by KUBOA
Finally the beautiful face opened and spoke.
"What is your name?" she asked, as if she were picking him up in a bar.
"Robert," Robert said. "Robert Caldwell."
She seemed to think about this.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Robert Caldwell was known to her and he was not him.
"You have insulted our clerk, I understand, Mr. Caldwell?"
"Well, no," Robert began. "That is, it was I, me, I who was insulted. Your clerk swore at me."
"That is not what she says," came the answer.
Was it possible this preeminence had already spoken to all available parties, had already called all the witnesses, had adjudicated and found him blameworthy?
"Well," Robert said again. "I merely questioned a price on some frozen pizzas and she...” Robert trailed off. "It sounds kind of silly now," he added.
"Is it silly?"
"I mean, it's just some crummy pizzas—"
"You're dissatisfied with our pizzas?"
"No," Robert said quickly. "No. I mean, it's not as important as all this."
"All what, Mr. Caldwell?"
"This folderol," Robert said, grandly.
She thought for a moment more.
"I'm quite at a loss what to do with you, Mr. Caldwell," she said with some stress.
Robert felt a tingling along the base of his neck.
The manager slowly rose from behind the desk, uncoiling her body like a constrictor. She moved from behind her judge's bench and Robert turned in his chair toward her. She moved as if she were an automaton, her feet seemingly rolling across the carpeted floor. As she emerged from behind her monstrous desk Robert comprehended her full majesty. She wore a short skirt with her suit jacket and her legs were strong and lithe, unstockinged they shone with a rosy glare. She stood next to his chair and her large, fulsome body exuded an animal musk. Despite his fear Robert felt a stiffening in his trousers, inappropriate as an erection on the gallows.
She turned Robert toward her and he realized for the first time that his chair was on wheels. She stood almost astride him, her legs slightly parted and her powerful thighs on each side of his. She took his face in her warm, moist hands and lifted his gaze upwards. She bent to look closely into his eyes and Robert saw revealed underneath her suit coat and lacy shirt the swell of life, two onerous mammaries.
"So, Robert Caldwell," she said, peering into his very soul, her hands moving gently on his cheeks.
The air was full of static. Robert was warmed by her proximity.
"I'm sorry," she said after a moment. "I'm not going to be able to let you go."
Robert wasn't sure he had heard her. He was muddled, sweating. His ears seemed to be filled with a low-range rumble as of some incessant machine deep in the bowels of the store. He was afraid, aroused—save for the blood flow to his genitals he could not feel his body. He was sure at any moment she would laugh and they would exchange companionable touches and it would all be over. A deeper, insane urge flashed through him. Momentarily he became afraid he would never see her again. He wanted to extend the agony just a little longer before being released with a chuckle and a pat on the back. He wanted to be her prisoner, just a little longer.
"We can't have you running around badmouthing our employees, can we?” She sounded almost reasonable. Her right hand left his cheek, nestled in the hair at the back of his head, caressing him for an instant. Robert closed his eyes.
Her fingers entwined in his hair tightened suddenly and she snapped Robert's head back, and his eyes shot open. She lowered her face over his and Robert thought—oh, briefly—she was going to kiss him. Her mouth would be hot and wet, like a jungle. He anticipated the contact.
"Worm," she said and her inviolate mouth pursed to a sneer.
"Look," Robert said, half- strangled.
"Your time to talk is over," she said, pulling harder on his hair. "Your time to talk is history. It's Babylon. It's Persia."
She had Robert's head in a death grip. He believed his hair was beginning to tear. He raised an arm in a half-hearted attempt at freeing himself only to find her knee quickly in his crotch. She wiggled it in tight and pressed firmly on his most tender center.
She looked intently into his eyes one last time and released him with a dismissive gesture. She stood and straightened her suit.
Again the face showed its feral smile and then she was at the door and there were hands on Robert and he was being dragged down the corridor and, before he could protest, he was thrown into a room and the door was closed.
