St George’s lips opened and closed as though he were sucking on a lemon, while behind them he quietly moaned.
‘I sent Von Slyke a copy by FedEx,’ I went on. ‘I’m not expecting him to be able to identify it. I’ve checked all the obvious sources to see who might have done it.’
‘Sty-lis-tic-al-ly,’ he probed, ‘it’s what? Whom?’
‘It’s not Von Slyke or Aaron Axenfeld. And probably not Etheridge, either. It’s too simply written. Possibly Jeff Weber, or Dodge, maybe even one of the Leo-McKewens. Could even be Cameron Powers, though Weatherbury claims he found everything Powers wrote, little as it amounted to. Whichever it is, it’s early. Which, besides the subject matter, makes it valuable.’
‘Aes-thet-ic-al-ly,’ he felt me out, ‘it’s what? A trial run?’
‘You mean for Last Good Year for Cadillacs? It’s possible. De Petrie wrote so much experimentally and it could be preparation for the first volume of memoirs. Although,’ I quickly added so he’d know I knew, ‘I’m certain you must have gone through De Petrie’s papers with the finest of fine tooth combs.’
‘He … holds … things … back!’ St George surprised me by saying. Four words, each one syllable each. I took the emphasis. ‘I can’t … say … what … he holds … back,’ St George added, again monosyllabically, with great sadness. I could understand the emotion: St George was supposed to be De Petrie’s literary executor.
Irian St George’s face seemed to suddenly sag in despair in front of me and for the first time ever, and only really because of the strangely direct overhead illumination of the restaurant, I wondered if he used a make-up base on his face. I’d long ago concluded that his mustache was dyed, well, partly dyed to look lyart. It was black, with one stripe of white, while his cropped short and quite receding head of hair was steel gray. The mustache color had to be fake. But it fit so perfectly to St George’s look, bringing out his soft, as though furred, ebony Arabian Nights eyes, his perfectly arched eyebrows, his long, bulbous yet sultanically aristocratic nose, that I never before cared if he painted it twice a week before a bathroom mirror.
‘I’ll show the MS to you,’ I offered.
‘E-ven-tu-al-ly. At the moment, you must find out who wrote it, and how you may u-til-ize it to best advan-tage. Before even your thesis. Say in a smaller paper, a few thousand words or so, placed in the Modern Language Association Journal … or even in the ex-treme-ly fash-i-on-able Queer Studies rag, Gender Flick. It would do nei-ther of us any harm at all,’ he appended pointedly, ‘if you were able to place a tidbit there.’
I didn’t have to read between the lines. St George was insinuating that he possessed solid contacts within both the MLA Journal and Gender Flick. I’d never been published in either periodical. And indeed, the two pieces I had sent in to the former on ‘recommendation’ from professors at Columbia Master’s Program – had been ‘declined’ with no suggestions for rewriting; meaning the editors were just plain not interested. Stung by the second of these rejections, I’d been unable to stop myself from mentioning it to St George during one of our telephone conversations, months before I’d come out to California. He’d sighed dramatically, then began, ‘Sure-ly you understand that American novelists are vir-tu-al-ly out of the picture academically, unless of course they have at least one proven per-ver-sion to offer.’ Doubtless meaning that my papers on Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe were useless because the subjects were unstylishly heterosexual: a turn of events which would have astonished both authors. Lacking publication, despite my superior class and paper grades, I had then lost out on the top two spots when departmental honors were handed out at graduation. And I would not soon forget the snub. Now, now … who knew but that this tiny unindentified manuscript I’d just happened upon in Von Slyke’s papers might end up changing all that. Who knew but that the tiny thing might become a glittering ticket into the very heart of those same bastions that had consciencelessly barricaded themselves against me. I’d show those trendy fuckers I could play their game!
‘Not to-tal-ly irrel-evant to this matter,’ St George interrupted my cogitations, ‘and you understand, this in-format-ion I’m about to relay is not in common circulation, nor for the ears of the hoi-polloi …’
I snapped to attention. ‘My lips are sealed tighter …’
‘Than your anus!’ He finished the sentence for me. ‘Yes, I hope so. This is my news. Professor Fusumi is not returning to us in the fall. Indeed, he’s not returning to California at all in the near future. I’ve had a communiqué – tor-men-ted, na-tural-ly – but certain … You realize what this entails?’
