the heat of New Orleans, he had worn a black topcoat hanging impresario-style from his shoulders, its frayed hem tickling shoes whose heels he had walked off. But there had been never a bead of sweat on the skull where he had reverently laid out three silver hairs.
Not even his snaky appearance returned as vividly as his smell. Maybe he’d spilled sour milk on his coat, maybe he’d shit his mildewed pants, maybe he’d spent the night in a dumpster, and maybe you could overlook one of those misfortunes in an aged pauper whose rancid breath suggested illness; but you could never forgive all of them, not if he gripped your elbow in a bony claw the minute you checked into the hotel and kept popping up everywhere you turned. Hal had failed to place the forgettable name when Beckford wrote to propose the fanzine, but now he placed the unforgettable stink.
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