Sibella & Sibella

by Joseph Di Prisco

  “My buddy and I would like to buy you two dolls a drink.” How you can sneer and offer to buy a drink at the same time must have been tough, and must have required experience and practice as a salesman exiled from some Glengarry or Glenn Ross.

  “That’s okay,” said Ashlay. “Thanks for the offer, though, sir.”

  The yahoo yahooted and raised up his blubbery arms in victory. Evidently he had won his bet.

  “I knew they were dykes!” And his belly jiggled drunkenly away from us, with our compliments.

  It was my privilege to know the late Jack Crabb—frontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyenne—in his final days on earth.

  “Where were we again?” said Ashlay. I think she needed me to repeat the question.

  “I was asking if you had a partner.”

  “No, I don’t have one now. How about you?”

  “How about me what?”

  “Do you have a partner?”

  She went there. I believe I correctly decoded the subtext. After I gathered my rapidly reducing number of wits, I explained that I had a long-term relationship that fizzled and I probably wasn’t over it, and then a recent relationship that I had high hopes for had also fizzled. I had drained a few too many beers myself, because then I made a silly mistake.

  “Ashlay, I’m not gay.” I awarded myself extra credit for not adding not that there’s anything wrong with that. At the same time, I was kind of flattered. Okay, a little bit turned on. Though not in that way, I would have said. And, yes, I could well have been kidding myself.

  She may have been very drunk, and she was a great actor or a great soul or both, because she smiled and said: “You think I am hitting on you, don’t you?”

  “Well.”

  Then there was a loud commotion involving those guys at the bar. Their voices elevated to shouting.

  “Is too!”

  “Is not!”

  “Fuck, bet you your commission!”

  “You’re on!”

  And the intrepid portly fellow bounded back like an overfed Labrador to our table to commingle with Ashlay.

  “I am slorry,” he slurred, attempting to pull himself together and failing, and hitching up his pants over his paunch in a futile effort at presentability. “My colleeb and I got ’nother bet going.”

  “Gamblers Anonymous’s meeting next door,” I suggested.

  He was speaking to Ashlay: “I made a bet with that dick at the bar, see um there? I said you’re Suzi Generous.”

  “The actress? Do you like her movies?”

  “Man, what a gorgeous piece of…”

  “I get confused with her all the time. Sorry, you’re a loser tonight.”

  “You sure?” He looked deflated, as if somebody had stuck a pin into his blow-up life-size sex toy doll.

  “I have no doubt whatsoever you’re a loser. My name’s Ashlay Commingle, and I’m a writer, published my first book, and we’re in town…”

  “Writers’re mosely losers, aren’t they?”

  “Have a nice night and give my best to the wife and kiddies.”

  I wished she hadn’t put it that way, because he was either going to take umbrage or the family pictures out of his wallet. But nothing of the kind happened. Like us, he was about as drunk as he looked. Inebriation may have accounted for his fulfilling every writer’s fond dream when he said, “Think my wife’d like your book?”

  That’s when I took control of the situation and told him of course any spouse in the world would love it. In fact, he could buy a copy right now, which I conveniently had in my gym bag. He happily threw down the cash and asked Ashlay to sign it “To Patty,” which the author did with a happy flourish. He stumbled off.

  “Hey,” I called out, “you forgot your bedtime reading.”

  He returned shyly and thanked us again. He almost inspired me to confirm he was right about Suzi Generous, but then again, he was actually wrong.

  “As I was saying,” I tried to start over with Ashlay, which sounded to me like a brilliant improvisation.

  She sipped her drink and spoke over me, I think to be considerate. “Sibella, sweetie, I like you, I do, but not like that. Have I hurt your feelings? Didn’t mean to. Like you, before I came out, I would say to women I was attracted to, ‘I am not a lesbian,’ but that was my way of handling my ambivalence, by trying to deny myself and hoping I had it wrong. Nowadays, I don’t feel ambivalent on the subject. One day it could be the same for you.”