My eyes were blinking at him. ‘Fusumi’s classes will open up. And eventually his tenure will go to someone else.’
‘Add-it-ion-al-ly,’ St George confirmed that and went on, ‘and hardly to be sniffed at, is the Harold Robbins Chair Fusumi’s been seated at these seven years … it’s a sub-stan-ti-al en-dow-ment … the old hack was certainly generous … and as part of it, the mansion he once resided in, ten gor-geous-ly furnished rooms, campus adjacent on Club View Drive, backing the LA Country Club.’
‘I see.’ I tried not to let him see how much my breath had been taken away. I knew that house, not far from St George’s. I’d been at it once, at a faculty tea. I knew that endowment, too. ‘But taking over a summer course is one thing, taking over an entire chair –’
‘In-ci-den-tal-ly,’ St George butted in, ‘the endowment is spe-ci-fic-al-ly for American literature of the twentieth-century and, unless I’m greatly in error, only one other candidate presents any com-pe-tit-i-on at all. We both know whom that is.’
‘Waterford Machado. Does he know?’
‘E-ven-tu-al-ly,’ St George said, ‘he must find out. But he’ – index finger up in the air for point number one – ‘teaches no summer course – as an emergency favor to the department. His proposed candidacy’ – middle finger for number two – ‘is mentored by a professor without great seniority, and’ – ring finger up too – ‘his thesis subject has not yet been approved.’ The fingers folded gracefully into a loose fist. ‘A single brilliant coup by, say, yourself …’
My quesadilla and drink arrived simultaneously.
I sipped, tasted, offered a taste to St George, who sniffed the cheese, jalapeno and tortilla but backed off and contented himself with watching me eat while staring fondly at me, like some giant cat, its furred elbows folded upon the Formica.
‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate all this,’ I said. ‘But I won’t even know where to begin. Do I contact De Petrie and Axenfeld and ask if they know who wrote it? And what if they say, as is most likely, they never saw, heard or read it? Then what do I do? Go through the bibliography of what the Timrod Collection has of the Purples’ manuscripts? What if, as is probable, it’s not listed in the library? Do I contact the heirs and executors and legatees of the dead members of the Purple Circle? Phone and visit their aged mothers and married siblings and by now grown nieces and nephews, their college roommates and old boyfriends? Is that what you expect? That I charm them, win over their confidence? Rummage around their memories and go through their basements and attics?’
‘Ex-act-ly!’ St George sighed out the word. ‘You see, you do know what to do.’ His meal arrived and he settled into it. ‘And you may have to do more too. But by way of assistance and en-cour-age-ment, I’ll provide all phone numbers and addresses you may require.’
I guess I stared at his response too long. He suddenly stopped eating and once more lifted an eyebrow in my direction.
‘Well … if you think so!’ I concluded.
‘O-ccas-ion-al-ly,’ he said, and by his tone of voice he was clearly changing the subject, ‘I sat in when Fusumi was lecturing, and I found the male students to be of an unusually healthy and salubrious sort. Tell me, Ross, about your students.’
‘Jocks looking for a fast C.’
‘Nat-ur-al-ly, troublesome Mr Rice is one such jock.’
‘The jockiest. Co-captain of the sch
ool soccer team.’
The eyebrow raised again and St George attacked his food with, I noticed, canines more than ordinarily pointed.
‘Ex-as-per-at-ing-ly,’ he finally said, wiping his lips daintily, and seeming anything but exasperated, ‘I believe I shall, after all, have to see Mr Rice, the younger, in my office. Perhaps,’ he added, ‘directly after soccer practice. Before he can, as the saying goes, hit the showers.’
Which observation led to several others and thus ended any further conversation about the MS, which might explain how it all moved into what I now see was Stage Two.
BOOK TWO
The Widow Weber
She’d always gotten what she wanted, eventually.
Even when she most complained that she had nothing.
Especially when she complained that she had nothing
Jeff Weber,
Cheyenne Augus
‘SEVEN FOUR,’ THE PHONE MESSAGE SAID in what I recognized from some of his poetry recordings, as well as taped radio and video interviews, to be Dominic De Petrie’s voice. ‘If you’re giving me a large sum of money and wish to discuss details of how to deposit it, leave a message. Otherwise don’t bother. I will not, I repeat will not return your call, no matter who you are or what you want.’
