The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  She was not impressed. ‘If you’re going to stand there, make yourself useful. Hand me those books. My back is killing me.’

  I did as she asked.

  ‘I thought Von Slyke sold his papers years ago,’ she said, and before I could reply, she added, ‘I guess he was waiting to jack the price up as high as possible.’

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised by her hostility, but I was. I tried another, less fraught angle of approach. ‘When I spoke to him today, Aaron Axenfeld gave me your phone number and address. He thought you might be able to help me.’

  She still wasn’t looking at me; her chubby little hand would periodically shoot out and I’d place three or four books in it.

  ‘I don’t fuck guys a third my age. Sorry.’

  I ignored that. ‘I found something among Von Slyke’s papers that didn’t belong to him.’

  ‘Thing?’ she asked, reaching for more volumes. ‘In the singular? Meaning only one? Not lots and lots of things that didn’t belong to him?’

  I ignored her imputation and charged on. ‘A manuscript. A short manuscript. I thought … well, it might be Jeff Weber’s. Actually’ – her hand jutted out and I again filled it – ‘it was Axenfeld who remembered Jeff talking about it. At a Purple Circle reading. It might be what you listed in the catalogue as an unpublished story.’

  Her hand jutted out, fingers grasping for more books.

  ‘The box is empty,’ I reported.

  ‘Take it down off the stool and get more books out of the other,’ she ordered.

  I did as she said.

  ‘So?’ she asked me.

  ‘So, you’re Weber’s executor and allegedly know about his work. I wondered if you could confirm that it is or isn’t his.’

  ‘And if it is Jeff’s?’ she asked.

  I hadn’t thought that far, so I was forced to wing it. ‘Well … then, after the proper consultation with Mr Von Slyke of course, the manuscript will be returned to where it belongs … You’ll get it. Or the Collection.’

  She didn’t respond to that, and I continued mechanically handing her volumes until the box was empty.

  ‘Next?’ she said.

  ‘That’s all,’ I replied.

  She turned around and put out a chubby hand, which I took and held as she stepped down the shaky stairs of the stool. On the floor she was about five foot two, looking up at me. Frowning.

  ‘You’re not bad-looking. Maybe I’ll revise my policy about screwing kids.’

  ‘Do you want to see it?’ Then I quickly revised that to, ‘I meant the manuscript?’

  ‘I know what you meant. No, I’m busy here. Bring it by my place.’ She bent over and began punching apart the cardboard boxes until they were flat. She folded them under one arm. ‘Say, seven. You have the address?’ She was already walking away.

  ‘Tonight? At seven?’ I tried to confirm it.

  She half turned around, scowling. ‘You want to yell any louder? I don’t think people up in Topanga Canyon heard you.’

  ‘Don’t you think it odd?’ Pamela Agosian asked. She then specified, ‘What H. L. Mencken wrote about the book? I’m directly quoting now: “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia.”’

  ‘What’s so odd about that?’ I asked, Socratically.

  ‘Well, after I’d got the book and noticed the blurb on the back cover, I looked up Mencken in the encyclopedia. He was alive and active at the time Willa Cather was writing. So he must have known … you know, that she was a lesbian.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Michelle Tsieh countered. ‘People didn’t publicly reveal that they were gay until well into the 1970s and 1980s. Right?’ she asked, turning to me.

  ‘Maybe,’ Pamela argued back. ‘But they were writers. The avant-garde. And they were a small group. People in the same field. There had to have been talk, gossip. Surely Mencken knew.’

  ‘I think he did know,’ Bev Grigio put in her two cents’ worth. ‘I mean, the book is written from the point of view of this man in love with this woman Antonia. Yet the man is written by a woman. So I think what Mencken wrote about the novel not only reveals that he understood all the complexity, but that in writing what he did about it he was writing a sort of inside joke.’

  All three young women looked at me for an answer. We’d left the classroom together, exited Royce Hall and advanced along Dickson Court in a group. Having reached the low, semicircular retaining wall that looked over a hill of grass down to Wooden Center, Drake Stadium and Pauley Pavilion, we’d stopped. The Santa Anas had been blowing through any arroyo and canyon they could find for the past two days. The air was flat-out hot, crackling dry, the sky such a perfectly enameled blue you actually felt it was a dome, as in those medieval illuminations. In class, the students were dressed as skimpily as possible in shorts and tops, sipping soft drinks. Even I’d had to resort to Evian every few minutes of the lecture. From where we four stood facing west, I could make out every leaf of every single tree beyond Circle and De Neve Drives, the air was that clear.

