Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  “You don’t say.”

  “And here comes another coincidence, a rather dramatic one. You see, I came to know your former spouse, and she told me all about the theft and the wallet’s magical reappearance. Ships in the Venetian night, shall we say?” She then added that once back in America they got to know each other much better from the Nob Hill club and routinely shared such intimate confidences after Pilates classes when they scuttled to a bar to soothe their aching muscles.

  It clicked for Myron. His ex talked freely about his finances and liked to spend freely his money, and he was fine with the second part but not the first. And long before she became his spousal-supported ex, she was on the slow stroll down Don’t Give a Flying Fuck Boulevard that led to the outskirts of Beamtown.

  “It was you? You broke us up? You were the one with the Italian boy prince she was fucking? And your Italian princeling didn’t object?” Myron was laughing. Mr. Full of Surprises Himself today.

  “You find this amusing? I was hoping you would, it’s all ancient history, isn’t it? In any event, my lover and I were bored with each other by the time I returned to the States, and at Brown—well, being bi used to be a graduation requirement.”

  “I don’t know whether to kill or kiss you.” He might have used the word he probably meant instead of “kiss,” but that other word brought up too many associations with his personal futility.

  “You’re not the first man, and by that I mean lover, to have said as much to me. But losing her seems like such a small trade-off, Myron, wouldn’t you agree? I did care for her, if that is any consolation, certainly I liked her far more than you did, and she seems much, much happier without you, doesn’t she? As you are happier without her, and much happier with your lovely Sibella. Your wife was never truly interested in men, that was instantly clear to me—as it should have been to you.”

  “Tell me why I should do business with you.” I think he was asking in the spirit of a thought experiment. You know. Like what if Mary Ann Evans traded places with David Foster Wallace? (Gnote to Kelly: Not to be cruel, but Evans is George Eliot.) I didn’t detect a note of hostility in his voice. (Agnother gnote to Kelly: The author of Middlefuckingmarch.)

  “Please, Myron, these are questions that beg to be separated. Such a crass expression you insist upon using, and unlike your divine Sibella you don’t have Tourette’s, but if so, the truth is the truth. Let’s let bygones be bygones, shall we? But the point of my little tale is this. Business is business, as Americans claim to believe. This incredible string of coincidences brings us to our little tête-à-tête today. I have been speaking of that fateful night in Venice when you decided you would do something radically new with your life, and when the wallet’s recovery put you on the road to enjoying unexpected, unparalleled success to come.”

  “Then I wish the gypsy’d kept my wallet.” Myron was pretending to be blasé? He was dancing too fast, which is what taking X will do, as I recall, but who could blame his X-less self?

  “Of course, you don’t wish anything of the kind. In fact, that was the very night you made your decision. You had been casting about to initiate a revolutionary change in your life. And that night you, voilà, decided you would make your splashy entry into the predictably unpredictable book business, or so your wife informed me, and as we all know, you have never looked back. You have tasted success the way no small publisher ever has before. Why, honestly, you’ve never been the same man. And what a lucky man you are, and what an extraordinary gypsy she must have been to be generous to you. That night changed your life forever. And tell me if I am wrong, but the name of your company, Hard Rain Publishing, didn’t it come to you in a thunderbolt that very night you decided to go into the business—that blustery, tempestuous, stormy night in Venice when you chose the blustery, tempestuous, stormy publishing business? Isn’t it strange about life, Myron, how our whole being changes on a dime, or in your case on a Euro? You wouldn’t want to tempt fate and disappoint a gypsy who channeled her forces for your great and lasting benefit? Who knows what disappointments would greet you?”

  “My wife had a big fucking mouth.”

