“Sweet dreams, Myron,” she said. “You’re probably not as bad a guy as I thought you were. Of course, hardly anyone would be. We’ll catch up by morning light. Big day’s coming soon,” she said with a thrill, leaning over him at a fetchable angle. “We got a funeral to get ready for.”
“Whose?” he asked.
Band the Sibella Slowly
No cock volunteered for Myron’s wake up call, and neither did the dogs do reveille. He felt a little better, it seemed, though there was no spring in his step. Maybe he should have stayed transfixated on the couch, but that wouldn’t be normally advisable according to the directives of the Department of Infectious Diseases, considering the ruinous state of that piece of furniture upon which he had spent the night. He probably should have stayed as unconscious as he normally was in his San Francisco offices of Hard Rain Publishing and probably should have never taken his posse to Fontana Town in the first place. But if he had done that and I had never kept him company, I would have missed a most marvelous, unanticipated event.
Now comes the place where you are going to question me all over again with renewed skepticism as to the soundness of my judgment. But you will also appreciate that on this occasion I am going to restrain my impulse to offer TMI. You’re welcome very much.
YGB asked me something at the right moment in bed last night (come on, man, use your fucking imagination) along the lines of, “We okay, Sibella?” You had to be there in order to catch how wonderful that might have sounded to me, but if you were, the double bed would have been too crowded for the unprincipals to circumnavigate. He and I were the apothefuckingosis of okay. And here’s a sentence you never heard cross my lips before: I was very happy. (Enough, Sibella, I know you want to, but don’t go there. You can resist everything except temptation.)
“Good,” he said softly.
He was sweet and considerate and it felt right, the whole experience, to speak euphemystically, and don’t allow that Spell Chechen Terrorist to autocolorectically sell me out. The closest we came to awkwardness had to do with—three guesses? No, not my length, which was kind of mattressly uncontroversial considering the horizontality. And you know, if anything, that factor inspired the opposite and ecstatic effect, truth be told. And not that I ruined the mood by babbling about books he had never heard of, much less read. Considering his relative book ignorance, that would have been shooting fish in a barrel, and besides, there wasn’t a whole lot of pillow book talk, ahem and ahim.
Yes, the fucking tattoo.
“Says right here,” he said, gently semaphoring a strategic and magical digit, “you are a Muse?”
“More like amuse bouche.” Even by my low standards that is a tasteless pun if you mangle the bouche, and forget the mangle, too. At least I didn’t quote the late great Marvin Gaye when he sang about textual healing. Miss that guy.
Ma mère et mon père, who could otherwise pass for brilliant, insisted I take French my whole time at Spence, classes I passed with meager distinction. I’ll finally cop to my deficit, my usual defenses along with my clothes being utterly irrelevant in that boudoirish context.
But as for the French, man, here goes: not that they’ve been hanging on my every Anglophone word, but I now officially need to cut them a break. This century they have suffered heartbreaking tragedies at the hands of those uni-browed, virgin-shopping, de-Johnsoned terrorists. Very well then, let’s start over. I have been unfair to those marching Marseillaise-crooners. Their cuisine may be criminally oversauced but it’s damn good. I mean, nothing beats their croque monsieur and their French fries (but forget the mayo). And their vin? Got me there, too, though that’s a question way above my editorial pay grade. The mossy-toothed existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre killed God on the cover of Time magazine, but who subscribes to the existence of Jean Paul Sartre anymore? Nicely played, Deity. Their countryside is rapturous and their cathedrals and their museums and their movies and their clothes and everything else—all right, I give up. They win, fair and square. Sure, they make fun of tourists, but who can blame them? They’re tourists! They are also very kind to tykes and to pooches. If only I could have mastered pronouncing the precious fucking “r” maybe I would have been more temperate off the top. If I were you, and obviously I’m not because you yourself are, I wouldn’t bet on it. But then the French went and sealed the deal when they elected a president who is cool and smart and speaks better English than our potato head prez (all right, pretty low bar to hurdle) and somebody who married his high school teacher, which would warm the cockles of my heart if my cockles were not currently preoccupied. All to say, Vive la France. Seriously. While we’re in a confessional mood, I also admit you have been correct all along: I am self-sufficient and high maintenance both. You yourself can order this combo platter if you exhibitionistically dedicate yourself.
