by John Crowley
“Gee, busy morning,” she said, extracting herself.
The phone insisted. Pierce followed her toward the door. “Call,” he said. “Call soon. I didn’t change the number!” The phone shrieked in rage. Pierce at last turned and ran to it, hearing behind him his door click closed.
“Hello!”
A pause, the confused pause of a wrong number.
“Hello?” Pierce said again, this time in his own voice.
“Oh. Pierce?”
“Yes.” He had a strange conviction that the woman who spoke was that woman in the country, the river cabin, the boat ride, Rosie.
“Pierce, it’s Julie. Did I wake you?”
“Oh. Hi. Hi. Yes, sort of, well I was awake but …”
“Listen,” Julie said. “I’ve got some news for you.” She paused. “Are you sitting down?”
“No. Yes. All right.” He carried the phone to the bed, and sat there amid the money.
“We sold it,” Julie said.
“What.”
“Good God Pierce we sold your damn book for Christ’s sake!”
“Oh. Oh. Good lord. Really?”
“It’s not terrific money.”
“No. Oh well.”
She named a figure of money that Pierce had no way of knowing was exiguous or generous. “Cockerel, though,” she said.
“What?”
“Cockerel Books. Wake up! And listen, listen. They want to do a trade and a mass market, so even though the advance isn’t huge, it could end up earning lots if it catches on.”
Silence.
“Pierce. Do you want to talk about it? You don’t have to do it. We could take it elsewhere.” An impatience had crept into her tone.
“No, hey, listen, let’s talk, let’s talk right away, but I’ll do what you think best.”
“They want some editorial control.”
“What?”
“I mean they think the book could do real well if it could be slightly tailored to a particular audience.”
“Crackpots.”
“Now now.” She laughed. “Not that at all. But they did mention some titles that have been big hits lately. Phceton’s Car. Worlds in Division. Dawn of the Druids. Books like that.”
“Hm.”
“They think yours might be like those.”
“You mean a tissue of lies?”
“Hey now.”
Not a tissue of lies, no; but it would have to be subtly degraded, almost certainly, in a way that material presented to a classroom, however simplified or schematized or highly colored, did not need to be: he would have to commit not only suppressio veri, but suggestio falsi as well. He saw with sudden clarity how the book he proposed to write would appear to a historian’s (Barr’s?) eyes; how it would have to contain pages that would seem simply fictitious, as fictitious as those pages of disposable novels that are mere transcripts of ordinary (but wholly imaginary) conversation, peppered with real proper names unsubtly altered. All right. Okay.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Let’s talk.”
“One other thing,” she said. “They don’t like your title.”
“No?”
“They think it would be misleading. And hard to file, too.”
“All right. Okay.” Pierce felt, in a general way, shot from a gun; it was hard to know, with the scenery changing so rapidly, what he was supposed to balk at, if at anything. “We have to talk.”
“I thought dinner,” Julie said, more softly than she had said any of her news. “Champagne. Oh Pierce.” A pause charged (Pierce could feel it through the earpiece, he could see her shining face) with clairvoyance of destiny. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it.”
When he had stood for a long time beneath a thundering shower, Pierce counted his money, the bills on the bed and what Julie had named to him, and made a few inconclusive calculations. He swept up the cash into its envelope, stripped the sheets, and after donning a T-shirt and a mohair suit (all his clothes were soiled) he filled a laundry bag.
“Good lord,” he said aloud, ceasing his gathering to stare into the iron day. “Good lord.”
He put his feet into rubber sandals, and fumbled change out of an ashtray; he went out and down, stopping at his mailbox and taking out a small handful of mail.
Didn’t like the title. It was of course the only title the book could have. He supposed that a red herring though could be interposed meanwhile: The Invisible College, how about. The Pneumatics. The Safe-Crackers.
The King of the Cats.
When he had got the wash churning queasily in a soapy sea beyond the porthole window of the machine, he looked at what mail he had, something from Florida, some trash, some booksellers’ catalogues, a letter in a minute and legible hand from the Faraway Hills.
“Pierce,” it said.
