by Dylan Hicks
“A marvel, isn’t it? From day one I was, as I like to say, aquiver for an Archer—please credit me if you have occasion to repeat that wordplay—but his gifts continue to astound me.”
Karyn was again at a loss. “An exciting time,” she said.
“Yes. Well, safe travels, Karyn. Till Winnipeg!”
May 2005
When Archer’s response finally arrived, it bore no signs of umbrage and no mention of the six-week delay. Sara’s work, he wrote ambiguously, was “extraordinary.” He hoped they could meet in person to revise the essay further. He would be happy to come to Buffalo, or, if she preferred, he would pay for her ticket to New York and put her up in a hotel.
He lived on the fourth floor of a brand-new condominium with a view of the Hudson. It was on Greenwich Street in the nominally disputed neighborhood variously called Hudson Square, West SoHo, or the South Village (real estate agents were keen to gerrymander it into SoHo). Until a few years ago, Archer told Sara as he handed her a glass of sparkling water, there’d been a garbage center just down the street. For a moment this seemed to summarize Archer: someone proud to live near a defunct garbage center. She drank her water nervously as he gave her a partial tour. The apartment didn’t seem to belong to a young man, at least not to any of the young men Sara knew, most of whom aspired in one way or another to hobohemia. The design was postmodern with a bricolage motif; there were many objects fashioned from cute, unlikely materials: stainless-steel dining chairs whose seats and backs were wavy beds of spoons, a desk lamp shaded by sewn-together sweater zippers, a jumbly chair made of old chairs. In a few cases Archer attributed the articles to their creators—the chair was by so-and-so, the clock by such-and-such. He had a talent for pronouncing foreign names respectfully, perhaps even accurately, but without a jarring change in his accent, so that the names seemed at once exotic and anglicized. There was no TV in sight, but he had an audiophile’s stereo system that Sara guessed cost about as much as you might make hanging drywall for two and a half years. The plinthlike turntable was spinning a record on which gnomes, it seemed, were forming a drum circle. A line of unpainted cement columns, an electric guitar, and a barely perceptible smell of burnt rice caucused for vestigial grit, but all in all the apartment was surprisingly clean and orderly, to an extent that Sara doubted could be wholly ascribed to professional help. Surprising because Archer’s appearance was untucked, his manuscript downright slobby. Midafternoon sun pervaded the large, open living room, where there were correspondingly large and vibrant paintings by John Currin and Kehinde Wiley; a panorama of Henry Darger’s Vivian girls in mixed poses of pastel victory and strangled distress; a hanging shark by the tire sculptor Yong Ho Ji; a photo of a street preacher by one of Archer’s friends; and three small, storybookish drawings by Marcel Dzama, a Winnipeg native whom Archer spoke of with a tincture of idolatry. People were depicted in all but the shark piece, Sara noticed, and she wondered if that signaled loneliness. She admired the Dzamas up close, not sure how admirable they were. There were three art history classes on her college transcript, but she didn’t trust her judgment of work not yet historicized. “I like how there’s no background,” she said. Archer reached for her glass, lightly touching her fingers, and asked if he could get her another water. She felt she had drunk the first one too quickly.
