Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  Who would fucking believe something as outrageous as that?

  The Purloined Sibella

  Myron was a card-carrying habitué of habitat of inhumanity and something of a luminary at Avenue, to which we had hastily repaired. The host advised him that somebody was waiting at his table. She didn’t say “somebody” was waiting. She actually said, “Some vamp’s expecting you.” Vamp? Had we time-warped without warning? I concluded otherwise, because the host didn’t invoke gams or heaters or gats, but she did point a nostalgically nicotine-stained, divining-rod of an index finger in what I presumed was a direction familiar to him but not me. It was my maiden lunch with Myron because my personal jeans mutual disarmament pact that I may have mentioned precluded such prior socialization. Then the host obliquely expressed a concern we all had cultivated today at the house: “Myron, you look like you need a drink.”

  Across the way said vamp was indeed lodged in Myron’s booth. She appeared to be studying wide-eyed the bill of fare as if the text were sacrilegiously lifted from the Kabbalah or as if she had never before examined an esoteric printed publication known as a menu. I approached alongside my bedragglian boss. The guidebooks advise that projecting self-assuredness and power and standing tall are the keys to survival when happening upon a threatening creature in the wilderness or in an overpriced restaurant.

  “May I?” he said to her.

  “Of course, Myron. Glad you could slip away from Hard Rain.”

  I sat down flanking him, unable to take my eyes off her and her red dress and her shiny black tresses pulled back devilishly tight against her skull. She was woo woo put together, like out of a French magazine. Not a Paris Review type of magazine, wiseass, and she might as well have been wearing sunglasses, because I could not focus on her eyes. I was guessing she was old—thirty-four, thirty-five—but don’t trust me, as along with my powers of perception I had been vacuumed into the vamp muthaship’s suckational field.

  As for Myron, he had never spent a sleepless night in his office reading, and his unsteadiness showed.

  “What do you recommend, Myron?”

  “What shall I call you? Calypso?”

  She must have misheard the question and she held up the menu for theatrical effect. “I’m leaning toward Chicken Diavolo.”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  “Delightful, Myron.” She hardly appeared to be enamored. “Tell me, who’s this statuesque, exquisite gazelle keeping you company? You are both cutely clad in your identical academic chic white shirt and black tie.”

  If she were aiming for the jungular, I conceded gazelle was a notable improvement upon giraffe. Myron shot a glance in my direction. The astonishment in his eyes indicated the likelihood that that was the first instant he detected our unbespoken clothing synchronicity.

  “Myron, is this your new lover?” And yes, she pronounced the word “luvah.”

  I looked around, to ascertain if this insane creature was referring to me, and I was taken aback when Myron chortled and chortled, which was nowhere in the time zone of polite, and I thought, what am I, chopped fucking livah? But then again that was a crazy idea and who uses the word “lover” anymore, and let’s all agree I was obviously no wurst-ish candidate for downbeat pâté or AARP-eligible amours.

  I introduced myself anyway, fuck her.

  “Sibella is an intern,” he said expansively, following up.

  “Junior fucking editor,” I said.

  “Oh right, she was recently promoted to junior editor. And don’t worry. She has Tourette’s.”

  “So don’t make any fast moves,” I said, “though I don’t fucking have fucking Tourette’s.”

  She addressed me: “Sibella is such a lovely name, one that, sadly, is hardly heard any more in this world overpopulated by the Madisons and Rachels, the Jennifers and Sophias.”

  “Sibella does sort of rhyme with luvah, never thought of that before.”

  “Tell me, are you?”

  What fuck the fuck? I didn’t have to say it for her to get the message.

  If you will.

  “Are you a sibyl, Sibella?”

  “Well, my last prime-time prophecy was that the Mets and the Knicks would win championships before my Alzheimer’s kicks in, so I must qualify for the indefinite future as a fucking failure in the oracle department. Same time, I’m kinda savvy with bird entrails, if you have any in your fantastic handbag that need interpretation.” It was a knockout bag on her chair, gotta say. And I myself wouldn’t have deposited the messy entrails of anything inside it. “Is it a freakin’ Birkin knockoff?” Like you? I didn’t add.