As De Petrie had cunningly arranged, I was too surprised by the ferocious negativity of the greeting to gather my wits about me in time to leave a properly intriguing message before the phone machine shut itself off and the line went dead. I put down the receiver and sighed.
On the desk, next to the one-fourth-filled coffee mug I’d found in the kitchen and made ‘mine’ for the duration of the stay – a masked racoon holding out a revolver and a cup saying ‘Hand Over the Java and No One Here Gets Hurt’ – was a copy of the letter I’d written to De Petrie and to Aaron Axenfeld. A good letter, with exactly the right balance of respect and request, courtesy and requirement. I’d written it seven times, let it sit for two days, altering a word here, a line there. I felt like Oscar Wilde, who quipped he had spent all morning changing one word of a poem, and the entire afternoon changing the word back. It was a week since the letter had gone out and neither author had replied. Thus my phone call.
Placed on top of this photocopy were the letters I had received in response to the initial flurry of correspondence following my lunch meeting with Irian St George. One was from the library that was collecting the Purple Circle’s papers, which I’d written to as Von Slyke’s ‘assistant’ – well, wasn’t I? The thirty-page pamphlet they’d sent was, according to the head of the American collection’s secretary, ‘as up to date and complete regarding what we have on hand here of the work of the other members of Mr Von Slyke’s esteemed circle’.
I’d gone over the pages again and again and I’d red-lined three possibilities for the manuscript I’d found. Wild ones, even I had to admit. But also three that I hoped made some sense. For example, I’d decided that the fragment had taken place not in the eastern part of the US, but in the South or West. If asked to explain why, I would have to admit this was more instinctual, more of a feeling than anything that could be proven about the cadences of the language, the mother’s diction, how more common car trips across longer spaces were in the 1950s and 1960s (the ostensible time frame). Little things like that. So, an untitled, unfinished short story written by Jeff Weber, who’d grown up in Wyoming, seemed a possible candidate. He’d been the Purple Circler driving earliest – at age thirteen he would daily use his family’s ten-year-old Fairlane coupé to drive to school, twenty-four miles distant – or so he wrote in his final book, Cheyenne August. According to the person who’d done the Timrod Collection notation, Weber had written this unpublished piece at some unspecified time in Manhattan, definitely before his collection Slights and Offenses had been gathered for its 1979 publication, since all of the stories considered for inclusion there were already known. This piece had handwritten across its top but not a title ‘What Occurred on Route 90’ – i.e. the main road between Billings and Spokane, where Weber had taken pre-college summer school courses in 1965 before matriculating at Bennington. It was further noted as ‘Six pages, double-spaced, typewritten. Ends in middle of a sentence. Three characters. Child narrator. A sketch. Not included in Cheyenne August.’
The next likely candidate was one of several unpublished sections of Mark Dodge’s unfinished autobiography, excerpts of which had been published in Weatherbury’s two volumes of the Reader, and which he – like Dodge – had sometimes referred to by the title Framed by Life and sometimes as Man in a Jar. Mark had also grown up in the West, and I knew from Buffalo Nickel that he’d written about taking car trips with his family. Perhaps the fragment had been a precursor to that book? An experiment? Mark Dodge’s literary executor, his youngest brother, Thomas Dodge of Walnut Creek, California, had non-professionally (nonetheless quite usefully) notated one piece as ‘some twenty typewritten pages with many handwritten ink changes, all about us kids together, three young brothers biking, fishing, fighting, plotting schemes to raise money, taking car trips to our Grandma and Grandpa in Stockton’. Mark Dodge had himself begun driving at fourteen, his father’s ‘ancient, beat-up yellow-fendered, green-bodied Ford F-200 pickup that because of its coloration everyone called the Greenfinch’ (cf. We All Drive Fords).
