“That’s your retirement stash, Dad.”
“What good is having bread if you can’t help who you love? It’s only money, baby. Another day, another dolor.”
God, I hoped not. The offer broke my heart, however, because it meant I had let him and Mom down once more, as I had all my life, and I didn’t want to accept a loan from them, and I had enough money socked away to pay my escalating rent—for a few months.
“What are you talking about? You’ve never let us down. Except for maybe that unfortunate high-heel sneaker phase you went through.”
“If I had to be tall I might as well have been really fucking tall.”
“Point taken. But don’t think of the money as a loan, think of it as a gift. We love you, and this is your dream job, books.”
I said I loved him and Mom but let’s hold off, and if I came to have no choice someday, I would humbly accept the money.
✴✴✴
As for Ashlay, she had heard that I was grimly negotiating with the ever-grumly Remnant of Fontana. But I told her I was merely buying some time. To what end? No idea.
“Don’t do business with Cable, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. He’s a bloodsucker.”
I knew that, but I was running out of options and time. And Cable had the operating capital, which had to be the money Myron made for his dad. This connection depressed me as much as it would have depressed Myron, who I hope was cutting his own deals in the afterlife and not watching too close.
“What else can I do?”
“Nobody would ever suggest to you, be Zen about it,” said Ashlay.
“I am more like Nez, opposite of Zen.”
“All right then. I always fantasized doing something with you, Sibella.”
She wasn’t talking about…? No, she wasn’t, so that was good. Maybe.
Truth is, I had mulled over asking her to come financially onboard the company. I knew she had the wherewithal, but I was wary, for all sorts of irrational reasons. For one thing, we were friends, and you weren’t supposed to do business with friends, and maybe that was normally prudent, but these were not normal times.
And then, boom: Ashlay announced she wanted to invest in the house. She said she had plenty of money from her movie days and a whole lot more from the incredibly flourishing Ashlay Commingle Scrunchie LLC, and she was looking for something new to invest in. Myron may have thought her movie career would be a sound platform for her book, but entrepreneurial Ashlay flipped that around, and she made the book serve as a platform for her other business ventures. And now she wanted to invest her hard-earned cash in Hard Rain, she said. Then she knocked me over when she proposed a number that came near to seven figures. I may have been a bust in math, but I could readily appreciate that serious amount of money now that I had learned how to crunch numbers ever since assuming control of the house. And you may be questioning me, asking me why I myself never approached her to buy in before. That’s yet one more place where my inexperience showed and where she had a lot to teach me.
“Had another idea,” she said. “Would you ever consider appointing me, I don’t know, junior editor? We could work together and you can teach me everything I don’t know.”
“You already know a lot more than I’ll ever know, Ashlay.”
I wanted to cry, but I controlled myself because if I wasn’t careful I was going to establish a behavior pattern I could not break. There’s no crying in baseball, as somebody once famously said in a lightweight but diverting movie, and there’s also no crying in publishing, which nobody ever bothered to say, because it was too fucking obvious.
It was going to be tight, and we were going to have a rough go reestablishing the company, even factoring in the serious liquidity Ashlay was willing to provide Hard Rain. We could however pay down a significant portion of the debt, and someday hire a senior editor and some office staff, and take on an intern or two—which I never was for a minute, get it? And hire a junior editor, maybe, who would have a job description and wouldn’t be relegated to answering the fucking phone, and have enough money to push the next season of books—as long as the backlist kept generating revenue. And Caprice’s work was destined to pay huge dividends via social media. She had no question that Hard Rain would fast become a publishing feel-good story, a back-from-the-dead tale. And who doesn’t love one of those?
There were books I was itching to publish that had come in over the transom. Thanks, Myron, for the transom concept. I’ll never forget it or you and I’ll never understand either. That’s what we were in the book business for, right? Not negotiating debts and financial complexities, but publishing new and good books, and you’re right, it’s all connected.
You know what was more valuable than Ashlay’s money? Her trust, her belief in what we were doing. We might make it out of this pit. I wouldn’t bet against us.
Then Ashlay stunned me all over again.
“Sibella, I need to tell you something else. I’d been contemplating investing for a while, but for some reason I kept holding off, and I think this minute I figured out why I hesitated. You’re going to think I’m being ridiculous. It’s one thing for someone with my history to write a book or get a doctorate, as I did, which are both pretty unlikely, and which anybody would say who never knew me. In real life, stranger things happen all the time, like I need to tell you. But if somebody like me appeared in a book of fiction, the reader who didn’t know any better would say come on. Books are not life, but they are the next best thing to me, and to you, too. Tell me. What’s the oldest cliché in the world? Right. The whore with a heart of gold. The image nauseates me. And that’s why I hesitated, because I didn’t want you, Sibella, to think I was some cliché. Pretty dumb, I realized finally, and that’s when I decided I would do what I wanted in my heart, to help out you and the house that gave me and my book a break. And also you’ll consider taking me on as a junior editor.”
