by Martin Amis
Gwyn's suite seemed as crowded as Coach: waiters, the hotel assistant manager, two interviewers, one incoming, one outgoing, two photographers ditto, two lady high-ups from Gwyn's publishers or its parent corporation and one publicity boy. The room was additionally infested with bouquets and bowls of fruit, presumably real but impressively fake-looking, and, at some unguessable level of authenticity, the excitement of increase, of reputable profit, the kind you get when commerce meets art and finds it good. Richard sat down near the publicity boy, who, he saw, was not only on the telephone but was physically attached to it: he had a thick wire circling his chin like a pilot's mouth-mike, freeing both his hands to cope with his laptop E-mail and all the other light-speed technologies they had wired him into. He was plumply handsome, the publicity boy, his backswept hair as darkly super-lustrous as an oil stain on a blacktop.
"I really do feel," Gwyn was saying, angling his head to accommodate the photographer who crouched at his feet, "that the novelist has to find a new simplicity."
"How, Gwyn, how?"
"By evolving into simplicity. By deciding on the new direction and heading for it."
"To where, Gwyn, where?"
"How about if we loop the Post guy," called the publicity boy, "and he can just watch you do the radio spot?"
"To fresh fields. Okay: the guy from EF can listen to me do the TV spot-from the audio booth. And pastures new."
"So have the signing after the reading but before the meeting.?
"Have the meeting during the signing. And I can get photographed while I'm getting photographed. Phyllis Widener. Richard Tull."
Richard knew from his Amelior Regained publicity pack that Phyllis Widener had a bold-print twice-weekly column in one of the New York tabloids: personalities, arts, local politics. Wry seniority was her thing; she was meant to be twinkly and unfoolable. That's what you got when you were old: experience. And maturity too. In person, Phyllis seemed to be the kind of American woman who had taken a couple of American ideas (niceness, warmth) and then turned up some dreadful dial, as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit- the range had no top to it-and just went on getting bigger and better as you lashed them toward infinity. Only her colleagues and superiors knew that the pieces she wrote, over many hours and many cups of strong coffee in her small and memento-strewn apartment on Thirteenth Street, often and increasingly turned out to be unusably vicious . . . Richard found a bit of hotel notepaper and a hotel biro and dragged up a chair. He was immediately rewarded with a good bit for his piece: Gwyn pausing mid-word, actually mid-syllable (halfway through "unsophisticated"), like a machine himself, when Phyllis's tape clicked off at the end of its spool; he sat there with his mouth open, on pause, while she replaced it. Meanwhile too it became clear that the energies of the publicity boy were directed not to the further accrual of publicity opportunities but to their radical attenuation.
"Unsophisticated approach, then that's their opinion. I prefer to liken it to carpentry."
"Are you a carpenter, Gwyn?"
"With wood, a poor one, Phyllis. With words, well, I have my molds and templates, my spirit level, my trusty saw."
"I think it's so beautiful the way you say that."
"You know. Pottering away."
The interview ended, and the room thinned out, and Gwyn, who looked fresh enough to Richard, went to freshen up next door. So he was left alone with Phyllis; he sat there, rinsed in her entirely embarrassing gaze, and duly began to interview Phyllis about her interview with Gwyn. After a minute and a half he had no more questions.
Preceded by the publicity boy, Gwyn passed through the room. He was expected downstairs in the restaurant, to be interviewed.
"I have been busy," he said to Richard, "on your behalf. How's your
schedule? There's a press interview in Miami and a big radio slot in Chicago. And a reading-signing in Boston. I was wondering if you could work them in.?
"Why's this?"
"I'm double-dated all over the place. I offered them you. It's all fixed."
Gwyn's was a non-smoking suite, on a non-smoking floor. Over half the hotel was non-smoking. Whereas Richard had dedicated his life to the cause of non-non-smoking. He had laid it down, his life. They sat in silence until Phyllis said,
"You two are old friends."
He gave an economical nod.
"You know, he admires your work deeply. I heard him. Telling everyone on the phone what a truly marvelous writer you were. He loves you very dearly."
"No he doesn't. He might want you to think he does."
Surprisingly she said, "You think he's trying to hurt you?"
"He doesn't need to. The world will do it."
You live alone, right? This was what the greeters and credit-card ratcheters of American hospitals said to the pungent phantoms of the reception desk-to those rendered unpresentable by neglect, to those singled out and quarantined by neglect. Phyllis looked okay. Richard didn't understand that much about other people. But he understood neglect.
"You live alone, right?"
She made her blue eyes rounder and her closed lips wider; she gave him rich assent.
"Never any husband or anything?"
It made him despair twice over. Because he had believed, until then, that he wasn't ready for despair. Suddenly Richard thought of Anstice- but saw himself living with Phyllis: rigid among the chintz and dimity of her bedroom, in new pajamas (the pajamas, perhaps, were a key part of this fresh beginning), with Phyllis leaning over him and applying a moistened washcloth to his brow …
"I'm sorry," he said, and sat up straighter.
"That's okay," she said. "Now can I ask about Gwyn?"
