Sibella & Sibella
Page 22
The Dream Calculus was essentially the product of Junior’s plagiarism. The book contained over a hundred pages lifted virtually verbatim from Brewster’s electrifying and beautiful and very distinctive prose. You never know who gets one, as Vonnegut wrote, referring to somebody’s junior, however. Perhaps Junior presumed nobody, including Brewster, would ever notice or make the connection. What I didn’t realize initially was that Calculus had been revised since I saw it—for which improvement I would have credited slash blamed Kelly. Once I had a chance to examine the published book, I could see that Junior’s protagonist, Chas of the Adonis Bod, had radically metamorphosed into a fascinating autistic poet. Lawyers were prepared to release publicly the relevant pages from the thousands of pages meticulously composed by Brewster, when he shared that room with Junior. It would be obvious to any objective reader that Junior pilfered the young man’s work, which of course he never tossed out, and passed it off as his own. Here’s one place where Junior could have used a book doctor—and an ounce of integrity. The lawyers pleaded for relief in the form of an injunction against the continued publication and distribution of the book and also seven-figure punitive monetary damages for plagiarism as well as for the pain and suffering Brewster endured.
Junior’s house kept its cool as long as it could. Then after the higher-ups read the supporting materials sent by opposing counsel, they acted. They recalled all the unsold copies, retracted the contract with Junior, and demanded repayment of his advance. It might have been easier for Junior if they had thrown him into prison gen pop.
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Most of this information I picked up from the scandal-mongering book press, but some I picked up from Junior himself. Get ready for this.
“Nobody’s talking to me anymore,” he said to me over the phone. “Thanks for taking my call.”
I closed my door for privacy, and also to disallow anybody from seeing tremulous me. I tried to sympathize with my ex. Yeah, I know, shut up, please.
“You were right to blow off the book, Sibella. I should have taken that as a sign. And then the new editors, especially Kelly—you used to work with her, you know how talented Kelly is—they got pumped up over the new voice, the groundbreaking material. It was groundbreaking. Brewster’s groundbreaking material. You would have known better. You would have seen it wasn’t me.”
But who the fuck was the Real Junior anyway? And another thing: life had to be difficult at home, too.
“Chantal’s going to leave me. I can feel it. She’s disappointed, she put me up on a pedestal.”
I knew that inclineration, once upon a time, because he needed a pedestal to be eye to eye with me, and I almost felt bad for his slide down that Park Slope.
“I’m doing it again. I’m lying to you right now. My wife already kicked me out, and I’m staying in some fleabag hotel in SoHo. She says she wants a separation for now, but I know she’ll get a divorce or an annulment and shield her family money from me—to make sure I can’t use her trust fund to pay off the claims.”
I’m no attorney, but her legal strategy sounded dicey. I’m also not an ER doc, but I did seriously fear he was going to hurt himself.
“No, I’m not drinking too much. Just enough. They say vodka is kind of easy on the liver. I’ve fucked up my whole life. Where do I go from here? My agent dropped me, and nobody at Yale will return my calls, and after the news broke, everything I had sent out came back rejected overnight. And the Sunday Times Magazine is going to do an exposé. Won’t that be fun? That’s after they canceled the puff piece they were going to run about the hottest new young gun author, umm, which used to be me. And get this, this is beautiful. Guess who’s got a new book contract? Brewster.”
We talked a long time and I sensed he was building up to something, and I turned out to be right.
“It’s pretty lonely here. My lawyers said I shouldn’t call Brewster, but I did. I apologized to him for everything, stealing his book, stealing his damn Ritalin and Adderall, which never did me any good anyway. And he was cool, said he felt bad for me.”
I couldn’t hate him, now that he was hating on himself competently and legitimately. I never liked piling on, or running up the score in a basketball game.
“Sib, I did have an idea.”
Here it was, his other Tod’s Shoe about to drop.
“Like I say, it’s pretty lonely in New York.”
That is what he said about the crowded metropolis that was the greatest city in the world, which I myself missed more than I would ever admit. How much was he drinking today?
Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies!
“I was thinking I’ve never been to San Francisco, and getting out of town would be a good distraction.”
Tell me, what girl doesn’t love roses on Valentine’s and diamond ear studs and, most of all, being embraced as a distraction?
Get a travel agent, buddy. Oh, right, they don’t exist anymore.
“I could see you, Sibella.”
You in the back row playing Angry Birds Candy Crush, tell me why I didn’t hang up.
“If you were up for it, I dunno, I could you know, like, stay with you.”
You over there texting your boyfriend, tell me why I didn’t shoot myself.
To be clear, I didn’t have the means to execute that plan or myself, and I didn’t have the words for a minute.
“You’re not saying no, Sib.”
That was true.
