Résumé With Monsters

by William Browning Spencer

  Philip secured the occasional word processing job through a temporary employment agency called On Time. These jobs would last a few days or a few weeks and then end. There was plenty of time for the writing of novels, but Philip found that the medication that kept the monsters at bay was equally effective in repelling the muse. During his off hours, he thought about Amelia.

  He lay in his apartment on rainy nights listening to the water pour through the system of pipes that he had cleverly rigged to send the ceiling's waterfall directly to the sink in the bathroom. He drank beer, more than was, perhaps, prudent, and he thought about Amelia in her small garage apartment in Hyde Park where she had settled after she left her sister's house.

  Philip missed her with a kind of stretched- tight yearning that was exhausting. If he could be with her, he would ask nothing more. He would be content to be invisible in her presence, a well-behaved ghost.

  This thought (engendered, no doubt, by a fatal combination of psychotropic drugs and alcohol) evolved into a plan of action. It required a movie theater that was next to a hardware store. Once such a theater was discovered, Philip had to wait until a movie was showing that appealed to Amelia. Then he had to convince Amelia to go. She was disinclined to go, indeed she was growing more remote with every meeting or phone conversation, but Philip eventually prevailed. It was a Saturday afternoon. That too was critical, since the hardware store closed at five in the evenings and was not open Sundays.

  Philip easily slipped Amelia's apartment key from her purse at the start of the movie, left Amelia in the darkened theater— "I've got to get popcorn," he told her—and took the key to the hardware store. The clerk made a duplicate, and he was back in the theater buying popcorn in less than fifteen minutes. "Long line," he whispered to Amelia. He dropped her own key back in her purse.

  During the day, he would let himself into her apartment and lie on her bed. Sometimes he would drink a couple of beers while lying there. The effect was soothing, reassuring. Surrounded by Amelia's sweet clutter—she was not an orderly woman—Philip would sense a kind of karmic marshaling of powers. She never made her bed, and he would lie on top of the sprawl of pale yellow sheets and smell the dazzle of different perfumes she wore and imagine her there. He knew, of course, that he was invading her privacy, and that what he was doing was indefensible, but, as is the case with all lost souls, he reveled in his abject condition.

  He would bring a small travel clock with him, setting it for four in the afternoon in case he dozed. He did not want Amelia to catch him sleeping in her bed. He expected that such a discovery would seriously impair his efforts to win her back.

  He was right.

  His heart recognized the sound of the key in the lock and all its implications before his clouded brain knew anything. He came out of sleep with his heart racing and blinked at Amelia's stunned features at she stared at him from the bedroom door. She had come home early. Without a word, without a scream, she dropped the briefcase and fled. Philip jumped up and ran into the living room. The door to the apartment was open.

  He saw her climbing into her car.

  "Amelia!" he shouted. She did not turn around.

  He went back inside and gathered the beer cans and the travel clock and put them in a paper bag. He locked the door behind him and walked down the stairs. Amelia was sitting in her car at the curb. She glared at him as he approached. When he was ten feet from her, she leaned on her horn, and roared away.

  Downcast, Philip got in his own car and drove back to his apartment.

  There was a message on his answering phone.

  "How could you?" Amelia sobbed. "How? Don't ever, ever talk to me again."

  Philip was fairly certain that there was nothing he could do—at least immediately—that would improve the situation.

  Philip was still seeing Lily Metcalf once a week. She told him, "You wobbled outside the bounds of acceptable social behavior, Philip. I suppose you can see that? I'm sure you have a better grasp on such things than poor Jay Martin, who, if you will recall, was not one of your favorite people in treatment and who urinated in the saltwater aquarium without giving it a second thought. I like to think that your understanding of society's little rules is sharper than Jay's."

  Amelia had called Lily, who had persuaded the younger woman not to go to the police.

  “I told her you weren't dangerous," Lily said, "although I confess my opinion there is intuitive and not exactly reinforced historically. She said you tied her up once and put her in a mail cart with a tarp over her."

  "I saved her life," Philip said.

  Lily nodded. "Uh huh. Well, I assured her that you would leave her alone."

  "Maybe you could explain how I have been going through some hard times."

  Lily shook her head slowly. "No. I don't think mitigating circumstances are what she wants right now. I think she wants a reassurance that you will leave her alone."

  "The thing is—" Philip began.

  "Philip!"