  “Such a lovely girl,” she said. “You two make quite a pair, Myron and his Sibella. She makes you happy, I can see that, Myron.”

  Some people possess that rarest of commodities called charisma, from the Greek, suggesting the ability to perform miracles. In our secular age, we look askance at the whole divine intervention phenomenon, and charisma has devolved to mean something more restrictive and modest, along the lines of charm. I happen to possess the inverse of charisma, or charm. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t decipher that this woman had charisma to burn. She probably had more than adequate juice to turn me into a toad if the combined efforts of the book business and of Junior had not already rendered moot that feat. In any case, she seemed to be enveloped by a mysterious penumbra, and I know this because I would have been incapable of picking her out of a Law & Order line-up of red dresses. I was looking at her but not able to see her. She dizzy-dazzled, as if a million golden asterisks of collusion burst across the solar system.

  Myron’s cell phone rang. He saw that it was Young Goodman Brown, and he didn’t pick up. He decided he was going to fire his Hawthorne-ignorant ass that afternoon, as he told me later. He’d warned him never to disturb his lunch at Avenue unless the building was on fire, only Myron didn’t grasp then that, as it happened, it sort of was.

  Myron resumed. “Gee, the suspense is kind of killing me, what do I call you?”

  “All in good time, Myron, all in good time.”

  “One thing you could clarify. If you are not Calypso O’Kelly, are you his agent? And the whole question of Calypso’s sexuality in the manuscript is a little ambiguous, to me anyway.”

  “I find men are turned on by ambiguous sexuality, don’t you agree, Sibella? But Calypso doesn’t subscribe to the whole antediluvian agenting business. Calypso is committed to guerilla writing, marketing, representing. For Calypso and for Hard Rain, there are market force fields impossible to be penetrated by agents, or for that matter able to be understood by mere mortals.” Was she referring to another person named Calypso or was she speaking of herself in the third person, the way superstar jocks when post-game interviewed have been known to irritate the piss out of me by doing?

  “Well, what mere mortal isn’t fond of gorillas?” said Myron. “I’ve been called one myself. Tell me. What kind of forces are at play?”

  She sighed. “The kind of forces that change the world, the kind of forces that will cause my book to fly off the shelves.” And that’s when I shivered. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees. Charismafuckitall. “You must sit back and occasionally wonder why you and your company have been so fortunate.”

  “I never sit back.”

  I could corroborate that bizarre fact, not that I was asked.

  We ordered. Chicken Diavolo for her. Dungeness Crab Louie for Reformed Myron and an oxymoronish jumbo shrimp cocktail for me. Bottom-feeders of the world, unite! We waited for the food’s arrival and chatted, at which mind-numbing activity she proved incongruously adept, sort of like the condemned on death row serving high tea.

  Nice weather. We need a lot more rain. But we’re having a lovely drought. What’s wrong with the Giants’ pitching this year? She gets to California whenever she needs to but prefers the capitals of Europe. What will possibly c
ome of the ill-conceived Euro? The Greeks, well, the Greeks, but the Germans, mein Gott, the Germans. Americans are perceptive and have sound reason to be disappointed about their current politics. Republicans are gutless obfuscators, Democrats, weak-kneed flip-floppers. Don’t get her started on Trump. Americans and their ridiculously phallic gun-fixation. Equities vs. bonds. Italy vs. France. (You must know where I stood conversationally on that one.) Berlusconi bunga bunga mama mia. World Cup. Myron and she, the mind-numbing usual, Myron and she. If we didn’t talk business soon I was going to hara kiri myself with a butter knife.

  Thank God she got down to the subject and to her suddenly served-up Chicken Diavolo.

  “You read the terms of the proposition.”

  “That I did, that I did,” he said. “It wasn’t as compelling as the manuscript, which was, I have to admit, intoxicating. Did you write it?”