  I downed the rest of my beer. Would that be unfathomable, for her to hit on me? Wasn’t I appealing enough for a slow night in a bar like this? Yes, I myself was surprised to be asking myself such questions and making such connections, which weren’t serious questions or connections, or were they?

  “Are you hitting on me, Sibella?”

  Not as far as I knew. I went with, “We both drank too much and we can laugh this off tomorrow, whaddaya say?”

  But I kind of knew what subtle Ashlay was implying. That I wasn’t finished yet, that my life had many phases left to go, with any luck whatsoever. I didn’t expect I would ever be gay, because aren’t you supposed to feel this in your bones early on in life? Something told me I was completely wrong about that, that people come out when they do and in all shapes and sizes and ages and let the fuck fall where it may. I’d spent many years as a jock in girls’ showers and locker rooms and there was no possible mistaking in college there was plenty of experimentation, a patronizing concept although I could see the point of defensively phrasing it that way, to inoculate yourself from the consequences and the risks. I never went that route, for whatever reason. Then again, stranger things have happened to me. And I wasn’t done living. This was but one of a hundred more good ideas that my friend, Ashlay Commingle, the original slippery girl, would come to share with me.

  “Another round, one for the road?” she asked, in the spirit of let’s not let this conversation end on a weird note.

  “I’ve had enough for one night,” I said to her, yet another thing I wasn’t sure of. But then I reconsidered. “Sure, why not?”

  Good thing Myron wasn’t at our table. He’d insist upon hearing an answer to my rhetorical question, which wasn’t rhetorical at all.

  Wolf? I got nothing left to report to you, Wolf, absolutely nothing…

  Part Four

  For Whom the Sibella Tolls

  My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right.

  Like a cowboy on a horse, an astronaut in his space station, a swimmer in the Olympic-size pool, Myron Beam died at his publisher’s desk. He was alone in the office after everybody went home, and around midnight the custodian found him slumped in his Aeron chair, and almost suffered a heart attack himself when he came in to remove the trash. Nobody was present, therefore, for the grand exit pursued by a bear, and no last words of Myron’s were recorded for posterity. I doubt that there would have been any, as this time the heart attack was anything but fake. It was real and it was massive, so I was told, and his death was instantaneous and painless.

  The obits were churlish and few in number. The Times chose not to run one, but the trades posted tiny mostly semi-respectful notices in which, of course, they felt obliged to cite the Fontana misfortune, which added color that was, to me, gratuitous if not immaterial and inappropriate. Other than that, not much notice was made of his passing. In this way, the powers that be conveyed the message that Myron Beam’s Fifteen Minutes were up Fourteen Minutes Ago.

  As you would have expected, the memorial service was sparsely attended, seven of us. You’re thinking The Great Gatsby, as was I, but let’s not push the collusion too hard. Not to give too much away, but nobody should expect a green light at the end of this particular dock. His ex didn’t show in the banquet room at the back of Carmine’s, and neither did an
y other family. Maybe in the end we were the closest thing he had to family. The proprietor and the host of Avenue along with Carmine and one of the waiters did pay their gracious respects, which was very kind. YGB and Kelly did not fly out, no surprise. As for the stable of house authors Myron had published and promoted, the less said the better. Don’t get me started about the Fontanas. No shows, as was the case with all of his authors but one.

  Ashlay was indeed present, and she was broken up like me. We sat together, holding hands, nothing erotic about it whatsoever, but I was still wondering ever since the night at the stupid bar. Sometimes holding a friend’s hand seems to be the thing to do, right? Hand-holding is a rare and underrated talent. Some people possess no aptitude for hand-holding, and before long you feel like you’re intruding upon their physical space, and other people’s hands eventually feel clammy and you pity them and look for the first opportunity to unclench and go to your corner and cut man. None of that applied to Ashlay. Good hand-holding is brave, is humble, is clean, is open, is free, is gentle, is affirming, is comforting. Ashlay was very, very good at it.

