The Book of Lies

by Felice Picano

  I couldn’t tell if they’d come out of the building together, were going in together, whether Machado had accosted the English Department chairman and St George was being too much of a gentleman to walk away.

  Whatever it was, the meeting agitated me.

  I excused myself from the students, telling them I’d see them again Tuesday. Then strolled, almost broke into a run really, to get to the faculty lounge and interfere. I’d just turned on to the brick footpath to the building, when Machado saw me coming, said something to St George and stepped indoors. St George turned to leave and I all but crashed into him.

  ‘Nat-u-ral-ly you’d appear!’ he greeted, ever on the offensive.

  ‘You’ve been in conference forever!’ I defended myself.

  ‘For-ever indeed!’ he agreed. ‘Are you going in to eat?’

  ‘If you are, I’ll join you.’

  ‘No. Walk me to the gar-age.’

  He led the way. Hands behind his back. How was it, I once more wondered, that he never carried anything: not a briefcase, not a book, not a sheaf of papers? My arms were always full on campus.

  ‘I see you were speaking with my competition,’ I tried.

  The famous eyebrow arched. ‘His thesis topic was approved.’

  Before I could offer a word of protest he went on, ‘It’s all ter-r-ib-ly po-li-ti-cal, of course. But so it was.’

  Before he had told me that Machado had no strong departmental backing. What had changed?

  ‘Un-for-tun-ate-ly,’ St George went on, ‘he defended his choice well. It’s drab stuff, compared to your own sure to be bril-liant ex-e-ge-sis!’ Again before I could reply, he asked, ‘The work goes well?

  ‘Fine. Very well. I’ve already met with Reuben Weatherbury. Thanks to you. He turned out to be delightful. I really was surprised.’

  ‘A de-li-cious lad a few years back,’ St George said, his eyes gliding aside in what I supposed was fond memory. ‘One of those un-der-grads who are at their phy-si-cal prime, ne-ver a-gain to be surpassed.’

  ‘He sure used it to his benefit,’ and when St George looked startled, I added, ‘Weatherbury himself told me how he seduced Powers. Which feathered his future nest,’ I hoped to imitate St George’s archness a bit.

  ‘Op-por-tun-is-tic,’ he agreed. ‘But smart and per-se-ver-ing. And?’

  ‘And, you mean the other Purples? I’ve spoken to Axenfeld several times. Only yesterday. And I had an e-mail talk with De Petrie,’ I added offhandedly.

  It had a different effect than the intended cheering one. St George looked morose as he tramped up the concrete parking ramp.

  ‘Who didn’t frighten me as much as I thought he would,’ I added.

  ‘He will! He will!’ St George predicted so bleakly I stopped.

  ‘Is there a problem with De Petrie?’ I had to ask.

  ‘The Oscar Wilde Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. De Petrie will not accept it.’

  Instituted only a few years ago by the LesBiGay Caucus at the MLA, the Oscar Wilde was granted every three years with a sizable amount of prestige and cash attached. That and its wellspring was one reason why it had been played up a great deal in the straight and gay press. Damon Von Slyke had received the first one.

  ‘He won’t go to the ceremony to address the caucus?’ I asked.

  ‘He won’t go. He won’t take their quote, fucking filthy money, unquote. He’d rather, quote, eat ground glass off roof tiles, unquote, before stepping foot anywhere near that, quote, bunch of parasitical assholes, unquote. I, of course, have been angling for the award since the last caucus at Kenyon College. Years of effort down the drain. I told him I’d write the acceptance speech. I told him I’d give the acceptance speech. All he need do is show up. I’d say he had laryngitis and all he need do was sit. He laughed and told me he’d rather quote, blow all those fucking literary leeches to the hell they crawled out of, unquote.’

  We’d reached St George’s BMW 950, a sleek, metallic-green guided missile pretending to be an automobile. It chirped happily twice in response to the presence of the keypad in St George’s pocket, unlocking its doors, starting up its engine, readying his favorite CD, and for all I knew also priming its back-seat high colonic tubes.

  Poor St George seemed so dejected.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I offered. ‘Talk to him or …’

  ‘I only wish there were,’ St George said.