Ashlay was the original slippery girl, and she had given me the slip once more. Over time, she had become anything but a cliché to me.
“If you’re a cliché, so was Myron and so was Figgy and Cable and Caitlin and all my exes and so was everybody and so was I.”
“Promise me you won’t ever think of me as a whore with a heart of gold, because I am neither one of those dumb things. Plus, I’ll fucking kill you. Lovingly, but I will still fucking kill you.”
✴✴✴
Ashlay understood what Myron wrought in the company, and I didn’t have to do much to get her up to speed—she was a fast study. Her lawyer was in touch with mine and we would work out the details. She did want to know more about the Fontana debacle and the Calypso near miss, and I tried my best to explain all I knew and all my doubts. She listened intently.
“Funny, Sibella, all this multiple identity stuff. Fig and Pork, that’s extreme, but I get it—though there’s a good chance it was a scam Cable cooked up. But then there were two Myrons, too. And Caitlin who was Calypso. And your old boyfriend, the editor in chief and your college boyfriend, both two-faced. And I guess multiple identity applies to me as well—I mean, how transparent can it be? Suzi Generous and Ashlay Commingle. Maybe all of us are two people, if not more. Identity may be a very fluid construct. Maybe multiple identities are all we are.”
“What about me?”
“You, Sibella? Isn’t it obvious?”
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, as if the air, the midday air, was swarming with the metaphysical changes that occur, merely in living as and where we live.
Sibella’s Web
Ashlay and I would have a lot to work out with the lawyers and we’d need to define her role and her financial share in the company, but I was optimistic. Between us titans of industry, my mind probably never completely changed from day one with regard to women and pornography, but that’s an abstraction, and Ashlay may have been lots of things, but she was anything but a
n abstraction. My views may have never wavered, but my heart did. One other thing. Because this was a privately held company, there was no need to disclose publicly who invested and who our white knight turned out to be, which is what she insisted upon.
Then she reached into her briefcase and handed over what she said was her new novel.
I was stunned. “When did you have the chance to write this?”
“Does a writer ever know how to answer a question like that?”
“I bet it’s good. I can’t wait.”
“Best thing I ever wrote. Then again, I am biased.”
With Ashlay’s new book and with Murmechka’s…
Oh, I forgot to tell you what my old colleague brought back to the office the day she departed. It wasn’t a fish wrapped in a newspaper as I had feared. She handed over two manuscripts, which she hoped I would consider one day when Hard Rain was back on its feet. One turned out to be a fabulous children’s book based on her Mr. Coyote sayings, illustrations by her, and the other was a mystically beautiful, erotic novel. I craved them both, they were great. Who knew? If I had my way, she was going to be the next Murmechka Sendak Slash Kundera.
Look at that. I came this close to saying Murmechka Fucking Kundera, but I restrained myself. My Tourette’s, though it was only my potty mouth, seemed to have begun to recede, slowly, reluctantly. Unlike with Junior, this was one abandonment issue I had no trouble with. Not only that. My uptalk had also apparently gone into Witness Protection on the mean streets of The OC. I kind of missed them both, and I couldn’t wait to tell my fucking mother? Just kidding. My mom, period.
I also couldn’t wait to work with Ashlay and to publish books and keep Hard Rain going—from now on. I recalled when Myron asked me that time, nonrhetorically, “Why in the world would somebody become a publisher?” He must have believed that I had a glimmering, because he left me the company, but I was continuing to work on the answer. I did discover a few things ever since the company turned over to me.
Number one, a publisher has to be certifiably crazy—and no wonder Myron qualified. And B, a publisher is somebody who sees no alternative to the certifiably loony life that is publishing books. Downtown Myron Beam. It’s similar to the life of a writer in this way: it’s such a demanding and often unrewarding existence, and writers should write if and only if they can imagine no other life to lead. Publishing, same same. And another thing. If publishing brings out the asshole in somebody, it might also bring out the opposite, whatever that is, and I will let you know when I figure it out.
“Hard Rain is coming back,” I said to Ashlay.
“Sibella, what shall we do to celebrate?”
Were Ashlay and I going to reprise our awkward conversation in that bar? Well, we could if she desired.
You heard me right.
She pointed to the Midleton on the desk.
Oh.
“It’s no Cosmo, but let’s drink to Myron,” she said.
“He’d also want us to drink to us.”
I poured. Confusion to our enemies, indeed.
✴✴✴
Nowadays I get into the office early, earlier than I ever did as a junior editor. I still go for the white shirt and black tie. It seems right, and if I ever come across a men’s retro blue blazer in my size in a consignment shop I will grab it. Myron turned out to have been a disappointment in some ways, but then again, we all do sometimes, and I missed him every single day. He had done something inexcusably wonderful when he dreamed up Hard Rain and was reckless enough to give somebody like me a job in the first place along with the material for his book. My book, too: this one.
