Which is more than we can say for the reverse, eh, Kerch?
You read “The Hourglass” ten years ago, chum; and made a point of mentioning how good it was every time we got together. I wrote that short story ten years ago, Jimmy! Ten fucking years ago! Nine books since. But by the mute testimony of your failure to mention even one of them, old friend now gone, you told me that it had all been downhill. Ten years ago, Jimmy. That was it, right? The one high spot and then nothing but mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, right? Too controlled, that’s what you used to tell me on the nights when we’d sit across from each other at the kitchen table, after your staff had gone to bed, when we’d sit and drink instant and reminisce. Too controlled, too cautious. There wasn’t enough wildness in what I put on the paper. Right? Right.
You had enough. wildness for both of us, Jimmy.
Jesus, I’m lonely without you. Christ, I’m glad you’re gone.
I’d stamped muddy spots a. round my feet. The tops of my shoes were covered. And I looked across the grave, through the rain that was coming down cold and nasty, and Jimmy’s ex-wife Leslie was staring at me. She’d cried so much her nose had swollen and closed both eyes to slits. She held her head to the side like a little girl who’s seen her dolly run over by a speeding car. I couldn’t hear the short, sharp thistles of her sobs, but those Audrey Hepburn shoulders went up and down, each intake of breath painful.
You had enough wildness for both of us, Jimmy.
I walked around the grave and stepped over the black, plush velvet, upholstered rope and scuffed through the pedicured grass to her. She could barely see me, but she knew who it was. We knew how each of us moved, even in the darkness.
I took her in my arms and she buried her face in the hollow of my shoulder. Her dress was soaked through and she was cold, heaving with sobs but not shivering. The weather report had said nothing about rain.
Every few years I was privileged to hold her like this. Usually she was crying. We fitted together, in this way, like ancient stones.
“Come on, love,” I said, over her head, into the rain. “It’s all done now. We’ve got to go put a lid on it.”
She spoke words I couldn’t understand, sending them into the fabric of my jacket. Then more words, two of which were Jimmy’s name and my name. And I turned her slightly, and started to walk her away from the grave site.
“I can’t go over there, Larry. Do I have to go over there?”
I said yes, she had to go over there, it was her due, it was the payoff for all the good times and all the bad times. I said I’d be there with her, and it would be quick, and then we could both go out somewhere and have a couple of dozen extremely potent drinks, and pretend the past was smoother and kinder than flawless recall permitted us to misremember it.
And the last of the limousines was waiting, and we let the chauffeur hold the door for us, and we got in and went off to Jimmy’s baronial mansion to hear the reading of the will.
And Kerch, left behind in the rain, went with us.
Jimmy had been having simultaneous affairs with four women, anyone of whom would have been sufficiently daunting to scare even Vlad the Impaler into impotence. One was an Olympic gymnast, no more than twenty years old, what is usually referred to as coltish, natural blonde naturally, and much given to scenes in restaurants where the maitre d’ objected to her carrying a coatimundi on her shoulder. Her name was Muriel. One was an authority on machine intelligence, in her early thirties, with what used to be referred to as “bee-stung” lips, a mass of heavy, thick black, lustrous hair the shade of thoughts for which one can be jailed without bail, and an intellect that made virtually everything she said incomprehensible to all but five or six of the finest minds on the planet. Her name was Andrea. One. was a Cuban actress who had fled Batista’s tyranny mere hours before an order for her arrest on grounds of moral turpitude was issued, whose exiled status in America had been guaranteed by the extension of said warrant whose grounds of moral turpitude had been upheld by Castro; not yet thirty, in appearance no more than twenty-five, she claimed to be Chicana, Puerto Rican, Venezuelan or Castilian, depending on what the casting director was seeking, with a pair of legs usually referred to as “terminating just under her chin,” with a voice and range that could have shamed Yma Sumac, and a temper that frequently manifested itself in a splendid right cross. Her name was Edith. One was a consumer advocate for CBS television, a former runner-up to Miss North Carolina in the Miss America contest, thirty years old, rather puckishly committed to a variation on the original Ann-Margret coiffure which, given all proper due, admirably suited her auburn hair, opinionated, contentious beyond belief, and directly responsible for a Xerox price rollback that had cost the firm nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Her name was Mary Louise.