“I’ll bet there’s a good story,” said my editor in chieftain. “There usually is behind every tat.”
“There must be, but I can’t remember it, and if I did, telling it is the very last thing on my mind.” And the very first thing on my mind I proceeded forthwith to consumatitiously demonstrate.
Afterward YGB said, and he could kill me with the honeyed sincerity of his voice, “Whatever the story may be, I hope you’ll be my muse, Sibella.”
Who was this boy to me, I yearned to know, and, God, I hoped my fantasy life hadn’t manufactured the whole thing.
Let us draw the faded gingham curtain, venal reader, on this scene.
About the curtain in that bedroom, queasy reader? You wouldn’t want to lay a finger on its long lost ginghamness without first snapping on latex gloves.
That’s all from me, Junior Editor Sibella, reporting from her idea of the cobbled lanes of Paree. Now back to you in the studio, Wolf, and I gotta say you’re looking mighty pale, do you ever get outside, see the sun? Qu’est-ce que c’est? Wolf?
✴✴✴
I am speaking about the morning after my night before when Myron lurched into the belly of the beast that was Fontana’s ramshackle house, whereupon he came upon a sight previously unwitnessed: No, not Loch Nessie or a unicorn. It was rarer than that. It was YGB and colloquially me and not schoolmarmishly I standing alongside each other in the kitchen. He had never observed the two of us in such intimate-seeming proximity in the Hard Rain breakdown room or anywhere else on planet Earth.
YGB and I studied Myron—one word would be—sheepishly. And don’t try to revise and inject goatishly, Murmechka. I have never been compared to any farmhouse animal (unless you are aware of any grungy grange filled with giraffe or gazelle herds), or spent a minute in any self-respecting agricultural enterprise, but I understand full well that sheep are supposedly meek and stupid. These were two adjectives that had never in the past been associated with Young Goodman Brown and Sibella of the Isle of Manhattan. Well, stupid was a viable candidate, but meek?
Because that is the moment the truth instantly cracked Myron like a beer bottle on the noggin during a college bar fight. He could tell that Meek and Stupid had slept together in one of those bedrooms advertised by FF’s son on Expediency dot com. YGB’s fantasy had, against all odds bodkins, come true. And so did mine. (If you only knew how hard it is not to embellish with narrative detail and selfies, but then again, you do.)
“You didn’t,” Myron said to us both in a hushed tone. “Tell me, please, you didn’t.”
“What?” YGB replied. Not his finest instance of oral repartee, I agree. And not at all like last night when he orally—
“You didn’t,” the boss repeated a third time in case we had missed it the first two.
Myron overplayed his hand, conveying contempt way over the border of tut tut tut with regard to the supposed desecration of professional decorum. Then again, Myron never played the hand he was dealt, which is what you are supposed to do in cards and in life. To my knowledge, in the end as you’ll see, he overplayed every hand
he was ever dealt. Maybe that explained, and not the gypsy, why he had all the success he had had, and also explained the dangers that loomed and the non-gypsies who targeted him.
Though this could not be fairly said ape pro Poe ravenous nevermore me, young people supposedly hook up all the time, as I read and have been known in the many moments of self-pity that I had called my life to envy. In strictly demographic terms, no big deal, right? Are you asking yourself if Myron was jealous? Was he possessive of his protégé, Sibella? If such thoughts cross your mind, you’ve been multitasking and not paying close enough attention, though who could blame you besides me? Perhaps it was none of his business what the senior and junior editor’s relationship was, and don’t think about inserting air quotes around relationship. That was our private business. But none of your business is the working definition of the business of a publisher like Myron.
