"That
was commonly believed to be a function of great literature: antidote to
suffering through depiction of our common fate."
- Philip Roth
1
I
am a whore and a pimp. This may seem preposterous to you, but I assure
you, though self-knowledge has not always been my strong suit, here I
am neither exaggerating for shock value nor confessing for pity.
I
came from good schools with a lot riding on me, the aspirations of my
own ambition, duly inflated by well-intentioned professors and administrators,
the hopes and dreams of my hard-working but underachieving parents, the
burnout of my older brother, who was both smarter and more industrious.
These are onerous pressures, each, and collectively, quite oppressive.
I was promise and capacity. I was Golden Boy. It was assumed I would make
it, in the vague sense that expression is intended, but mostly this: procure
a big bundle of money while doing meritorious things.
Oh, I started out
with high hopes. With my degree in English Lit tucked, metaphorically,
under my arm (my area of specialty was 20th century British Literature)
I headed to New York City-where else?-with the aim to get a job in publishing,
figuring, naively, on walking into an assistant editorship at Knopf or
Henry Holt or Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Figuring, I guess, they were hungry
for a bright young man who had digested a lot of writing and practically
passed metaphors and similes with his flatulence. You've guessed by my
tone by now that the doors were not exactly swinging open for me. Oh,
everyone was nice enough-egad those publishing houses are filled with
beautiful young 24 year old women fresh from college, firm jawed, severe,
the kind of women who look you right in the eye until you look away no
matter how unchallenging your last remark was-and I even had a few promising
interviews. I actually met Roger Giroux-he must be 104--though it was
in the corridor of the building where FS&G resides and our conversation
was brief, chatty, meaningless. He was, at that particular moment, concerned
about some television show which had just aired (I gathered from his somewhat
disjointed commentary) and which offended him deeply by its depiction
of J. D. Salinger as a nasty old man. To be honest I'm not sure Mr. Giroux
knew to whom he was talking or ever registered a single comment I made.
So, to pay the
rent for my pitiable one room apartment (New Yorkers settle for so little
in the way of comfort, the city itself, supposedly, redressing the imbalance
by its sizzle) I took up a job-where else?-in a bookstore in the Village,
a squatty, dark, dank little dungeon where used books mixed with a random,
arbitrary sampling of some of the newer offerings by our contemporary
geniuses. If this all sounds rather bitter, rather sour grape flavored,
I plead guilty. I enjoyed spending my time in the bookstore-more often
than not, rearranging Trollope, Iris Murdoch, the Powyses or John Fowles,
ad infinitum, one week alphabetizing their subsections by title, one week
placing the books chronologically. And, if this was just idle make-work,
the owner, Pat Trevelyn, a corpulent, ex-hippie who only wanted to make
enough money to feed his cat and keep himself in marijuana, never questioned
a single move I made. Nor did he recognize any of them.
So, the time went
by, weeks and months. New York became a heavy yoke around my neck and
my letters back home were full of book-talk, most of which I garnered
from the eccentric clientele which frequented The Book Inglenook (a clumsy
appellative which one can only imagine was designed to avoid the cliched
Book Nook) or from the sagacious pages of The New York Times Book Review
and The New York Review of Books. It didn't take too many ramen noodle
meals to make me realize what a failure I was and I was on the verge of
bailing out-running back to Saskatoon with my paper stuffed suitcase-when
an ad in the back of the NYTBR caught my attention.
It said: Editor
wanted. Small press. Benefits. Rapid advancement. And a phone number.
I called--of course
I called--and got the ubiquitous answering machine and it wasn't until
the next day when I returned home from the BI that a return message lit
up the red-eye on my own machine. Its message, delivered in a smooth,
slightly nasal but very proper voice said, "Mr. Brackett, thank you for
answering our ad. If you could appear at our offices tomorrow morning
at 9 a.m. we could talk further about this employment opportunity. Please
bring a current resume." And he gave the address. An address, which I
was unfamiliar with, though I knew it was squirreled away among some claustrophobic
uptown non-descript buildings, and, indeed, it turned out to be absurdly
difficult to find. One had to wend one's way through trash-strewn alleyways,
up some unpromising exterior stairways, down some darkened corridors to
finally arrive. I expected the Minotaur at any moment. It was almost as
if it were consciously concealed.
