Notes Toward The Story and other stories

by KUBOA

  Yet, I could not look away.

  The top sheet bore what I imagined was the title, flung across the head, above where the lines began, like on a school report. And the title was Anima, certainly a broad- enough topic, I thought. And in more crabbed alphabetiforms, as if it pained the poor soul to pin his name on the page, as if, indeed, by pinning it there he may have trapped himself, below the larger title, it said: by Jim Nozoufist. And, of course, there amid the detritus which was his book lay his check, which I barely registered except to notice it was at least made out in ballpoint to Ardent Publishing, Publisher.

  Ridiculous, I thought. Ridiculous title, absurd nom -de -plume. Who was this wise guy kidding? And, somewhere in the middle of my nonsensical fear, a small anger grew, a misplaced anger at this ridiculous Jim Nozoufist and his unsanitary manuscript. How dare he,! I huffed. I sat back hard in my chair, which once again tilted dangerously, like a rolling log over a chasm. Sherri looked around hopefully with a can-I-help look on her exquisite, colorful face. I scowled back.

  After a moment I picked up page one of Anima and began to read. I read the first sentence with a self-righteous mad on. I read the second sentence with a prickle- like fever at the back of my neck. I read the third sentence, a sculpted piece of prose mastery worthy only of some pixilated offspring of Beckett and Virginia Woolf, with a growing sense of disbelief. Oh, my lares and penates!

  An hour passed. Two. Somewhere beyond the periphery of my mindfulness I was cognizant of a sulking Sherri who went about her work, left for lunch, returned. It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I threw down the pages I still had in my hand and craned my stiff neck heavenward. It was unbelievable. It was preposterous. I looked guiltily around me, as if I had smuggled some plutonium and was squirreling it away in my desk drawer, or as if I had just inherited the secrets of eternal life and did not want to share them with anyone. Not even my sweetheart, not even my parents. Sherri turned inquisitively toward me but my face must have seemed deranged, goggle-eyed, for she crinkled her nose and widened her beautiful mahogany blinkers and turned back to her own work. I took a series of deep breaths and leaned back precipitously in my chair. What was first an inkling of something other had become a faith in something grand. I had on my desk a masterpiece. A piece of the puzzle, the missing pieces perhaps in the puzzle of world literature. Or, so I felt initially.

  No. It was stronger than that. I was sure. This was it. This was the real thing. And I was an editor at a dog assed, corrupt publishing concern that would take this precious cargo and jettison it upon the world like another book of grandma’s poetry, like another memoir of “My Mmost Mmemorable Ccharacter.” I surged with power, but it was a power checked, a light under a bushel, a light obliterated and trapped under a sleazy, perplexing bushel. But my metaphors run away. I had to think. I had to clear my mind and figure out what to do.

  I gathered the pages and stuffed them back into their envelope (they didn’t want to fit, as if once oxygen had reached them they had expanded, full of life, or as if they would not be imprisoned again, ever again). I made a quick, rude excuse to Sherri, rushed past her, and went immediately home.

  I must keep Anima with me at all times. I must never let it out of my sight. These were my thoughts.

  And I must find Jim Nozoufist. And tell him—what? That he was a genius, that he had written the most important novel since Joyce reconfigured things. Needless to say, I re-read the book in its entirety that night—it took me until the wee hours—and it only reinforced my opinion. This was the book that the literary world had been waiting for. It was an answer to questions we didn’t even dare ask, questions we didn’t know needed asking. And I owned it. Anima was mine.

  2

 

  The address listed for the author of Anima was in a tony part of Manhattan, a part, quite honestly, where I rarely ventured, where the word penthouse was tossed around lightly, where the recirculated air was ripe with the scent of freshly minted cash. Was it possible this adept was worth more than the entire publishing concern on which he was pinning his literary aspirations? Why didn’t the joker just publish the book himself, certainly a time-honored way of appearing in print, and just slightly more expensive than turning over blood money to Ardent?