  The car door slid up. Inside it looked like a British men’s club of the last century, lacking only vast mahogany bookcases. The compliant leather bucket seat angled for him to sit, then soundlessly spun back to face the steering wheel. Looking up at me, he smiled feebly. ‘So you see, it’s a joy to me, if a minor joy, that your work is going along so well on all this …’ St George gestured.

  ‘It is! It is,’ I replied. I’d wanted to tell him how far I’d gotten with the Len Spurgeon business. Now seemed the very worst time to do so. Instead, I said, ‘I’m driving up to see Rowland Etheridge’s widower.’

  ‘Good. Go to it!’

  The car door slid shut. I waited until he’d purred out of the garage before I headed for the rented Celica hidden somewhere on a lower, far more plebeian, level of the garage.

  The Reseda Avenue exit had looked on the map to be the one closest to the address Tanya had given me. I’d not yet familiarized myself with any of the San Fernando Valley since I’d arrived at UCLA, mostly because I hadn’t needed to. I’d heard various disparaging remarks about this large northern section of Los Angeles – separated from the more notable areas of Beverly Hills and Brentwood and Hollywood by the considerable bulk of the Santa Lucia Mountains -among the students, but like other comments they often made about each other’s clothing, sanitary habits and computer skills, it seemed something too ‘local’ to pay attention to. From what I could see exiting the freeway, the area was typical southern California suburb: few buildings higher than a single story, whether shops or homes. Some larger avenue corners were guarded by diagonal strip malls of maybe two and three floors high. It was verdant and at this time of day, i.e. one o’clock in the afternoon, very quiet. A few people on lunch hour walking dogs, Latino carpenters hammering away at a site, women with purple hair unloading groceries from Minivans.

  The address I’d been given turned out to be on a corner, completing another line of single-story shops: printing and photocopying, insurance office, small-children’s clothing, two boarded-up stores and a mini-grocery with a Middle Eastern name. The final store had floor-to-ceiling windows, and two doors, one opening on the avenue, the other on a side street. Dozens of giant plants lazed in the oversized windows, saguaro cacti taller than I, python-sized snake plants, a jade tree of such amazing girth and complexity I could understand why they were called ‘heaven trees’ in parts of Asia. All in large vats. Behind were forest-green-colored shades pulled shut, blocking everything within from view. The place looked closed, despite the listing of hours on the front door that said it was open noon to midnight. Other, more discreet, signage in the windows included a small plaque identifying the place as home to the Harmonious Fist Martial Arts Academy and Meditation Center. I kept wondering where I knew that name from. Whatever it was, it confirmed the connection with Camden Phoenix. I decided to leave a note under the door saying I’d try him later. Meanwhile I’d drive directly up the coast to Ventura and Tobermann, Rowland Etheridge’s heir.

  The first time I’d heard the name Rowland Etheridge was years ago, in undergrad physics. Our professor, a stout woman with little charm and a thick MittelEuropean accent difficult to follow, was discussing the structure of space and time and other matters of cosmology. She said – and I’d never forgotten – ‘It was an American writer, Rowland Etheridge, who when he read that ours might be only one of a chain of many possible universes that had come into existence over unimaginable stretches of time, replied, “Just my luck to have been born in a Bad-Hair Universe.”’

  I’d of course copied down both his name and his
witticism. Then I’d done what any other interested undergrad would do: I’d gone looking for something he’d written. Without luck. By the end of the twentieth century, not a single Etheridge book was in print. Most had been mass-market paperbacks with short shelf lives. I finally located his 1992 novel, On Buzzard’s Bay, in the library stacks and read it with surprise and pleasure.

  Pleasure, because by then I’d already read a few books by Mark Dodge and Dominic De Petrie and, putting together the back-cover squibs about Etheridge’s novel being a roman-à-clef with the little bio under his photo saying he’d been a member of the famous literary group the Purple Circle, I rather queasily came up with portraits of those authors who appeared thinly disguised in Etheridge’s book. Surprise, because of the uncomfortable combination of high satire and affection with which Etheridge had written of the two men -and of others I didn’t know.

