As De Petrie predicted, Axenfeld unearthed a dozen excuses why he couldn’t possibly see me, but I wore him down; he had no choice but to eventually relent. We settled on three p.m. tea.
Feeling I was on something of a roll, I instantly phoned Dominic De Petrie, got his off-putting phone-answering message, assumed he was eavesdropping, and said, ‘St George was so ecstatic about your appearance, he’s fronting my trip East. I’ll be in P-Town staying at some dive called the New Crown and Anchor on Saturday and Sunday. Can I drive to your place one afternoon? From the computer’s map it’s only a distance of a few miles. Oh, by the way, thanks for not telling him of my involvement!’
He picked up the phone at that moment and, surprisingly excusing himself, said, ‘Some half-witted bitch who calls herself the books editor of what claims to be the world’s best newspaper has been badgering me with phone calls for a week. Those jackasses at that rag spent the first thirty years of my career denigrating my work. Now, without any warning at all, they can’t exist without me. I’d sooner have bamboo shoots hammered under my toenails on an hourly schedule than be subjected to her. So, you’re coming, are you? Not scared of encountering me in the Old Dark House? You know, I’ve not been seen in public since plesiosaurs hunted Triassic oceans.’
‘At Tobermann’s I saw photos of you and Etheridge.’
That aroused De Petrie’s attention.
‘You were handsome,’ I ventured. ‘He said you were.’
‘That poor boy is so deluded he’d think anyone or anything neither a Rowland Etheridge nor a mole-rat was handsome.’
‘I’m not deluded,’ I said. ‘I know what I saw.’
‘Perhaps, but I’m a ghastly phantom today. In fact, whenever I unawares pass by a windowpane and catch an inadvertent glimpse of myself, I can’t help but instinctively think, “Quick! Kill it with a stick!”’
‘I’ll bet you’re handsome and distinguished!’
‘God, anything but “distinguished”!’ he shot back.
‘Well, I’m coming. Ready or not,’ I replied. ‘I’ll be seeing Mr Axenfeld too. But of course you already know that, don’t you?’
‘What was it they called Louis Treize? The Universal Spider! That’s me. Spinning, ever so gently testing my guy line for any conceivable quarry.’
I laughed and said, ‘Maybe you can help me with something? Mr Von Slyke told me he was going to send me a story about himself and Len Spurgeon. He was very furtive about it. What I received, however, was merely a story already long published, which he had defaced to alter a name.’
‘“Master and Man”,’ De Petrie said.
‘That’s right.’
‘For years now he’s been retailing that fabrication.’
‘But I don’t believe it’s about them at all.’
‘Why not?’ De Petrie asked.
‘I don’t know … It’s not how Len would act.’
‘How do you know how Len would act? You never met him. He’s been defunct half your life.’
‘True, but I still feel he wouldn’t … the story is bogus.’
Silence, then, ‘You are astute, aren’t you? Or perhaps you’ve achieved a preternatural link? Yes, the yarn is – as you so ungently put it – bogus. It didn’t betide Dame at all, but Mark Dodge. And, as you also correctly guessed, did not concern Len, but instead a model-slash-hustler named Larry Kalani from Maui.’
‘Then why would Von Slyke …?’ I couldn’t finish.
‘Because he’s a fabulist,’ De Petrie said, adding, ‘A fabricator! A falsifier! A perjurer! A foreswearer! A counterfeiter! A deceiver! An impostor! A storyteller! A yarn spinner! A teller of tales! A false witness! A pathological liar! He’s incorrigible. He’ll stop at nothing! Example! I was sitting once with half of the Purples, Dame and Aaron and Cammy, and who else was it? Oh, right! Jeff Weber. It was at the Bethesda Fountain in New York City. Central Park. At that time there was a rather okay outdoor cafe beneath and surrounding where that oversized cement staircase debouches from the 72nd Street pass-through and they served a not too shabby brunch. On fair weekend days all the most fashionable young queenlets of the late ’70s could be found putting in an appearance. We’d proceed there many a spring and summer Sunday just past noon, sporting our latest Ron Chereskin sweaters and Nino Cerrutti jackets and of course our most elaborate footwear. During one such déjeuner sur le pavement, Dame began relating to us an amusing little incident that he prefaced by claiming it had happened to himself. He was diverting. His details were delightfully telling. His rendition was non pareil. Perfect. Save for the insistently irritating fact that what he’d just related to us had actually happened to Cammy, not to Dame, and that Dame knew that all at the table knew it had happened to Cammy, not Dame. When Dame had completed his tale, there was this long and utter stillness. Then Aaron uttered, “… Nevertheless!”