I had been seeing Leslie for three years.
Not until six years after they’d married did Jimmy bother to ask if I’d been troubled by the heat-death of the universe. Simply never occurred to him to worry about it. Not that he was bone-stick-stone insensitive; no indeed: it was that he moved too fast for consideration of the emotional debacles at any given point along the scenic route.
They were living in Connecticut, near Crown Point, in a stately manse brought over from Thomas Hardy country, somewhere near Dorset, brick-by-brick, in the early 1900s by a Dutch robber baron who’d made his boodle in association with Elisha Otis on the development of the gearless traction elevator. It was one. of those fumed oak, parquet-floored, wine-cellared beauties all writers dream about owning; just the right setting when one receives the word that one has been awarded a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or an American Book Award, or a high six-figure purchase offer from Paramount. Two, and almost three, of those came to Jimmy in his stately manse. I was writing a lot of book reviews for The Village Voice and Kirkus.
He called late in the afternoon; the last spear of light permitted entrance by the surrounding buildings, had almost vanished from the airshaft, and I sat in gloomy relaxation trying to decipher the Mayan Codex that Doubleday charmingly called a royalty statement.
“What’re you up to?” he said, without identifying himself.
“I’m locked in nonorgasmic congress with Doubleday’s bookkeepers. It’s the first time I’ve ever been fucked by a mindless octopus.”
“How about dinner?”
“When, tonight?”
“Yeah. I’m in the city. You free?”
“According to my royalty statements that’s exactly what I am.”
“The new book isn’t doing well?”
“How could it? They must have taken the entire printing, loaded it on barges, floated it out the Narrows and deep-sixed it. Weighted down, no doubt, by the excess profits from their latest bestselling cookbook.”
“You don’t sound like the man to cheer me up tonight.”
“Sure I am. You can spend my last exuberant evening with me before I establish residency in the nearest leper colony.”
“That would be the Carrville Leprosarium. In Louisiana. And they don’t call it leprosy any more. Hansen’s Disease.”
“Why aren’t I grateful for that information?”
“I could stop off at Abercrombie & Fitch on my way over, and pick up a nice big bell for you. Or maybe a cassette of Frankie Laine singing ‘Unclean, Unclean. ‘ Do wonders for getting you a seat on the subway during rush hour.”
Badinage. Brightalk. Never a discouraging word, and the deer and the antelope play. The ritual incantations of those who had resonated to Salinger. I still had my red baseball cap in the bottom of a carton of old clothes, at the back of the bedroom closet. Nostalgia somehow cannot survive the smell of mothballs.
“I’m here; come on over whenever you’re free.”
“About an hour. We’ll go have a steak. I’m paying.”
I smiled. Naturally, you’re paying. With a five thousand copy printrun of Laurence Bedloe’s most recent astonishment, The Salamander Enchantment, rapidly being carried by salutary sea-currents toward the
Bermuda Triangle, naturally you’re paying for steaks. Now if you’re up for Twinkies and Hawaiian Punch, I’m paying.
“See you when you get here.”
“Take care.”
“So long.”
I listened to the dial tone for about two minutes. Then I sat in the growing darkness, thinking about Arctic tundra. somehow it didn’t make the Carrville Leprosarium seem more attractive.
After a while the doorbell buzzed and I put on some lights and let him in. He had the look of a man who had broken some vows.
“I need a drink,” he said. He fell into the rocker with the leather seat, toed off his loafers, and sank down onto his spine, eyes closed. “By the unspeakable name of the slavering hordes of Yog-Sothoth, though Allah be the wiser… I do fiercely need a drink.”
“Can be done, chum. Give it a speakable name and I’ll put it in your paw in moments.”
He rubbed his closed eyes ferociously. From inside his hands he mumbled, “Any damn thing. Largeish, if you will.”
I went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard and gave the cognac a pass. This looked like heavy weather drinking. I poured Wild Turkey into a big water glass without benefit of jigger, tossed in a single ice cube, raised the level with a little tap water, and carried the BomDer’s Moon back into the living room.