  After some initial wrangling with a taciturn doorman, who insisted there was no one living in Two Towers by the name of Jim Nozoufist, a call was made to the apartment number written as the return address on the soiled envelope I had clenched under my jacket. (I had spent the earliest hours of the morning at Kinko’s making a copy of Anima, which now resided in the locked drawer of my desk in my apartment.) Some muted conversation was made into the phone, while I stood by like a miscreant pupil, some description given of the personage wishing admittance I imagined, and after hanging up the doorman simply opened the inner door without apology or even assent. I walked past him, hiking up my dignity, looking into his dead eyes as I walked unnecessarily close to him and into Two Towers.

  The elevator stopped on the thirteenth floor and I bobbed down the thickly carpeted corridor to Apartment 1307 and lightly rapped on the door. After a few sweaty moments—was there another gauntlet to run before admittance?—the door opened and an astoundingly beautiful woman in her mid- to- late fifties50s stood there glittering like a prize. Her jewelry glittered, her dress glittered, her teeth glittered, even her décolletage, sprinkled with some kind of glitter makeup, glittered. She was smiling to beat the band.

  “Mr. Brackett?” she twinkled.

  “Yes,” I said, transfixed by her. “Call me Todd.” I was so nervous it came out “Dodd.”

  “Please come in.”

  I walked in as if I was being led past the Ppearly Ggates, mesmerized as much by this ideal of womanhood as by the incredible space into which I was coaxed. It might have been Gloria Vanderbilt’s home, or, indeed, one of the nicer salas in hHeaven. If my conscious brain was working at all it was chewing on the question, who is this ravishing dowager and what does she have to do with J. Nozoufist?

  “Please sit,” she gestured toward the plushest piece of furniture I had ever seen. I could have lived in it.

  A gentleman appeared as if a bell sash had been pulled.

  “Would you like some refreshment?” this lovely woman asked, all flickering eyes and teeth.

  “No. Uh, actually, yes, some ice tea, if available,” I managed.

  “Ice tea, Noah,” she spoke to the superannuated butler, and I assumed he really was the Biblical patriarch.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Brackett. How rude of me. I am Cecilia Quisby. My name may be familiar to you, though I’m well aware that it is not me who you are here to see.”

  I didn’t know her from Betty Grable but I smiled and nodded. She seemed to know a lot more about whatever was happening than I did and in such situations I always find it best to keep mum until things begin to take shape. It didn’t take long.

  “You are looking for Jim,” Cecilia Quisby shimmered.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m from Ardent Pub—”

  “Yes, I know. Jim sent you his book. I told him we could look elsewhere, but, well, Jim has a sort of stubbornness to him, which…”

  She drifted away momentarily and I took the opportunity to try and win some respect from this imposing woman.

  “Frankly, Mrs. Quisby—”

  “Cecilia.”

  “Cecilia. Frankly, I think, just maybe, Mr. Nozoufist has written something really remarkable here.”

  “No,” Cecilia Quisby spoke quickly and then caught herself. “I mean, really? It’s, it’s good?’

  “Um, yes. I believe it is quite good.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Excuse my Alabama- backyard French,” she said and sort of fell back into the couch, wherein she could have fallen quite a long way.

  “Jim is a real writer, then?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Hm,” she said and she lay there, in a repose rather unladylike for someone so elegant, though it gave me
ample time to run my eyes over her aged but stately figure. She was a supernatural being.

  “Mrs. Quisby—Cecilia—who is Jim Nozoufist? Is he here? I would really love the opportunity to speak with him about his book and about the possibilities I think—”

  “Jim’s not here at the moment, Todd,” she spoke, familiarly, and she rose to a more upright posture and placed a warm hand on my knee. It burned through my cheap suit pants. Up my leg went the heat of torment.

  Letting the fluster pass, I took a difficult swallow of ice tea, which Noah had delivered I know not when, but which, magically, appeared near my right hand.

  “Is Jim Nozoufist your husband, mMa’am?” I don’t know where the Southernism came from, triggered possibly by her mention of Alabama.

  She let loose a cachinnate fanfare. “Oh, my, no,” she said. “Jim, well, Jim, works for me.”

  “As?” I asked without thought.

  “Oh, odd jobs. When a woman reaches my age she needs some seeing to. Jim does a little driving for me, a little grocery shopping, that sort of thing.”

