by Bill Gaston
Theo caught himself memorizing the address. Why in heaven’s hell would he want to hear Ott again? That time twenty years ago had been so horrible. He thought about it still. The spectacle. Ott singling him out, shouting, emphasizing the “you.”
Since then, Theo hadn’t bought any of Ott’s books. In bookstores he found himself avoiding looking at their covers. Eight o’clock, Theo whispered, scanning the poster.
Also he hated readings on principle. He never went to one voluntarily. In the four years at this university he had often been forced by committee — risk to tenure was never mentioned, but there it was — to take on the chore of hosting yet another minor writer. A campus tour, dinner, then the reading itself, Theo sitting with ten or so self-conscious others in a sterile room of empty chairs, wishing he had a bottle of wine, a magazine, or — blasphemy, given what he did for a living — a mini-TV so he could watch the ball game.
Even that first reading, long ago, had been reluctant. It was a date, a first date, with fellow grad student Oona. A prof had mentioned a reading by some new writer named Ott and, later that night, there they were, driving to the suburban library, neither Theo nor Oona wanting to be the one to venture that this idea sounded a little dry. They’d been coolly discussing how the word carnal formed the hot root of the carnivalesque, and both wanted nothing more than to find a bed somewhere, which they did eventually do, and did again and again for years until their sole reason for being together rubbed itself out.
Eight o’clock. A converted church. Theo stood before looming wooden doors, posters of Ott’s face taped to them. He’d actually done it. He’d come, once more, to hear Anthony Ott read.
People filed by as he stood at the threshold. He had not yet committed himself. He would ponder this a moment. Why had he come? Was he bored? No. Did he want to relive memories of Oona? No. Youth? No. He was proudly pragmatic. He never loved what wasn’t there.
So why? He felt a yawning in the gut. Ott had shouted, See you again.
Not that Ott could pull what he pulled last time, not with this many people — ten had pushed past him into the church in the last minute alone. The other time there had been just him, Oona and two old ladies. And Ott. In a windowless back room of the Valley Library, Ott had loomed over them there in the front row. The only row. Maybe that had been part of Ott’s problem, that so few had come to hear him read.
Bearded, dark, he’d had an Abraham Lincoln severity, without the height. His eyes were wise, but also mean. In an academic hierarchy logical to Theo at the time, Ott’s wisdom gave him the right to be mean. He’d looked at the four of them in turn, then shaken his head and, well, sneered. At the scant number perhaps, or at what he’d seen, or not seen, in their eyes. It had made Theo nervous and, for some reason, ashamed.
Ott read from what he called a work-in-progress. It sounded like poetry. Odd syntax, obscure allusion, images that when given close enough attention granted a rustle in some dusk-lit thicket of the brain. Actually, Theo didn’t listen much. Oona’s bare knee was against his. Theo answered her pressure. She increased hers. He his. At one point, with Ott ten minutes into it, Theo’s and Oona’s legs were shaking in a push-of-war, and they were trying hard not to laugh.
Ott eventually finished, informed them that the book he had just read from was to be called The Lobe, then looked Theo in the eye and asked, loud, “Why did you come?”
“Me?” Theo asked. He couldn’t tell if Ott had seen their game-playing, or if the question was simply interest.
“Why did you come?” Ott asked again. His expression wouldn’t change.
“Ah, I wanted to hear you read. We” — best get Oona in on this, take some of the heat — “wanted to hear you read.”
“I’m nobody. Do you go to every reading in town?”
“No.” Theo almost added “sir.”
“Tell me why you came. Tell me the truth.”
Ott leaned onto his podium and he hung out over Theo, barely three feet away. Theo felt his face go red. He shrugged.
“I don’t know.” He turned to Oona and tried a joke. “Hey, why did we come here? I thought we were going to Rocky II.”
“How long,” Ott asked, “have you wanted to be a writer?”
“What?” Why torture just him? There were three others here.
“You want to be a writer, don’t you?”
“No. I dunno. Maybe. I’ve thought about it.”
“So tell me a story.”
Theo laughed weakly. He looked over at Oona, and she grimaced in sympathy. He tossed back at Ott, “I’ll write one and mail it to you.”