“You couldn’t.” On the plus side, at least a slight variation on the prevailing Beam theme.
“What?” YGB said, suddenly having an awkward way with his tongue.
I added nothing because I was sensing anew the limits and therefore the instability of words, being a big fan of Gertrude Stein as well as being an excellent junior editor and the soon-to-be ex-colleague of probably my imminently ex–editor in chief.
Myron shook his head. Get sick enough and there’s nothing you can do with the unraveling of the world.
“Sibella, are you crazy?”
There was a strong chance. But in a good way. As my precious Gertrude once O-Steined, the white hunter the white hunter is nearly crazy.
“You realize this is going to end badly for you, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
“Of course you don’t.” I would locate his utterance somewhere at the midpoint of the sympathetic scale, somewhere far to the right of “Oh, you crazy kids!”
What could we say? If we knew what he knew, we might not have opted to do what we did, but I wouldn’t wish Myron’s romantic knowledge upon anybody, particularly me.
“Where’s Caitlin and Cable, and, God, that sounds like a country music group.”
“Saw them go into Figgy’s former office a while ago,” YGB said. Sleepy as he might have been this morning, considering you know what, he kept a watch on anybody who might affect his antisocial standing with his boss.
“What’s that on the table?”
I espied the ominous blue cover that unmistakably betokened the mundane workings of the American judicial system that is the envy of democracies and the scourge of struggling publishing houses everywhere. Before this moment I had not noticed its presence.
“Oh, Myron,” said YGB, “this was delivered when you were asleep, and I signed for you, like I always do in the office.”
“You fucking did what?”
“Didn’t want to wake you.”
“You’re a certifiable idiot.” Harsh, even for Myron.
Yet YGB was visibly grasping the possibility that Myron had a case.
“Somebody’s suing me, and I should have known. That constitutes improper service, but it was a matter of time before I was tagged anyway. Young Goodman Brown, you’ve learned nothing from me, but I hope you learned something from Sibella last night, which considering your obvious starting point, would be a long shot if you didn’t. No offense, Sibella, you little minx.”
“None fucking taken?” I said, not being brilliant and not being little and not being a minx and here came the fucking Uptalk Monster stomping through my mental bog more pissed off than ever.
Myron didn’t bother to scrutinize the document. Who else knew he was here anyway, far from the madding crowd of his publishing offices and in the way more fucking madding crowd contained within this nuthouse?
✴✴✴
Bull by the horns: the cliché always worked for Myron. And the uncastrated bovine brute in the old china shop also had the virtue of being accurate with regard to him.
“Come with me,” he said to his rosy-cheeked, still helplessly ebullient junior editor, and I obediently followed as he shuttled bull-hornishly down the hall. Yet with each bare footfall, I was beginning to note the slightest receding of my perfect feeling of satisfaction and delight. That deep down tingle began to get tangled up. Maybe there was a chance I had been a tiny bit unwise after all.
Myron pounded on the door of what was once supposedly Figgy’s office. After a few moments, Caitlin appeared as she was buttoning up her denim shirt. She seemed to be having lots of trouble with all her buttons ever since she drove up with Cable—and what had come over the female race around me with their buttons and their breasts, not that I should talk on this of all mornings. Across the way the other half of The Caitlin Cable Band was pulling himself back together. Looked like Mama Fontana and Myron were the only surviving ones in this house not to have recently tripped the light fandango. I had briefly forgotten about Suzi, I mean Ashlay, but I didn’t have time to follow my train of thought where it was going: off the tracks and into the gulley.
“Morning, Myron,” said Cable to the window, zipping up, his back to the publisher. “Hope you’re feeling better.”
“You don’t, and I seem to have been served.” He waved the papers.