  “She possessed many exquisite attributes, but…”

  And then as she was getting to the part where she was going to enlighten him further about the mysterious Venetian night…

  “Myron,” I heard a voice behind us say and I leaped up in my chair gazellishly, there was that much tension in the air. Unfortunately, it was an instance of Young Goodman Brownus Interruptus. “We have a critical situation.” Some boys have bad timing, as I should know, and if this book or my abdomen had an appendix, I could list all the examples known to me. And these gents have bad timing in whatever sphere of life where timing is everything, by which I mean in every sphere of life.

  “The critical situation before you is that I am going to terminate you, something I should have done the first time you wore those pink socks.”

  “What’s wrong with my pink socks? Sibella, tell Myron what you said when you saw—”

  “Get the fuck outta here,” Myron cut him off. For the record, let me stipulate that they were adorable socks and I felt bad for how Myron was humiliating him.

  Then he leaned down, and into Myron’s ear he funneled under his breath the rumor that was circulating throughout the intricate series of tubes that was purportedly the Heart of Darkness Internet: Mistah Figgy Fontana, he dead.

  Fuck, if that news were true, that was as somber as Myron’s suspected cardiomyopathy. As serious as any situation in Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room could possibly be. Figgy Fontana was a horse for the company, a thoroughbred truly, a reliable money-maker for years, and once again Myron’s lead author this season with his new novel, Swimming Buck Naked in the Hurricane. Advance orders for what we were touting an irresistible beach read were through the roof, and Myron had preemptively ordered a second printing. But a “beach read”? Please track down the craven idiot who coined the sappy term and draw and quarter him or her. Who reads at the beach? The sunscreen, the wind, the fleas, the seaweed, the crab carcasses, the shards of oyster shells. Don’t you hate it when the sand gets between the pages?

  Myron had printed a barge load of hardcover Hurricanes in China, and Figgy was scheduled to start in a few weeks his national book tour on Myron’s dime, starting with national television and radio interviews. (Nationalistically filluminate about conducting business with the repressive People’s Republic of China if you must, but then you try running a publishing company with scrawny Lindsay Lohanish margins before you utter another self-satisfied plaint.) He took out full-page print ads in the national periodicals, not because he believed they paid off but because authors pucker up for that kind of publicity. Normally, he wouldn’t bother to throw away money like that, but grand symbolic gestures were sometimes ultimately cost-effective when dealing with a delicate ego like Fontana’s. Delicate, did I say? The man was a hothouse flower—if, that is, he hadn’t been cut down by the Grim Reaper’s scythe. But in any case that’s not the proper botanical reference point. Think cactus.

  Rest in peace, Figman, you soused-at-daybreak, unscrupulous pseudo-genius—if, again, the rumors ended up to be true.

  It was clear that our lunch meeting was going to be abortive. Myron told YGB to go back to the office in case he was needed there. Because one place he was most definitely unwanted was here.

  “He is gorgeous,” said the Diavolo-devotee and Venetian sexplorer, tracking the editor in chief’s retreating form. “Somebody could eat up that pretty boy with or especially without his pink socks. I swear he looks familiar, too.”

  I picked up my butter knife and wondered what artful damage I could inflict by means of it. “You slept with him in college?” Everything is permitted.

  “Who can keep track?”

  “Look,” Myron told his baffling non-companion, “I have an urgent problem I need to deal with back at the office.”
Not that I myself appreciated what difference it would make by sinking his butt down into his ridiculously overpriced Aeron chair (chairs he also gave all his senior staff last Christmas).

  “The Figgy Fontana?” She spoke with a whisper and she looked distraught. Was she momentarily concerned there was more than one Figgy Fontana? “I should have known,” she said mysteriously, emotionally. Then she rallied her resources, clearing her throat and keeping her eye on the prize: “Meanwhile, you would not wish me to shop the book around, would you? You would be making an unwise decision, if you ask me.”

  “No, I’ll buy it at your number.”

  Whose woods these are I think I know / His publishing house was soon to be pillaged though.