“Come on.” Anthony Ott’s stare was now severe. “Tell me a story.”
“I can’t just —”
“Fucking tell me a story.”
One old lady gasped. Theo glanced over. She gathered up her sweater, to leave. The other old lady was smiling.
Ott loomed over him, relentless. What the hell. A story. “Once upon a time, there was a boy and a girl with nothing to do. What they really wanted to do was go play doctor. Instead they went and hear a big man read a storybook.” Theo wasn’t saying this out loud, of course. “The big man read his storybook a long long time and put everyone to sleep . . .” Some bizarre part of his brain was telling this to the main part that was shy and outraged. Here he was a minute away from sex with Oona in his parked car, and this monstrous bohemian was humiliating him.
“When the story was over,” Theo said to himself, watching Oona sort of smiling at Ott, “the man got very bossy and the boy began to cry —”
“No story to tell?” asked Ott. He was smiling sarcastically, packing his briefcase.
“— and he decided never, ever to buy that man’s books.”
Ott was leaving. Speak up now or forever hold . . .
At the door Ott turned and waved to the empty room, wearing a cheery smile. He pointed at Theo and said, “See you again.”
Theo stood at the church doors, still undecided, when a nondescript fellow, the host, likely a lit drone clinging to tenure like himself, came out and, though there was no reason to whisper, whispered, “We’re starting.”
Theo looked for a seat. The place was packed. Sixty or so people had come to listen to Anthony Ott. A single empty seat in the front row, in front of the podium. Anyone sitting in the front row would be Ott fans. Would people think that of him too if he took that seat, even if it was the only seat?
Theo made his way to the glaring chair. He made a show of scanning back over the room, and shrugging before he sat down. And then he pointedly looked at his watch.
Suddenly Ott entered from the side. He strode to the podium, dishevelled, preoccupied, utterly not nervous, as though this reading were just another of the day’s chores.
Theo stared up at the man. Twenty years. There was something obvious and repulsive about the bastard still.
Ott snapped open a battered briefcase and lifted out a stack of paper that he thunked onto a shelf inside the podium. Age hadn’t changed Anthony Ott much. A few pounds, some grey hair. Mostly, he looked twenty years wiser and meaner.
“I’ll read from a work-in-progress,” he announced, looking down, shuffling the unseen stack. Theo hated it when he couldn’t see the paper. He liked watching a pile dwindle, liked being able to tell how much longer the ordeal would go on.
Ott looked up suddenly, as if remembering where he was. He began searching the eyes of the audience. He didn’t hurry. Seat by seat, he met eyes. People began to shuffle. It was dreadful. Theo heard a snicker. Ott continued his scan. When he was almost through, almost up to Theo himself, Ott threw a match into the fumes of unease by saying, “I wonder why you’re here.”
The hall went into high fidget.
A vague dread had been growing in Theo’s stomach ever since he first sat down. When their eyes did meet, Theo knew. In relation to Ott, he was sitting in the same spot exactly as on that horrid night past. Theo jolted upright with déjà vu. His spine rang. They started at each other. It
was like decades had passed in a night’s sleep.
Ott’s eyes moved on. But his lids had lifted in recognition, Theo was sure of it.
“Anyone with ideas for a title for this thing of mine,” Ott announced, a sneer prying up his lip, “I’ll gladly consider it.” Some people laughed. “Not good at titles,” he added. More laughs, though Ott had sounded serious.
Ott began to read. Theo did try to listen. Readings were torture.
It went like this: Ott described someone named Marty, a man who saw people as “scared carcasses fleeing a death so inevitable it had somehow already happened.” Theo got caught pondering this notion and missed the next bit, about Marty reliving his mother’s breast whenever he smelled a certain fabric. Or when he felt a certain fabric? Angry to have missed it, he missed some more. Now Ott was onto someone named Lulu. Lulu was a girlfriend, a woman obsessed with birds ever since she heard they’d evolved from dinosaurs.
“. . . her mind cradled the freshly ancient miracle,” Ott read, looking up, “of a brontosaurus taking wing in the body of a tweeting finch . . .”
Theo half-heard all this. He was trying to recall Ott titles, none of which he’d read. The Chrome Harpsichord? Call Me 46? Weren’t those two?
