2
The
address listed for the author of Anima was in a tony part of Manhattan,
a part, quite honestly, where I rarely ventured, high rises where the
word penthouse was tossed around lightly, where the recirculated air was
ripe with the scent of freshly minted cash. Was it possible this adept
was worth more than the entire publishing concern on which he was pinning
his literary aspirations? Why didn't the joker just publish the book himself,
certainly a time-honored way of appearing in print, and just slightly
more expensive than turning over blood money to Ardent?
After some initial
wrangling with a taciturn doorman, who insisted there was no one living
in Two Towers by the name of Jim Nozoufist, a call was made to the apartment
number written as the return address on the soiled envelope I had clenched
under my jacket. (I had spent the earliest hours of the morning at Kinko's
making a copy of Anima, which now resided in the locked drawer
of my desk in my apartment.) Some muted conversation was made into the
phone, while I stood by like a miscreant pupil, some description given
of the personage wishing admittance I imagined, and after hanging up the
doorman simply opened the inner door without apology or even assent. I
walked past him, hiking up my dignity, looking into his dead eyes as I
walked unnecessarily close to him and into Two Towers.
The elevator stopped
on the thirteenth floor and I bobbed down the thickly carpeted corridor
to Apartment 1307 and lightly rapped on the door. After a few sweaty moments--was
there another gauntlet to run before admittance?--the door opened and
an astoundingly beautiful woman in her mid to late 50s stood there glittering
like a prize. Her jewelry glittered, her dress glittered, her teeth glittered,
even her décolletage, sprinkled with some kind of glitter makeup, glittered.
She was smiling to beat the band.
"Mr. Brackett?"
she twinkled.
"Yes," I said,
transfixed by her. "Call me Todd." I was so nervous it came out "Dodd."
"Please come in."
I walked in as
if I was being led past the pearly gates, mesmerized as much by this ideal
of womanhood as by the incredible space into which I was coaxed. It might
have been Gloria Vanderbilt's home, or, indeed, one of the nicer salas
in Heaven. If my conscious brain was working at all it was chewing on
the question, who is this ravishing dowager and what does she have to
do with J. Nozoufist?
"Please sit," she
gestured toward the plushest piece of furniture I had ever seen. I could
have lived in it.
A gentleman appeared
as if a bell sash had been pulled.
"Would you like
some refreshment?" this lovely woman asked, all flickering eyes and teeth.
"No. Uh, actually,
yes, some ice tea, if available," I managed.
"Ice tea, Noah,"
she spoke to the superannuated butler, and I assumed he really was the
Biblical patriarch.
"I'm sorry, Mr.
Brackett. How rude of me. I am Cecilia Quisby. My name may be familiar
to you, though I'm well aware that it is not me who you are here to see."
I didn't know her
from Betty Grable but I smiled and nodded. She seemed to know a lot more
about whatever was happening than I did and in such situations I always
find it best to keep mum until things begin to take shape. It didn't take
long.
"You are looking
for Jim," Cecilia Quisby shimmered.
"Yes," I said.
"I'm from Ardent Pub--"
"Yes, I know. Jim
sent you his book. I told him we could look elsewhere, but, well, Jim
has a sort of stubbornness to him, which…"
She drifted away
momentarily and I took the opportunity to try and win some respect from
this imposing woman.
"Frankly, Mrs.
Quisby--"
"Cecilia."
"Cecilia. Frankly,
I think, just maybe, Mr. Nozoufist has written something really remarkable
here."
"No," Cecilia Quisby
spoke quickly and then caught herself. "I mean, really? It's-- it's good?"
"Um, yes. I believe
it is quite good."
"Well, I'll be
damned, excuse my Alabama backyard French," she said and sort of fell
back into the couch, wherein she could have fallen quite a long way.
"Jim is a real
writer, then?"
"I believe so."
"Hm," she said
and she lay there, in a repose rather unladylike for someone so elegant,
though it gave me ample time to run my eyes over her aged but stately
figure. She was a supernatural being.
"Mrs. Quisby-Cecilia-who
is Jim Nozoufist? Is he here? I would really love the opportunity to speak
with him about his book and about the possibilities I think-"
"Jim's not here
at the moment, Todd," she spoke, familiarly, and she rose up to a more
upright posture and placed a warm hand on my knee. It burned through my
cheap suit pants. Up my leg went the heat of torment.
Letting the fluster
pass, I took a difficult swallow of ice tea, which Noah had delivered
I know not when, but which, magically, appeared near my right hand.
"Is Jim Nozoufist
your husband, Ma'am?" I don't know where the Southernism came from, triggered
no doubt by her mention of Alabama.
She let loose a
cachinnate fanfare. "Oh, my, no," she said. "Jim, well, Jim, works for
me."
"As?" I asked without
thought.
"Oh, odd jobs.
