The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  ‘Well, you must think I’m out of my mind,’ he said, his voice rising at the end to seem almost querulous, ‘answering the phone as I did. And you’re Ross …’ He sounded as though he’d hang up unless I said the exact right thing.

  ‘Ohrenstedt. I’m living at Damon Von Slyke’s while he’s in Europe this summer. I’m preparing his papers for the Purple Circle collection at …’

  ‘Oh, right!’ He still seemed completely fazed. ‘I did get your letter. The problem was I didn’t know how to respond.’

  Could the little MS have been his? Axenfeld’s? When I’d eliminated him almost immediately? ‘You know the piece?’ I asked, and my pulse was pounding so hard I could actually see it lifting the skin in that little hollow under my thumb in the hand holding the receiver.

  ‘That’s just it –’ uncertainty even more evident in his voice. ‘What I read did seem familiar. Yet when I racked my mind to think why, I came up with a blank.’

  ‘Mr Von Slyke didn’t recognize it either.’

  ‘So, you’re doing what there, exactly, with Dame’s stuff?’ Axenfeld now asked in such a forthright, almost accusing tone, so different from how he’d responded so far that I felt like an intruder.

  I began to explain the process and had gone on for some time when I interrupted myself to say, ‘Well, you must know what I mean. Someone must have done the same when you sent your papers off to the Timrod Collection.’

  ‘My papers are still here. For the collection I gathered a few drafts of the published books and added some letters the Leo-McKewens sent from Italy.’

  I thumbed through the catalogue: only two pages of the thirty were of Axenfeld’s work. Every item listed was previously published. ‘You mean there’s more material not represented?’

  He guffawed and was instantly contrite again. ‘I’m sorry and you must think me terribly rude but, “Is there more material not represented?”’ His voice dramatically rose in pitch, and he answered himself, ‘Do gorillas have hair? Do hair burners have sex?’

  ‘Then there’s …’ I tested the waters, ‘a lot more?’

  ‘You’re probably too young to know the reference, but I’ve got an entire Fibber McGee room. McGee was a radio character in the ’40s who had everything but the Pacific fleet in his closet. Whenever anyone would open it – lots of sound effects! Most of what I write, most of what I’ve written since 1972, goes directly into the room. Never to see the light of day. My literary Fibber McGee closet. Only a room.’

  ‘An entire room filled with unpublished manuscripts?’ In my mind, it glittered with treasures like some illustration out of Scheherazade’s tales.

  ‘Unpublished – and,’ Axenfeld specified, ‘unpublishable!’

  ‘You would think so. Everyone knows how hard you are on your own work. How, when asked why you’d published only six books in twenty-three years, you replied, “That was five too many.”’

  ‘I was a bit hard. Even so, I know what’s here. It is unpublishable.’

  I wondered what decision his literary executors would make contrary to that opinion after he were no longer around to hold back the flood tide. It wasn’t my duty to say anything, and more, if I did say anything, it might make him nervous and possibly destroy the work. Authors were doing that all the time.

  ‘So, the manuscript I sent you, could it have possibly been by one of the others at your meetings?’

  Fleming and Weatherbury had each, separately, gone over letters, journals, diaries and conversations to ensure that every page the nine members of the Purple Circle had read aloud to each other during their short-lived period together was not only listed but also published, then glossed and notated ad nauseam.

  ‘It was so long ago … I keep thinking it was something Jeff Weber said,’ Axenfeld admitted.

  ‘A piece he’d written?’ I tried. ‘Was then writing?’

