Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  Though I was merely a tall Plan B, I thought I’d add, for the porpoises of his educational enlightenment, “Your history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

  “You’re weird.”

  “I may be, but I am a junior editor at Hard Rain Publishing, your father’s eminent publishing house, Caleb.”

  “It’s Cable, I tell you, and I thought you were an intern.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Bitches.”

  At that instant a most disturbing recognition flew into my mental windshield like a plump, collagened-up bug going a hundred miles an hour until The Big Sleep and then splat. All these post-Junior years, my body and I had witnessed less action than a federally protected Native American reservation mall church and casino combo operation at dawn. Then there was last night. And then, there was whatever this morning’s invitation signified, and not that I would have ever taken it seriously in the time it would take me to get through a dozen Prousts. Perhaps Cable’s crude pass shouldn’t count, considering the off-the-charts high-slimage content, but as a good Spence alumna I could at least credit the request, repulsive as it may have been.

  As I departed, Cable ventured a question for his girl. “Who’s this Calypso they all keep talking about?”

  Caitlin told him to shut up. I was for once wishing she indeed possessed those powers I once feared she possessed and would change him back into the lizard he was.

  Myron was on his way out the front door, with me catching up in his wake, which I seem to do a lot and will do a lot more in the future, and I didn’t need to be informed by him that we were headed off into the great unknown, or, since we had left one great unknown, a greater unknown. Or, same thing, we were off to enter the orbit of the Red Planet of the Great Fontana.

  Dearly Beloved, we are gathered together.

  Wolf? Wolf? Where are you when I need you?

  The Sibella Jar

  Myron and my expert tracking skills were hardly to be tested that morning, which was good because they were sorely lacking for us tale of two cities slickers. It wasn’t long before we entered a clearing when what to our wandering eyes should appear but a smart-looking idyllic redwood cabin neatly surrounded by a high, finished redwood fence, all Sick Family Fontanason. More different in appearance from the main house a building could not be. It was situated on a low-lying bluff, the kind of terrain where the cad and the lunatic the world knew as General George Armstrong Custer met his bloody and, by historians’ consensus, well-deserved fate. After making such a connection, I did not fear an onslaught coming down from the barren hillsides. Instead we walked through the gate and onto the beautiful polished oyster-colored paving stones that led invitingly to the front door. We were about to confront Fontana about the lawsuit and determine what his role was in its initiation—as well as his future as a writer of books for the company called Hard Rain. Then and only then the raiding party could McMurtryianly ride in yip-yip-yipping and finish us all off once and for all.

  The windows were closed and curtained but there were planter boxes outside laden with all manner of pretty, carefully tended wildflowers. The happy bees buzzed blissfully about. Hummingbirds darted and hovered, hovered and darted. The overhang on the porch was brightly adorned with proliferating purple and white wisteria. A poet’s haunt. A determined Myron knocked on the author’s door with authority of his own.

  It was Ashlay who opened up the door. Did you require additional verification that this was one slippery girl? She was dressed in what looked to me to be her conception of workout clothes: skin-tight T-shirt, X-ratedly abbrev. mini running shorts, and pink tennis shoes, with a pink baseball cap emblazoned SSG for Slip, Slippery Girl, I guess, on top of her head. But no AC headband. In her grasp was her untrusty Tolstoy. At least she didn’t run in yet another jumpsuit.

  “Myron, you feeling better?” Ashlay seemed sincere, as why not?

  What he was feeling was most likely what I was feeling: electroshocked. All we were missing was the attractive bit in our mouths to protect our teeth and tongue. We stepped inside the air-conditioned cabin and there behind a desk, on the other side of a 20 x 10 Persian rug, which had to be over a hundred years old and probably would have been offered for a hundred thousand bucks by some West Side Armani-decked-out turbaned rug seller, presided the raj, His Figness. He was in a white shirt with French cuffs and pearl links, and his oversized major literary agent type black-rimmed glasses inched down his professorial nose. His eminence grease hair was slicked back neatly. He had a book open in front of himself, which I was soon to find out was his own copy of Ashlay’s favorite Russian novel, and off to his side was a computer monitor big as something in an air traffic control tower. The whole cabin gleamed and glowed. Ah hah, this was where he must have spent some of his enormous royalties.