When a woman reaches my age she needs some seeing to. Jim does a little
driving for me, a little grocery shopping, that sort of thing."
"I see. Well, I
don't want to take up too much of your time. When can I speak to him?
It's rather urgent," I added, self-importantly.
"Noah," Cecilia
Quisby spoke in conversational tones and the man was suddenly there. "Call
Jim and have him come straight over."
Noah nodded, I
think, and left the room.
Cecilia smiled
her bright white smile at me and we sat in silence for a few moments and
I sipped at the ice tea without tasting it.
After a while she
scooted a half-inch closer to me, leaned forward and replaced the hand
on my knee, perhaps a measurable space higher on my thigh. This woman
knew men. She knew me and she had me and she knew she had me. I didn't
care. It was literature a-calling and, for the moment, even the sexual
flirtation of such an attractive woman took a backseat.
"Todd," she said,
as if about to let me in on a family secret. "Prepare yourself for Jim.
He may not be what you were expecting."
"Ok," I said, though
I wasn't aware of expecting anything.
A moment later
there was the sound of activity coming from the kitchen area.
"I believe he's
here now," Cecilia Quisby said, rising from the couch. Putting space between
us was both a relief and an agony.
What emerged from
the rear of the apartment was indeed not what I had expected no matter
what I had expected. Neanderthal was an unavoidable reference term and
had I Tourrette's syndrome no doubt I would have spoken the word aloud.
Jim Nozoufist was a man about the same age as Mrs. Quisby, though through
grime and facial hair it was difficult to ascertain much about the man.
He was positively pithecoid. Surely this was just some poor homeless gull
they brought up to impersonate the author. His dungy attire-ankle-length,
soot-grey raincoat, unbuttoned formerly white shirt, oversize achromatic
pants, squalid, unlaced hightops-reminded me of the costume Ian Anderson
of Jethro Tull used to sport in his early rhythm and blues days, a sort
of crazed, exhibitionist, street person affectation. Indeed he somewhat
resembled Mr. Anderson in the uncouthness of his wild appearance. Aqualung
with an Olivetti, I thought. No one could have been more out of place
in Cecilia Quisby's elegant apartment.
"Jim, come here,"
Cecilia beckoned with a bejeweled hand. "This is Todd Brackett from Ardent
Publishing. He's here about your book."
No change of expression
occurred on the exanimate face of the feral fellow. Did he understand?
Was he capable of more than animal instinct?
He shuffled forward
and extended a meaty and distinctly unclean hand. I took it gently but
he squeezed like an Irishman in a pub contest and when I drew my smarting
body part back I found myself imagining all sorts of disease, scrud or
double scrud. I wanted to bolt for the bathroom.
Professionalism
reigned.
"Mr. Nozoufist?
As Mrs. Quisby said, I'm from Ardent and I've had the pleasure of reading
your manuscript, your, um, novel, Anima, and I'm quite taken with it.
I believe you have a real gift. I have taken it upon myself to contact
you personally, not standard procedure perhaps at Ardent, but I was moved
to do so by the particularity of your work, by its special otherness,
which it is my belief may just be something very special in the world
of contemporary letters." I felt as if I was talking to an actor standing
in for the real author. At no time during my speech did I believe this
was the author of the book I still had clenched inside my jacket. I also
felt orotund and absurd in my language and as if I was talking over the
poor man's head.
There now emerged
from somewhere inside the whiskers and grime on Mr. Nozoufist's facade
a deep growl or grumble. Bubbles of saliva formed in his mustache. Fear
flashed through me-perhaps he was an epileptic, perhaps he was about to
bite my neck-but I glanced at Cecilia and she was smiling beatifically.
This calmed me somewhat.
"I'd like Ardent
to publish Anima," he said.
I nodded and was
about to open negotiations-whatever those were going to be-when he sputtered
further.
"Cecilia sent the
check. We've paid," he said, and looked to his patron for reassurance.
Cecilia moved to him and took his filthy arm in hers and placed a kiss
on his hispid cheek. He smiled, a horrible smile, a monster's lascivious
grin.
It suddenly occurred
to me that Jim Nozoufist did a little more than some grocery shopping
for this woman. There was a warmth between them one sees in movies, that
romantic shorthand which says, intimacy. It made me feel unwell for some
reason.
"Mr. Nozoufist,
rest assured that all is satisfactory in your prepayment and the contract
that denotes. Ardent would be proud to publish your novel. Ardent would
be more than proud. Ardent should get down on its collective knees (here
a brief flash of Sherri's lovely face threw a blinding flare over my vision)
and beg to publish Anima. What I'm saying is--"
And, here I was
at the moment of truth, the moment I had been dreading. What was my plan?
Did I think I could parlay this man's talent, this wild man's exotic talent,
into some kind of score for Todd Brackett? What were my motives? I had
convinced myself that they were pure and that the main thing, the important
thing was to get this book into print and into wide distribution, where
it could, rightly or wrongly, upset the placid and smug and dull ship
of state which was modern fiction.