  “This pollo is perfectly prepared.”

  “And that’s a lot of money you’re seeking for what may or may not be a first-time author. Is Calypso O’Kelly a pen name?”

  “You have an unsavory reputation for skimping on advances.”

  “It’s a pretty primitive aspect of the book business.”

  “Money is the essence of primitive.”

  “Not to me. I feel sophisticated when I am in the neighborhood of my money.”

  “Is our lunch over prematurely and so unproductively, Myron? That would be very tragic.”

  “Listen, money’s one part of any book deal. Novice authors always make that mistake. It’s every bit as important, or more important, how a book is represented to the public—not to mention all the other contract terms.”

  “Do we need to order more cocktails to get through this silly portion of the fake negotiation, Myron?”

  Cocktails? We had a winner, ladies and gentlemen. Another Bloody Mary for Birkin Baby Grrll, another Martini for him, a Diet Coke for me. One day I have to stop drinking that concoction. It might be a contributing factor to my uptalk. It might be stunting my growth and thereby inhibiting me from joining the Knicks, who need a lot of help on the boards these days because you can’t win without rebounding, and you know what you require in order to rebound? A lot of want-to and strong anterior cruciate ligaments, both of which I have in spades.

  “Have you accomplished everything in life you desired, Myron? You and your publishing house have been on a magical run for years. Has this brought you peace and joy? But surely not the way your young lover, Sibella, has? Fact remains, you have the whole book business on its heels.”

  “We call that an overstatement, where I come from.”

  “Your success can’t be a matter of your judgment and intelligence.”

  He practically choked on a crab leg. “The things that come out of your mouth. Have you ever done business with anybody ever, whoever you are?”

  “Don’t mean to offend your sense of propriety. I thought you were more of a bare-knuckles bruiser, which is the reason you are the first and with any luck on your part the sole publisher to see the book presale. Ready to pony up for an exclusive? You wouldn’t want this to be the first time you passed up a golden opportunity, would you?”

  He liked her aggressive approach to business, which he could work with. And considering who Myron used to be, her aggressive approach to décolletage, with which he probably couldn’t work with anymore. It was at this point I detected the faintest of petite erotic moles on her upper lip.

  “You talk about luck a lot.”

  “I have kept my eye trained on your company for a long time, Myron. You probably don’t realize this, but we might have almost met once, before you ventured into the book business. You must wonder why you have achieved so much in such a brief time. I may have a clue as to why. Care to know what that is?”

  “My good looks? My infallible editorial shrewdness?” He palpated his hairless pink scalp, forebodingly.

  “You are aging fairly well, but I don’t think that’s it. And your acquisitions? Let’s say they are eclectic, to put it politely. Life is strange, Myron, but your success may stem from one fateful night in Venice. Do you remember the gypsy?”

  “Gypsies are everywhere in Venice, like cockroaches, no offense to the Roma people.” He didn’t like this turn, or that she seemed to know things about him she shouldn’t.

  “Yes, but there was one particular beggar of a gypsy you came across on an evening walk in the rain, a gypsy to whom one fateful night in that moody, mysterious, labyrinthine city you gave one Euro out of the kindness of your heart. Venice is a place that yearns to be walked in any sort of weather. It was raining a hard rain, you might say. And she was such a sad sight, sitting under an awning on the street, a tin cup in her hand that was randomly pinging from wind-driven raindrops. That was remarkably generous of you, to give her a Euro, and something tells me that she appreciated it.”

  “Well, I have had my weak moments.” Myron was looking progressively more and more disturbed.

  “And yet, in such a moment of largesse, which took place in Piazza San Marco, when you bent over to put the money in her cup, she surreptitiously managed to pickpocket your wallet.”

  Myron looked stunned, as if an invisible viper had sunk its teeth into him, which resembled the effect occasionally produced in him by Murmechka and sometimes Caprice, only now the quadrants of his face appeared to have been rearranged by one of those expressionist painters whose work gave me a migraine at the MOMA.