  Of course, there were a few eulogies, all variations on the theme of Myron’s visionary nature and Hard Rain’s long run of successes—and nobody touched upon the recent missteps. All were variations on the notion that Myron was a loveably unlovable eccentric and a paradoxically hidebound risk-taking fellow who lived and died for Hard Rain. In other words, he was a man who was hard to pin down.

  Memorial services, like wedding ceremonies, usually feature a bombshell or two, and for similar reasons. Such occasions call for taking a risk, because what is the point of holding back now? No exception on this occasion. For one thing, out of nowhere, Caprice delivered a knee-buckler of a gorgeous eulogy—touching, deft, droll, heartbreaking. I did not see that one coming. And Murmechka more than held her own, too—Murmechka! And not one wise beast made a cameo in her stately address. “I loved Myron,” she said. “We all did. If you didn’t love Myron, in the end there was one possible explanation: something was wrong with you.”

  I myself said my piece, and there was plenty wrong with me, but I think nobody could tell who didn’t know before. I would insert here an outline of my remarks, but that is impossible because I spoke off the cuff with no notes. And if I possessed a copy of the script, why bother? If this book ever sees the light of day and if it is nestled in your hands, it is, among other things, my eulogy for Myron Beam.

  ✴✴✴

  As we filed out, company counsel pulled me aside. He had personally overseen Myron’s final disposition.

  “How can I help?” I asked. “Everybody’s packing up their stuff, and we can clear out as soon as you like.” I knew that winding down Hard Rain was not a simple matter, what with contracts to be fulfilled, the backlist to manage—theoretically, the company could run by itself or with very minimal staffing indefinitely. Under the best of circumstances, it would take a while to reorganize and institute corporate or management changes.

  “Hold your horses, Sibella. One thing I don’t want anybody to do is clear out. We can get into this when we sit down to talk, but I want you to know Myron took measures to help assure the company would go on.”

  Counsel doubled as Myron’s estate lawyer, he said, and he asked me to come to his office tomorrow first thing, and I agreed, and that was a night I didn’t sleep a wink.

  ✴✴✴

  Myron’s lawyer had a neatly topiaried moustache, which reminded me of cute photos of my dad when he was in college, and he had a law degree diploma from Stanford prominently displayed on the wall. Obviously unconcerned about his billable hours, he didn’t waste a minute.

  “The house is yours, Sibella.”

  Myron left me Hard Rain Publishing. He had no other heirs. He had hardly any other assets outside the company. What there were would be liquidated and proceeds plowed back in my direction. That was the gist of the lawyer’s message, conveyed in the cashmeriest of voices. Myron’s wishes were recorded for posterity and his voice rang out from beyond the grave.

  “What fuck the fuck?” my voice rang out.

  “Myron told me about your Tourette’s, but he kind of liked it. Want some water?”

  I did not and he went on. Hard Rain, Inc., was a privately held corporation, all the stock owned by Myron, and he was bequeathing all his shares to me, to employ at my sole discretion. Looking back, I might have imagined this development had I been half as smart as I thought I was, but as you determined for yourself starting on page one, I wasn’t and I didn’t.

  “He went against my advice to give you a heads up, didn’t want you to know about the bequest, because like most people he thought he was going to live forever. Besides, Myron was Myron and he did things his own way. Everything’s spelled out in the last will and testament, and I’ll give you a copy to look over.”

  I asked when Myron wrote his will. No surprise: the week after the fake heart attack.

  “But there is something he wanted you to understand in no uncertain terms. You can cash out the stock, or you can sell the company, or parts of the company, or you can keep it and run it, as you choose.”

  I said it couldn’t be that simple, knowing Myron as I did, which was not as well as I might have, but certainly better than most.

  “You’re right, Sibella, it’s not that simple. It’s going to be complicated, whichever way you go. You need to know that the company is underwater, the debts are serious.”