The small white
sign with black lettering on the door said, "Ardent Publishing, James
Quillmeier, Publisher."
I gave the hollow
plywood door a light knock while opening it enough to poke my head in.
My first sight was a wall decorated entirely with oversize blow-ups of
book jackets, presumably some of the firm's successes (though I had heard
of none of them). Rotating my head a few degrees east I found a smiling
visage which was bright as a blister and seemed to single-handedly hold
back the room's fuscous gloom. The face belonged, it turned out, to Ardent's
loyal secretary, Sherri Hoving, and it was a face which was to turn up
in my dreams for years to come, a face like an iceberg refracting light,
with a gaze like a baby uses to gaze upon another baby. She was a brunette
with skin like sealskin and she seemed to be both dark and light simultaneously.
But, before I get ahead of the story, before I wax idyllic and burn my
candle at both ends, leaving little suspense for your delectation, allow
me to proceed into the cluttered and claustrophobic offices of Ardent
Publishing.
"Mr. Brackett?"
the face tinkled.
"Yes, I have..."
"Yes, I know. Mr.
Quillmeier is expecting you. At the moment he is on the phone to Tokyo
but he'll be with you momentarily, I'm sure."
"Thank you," I
said and backed, self-consciously, into an old-fashioned armchair that
was shoved against one wall.
The face beamed
at me. I tried to beam back but my smile felt phony and I imagined I might
have looked like Dr. Sardonicus. I tried to relax.
"Can I get you
anything?" she asked after a few sunny moments.
"Nothing, thank
you."
"Oh. By the way,
I'm Sherri Hoving. Sherri. Sort of the grunt around here, do a little
of everything, nothing of any real consequence."
This turned out
to be so far from the truth-Sherri (short for Sherrifa, of all things)
Hoving kept Ardent Publishing together with ingenuity, spit and rubber
bands, and, if not for her devotion and sapient governorship, this small
concern would not stay afloat. It didn't take me long to learn this, and
other necessary, hard-to-swallow truths.
I bided my time
in their cramped waiting room, feeling as if I were being kept waiting
only for show, but enjoying the view of Ms. Hoving's immaculate bare legs
under her desk. Every few minutes-you could set your watch by it-she raised
her freckled face toward me and smiled.
When I finally
was ushered into Mr. Quillmeier's presence I found myself in an office
not much larger than the waiting room, papers on every surface, the walls
decorated with more book jacket blowups (Mr. Anthony's Reproductive
Organs, Flowers and Petals, The Scamp's Dog) and along every wall
stacks of books, about a hundred copies of each title.
Quillmeier was
a piece of work himself. As round as a turnip with a mustache which appeared
to be stuck on with sweat, he punched out a chubby fingered hand and gave
mine one quick pump.
"Sit down, Mr.
Brackett," he said, gesturing toward the only other chair in the room,
pushed up uncomfortably close to the edge of his worn old desk.
"Thank you, " I
said, already formulating escape plans. This was certainly low-end publishing.
How desperate was I to work in that rarefied atmosphere of disseminating
literature to the great unwashed?
"Your resume,"
Quillmeier spurted.
I fumbled in my
cardboard briefcase, which I tried to keep partially concealed between
my knees. I pulled out a copy of my freshly printed resume and in so doing
wrinkled it. I began an apology and a quick search for a second copy but
Quillmeier snatched the proffered first copy from my sweating hand.
"Fine, fine," he
said. He read it the way a child reads a history book. His concentration
appeared to cause him pain as his face squinched, his left arm shot out
involuntarily in spasm; he squirmed in his seat. It was an uncomfortable
ten minutes before another word was spoken. I thought, flowers and
petals?
"Starts at 20 a
year," Quillmeier said, finally.