  Without your gracious permission, I think I should take the opportunity to summarize my complex, nuanced, junior-editor feelings at this juncture, which I dared not express out loud, with regard to a publisher who never gave an author an advance (with the exception of Figgy Fontana, so please let’s keep a candle burning) a penny over one or two thousand: six hundred thousand plus plus fucking smackers?

  Myron wasn’t in the mood to haggle. Not saying that under other circumstances (anything other than the possible demise of Fontana, and the ridiculously improbable gypsy story, and his ex’s preposterous affair) haggling isn’t always very big fun for a publisher.

  She did not blink or blanch or do anything else beginning with a b, and she certainly did not blubber her gratitude. That’s the sort of style he otherwise enjoyed. It was not much of a style, but it was his.

  “Let me know when the contract is ready,” she said matter-of-factly, “and Calypso will come into your office for the signing.”

  Six hundred thousand plus plus. Tell you what, gentle book buyer, to Myron in his current state of mentation—using the bossy word very pompously—that was a steal. Which made it clear to me how far gone my boss was. But to him this book at least enjoyed the added advantage of zero zombies and vampires, a minute percentage of whips and chains, and an altogether arresting shortage of wizards and British accents. Besides, if his lunch date and the gypsy were right, he couldn’t help but succeed in any project he embraced. Every risk he took was, well, no risk whatsoever.

  As she was speaking, she was confidently dining with brandished knife and fork in dueling hands, Euro style, and after she sent on its merry way down her alimentary canal a thoroughly masticated morsel of spicy poultry, she said: “All the money up front with the delivery of the manuscript, which has already been delivered, so due now.” It takes genuine talent to eat and speak at the same time, something suspects being interrogated on Law & Order were gallingly good at. Because tell me, who eats a hot dog with kraut when being interrogated on a street corner as to the commission of a class A felony?

  “One hundred K now, the rest upon publication.” What the heck, a little rug-trading is Diavolo Chicken Soup for the Publisher’s Soul.

  “Half now, half upon publication.”

  “One hundred K now, the rest…”

  She raised her palm. “Tell you what, Myron, you’ve been such a delightful lunch companion and you’re clearly having a strange day, and you’re a little bit in shock as a result of my revelations, let’s say two hundred K now, and we split net receipts up to the number, and then once we pass that number, we get sixty per cent of the receipts and the first three hundred K in sub-rights.”

  “You’re good, whoever you are.”

  “Good? Me? That’s something I have never heard. And as a result of publishing my book, I imagine the gypsy’s power will stay with you. I’m going to remain and polish off the chicken, if you don’t mind,” she said, as if she were uttering a veiled threat to the species if not the whole environment.

  Myron helpfully pointed at the rogue chili pepper flake on her magnificent lower lip, which she gratefully attended to by means of her white napkin. Hey, they had a relationship, didn’t they?

  “Forgetting something, Myron?”

  He wasn’t forgetting anything. He put down all the cash in his pocket because there are at least two things you can bank on in the book biz: the sun will likely come up in the east tomorrow and lunch is on the publisher. Reluctantly, I admired how she did business. Very professional. Or at least very much like Myron.

  “Condolences about our friend.”

  He looked confused.

  “Figgy Fontana?” she said.

  “Our friend? He is my author.”

  “Or unfortunately was.”

  “That’s the thing about publishing a book and exploiting what are essentially licensing rights. An author’s book not out of print exists continually in the present tense. The marvels of the back list are also not to be underappreciated—or carelessly over-reported.”

  “At least till rights revert on account of nonperformance. Poor Figgy Fontana, what a fantastic writer. I hope for everybody’s sake the rumors aren’t true.”

  “Hell with the paper contract,” he said. “You can have one whenever you want, but in the meantime, you and I have a deal, with the splits going the way you spelled out.”

  “Deal. And Myron, the gypsy is never wrong. My book, our book, will make us millions. It is a foregone conclusion. The forces are at work,” she said, “guiding you, guiding us.”

  They shook. She and I shook, too. It seemed the thing to do.