  “Figgy?” asked Myron. You would have double-checked, too.

  “Who else would be in my office, Myron?” He chuckled. But perceptive on your part. You are correct, not Moron.

  I cast my eyes around the place, his wall-to-wall bookcases packed floor to ceiling, the artfully recessed lighting. My quick scan revealed the twenty plus leather-bound volumes of the OED, complete sets of Shakespeare and Henry James and Austen and Mark Twain and Conrad and Trollope and Turgenev and Dostoevsky and Eliot and Proust (damn) and all the rest of the crazy canon guys and gals in impressive profusion. And a whole bank of contemporary poetry books, too.

  No, Myron was not appearing woozy in the slightest, because his unreliable body had probably determined he had played the dizzy card once too often, but thanks for asking.

  Ashlay spoke up: “Fig and I were discussing Anna K, which is his favorite book of all time. What a coincidence.”

  Coincidence, my sweet ash lay.

  “Have a seat, Myron,” said Fig, “and you too, Sibella,” my first clue that he knew who I was. Myron and I both hunkered down into oversized red leather chairs, which matched the one Ashlay would use for her own ash. “Care for a cup of green tea? Suzi… I am not used to Ashlay. Suzi brewed some.” He pointed toward the kitchen where stainless steel fridge and stove ruled the designer day, and on the countertop stood a post-mod tea cozy next to a cut glass vase embracing a splay of orange roses.

  No coonskin caps, no wall-mounted rifles, no heads of elk, no fishing poles.

  A regular writer’s den. Check that. A writer’s dream cabin.

  I couldn’t help but notice over the credenza behind him, against the back wall, an abundance of photos of great authors—Hemingway, James, O’Connor, the other O’Connor, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Eliot, Wharton, Plath, Nabokov (the one with the butterfly net), Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Isak Dinesen.

  Oscar Wilde?

  Oscar Fucking Wilde, you got a problem with that?

  Kelly, do you know the etymology of the Italian word credenza? The root lies in the concept of belief, from the verb to believe. And that was the piece of furniture upon which, back in the day, the staff tasted food for a prince or a pope, sniffing out poison. What’s not to love about the Italian language and culture and high risk dinner parties? And on that credenza of Fig’s I noticed something very curious if not promising indeed. Three neatly stacked piles of pages, three-hundred typescript pages each I was reckoning. A Machiavellianish credenza would be the perfect place to deposit those manuscripted Figgies for tasting. What do you think I was thinking? I won’t bother to ask what you thought was going through Myron’s mind.

  You would be wrong about one thing. Speaking for myself, I was not thinking. Too much was happening before me to think that far ahead.

  “Fig and I were talking about love and death in Tolstoy,” Ashlay said.

  “Sure you were,” I said.

  “How one seems to follow the other,” she added.

  “In novels, love and death, like the night follows the day,” sa
id Fig. “But in life? Well, I hope not. Books are not life. Life is more interesting, that’s what I have come to realize.”

  “Me, too,” Ashlay said, with passion in her timbre.

  Shivering his timbers, Myron I could tell almost wanted to agree, but couldn’t, because as you know, he is, news flash, a book p-------r.

  “But betrayal, alas, is usually not far behind,” she added.

  “Sad but true,” said Fig, “very sad but very true. And, Myron, where did you find this wonderful new writer, what a gem. Send me an advance review copy, would you? I’ll surely want to blurb Slip, Slippery Girl.”

  Ashlay beamed and Myron Lastnamed as well.