“A formality, Myron, nothing personal. I thought now’s a good a time as any when we could talk man to man. I couldn’t get you to promptly perform an audit of sales, but mainly the new contract looked hinky to me, and I figured I would protect my dad. If you think about it a minute, you’ll understand.”
“You believe I am ripping you off?”
“I wouldn’t put it quite that way, Myron. As I say, I am merely looking out for my family, doing the diligence.”
“Your family has been taken care of by me for a long time, for over a million bucks. Can you be that dumb and greedy?”
“You clearly have never read any of Figgy Fontana’s books. If you had, you would know the Fontanas are motivated by the simplest of considerations: cash, cash on time, cash on the barrelhead.”
“Your dad would be proud.”
“I feel his presence all the time.”
“Speaking of his presence, I’d like to pick up the three new books.”
“That’s not gonna happen till we deal with those pesky legal matters.”
“You paid for a process server?”
“You’re a guest in my dad’s house, didn’t want to offend you by serving you myself.”
“About your dad, he did cash the check for the advance.”
“Technically, yes, well, technically I did, as we were entitled to do by contract.”
“About that purported hinky contract, you see, Cable, that’s where the books come in, by contract.”
“Contract law can be complicated, as any IP lawyer could attest.”
“You’re going to shop those books, aren’t you?”
“Oh, I am sure you can avoid our taking such a drastic step, we’ve had such a fine working relationship for so long.” Ready for this smooth move? Air-quotes around “relationship.” What a dope.
In that cathouse atmosphere of litigious song and dance, I could say right then and there we may have been observing a clear-cut instance of wrongful behavior amounting to egregious tortious interference, which sounded less like law school to me and more like a dessert that backfired and produced unintended gastrointestinal consequences. And I would proffer my legal opinion indeed if, that is, it weren’t for the fact that I don’t know what I am talking about and that I ruefully regretted Law & Order never having screened a single episode hinging on this fascinating matter of jurisprudence.
“Calypso, sweetheart,” Myron sarcastically addressed her, though I’m not sure why he shifted his attention to her. He was conceivably more of a romantic than I had counted on, a lesson I should have filed away for future use as my personal permission slip to run back home to Gotham City. “
I hope you know what you’re getting into with this idiot you got on the hook.”
“Who’s Calypso?” asked Cable. “Who’s on the hook?”
“All happy families, something something,” she said again, evidently thinking that it worked yesterday to semi-satisfying effect, why not try again?
On the other hand, she appeared disconsolate. Or she wanted us to think as much. They were nothing but a pair of Ivy League scammers, and my hunch was each was playing the other, as well as Myron and Venetian fat cats and who knows who else? I wouldn’t say I was surprised, and I wouldn’t say that they intimidated me, because facts are facts, and I apparently knew something they didn’t know, that they needed Myron as much as—or more than—he needed them. Game on.
Cable asked Myron where he was going, their colloquy was just starting to get interesting. But this exchange had no chance of ever getting interesting in this or the next geological era and Myron had already made his move, out the door.
“Sibella, that’s your name, right?”
“Yes, Caleb.”
Cable was curious. He wanted to know if I’d be interested in hooking up with him and Caitlin for, you know, a three-way. Not very long ago I went through a phase during which every sentence I uttered ended with “bitches.” Layup lines, bitches. Extra salsa, bitches. You get what I mean, bitches. It was diverting while it lasted, but it would have been wasted on these two bitches.
“You, me, and Calypso, the old striangulated slap and tickle me Elmo?” queried I.
“You lost me, but it sounds fun, no?”
“Fun? Honestly, it’d be more fun to paint Figgy Fontana’s toenails. Why don’t you proposition Suzi Generous? It’s your golden shower opportunity. I hear she’s usually up for anything.”
“That’s what I was counting on, too, but she turned us down before she went out for a run this morning. Suzi said she had zero interest in me, including on a slow day before a funeral, which is this afternoon, can you believe that?”
Sibella & Sibella Page 14