Robert looked at his cell, with a searching eye, still dazzled from the rough handling, tempering his outrage. He was looking for signs of comfort, for a human touch, for a feeling that here he could sort things out. There was a certain relief to being left alone.
It was a small room, but it was well- appointed. There was a couch (which Robert found out later was a HhideA-aB-bed), a wash basin, a commode, a chair such as one might find in chain motel rooms, a plastic plant in a bucket. No window. No television. No books.
Other than the aforementioned plant—what was it supposed to resemble, a palm,? eucalyptus?—the only nod to aesthetics was a cheap art reproduction Sscotch- taped to the back of the door: Breughel's The Fall of Icarus.
Robert stretched out on the couch and tried to order his thoughts. He had been insulted, mocked, embarrassed, roughly treated, and, finally, thrown into a small room, apparently to frighten him. He took several deep breaths. Okay, he told himself, overall it wasn't that bad. He had not been physically hurt. What they intended to do with him was a mystery but they would surely come back and talk to him further. Perhaps she would come again. Perhaps they could start over again. This was all a misunderstanding. It could be rectified.
When they slid his evening meal under the door was the first time Robert noticed the slit in the door fashioned just for that purpose. And, for the first time, Robert felt nauseatingly afraid. He was actively sick into his commode and the food was left there to spoil. The next morning—had he slept?; Hhad he really slept here all night?—another tray of food was passed under the door and Robert understood he was to slide the old plate out. This he did.
That morning the eggs and sausage looked highly edible and Robert cleaned the plate, again sliding his dishes back out when he was finished. At lunch the process was repeated.
As the days went by Robert realized the real test facing him would be the lack of human contact, and this interested him and amused him. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. He tried once to shout through the door when his dinner plate arrived but there was no reply.
After many months Robert's routine became sacred. He slept eight hours every night and in the morning made the bed back into a couch. He was disciplined. Once, when the lunch plate was not delivered until mid-afternoon, Robert grew restless and morose. But he was immediately cheered when the food arrived, especially since his desert was tapioca pudding.
One day was like the next, soldiering on into the unforeseeable future, and Robert found himself living an inner life which surprised him with its richness. His imagination became a flexible, athletic, living thing. He kept his senses alive, his brain sharp. Sometimes he thought of Gayla, but he knew she was young and strong and would make it without him. He smiled a rueful smile and wished her well.
His diet was good thanks to his keepers and he even exercised. His body became an important part of him, no longer just a tool for mobility, but a soul-cage, and he began to marvel daily at the imposing size of his chest and the slate-hard curve of his thighs.
He stayed alive and alert and at the ready. Someday, again, soon perhaps, something would happen to Robert, again a twist, a curve in life's numinous and pedagogic road, and this thing which happened would gladden and astound him. Maybe she would return, or maybe it would be something else. But Robert stayed ready, alone in his room beneath the supermarket, a coiled spring of possibility.
Character
Tom Meniscus, at
first, did not realize that he had found the secret backstairs to the bedroom of his best friend, Rolland Hanson’s sister, Katelynn, who was both an invalid and a pink pants, so it was rumored, until he saw the cracked door and its buttery sliver of light and saw the upright, glimmering form of the young woman’s perfectly orbicular mammaries, clad only in diaphanous bedgown, nor did he know what he should do with this information except that he must keep it from his roommates, Jeff and Jerry Kinnoson, who were known around campus as party boys with forceful sexual proclivities, including the near-rape of a nubile, freshman bookbuster, according to some sources outside their fraternity ΣΑΕ, not to mention from Katelynn’s dipsomaniacal mother, Kathe, and her brutish father, Ron, Congressman Hester’s aide, which amounted to a real test of Tom Meniscus’s character, I’m telling you.
My Friend,
Bob Canaletto
I wanted to write a story about my friend, Bob Canaletto, the plumber. I wanted to describe his rise to grandeur, to the pinnacle of plumberness. How did he do it? Why him and not a dozen other plumbers, equally talented, equally blessed?