  So it went for an entertaining half hour or so, a veritable cliché for the bookish set. Chitchat chatting, don’t you know, with an old lion of a writer recently back (in our minds at least) from the dead and with a fledgling peacock (technically, peahen) of a new writer whose professional past had been left behind for good as she sucked up a life of letters and the arts. Ars longa is a tried and true classical expression, though the longa of Ashlay’s past had nothing to do with a life in letters. Both of them were indeed civetly sipping tea with the loyal and devoted and well-heeled publisher and his anti-heels junior editor who was probably glowing like a seventies luvah lamp from last night. I know I have commented that I don’t care about the feelings of writers, because they are unknowable to anybody including possibly themselves, and that’s fundamentally true, but something about today was making me reevaluate. For one thing, I was charmed by Fig, which I never would have suspected before. Based on what I told you, would you have suspected as much? Of course you wouldn’t.

  “Fig,” Myron said, “what a fabulous office you have.”

  “My late, lamented brother Porphyry designed and constructed it. He had many hidden gifts. You like?”

  “He had the perfect understated touch,” Myron said. “It’s so you inside these four walls.”

  “Well, I feel instantly productive when I come to work. But these days I cannot shake memories of my poor brother. I don’t think I will ever be able to disassociate my office from my memories of him.”

  Ashlay and I murmured our condolences.

  “Myron, I’m glad you and your staff and Ashlay found time to be here for the services. We should be getting close to the time.”

  That was our cue to get up and prepare for the obsequies. And about the lawsuit Myron had gone there to discuss? The subject never came up.

  Wherefore art thou Porkeo?

  ✴✴✴

  We stepped outside the cool confines of the cabin to be sledge-hammered by the heat on the anvil of our heads. Wilting under the mind-bleaching sun, we hobbled along the beautiful paving stones that led to the outskirts of Figgy Fontana’s writer’s fortress. Writers need a stronghold of one sort or another. It might be a cave, it might be a studio apartment in San Francisco where they wear noise-canceling headphones, but they all yearn for isolation and privacy in order to tap their emotional and psychological resources. But the physical beauty of this author’s workspace, well, that was impressive. And more than that. Fig’s office was pristine and stunning and inspiring.

  Once we got to the other side of the redwood fence, the instant Fig closed the gate behind us, however, he betrayed a signal that something grave was about to transpire. He was leaving behind that writer’s artificial and secluded world of his. Ashlay’s heart had been plainly filled up by the conversation, and something about her today was causing me possibly to reevaluate my views on her, and with renewed vigor she started running up the hill for her workout, for which she had been puta tively dressed. Her ponytail bounced beyond the harness of her suddenly appearing scrunchie, which was cute and functional and almost, I can’t explain how, innocent.

  When the three of us were alone, Fig pulled his white shirt out of the waist band on his beige chinos, rolled up his sleeves. He tugged the baseball cap down tight and low on his forehead, and he metamorphosed into the sort of man who had ravaged his three pickups and murdered those trees. And why was I wondering about those dogs we heard barking when we drove up? No clue. This next part is very hard to explain, and probably harder for you to believe, but this is the case. Since leaving the womb of his office, where he had been reborn before our very eyes, he had become his former self, somebody unfortunately more akin to the fellow Myron had come to know prior to our visitation.

  “Moron, stay outta my cabin, ya hear me? And don’t be bringin’ any these baby giraffe girls.”

  Et tu, Figgus?

  I concede I do walk with a lope, consistent with giraffes and cagers, which is the old-school name for basketball players because they used to play at the historical inception of the sport in a kind of cage. That was when bee ball was invented by Doctor James A. Naismith, who wanted boys to have something to do with themselves besides the obvious during the long, long Canuckian winters.

  Myron and I were bewildered by this brutally abrupt transformation and Myron asked him to repeat what he said, because he couldn’t trust his ears, and neither would you, not if you had been in attendance for our genteel conversation, the one where he and Ashlay and Myron and I, discussing in such a moderate manner books and what they meant and that I…

  “Ya heard me. En ah nothah thing, ya ain’t gettin’ mah fuckin’ books widout a fight, and ferget the damn dick-twirling book tour, Moron.”

  “Fig, what is going on?”