  ‘No. I don’t know … I’m losing it … It was Jeff. Maybe I can reconstruct it. Let’s see. I’m pretty sure we were at Rowland Etheridge’s place on West 21st Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, and we were in that long front room of his with its bay window, and it was a break between the readings. Usually four of us would read each session. Two before and two after dessert. That way, we’d each get a chance to present work every other meeting. And although I usually dreaded it myself, the others fought for the opportunity, treating it as a privilege, which I suppose it was. At any rate, it was intermission, which I loved because that was the time for gossip and catching up, and fun and food. Rowland and Dame and yes, now I recall, Cameron too had gone into the kitchen to prepare coffee and food. I could hear Rowland and Cammy doing their high-pitched “Mammy and Scarlett O’Hara” camp routine, accents dripping with molasses on grits (I’m sure you know they were both Southerners) and Dame yelling, “Stop! Stop!” He was laughing so hard. The Leo-McKewens and Dominic had put on their coats and gloves and had just gone down the flight of stairs outside to where Mitch had parked the car to get something, a book Frankie had mentioned earlier, I think, Dame was interested in reading. And poor Mark Dodge had been pushed and shoved complaining out of the apartment into the hallway to smoke a cigarette, since Rowland had just stopped smoking and would no longer allow anyone to light up inside his apartment. Mark was smoking like a chimney but was also periodically banging on the apartment door and howling that he was going to freeze to death out there since Rowland’s wasn’t one of those chic Chelsea townhouses but instead a sort of O’Henry brownstone tenement and the hallway was unheated and it was a frigid mid-February. Jeff and I were sitting alone on either end of Rowland’s ancient heirloom sofa from his parents’ Rappahonack home, with its shiny green horsehair upholstery and jet-tipped black antimacassars. Our arms were across the sofa back, and we were looking backward out the bay window, at the frozen street below, ice riming the branches of the trees like lace, looking down at Mitch and Frankie and Dominic on the sidewalk. It was evening, lamplit by those yellow sulfur streetlights, and there had been a six-inch snowfall that day, and it had snowed once more after we’d arrived and the three of them were stripping snow off the roof of their Corvette and other cars and throwing big puffs of it at each other and laughing and pulling each other by their scarves and falling down in the middle of the still-unplowed, already frozen, snow-covered street. Jeff and I hadn’t seen each other since the previous Purple Circle meeting several weeks before, or even spoken to each other on the phone. I don’t recall if it was because we’d been too busy or what was the reason, but I felt guilty about it, and so we were talking about oh, who knows what, so much to catch up on, and I recall thinking how handsome he looked that night with his hair worn longer than usual, which I supposed was Dominic’s doing, since they were palling around together at the time and it showed up in odd little ways, such as a “makeover” for Jeff from the more style-conscious Dominic. And so I guess the two of us finally got around to the story that Mark Dodge had read, yes, that’s right, or rather the excerpt from that autobiographical novel that would later come out many years later, in the two Readers long after Mark died – what a shame that was, Mark was so gorgeous, and so nice! – and I think Jeff said how what we’d just heard had reminded him, Jeff, of another piece, something he’d just read, or … at any rate, a story about two kids fighting in the back-seat of a car. Then the food arrived, Rowland carrying a tray with coffee cups and plates, and Cammy holding the coffee pot and yelling, “Make way! Make way!” And Dame with this amazing cake … eight inches tall and round and frosted white, looking like some Gothic castle turret, and at that moment Mark and Dominic and the Leo-McKewens all came into the flat together, each carrying great handsful of powdery fresh snow, which they threw up in the air, so it was snowing indoors and Rowland had a hissy fit about how it would ruin the carpet and everyone began shouting and laughing and trying to calm him down and I’m afraid that swept away all talk or thoughts of stories so I simply don’t remember anymore.’

  Axenfeld’s words had drawn me away from
the desk in the library in Hollywood, away from the phone and completely into that world of wintry Manhattan and the nine of them, so young and so alive and active, with their foibles and their play and their mix-ups and desires, a long quarter of a century before.

  It took me a second to come back. ‘So Jeff Weber told you about the story. But did he say it was his, Jeff’s own, story?’

  Axenfeld sounded sad as he replied, ‘The truth is, I just don’t remember clearly what Jeff did say.’

  I tried another angle. ‘He didn’t say it was Mark’s story?’

  ‘No … I don’t … Sometimes the unconscious does marvelous things with memories if you just let it alone a while.’

  ‘Well, thank you, Mr Axenfeld. I appreciate you’re taking time out to talk to me like this.’

  ‘I wish I could be more helpful.’ He sounded genuinely sad.

  ‘You were. Really you were,’ I said to cheer him up, because now I’d concluded that he wasn’t sad about not knowing what I wanted, but because he’d too well evoked that moment in February, and it had pained him so much to remember it. ‘And maybe,’ I added, hoping to draw him out a bit, ‘someday, if you ever decide differently, you’ll let me come organize your Sibber McGee room.’