"What is it, Todd?"
Cecilia asked with genuine concern in her voice.
"I think Anima
may be the greatest novel of its, of our, time."
I said it. I laid
it out there like a taunt and I did not know, in this extraordinary company,
where such a taunt would lead. I did not know who would pick it up.
After a pregnant
moment, our aberrant author spoke.
"You do work for
Ardent, don't you?" It was somewhere between a growl and a barroom challenge.
"Yes, yes," I assured.
"But, this book, this marvelous book, is something quite uncommon. Quite
frankly, it is too good for Ardent. I mean, we are fine for what we do,
but, Mr. Nozoufist, Jim, if I may, Anima needs one of the big boys.
It needs a Knopf, a Farrar Straus & Giroux. It needs a Gary Fisketjohn.
It needs a Liz Darahnsof. It needs paperback rights, foreign rights, electronic
rights, Hollywood representation, for Christ's sake!" I was sweating.
"This is a major book. A searingly significant, important book." I finished
with a deep breath as if I had sprinted here from Newark.
"I don't understand
a word you're saying," Cecilia Quisby let out. "And I'm sure Jim doesn't
either. With your Fiskyjons and your Jews and your Darryn Soft, Mr. Brackett,
Todd, we are simple people. What are you suggesting?"
I didn't know.
Could I tell them I didn't know? That even I was out of my depth?
"I don't know,"
I said.
"Ardent's good
enough for me," the musty giant now spat out and strode out of the room
so quickly it left me speechless. I looked at Cecilia Quisby--she smiled
like the opening of the moon--and a few minutes later I was walking back
toward Ardent, shell-shocked. The manuscript was still tucked under my
jacket and my arm was cramped from the tension of holding it there. I
had never even brought it out, examined it in front of its exotic creator,
showed him that I knew my way around a work of fiction. I only then understood
that that was what I had desired--to prove myself to the author of such
an eccentric masterpiece. I had expected to be parlaying with someone
along the lines of Mervyn Peake or Alexander Theroux.
Cecilia Quisby
was right. I hadn't expected Jim Nozoufist. I hadn't expected a madman.
And, now, where were we?
Sherri
was playing coy when I returned to the office, playing at avoiding my
eyes but giving me uncertain, saucy side-glances at every opportunity.
I sat down at my desk and stared straight ahead. My head was full of expensive
perfume and deodorized penthouse air and Cecilia Quisby's squeezable bosom
and her hand which generated heat like a magnifying glass and the sweet
rot of old flesh and fetid clothing and the incredible, exploding encyclopedia,
which hovered above it all, that book called Anima. I finally remembered
to unclench my arm and release the manuscript and I lay it in front of
me atop the numerous unopened envelopes that would make up Ardent's Spring
list.
I believe Sherri
hissed or made some noise, which was not quite human speech, and I slowly
turned toward her. She smiled a delicate, infirm smile.
My heart beat hard
once or twice--there was pain there--should I worry? And then I opened
my arms and Sherri Hoving slid across the room and onto my lap and her
warm mouth covered mine and her tongue swelled into me and I lost, momentarily,
all my worries as my blood careened around in my body looking for the
place it was needed most. It found my loins.
Sherri felt the
stiffening there and she loosened her kiss slightly and looked into my
eyes. Her hand went South, where the trouble was, and opened my tensions
to the air and it was that handjob at my desk--that release--in the middle
of a most troublesome workday, which began to crystallize things for me.
Which began to set a coarse for myself, for Sherri Hoving, and for our
demented ward, the foul and priestly Jim Nozoufist.
Through
Cecilia Quisby I set up a meeting with our author for the following day
at a coffeeshop near Ardent and I asked Sherri to join us. My reasons
for doing this were a bit confused, but it's safe to say, I wanted a witness.
I wanted backup. And I counted on her to be true to her pseudo-lover and
I counted on her unique capacity for organization, something this situation
was in desperate need of.
I sketched the
situation for Sherri and throughout my extravagant tale she looked at
me wide-eyed, her moist mouth forming a series of variations on ohs and
ovals. At the end of my recitation--and I told her almost everything,
including my reticence about seeing this work of literature go through
the mill which was vanity publishing--her doe eyes blinked once or twice
and then she was all business. I told you she was the glue which held
Ardent together and that professionalism took over and she immediately
began making notes and gathering together a file, a file which would remain
a secret between her and me, under the name "Anima, Nozoufist." The Anima,
Nozoufist file. I believe she felt that this secret was further cement
to our "understanding," though, for the time being, the personal was a
back burner for me.