  “Wass goin’ on is dat we muss bury mah pig uva brother, witch is Pork. Witch is what he wuz, a pig what stoled my stories.”

  Beyond that, and inarguably, the man may have been making no fucking sense, but he was making more sense than I then knew.

  Sibella of the D’Urbevilles

  The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between the two eternities of darkness.

  Or in the case of Fontanaland, two eternities of perversity.

  Everything was about to accelerate like a NASA launch countdown, and I am going to try to keep up because, Houston Street, which you ought to learn how to pronounce, Kelly, we were about to have a big problem.

  The funeral procession was gathering into formation. The suspect funeral home guys had done their job, transporting the deceased’s body onto a flatbed truck with a single strip of funereal black bunting. The coffin was cardboard and came from Costco, I’d bet, where you can probably buy a six-pack of coffins if you were a cost-conscious serial killer. This could have passed for high ceremony in this distant Martian colony. A dusty black van was idling, and I was hoping for it to be air-conditioned, having been spoiled by the cabin.

  YGB, Ashlay, and I were in our places outside. Cable and his Mama and his Caitlin were there, too. The Hard Rain faction didn’t have proper mourning clothes, unless you counted Ashlay’s jumpsuit, which was black and as appropriate as could be expected under the circumstances, and did she carry a spare in her purse? And where did her running clothes come from? Then there were Caitlin and Cable: all in black. Mama in formal check flannel shirt. Sunglasses to the ready. Fig was at the graveside already, saying his private farewells, we were advised.

  “Where’s Myron?” Cable wanted to know. “Can’t get started without the big-time publisher.” Scorn in his voice dripped like acid. Smallist consolation: this time at least no air quotes.

  Caitlin said Myron was flat on his back on the couch, having relapsed. “He’s green to the gills.”

  “Myron’s such a twit,” decreed Cable dispositively, “such a tweakling.”

  We all piled into the van (giving thanks for the cranked-up AC that did not stand for Ashlay Commingle) and followed the truck in our humble cortege. In a few minutes we had arrived at the cemetery, where the briefest ceremony took place—a few valedictory remarks, and a lengthy bit of silence, nary a sniff to be sniffled.

  The brother of
the deceased got in the last word: “I’ll miss ya, ya fucker.”

  And the body was lowered down and clods of symbolic dirt were shoveled by each of us with our most authentic fake solemnity.

  ✴✴✴

  When we drove back to the homestead about an hour later, Mama Fontana said she had yummy refreshments. I know I spoke for everybody in my group when I say as far as I was concerned, dehydrated as I was, as it related to libations, not on your fucking life. I did snatch the last bag of Doritos and an apple from the car this morning, and that would tide me over. At the same time, I didn’t know how Myron was feeling, but I had a pretty good hunch where he was feeling.

  Our host and author pulled me aside and gave me a hard look. “You, baby giraffe girl, you’se comin’ wit me.”

  “What about the, uh, refreshments and reception?”

  “Fuck it.”

  Whew, saved by the fuck.

  Something told me I could handle him if things went sideways. Then again, my overconfidence has been known to get the best of me. See: Junior. But if you do, remember what I told you: in a dormant and non-symptomatic state, his herpes virus may nonetheless pose a threat.

  We headed off toward the inevitablest destination: that clearing where the cabin was.

  “Ah will kill’m, tha sunovabitch, mebbe ya’ll kin stop me.”

  All the more reason for me to go, to forestall prospects of mayhem. I might have dragged YGB along, if I were thinking more clearly, but perhaps I was thinking clearly, because I may not know much about the male species, but I do know that too much testosterone in one physical setting can prove combustible. Let the wild rumpus start.

  ✴✴✴

  “Myron,” said the author to the publisher upon entering his cabin, “may I get you a cold beverage and how did you gain access, old chum?” As before, he had impeccably switched persona once inside the writer’s Bourn of thrillers named Legacy, Ultimatum, Supremacy, and Identity, guilty pressure movies I wished I didn’t like as much as I did, though I also wished I possessed that hero’s knack for escapability.