Long time no hear from. Thot you would like a word from out here. Its a quiet month my grandfather called tying down time. Everything is getting put away, tied down, nailed up etc for Winter. This will be my first whole Winter in this cabin. I put in 1 bag beans 1 bag rice 50 lbs spuds 1 bottle brandy powdered milk lamps shotgun etc just in case. Sheep are fine + send their regards. By the way I have heard that down in Blackbury Jambs there is a nice apt. that will be for rent soon. People I know are leaving in Feb for the coast. 2nd floor, nice view sun porch fridge etc. Just thot I would throw that in. Be nice to have you in the county.
It was signed, “All best, Spofford,” and there was a postscript: “The Muchos have filed.”
Pierce read the whole of this letter twice, and then sat in thought with it in his lap until his clothes had to be moved from machine to machine; and then, as he sat watching his empty pants and shirts signaling to him wildly as they were flung around, he realized with a slow-breaking and astonishing certainty that today, this day, was his birthday. He was thirty-five years old.
Pierce Moffett, even back in those days when he had stood on his rooftop on the giddy edge of assenting that the cosmos was in some sense a story—that the universe was a cosmos—still would not have supposed that the story was in any concrete way his story, or believed that his own individual fate might be discernible in the harmonies he began to hear, the geometries he began to see. In fact it had come as a surprise to him to learn that most people who take an interest in auguries, clairvoyances, and astral prophecy do so not in search of some general illumination about the nature of life and thought and time, but in hopes of finding guides in them for action, Cliff’s Notes to the plots of their own lives. Julie Rosengarten, for instance, had always read them so. But Pierce—if, one morning as he walked the city, a safe had fallen on him out of an upper story, cutting off his tale for no apprehensible reason and without the least foreshadowing, he would not, so to speak, have taken it amiss. A profound conviction that his fate was far more subject to accident, blunder, and luck than to any logic, cosmic or mundane, a conviction that long predated his occult studies, had also survived them easily.
On the other hand, sometimes the omens can call out so clearly that even such a one as Pierce has to take notice.
That very day, the day of his birthday (his birthday!) he did make a vow; a vow that he would never have thought himself capable of, but made with all the small strength left him by the morning; a vow of abnegation that was the least he could offer up in exchange for what had so suddenly been showered on him. That’s it, that’s it, that is it: from now on he would dedicate himself to furthering only his own fortunes, and would not fritter away in the hopeless pursuit of love any more of the gifts apparently reserved for him.
A week later, with a vengefulness delicious and vivifying, made more vivifying by the tinge of fear that colored it (for he didn’t really trust his future to remain in sight for long), he returned unsigned to Earl Sacrobosco his contract for the spring semester. He needed time to work on a special project, he said, that would require some difficult research, the right hand of scholarship as teaching was the left; and since sabbaticals were not on off
er for the untenured help, he must regretfully etc.
There.
He wrote to Spofford in the Faraways, stating a January date when he might take another jaunt thither, and asking him to telephone the next time he found himself near an instrument, call collect, reverse the charges.
And at Christmas he bought as usual a small bottle of gin and an even smaller bottle of vermouth, and went across the black bridge to Brooklyn, to visit his father Axel: and to break, if he could think of a way to do it that was both clear and not hurtful, the news to him.
EIGHT
Twenty years before, Axel Moffett had won a good amount of money on one of the high-rolling TV quiz shows then popular. His field was Western Civilization, and he had the advantage of knowing and loving deeply all the hoary anecdotes and Great Moments and imaginary Turning Points and romantic incidents in the supposed lives of the supposed heroes of that civilization, from Alexander and Boadicea to Napoleon and Garibaldi; Pierce, schooled in a more scientific history, would have done far less well. There were no essay questions asked, and Axel, though shaky on exact dates, could almost anticipate, as soon as any question was begun, which of the relatively small number of great stories was being fished for. To an uninstructed audience, though, his knowledge must have seemed unimaginably wide; it had seemed so, for that matter, to Pierce, fourteen years old, watching his black-and-white and strangely reduced father answer firmly what Austrian had briefly been emperor of Mexico (Axel had loved the movie, poor poor Carlotta, and Brian Aherne’s soft and hopeless eyes). Around the TV in Kentucky, they all cheered, except Pierce’s mother, who only shook her head smiling, as though it were only another unfathomable oddity of her husband’s, only another to be forgiven and forgotten.