We arrived at the
coffee shop about fifteen minutes early, such was our excitement and nervousness
to set this thing into motion, whatever this thing was to be. With Sherri's
encouragement our plan was simple, at least as far as step one went. Beyond
step one was a haze of possibility, a scrim over the future which seemed
murky and confusing and even perhaps a little dangerous, though I didn't
at the time have anything to be afraid of. We sat over our dry bagels
and weak joe and our conversation was scant and clipped, airy like a tattered
flag. The fifteen minutes passed and then another fifteen and Sherri looked
at me with an anxiety in her boyishly resplendent features which was overflowing
with sympathy and concern. I believe she might have, for just a moment,
believed I had made up Jim Nozoufist out of whole cloth, however exotic
that cloth would have to be. I admit that I even had the passing notion
that I had imagined the man, something from some primitive consciousness
welling up like a bad dream, something unreal, a bit of undigested beef
perhaps.
Just as exasperation
began to take over I saw through the shop's wide glass window the madman
author striding our way, crossing against traffic as if he were indestructible,
walking almost totally erect. To say he burst into the coffeeshop is to
resort to cliché, but Nozoufist practically thrust the door off its hinges,
so exaggeratedly violent was his ingress. Sherri jumped in her seat as
I stood to beckon the Yeti over. Jim wore the same outfit I had seen him
in earlier. Sherri wore a look of what might be described as professional
doubt, mixed with, I think, bemusement.
The waitress eyed
us askance now but took our order for another cup of their dishwater coffee
and a round of eggs and toast for our guest.
"Jim," I began,
"This is Sherri Hoving from our office."
"Pleased," Jim
grunted and put a hoary hand out, which missed Sherri's delicate attempt
at a handshake and ended up gripping her forearm as if this were a meeting
of two Vikings.
Step One was this:
we were going to convince Jim Nozoufist to make us his independent agents.
Sherri had sketched out a contract which gave us full power to place Anima
where we thought best and make what demands we could, reaping only a measly
15% of whatever profits befell us. The important thing, the only
thing, was to get Anima into bookstores, onto library shelves,
into the right critics' hands, to get the damn thing recognized.
The inchoate contract also gave full editorial decision-making to Todd
Brackett, but with final say on any changes to the author.
Nozoufist seemed
to chew on these terms at about the same frenetic and unwholesome way
he dug into his toast and eggs. We could not look at him and spent the
tense minutes looking at each other with, for want of a better word, affection.
Our eyes may have been dewy.
"Ardent doesn't
want it," he said, finally.
"No, no," I quickly
corrected him. "Ardent would publish it in a heartbeat. Cash Cecilia's
check and throw Anima out there. But, you have to understand Ardent
would publish the ravings of any lunatic who could muster the money to
pay their fees. They would publish that surly waitresses' love poems to
her trucker boyfriend. Ardent is not about editorship. Ardent is about
taking money from people who are desperate to have something, anything
in print. Anima on the other hand is a life-changing work of the
imagination. We can take it just about anywhere we want and get some real
attention generated. We can make you famous, if that's not putting the
inappropriate slant on it."
"Ardent is for
the odes or autobiographies of retired doctors and lawyers, who have nothing
better to do with the money they've made grinding the noses of the poor,"
Sherri put in. I squeezed her knee.
"Hmm," Jim Nozoufist
said, maybe through his nose.
"We'll take full
responsibility," I added. "If we fail to produce anything greater--but
there is little chance of that--we can always fall back on Ardent."
"Ok, then," the
mammalian author said, rising quickly from his seat. This time his handshakes
hit their marks and he was gone, seemingly carried out by a gust of wind
from the reek of New York, a wind up from the subways, smelling of urine
and lost dreams and the foul decay of a once great city.
Sherri and I looked
at each other. She couldn't suppress a tight giggle.
"Well, we got what
we wanted," she said. "What next?"
"I'll make some
calls," I said. "You make up a formal contract and we'll get that to Mr.
Nozoufist and get this ball rolling." I smiled with a confidence that
was the confidence of a child becoming an adult. I was making it.
Sherri
and I walked back into the office holding hands like Hansel and Gretel,
cooing at each other, snickering like schoolchildren. We were met by the
grim countenance of our plenitudinous boss.
"Hello, Mr. Quillmeier,
" Sherri said, seriously suddenly, with more aplomb than I could have
mustered.
"Early lunch?"
he asked.
"Meeting with an
author," I said, but from Sherri's darting eyes I knew I had blundered.
"We don't meet
with authors," J. Quillmeier firmly informed me. "We publish their shitty
books and cash their checks and move on."
"Is that on our
logo?" I asked, sarcasm born of this newly acquired and foolhardy confidence.
Mr. Quillmeier
glowered. He placed a chubby hand on a chubby hip and looked us over as
if he didn't quite know what we were up to, into mother's cosmetics, perhaps,
or sneaking out back with the airplane glue.
"Who is this author
who demands such attention?" he asked.
It was a fair question.
Unfortunately, it caught the two of us, answerless. We stared straight
ahead. My armpits filled with moisture.