‘You know the old joke? An English garden party. Very chi-chi. The hostess, Lady Fitzroy, introduces to the assemblage the cast of the tableau vivant about to commence. In doing so she mentions the name of Mabel Hatter-Krone. Forthwith a voice from the crowd pipes up, “Mabel Hatter-Krone sucks cock!” The most absolute cessation of sound in the garden among them all for the longest second in recorded history. Then Lady Fitzroy goes on gamely, “Nevertheless”!’
De Petrie laughed and laughed until I thought I really do appreciate this man. I wondered whether to inquire of him if Len Spurgeon had possessed a hissing, spitting, pink-colored snake-like penis like the one in my dream, because if he did I was certain De Petrie would tell me. But I didn’t. Instead we confirmed my arrival time in North Truro, said goodbye, hung up.
I had one final task. I phoned Camden Phoenix and got his answering machine. No surprise. I hadn’t expected him to be awake so prematurely in the day, or if conscious answering his phone. I left the following message:
I’m still searching for a document among Frankie McKewen’s papers I have reason to think is in your possession and are holding back for very good reasons of your own. A composition that may be a short story or an anecdote or even a fragment of something larger. If you have what I’m looking for, I’ll pay for it. I can offer up to fifteen hundred dollars. But of course I’ll retain rights to first publication. Search for something that has ‘Paul’ as character or narrator. Something unsigned, undated, in a different typeface than most of Frankie’s other material. Anything that when you first came upon it you said to yourself, ‘Is this Frankie’s or not?’ and couldn’t decide.
When I returned back home to the Casa Herrera y Lopez from my class, there was a message on my e-mail from Camden Phoenix. It read:
Three-page single-spaced manuscript, typed on Frankie’s Royal electric portable typewriter but with typing errors different than Frankie’s usual mistakes and therefore I think written by someone else. It’s a story about three guys taking a cabletram ride up a mountain outside of Palm Springs, California.
Theo, Harve and Paul. Very exciting. No title page. No date. No byline. Wire my bank a check for fifteen hundred dollars and it’s all yours.
… followed by his bank branch and a direct-deposit number.
I held my breath a half a minute, dialed my sister Judy in San Francisco, naturally was connected to her answering machine, and without preamble asked for a loan. That night she returned my call and without asking why I needed the money, used her computer to transfer it to my bank account. Her husband, Bart Vanuzzi, was in summer training camp in Florida, not far from Fort Myers. I ought to stop by and see him.
I pretended this was news to me. Instead it had been a stand-by. If she wouldn’t give me the money, I’d try hitting him up.
‘Oh, sure!’ I said. ‘That’s all the country’s greatest quarterback needs, surrounded by reporters and coaches and other overpaid jocks! To have his intellectual nerd brother-in-law hanging around!’
‘You’re not a nerd. Anyway, Bart is proud of you,’ Judy said, loyal sister that she was. I could hear her munching rice cakes as we
spoke. ‘You should have heard Bart talking about you to his family at Sunday dinner after you visited us. He made you sound like Oliver Wendell Holmes.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘Or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Someone great!’ she added.
It would be something to tell the jocks in my class when I returned after midterm. ‘Give me his address and number. Thanks for the money.’
‘No problem. I really don’t know how you exist on so little. What do you use when you want to go shopping? Do you even have a credit card?’
We jawed on a while, Judy amusing me with stories of Bart’s family, and the big Italian-American Sunday dinners at which everyone tried to feed her something besides her usual super-high-cellulose celery and fennel from the antipasto plates. Their failures – and their distress.