  “I see. Well, I don’t want to take up too much of your time. When can I speak to him? It’s rather urgent,” I added, self-importantly.

  “Noah,” Cecilia Quisby spoke in conversational tones and the man was suddenly there. “Call Jim and have him come straight over.”

  Noah nodded, I think, and left the room.

  Cecilia smiled her bright white smile at me and we sat in silence for a few moments and I sipped the ice tea without tasting it.

  After a while she scooted a half-inch closer to me, leaned forward, and replaced the hand on my knee, perhaps a measurable space higher on my thigh. This woman knew men. She knew me and she had me and she knew she had me. I didn’t care. It was literature a-calling and, for the moment, even the sexual flirtation of such an attractive woman took a backseat.

  “Todd,” she said, as if about to let me in on a family secret. “Prepare yourself for Jim. He may not be what you were expecting.”

  “Okay,” I said, though I wasn’t aware of expecting anything.

  A moment later there was the sound of activity coming from the kitchen area.

  “I believe he’s here now,” Cecilia Quisby said, rising from the couch. Putting space between us was both a relief and an agony.

  What emerged from the rear of the apartment was indeed not what I had expected no matter what I had expected. Neanderthal was an unavoidable reference term and had I Tourrette’s syndrome no doubt I would have spoken the word aloud. Jim Nozoufist was a man about the same age as Mrs. Quisby, though through grime and facial hair it was difficult to ascertain much about him. He was positively pithecoid. Surely this was just some poor homeless gull they brought up to impersonate the author. His dungy attire—ankle-length, soot-graey raincoat, unbuttoned formerly white shirt, oversize achromatic pants, squalid, unlaced high-tops—reminded me of the costume Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull used to sport in his early rhythm- and- blues days, a sort of crazed, exhibitionist, street person affectation. Indeed he somewhat resembled Mr. Anderson in the uncouthness of his wild appearance. Aqualung with an Olivetti, I thought. No one could have been more out of place in Cecilia Quisby’s elegant apartment.

  “Jim, come here,” Cecilia beckoned with a bejeweled hand. “This is Todd Brackett from Ardent Publishing. He’s here about your book.”

  No change of expression occurred on the exanimate face of the feral fellow. Did he understand? Was he capable of more than animal instinct?

  He shuffled forward and extended a meaty and distinctly unclean hand. I took it gently but he squeezed like an Irishman in a pub contest and when I drew my smarting body part back I found myself imagining all sorts of disease, scrud or double scrud. I wanted to bolt for the bathroom.

  Professionalism reigned.

  “Mr. Nozoufist? As Mrs. Quisby said, I’m from Ardent and I’ve had the pleasure of reading your manuscript, your, um, novel, Anima, and I’m quite taken with it. I believe you have a real gift. I have taken it upon myself to contact you personally, not standard procedure perhaps at Ardent, but I was moved to do so by the particularity of your work, by its special otherness, which it is my belief may just be something very special in the world of contemporary letters.” I felt as if I was talking to an actor standing in for the real author. At no time during my speech did I believe this was the author of the book I still had clenched inside my jacket. I also felt orotund and absurd in my language and as if I was talking over the poor man’s head.

  There now emerged from somewhere beneath the whiskers and grime on Mr. Nozoufist’s facade a deep growl or grumble. Bubbles of saliva formed in his mustache. Fear flashed through me—perhaps he was an epileptic, perhaps he was about to bite my neck—but I glanced at Cecilia and she was smiling beatifically. This calmed me somewhat.

  “I’d like Ardent to publish Anima,” he said.

  I nodded and was about to open negotiations—whatever those were going to be—when he sputtered further.

  “Cecilia sent the check. We’ve paid,” he said, and looked to his patron for reassurance. Cecilia moved to him and took his filthy arm in hers and placed a kiss on his hispid cheek. He smiled, a horrible smile, a monster’s lascivious grin.

  It suddenly occurred to me that Jim Nozoufist did a little more than some grocery shopping for this woman. There was a warmth between them one sees in movies, that romantic shorthand that says, intimacy. It made me feel unwell for some reason.