  ‘Mencken died in the late ’50s, Cather in the ’40s. No one ever asked that question of the two of them while they were alive. And there’s no one alive they both knew for us to ask.’

  ‘What about “internal evidence”?’ Michelle asked. ‘What’s right there in the text. Wouldn’t that tell us?’

  ‘Not really,’ I replied. ‘Of Mencken’s statement, there’s too little of text for it to be reliable. And anyway, wasn’t that the great mistake of Lacan and the Semioticians forty years back or so, believing that a text must reveal what the author didn’t or wouldn’t want to reveal? Even at times despite the author’s intentions? Isn’t that why they’re so discredited today?’

  Below us, on the grassy slope leading down to the Powell Library’s yellow plastic extension – put up as a temporary structure in the 1980s, and supposedly to be torn down, but so beloved by students and faculty alike for its sheer ugliness it had remained – a half-dozen jocks were stumbling and charging into each other, around a white-striped soccer ball. I made out Ben-Torres’s figure among them, as well as another Basketball Bruin, Colby Granville, and wasn’t that Ray Rice down there, trying to outknee that gargantuan Samoan linebacker? Looked like him.

  ‘The Discoursists’ failure,’ Michelle began, ‘as I understood it, was that they took a contrary view to the modernist credo that authors like Joyce and Mann consciously put far more into any work than we could ever take out of it. Whereas …’ she wavered.

  ‘What if,’ Pamela asked, ‘the author or authors are alive. And could be asked? Would Cather or Mencken ever tell us what they thought? What they meant?’

  I wanted to tell them that was what I seemed to be coming up against with the living members of the Purple Circle. Not even the meaning, but merely whether something was their own work.

  ‘You’re saying,’ Bev interrupted, ‘that it is the function of a work of art to be, not mean?’

  ‘Not only that. Maybe Cather would simply be too embarrassed. Think her lesbianism too personal a matter to discuss.’

  ‘That’s certainly possible,’ I admitted. ‘We are talking about people born and raised in the nineteenth century. They hadn’t been exposed to the incredible publicity of electronic media that we’ve experienced. But the real question,’ I suggested, ‘is not whether Cather – or Proust or Wittgenstein either – were too embarrassed to air personal identity issues, but rather how others would deal with the issue. Reviewers, critics, readers. Publishers for that matter. For every Gertrude Stein who lived an “out” life, there were millions of lesbians who never dared. Even today, four decades after Stonewall, there are critics who go out of their way to deny the crucially inherent homosexual nature of these geniuses. They’ll stand on their heads to persuade you that Wittgenstein’s entire philosophic system wasn’t constructed because he lived in such a homophobic world that he literally had to reinvent the universe. Or that Alan Turing’s ad
olescent passion for another brilliant boy scientist and his complete alienation after the boy’s death and because of his sexual nature weren’t responsible for his breaking the German’s Enigma Code in World War II, or for his discovering the cathode tube as the best data storage and retrieval path, thus enabling modern computers to exist. Our lives are so threaded through by our sexuality and how we perceive the world perceives our sexuality that anything we create must reflect it, even when we try most to suppress or hide it.’

  I was at that moment – surrounded by three intelligent, questing students – feeling like a real teacher, as though this job I’d taken on without being at all certain about it was the right one. The exact right one. Thinking how Plato had felt with Aristotle in that stoa in Athens. Or Aristotle with the brilliant Prince Alexander as a student. So proud … When out of nowhere something swacked me on the side of the head.

  ‘Hey!’ all three women yelled at the same time.

  Bev caught the soccer ball that had struck me, just as it caroomed off. ‘Hey, you guys! Watch out! Someone could get hurt!’

  I was momentarily stunned. It was more a glancing blow than a full punch but it grazed my ear. Which was still ringing.

  ‘You all right, Mr Ohrenstedt?’ Michelle asked. ‘Why don’t you sit down a sec?’

  She took my arm as though to pull me down to the brickwork of the terrace wall. I resisted.

  ‘You don’t look right!’ Michelle said. ‘How many fingers?’

  ‘None,’ I replied, having caught my breath, balance and enough sight to see her fist held in the air. Then, ‘I’m okay. Really.’