He got about halfway up the pyramid of cash on offer before being stopped; the producers decided that he was too queer a fish to be allowed the highest prizes (though he had amused for a while, with his antique courtliness and his way of answering with blazing eyes and a loud of-course tone, as though he were being challenged). It wasn’t a question of rigging—Axel could not have been rigged, and ever after could reenact his horror and shame on discovering that others on that very program had been; it was a simple matter of asking him for a fact so obscure, so out-of-the-way, so disconnected from the Great Themes that a specialist would not have known it (and it was tried out on some). To the masses, of course, it seemed no more of a crusher than many others Axel had answered easily or anyway sweated out (What song did the sirens sing? What name did Achilles take when he hid among the women?), but Axel hearing it could only stand stupefied in his glass box without the vaguest guess, until the clock ran out.
What was odd was that Pierce had known the answer to that question.
He had listened to it asked—in the TV lounge at St. Guinefort’s Academy this last time—and had heard the tick-tock music begin that marked the time in which an answer had to be given, syncopated with a distant Ping-Pong game elsewhere in the school hall. He had heard, unbelieving, the answer worth thousands unfold in his own mind while Axel stared. The music stopped; there was a moment’s grace, but it did Axel no good. From his card the host read out the answer, the same answer that had unfolded within Pierce; the studio audience mourned, Pierce’s schoolmates turned from the screen to look at him, some jeering, some curious, some groaning over the lost bucks. Pierce sat silent. Axel was led away after being commiserated with by the gleeful host, his stricken head held high, a look on his face, all lost save honor, that Pierce would never forget: if he had seen his father led to the block it could not have made a more heartrending memory.
He never told his father that he had known the answer.
The money Axel had by that time won seemed anyway a vast treasure; in retrospect it would appear almost trivial, as so many dollar figures of those days would, but it had been enough then to buy the pretty if shabby building off Park Slope in which Axel lived, and to which Pierce had been born. Axel had thus become a landlord, which he hated, but the building would support him without a lot of labor in the often mismanaged and sometimes dreadful years that lay ahead for him. Even now when its rent-controlled tenantry hardly paid the taxes and the most minimal of maintenance, it was somewhere for Axel to lay his head. That was how he put it to Pierce: “At least,” tears often blooming in his eyes, “at least somewhere to lay my head.”
This Christmas afternoon Pierce found him standing in the entranceway of the building, like a homeless bum taking shelter there (the comparison was Axel’s). “The bell’s broken,” he said, fumbling with the key, “and Gravely’s gone to his people on the island. I didn’t want you standing out here ringing, thinking I was gone, though where I’d be I don’t know.” Gravely was the super, a black man of great kindliness, even sweetness, who had been there since Pierce was a child; Axel revered Gravely, and Gravely called Axel Mr. Moffett; stooped, gracious, slow, and wise, he was one of the almost fictional characters that entered Axel’s life as though from the old movies he loved, and who had passed out of real life everywhere else, if indeed they had ever inhabited it. Pierce feared for Axel when Gravely was dead.
“Where I’d be I don’t know,” Axel said again as they climbed the stairs. “Where I’d be—I don’t know. Oh Pierce. The homeless on a night like this. The homeless man on this night of all nights. This night of all nights in the year.”
Pierce’s uncle Sam had described Axel once as “a little theatrical.” To nine-year-old Pierce (newly come to live with Sam) this didn’t communicate much, but after pondering it Pierce thought that maybe what Sam referred to was Axel’s habit of repeating, over and over and almost to himself, a phrase that momentarily struck him, like an actor rehearsing it, trying it this way and that way, pressing emotion or levity into it until it made him laugh or cry. Later on, other meanings of Sam’s description seemed more obviously intended, but still it was probably true what Sam also said, that Axel had missed the boat by not going into acting or Holy Orders, one.
They were greeted as Axel opened his door by a harsh shriek of Latin: “De mortuis nil squawk wheep!” Then: “Shut up, shut up.”