I hardly knew what
to say. That was the interview?
"I hardly know
what to say," I offered.
"Take it or leave
it," Quillmeier said with a not unfriendly, but somehow greasy smile.
"Can I sleep on
it?" I asked, sheepishly.
"Nnn," he said,
settling back into his well-broken in chair. I thought I was almost dismissed.
I thought to Mr. Quillmeier I was already a former applicant.
"No," I said. "No,
I don't have to sleep on it. I'd be proud to work for Ardent," I said.
I don't know where it came from.
"Fine, fine," Quillmeier
said, rising ever so slightly from his seat and giving my hand one more
fat pump. "Monday at 9, then?"
"Yes, surely,"
I said, backing out of his office.
In the anteroom
Sherri Hoving was standing next to her desk, the whole, dark, willowy
length of her, presented to view. She wore a smile that said I knew
you would get the job.
A momentary queasiness
overtook me. Sherri Hoving took a step toward me and put her arms around
me, the way an aunt might hug a troubled nephew. I placed a tentative
hand on the sweet, slick material over her lower back. Here was warmth,
succor. Everything was going to be all right.
When I stepped
out into the big city sunshine elation welled up inside me and I said
to the lizard which lives inside us all, "I have a job in publishing."
When
I left Ardent it was still only 10:30 a.m. I first went to the bookstore
and told Pat that I had found another job and would work out the remainder
of the week if that was what he wanted. It was Thursday. It wasn't much
notice. But Pat looked at me through his herbal haze and smiled a beatific
smile and said, "Blessings on you, Brackett. Go out there and find the
best damn authors you can. Make them write books that will shake the foundations
of our constipated society. Draw from them their best work. Draw from
them the words inside themselves that they are unaware of, words which
lay dormant like an illness of rage. Publish, Brackett. Do good."
Well, I was somewhat
taken aback. Part of me knew I wasn't exactly indispensable to The Book
Inglenook, but I didn't expect such a divine sanction, such a heartfelt
fare-thee-well.
"Well, Damn, Pat,
" I said. "I will try to live up to your expectations. I will do my damnedest."
"I know you will,
Brackett. Which publishing house has the good fortune to have picked up
your worthy services, if I may ask?"
I hesitated. A
foreboding came between us.
"Uh, a small concern.
You might not know them. Little house called Ardent." I started to throw
off a couple of their titles as if I had heard of them prior to my visit
to their Lilliputian offices but Pat's expression was one of consternation,
dismay, perhaps qualmishness.
"Ardent," he said
like a book dropped on a dusty floor. He looked down at his desk in embarrassment.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. Nothing,
Brackett. I thought, you know."
"I don't," I assured
him.
"Well, it's just
that they're a, a vanity house."
The words hit me
in the solar plexus. The dreaded words hit me like being told "Can we
just be friends?"
"Shit," I said.
"I'm sorry," Pat
said. "Rain on the parade, that's me. Look, go there. Get started. Do
the best you can and look for greener pastures. It won't be bad. It is
publishing. Sort of."
I carried that
"sort of" around with me for the next couple of weeks. After leaving Pat
(he said, go ahead, he really didn't need British Fiction re-alphabetized
again) I treated myself to a real deli sandwich and an egg cream. I felt
very New Yorkish, though that "sort of" sat in my stomach heavier than
the sauerkraut on my Ruben. I called my parents that evening and told
them I got a job in publishing and tried to make it sound lively, consequential,
promising. I think it worked. My parents wouldn't know Alfred Knopf from
Cima Academic & Language Media.
I
wouldn't have thought it possible that they had room for me in the offices
of Ardent Publishing, but when I went in that Monday morning, my cheap
case stuck self-importantly under my armpit, they had cleared a corner
of the anteroom (I can't imagine what was there before-I had no memory
of a filing cabinet or couch or potted plant). There now was an old oak
desk, the surface of which was as bare as a stone. Sherri Hoving gestured
toward it like Vanna White toward a new SUV and I returned her friendly
smile. We were roommates.