I wanted to discuss the "right place at the right time" theory, to debunk it, in a way. There is genius and there is everyone else, and no one, least of all me, admittedly, understands where that demarcation lies. I wanted to say something about that, and about Bob, as a person, as a friend, godfather to my young daughter, Dido. So much has been written about him as a star, as the brightest plumber of his generation.
He has been revered, delineated, deconstructed, and, for all that, misunderstood. His rightfully famous "Burr Removal Treatise" has been reprinted more times than "Desiderata," but few have taken the time to comprehend what he was really saying. Ditto for his "Drain Snake Dialogue: A Lucubration."
But, what about the spiritual Bob Canaletto? What about the philosophical side to this worker in sanitary ware? Was his belief in metempirics consistent with his handling of flux and solder? Did his "God" create his likeness with lampblack, plumber's soil? As of now, this has not been plumbed, if you'll forgive the play on words.
Now that he's gone, has anyone stood up to say, "I knew Bob Canaletto, and he was more than a great pipe cleaner?”? I wanted to be that person. I wanted to add my voice to the multitudes crying his name.
I wanted the real Bob to emerge from the sciamachy of myth. Did I know Bob Canaletto better than anyone else knew Bob? This does not interest me. I claim no personal glory.
I wanted to set Bob free.
But this cannot happen now. The zealots and the coven of family members and "friends," the sycophants and arcanists, have had their say. The papers are sealed, the gag order issued, the libraries mute.
But I know. I have my memories, like freshly milled dreams. I sit quietly now and replay them. My sweet memories of my friend, Bob Canaletto.
Delitescent Selves
A short piece of fiction
disguised as a book review
Delitescent Self: A Sort of Autobiography
by Lark Partee
W. W. Norton ($26.00)
Reviewed by Resole McRey
The famous American writer, Lark Partee, author of the novels Don’t Put Mme in a Nursing Home and A Devil of a Time, among others, has now penned his autobiography, made all the more gladly received by the author’s renowned reclusiveness. You know the story: hHe hasn’t been seen in public, no photographs of him exist. So one marvels that such an eremitic spook would even publish a personal history.
First off, as we know, Lark Partee is the author’s pseudonym and nowhere in this purposely cryptic and arcane confession, does Partee reveal his real name, nor does he talk at all about his early life and family. In passing he does remark, “I was bullied as a child. In the 40’s, in America, there was only one thing for a male child to be and that was tough. I was not tough. I was slight, wispy, dreamy, and distracted. I was easy prey.” One must intuit the life between the lines, so to speak.
Like Salinger and Pynchon, Partee apparently began to duck the limelight immediately, at the outset of his writing career. In 1958—Partee must have been, what,? twenty-two22 or so?—a slim, first novel appeared from Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, entitled Blast. It was the first appearance of the ghostly authorial signature, “By Lark Partee.” It seemed to come from nowhere. There was a jape for an author’s photo, showing the back of a man’s head. And the publisher was either in on the ruse or outside of it like the rest of us. At any rate, the novel was an immediate success, becoming the year’s number one bestseller—an aberration for such a literary, experimental first book—and quickly becoming a perennial assignment in college English classes. Its tale of a boy with the head of a donkey, trapped either in a village of cruel idiots, or in his own imagination—there are two schools of thought—struck a chord. The book is probably more discussed than read.
In Delitescent Self he dismisses his freshman effort as “that silly book that was embraced by silly people who thought they saw in it a reflection of themselves or the author or both.” An odd assessment for a book that established him as one of the uUp-and-coming authors of the sixties. And the money from the book, Partee admits, aided him in his desire to hide.
But it would be seven years before another book was released and it was the universally panned Callous. A long-winded, Joycean, self-indulgent rewriting of ancient mythology, its initial print of 50,000 copies (a monumental count by sixties’ standards) was almost immediately remaindered and, for Partee collectors today, it is difficult to find a pristine copy without the telltale scarlet slash on the top -edge.