“Amazing,” Pierce said laughing, “how many parrots learn to say ‘shut up.’ I wonder why that is.”
“When,” said Axel with a look of exhausted patience, “are you going to take that thing away. Out. Out of my life.”
“Well,” Pierce said, “that’s sort of something I came to announce, in a way.” He pulled the small bottles from their snow-soggy paper bag. Because of his past history, Axel kept no liquor in the house; he drank only beer and a little wine in taverns. But at birthdays and Christmas he must have a martini, two martinis, to remind him of a more festive time, happier days. He was already at work with pitcher, ice, stirring rod.
“People drink them now on the rocks,” he said. “Horrible, horrible. That’s not a martini. Though I think the little sliver of lemon is a good idea. A twist. A twist of lemon. Really, Pierce, he should be returned to the jungle. It isn’t kind. He looks so shabby. He should be flitting through the jungle, the Amazon. Like a green thought in a green shade. He makes me feel like an old maid, something Victorian and dowdy. Dowdy. When when when are you going to take him away.” He was laughing now. “Liberate me from this enslavement to a bird.” He stirred. “Like a green thought in a green shade. Like a green thought: in a green shade. Libera me domine.”
Pierce sat on the colorless sofa, contemplating his bird and his old home. It had acquired a patina of Axel that had obliterated almost all that had remained in it of his own life and his mother’s here, even though very little had changed. The walls hadn’t been chocolate brown when he was a boy, but he didn’t think Axel had painted them so; they had just grown so. This sofa had once been a blue one he could remember; the framed etchings of cathedrals and the Cameron photograph of William Morris had once been pictures he had looked long at. There was even a lost pattern on the rug that belonged to his memories. It was all buried here, like an earlier Troy, ben
eath the tidy dirtiness, the rummage-sale and salvage acquisitions, the old-man smell.
“Libera me domine,” Axel said again as he brought the pitcher and two glasses. Pierce had to strip the twists from the lemon, Axel’s plump white tapering fingers were no good at such tasks, “nerveless” as he said; and rub the glasses with them, and then pour and present. It was like a hasty tea ceremony. Axel enjoyed it enormously.
“You see the glasses,” he said. They were tall and etched, with fluted green stems. “Venetian. Well not really Venetian, but like Venetian. Victorian copies, I suppose, maybe, possibly.” They struck Pierce as Woolworth’s, but he knew little about such things. “Off the truck, of course. The boys brought them to me. Here, Axel, you kinda like this fancy stuff, why don’t you take these, heck we’d just break ’em. They know, you see. They can’t really appreciate the things themselves, but they know there’s something there, something they don’t grasp. Beauty. Books: they always bring me the books. Hey, Axel, what’s this, I found this. And it was Rabelais in French, a little quarto volume, only one of a set, and I said, Yes, Teddy, this is a great classic”—kindly, grave, careful of simpler sensibilities—“and it’s in French, of a very old-fashioned kind. … You read that stuff? he said, and I said, Yes, I can make it out, I know the lingo. … Well, they tease me, they’re just honest hard-handed kids. Merry, merry Christmas, you know your coming here means a lot to me, a lot. Pierce. It means a lot.” He sighed. “Just hard-handed good simple boys. Rowdy. Rowdy.” He chuckled at a private memory.
“Are you guys making any money?” Pierce asked. He always felt loutish cutting across his father’s enthusiasms with questions like that, but he couldn’t seem to help it. He mistrusted this salvage business Axel had got involved with, a gang of Brooklynites who after work and on weekends stripped abandoned houses and tenements of copper and lead piping and whatever else of value they could find, under contract to the demolition men. They had a headquarters in an old firehouse they rented from the city, a place to get away from their wives and drink beer prodigiously; they were pledged to one another and to an older man called the Chief, a one-time Navy chief Pierce gathered, who ran the operation—so Axel’s stories suggested—in a manner somewhere between a scout camp and a gang of Villon thieves, though Axel insisted there was nothing illegal about it. Axel kept the books; just how much of the fun he joined in he didn’t quite say.