"Wow," I said.
"My own desk. It looks so pristine, so uninhabited. It appears ready to
transact some majestic and transformative legerdemain. I hardly know how
to become worthy of it."
"Well," Sherri
said and bent her--have I already said willowy?--five foot nine frame
over her own desk and fetched from there a stack of what I immediately
recognized as manuscripts. There were a dozen or so of them. They were
printed on various qualities of paper. Most at least were typewritten,
if not composed on a word processor and printed in dot matrix or laser
jet, but there were a couple copied out in long hand on hundreds and hundreds
of legal pad sheets, neatly stapled together. I sighed.
"Yep," Sherri Hoving
said, relinquishing the burden to her new co-worker, the sap. She practically
washed her hands in Pilate's bowl.
I weighed them
in my hands for comic effect, as if in so doing I could determine their
value.
Sherri Hoving laughed.
It was the sound of snowflakes falling on a harp. I was enchanted. I suddenly
knew something new: Sherri Hoving enchanted me.
"Read them. Write
up a page of synopsis and critique for the boss and then type a letter
of acceptance to the author," she said, and was betrayed by a slight blush.
I wavered. "We
accept them all?" I asked, though my pride was already an area of deep
despoliation.
She
opened a drawer in her desk and produced a fistful of checks.
"Fifteen checks.
Fifteen manuscripts," she smiled, sheepishly. "We accept them all."
I sighed, set down
the stack on my desk, set myself down in the chair at my desk, which suddenly
threatened to throw me around a bit, spinning like a dervish, its ancient
spring so loose and disconnected. This bit of pratfall, perhaps, erased
the tension of the moment.
Sherri tinkled
again, again like the music of a harp, and I smiled a big, goofy grin.
"Welcome to the
fast lane," she said and laughed again.
"I'm here to do
my best," I said, a little too earnestly. And, then because that felt
awkward I compounded the awkwardness. "Would you have dinner with me tonight?"
It was a complete
surprise when to my unexpected question she barked out a quick yes,
and was herself embarrassed by her enthusiasm.
So, my stint at
Ardent Publishing began with mixed blessings. Sherri Hoving moved like
a springborn fairy around that tiny room and every time she did my heart
played the anvil chorus. And, meanwhile, I amused or depressed myself
with the worst prose ever committed to paper. Ever, beginning with the
Egyptians. It was mixed blessings all right.
That
night I arrived at Sherri Hoving's apartment in one of the nicer buildings
in the same area of uptown where Ardent was also housed. She answered
my buzz and when I found her on the third floor she was standing in the
doorway to her apartment. She was wearing a sleeveless, short black dress,
which set birds loose in me. Her long, bare legs were lightly tanned and
sprayed gently with freckles, as were her delicious and pronounced shoulders.
Her knees were brown biscuits. Her limbs were exquisite.
"Hello," she said,
and I thought I detected a slight purr.
"Hello," I answered
back. We moved into her rooms that were shockingly well-appointed. How
much was she making at Ardent? Tasteful doesn't begin to describe how
divinely laid out her apartment was. Interior decoration to me had always
meant, "where do I put the bookcase?" But, here, well, here was art.
"This is lovely,"
I said. And even though that sounded a tad fey the sincerity won the point.
"Thank you," she
said.
We stood awkwardly
near each other for a moment and I was about to ask for a restaurant recommendation
when she stepped into my personal space and put her mouth against mine.
The kiss--warm as life and moist enough to make its prolonged hold unbearably
exciting--lasted until she turned her cheek slightly and exhaled as if
she were overwhelmed.
"I've been wanting
to do that since the first day you walked through the door at Ardent,"
she said.
"You haven't been
alone," I said. It was almost right.
"Kiss me again,"
she said. I did.
That evening we
spent on her plush, off-white couch, our tongues intertwined like the
caduceus. And, while the making-out (forgive the seventh grade terminology)
was erotic and moist and stimulating, it went no further. Oh, at one point,
I believe, I cupped her small, bird-belly breast and she sighed and we
kissed and kissed some more. I remember thinking, we have all the time
in the world. We never did eat and I left around 2 a.m., my head spinning,
my mouth refreshed as if I had drunk at Tantalus' pool, and my heart full
of love, oh overflowing love, for Sherrifa Hoving.