When we disconnected it was already nearly midnight. I looked over the pop quizzes I had surprised the class with this afternoon and unearthed Ray Rice’s page. He’d been there today, silent, incommunicado, frowning, occasionally growling, ignoring everyone: in short, as customary in class. He’d acted as amazed as everyone else when I’d sprung the exam on them, despite the e-mail warning. Had he forgotten my threat? Or could that not have been him on my e-mail? No, it had to be him. He didn’t perform badly on the test, scoring eight out of twelve questions, which was equivalent to the Tsieh twins and Pamela Agosian, the other high-scorers in the class. So I gave him an ‘A’, writing on top, ‘Nobly done, Mr Rice.’ And just to bother him, I appended, ‘We’ll make a littérateur out of you yet!’ But I was disappointed to see that his handwriting was in no way similar to the shape of characters on the bewildering letter I’d retrieved from the house gate.
To hell with it! It probably wasn’t intended for me in any case. Besides which, I had my thesis developing quite nicely. I was about to obtain another fragment of Len Spurgeon’s book. I was on my way to the East Coast to encounter two living legends, the other two remaining Purple Circlers, Aaron Axenfeld and Dominic De Petrie. At Axenfeld’s I would attempt to gain entrance somehow into his Fibber McGee room and see for myself what he had stashed away there. As for De Petrie, I was to beard him in his own den on his own invitation. Doubtless this rendezvous was to some extent intended for him to check me over and determine if I indeed resembled Len Spurgeon as Von Slyke had written. But it was for some still-arcane reason of his own. Was I mistaken? Imprudent to believe De Petrie and I were getting along well? I remembered how Dr St George’s voice had subtly altered on the phone earlier when discussing De Petrie’s interest in me: he’d been a little envious, even grudging. More than that, he’d been very inquisitive.
Generally, I believed as I began packing for the next morning’s eight a.m. flight that I was aimed not merely toward Florida, but rather toward some majestic expanse of rich and grassy plateau, both a resting place on my ascent but also a springboard from which I would soon soar to even more empyrean heights. The more fool I.
BOOK EIGHT
In the Fibber McGee Room
‘That’s the definition of culture – knowing and thinking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with us,’ Janus said, between inhalations of the most crystalline Andean cocaine we’d ever laid eyes on. ‘About those abandoned Anasazi cities, for example; or poetic meters during the Southern Sung dynasty;
or …’ he paused for one more sniff, ‘the metaphysical significance of Jeff Stryker’s penis.’
Aaron Axenfeld,
At Imperial Point
THE ONLY TRULY PROMINENT CITIZEN OF Fort Myers, Florida, in its short otherwise, lusterless history appears to have been a doozy, Thomas Alva Edison, and the constituents of the town made certain that even the most transient visitor never lost sight of this dazzling fact. There was a Thomas Edison Drive and a Thomas Edison Boulevard, a Thomas Edison Memorial High School and a Thomas Edison Community College, the Edison movie theater, and the Edison-Flagler Bank, Edison hardware, stationery, and book stores, an Edison card ’n’ things shop, and numerous elementary schools, post offices, grocery stores and superettes bearing the magical name. Naturally there was also the inventor’s winter headquarters, a substantial Spanish-style house fronted by a palm-lined boulevard on plentifully landscaped grounds, now a museum, and the inventor’s multi-building laboratories, retained as they’d been left the day Edison had failed his civic duty and died. The most recent addition to the long list of Alvaic fame was a prodigious new Thomas Edison Entertainment Complex and Outlet Mall placed within the confines of an eighteen-hole golf course-cum-retirement village of separate and attached condominiums, able to hold 60,000 people.
In the hour or so I was turned around, bewildered and downright lost in the confines of the city and its environs, I managed to pretty much hit every one of these sites once before a pre-adolescent took pity on me and directed me to Highway 41.
From there, a sign led me to a faster, four-laned thoroughfare. Either 287 or 86. Perhaps both at the same time, I was never certain, given the whimsical signage. This avenue, however, successfully brought me to a bridge that crossed Pine Island Sound and set me onto the island where Aaron Axenfeld lived in a family-owned once vacation-only now year-round home.