J. Quillmeier had
us and let us run, cruelly, like hooked fish, which he only wanted the
barb to dig deeper into. He stood before us like the Colossus of Rhodes
for a few minutes while we fidgeted and cleared our throats.
"Was it perhaps
James Nozoufist?" he asked.
We were stricken.
We looked stricken.
"How--" was as
far as I got.
"Cecilia Quisby
is a very old and dear friend, my compatriots. She phoned me at home to
find out how long until we could expect to see her man's book in the bookstores."
"Cecilia Quisby
told me she tried to talk Nozoufist out of publishing with Ardent," I
said, floundering, fighting for my life.
"A blind. She sent
the book in through the regular channels, but, still was not above a phone
call to an old admirer to grease the works. Seems she had a visit, a peculiar
visit, from our chief editor who did nothing but confuse her about our
intentions. Quite inappropriate. Hence, the call."
"Ahem," I believe
I said.
J. Quillmeier waited.
"Mr. Quillmeier,
this book, by this friend of your friend, is, well, it's quite a book."
"And?"
"And I think, maybe,
it's just, sort of, not for Ardent."
J. Quillmeier waited
another painful minute, looked at me, looked with not a little disappointment
at Sherri, and then spoke, with decisive finality.
"You're fired,"
he said, poking a sausage-shaped finger at my sternum.
"And you," he said,
hesitating as he turned toward the soul of his publishing house, and in
that moment of hesitation, Sherri Hoving, God bless her, moved in my direction
and slipped her frabjous arm through mine in a show of confederacy. "Well,
you're fired, too," he was forced to add.
He then rolled
into the inner recesses of his private den, a bear who must certainly
go into hibernation, at least temporarily, with no Sherri Hoving around
to keep his affairs in order.
"Well," I said,
exhaling for the first time in ten minutes.
"We're out on the
street," Sherri said, with brave calm.
"But we have Anima,"
I said. And I think I really believed it was a charm, a shield, a mojo
against the perilous future.
Of
course, in the following days, there was a back and forth wrangle between
myself and J. Quillmeier about who indeed did own the rights to the wondrous
Gordian knot which was Anima. It was the most conversation I had
with the man in the nearly thirteen months since I had come to work for
him. He was a surprisingly savvy combatant. I say surprisingly, because,
one must ask, what is he doing running this shill game for suckers if
he has the smarts to do better work.
It was my, our,
contention that the author had signed a binding contract with us (he actually
had not at this time, but the contract was professionally drawn up by
my amorous conspirator and awaited only a meeting with the author for
the proverbial eyes to be crossed, etc.) and that he had no such contract
with Ardent Publishing. It was J. Quillmeier's retort, as one might expect,
that the check, which he had quickly cashed, from Cecilia Quisby, constituted
a contract and one which he had already made moves to justify by putting
the manuscript through the motions of getting into shoddy print and between
two glued-together cardboard covers and hence turned into a proud Ardent
book. I doubted this contention, simply because we had both copies of
the manuscript, and though it was possible he had obtained another from
Cecilia Quisby, J. Quillmeier had not the means nor the wherewithal to
get the whole process rolling by his own rolling self. At least, this
is what Sherri and I fervently hoped.
We believed, though,
that we had to move quickly.
We set up another
meeting with Jim in the coffee shop (as we now began to call him whenever
we referred to him, the familiarity meaning---what?--a confidence that
he was ours, that we were going to ride his raggle-taggle coattails into
literary stardom). We anticipated trouble arranging said meeting, but
Cecilia betrayed no loyalty to her old friend JQ, and readily set us up
with our author but she also did not offer his address. It was an unspoken
part of the dealings that everything would be funneled through the glamorous
and ladylike hands of Cecilia Quisby.
Jim was late again.
Sherri and I sat in worried silence, holding hands lightly, fingertips
to fingertips, across the tabletop, casting strained, grim smiles at each
other as each additional five minutes ticked away. Finally, Jim was blown
in, by that same ill wind, leaves and detritus seemingly swirling around
him, his hair a tangled mass, full of birds' nests and insect larvae and
perhaps the missing body of James Hoffa. He threw himself into the booth
on Sherri's side, fairly slamming against her but not upending her tight
smile.
"Ok," he began,
as if he had called this meeting. He was all at once in charge and it
momentarily upset me.
"What you got for
Old Jim?" he asked, a piratical jolliness inflecting his voice, unlike
anything we had heretofore witnessed.
"A contract," Sherri
said, briskly, whipping it out from her briefcase and laying it on the
yolk stained Formica.
Jim looked down
at it the way first man must have looked at first fire.
"It says, basically,
what?" Jim said, quickly, as if to hide his embarrassment at not understanding
the legal jargon before him. "You own me. You own Animus. You get
all the money."
I didn't know if
he was kidding or not. I didn't know if he was capable of kidding.