Finally, there was that mass of unfinished papers Reuben Weatherbury had filed at the Henry Timrod Collection as executor of Cameron Powers’s estate. Powers was from the South, and like Dodge, and to a lesser extent Weber, had as running themes throughout his work driving, highways and automobiles. Of the six stories in the posthumous compilation ‘Miss Thing’ and the ’41 Bugatti (all collations of many drafts), three took place in and around highways and cars. I knew that Powers’s father had at one point in his chequered career been a (not very successful) Pontiac-Oldsmobile dealer. During his single recorded interview with a short-lived literary quarterly out of Durham, North Carolina, in 1981, Powers had reminisced about how he and his girl cousins would play ‘story’ in the family station wagon while enduring long drives to their grandparents’ home in the Blue Mountains of Virginia, and how especially good young Cameron had been at the game. Any of the unpublished, unfinished MSS in the collection, all with many titles each, might be what I had in hand.
No response had come as a result of my sending the little manuscript to Damon Von Slyke in a FedEx packet along with Puddles’s address book, except a phone message on the machine saying, ‘Thanks, Ross. Got it yesterday. It’s getting rainy here and rain in London is too cliché, so we’re off to Hamburg. Ciao.’
What I would have preferred was to visit the collection and go through it all myself, but it was 3,000 miles away and I was just getting to work on Von Slyke’s cataloguing. It would be months before I had the time to go.
Second best, would be to have the library fax me some first pages, but this, I was advised when I phoned, was not possible. Mostly because while I was considered ‘accredited’ – i.e. due to the subject matter of the thesis I’d filed at UCLA’s PhD program, my name was on file at the collection as an accepted Purple Circle scholar with most (if not total) access – even so, they only had one person on staff June and July, the secretary I was speaking to – a marbles-in-the-mouth Fairfield County native – Christopher Kovack, and as it was summer session with no bibliographic classes taught at the university the collection was attached to, Kovack had no undergrads to badger into doing grunt work. He’d fax stuff, if he ‘got around to it’, he assured me, making certain I knew this was totally dependent upon his free time, passing whim and possibly what I might offer him.
The two slightly more hopeful responses I’d received to my letters included a San Francisco Museum of Modern Art card of a ‘hyper-real’ Wayne Thiebaud painting of various pie wedges in a chrome circular cabinet from Thom Dodge saying that he and his brother’s papers would be available to me, and listing his work hours and home and work phone numbers.
The other note was on Language
s Department letterhead from Professor Tanya Cull, PhD, at Berkeley. I’d discovered Cull was the niece of Mitch Leo, as well as his executor, when flipping through Von Slyke’s very up-to-date Rolodex file. Her correspondence to me read, ‘What you described doesn’t sound like anything Mitch wrote. I’m afraid I’m too busy getting my own new volume, Revisions to the Hegemonic ‘Norm’ (Univ. of Illinois Press) ready for the printer to be able to look for what you need until August first. But if you have to have it sooner than that and want to come look yourself – I’ve retained photocopies of the entire Leo oeuvre – let me know when.’
I began to plan a trip to the Bay Area to see Dodge and Cull. I’d phone my sister and stay with her and the quarterback in their skil-lion-dollar place in Presidio Gardens, which might also help mend fences a little in the personal relationships area. But it was only two in the afternoon and I decided I wasn’t totally beaten down today: I could bear one more rejection. So I dialed the unlisted phone number I’d found in Von Slyke’s desk directory for Aaron Axenfeld where he lived, on a small Florida Gulf island south of St Petersburg.
I’d prepared myself for an assault equal to that of De Petrie’s phone message, even written down what I would say to Axenfeld whether he’d left a message or answered in person. Despite that, I was caught unawares when, after three rings, the phone lifted and a young laughing male voice said, ‘You’re wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! It was not Renata Tebaldi. It was Leyla Gencer, the Turkish coloratura, known to her claque as the “Marbled Halvah Soprano”, who sang Adriana Lecouvrer at La Fenice in 1968 with Franco Corelli. Don’t say no. I have it on the very most reliable authority.’
‘I won’t say no,’ I replied. ‘Mr Axenfeld. Aaron Axenfeld?’
‘Yes … but you’re not –’
‘Ross Ohrenstedt. Calling from Damon Von Slyke’s office. I’m collating his papers. I sent you a letter a few days ago. I wondered if you’d received it, and if you hadn’t, if I could ask you about something among the papers I’d found.’ It all came out in a rush, since I didn’t know how else to keep his attention.
The Book of Lies Page 10
