The Cry of the Sloth
Page 3
Egan Phillips stood on the front porch looking out over the turgid water of Lake Michigan. A yellow cardigan caused him to stand out against the grayness of the day and to be noticed by a woman on a bicycle. She biked this way every day to take milk to an old woman, biked past this house. In fact, she had biked past it from time to time since she was a child, when she had also driven past it with her father on a tractor. He let her ride on the tractor when he thought her mother would not find out. This was a secret between them. She was surprised to see someone standing on the porch, since the house was scarcely better than a ruin. Something about the figure in the yellow cardigan, something dark, caused her to put out her feet, and sliding them on the gravel on the roadside, to come to a complete halt in front of the house, though safely on the opposite side of the road, for she did not know what the figure might portend. The man on the porch noticed how she stopped by sliding her feet on the gravel, and it reminded him of someone long ago. The wind was blowing yellow strands of blond hair across her face. Now this girl, silhouetted against the heaving breast of the tumid lake, hallooed in his direction.
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To All Tenants:
As specified in your contracts, rent is due on the first business day of each month. This means it is due in my office on that day. Being somewhere in the postal system does not count. Beginning August 1, a surcharge of two dollars ($2.00) will be added to the subsequent month’s rent for each day your rent is late.
The Management
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Dear Willy,
I count on my fingers, can it really have been eleven years? We promised to keep in touch, and yet … I suppose even in California you now and then get wind of our doings back here, things that people in your area would be interested in if they could get over certain regional myopias of their own. But of course you know that. I snap up your books the day they appear. Well, “snap up” is probably not the word, since they don’t exactly “appear” here; I have to order them from New York, which I do the moment I learn a new one is out, which is sometimes months later. And now and then I catch a review of one of them in some small periodical. I myself wrote a very positive little essay on your third novel for The Glass Stopper—an interesting little mag while it lasted. Unfortunately the guy who was putting it out killed himself before the issue containing my article could appear; he jumped off the roof of a parking garage in front of a bus. Otherwise I would have sent it on to you. In that essay I argued that Cadillac Waltz, Buttocks, and especially Elevator Ping-Pong Raga belong right up there with Simon Kershmeyer’s best stuff. I can probably dig up a carbon if you are interested. Each time I see a favorable mention of your work I experience a salience of warm pleasure at the spectacle of an old friend doing well, a pleasure mingled, I confess, with a small measure of personal satisfaction. And why should it not be? It was I after all who led our little group in those experiments which you especially have honed to such perfection. I like to think of myself as the spark that lit the conflagration. By the same token, I am thoroughly exasperated by the denigration of your last novel in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Saturday Review, etc., especially when I consider the deference those same people pay to that buffoon Marcus Quiller, from whom oddly enough I received a card just last week. I’m happy to report that he is as he was: smug, affable, and looking out for Number One.
But enough of that; I am not writing to shop old gossip. I have a friend in need, a very special kind of friend made all of words and paper. I allude, of course, to good old Soap. I can’t imagine you haven’t run across my magazine out there, though you might not have been aware of my intimate connection; I don’t blazon my name across the cover. We have a couple of outlets in your area, and one can usually pick up a copy at one of them, but just in case, I’m enclosing our last issue. I’m afraid it is a little difficult to read, since some of the pages were printed out of order. It might be easier to tear out the staples first. They also forgot the page numbers, but I have penciled those in for you. I am one of the founders of the journal (my ex-wife Jolie was the other), and I have been the sole editor for lo these seven years. No one who has seen any of the recent issues, among our strongest, could possibly surmise the painful truth—that the magazine is, if not on its deathbed, then staggering dangerously toward it. Unless it receives a transfusion of real money soon it will certainly expire. (But don’t worry, I’m not asking you for that sort of help). The demise of Soap would not be of great moment to anyone but me and a few hundred loyal subscribers and contributors except for the fact that there is absolutely nothing to take its place. Imagine: a region the size of France and not a single venue for first-class work by local writers. For seven years, beginning with our first issue of just three mimeographed pages, I have striven with Poundian fury to put work of that caliber in front of the public, and I’ve done this not simply without the support of our local so-called art leaders but in the face of their active opposition. (I say opposition rather than sabotage only because I have no material proof.) Without Soap’s voice—however shrill it may sound sometimes to some people—the entire region would be defined by the vulgar populism of works like Sokal’s Moon Light and Moon Dark, a depressing example if there ever was one of the sort of book esteemed here today. But of course, having grown up here, you know all about that. And yet we keep on going, you and I. And for me, besides the slow insect-like construction of my own works—I am currently laboring on an odd little something which I suppose we’ll have to call a novel—keeping on means keeping Soap afloat.