The piece she intended to write was going to be borderline hostile anyway-before Richard even got started. As it turned out, Phyllis's editor would get no further than the end of the second sentence before deciding, with a practiced shrug, that the Barry profile had better be quietly spiked. In fairness, Richard never thought that Phyllis's piece would be influential enough to be worth contaminating. He was just getting in shape for later on.
Broadly satisfied, he left Phyllis in the lift and returned to his room. Over a club sandwich he roughed out a 550-word review of Time's Song: Winthrop Praed, 1802-1839 and then curled up with AntiLatitudinarian: The Heretical Career of 'Francis Atterbury. At one in the morning, by which point his day was twenty-five hours old, he went out into New York. A brief turn, in his mack, along Central Park South.
He knew American fiction, and he knew that fiction, considered in aggregate, would not lie. For him, coming to America was like dying and going to hell or heaven and finding it all as advertised. Take hell: black fire and darkness visible, the palpable obscure-and ice, to starve your soft ethereal warmth: the anti-universe of the damned. New York was out there and he didn't have any time to think about it. But he knew, the instant he arrived on its streets, that New York was the most violent thing that men had ever done to a stretch of land, more violent, in its way, than what was visited on Hiroshima, at ground zero, on day one. He looked up. He looked up and saw no difference: the usual metropolitan sky with its six or seven stars weakly guttering. Raw land can do nothing about them but cities hate stars and don't want their denizens to be reminded of how it really goes with ourselves and the universe.
"So!" said Leslie Evry, settling back in the swivel chair with his hands interjoined behind his head. "What brings you to our fair land?"
Richard had to hear this again. This was great. The whole adventure had lasted five seconds. And here he was: wiped out.
"I beg your pardon?"
"What brings you," repeated Leslie Evry, with brio, "to our fair land?"
Richard had been asked this question several times already-by liftmen, by barmen. Now he was hearing it from Bold Agenda. He was hearing it from his own future. Of course, Richard liked to think of himself as a virtuoso of rejection; his history of humiliation was long-was long and proud. The humiliated are al
ways looking for consideration and getting the unconsidered, the offhand and ready-made. So Richard sat there, devastated, wiped out, by a reflexive banality from Leslie Evry.
"What brings me to your fair land? I somehow ran away with the idea that I had a novel coming out in your fair land."
"You certainly do. Seen this?"
He was handed a slender flyleaf or bookmark. On it were listed ten or twelve tides. There he was, near the bottom. Richard Tull. Untitled. $24.95. 441pp. Richard Tull recognized Richard Tull. The other names were not familiar, were in themselves unfamiliar; even the compilers of American telephone directories, he sensed, might have been impressed by their unfamiliarity. The only thing they reminded him of was the castlist of Amelior and Amelior Regained: Gwyn's identikit hominids-Jung-Xiao, Yukio, Conchita, Arnaujumajuk.
"Have you heard anything about any reviews or anything of that kind?"
"For sure," said Leslie. Smartly he flipped open a folder on his desk. "John Two Moons had some coverage in the Cape Codder. He keeps a fishing boat up there or something. And Shanana Ormolu Davis had a nice mention in the Shiny Sheet. In Miami. She's working with the hearing-impaired down there. At the Abbe L'Epee Institute?"
Two stamp-sized clippings were passed toward him. Richard looked and nodded.
"You know how John Two Moons got his name? It's kind of a nice story. Apparently-"
"Excuse me. What about Untitled?"
"Excuse me?"
"Untitled. Twenty-four-ninety-five. Four hundred and forty-one pages."
Then Leslie Evry did a terrible thing. He said "Excuse me?" again- and then lavishly blushed. "Not thus far. Insofar as we know."
"Is there a. prospect of any reviews?"
"A 'prospect'?"
"Is there anyone in the publicity department I should be talking to?"
"May I ask what this would be in regard to?"
In the past, Richard had often been known to be "difficult." Difficult was a word that applied to his person as well as his prose. Unfortunately, though, he soon failed to command much of an arena to be difficult in. There was surely no more elbow room for difficulty (difficulty was exhausted), he decided, after his yodeling stalk-out from the debating hall of the Whetstone Public Library Literary Association ("Whither the Novel?"). He stalked out because he was the only panel member who, in the cafeteria before the talk, had not been offered a biscuit with his tea. As he rode alone on the bus and, later, on the tube train, with his armpits ablaze, Richard recalled that he had been offered a biscuit. But not a chocolate one. Just a ginger-nut. And that same year he had to be expensively dissuaded from suing a reviewer of Dreams Don't Mean Anything for that dismissive filler in The Oldie . . . Richard considered being difficult now, and stalking out of Bold
Agenda. Then what? A few plangent inhalations, on Avenue B? Like all writers, Richard wanted to live in some hut on some crag somewhere, every couple of years folding a page into a bottle and dropping it limply into the spume. Like all writers, Richard wanted, and expected,the reverence due, say, to the Warrior Christ an hour before Armageddon. He said,
"Frankly, you surprise me. Roy Biv was full of ideas. As it happens I-"
"Ah, Roy! Roy Biv!"
"As it happens I've already fixed a few things. A reading and signing in Boston. I'm doing the Dub Traynor interview in Chicago."