  ‘Fibber. With an “ef”,’ he corrected. ‘And you are sweet. But you know what I just did suddenly remember?’ Axenfeld asked in a different tone of voice and for a second I thought, he’s got it, he’s going to remember who wrote it.

  But no. Instead, Axenfeld said, ‘I remembered someone who would know better than I ever will. Bobbie Bonaventura!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She’s there near you somewhere. Hold on, let me look in my address book.’

  ‘Bobbie with an “i” and “ee”?’ I asked. ‘Bonaventura spelled as it sounds?’ As I wrote it down, it sounded familiar.

  ‘Actually it’s Roberta. We knew her as Bobbie,’ he said, seeming quite distracted, as I guess he searched. ‘“The Widow Weber”, Dominic always called her. Which may be cruel but is not completely inapt. Bobbie went to college with Jeff Weber. Dominic said he thought Jeff and she might have been lovers for about two minutes. But they did continue to hang out together all throughout college and they moved to New York City together, and remained in contact all through later life. And, of course, she helped care for Jeff when he got sick. Here we go. Yes, California. Venice Beach. Is that far from you?’

  ‘Not at all.’ I took down the number and address.

  No sooner had I done that than Axenfeld once again changed the playing field. ‘You know, I wonder if she’s still there. I’d heard, well, but you know how you could find her? Dominic told me she worked as a manager for one of the big bookstore chains there. What would that be? Waterstone’s? Borders?’

  ‘Not in one of the gay bookstores? West Hollywood or Silver Lake? Not in Mar Vista or Westwood? In a woman’s bookstore?’

  ‘No, not West Hollywood or Silver Lake. And the other places don’t sound right either. Near where she lives, I think, he told me. She doesn’t own a car. Is that possible in Los Angeles?’

  ‘Yeah, sure, if she walks or rides a bus to work. She was Jeff Weber’s closest friend, you say? And it’s Roberta?’

  ‘Yes, and Jeff’s executor too, I believe. I remember someone, maybe Dominic, saying that Jeff’s mother died only a year or two after he did, and because he’d lost his father and I don’t think there were other siblings, Bobbie became his heir and executor. In fact, I’m sure that she arranged for his work to go to the collection. Because Maureen gave me her phone number and address. I spoke to her about the whole thing before I agreed to sign up with the collection. I also think Bobbie had something to do with getting Jeff’s stories reprinted a few years ago.’

  ‘Slights and Offenses, you mean. So she’d know if this piece was Jeff Weber’s?’ I said the obvious. ‘Well, again, thank you. And I hope you won’t think I’m sounding sycophantic, but I love your writing. Especially From the Icelandic. And I’m not alone in wishing you’d publish more of what you’ve got in that room.’

  ‘You’re very nice to say that.’ He sounded genuinely modest. ‘But you must now wipe your mind clear of everything I told you about my Fibber McGee room. Promise?’

  When Axenfeld rang off, I put down the receiver and looked at what I’d written on the pad in front of me. ‘Roberta i.e. “Bobbie” Bonaventura. The “Widow Weber”’ and all of the real and possible info about her. Not a defeat at all. But a new lead.

  I don’t know how long it was before I began to notice that the library was silent. Not only the library but the house and outside too. No radio in the distance was playing Conchita’s favorite ‘oldies’ station. No sawing razzed, no hammering machine-gunned from the workmen erecting garden structures in the abutting property. Not a hint of an ambulance beseeching or fire engine clamoring its way down along Hollywood Boulevard. Oddest of all, there wasn’t a single chord of the omnipresent birdsong that had become a diurnal and nocturnal background hum. The light from out of doors, though undoubtedly from a potent summer sun, appeared cold and white. And though I knew that tropical orange hibiscus preened in front of the window glass, for a minute it all seemed frozen out there, frozen and quite still.

  Could the past have such a powerful hold over a person its influence could be transferred to another, not even alive at the time? As though memory weren’t ephemeral and empirical as I’d always thought, but permanent, a sort of decal?