Over
the ensuing months I was responsible for publishing numerous books under
the Ardent imprint. My name appeared on them all as editor, though, in
truth, my only addition to the stream which is literature, was to make
subjects and verbs agree (sometimes when they stubbornly seemed unwilling
to, fighting like Kilkenny cats), clean up any language which strayed
from the somewhat rocky path which is English grammar, take out the names
of famous people in far-fetched tales of sexual misconducts (to stave
off lawsuits, obviously) and substitute names of my own invention. This
was at least creative and, at times, diverting. For instance, for John
Kennedy I substituted Matt Chinoi, Snake Charmer. I replaced a particularly
ugly reference to Calista Flockhart with the ridiculous name Sysipha Van
Grubelhoffer. I turned Johnny Carson into Mungo Park. Etc. It was the
only thing that made me feel as if I were not scooping up hot dung with
my own well-trained hands and flinging it out the window onto the passersby
below.
Some of the titles
that left our offices with my name printed in garish Franklin Gothic on
the copyright page were: The Battle of the Bulge as Witnessed by Me
and Tom Rasking by Lt. Col. Gerald "Flip" Craig, Senior Citizens
are Sexy, Too by Jenny Vookles (that Jenny rankled, for a woman in
her 80s), Liposuction and You by Dr. Vance Partridge, Diddy-Wah-Diddy
by Resole McRey (surely a pseudonym--I wonder what he was hiding),
Tambourines, Pig-whistles and Daisies in Gun Barrels: A Nomocanon of
Poems by Camel Jeremy Eros, Huckleberry Finn, Racist by Janet
Grimace, Love Gained, Lost and Regained by Anonymous (hmm), Southern
Jewism and the Delta: A Prototype by Shlomo Einstein, I Fought
the Gulf War by my Own Damn Self by Larry "Renegade" Yates, and on
and on.
And, in truth,
some of these dogs sold. I imagine what happens is the author's hometown
bookstore, some mom and pop place called Book Land, or The Book Rack,
orders a couple hundred for a signing, and the author's friends and family
feel obliged to come and actually purchase a copy. At least our books
are inexpensive, comparatively. But, of course, we can afford to be. We
are totally subsidized up front. And our author's contracts, well, I can't
even discuss them. They are the special province of J. Quillmeier and
J. Quillmeier alone. Who, by the way, is rarely in the office, the official
statement being that he is having lunch with a client, or meeting with
Japanese businessmen about overseas rights, or somesuch nonsense. But,
those contracts, which are kept in locked files in his office, are as
secret as the recipe for Coca-Cola. Very fishy, but I suspect our authors,
for whom we promise to work very hard, pumping product out to the media-drenched
society which awaits such drivel-we send out a single press release to
a select group of bookstores and trade publications, total cost about
$43--our poor deluded authors, I suspect never have made a penny from
their Ardent contracts. This is just supposition on my part, but it is
not without some basis in evidence. But, that's another story and not
this one, and, to be honest, what the hell do I care? These schnooks knew
they were buying their way into authordom. What did they expect? Had they
ever seen an Ardent title on the bestseller lists? Had an Ardent author
ever been on Oprah? No, they knew the pond they were fishing in was stocked
and the catch was a cheat and they knew that in the end even the water
in that pond would prove to be a sham, like the water under Casanova's
boat in Fellini's film. I didn't care. Sorry.