  Let me tell you, a luvah and protectah such as I could not believe a cadaver’s paw would be as key-cold to the touch as her hand.

  You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative. That’s an obscure collusion, Kelly, until you realize we had partaken of the nakedest of Naked Lunches.

  Myron took off and I followed him out the door, but then I lied to him: “I forgot something, go on and I’ll catch up.”

  I hustled back to the table. Before her a fresh Bloody Mary with a threatening stalk of celery that was so large it must have been biogenetically modified. And my mind was playing tricks again. She should have had those claws and talons and teeth and fire.

  “I knew you would come back to me, Sibella.”

  “I see you.”

  “Of course you do. That’s why he brought you along.”

  “No, I see you for the fucking thing you are.”

  “And what would that be, dear?”

  “I have no idea, but I will find out. And all that Myron and Sibella luvah bullshit, what fuck the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Wanted to give the old man a little thrill, that’s all, get his pulse racing. Are you frightened of me, Sibella? Don’t be. In the meantime, remember what I am about to tell you. When all is said and done, you’ll find, everything will work out to your lasting benefit.”

  “You’re on notice. I’m a junior editor.”

  “And perhaps a sibyl on the side?”

  “As a sibyl, I am an intern.”

  “See you in your dreams, Sibella.”

  Fuck if she would prove to be right about that one.

  She removed the celery stalk from the glass and inserted it into her mouth. The snap executed by her brilliantine teeth popped my ear drums.

  Defensive basket interference, score the bucket.

  ✴✴✴

  Gustave Aschenbach—or von Aschenbach, as he had been known officially since his fiftieth birthday—had set out alone from his house in Prince Regent Street, Munich, for an extended walk. (Lots of luck colluding, Kelly.)

  In a few minutes I caught up with Myron, who was trudging along lost in thought, not an everyday sight. As he and I wended our way back to the office, I kept a sharp lookout for any more gypsies who might have additional plans to fuck up his head. Then again, on downtown San Francisco thoroughfares gypsies are as rare as Republicans and Dodger fans.

  He was silent, but I couldn’t resist tal
king. Yes, we were both upset about the Figgy development, but I was also thunderstruck he was throwing that much money at any book—and more than that, doing any business whatsoever with this…this, this, this…shifting namelessness in a red dress with a fancy purse to die for.

  “Sibella, I couldn’t stop myself. I can’t believe she knew about the wallet and the gypsy and my wife, my fucking wife. I couldn’t lose her book. Something came over me. I didn’t want it—I needed it. I couldn’t let any other house publish it.”

  I told him that he might have made a deal with the devil. A trite expression, but there it was. Devil, crone, witch, sorceress, voodoo princess. You pick the term.

  He came to a full stop and we faced each other. “You felt that, too?”

  There was no need to confirm his intuition.

  “Something about her…it was like I could not say no to her.”

  When I looked into his eyes I saw that he meant it and that, gypsy or no, he was in for a dreadful spell, which meant I was too.

  He said he had a question. “Figgy, Calypso, Venice, my ex. Without warning, in the last eighteen hours my world has completely turned upside down.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  “To me it fucking is.”

  I didn’t know what to say. “I look forward to reading her manuscript.”

  “But what if she was right about the gypsy? That all my success came from that supernatural source? I do have this problem: I have no doubt everything I publish is going to sell. And so far, so good. But that’s not possible in the crazy book biz. A gypsy’s spell did the trick for me or I am the luckiest publisher of all time? Which is it? Either way, I have been living a fairy tale. But which is it? Go on, tell me.”

  “Permission to speak freely, Commandante?”

  “Permission granted, Intern.”

  I let that pass, he was having a rough day. “They could both be correct explanations.”

  “And maybe there’s a third I’ll never know. What difference does it make?”

  He wanted an answer. For him, as I have said before and may well say again, there was no such thing as a rhetorical question.