Racking my brains, I have come up with an idea for next April or May that I think will turn the trick, generate the needed funds, and at the same time land us on the map of public opinion. Soap is going to host a weekend of symposiums, lectures, workshops, and readings. The idea is to take real avant-garde literary works and under the slogan “Far Out is Fun” fling them like gauntlets in the face of an astonished public. In the same spirit, I am thinking of inviting street performers to come in during the breaks, and maybe also at mealtimes, or does that seem to you over the top? We don’t want anything that might drown out the discussions, which I anticipate will be lively and contentious, so maybe just fire-eaters, jugglers, and the like, and no musicians unless it’s some barely audible ones off in a corner, harpists and such. I’ve been working to come up with a name for the event. How does “The Words on Fire National Conference” strike you? Is that just too flat? And do you think “Festival” would be better than “Conference”? I go back and forth on that one. I want to suggest a celebratory spirit, but I don’t want it to sound like a big party. I’ve been talking this thing up locally for a couple of months now, and the response so far has been terrific. Unless I run things on into the wee hours, we are not going to have nearly enough room on the schedule for all the events people have suggested. There is just an amazing hunger out there for something like this. A big question still up in the air, though, is the name of the person who will give the Awards Lecture. That lecture, along with the subsequent banquet and formal dance, is going to be the biggest bang of the whole shebang. The downtown Grand Hotel has just refurbished the splendid old Hoover Ballroom, and I’m told a few of our local bands are quite good (I myself hardly ever listen to music). I’ve had lots of unsuitable suggestions for the speaker, and to those I’ve responded with only a noncommittal nod. That’s because I’ve had you in mind from the outset but have held the idea close to my chest in case you’re booked for that week. I can’t pay you in advance, but I can promise a reimbursement of expenses plus a modest honorarium after the event. Your presence will close the festival on an unmistakable note of defiance. Of course our local so-called movers and shakers would prefer a venerable warhorse like Norman Mailer or, even worse, a flash-in-the-pan mountebank like Quiller. I remember how you used to refer to the NYT’s best seller list as “the roster of shame” and how, encouraged by our shouts and laughter, you would climb up on a table in the cafeteria and read it aloud each Sunday, pronouncing the titles
with that drawling faux-Oxford accent of yours, which would break everybody up, you made all the books sound perfectly ridiculous. So I rather doubt you’ve read The Secret Life of Echoes, Quiller’s latest concoction. Considering the well-known literary penchants of the accused, you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s another farrago of soft porn and phony philosophical ruminations; they fuck and then they talk about the Meaning of History. He has Errol Flynn appear as a ghost to give advice on how to dress to the poor working-class slob who through good looks and brains has landed a job at Goldman Sachs. In the cubicle next to his dwells Neenah of the long legs, big boobs, and “moist pudendum” (his words). Need I say more? The armies are ranged for battle. Gird your loins, Willy, and join us in April.
My very best,
Andy Whittaker
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Dear Dahlberg,
I’ve spent the past day and a half on your MS. I wanted to read it all the way through before writing you, but I can’t go on. I really don’t know what to say except it’s not what I expected, which was something more in line with your earlier stuff. Reading this new material was like walking on a thick pile of soggy sheetrock. One thinks, after finishing one interminable sentence, with no verb or subject in the offing, and having finally reached the relative safety of a full stop, that one will just not have enough strength for the next sentence, not enough willpower to haul a clogged boot out of the sticky mess and heave it forward into yet more mess, until finally one really can’t, and doesn’t, at which point one lets the whole thing slide off one’s lap onto the floor.