Jimmy was sitting on the floor, in the darkness near the window. I couldn’t see him that well, but I could hear him sobbing. I think I grabbed for the doorjamb to steady myself. In the fifteen years we’d been friends, I’d never seen him cry. I’d never known him to cry. I’d never heard anyone mention that they’ d seen him cry. It had never occurred to me that he might one day, in my presence, cry. I didn’t even know if he was able to cry.
He didn’t know I was there, staring at him.
Very quietly, I carried the glass over to him, put it down beside his crossed legs, and I went back across the room and sat just outside a pool of lamplight, my face in darkness. I had, no idea what to do, didn’t want to say something wrong, definitely didn’t want whatever I finally said to be banality or homey homily; so I waited. Eventually, it seemed to me, he’d stop, take a drink, and we’d talk.
Eventually he stopped, noticed the glass, reached for it slowly and drank long and deep; and then he looked around for me.
“Here’s a new one for you,” he said.
I spoke softly. “Not so new; I do it all the time.”
A marvelous waiting silence resumed.
Quite a while later he said, “I never asked you: were you pissed off at me for marrying Leslie?”
I thought about the right answer. Not necessarily the kindest answer, or the most polite answer, or the truthful answer, just the right one. “I think we were about done with each other.”
“That’s no answer.”
“It’s an answer. You want others, I can make up others. But that’s definitely an answer.”
More silence. He finished the drink, I went in and threw a lot of cubes in a mixing bowl, brought the bowl and the bottle, and set them down in front of him. He worked at it slowly. Neither of us would end up alcoholics: we weren’t passionate enough about the juice. Oh hi there, I’m recruiting for Richard the Lion-Hearted; we’re putting together a wonderful follow-up to last year’s big hit, The Children’s Crusade. This year it’s The Wino’s March on Mecca, from the people who brought you the Black Death. You’ll just love it—all the Sterno and Grand Marnier you can osmose. Whaddaya say?
Listen, I’ll talk to you later. You go save Mecca, I’ll have a go at writing the Great American Novel, and we’ll meet right next to the big lions on the steps of the New York Public Library two years from now. You can’t miss me, I’ll be the one without the Holy Grail.
“You know, I’ve always felt like your kid brother,” he said.
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
“Always felt faintly ridiculous around you. Loudmouthed, gauche, coming on too strong even when I was purposely speaking so softly I knew people had to strain to hear me.”
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
“You know I’m a better writer than you, don’t you? Not just sales… better. There’s heat in my stuff; it works, it pulls the plow. Better.
“For Christ’s sake, Larry, there’s nothing but cold dead air blowing through your books. They ought to hand out woolly mittens with every copy of your stuff.”
I thought about Arctic tundra. “Six months, Jimmy; just six months.”
He started crying again. “For Christ’s sake, Larry, help me! You’ve got it all together, you’ve got the answers, you’ve always had the answers. I don’t know whether I’m coming or going, I’m falling apart. I feel like I’m being emptied out, like a hot water bottle; it’s all running away from me. I’m going to kill somebody, I swear to God I’m going to run through the streets killing strangers.”
“How about some gin rummy, tenth of a cent a point?”
He got up, went into the bathroom and washed his face.
When he came back he sat down in the rocker, looking bushed. “You ready to talk about it now?” I asked.
He stretched his hands out on the arms of the rocker until the fingertips were just at the edge. Just at the edge. “This open marriage with Leslie is killing me. I can’t stand it.”
It was the first I’d heard of it. When he married her I stopped thinking about anything in that area. I never knew what went on with them in that way. I felt my stomach getting cold. That’s the way I respond to photographs of Dachau.
“So get out of it,” I said.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“It’s only six months, Jimmy.”
He started yelling. “Give me a break, will you? I’ve got nobody else in the world to talk to. You’re my best friend, maybe the only friend I can really trust. I’m talking to you, I’m asking for help!”
What I wanted to say was: come off it, Jimmy! You’ve got exactly and precisely what you always wanted. You’re rich, you’re well-liked, you’re urbane and charming; you’ve got a beautiful, intelligent wife, a big classy home steeped in authentic antiquity; everywhere you go they know you, your face is on the tube and they don’t hold you for The last fifteen minutes of the Carson Show; you go where you want, do what you want, you’re a workaholic under the weight of the Puritan Work Ethic, so you get off on slaving night and day…
You’re who you made you, Jimmy; so come off it.