  The result was confusion. Not quite knowing what to do, I’d put aside Etheridge’s work, not writing it off so much as filing it away into a question-mark bin. Then, during my junior summer, Erling Cummings’s Nine Lives was published. The first group study and biography of the Purple Circle, it received acclaim, and by the holidays of that year I, along with 20,000 other readers, was immersed in his lively resuscitation of the group. By then I’d decided American lit. was my field of study, the recent past my concentration. So Cummings’s book led to me locating and reading others: St George’s scholarly On the Edge of the New: Dominic De Petrie and the Purple Circle, Thaddeus Fleming’s earlier Gauntlet to the Ground: The Purple Circle 1978-1982 and Reuben Weatherbury’s two volumes of the Reader.

  In the latter tomes I once again read Etheridge: an excerpt from his 1981 novel Desperately, Yours and his 1979 one-act play, Singular Sensation. Those interested me enough to search for more. I got my hands on more plays, available in ‘stage editions’ stapled together with flimsy paper covers, in a drama bookstore: Beauregard in Brooklyn Heights and Mustang Sally. Those intrigued enough to search for the novel Weatherbury excerpted. I went back and read up on Etheridge in Fleming’s biography.

  It was then that his statement, ‘Just my luck to have been born in a Bad-Hair Universe’, made sense. Because while Mark Dodge had lived gloriously but briefly, and while Jeff Weber had succeeded on his deathbed, while Cameron Powers had been dyslexic and needed others to actually write his books for him, Etheridge suffered a far worse fate as a writer than any of them: he’d begun with great promise and not lived up to it.

  Born in 1938, in Richmond, into a family of old Virginia gentry that had gracefully decayed since its glamorous antebellum years, an only child of aging parents, Rowland Etheridge began life with the unfortunate combination of being coddled and at the same time expected to carry the splendid tatters of the family name. A precocious child, he was struck by polio at the age of seven, and for several years lost the use of both legs, forced to move around in a wheelchair. His family’s name, position and connections rather than what remained of their fortune got him up-to-date medical care. Rowland’s polio was arrested and, following a decade of experiments in orthopody, banished, leaving behind a left-side partially fused hip socket and a left leg that neither bent at the knee nor could be relied upon for support or strength.

  As a teenager and adult, Etheridge remained extremely sensitive about this ‘deformity’; at the same time he’d done marvels to make certain no one noticed it. It had depressed him to have lost those years of childhood play, and especially as a result of the hipbone fusion to have lost forever the ability to ride a bicycle. He’d spoken movingly about this to his two closest friends among the other Purples, Damon Von Slyke and Dominic De Petrie. Both mentioned it, either in their journals or in letters to others. Both had been amazed at Etheridge’s resiliency and courage. Because at the same time as he did whatever he could to hide his physical problem, he went out of his way to make certain people would see him as a fully physical person. From his prep school years through college and later on, he’d appear on stage, in plays. Always in roles that required if not athletic skills, at least a great deal of action. De Petrie wondered whether Rowland was guided to the stage by a helpful counselor, or whether he’d seen it himself as a way to overcome his disability, gain confidence and fulfill a lifelong passion for getting others’ attention.

  Whichever, the strategy worked. By the time he graduated Yale, Etheridge had appeared in a half-dozen of the much noticed Yale Drama School productions, gotten excellent reviews (as a result of his ‘forcefulness, concentration and odd, always clear diction,’ said one critic), had one play put on at a small New Haven theater and a story published in the Yale Review.

  Rowland was twenty-one when he came into his not-very-big-but-after-all-for-a-young-man-on-the-rise sufficient trust fund. He moved to New York City, where he joined three pals from the Drama School and Stillman Hall in what was a not quite cold-water three-bedroom flat – in view of, though admittedly without the key privileges to – nearby Gramercy Park. There he settled into a routine of mornings at the typewriter, afternoons outdoors getting to know Manhattan, and evenings at parties, either at their own place, which became popular among the actors/playwrights set, or at local clubs and bars.