Theo sat up with a jerk. Ott was staring hard at him, saying, “. . . the worst part was that in public places Marty loved to point out any big or little step and say to her, ‘Watch out. It’s a lulu.’”
It was a big-eyed, accusing look. The bastard. The arrogance. What right had he to single out a daydreamer and stare at him? This wasn’t school.
“. . . her comeback with a louder ‘Real funny, Marty’ always saw him instantly defeated, and recalculating the arithmetic of their love . . .”
Had Ott indeed recognized him? He was back reading from the page now. Or was he just pretending to read? His lips moved, but not his eyes.
What had happened that night? Theo had left the library with an ugly, unfinished feeling. Motives shrouded, meanings hanging. He’d told Ott he wanted to be a writer. It was the only time he told anybody that. He hadn’t even been sure of it himself until he heard himself say it out loud.
Theo had not become a writer. But neither was he jealous of writers, though Oona had accused him of this that night as he punched his bed between fits of lovemaking, cursing Ott. Oona assured him over and over that Ott hadn’t made a fool of him, that Theo had stood his ground. Yet all through their relationship, whenever Theo tore into any writer, living or dead (which was his job as a student of literature, after all), Oona would say to him, simply, like it was truth, “You’re jealous.”
He’d given it a try. But it was almost as though he was too smart for creativity. It was like he knew too much in advance, his brain a wary seer that predicted a mistake before it was even made. Theo saw this but could not stop it. Every good idea was analyzed to woodenness before it was typed down and, after several years of such trying, he quit. But he was not jealous. He’d admitted to himself without terror that the part of him that in childhood had been able to “make stuff up” was hidden from him, or lost. It was not a big deal. Intellect had overcome a certain instinct, a certain spontaneity. That was all. He was not jealous.
Eyes. Theo remembered where he was. Ott was staring at him again.
“. . . and the scabrous fur falling in handfuls from Marty’s dog Mica drove Lulu nearly wild . . .”
When Theo met his eye, Ott turned back to his pages. But it did indeed seem he was not reading at all. Theo hadn’t heard the crisply onomatopoetic flip of a page in some time now. Ott was merely talking. Or had he memorized his stuff? Was that possible?
“. . . it was birds she wanted. Birds. Birds! Flight. A pet at home in space. Not the mud blood bone tongue of dogs . . .”
Theo checked his watch. Ott had been reading now for almost a half hour. A decent reading lasted forty minutes. An excellent reading lasted thirty.
Theo hoped Ott would at least be decent. He waited for voice intonations to rise to a final peaking sentence. He recalled one poet he’d hosted who had read on and on, almost an hour and a half. It was always lesser writers who read longest. Once they lucked onto a stage they refused to let it go. Toward the end, over shuffling feet, the poet had read faster and faster, his face pale. Another thing about readings, Theo decided now, was that writers deserved whatever they got.
“. . . on his sixteenth birthday Marty received from his folks a truckload of dirt dumped in the back yard. He was invited to level it and plant the vegetation of his choice . . .”
So Ott had memorized this stuff. He was definitely no longer reading. He stared at the ceiling, or over the heads of the audience. And at Theo.
“. . . as far as the more exotic plants went, all he got was a single cantaloupe the size and shape of a cat’s head, those sleekly flattened and sinister planes . . .”
On and on and on. The reading approached the hour mark. The next time Ott eyed him, he would look pointedly at his watch.
“. . . it was Lulu’s magic with flowers that seduced him. She could entice from dirt blooms the likes of which no one thereabouts had seen, blooms so huge with colour they shrieked, were almost frightening . . .”
On and on. Perhaps Theo slept. Because, when it came, the shout from several rows back had the effect of jolting him awake.
“Not this time, Ott!” a man yelled. A chair scudded on the floor.
Theo turned with everyone else to see a young fellow with wild hair stumbling out of his row. He wasn’t looking at Ott. He made it to the aisle and stomped out of the church, mumbling.
Ott watched the retreating man. His voice rose as if following him out the door.
“Well. Suddenly, one day Marty just stopped growing things. He just gave up. Woe to him. Big mistake.”
Ott looked down again to his pages, though Theo was certain now he wasn’t reading.
“. . . his new hobby was no more than a distraction for his failure at flowers . . .”