“I’ll hop on a plane and I’ll stay with you for a little while, till, like, the tempest quells, for old times’ sake? Whaddaya say, Sib?”
Forget the old times’ sake, which was bad enough, did he really say till, like, the tempest quells? The like was bad enough, but the tempest quells? What did Sib ever sib in him? Since your answer to that question is to be located within the capacious confines of the null set (the single concept that made me smile during my entire dystinguished math career), you will have trouble with the next development.
You probably think I am a doormat, you probably think you would never entertain such a crazy idea as the one I was not being entertained by. You may well be right. I am the last person to argue, since you’ve come this far along with me. But you didn’t know Junior the way I didn’t know Junior. Being anointed somebody’s Muse at a tender age entails some serious lifelong responsibilities. In Museland it’s not always sweetness and light. You take the good with the bad. Or more often than poets care to remember, the bad with the really fucking awful. But most important to recognize, muses are by nature and temperament unpredictable if not fickle. The instant you take them for granted and attempt to sing your full-throated song, your mouth fills with cement.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
I want to do with you what spring does to the cherry trees. I always wished somebody would one day go the full Neruda like that on me or at least not call me a distraction.
If you are staring bug-eyed at the page (never a good look, incidentally, so cut it out if you ever want a fulfilling social life, as if I should know), and lingering in incredulity over the Junior book scandal as well as my being sort-of-tentatively-open-to-the-idea-of-reconciliation-sex scandal, strap yourself up for the next part.
Wide Sibella Sea
Breathing down the neck of Junior, as his star-crossed book was shooting up the charts before spectacularly crashing, was Ms. Ashlay Commingle, author of Slip, Slippery Girl (Hard Rain Publishing Inc., San Francisco, California).
“You know, Myron, if we had Dream Calculus in our pocket we’d have the two hottest books on the planet.”
By the way, since you might be wondering whatever became of inserting into the book the hair-tie gimmick, Myron looked into it, but the cost was prohibitive, and he was having those cash problems, so sayonara, scrunchie. Not to worry, Ashlay would work around that disappointment, as she always managed to do.
Isn’t brouhaha about the dumbest word in the language? It also looks stupid, like February, which always looks misssppppelllled. I cannot swear I have read every single entry in the OED, but that will not hinder me from nominating the word for bad dog noun of all time. You won’t be shocked to hear that its etymology goes back to the fifteenth century, when, as you know, Kelly, dinosaurs still walked the earth.
And though now you would never be in a position to edit my book, my dear old Kelly Girl, I feel nostalgically attached to you, and semi-codependent enough to keep you nearby in my imagination and on your perfectly painted toes. You know what they say: keep your friends close, your pedicured enemies closer.
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Truth is, big reveal, Ashlay was okay. More than okay. I’d been wrong about her. You heard me. Please, suh, may I have ’nother slice of ’umble pie?
For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. Jeez, George Eliot, she’s a big-time baller.
Look, I had my issues with pornography and my opinions had not changed. But my mind changed about her. I could no longer see her as demeaning herself and allowing herself to be exploited. And every word in that last sentence makes my skin crawl. And, no, despite being tempted, I never did pay to view her cinematic ventures, which surely compromises if not undercuts everything I have said or will say on the sujet de Suzi Generous. Even so, she had made her choices and she benefited or suffered as she did. If I wanted to start critiquing lives, I needed to start with my own. Wait, that’s what I have been doing for a couple of hundred pages. She and I had our differences, but nobody made a movie featuring me doing something I may have regretted later—at least I hope Junior didn’t film us. I cannot say I ever heard Ashlay express a single regret about her X-rated career, while you have heard a thousand regrets about my life. Next stop, Lincoln Center.
I wasn’t nominating her for beatifuckingation, don’t get me wrong, since I don’t have much clout in Vatican City anyway. And she and I wouldn’t have gotten to know each other much better if she ascended by her lonesome into heaven. I was overseeing her publicity, and we traveled together on one leg of her book tour, the West Coast. Caprice did the other leg with her, the East Coast swing. Ashlay took my gently framed advice to tone down the porn costumery, which, between you and me, might have been a small risk, given the expectations she brought to every appearance—and those expectations were very explicit, like her once-upon-a-time career. But she decided she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, and damn it, she succeeded. I have to clean up my own act at this late stage. Show some respect, Sibella.