  He told me how serious. I stood up and walked around his office, the place where Myron and his lawyer devised the will. He told me the number attached to the indebtedness. It was a stomach-churning number.

  “I’ll take that water now.” I sat back down and the bottle trembled as I drank.

  “This is an estimate, I need to advise you. You will want to hire a forensic accountant, and you need to dig into all the files, to figure out what the true figure is.”

  “Whatever it is, we’re swimming in fucking red ink, right?”

  “Afraid so. This is a lot for you to take in.”

  “Should we sell the company? Should we declare bankruptcy?”

  If my uptalking retained a stressor of any kind, this would qualify.

  “This is where I am obliged to go the full legal, and I must advise you that you should retain your own counsel.”

  “All along I thought Myron was rolling? in it, and he was taking in big money? season after best-selling season?” Uptalk was running fucking amok, which is a Malaysian word, like chimpanzee, “man of the jungle,” and as you can tell, I was decompensating like mad in plain sight. Glug glug glug went the water.

  “Off the record, Sibella?”

  “Off the record, please.”

  “He spent money like a drunken sailor, he never listened to me, and his revenue streams were never as strong as he wished or as he implied to everybody else. A few big hits early on got him going, and he thought he was never going to lose a dime, so why not take bigger and bigger risks? The divorce settlement was expensive, and that didn’t help. That’s around the time he started borrowing money left and right, stealing from Peter to pay Paul, and slow-paid when he had the cash to square up. And then he really got slammed. Here was the clincher. His investment portfolio went south. He’d made a lot of good bets in the past and he was fat and happy, and then he made a lot of bad ones and he wasn’t. Bears and bulls—most of us get gobbled up or trampled eventually by the market. But Myron? Myron thought he could outrun the beasts. For years he was sustaining the company out of his own pocket with his stock proceeds, but then his luck ran out. He never listened to me. Again, off the record.”

  “But he did sell lots of books.”

  “He sold tons of units, but he didn’t manage his money, his business. Whenever I got into it with him, tried to rein him in, you know what he told me? He’d say things like, ‘You think book publishing is a business? You might
be a pretty good lawyer but you’re dead wrong about that. Publishing’s a magic carpet ride. It’s a horse race. It’s mud wrestling. It’s a fight club—which was the title of a pretty good book, wish I’d published it. Publishing’s a fairy tale, and the best fairy tales are messy and violent and unpredictable, and some of them come true. None of that is revealed on income statements and the P&L.’ Which is when I told him, ‘You could be right, Myron, but what is revealed is the income and the profit and the loss.’”

  I didn’t think mentioning the Venetian gypsy would be advisable at this juncture, because counsel was on a roll.

  “Look, Sibella, Myron was a character, like somebody out of one of his books. I loved the guy. You did, too, I know, and he loved and trusted you to the end, and as now you know, beyond the end.”

  “Myron died broke with his company deep in debt.”

  “To cut to the chase, uh-huh. But you know, Sibella, you can take a pass on the whole thing, get out from under. I can recommend a good BK lawyer who can help you do a workout.”

  “The Hard Rain brand name has value, right?”

  “But the value has an expiration date, and it won’t keep indefinitely. In the meantime, the name is your best asset—along with the backlist.”

  Sometimes in a basketball game, you get down big in the first half, but you keep playing hard, and if you get lucky your shots start to fall and you find yourself in a position where you can take a shot at the final buzzer and win. To tell the truth, I never had that experience of being the hero, pulling a game out at the last second, but there had to be a first time for everything, and I learned a lot from those losses. Thanks, Dad, for reminding me that time, I never forgot it.

  I don’t know why or exactly when, but sometime during the course of the hour with Myron’s attorney, I impetuously decided I would live up to Myron’s doubtlessly misplaced faith in me. At the same time, I would have to come to terms with my misplaced faith in him, too. I knew it was going to take me a while to piece together everything, to gain a realistic sense of the financial state of Hard Rain.