"Of course not,"
I said. "Just as we discussed. We will do everything in our power, everything
to see that Animus gets the publishing contract it deserves, including
all foreign rights, paperback rights, etc. at the best house possible
and for the most money available. We vow to do this not only on this piece
of paper in front of you but, here, to your face, with honest and heartfelt
integrity. We will get your book the attention it deserves and for that
we get 15% of all profits."
"15%," Jim said.
"That's fairly
common, low even. Understand, Mr. Nozoufist, we have given up all other
work to pursue this. We have no other job but getting this book out and
reaping the rewards it deserves. We have, you might say, put all our eggs
in one basket, laid our whole lives on the line," Sherri put in.
Nozoufist looked
at me with what I thought was a twinkle in his eye--he resembled briefly
a deranged Santa Claus--and then at Sherri the same way. Suddenly he leant
over and kissed my compatriot full on the mouth, pulling back like a drunkard
who has just taken a large draught of a rich ichor. A smile opened up
the box of snakes which was his visage.
"Let's do it," he
said.
I was taken aback.
But then I smiled just as quickly and took his callused hand into mine
and gave it a hearty shake. Fellow-feeling flowed.
Sherri, recovering
from her bestial buss, pointed a red-nailed finger at the line on the
contract where Jim was to put his John Hancock and brought out a pen from
her lap with which he would sign. Jim gripped the pen like it was a Louisville
slugger. Just for a second I thought he might make a crude X on the space
provided, but he signed with a flourish, his name a dance of curlicues
and embellishment, ending with a singular paraph.
"Good," he said.
And he was gone.
Although
tangential to the tale, now might be the time to discuss the nature of
the relationship so recently born between the lithe Sherri Hoving and
your humble narrator. After that unexpected office manipulation of my
membrum virile, I supposed, naturally, that we had embarked on
that journey which takes a couple of ordinary human beings and transforms
them into the coniunctio spirituum; in short, that we were now
a fully feathered couple, free to partake of each other's intimacies,
privileged to feel the human warmth and moisture at the heart of the creature
called man (and woman). I thought, bluntly put, that we would be fucking
and soon.
It was not to be.
Instead we regressed. That workaday pizzle-pull was not repeated and when
our tongue sucking grew too intense Sherri again began that coy retreat
which had initially signaled to me that we were not to be, couplewise.
It was frustrating and may or may not bear on the frustrations to follow.
I am not a Freudian disciple and do not pretend to possess the ability
to explain human endeavor in terms of inner chemistry, misfiring neurons,
bad potty training, want of breastfeeding as a child. So what follows
followed. My flesh-loneliness is, most probably, only a not-so-interesting
sidebar.
The truth was we
couldn't place Anima. Much to my chagrin and shock, even when we
were able to get the thing into what I would have supposed to be sympathetic
hands, we got kind dismissals, compliments galore, but no takers. Roger
Giroux himself penned a quick note, calling the book a "spiritual cousin
to Confederacy of Dunces," but his house passed on it, seemingly
against his wishes, but it's hard to tell. And, besides, I thought, Jim
Nozoufist could write rings around that poor dead Louisianian. If he were
alive, I guess I mean.
I was flummoxed.
I was confounded and astonished. We tried half a dozen major houses, both
Sherri and I calling in whatever tenuous connections we boasted and received
little or no encouragement. Could it be that I was wrong about Anima,
about its place in the line of literature which went from Homer to Rabelais
to Sterne to Joyce and then, unerringly, I believed, to our own beloved
dement. No, I was not wrong. This was a hell of a book, a world-beater.
It was the times that were to blame. I was not the first to decry the
shallowness which had overtaken the culture, from idiotic TV, to bright,
shiny, big-spectacle movies as empty as raided graves, to art which only
imitated art which had self-consciously imitated art before it but at
least for a laugh, right up to and including the now conglomerate-controlled
publishing houses, where there were only acquisitions editors,
where there was the search for the next Bridges of Madison County
ongoing, but not the next Thomas Pynchon. I knew it. I knew it all. Maxwell
Perkins was dead, as dead as Marley. I knew it but I still hoped. Surely,
there was a place for genius still, a place for something as fresh and
new and invigorating as Jim Nozoufist and his cracked, portmanteau tome.
Six months passed
in this way. Increasingly frantic phone calls, faxes, letters, cold-call
visits to houses we only knew the names of. We worked out of Sherri's
apartment, where it was comfortable and clean and she cooked wonderful
meals of couscous and exotic vegetables. She told me to stop worrying
about money and I did, for minutes at a time, but things were not going
well. Soon we would have to admit that we had to look for work--continue
our ceaseless search for a home for Anima--but, at the same time,
do something, however menial, to pay the bills.
It was about this
time when I got a call from Cecilia Quisby. She was concise on the phone,
but not unfriendly, and she wanted the four of us to get together to discuss
the future of Jim's book. I was to pick her up at half-past seven and
proceed to her private club, where a dinner would be waiting for us, over
which we could make some plans on what to do next. It sounded good. It
sounded wrong. But, what choice did we have?