What happened to the tough little guy who told those tough little stories about his life as a hardware store clerk? “Good Luck at Smart Value” got more favorable comments than just about anything we’ve published in years. I think I told you that. Sure, we had predictable penny-ante backbiting from the tiresome yahoos at The Art News. I would never have sent you the clipping if it had occurred to me that you would take it as anything but a grand joke. When these people like your stuff, Dahl, that’s when you better start worrying. Believe me, your description of the owner’s wife heaving those fifty-pound sacks of Quikrete into the bed of a pickup was flat-out amazing. I mean, that was real writing. You could just as well have been describing a reciprocating single-action piston pump with pulse damper or a smoothly ratcheting mechanical windlass, the writing was that cold and dead, and yet it was also feverish. It had the brutal honesty we usually associate with instruction manuals. That you are not exactly a polished writer worked in your favor; it’s how Hemingway might have written had he never gone to high school. I confess, I envied your raw energy, the authenticity of that voice, and I thought how fun it would be to write like that. I am reluctantly returning your MS.
Andy
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I am just now becoming aware that an odd thing has been happening. Ordinary objects—chairs, tables, trees, my own hands—seem to have become closer than they were. The colors are brighter, the edges sharper. This is a process that has been going on, that has been increasing, over the past several weeks without my quite noticing. And with it has come a tremendous new confidence. Maybe I am finally getting over Jolie’s leaving. Looking back, I can see that I have probably been in a real clinical depression. Only now, in retrospect, am I able to see clearly what a solitary time I have had of it, almost never going out to a restaurant, to the movies, anywhere in fact except for walks by myself in the park. I just opened cans at home. And the terrible thing is, after a month or two, I started eating directly out of them, out of the cans, standing in the kitchen and spooning it up and then leaving the cans on the counter. Now the ants have come, millions of them. That sort of behavior feeds on itself. And of course I was not good company, I was terrible company, I can see that now. So after a couple of feeble tries people naturally didn’t want to invite me over again, just to watch me sitting around under my cloud of gloom. The idea was, I guess, if I couldn’t entertain them, then to hell with me. I started having thoughts that I see now were practically paranoid delusions. I decided our so-called best friends, the Willinghams and the Pretzkys, had never liked me, that it was always only Jolie they wanted to invite and I was only there as some kind of unfortunate appendage, an exceedingly unattractive older relative she was forced to drag around with her. I wonder what they would say now if they could see the ants. On the other hand, how did I behave the few times the Pretzksys did invite me? I sat there moving the food around on my plate. I think I droned, I could hear myself droning, sitting at the end of the table going on and on, but I couldn’t stop it, stop myself, the words just pouring out, almost without inflection, in a dull stream. I remember on one occasion glancing up from my plate and seeing Karen dart a meaningful glance at John, who was staring at his own plate. Meaningful, and yet I could not understand what it meant. God, how I hated them both when I got home! Hated them for making me look like a bumbling fool, and worse, like a bore. Now I feel a new power to write, the sentences just pouring out. I feel the books in a stack inside me. I have only to open them up, open myself up, and read off the words.
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Dear Jolie,
One week despair spreads like mold, and the next week happiness glitters like a bright polish on all the little buttons (I mean the days). Do you remember, after Papa finally died and we got the buildings, how we thought we were set up for life? We were going to be like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, except in reverse—you were going to work the presses, while I was upstairs turning out the novels. Laughable, isn’t it? Or maybe it was Sartre and Simone. I look back at that now, at us then, at me and my fantasies and the stack of my aborted efforts, and I grimace.
I was, naturally, overjoyed to hear that “dear Marcus Quiller” was standing on your doorstep when you came home from class last Friday. After all these many years! And that he looked so youthful! I should have known when I let slip you had moved to Brooklyn that he’d hunt you up, or hunt you down, depending on how one looks at it, at him. He doesn’t miss a lick, young Marcus. I obviously do not look youthful. I look in the mirror, and I look ravaged, I look hateful. I spend most of my time at the most dreary, mind-deadening, soul-killing, gut-twisting activities you can imagine. But of course you can’t imagine, because it’s far worse than when you were here. But I’m not writing to complain. I am, in fact, doing quite well, despite everything. My projects are roaring apace. But I’m in a dry patch financially, and you are going to have to make out on your own until I can get things turned around. I have begun negotiations with the bank. I am feeling strong and confident.