The first days after sending him the reimagined essay, she had checked her e-mail even more excessively than usual, feeling, each time her mail page loaded, a turbulence in her stomach made up equally of excitement and dread. After a few more days this gave way to the gastric calm of unalloyed disappointment. She had congratulated herself for putting in all that time with a blind eye to reward, but she hadn’t imagined being ignored by her one certain reader (and as the weeks went on, she realized that her eye had always been squinting at reward). Briefly she chalked up Archer’s nonresponse to restraint, then to cowardice and arrogance. Finally she blamed herself for going overboard on his piece, not knowing when to quit, falling prey to the same brakeless perversity that had driven her as a girl to keep painting and painting until she was looking down at an eight-by-eleven study of trampled goose shit. She had hoped that editing Archer would lead to a rehabilitation of her own writing, but in the weeks following her work on the essay, work that had already taken on an added glow of inspiration that she was careful not to dim by consulting the essay itself, she accomplished very little: she proofread a numbingly circumstantiated book about the racehorse Phar Lap, she updated her résumé, and she listlessly revised one of her doomed short stories. Her freelance services, never in hotcakey demand, were less sought after than ever, her main proofreading client having returned, supposedly, to doing the work in-house, while another reported that a novel assigned to Sara’s finishing pen had gone to press with several errors, including a cringingly Texan spelling of Jane Austen’s surname and a homophonic mishap in which a character was allowed to buy fancy linen stationary. The editor was reservedly forgiving about the mistakes, but the news was a blow to Sara, who if anything considered herself too scrupulous, too much the proofreader and too little the artist. Perhaps she was too little of both. She thought of her still-shaky grasp on the past-participial forms of wake, awake, and awaken, the scores of unencouraging rejections she’d amassed, often from online journals whose content pointed to editorial standards of rampantly open-armed unselectivity. Her fear that she would go to the grave as a marginalis of the publishing industry was being replaced with the fear that she wouldn’t even succeed at that. She was biding her swollen time. It wasn’t surprising to discover, one recent Monday morning, that her sole obligations for the week were an eye exam and a loose promise to help her mother make a chandelier out of milk jugs. So it was with considerable gratitude that she received Archer’s response letter that same morning, up to her elbows in rinsed-out plastic.
He returned from his Inspector Gadget kitchen, handed her the refreshed glass of water, and sat near her on a blue-gray sectional sofa, low to the ground and uncomfortable. He softened the music by remote control, making several adjustments until the volume was just right. They each had a copy of the manuscript. “So I really like what you did,” he said.
“Thanks.” The word came out croakily. “I took pains as well as naps.”
“My stepdad’s a big believer in the power nap.”
“Actually, I didn’t nap at all while working on your essay,” she said, “or even sleep much. But lately I’ve been overnapping. I used to say that napping was crucial to my writing process, but now I think writing is crucial to my napping process.”
He chuckled. “At first when I saw what you’d done, I thought it was a bit much.”
“Yeah.”
“But I’m into it now. It’s like you have a psychic sense of”—a boyish hesitation—“I think this is the piece I would have written if I were a real writer.”
“You’re a good writer. It just needed—”
“Yeah, I mean, I still think some of the best stuff here is from my original draft. But I know I’m not a serious writer, I know I’m a dabbler.” She tried to use silence and her shoulders to both contradict this and endorse its clear-sightedness. “I guess that’s one of life’s tasks,” he said, “discovering your limitations, trying to stretch them while also learning to accept them.”
“Yes,” she said. Perhaps, that night in December, she had imputed more arrogance to him than he really possessed. Maybe groups brought out his worst.
“Have you wanted to be a writer since you were a kid?” he asked.
“No. I wanted to be a vet. And you?”
“Hockey player.”
“Were you any good?”
“At wanting to be a hockey player?”
“At being one.”
“Pretty good. I got a lot of my growing out of the way early, so for a few years I was big for my age, believe it or not.” He dropped his eyes, apologizing for his slight frame. “And I thought I had a leg up, since my parents have some connections in
sports.”
That seemed a rather demure way to put it. She smiled.
“Well, they own the Manitoba Moose. But the Moose aren’t an NHL team, so—”
“Archer, I’m from Buffalo.”
“So you know hockey.”
Not well, actually.
“Needless to say, my nepotistic advantages wouldn’t have extended to the rink.”
“Just out of curiosity,” she said, “have you ever met Bobby Hull?”
“Yes!”
“He’s one of my dad’s heroes.”
“Mine too. More water?”
“I’m fine.”
“Girls, for the most part—would you say girls tend to have more realistic dreams than boys? Little girls and boys, I mean.”