Also, she added,
could Ms. Hoving pick Jim up, and she rattled off a quick address.
I arrived at Two
Towers at seven fifteen, dressed in my best suit, which was a poor imitation
of good grooming, nervous as sunlight. This time the doorman parted the
waters for me immediately and I proceeded up to Cecilia Quisby's wondrous
place of residence, feeling like a kid on a first date.
Knowing my early
arrival was rude I rapped lightly on Cecilia's door. It took some 90 seconds
or so--an eternity--before the door was opened and there stood Dame Quisby
herself. I had, of course, expected Lurch and was embarrassed to find
Cecilia at the door dressed only in a housecoat, albeit a sheer, sparkling
housecoat. The shins which showed beneath the elegant hem of her garment,
though aged, shone like ambergris and her toenails were painted a pale
shade of lavender, which made my heart do a sad drumroll.
"I'm so sorry I'm
early," I sputtered.
"Nonsense," she
said, waving me in.
I shuffled in,
a child, a nullity in her reflective radiance.
"I'm afraid Noah
is off for the evening, so if you could just make yourself comfortable
while I dress," she said gesturing vaguely toward all that was hers.
"Certainly," I
said.
She wafted away
toward her bedroom and I spent some time examining the art on the walls.
All the names were familiar. All the paintings were authentic.
"We're not having
much luck with Jim's book," she called from the recesses of her apartment.
It was a statement, almost, but not quite, a challenge.
"No," I admitted.
I began my rant about the unappreciated prophet, the overemphasized profit,
etc. She cut me off with a reverberating contralto.
"La di da, Todd,"
she sang. "You underestimate yourself. You have literature in your veins."
I let a few moments
pass. I had no answer.
"Is that not true?"
she asked, this time the challenge more clearly delineated.
"Well, I've tried
all I know. I've called in all my markers. I've--"
"Todd. Todd, come
here," she spoke, as if I were her stubborn spaniel.
I walked slowly
toward the doorway to her bedroom. I didn't want to go there. I was sore
afraid.
I stood in the
doorway but my eyes were on my shoes.
"Look at me, Todd,"
she commanded.
I raised my face,
knowing what would be there. Cecilia Quisby sat on the edge of her bed
putting her stockings on. They were the kind that stayed up only by the
magic of their darker top halves. I was looking at quite a bit of the
fifty-year-old Cecilia Quisby and I was thoroughly impressed by what she
was showing me. Her body, covered here and there with bits of lace and
whalebone perhaps, was a wonder, for all its wrinkles and extra flesh.
The places of extra flesh seemed derived from Elysian fields, fruit from
the garden Adam was born in. I could not help but survey it.
Cecilia Quisby
smiled like a ring-dove. Her remonstration was temporarily halted so she
could address this new question, the question of what she was going to
do about the lust she had engendered in me.
"You don't think
I'm too old and used," she said, a hint of insecurity in her voice, but
a voice which quavered like a taper. She lightly spread her arms and revealed
herself all the more. She was an aged Delilah, but the temptations were
nonetheless irresistible.
"You're the most
beautiful thing I've ever seen," I said. And I meant it.
"Come here, Todd,"
she said, and, of course I did.
I stood next to
the bed and she wrapped her arms around me and put her cheek on my zipper
and held me there like a queen making time-honored use of some hierodule.
I ran my hands over what parts I could reach-shoulders, her slightly furry
cheeks, her still glossy though graying hair, the tops of her bare breasts-but
I felt as if I were straighjacketed.
What happened between
Cecilia Quisby and me should not be made public knowledge. Things occurred
in that plush and mirrored bedroom which I will forever want repeated,
will forever be tortured for wanting them repeated. She was a remarkable
woman.
After our athletic
endeavors Cecilia Quisby begged off on the remainder of the evening, citing
fatigue, headache, surprise, new things she would have to digest.
"Could we do this
tomorrow night?" she asked from amid her pillows and silks.
I hoped for a moment
she meant, well, at any rate, she meant the dinner/meeting.
"Of course," I
said. I bent to kiss her on the cheek as I left and she turned slightly,
I thought away from my lips, but perhaps it was just an awkward parting.
I left feeling wrung out. I had at least, for the first time in a while,
if only for an hour or so, forgotten Animus and the pledge that
hung over me like the sword of Damocles. I forgot it until I arrived at
Sherri's and found her in tears, her clothing torn, a bruise swelling
up under her left eye like an ugly toad.
When she lifted
her face to me it brought a more frantic flood of tears. She sobbed like
a nun with stigmata, my name spewing from her blubbering like a curse.
"Wh-where were
you?" she asked.
"Picking up Cecilia-what
the hell happened?" I sat down by her and put my arms around her only
to be pushed away.