I would show plenty of respect, as would the book world, who lapped up her tale (stop it, just stop it, I said). Starred reviews abounded in the trades, and the indie book stores welcomed her as a bright new luminary into their bosom with open arms and lots and lots of publishing One Love free publicity. Her Amazon page listed five hundred plus four- and five-star reader comments, and it was early in the book’s life. Speaking of those Roman Catholics, the solitary sour note was sounded by their media moguls, who normally reserve their Jane Ire for abortion and evolution and gay marriage, but who took an abedding interest in Slippery Girl. They didn’t appreciate that the clever and cleavaged and brilliant protagonist fell head over heels for a man of the cloth, who responded in predictable and spectacular ways—but erected not to leave the priesthood in the process. No, instead, protagogirlist herself returned to her childhood Catholic roots, and a refreshed love reblossomed, a love that finally turned, and I mean saved by the belle on the last page, Platonic. Passionate, but nonsexual. Curveball catches the corner, strike three. The Catholic reviewers missed the pitch by a mile. And once again the crowd went wild, because negative publicity, especially of a religious tint, engenders a backlash—a backlash when it comes to books in the form of a pop in unit sales. Her sales popped like Fourth of July fireworks.
As I said, I accompanied her on part of her national book tour, where I witnessed her signing a thousand books and submitting herself to the huggations of a thousand slobbering admirers. A large percentage of these acolytes wore her trademarked patent pending AC hair ties, which she had marketed with extraordinary results. And you guys out there, thanks for reading books like girls and thanks for showing your true colors for the readings, but what is with your ponytails and your AC hair tie? I think you need to take a hard look at your life. If I may continue. What a powerhouse was she. And she was a terrific reader, too. Theatrical and funny and self-deprecating, in all the right places. She was a revelation.
Over time, we got to know each other, especially during the post-appearance get-smashed-togethers in late-night restaurants and bars where she could unwind after her performances. From filing her information with the Library of Congress, I knew she was a lot older than I was, which you might not be able to tell because she was visually stunning and did not look her age. We discovered that we liked some of the same books and movies, and that our domestic backgrounds had similarities. Her mom was a homicide detective (my anthropologist mother was a kind of detective) and her dad was a shrink, like mine, and on cue we rolled our eyes in tandem when we fondly recalled daily therapy that took place over mac and cheezie. As most parents would have done, her folks had not approved of or understood her movie years, but unlike many others, they were open-minded enough to stay connected with her, and they never for a minute cut her off. Then when she went to grad school and then published her novel, they were over the moon with her. Neither of us had siblings. We talked of the pros and cons of being only children, acknowledging that we couldn’t imagine having had a different life. I don’t pretend to understand what motivated Ashlay throughout her life, but then again, for some reason I found that elephant-in-the-room interest on my part to be irrelephant. Instead, I began to cultivate genuine affection for her, and I think she felt the same way about me.
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Ashlay’s drink of choice was a Cosmopolitan, a pretty in pink drink that is too sweet for my tastes. It does look mouthwatering in its iced Martini glass presentation, I will say that. Me, I liked my beer, a holdover commitment from college, unlike the other college commitments that did not hold over, though in my defense, I usually opted for the obscure, local, artisan beers that I discovered along the way.
One night after an especially strong reading to a huge gathering that tuckered her out, she consumed a lot of Cosmos, and I was keeping up with one beer after another. We were at a table in the bar of our hotel, some place in Portland or Seattle or Denver or Santa Fe, I can’t remember. It possibly could have been Austin, which isn’t on the West or any other coast, but if you were a resident of Austin you likely were confused to have landed in Texas in the first place, period. For certain it was one of those generic hotel bars, often empty as a schoolyard after a fire drill, same bored bartender wiping glasses, same track lighting, same music bubbling in the background, same salesmen guffawing over the same jokes to each other propped tenuously on their stools, their identical ties aske
w as their lives, and their marriages and drinks on the rocks. A place that cried out for social worker triage.
A solid three maybe four, hell, maybe five Cosmos in, she went, “Sibella, when did you perform shock therapy on Myron? Because sweetheart would never realize on his own I was queer.” And I’m thinking: girl’s two fucking sheets.
“What?” I said, because I had done no such thing. And, Officer, this onetime junior editor was also not going to pass a field sobriety test tonight. Honestly, I had never, and it was none of my business. But oh, the truth-telling properties of vodka plasma drip. And yet, sexual orientation on that order supposedly applies often to porn stars, or so I had heard. The wholesale X-rated exposure of the male world and all those male bodies, depilated for the most part as they may have been, might make such a switch attractive, if not inevitable. Then again, what do I know? But as to her statement, I had not drawn any such conclusion, mainly because the question never occurred to somebody as self-involved as me or I and I’m not going to go through that troubling grammar exercise again, and I had other problems I needed to deal with.
“Do you have a partner?” I stupidly asked, not because I was curious but because I was at a loss for polite conversation topics in this context. If she had a partner, I had never heard. Was there a chance she wanted to keep that part of her life private? Considering her public profile in her previous life, that would have been mildly astonishing.
That’s when we noticed a man sporting a short-sleeve dress shirt two sizes too small for his button-busting gut and a fat tie big as a flag because he had materialized and was standing over us at our table in the ghost town of this bar.