  ‘You sure?’ Pam asked. ‘Want to go to the medical office?’

  ‘No. I was just surprised.’

  I could hear several guys now yelling, ‘Throw the ball!’

  Bev was about to throw it, when Pam grabbed the ball out of her grip and stepped over the wall, onto the grassy bank.

  Ignoring their continued calls for the ball, now held close to her side, Pam shouted in a voice just looking for trouble, ‘Which one of you assholes hit him? Which?’ she demanded.

  They ignored her and kept yelling at her to throw the ball.

  ‘Screw you!’ she shouted in answer and turned around, the ball still in her grasp. ‘Let’s go,’ she announced. To me. ‘I think you should see a medic. It might be a concussion and …’

  Three players, Lorenzo Linden, Colby Granville and Tony Taponaupoa, hopped over the retaining wall and blocked our way. ‘The ball!’ Tony demanded in a big bass voice, one huge hand held out, fingers itching. ‘Puh-leeze!’

  ‘Are you the one responsible for his injury?’ Pam asked.

  ‘We’re taking Professor Ohrenstedt to the infirmary.’

  ‘I don’t know about any injury. The ball.’ Tony insisted.

  Ben-Torres, Ray Rice and another guy were advancing from another angle, up the side of the hill, toward us.

  ‘Give him the ball,’ Bev said quietly. ‘Don’t cause …’

  Pam headed us in another direction, and the three huge guys blocked us there too. ‘Don’t make me hafta take it,’ the Samoan threatened, smiling to show a trendy red plastic front tooth. ‘Think you can take it from me, fat boy?’ Pam taunted.

  For an answer he suddenly darted toward her. Pam pulled back and away and he slid past like a bull finessed around the cape of a matador. The two other guys each made a jump in her direction, and Pam wove back and forth, dribbling the ball, and as Lorenzo came too close, she threw the ball to Michelle. I heard Lorenzo grunt suddenly and saw Pam dance away. She’d just elbowed him in the ribs. Michelle dropped her bookbag and ran with the ball, putting distance between herself and the others. Bev also dropped her books and ran to join Michelle, blocking Colby. Michelle faked a hand-off to Bev that Colby fell for. So she popped the ball up to Pam, who’d gotten clear, and Lorenzo and Tony both charged her. She faked one, then the other, then handed off to Bev, who leapt up, hung onto Colby’s shoulder and threw the ball over his head back to Michelle.

  All this should have been good clean fun, if it weren’t for the guys grunting and murmuring just loud enough for me to hear, ‘I’ll get you, bitch!’ and the women mumbling back, ‘Eat me, lard ass!’ among other endearments.

  Suddenly all six were headed my way. The ball was free, in the air, six sets of hands grabbing for it, but I’d jumped up first, highest, and I nabbed it, spun in the air, got my fingers tighter on the ball, turned a bit more still in the air and, having calculated right, came down just outside of the terrace on the grass, well away from the morass of limbs and bodies and grunts of ‘Fuck! Shit! Bitch! Asshole!’ Invigorated by what force I couldn’t tell, I touched ground barely a second, leapt even further away from the crowd, held the ball close to my chest and turned again. This time directly into Ben-Torres, Barry Thayer and Ray Rice. I put up a game fight, but where we were struggling the ground was hummocky, at a forty-degree angle, and all their arms poked different parts of my torso, so I simply let them take me down to the grass and, once there, I let gravity take its course and rolled down the hill, pulling the three of them along with me.

  By the time I’d come to a stop, only Ray was still holding on. I was on my back, grasping the ball, but he fell on top of me, knocking out what was left of my breath. Using his superior strength, he held me down with legs athwart my thighs, held down my hands easily and popped the ball out of my grip into the air. Ben-Torres was motionless there and caught it with his sneaker tip, kicked it up once, tipped it higher, shouting, ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it,’ and bounced it from his shoulder and then headed off into a new direction I couldn’t see but could easily infer from where he charged next, away from us, joined by the others.

  Ray meanwhile hadn’t let go.

  ‘Okay!’ I said.

  Instead, he continued to hold both of my hands back over my head, and leaned over to my right ear and said, ‘I sort of like you in this position. I’d like to tie you down and have some fun.’

  For a second or two I struggled. But of course I soon realized this was what he wanted. So I stopped struggling. He’d arranged his crotch near my sternum. I couldn’t help but feel his erection.