Wanted to say that. But didn’t. Sat there and said, “Go ahead, tell me what’s happening.” Remember when you were a kid, how awful it was when you bit down on the tinfoil?
And he went on for about two hours, telling me everything about his life, and Leslie’s life, and my life, and about how dear I was to him because I was his role-model. All of this went in and flowed out again, and I must confess there were even three or four things that disgusted me.
And then we went out to O. Henry’s Steak House and had magisterial chunks of some King of the Beasts, and I put ketchup on mine and KercherOliver James Crowstairs, the best:. selling and critically acclaimed author winced and said, “That’s disgusting, Larry.”
And I said: “Chalk it up to improper toilet training.”
Jimmy’s baronial mansion was not the one in which he’d lived with Leslie. That had been Connecticut. This was Los Angeles. The Crown Point mansion had been brought over stone-by-stone from Dorset. This one looked as if it had been brought over ticky-by-tacky from the back lot at Twentieth.
But it had a “library.” Yes, indeed, it had a library that held the 37,000 books Jimmy had owned at the moment of his death. He read a book a day, summer or winter, bright or cloudy, naked or clothed.
And we gathered there, in the high-arched library, for the reading of the will, the last will and testament of Jimmy, beloved Kerch, American literary treasure.
It was not what I expected. But then, Jimmy never did the expected. There was an evening we spent together at a reception for the Brazilian ambassador to t
he United States, at the Spanish legation in Washington, during which Jimmy had a meaningful relationship with a gigantic silver Cellini tureen filled with applesauce…
It was not what I expected.
The room had been set up with deep, comfortable chairs all facing an enormous beam-television screen. The projector was hooked up with a Sony Betamax unit. An impish-looking man of middle height, wearing what was clearly a very expensive three-piece suit that had not been properly tailored to the slump of his shoulders, stood before the screen holding a document that was very likely the last hurrah of my friend Jimmy Crowstairs.
Despite the serious manner of the imp in the three-piece suit, intended I suppose to give the occasion the proper portentous ambiance, it was impossible to get away from a festive feeling in that room. Jimmy had been an inveterate collector—of everything. The library was floor-to-ceiling with books, almost all hardcovers, arranged alphabetically by author, from Aeschylus, Aldiss and Algren at the left of the topmost shelf of the first bookcase to the left side of the entranceway… to Zamyatin, Zelazny and Zola at the bottom of the last bookcase all the way around the enormous room at the right side of the entrance. But there were also glass cases spotted across the room, containing pewter figurines, Makundi sculpture from Mozambique, lacquered boxes from Russia, T’ang dynasty glazes, gold scarabs encrusted with lapis lazuli from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, scrimshaw from whaling villages in New England, Amerindian pottery, German kinetic sculptures flickering and strobing, ceramic statues from the Austrian courts, fantasy bronzes by Enzenbacher, Spacher and Rumph; and lucite easels with paintings: Kanemitsu, Stamitz, Pebworth, David Hockney, the Dillons, Wunderlich, Bash, Wyeth, Rothko, Kley, Campanile and Willardson. And in the dead center of the room was a nine foot tall model of the Abominable Snowman that Steve Kirk had designed for the Matterhorn at Disneyland.
No matter how hard the imp in the three-piece suit worked at it, he could not possibly overcome the lunatic frivolity of that yeti.
The five chairs were arranged in a semicircle. At the extreme left, already seated, Jimmy’s sister SylviaTheCunt stared straight ahead, folding and refolding the telegram that had commanded her appearance here. The next chair was empty. And the next chair. In the fourth chair sat Jimmy’s friend Bran Winslow, himself a writer, and probably the gentlest human being I’d ever met. He had not been at the burial ceremony. In the last chair, at the extreme right, sat Missy, which was short for Mississippi, who was—and for the past fifteen years had been—Jimmy’s assistant, good right hand, troubleshooter, basic office staff and Person Friday. She let no one call her a “girl,” even if the word Friday followed it.