  “But then a miracle. When you got back to the hotel that evening, the concierge said your wallet was waiting at the front desk. He didn’t bother to state the obvious, which was that in the long, bloody history of Peggy Guggenheim and the state of Venice, no pilfered wallet has ever been returned to its rightful owner. Amazingly, until then, you didn’t apprehend it was missing.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am the one who considerately sent you the Adventures of Calypso O’Kelly and I am your lunch companion and the Chicken Diavolo is delicious, though we don’t know the identity of the person—or was it the gypsy herself?—who left the wallet at your hotel situated on the lagoon, where you shared a suite with your lovely bride on the top floor.”

  “Really, who the hell are you?”

  “You ask many irrelevant questions, Myron. Does he do this with you, too, Sibella? Men can be so irrelevant at the most inopportune times, don’t you find, and most of the time in bed immediately after climax, for instance?”

  Damn, she accurately intuited the ancient reality of Junior and me, but nonetheless, it was time for In the White Trunks Weighing Who Knows What Junior Editor Sibella to come out swinging: “Enough of this whack shit craziness, whoever the fuck you are.”

  “Ah, Myron, how sweet, Sibella is your protector,” she said, pronouncing it protectah. “And not only was your wallet intact, there were more Euros than before. Five thousand more. That was no ordinary gypsy, is my theory—that would be anyone’s theory. Legend has it that some gypsies possess supernatural powers. And she could have been one such. And she was touched by you, she gave you a gift that has not stopped giving. For take into account this one overwhelmingly salient fact: You have never wanted for money ever since that amazing night, ten years ago—you won’t believe this, today is precisely ten years. You invested a single Euro that night, and you enjoyed a five-thousand-fold return. Since then, every investment, every business decision you have spun into pure gold.”

  “My financial run of good luck was nothing but the result of living in the age of irrational exuberance and the dot-com boom.”

  “Apple, Xerox…” she intoned.

  “Jeez, remember Xerox? Glad I got out before the…”

  “Amazon, oodles of Googles, pharmaceuticals, every build-it-and-they-will-come crackpot IPO move you made was brilliant.”

  Now things got stranger still. For at this moment, it was as if a cloud lifted a
bout her and I could see her at last. What was happening? And where was it happening? In me or in her? It wasn’t that the pale erotic mole on her lip darkened and sprouted wiry follicles of hair. It wasn’t that her fingernails metamorphed into raptor talons, or her hair transformed into a tangled nest, or her once fetching breasts turned into dugs drooping down to the table. It wasn’t that her eyes gleamed like hobo campfires. All that would have been something. And yet, and yet, I saw into her. I had previously endured similarly disturbing, revelatory experiences in college, but they all involved psilocybin and being tossed into the back seat of the campus police car and the administration of a shot of thorazine at the infirmary. She cackled with what sounded to my unreliable ear like demonic delight. Had I stumbled into another job the way I had stumbled into Hard Rain? The job of a sibyl?

  Dare I say.

  Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

  I was projecting like mad, and I needed a new job fast.

  But then the witch winked knowingly at me, and only then did she speedily, olé aginously, revert to her original, vague, and fashionable Hermes form—or revert in my own mind, and what difference would that make anyway?

  “It’s such a pleasure to see you again, Myron. It’s been a long time.”

  What fuck the fuck did she mean by again? She had never met my boss before, or so I inferred a minute ago.

  She smiled. Consider yourself lucky you didn’t witness that. Some smiles have the uncanny capacity to warm the whole room. Hers deposited stalactites on the ceiling. “I should have told you before. I was fresh out of Brown then, so ten years earlier I was twenty-one or so, and I had a much older Venetian lover, about the same age difference that exists between you and your Sibella. He was some prince or marquis or count, but since he was married, he arranged for a spectacular suite, and we could enjoy each other’s company free of prying eyes. As it happened, we were a few doors down from you. I hope we didn’t disturb your slumbers, he was very boisterous in bed. Any candidates to be my lovers are required to be.” Of course, luvahs.