The
absence of the boss in the incommodious space of Ardent Publishing made
for a sexual tension between Sherri and me, a delicious, daily sexual
tension. Many days we spent with our respective tongues in each other's
mouths, hands wandering the curvy landscapes that are the human body,
heat rising like fervor from the Devil's kitchen. But, beyond experiencing
how lovely Ms. Hoving felt through her midsection, or where her hip gently
swayed into her tender thighs, or circumnavigating the sweet meat of her
upper arms, and down her choice lower back which effortlessly tipped into
her incredible hindquarters, and all this mostly through whatever silken
material covered her winsome body that day, nothing else happened between
us. Every time the caloric vigor rose to danger levels-she could feel
my need through the front of her brief skirts I am quite sure-we swayed
away, we danced into a joking middle ground where there was only close
friendship, companionship, flirting. It was frustrating, of course.
About equally as frustrating as wading through those irksome manuscripts,
feeling myself dipped in bad prose as if in machine oil, or a particularly
adhesive oleo.
Meanwhile, Sherri
was the most professional secretary/jackie-of-all-trades I'd ever witnessed
or worked with. She literally did everything for Ardent, from mailing
out the many letters of acceptances, to keeping the books (and cashing
those mendacious checks), to acting as go-between between the elusive
Mr. Quillmeier and anyone else. I composed my own letters of acceptance
(oh, sorry lies! oh, loathsome soft-soap!) and for that, and for my 200
word synopses, I called myself an editor. I collected a paycheck that
allowed me to live in the hub of the publishing industry, the city which
never sleeps.
It
was around my one year anniversary at Ardent (my parents in their frequent
phone calls and letters were fond of repeating to me the gloating and
inflated remarks they made to their septuagenarian friends about their
big-shot son), after a particularly dispiriting evening at Sherri's (we
had actually unzipped a couple of pieces of clothing, almost touching
various body parts through only one sheer layer of undergarment) I arrived
about thirty minutes late to the office.
"Hey, Hotshot,"
Sherri said, a shy, almost frightened smile tempting the corners of her
syrupy mouth.
"Hey, Sherri,"
I dropped.
"You okay? You
look a little bedraggled. Maybe bed-raggled, eh?" This was sexy banter
to her, I suddenly realized. She thought what we had done the previous
evening was highly erotic, would garner a couple of x's at least. Were
there really young women this innocent living in New York City? The notion
seemed ludicrous and I admit I was a bit cross.
"Not raggled enough,
perhaps, lover?" I practically snarled.
Her face retreated
like a beaten cur. She turned to her desk and made a show of shuffling
around in the papers there. She turned with a snap and held out a slim
stack of telltale, ecru 8 ½ by 11 envelopes.
I groaned.
"Mail's here already,"
she said, throwing a slight lilt into her speech, a pitiful attempt to
cajole me into our old style.
"Thanks," I said
and took the stack as if it were a flattened and exenterated piece of
roadkill.
I sat at my desk
and stared at the return addresses for many minutes, stalling, trying
to gather what wits I had left. The work came from all over. America was
awash in wannabe writers. There was Abe Peters, Lincoln, Nebraska; Rory
Canseco, Wind River, Wyoming; Lauralyn "Laurie" Enos, Fidelity, Georgia;
Lamar Negri, Page, Washington (a writer's town, surely!); Kenny the Snake
Girardi, Somerville, Tennessee. It was all so-debilitating. I was tired
just holding these monstrosities. I punched them aside, dismissively.
I couldn't do it. Not that day. Maybe never again.
I don't know what
caught my attention, what about the envelope made it stick out-maybe it
simple stuck out, lay uncovered in the cast aside heap. The envelope
itself was smudged, as if handled by a car mechanic. Were it evidence
in a police investigation the culprits prints were readable with a naked
eye-there was no need to send these babies to the lab in Washington. And
the return address said, simply, "City." Presumably, this meant this labor
of love came from somewhere within the confines of our sprawling megalopolis.
It was addressed "Ardent Publishing. Fiction Editor." And our address.
Written in blurry pencil, as if from inside an aquarium. It was a wonder
it made it to us, so indecipherable was the penmanship, so childlike the
scrabble.