  I heard the voices of the three women approaching. ‘C’mon, Ray. Fun’s over. Let him up!’ They still sounded psyched for action.

  ‘We’ve really got to stop meeting like this, Professor,’ Ray whispered as erotically as he could in my ear. He blew once hard, so I’d be in no doubt of what he meant. Then he was off me, gone. As I sat up and tried to catch my breath, I could see him running, shouting, up the hill, toward the other guys.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said, but I let Pam and Bev help me up. ‘You ladies are something, you know,’ I added, dusting off my slacks and joining them in the ascent back up the grass.

  ‘After today, none of them’ll call us ladies,’ Bev said, and all of us laughed.

  One of the disadvantages of being dead, I believe Lord Chesterfield commented, is that it is rather difficult to tend to one’s reputation. Of the nine members of the Purple Circle, five of them had had for the past few decades that very problem. And of those five, two had an even bigger problem. Cameron Powers had only published one book in his lifetime – a travel book about Rome and its environs, unique and quirky, yet still a travel book – and as a result he’d never developed any reputation. Early pieces written about the group had mentioned him a bit embarrassedly as a book editor, or at times as Von Slyke’s lover. As a result of Reuben Weatherbury’s efforts on his behalf, Powers was better known posthumously than he’d ever been when breath still filled his body.

  Jeff Weber’s problem was different. Unlike the Leo-McKewens, he hadn’t been social, hadn’t constantly thrown dinner parties and afternoon teas, hadn’t cultivated gay and straight authors or heiresses, or television anchorwomen, or well-connected men of a certain age entwined in Manhattan’s ‘uptown art scene’. He’d not spent two months every year in a European city, nor had he spent summers at a beachfront
house entertaining. Also, unlike Rowland Etheridge, who had managed to beef up his faltering fiction-writing career by going on to write, direct and be extremely involved in plays, even if it was merely at various Off-Off-Broadway theaters and second-drawer university drama departments, Jeff Weber had stopped writing plays altogether after he left college and so had not managed to achieve a name in that field. And finally, unlike Mark Dodge, Jeff Weber had never had a beloved book which had sold a million copies, been translated into five languages and made him famous.

  Instead, Jeff Weber had written and published a novel about coming out, in 1978, and a collection of short stories about the Manhattan and Fire Island gay scene, in 1979. Ode to a Porno Star had all the makings of a hit: it was told from the point of view of a young Midwestern naïf who arrived in New York the morning of the Stonewall Riot, and it dealt with just about every potentially amusing and poignant encounter such a hapless lad might have, right up to the absurd love affair with the spectacular man who happens to be everyone else’s fantasy-figure. But for all its richness of detail and writerly strengths, there was something too restrained about the satire, something held-back in the romance, something not-quite-there re: the inner workings of the gay scene he was writing about. No surprise, as those who knew Weber admitted: that same restraint, that very sense of holding back, characterized him as a person. Damon Von Slyke, who of all the Purple Circlers claimed to have known Jeff best in the earlier years, was astonished to discover (and to reveal to Powers in a letter) that it had taken Weber ten years of what Damon had thought was a close friendship to reveal that he’d always hated his father and had gone out of his way to destroy by fire his father’s most cherished possession – an old folio volume of Dante’s Inferno with illustrations by Dore, which the seventeen-year-old boy had inherited.

  Slights and Offenses, the book of Jeff’s stories published in various magazines and anthologies, did have the satire, did have the gay-scene inner workings, did have the romance. De Petrie praised the book both in print and in private, writing in his journals that ‘Jeff’s delight in spinning a yarn for us over a littered dinner table, and the way Jeff transformed himself from a stylish West Side queen into some grubby old Pecos Bill or Gabby Hayes figure right in front of us as he narrated his tall tales and impossible sagas, have finally been caught, if momentarily, in two or three of the book’s best stories.’ But the book was, after all, a collection of short stories, difficult to market, and without that sustained reading experience a novel provides. It actually did better in sales and reviews than Ode, but still not very well. That depressed Jeff a great deal (according to De Petrie’s journal entries, he even thought he’d stop writing), at the same time that it made him defiant (cf. a contemporary letter from Etheridge to Von Slyke in which Jeff declared he was as good a writer as any of them, and he would ‘show them!’). As a result, Weber’s editor wasn’t able to offer him a contract for a third book he was working up: a never-finished novel about an eastern university town.