  During his first year on his own, Rowland had two short stories politely declined by the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post. He also had two full-length plays nicely declined by the six theater companies he’d submitted them to. That was almost expected, everyone around him told Rowland. So he charged on. During his second year out, he had four stories declined, not only by those two august periodicals but also by several others. By now his two completed plays had gone the rounds of every theater company in town without having found a taker. No matter. He’d found a literary agent to handle the rejections. Someone who believed in Etheridge’s work and talent. And the increasingly personal and gracious declines from magazines had, after all, not been in vain: they’d led to offers of freelance work, including one from the New Yorker itself to (in the words of a subeditor) ‘help us’ with these little pieces for ‘Talk of the Town’.

  A job. An honest to God job in publishing!

  That called for another party. Rowland’s routine altered again. He was now one of many daily denizens of those famously labyrinthine, warren-like, closet-studded, book-filled offices of the magazine, then on East 43rd Street. Not quite an editor, not quite a gofer, not quite a volunteer, paid and part of the grand thing, with people like Alexander King and S. J. Perelman occasionally wandering into his hole in the wall, albeit always looking for someone else. And of course it was more money, so even though Rowland no longer had his mornings at the typewriter, he could usually find an hour or two most afternoons to work at his short stories and plays.

  Eventually one story was published – in a rival magazine, barbarously edited, almost entirely, Rowland later suspected, due to the fact that his third roommate was sleeping with the fiction editor. Eventually a play was produced, although in the smallest theater he’d ever laid eyes on, down in some hotel off the Bowery, in a production that cost so little, opening night receipts, while not high, must have recouped. Still, he was young and it was a start.

  Almost a finish. Those high points in his literary career occurred in 1962. For another half-dozen years, there was nothing.

  Nothing literary that was. His personal life was interesting enough. One of his roommates – not the one Rowland had a silent crush on since the first day of college – announced to all and sundry at one of their rowdier parties that he was homosexual, and the next day moved out of their group apartment and into one with two other men no one seemed to know. Meanwhile, the roommate Rowland had a long-time crush on, a young man of good family, carefree disposition and dissolute habits who’d slutted around with any female under the age of fifty and had oddly (and Rowland thought quite unfairly) grown more handsome and thus more desirable with every new depravity, suddenly announced he was in love; deeply, seriously in love, with Cathy Someone or Other. Taking advanta
ge of the new space in their flat, he moved her in, which, while it gave Rowland an ‘office’, otherwise reconfigured the menage and daily discommoded him.

  His drinking and partying increased. Conversely the time he spent writing decreased. After a few more years, his agent tactfully pointed this out to Rowland. He in turn diplomatically pointed out that she’d gotten no sales of his work in a very long time. They compromised by blaming it all on the Death of Theater and the Literary Magazines. By the end of their meeting they were once more bosom buddies, off to lunch. By the end of their lunch, they’d hit on a plan: why shouldn’t Rowland take advantage of circumstances and write up his own story, that of young Manhattan singles on the prowl, living in group bliss and group despair? It was after all, the 1960s. And while Rowland’s connection to the counterculture as it was being lived in Lower Manhattan and San Francisco was virtually nil, still it was all sufficiently ‘in the air’ and he was no dummy.

  A play, he thought. Months were misspent trying the material in that form. Then, since neither he nor his agent could miss the very evident proliferation of paperback books in airports, in Woolworths, on newspaper stands, virtually everywhere one looked, Rowland decided he might try writing the recalcitrant material as a novel. His agent agreed and began talking it up to people in publishing. Rowland set to work.

  Etheridge’s first novel was published in the summer of 1968. By then his adored roommate had moved out of the flat, on his way to Los Angeles, not to marry Junior Miss but with a woman of forty named Claire – to act in the movies. His second roommate, gone a few years, had still not settled which of the two men he wanted and so he continued to live with both. However, he’d appeared in character parts in so many Off-Broadway plays, everyone said it was only a matter of time before he caught a major Broadway role himself. That happened the spring Rowland bid adieu to his remaining roommate and former college pal, a droll fellow who’d failed at acting and been dragged into the family business and now worked very profitably in commodity futures on The Street.