  “Mr. Nozoufist, rest assured that all is satisfactory in your prepayment and the contract that denotes. Ardent would be proud to publish your novel. Ardent would be more than proud. Ardent should get down on its collective knees (here a brief flash of Sherri’s lovely face threw a blinding flare over my vision) and beg to publish Anima. What I’m saying is—”

  And, here I was at the moment of truth, the moment I had been dreading. What was my plan? Did I think I could parlay this man’s talent, this wild man’s exotic talent, into some kind of score for Todd Brackett? What were my motives? I had convinced myself that they were pure and that the main thing, the important thing, was to get this book into print and into wide distribution, where it could, rightly or wrongly, upset the placid and smug and dull ship of state that was modern fiction.

  “What is it, Todd?” Cecilia asked with genuine concern in her voice.

  “I think Anima may be the greatest novel of its, of our, time.”

  I said it. I laid it out there like a taunt and I did not know, in this extraordinary company, where such a taunt would lead. I did not know who would pick it up.

  After a pregnant moment, our aberrant author spoke.

  “You do work for Ardent, don’t you?” It was somewhere between a growl and a barroom challenge.

  “Yes, yes,” I assured. “But, this book, this marvelous book, is something quite uncommon. Quite frankly, it is too good for Ardent. I mean, we are fine for what we do, but, Mr. Nozoufist, Jim, if I may, Anima needs one of the big boys. It needs a Knopf, a Farrar Straus & Giroux. It needs a Gary Fisketjohn. It needs a Liz Darahnsof. It needs paperback rights, foreign rights, electronic rights, Hollywood representation, for Christ’s sake!” I was sweating. “This is a major book. A searingly significant, important book.” I finished with a deep breath as if I had sprinted here from Newark.

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” Cecilia Quisby let out. “And I’m sure Jim doesn’t either. With your Fiskyjons and your Jews and your Darryn Soft, Mr. Brackett, Todd, we are simple people. What are you suggesting?”

  I didn’t know. Could I tell them I didn’t know? That even I was out of my depth?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Ardent’s good enough for me,” the musty giant now spat out and strode from the room so quickly it left me speechless. I looked at Cecilia Quisby—she smiled like the opening of the moon—and a few minutes later I was walking back toward Ardent, shell-shocked. The manuscript was still tucked under my jacket and my arm w
as cramped from the tension of holding it there. I had never even brought it out, examined it in front of its exotic creator, showed him that I knew my way around a work of fiction. I only then understood that it was what I had desired—to prove myself to the author of such an eccentric masterpiece. I had expected to be parlaying with someone along the lines of Mervyn Peake or Alexander Theroux.

  Cecilia Quisby was right. I hadn’t expected Jim Nozoufist. I hadn’t expected a madman. And, now, where were we?

  ***

  Sherri was playing coy when I returned to the office, playing at avoiding my eyes but giving me uncertain, saucy side-glances at every opportunity. I sat at my desk and stared straight ahead. My head was full of expensive perfume and deodorized penthouse air and Cecilia Quisby’s squeezable bosom and her hand, which generated heat like a magnifying glass, and the sweet rot of old flesh and fetid clothing and the incredible, exploding encyclopedia, which hovered above it all, that book called Anima. I finally remembered to unclench my arm and release the manuscript and I laid it in front of me, atop the numerous unopened envelopes that would make up Ardent’s sSpring list.

  I believe Sherri hissed or made some noise, which was not quite human speech, and I slowly turned toward her. She smiled a delicate, infirm smile.

  My heart beat hard once or twice—there was pain there—should I worry? And then I opened my arms and Sherri Hoving slid across the room and onto my lap and her warm mouth covered mine and her tongue swelled into me and I lost, momentarily, all my worries as my blood careened in my body looking for the place it was needed most. It found my loins.

  Sherri felt the stiffening there and she loosened her kiss slightly and looked into my eyes. Her hand went sSouth, where the trouble was, and opened my tensions to the air and it was that hand job at my desk—that release—in the middle of a most troublesome workday, which began to crystallize things for me. Which began to set a couarse for myself, for Sherri Hoving, and for our demented ward, the foul and priestly Jim Nozoufist.