“You win!” someone yelled just behind Theo’s head, making him jump. “That’s enough! You win!”
Theo turned. A hefty man behind him stood, red-faced, pointing at Ott. He held a suitcase. The airplane tags dangling from the handle looked fresh.
“I’m out of it!” the hefty man yelled. He shoved his way out of his row and clomped puffing out of the church.
Ott read calmly on. A tiny smile lifted the corners of his mouth.
“. . . distractions, one after another, blocking all light from a life. The travel, the TV and brownies and cookies and more of Auntie Em’s chili and cornbread and, my goodness, Marty spun like a top in his search for the next wee thing to fill his skinny time . . .”
Theo wondered hard about leaving. He heard others get up, some quietly, some with a grumble. He heard whispers of grievance, of attempted mutiny. He thought he could hear one man softly weeping.
Theo didn’t want to leave. He realized he was enjoying himself for the first time since it had started, over an hour ago. He looked at his watch. An hour and a half ago. Which was enough, he joked to himself, to make any man cry.
He sat back in his chair. Perhaps Ott had a kind of cult following, people who travelled to all his readings, like fans of the Grateful Dead. Theo swivelled and checked out the audience. About a third had gone. The remainder looked to be of two types. One group seemed confused. They sat politely but wanted to leave. This strange author had gone on far too long, they seemed to be thinking. The other group was more resolute, angry, used to it. They looked dug in.
“. . . there’s a twist to this tale, that will without fail, save us from ruin, as sure as the mail . . .”
God, the maniac was rhyming now. Theo listened. He heard iambic and dactylic, enjambment and inversion. Marty and Lulu kept popping in and out, as if to keep up the pretense of a story. But it all made a sort of sense, Theo thought, it seemed to be about something almost vital. Almost, well, personal. One’s dirty underwear, or something. Theo could not put his finger on it
. Whenever he thought he had, he realized he’d missed the next bit, the next clue, and his logic fell apart.
“. . . Marty went to bed. Marty slept all night long. Marty got up. Marty washed. Marty looked out the window. He said, Hello Mr. Sun. He had a good breakfast. Good Marty. Where was Lulu? Good Lulu. Lulu was not there. Lulu was not with Marty . . .”
This was some kind of challenge, Theo decided. The church was now a quarter full. A dozen people. One man was snoring loudly, but it sounded fake, a provocation. Ott kept going, looking perfectly at ease. Twenty minutes later the snorer left.
“. . . Lulu sat in her kitchen too. Picture a split picture. He and her, staring at their phones. Lulu’s phone is off the hook. She knows that Marty knows it’s off the hook. And she knows that Marty knows that she knows that he knows. And she knows that Marty knows that she knows that Marty knows that she . . .”
Theo looked up. He had decided. He no longer considered Ott a profoundly irritating human but rather a kind of natural force. An unclimbed mountain whose obstacles were boredom and spite. Ott walking in and opening his mouth had been a challenge from the start. An arrogant dare, a slap in the face with verbosity’s gaudy white glove.
Theo would meet Ott’s challenge. Whatever the game, Theo was going to win.
By midnight, four hours since the start, only Theo and one other man were left. Theo turned his seat around to study him. He was young, thirtyish, dressed in a blue track suit. He looked in shape. He looked prepared. He sat erect, eyes closed. He was either asleep or in the bosom of some Eastern discipline.
Theo listened and didn’t listen. Ott was now into Marty’s childhood.
“. . . with a pure innocence, Marty squished the frog. He was as innocent as the frog itself whenever it long-tongued a bug. Now it was frog’s turn to be a bug, Marty’s to be frog. Sacred teeter and totter. Profane reason had not yet intruded on Marty . . .”
Theo drifted in and out. Sometimes he sought daydreams so as to escape Ott’s words, some of which nonetheless slipped in and poked him. He tried to recall Oona but couldn’t, not her face. Parts of her body, yes. Which perhaps summed up their time together. He could recall the feeling of being inside her, as distinct from being inside other women. He could recall her voice too, he’d loved her voice. They’d had some good times. Lying in bed, no hurry, savage in their desire, no plan to life. How long you could sustain that kind of life was of course the whole —