“There are very few professional ballerinas,” she said.
“True, but I remember in elementary school how we had to write an essay on what we wanted to be as grown-ups, and most of the boys wanted to be athletes or rock stars or the prime minister, where the girls wanted to be things they could actually become—teachers, say, or vets.”
“Again, there’d be an alarming surplus of veterinarians if every animal lover followed through on her childhood ambitions,” Sara said. “Maybe more of those girls wanted to be pop stars and fashion models and the prime minister, but they thought they’d be laughed at for saying so, or they already thought they weren’t good enough. And of course they didn’t have as many role models as their male counterparts.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “You don’t need to run through the whole syllabus. And I think it’s good you didn’t become a vet. I liked that piece you had in Kinetic Pepper Mill.”
“Oh, thanks. That’s kind of old.”
“Anyway, I think we could get the essay published. A friend of mine helped start this cool literary journal. No guarantees, obviously. He’s not a good friend, and to be honest he turned down something I wrote last year. He’s a fuckwad, in a way. But he’d look at it.”
“When you say we could get it published, what do you mean?”
“I mean I could get it published.” He had his hands on the back of his head and was drumming with his thumbs. “But I want to pay you for your work.”
“You don’t have to do that. You didn’t hire me; you just asked me to look at something as a friend.”
“Were we friends? I mean, I hope we become friends, better friends,” he said. “The point is, now I want to submit the essay for publication, and it’s almost as much your work as it is mine.”
Almost!
“I’d like to pay you eight thousand dollars for it.”
“Eight thousand dollars?”
“Yes.”
She conquered a smile, not wanting to look transparently venal. She was humbled by the instant knowledge that she would take the money. That humbling, she supposed, was intrinsic to patronage, though this wasn’t quite patronage.
“That’s more or less two dollars a word,” he said, “which I understand is the going rate at the top glossies.”
“I hear Norman Mailer gets four dollars a word when he writes for Parade,” she said.
“But I think it’s a fair—”
“Kidding! Really it’s way too much. No offense, but I don’t think this is bound for a top glossy.”
“Well, obviously. Quite probably my friend won’t even take it at his nonpaying literary journal. But you should be compensated for your work.”
“That’s always been my contention,” she said, trying for breeziness. She felt hypotensive, as if she’d stood up suddenly after watching seven hours of televised billiards in a solarium. “Not about my work on your essay,” she added. “In general.”
“I know what you’re saying. I agree.”
She pointed at the stereo. “Is this Devendra Banhart?”
“No, it’s the Incredible String Band, but I’m pretty sure Devendra was influenced by the ISB.”
“Don’t you think you should use the active voice there: the ISB influenced Devendra?”
He looked at her warily.
“Kidding again.”
“Ah, that’s good, you got me,” he said, touching her arm. “That’s good. They’re my favorite band. They were doing some reunion shows in the UK a few years back, and I even followed them around for a while.”
“Yeah? Do you people have a special name, like Deadheads do?” It was a relief to talk about something other than money.
“Not that I know of,” he said. “I think you can just add head to any band name or abbreviation.”
“An unwieldy solution, though, for fans of Talking Heads, or Radiohead, or Edith Head.”
“Who’s Edith Head again? Is that the porn star?”
“God, you guys aren’t even properly furtive about your porn anymore. No, she was a famous costumer.”
“She made costumes for pornos?”
She laughed. “She did do the costumes for She Done Him Wrong: Mae West, Cary Grant, very hot.” She liked articulating the movie’s hotness in Archer’s presence.
“This is my favorite part,” he said as the singer lullabied over two arthritically changing chords. “Kind of an acquired taste, I guess, but they’re, I don’t know, so pure in their eccentricities, so . . . I wish I could describe how I feel about them.” He looked at her hopefully, perhaps expecting her to fire off that elusive description.