Andy
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Dear Anita,
Yesterday I picked up from the sidewalk a small brown bird that had tumbled from its nest—wide clown mouth and stubby wings like tiny flippers. As I cupped it in my hand, I thought of the heedless cruelty of nature and the plight of all those driven untimely from the nest, who must strive against the pangs of loneliness even as they search for food. Like the little bird, I felt at that moment helpless and naked in the face of a world whose haphazardness is difficult to comprehend; and then, thoughts being what they are, uncontrollable and yet connected, I thought of you and of our two days in Rochester. Was it only two? No. It was an eternity, an instant, or both. As I wrote in a poem once: “How we do writhe to the tricks of time.” (Or maybe it was “in the clinch of time.” I forget.) With such thoughts in mind, I have rushed home to pen this letter.
Seated at my desk I gaze out the window to where a mighty elm once stood that stands no more. It was but yesterday, as the saying goes. Like us, like our “affair,” it was sawed off at the knees. I stare out, pensive, and let the reel of time unspool, while I relive in memory frame by frame our two days of passion in that rumpled nest of damp sheets and pillows. Two fabulous days … and then? And then I went back to mine, and you to yours. But why?
I wonder, Anita, whether like me you sometimes ask yourself that. Was it really just a feeling of obligation toward those others to whom we had once mad
e a careless promise? I know we wanted to believe it was that. I remember how, waiting at the airport for the departure of our separate planes, we spoke of “poor Jolie” and “poor Rick” and we felt self-sacrificing and noble and sorry for ourselves. Our lips touched for the last time, momentarily and roughly, for we were standing in the boarding gate and people were shoving and pushing to get past. Crossing the tarmac to my plane I glanced back and saw a row of faces looking out from the terminal, noses and lips grotesquely flattened against the glass. Which one was yours? I didn’t know, so I blew kisses to them all.
How different it all looks in retrospect. Now I see not much nobility and a good deal of cowardice. We turned aside from a torrent that, had we launched our frail craft upon it, might have carried us who knows where—into a whirlpool perhaps, or, equally perhaps, to a small island with a coconut tree! We chose instead to continue paddling in the quiet pools of domesticity, though we knew in our hearts that those pools were already congealing to stagnant fens! I discovered that soon enough in the crudest and most painful manner, and I have just received news through Stephanie M. that you fared no better. We thought of them, but did they ever think of us? If it is any comfort to you, let me say that I have always considered Rick to be a perfect asshole, as does everyone else who knows him.
Anita, so much water has passed under so many bridges that I fear we’ve let happiness slip from our grasp. Eight turbulent years, and the image of you in my mind is as untarnished as if minted yesterday. I can still see you as you were on our last night together, seated on the edge of the bed in that dingy cement-block motel on the outskirts of Rochester. A huge neon sign flashing just outside the window is casting the room in alternating tints of garish green and red. Your head is lowered, your breasts bare, your damp hair falls in a dark curtain across your face. In the changing half-light you are looking down at a large menu lying open on your knees. Now the camera zooms out, and I am in the picture as well. I am leaning against a dresser, my elbow resting on a stack of empty pizza boxes. I am wearing just my trousers, a pair of charcoal J.C. Penney slacks, without shirt or socks. The carpet at my feet is littered with cast-off clothes and Budweiser cans. It is, as they say, the end of an affair. We are trying to decide whether to order meatballs or pepperoni. Concealed from your gaze by that curtain of hair, I am staring intently at you, attempting to fix this image in my mind, while you prattle on about toppings. I succeeded only too well, it seems, for the image is still there today, indelible and tormenting: salient against the dark of your summer tan, your breasts are turning green and red, semaphores flashing in the dark night of memory.