"He tried to rape
me, you shit," she managed to get out.
"Who?" I said,
automatically, though I knew. Of course I knew.
"That beast, you
selfish jackass. That goat-footed author of that horrid, horrid book.
I never want to see him again. I never want to see you again."
"Sherri, you don't
mean that," I started.
She was suddenly,
fiercely calm. She looked at me with the face of an unrepentant killer
about to be electrocuted.
"I do, though.
I mean it. He attacked me. He thought it was part of the deal. God knows
what goes on in that beastly mind of his. And you, while you were sporting
with that rich--" here tears took over again.
"He told
you that, that I was bedding Cecilia Quisby?" I sputtered in mock outrage,
my face coloring with shame.
"Get out, Todd.
That animal tried to put his thick dirty prick into me and I will never
forget that and never forgive you for it. Get out."
I started another
weak protest but I was beat. I was beat all to hell. I didn't know who
I was, where I was from, who was on my side or who wasn't, or even if
I was on my own side. I wandered out onto the rebarbative sidewalks and
meandered around for a few hours. I was as loose as the trash blowing
up Fifth Avenue. I was as pointless.
What
had happened was this:
Jim Nozoufist and
Cecilia Quisby, apparently in frustration over our impotence, our ignorance,
our inability to get Anima published, had re-established contact
with Ardent Publishing and J. Quillmeier and had signed with him (in apparent
disregard for the contract Nozoufist had with us, but we were weak as
kittens afterwards--we were cowed, subjugated--and they knew it) to bring
the novel out as the sole offering from Ardent in the Fall of that year.
They also, coincidentally, had made a more personal, more vindictive pact
to humiliate us, use us, show us that power in the circles they frequented
had to do with who had whose dick. In the case of Cecilia Quisby's seduction
this amounted to a fairly memorable and aristocratic, almost feline, display
of how a woman controls a man, how she has him like a leopard on a leash.
In the case of
the less sophisticated Jim Nozoufist this amounted to a savage attack
on Sherri that included tearing her blouse and blackening her eye. Sherrifa
Hoving would never press charges, for her own personal reasons, which
I can only guess at. Shortly, after this, I heard she moved out west and
was working for one of those fancy- book houses, the one which makes a
living publishing books of immaculate glossies of baby-boomer memorabilia,
books for Architectural Digest coffee tables, gorgeous books, empty as
skulls. I never heard from her again.
Ironically, sadly,
Anima, was never published. Either Cecilia Quisby and J. Quillmeier
made their own secret concordat and shelved the book for reasons of their
own or they came up with a better plan.
Six months later
there appeared on the literary horizon a new publishing house, Quillmeier
Books. Its sole first offering was a potboiler entitled Run for It.
You know the story. It went into multiple printings, launched the publishing
house making James and Cecilia Quillmeier the toasts of bookdom, sold
to the Book of the Month club, went to NAL for a cool million mass market
rights, and the movie version, starring Bruce Willis and Natalie Portman
was said to be filming in Chicago, where they were having script problems
which was to delay the actual release of the film until the fall of the
following year.
Run for It,
the book, was seemingly everywhere at once: in every chain bookstore window,
in every glossy magazine's book review section, no matter how perfunctory
(People called it "John Grisham with extra adrenaline."), in the
laps of every commuter. Its author, a James Skald, had his handsome kisser
spread across America like a new brand of cereal. Or a new hostage crisis;
he practically had his own theme music. He was on Oprah, he was on Charlie
Rose, he was on NPR.
And James Skald,
household name, with a face now as familiar as Dan Rather's, seemed to
have come from nowhere. He had a burnished, prizefighter's mug, somewhat
ruddy, perhaps freckled (it was hard to tell through the makeup and TV
lights), and his clean-shaven jaw was as chiseled and well-cornered as
a bank building. Still, if you squinted and held up Time's cover to the
right light you could see a bit of wildness there, underneath the well-groomed
and artificial map. Somewhere under the sleek surface of that face which
had been configured for television to consume and disseminate there was
something almost sinister, almost feral. It's the beast inside man, I
guess. We all have it.
But,
some nights, here in Pittsburgh, where I moved and got a job at another
bookstore, some late nights, when I'm lonely and I'm thinking about the
snake-like shapeliness of Sherri Hoving or the delights of Cecilia Quisby's
venerable body, I'll pull out Anima and read sections of it to
myself. Or aloud if I've had a couple of drinks. Or sometimes even over
the phone to family or friends back home, who wonder why I've called after
all these years just to spout off some baffling jabber into the plastic
receiver they clutch to their ears as if they expect real communication
from it.
And I marvel, still,
still I marvel, at the magisterial sentences, at the distilled but cockamamie
wisdom, at the fantastical, magical, misbegotten, empyrean otherness
which is this novel, Anima, destined to die with me, to know only
the life which I bring to it.