It was an exotic
enough piece of communication that I slit it open right away. The yellow
ledger-pad paper tumbled out as if enchanted, as if the pieces of foolscap
were fey genii released from their bottle. They made a mad pile on my
desk, papers from hell, or some suburb of hell reserved for the work of
the crazed, for the products of contaminated minds. They scared me somehow,
covered as they were with that same penciled scrawl, which seemed alive
on the page, like some particularly loathsome form of insectivore, one
which found its way into your bedclothes at night, one which entered your
body through the soles of your feet and lodged someplace vital and vulnerable,
slowly poisoning you, slowly fusing or liquefying your entire inner self.
They were chthonic.
Yet, I could not
look away.
The topsheet bore
what I imagined was the title, flung across the head, above where the
lines began, like on a school report. And the title was Anima,
certainly a broad enough topic, I thought. And in more crabbed alphabetiforms,
as if it pained the poor soul to pin his name on the page, as if, indeed,
by pinning it there he may have trapped himself, below the larger title,
it said: by Jim Nozoufist. And, of course, there amid the detritus which
was his book lay his check, which I barely registered except to notice
it was at least made out in ballpoint to Ardent Publishing, Publisher.
Ridiculous, I thought.
Ridiculous title, absurd nom-de-plume. Who was this wise guy kidding?
And, somewhere in the middle of my nonsensical fear, a small anger grew,
a misplaced anger at this ridiculous Jim Nozoufist and his unsanitary
manuscript. How dare he! I huffed. I sat back hard in my chair, which
once again tilted dangerously, like a rolling log over a chasm. Sherri
looked around hopefully with a can-I-help look on her exquisite, colorful
face. I scowled back.
After a moment
I picked up page one of Anima and began to read. I read the first
sentence with a self-righteous mad on. I read the second sentence with
a prickle like fever at the back of my neck. I read the third sentence,
a sculpted piece of prose mastery worthy only of some pixilated offspring
of Beckett and Virginia Woolf, with a growing sense of disbelief. Oh,
my lares and penates!
An hour passed.
Two. Somewhere beyond the periphery of my mindfulness I was cognizant
of a sulking Sherri who went about her work, left for lunch, returned.
It was four o'clock in the afternoon when I threw down the pages I still
had in my hand and craned my stiff neck heavenward. It was unbelievable.
It was preposterous. I looked guiltily around me, as if I had smuggled
some plutonium and was squirreling it away in my desk drawer, or as if
I had just inherited the secrets of eternal life and did not want to share
them with anyone. Not even my sweetheart, not even my parents. Sherri
turned inquisitively toward me but my face must have seemed deranged,
goggle-eyed, for she crinkled up her nose and widened her beautiful mahogany
blinkers and turned back to her own work. I took a series of deep breaths
and leaned back precipitously in my chair. What was first an inkling of
something other had become a faith in something grand. I had on
my desk a masterpiece. A piece of the puzzle, the missing pieces perhaps
in the puzzle of world literature. Or, so I felt initially.
No. It was stronger
than that. I was sure. This was it. This was the real thing.
And I was an editor at a dogassed, corrupt publishing concern that would
take this precious cargo and jettison it upon the world like another book
of grandma's poetry, like another memoir of "My most memorable character."
I surged with power, but it was a power checked, a light under a bushel,
a light obliterated and trapped under a sleazy, perplexing bushel. But
my metaphors run away. I had to think. I had to clear my mind and figure
out what to do.
I gathered the
pages together and stuffed them back into their envelope (they didn't
want to fit, as if once oxygen had reached them they had expanded, full
of life, or as if they would not be imprisoned again, ever again). I made
a quick, rude excuse to Sherri, rushed past her and went immediately home.
I must keep Anima
with me at all times. I must never let it out of my sight. These were
my thoughts.
And I must find
Jim Nozoufist. And tell him--what? That he was a genius, that he had written
the most important novel since Joyce reconfigured things. Needless to
say, I re-read the book in its entirety that night-it took me until the
wee hours-and it only reinforced my opinion. This was the book that the
literary world had been waiting for. It was an answer to questions we
didn't even dare ask, questions we didn't know needed asking. And I owned
it. Anima was mine.
Continued
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