  I shivered.

  Four phone calls later, I located Bobbie Bonaventura. As Axenfeld thought, she was working for one of the ‘Ultra-Super’ bookstores that had taken over the city, getting larger and more varied with every year, less like a bookshop and more like a 1950s department store with floors of books, CDs, CD-ROMs, magazines and newspapers, tons of tie-in theme merchandise: clothing, toys and furnishings from the latest movies, videos and ROMs, multi-ethnic restaurants, coffee shops – as well as LA’s own riff on the new Pacific Rim food craze, Bancha bars, where you could order anything – hot soup to cold drinks to yogurt and ice cream – so long as it was made out of green tea.

  I’d guessed from the last address Axenfeld had given me for her, and the fact that she didn’t drive, that Bobbie would be somewhere on the city’s West Side, not far from where she lived in Venice. Especially as the dozen Santa Monica and Venice streets parallel to the Pacific ocean had been cleared of all auto traffic a few years before, miles of road now pedestrian malls, with public transportation provided by electric trams running through what had been narrow streets and back alleys.

  It turned out that Bobbie managed the fantasy and science fiction section of a brachiosaurus of a place at the Third Street Mall in Santa Monica. This shop had not only absorbed its main competition, another chain up the street, it had also ingested two small used-book shops (one formerly on the open mall, another a few blocks away). In addition, it had eaten up the Penny Lane Used CDs shop and the local Sam Goody’s, the never that successful Warner Bros. emporium, the largest art bookshop in the city and a multi-theater cinema. All their stock and much of their interiors had been replaced intact within this new five-story building sited at the far end of Third Street’s recent two-block northern extension at Montana Avenue. Actually, two existing structures, cleverly connected across what had once been road by a huge window-fronted indoor-outdoor food area, the three-story glass-paneled walls utilized for exhibiting videos day and night, inside and out, promoting items in one or another of the twenty separate departments.

  From the huge central information desk, I was directed by a ‘touch-screen’ computer to the third floor, left, to where I’d been told Bobbie worked: at Blade Runner science fiction shop.

  Growls, grunts and a sudden ear-piercing scream ‘Dooooonnnn’t!’ assailed me as I stepped through the theft-deterrence device. A second was all it took for me to realize that it derived not from that sensor, or from any of the score of browsers indifferently squatting to read on the carpeted floors or lea
ning against the walls, but from a recent video, Hellraiser Ten: The Magnetification of Pinhead, reproduced from a grape cluster of eight monitors, hanging at differing angles from the middle of the shop.

  Bonaventura was less easy to sight. I had to circle the purposely constructed maze of shelving twice before I at last came upon a short, thick-set, middle-aged woman with a steel-gray ‘fright wig’ of curly hair who looked as though she might actually be an employee. This had more to do with what she was doing than how she was dressed. Bonaventura wore the most washed-out blue shoulderstrapped farmer dungarees I’d ever seen over a pale pink T-shirt. The pastels and hairstyle – and even her rather blank face – made her look like an overgrown toddler. As she was awkwardly standing on, and trying not to fall off, a fold-out metal stool, alternately packing volumes of Arthur C. Clarke onto a top shelf and bending down to reach for more in a cardboard box that shared the narrow seat with her chunky ‘Air-Dr Martens’ mixed-media shoes, the physical resemblance to a three-year-old was if anything even more exaggerated.

  ‘“Scott Fitzgerald says that when you’re in real trouble, it’s somehow always three o’clock in the morning,”’ I said, quoting the opening of Jeff Weber’s novel Ode to a Porno Star.

  She stopped, books in hand, scowled and replied, ‘“But Fitzgerald was wrong. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and there I was, on Christopher and Gay Streets, deep in dogshit!”’

  ‘I just love it,’ I enthused.

  Without comment, she turned and put the books on the shelf. Without turning back and in a surprisingly gravelly voice, she said, ‘So you a groupie? Or his long-lost son, looking to get your hands on the fab-u-lous Weber inheritance?’

  ‘Neither. I’m an assistant professor at UCLA, doing a book on the Purple Circle. I’m currently working on getting Damon Von Slyke’s papers ready to go to the Timrod Collection.’