By 1965 readers had embraced a bevy of new writers, Updike, Roth, Mailer, Oates, and Partee was clearly on the outer boundary of this kind of quintessentially American writing. Partee’s oeuvre, whatever else one may say about it, stands clearly outside any school. When, a few years later he was lumped together with the postmodernists, Barth, Barthelme, or Hawkes, he released A Devil of a Time, a sentimental story of love gone wrong, of love displaced, and finally of love rediscovered. A six-hundred-600- page opus, a straightforward soap opera, more Michener than Broch, it was an instant bestseller, outselling the nearest competition by 2 to 1, though the critics were strongly divided on its literary merit.
Here, Partee calls it his “favorite work of the imagination; perhaps the only work I ever did that fully employed my clockwork-like imagination and my clockwork-like heart. I still love the book and others do, also.” This last addendum seems strange. What others is he speaking of? His wife, if he has one? His friends, his readers? And does he truly believe this his best work or is this just more obfuscation?
Certainly there is more literature than life in Delitescent Self, yet Partee even shies away from revealing too much about his creative process. He takes years between books but does not explain why this is so. In mid-disclosure he makes this statement: “Novels are play. I play. I let my mind go a-wandering, like a boy in a dark wood, a fairy -tale wood, where one is just as likely to meet a lonely princess as Old Harry. If I could not continue this childish activity I would cease to exist, inasmuch as I seem to exist now.”
Masks upon masks. It seems Partee wants us to believe with him, like the dying Tinkerbell. He almost begs us to peek behind the curtain yet he maintains a death-like grip upon the edges of the material. He keeps his cards, and they may be tools of divination, close to the chest.
Yet, for all the shadow play, for all the concealment, for all the adumbration and hide-and-seek, what emerges from this odd unbosoming, this “sort of autobiography,” is a man at odds with the world, a man alive—or so he believes—only on the page. It is an absolution, a Ccatholic sacrament, if one reads the clues sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout the text. One hypothesizes, connecting the dots, that strict Catholic parents, perhaps in a small town, raised Lark Partee, and perhaps he fled from them with their disapprobation ringing in his ears. The only clear reference that supports this is in “Chapter Two: Real Life,” and, though it is scant, it is telling. Part
ee says, “My folks will never read my books. Papal law shall forbid it.” But there are other, more ambiguous intimations concerning this “escape.”
Between A Devil of a Time and his next book, the strange, metaphysical Dr. Dee’s Assistant, a gap of ten years. Partee calls these years, “My wandering Jew years. My time in the desert.” Whatever happened during this period of silence the result was a book that many critics point to as the work that established Partee as part of the modern canon, and he began to be mentioned with Barth and Mailer and Gaddis and Roth. William Pritchard, in The New York Times Book Review, called Dr. Dee’s Assistant, “a work of transcendent beauty, as if light were distilled and reconfigured as alphabetiforms, a book that goes deep into the soul of modern man and is not afraid of what it finds there.”
In Delitescent Self, Partee calls the book, “a poot. Something to do while my mind did other things.” Surely, he is hiding again behind a vizard of perversity, flying in the face of his own reputation.
The later books are generally regarded as a downward slope, a diminution of his creative powers. These books were produced quickly, appearing annually: Rankle, The Art of Diamond Mining, and his last work, Don’t Put Mme in a Nursing Home. These seem tired exercises or “idea” books, stillborn and with little to recommend them. It was also during this period that he novelized the screenplay to Jacque Dormay’s noir thriller, The Gun Also Rises. Again, one wonders what the quixotic man -of -letters was thinking. Though entertaining on the surface, this “hack-work” lacks any real spark.
Another period of silence followed and then this book appeared like Banquo’s ghost, an apparition from the past. Partee is still highly regarded for his earlier work but one wonders what this paradoxical attempt at autobiography will do to his reputation. Not that it matters a damn to the man, who must now be approaching seventy70*. Near the end of this book he says, "It’s a long drink of tepid water, life. For every fizgig there are days of dormant inactivity, of ennui. Women, writing, and gardening have kept me sane, kept whatever neurons firing that still fire. I am grateful for this, YHTD.”