As I was walking down the hall this morning to the office, I noticed that the periodontist next door had evidently moved out. I have been busy, and in all the excitement I must have missed the movers. The new tenant was a Dr. Handy, which is a pretty good name for a dermatologist specializing in cosmetic surgery, or so the plaque identified him, and he would be seeing patients by appointment. I didn’t have an excuse anymore to delay getting the Muse 86’d. But then the issue got complicated in my head, as most issues ultimately do for me, as you have noticed over and over again to your periodic if not unflagging chagrin. On the other doctor hand, you can laser erase a tat, and that would be painful on its own terms, but you cannot laser erase your past, which would be more painful, and that tattoo was my past and my past was mine the way Myron’s past was his and your past will always be yours.
Had I changed? There was a chance. That’s when I determined I could live with the ink after all. Our penultimate plot twist. That means, Kelly, there’s one more little twist to come. We’d been through a lot together, that tat and I, hadn’t we? It would provide visual material for a good story to spin for somebody’s grandchildren or even my own should they require a cautionary tale, and they always do, not that any kid would listen. I didn’t expect any prospective future mate of mine noticing the ink would care—or ever exist. I filed away the laser removal idea at the bottom of the ever expandable slush pile of my brain.
You know what the strangest aspect was? For the first time that I had ever thought about the tat, I did not visualize the image of Junior flowering in my imagination. It wasn’t his tat on me anymore. It was mine. I claimed possession of it. Maturation or denial? You be my judge. Or my therapist, but if you hang up a shingle down the hall, and if by your misfortune I wander in and hunker down in your chair near a box of tissues, think twice before you utter a “Say more” to me if you know what’s good for you. I might hand you this book of mine.
To be clear, by saying I took possession of the Muse, I was laboring under no illusion that was in fact who or what I was. Then again, people often miss that’s one of the Muse’s neatest tricks, to pretend to exist. Artists plead for the intervention of the Muse when they are stuck, or drink to the Muse when they get lucky, or castigate the Muse when she lets them down. The very notion of the Muse implies that the power for great art, for the creation of something beautiful, is external to the artist. I couldn’t confirm that, but I also couldn’t assert with conviction that was a wrongheaded point of view. For me, though, the Muse did her best work when nobody was noticing, not even the artist. But you could look at the whole thing in a different way. If you ask me, each of us, artist or no, has our own Muse. Maybe each of us is our own Muse. In any case, that’s how my tattoo was now speaking to me.
Mr. Zuckerman took fine care of Wilbur all the rest of his days, and the pig was often visited by friends and admirers, for nobody ever forgot the year of his triumph and the miracle of the web.
✴✴✴
That early morning, after taking my place at Myron’s old desk that was now my desk, the phone started ringing. Nobody was picking up, of course, because no junior editor or anybody else was around. But it was different now. Though we were gradually, tentatively becoming more stable as a company, I was not quite fully accustomed to thinking of myself in my new role. I considered letting the call go to voice mail, though not for long, to be honest. After all, it was merely the phone ringing, and what could be more normal than a phone ringing in a publishing house? It might have been a bill collector, it might have been a lawyer, it might have been an A-List movie star looking to take an option. Anything in the world could have been happening around here and anybody could be calling. I decided to take my chances. I picked up the phone.
“Hard Rain Publishing.”
“May I speak to the publisher?”
“Yes,” I said. “This is Sibella Cassidy.”
Acknowledgments
The author is deeply grateful to:
Regan McMahon
Kristin McCloy
Briah Skelly
Rare Bird Books:
Tyson Cornell, Publisher
Guy Intoci, Editorial Director
Julia Callahan, Director of Sales and Marketing
Hailie Joh
nson, Editorial and Design Manager
Jake Levens, Marketing and Publicity Manager
Sydney Lopez, Marketing and Publicity Manager
Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli, JET Literary Associates
Kim-from-LA: Kim Dower; Kristin Spillers
Beth Needel, Lafayette Library and Learning Center
Vickie Sciacca, Lafayette Library
Kathleen Caldwell, A Great Good Place for Books
Ava and Raylan James
Patricia James, as ever and always
Joseph Di Prisco was born in Brooklyn and lives today in Northern California, with his wife, photographer Patti James. He’s the author of the novels All for Now, The Alzhammer, The Confessions of Brother Eli, and Sun City, prize-winning books of poems, and books about childhood and adolescence. His memoirs The Pope of Brooklyn and Subway to California came out from Rare Bird Books. He is the founding chair of the Simpson Family Literary Project, which promotes literacy and literature, writers and writing across the generations.
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