Sanibel Island was traversed by an extension of this concourse, transformed into a sometimes four-laned, more often two-laned, thoroughfare running from the southern, lighthouse-dominated, tip to its north end, where it crossed Blind Pass to smaller Captiva Island. Because Sanibel had been settled late in Florida’s history, and by the Gulf Coast’s more affluent middle class rather than by the wealthy northerners who’d populated and so defined the state’s other cities, it wasn’t a resort but a vacation spot, far less built up. Besides the lighthouse with its restored ‘whaling village mini-mall’ only a mid-island guesthouse, Bayley’s Conch Hotel, pretended to any pre-twentieth-century flavor, and that because it was the oldest edifice. Other motels, hotels and eateries were confined to the main road and three narrower parallel lanes. The beaches that girdled the island were thus conserved from commercialization. The many-leveled Gulf of Mexico aquamarine waters were fronted by wide strands ornamented by palm trees, garnished by bougainvillaea and set-back houses subject to severe zoning, rendering them widely spaced and architecturally unadventurous. The less desirable – less breezy – Pine Island Sound side was more closely controlled due to its two serenely beautiful wildlife preserves.
A few small tarmac roads ran crosswise, including one I’d been guided to turn onto. It passed a stone gate flanked by Washingtonia palms curving onto a small spit of land with access to a dozen homes, none very visible through the foliage that made the area seem older, more established, and exclusive.
The seventh house was sheltered by two huge live oak trees, festooned with masses of Spanish moss. A question mark of a path led to a carport where a late-model Toyota sedan the shape and colors of a Japanese beetle was parked. I pulled my rented car alongside it. An implausible proliferation of azaleas and begonias both in soil and set about in pots of differing sizes confirmed I’d arrived at the right place. Axenfeld had confided he was an indifferent gardener but the strong sun, constant breezes and gulf moisture ensured botanical achievement.
The single-story, wooden-sided ranch with angled roof appeared locked, the window screens shut. But a note fluttering on a pushpin wedged into the front door read ‘Sur la plage’ with an arrow. Following it, I saw the azure horizon and headed that way. A minute later I’d reached the backyard, sparsely cultivated by low bushes that gave onto sand. Taking off my sandals, I went in search of my host.
Fifty yards away, an immense, sun-faded striped umbrella had been wedged at a shallow angle into the sand. As I neared, I saw that someone within was stretched upon a legless beach chair. He was barefoot, in sun-bleached trousers and a long-sleeved shirt out of which long, beautifully shaped hands protruded. His gaunt, motionless head led me to assume he was sleeping with his eyes open, an assumption confirmed by his stillness, and by the fashion magazine that la
y on the sand only inches from his outstretched index finger, its cover bent back as though abruptly let drop. In that light, his head looked like one of those watercolor portraits John Singer Sargent created late in his career: bony planes of cheek and nose and forehead, except where immutably worn sunglasses left a sallower complexion. His grizzled hair, close to his skull, was iron-gray except around his temples, where it was so short as to be nonexistent. The eyes in that owlish countenance were the same unflinching gray.
For the briefest of moments I felt I’d so much intruded that I ought to pull back, perhaps drive away. The fingers of one hand moved. Gesturing me nearer?
‘Is it three o’clock already?’ he asked in that pleading tone, in that young voice, with which I was already familiar.
‘I really didn’t mean to … I ought to come back later.’
‘No. It means I’ve been sitting here for hours. That I’ve wasted another afternoon.’ He drew himself up, threw back the umbrella and stood. I’d expected him to be small and mousy, possibly because of how unprepossessing he’d always been on the phone, possibly because of his decades-long association with a particular insurance company where he’d quietly toiled, in the process becoming to some of the less conventional Purple Circle members the image of a colorless little man, a sort of Bartleby Scrivener. He revealed himself as over medium height, lean, fairly well muscled for his sixty odd years, still agile, if a bit maladroit.
‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Do I look like him at all?’
‘Like …? Like Len? Yes, you do! Then again, no! Upon more inspection, you do, yes!’
The Book of Lies Page 37