She listened out of politeness. Now the singer was warbling in unison with a sitar. “Well,” she said when the song ended, “if you want to pay me eight thousand dollars, I’d probably only demur one more time.”
“I could give you half now.”
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she said.
He walked over to an escritoire in the adjoining office, sectioned off by a screen of what looked to be a bamboo-based composite, and pulled out a checkbook from a pigeonhole. “Is it Crennel with two n’s?” he asked. She said yes, and he reached over the sofa to hand her the check. Its dimensions exceeded the currency-sized norm.
“Sorry,” she said, “but this says ‘Crellen.’”
“What? Jesus.” He wrote another check and returned to his place on the couch. Now he was leaning back more, for a few seconds trying to rest his feet on a coffee table that had been placed deliberately beyond the reach of all but the very long-legged. “Of course there’s still more work to do. A lot of what’s here”—he tapped the manuscript with his pen—“isn’t . . . how to put it? . . . It’s not true.”
“But what is truth?”
“Though some of the made-up stuff is remarkably close.”
She pushed her hair back. “Goethe said something about Elective Affinities, that it didn’t contain a line that hadn’t been experienced, but no line the way it had been experienced.”
“That’s cool. The key, I think, will be nailing down which of the false claims are, like, artistically indispensable, then which of those could be disproven. A few tweaks here and there and I’d say we’re golden, but we’ll want to be careful. Oh, I should have you sign a nondisclosure.” As it turned out, he already had one prepared. “And if the essay does get accepted, I’d want you to respond to all editorially directed changes. Posing as me.”
“I’ll try to write in a deeper voice.”
He ignored her admittedly lame joke. “I opened a new e-mail account for writing stuff,” he said, writing down the address. “The password is sarcher.”
“That’s a terrible password.”
“It combines our names.”
“I see what it’s doing, but it’s totally insecure.”
“Sara, we’re all inse-curr.” He said this like Kanye West. “On that subject, uh, this part you have about me being—where is it?—‘especially stung by and defensive regarding the criticisms of women’?”
“Yeah.”
“I really don’t think that’s me at all.”
“It could be argued that your objection proves the point.”
“Maybe, but—”
“We’re trying
to create an essayistic persona, right? Maybe you’re not like that in real life, but you are for the purposes of this essay. I think your essayistic persona—”
“Are you gonna say ‘essayistic persona’ a lot?”
“Are you gonna contractually prohibit me from doing so?”
“Probably not.”
“I think your essayistic persona should be nakedly forthright, uncompromising, unconcerned with what other people might think.”
“Wow, wouldn’t that be cool, huh?”
She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic.
“Also”—he flipped to page four—“I think male masturbation is more maligned today than female masturbation, you know, the male masturbator seen as abject, comic, lonely; the female, healthy, liberated, self-sufficient.”
“Frustrated that she can’t get off with her boyfriend,” Sara said. “Anyway, male masturbation per se isn’t ridiculed and maligned so much as its trappings: the porn and the blowup dolls and the crusty tube socks or whatever. And maybe female masturbation is portrayed differently by men because it arouses them. They can’t imagine that girls and women attach far more remnant shame to it than boys and men do. You see that cluelessness in, say, the pie bit versus the flute bit in American Pie.”
He nodded. “Let’s get that in the essay, the American Pie thing.”
“It’s not really a thing,” she said. “More like provisional blah-blah-blah, to be honest.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Shouldn’t what?”
“Be honest. Maybe watch the movie again and cook something up.”
She wrote a note to herself.
“I remember reading in Playboy that men rape themselves when masturbating,” he said, “when they should be making love to themselves. I tried switching to my left hand, but . . .”
She let him soak for a moment in quiet.
“But first things first,” he said. He didn’t have sleeves to roll up—he was wearing khakis with frayed hems and a Che-like T-shirt featuring a drawing of the Métis leader Louis Riel—but he transitioned into more systematic work by moving closer to Sara and fluttering his pen over the essay’s opening sentence.