"Dub Traynor? For the book?"
"For the book."
"Well that's great. Hey. May I introduce my co-director. Frances Ort. Frances? Come and say hi to Richard Tull."
Bold Agenda, as an operation, was still only half constructed. Frances Ort had not so much entered Leslie's office as wandered on to his floor-space. Behind her, big clean guys in overalls plodded about carrying sections of white wallboard. On arrival Richard had himself plodded about among them for a while, before finding Leslie. You could see how it was all going to look one day-cord carpets, white cubbyholes.
"It's certainly a pleasure to meet you, sir. I'm really looking forward to reading your novel."
"I was just telling Richard," said Leslie, "how John Two Moons got his name."
"I love this story."
In appearance Frances Ort suggested a rainbow coalition of the chromosomes. She could probably go anywhere in the five boroughs- Harlem, Little Astoria, Chinatown-and provoke no comment other than the usual incitements to immediate and rigorous sexual congress. In this she resembled her colleague. Ethnically, Evry and Ort were either everything and nothing or neither one thing nor the other. They were just Americans.
"Well. You know how Native Americans get their names."
"I think so. It's the first thing the dad sees."
"Right. Now. The night John Two Moons was born there was this beautiful full moon, and his father-"
"Was drunk," suggested Richard.
"Excuse me?"
"Was drunk. And saw two moons. Well they are meant to be incredible drunks, aren't they? Native Americans? I mean we're bad enough,
but they're…"
"… And-and his father walked out, by the lake, and saw the full moon reflected in the water."
"That's it?" said Richard. He was thinking about smoking, in directdefiance of the sign on the wall, which told him not to: not to think about it.
"Frances here has been working in Miami with Shanana Ormolu Davis," said Leslie, standing, and taking up position at her side, "updating-"
"How did she get her name? I beg your pardon. Go on."
"Updating sign language for the hearing-impaired. It's really interesting."
"African, or Afro-American," said Frances, "used to be this." She flattened her nose with her palm. "And Chinese used to be this." She tweaked her left eye slantwise with a childish fingertip. "And 'tight' or 'cheap' used to be this." She stroked her chin.
"Meaning?"
"Jewish. With a beard."
"Christ. I can see that needed some work."
"And a person of same-sex orientation," said Leslie, "used to be-"
"Queer," said Frances.
"Excuse me?"
"Queer. They're called queers now."
"Right. Queer," Leslie went on, "used to be this." He gave a languid flap of the wrist. "Can you believe?"
"And now what is it?"
"Queer?" said Leslie, turning to Frances. "What's queer now?"
"Queer? I think it's just sign language for queer."
"We've come a long way," said Richard.
"Too right," said Frances.
"Too right," said Leslie.
He took her hand. Or she took his. Or their hands joined. In a way nothing was expressed by this, no claim of love or friendship or even solidarity. But it still looked like sign language. Meaning the future, the next thing, meaning evolution, and Amelior…
Frances said good-bye and very soon Richard was being guided toward the stairs by Leslie, who was saying, "As hard as we're working here you can see we still have a way to go. Copies have been submitted for review. At the present time distribution is light going on minimal but if the reviews are perceived as positive then things may build from there. Can I ask you something? Are you just touring the States anyway'?"
Now Richard paused on the stairs. He saw no way out. "I'm writing a piece about Gwyn Barry."
"Isn't it amazing the attention he's getting?"
"Yes. Consternating. How do you account for it??
"I guess it's a book whose time has come. The Profundity Requital- that's the key for him. He's on fire. And if the Requital goes his way: abracadabra. Supernova."
Don't worry about it, he wanted to answer: the Requital will not go Gwyn's way. Richard was resolved. He owed it to Profundity. He owed it to the universe.
They moved on.
"I'm sorry we can't get out there more for Untitled," said Leslie. "But yet. If you so choose to do so …"
At the front door he veered off to the left, into a storeroom or junk room. There were sounds of mauling and tugging and dragging and his sudden and surprising "Shit!"
and then more dragging, until he finally flung a lumpy brown mail sack out into the passage at Richard's feet and came stumbling in on after it.
"You're doing readings, signings," said Leslie. He looked vivid- warmed up. "I don't know. You could care less, right? I don't know. There's eighteen copies in there. You feeling strong?"
What could he do? Untitled was his youngest, and probably his last born. The sack looked ragged, frayed, at the end of its tether. But Richard swung it up onto his shoulder. And he had to make it clear to Evry that he could lift it: that he was man enough.
"Boston. That your first stop?"
"Last stop."
"Oh. By the way. Great book."
It wasn't until now that Richard teetered, all his weight gathering on his back foot. "Thank you," he said in a youthful voice. "That's very kind of you. I did feel I was on to something. You don't think … I was worried about the penultimate bridging passages. You know: where the figment narrator pretends to attempt that series of decoy refocusings."
Leslie nodded understandingly.
"Because the travesty is a counterfeit."
"Yup."
"Not that he's really a narrator."
"Mm-hm."
"Reliable or otherwise. But he had to be a surrogate if the sham refocusings were going to seem to work."
"Absolutely. Hey are you sure you can handle that?"