  "Well, okay, sure. I understand how this is a major setback."

  "Philip," Lily said, "Amelia is engaged to be married. You are not winning her back."

  And the very next day, when Philip watched Amelia pull into evening traffic from the parking lot of Pelidyne, when he followed her—in a rental car; he was no fool—north on Lamar, he knew the truth of what Lily told him. He didn't have to have it spelled out. He didn't really need to see them embrace on the porch steps.

  Amelia's fiancé was a tall, good-looking guy, obviously just off work himself, his tie loosened. He kissed her long and hard in the dappled sunlight. They were both wearing suits, and there was a certain androgynous aspect to their lovers' clinch until he slid a hand in her blouse and she laughed and pushed away, exposing a wanton glimpse of breast and bright red bra.

  No, Philip felt that this scene was overdone. The Dark Gods must have thought he was particularly dense, that he had to have everything spelled out.

  All right. All right. She's romantically involved.

  It was fitting that a letter should arrive, the very next day, from his publisher saying that The Despicable Quest was terminated.

  2.

  “Wow!" Sissy wrote back.

  I went out to the mailbox and there was your letter, and I called up my friend Louise and said you sent me a letter and she said What did it say ? and I said I don't know cause I haven't opened it and she said You goof and we both had a good laugh and when I hung up I read the letter and it u»as so sad I cried so that Dirk asked me what was the matter and I told him and we got in another fight and I crashed his car, which is a long story. He blames you for crashing his car. Can you believe it?

  Anyway, I think it is awful about your book and I hope your publisher eats poison snails in some geeky New York French restaurant and dies, and excuse me but your old girlfriend doesn't sound like your type anyway, and I think you are well off without her.

  You need a woman who is also a big fan. I guess that is not a hint, but you could take it that way and I wouldn't mind.

  The letter was eight pages long and narrated the events in Sissy's life and the lives of her numerous siblings and relatives. The family seemed to be a contentious one, and they were presently fighting over the custody of a child with the unlikely name of Gator, the offspring of someone named Skeet who had disappeared and was rumored to be living in Alaska.

  A week after receiving this second letter from Sissy, Philip found himself at a party thrown by his therapist.

  "It is not kosher to fraternize with clients," Lily told him, "but I met AL through you, so it is fitting you should come. Besides, I'm retired. Who's gonna fuss?"

  Midway through the party, AL Bingham climbed up on a chair and announced that he was going to marry Lily Metcalf.

  Everyone applauded as the loving couple embraced and kissed.

  As the party wore on, Philip found himself experiencing the usual sense of disorientation and loss. He didn't know anyone at the party except Lily and Bingha
m, and he was standing amid several college professors.

  A fat man with a close-cropped gray beard studied his coffee cup. "This china is rather like the china they had when I visited Yale to deliver my paper on cognitive responses to sexual imagery in male adolescent peer groups."

  A shrill young woman leaned forward, "I can't tell you the amount of coffee I drank while studying under York who has gone on to win a Nobel, you know, and who said I was probably the best student he ever had."

  A very thin man nodded his head. "Feldstein always spoke highly of York. I had come down to UT to deliver a lecture which Dean Markson later said was the highlight of the semester, and Feldstein came up to congratulate me on the Morrison grant and..."

  Philip drifted away from the group and was on his way out the door when Bingham caught him.

  "Leaving so soon?" the old printer asked.

  "I've got to get up early tomorrow," Philip said. "The temp agency called with a job."

  "Ralph was asking about you yesterday," Al said. "Said he missed you."

  "I bet."

  "Yeah. Well, you know Ralph."

  Philip and Bingham walked outside and stood on the lawn.

  "I'm pretty excited about marrying Lily," Bingham said.

  "I think it's great. Congratulations."

  "Thanks. Hey—" Bingham grew suddenly awkward, fishing a cigarette pack from his pocket and tapping one out on his sleeve. "Since you brought us together, I was wondering if you would be best man."

  "It would be an honor," Philip said. "When is the wedding?"

  "Next week. Saturday."

  "That soon?"

  "Gotta move fast," Bingham chuckled, at ease again, clutching Philip's shoulder. Bingham winked lasciviously. "Wouldn't want her to get knocked up out of wedlock."

  For the wedding, Philip wore a rented tux, brown and shiny. When he tried on a smile in the mirror, he thought he resembled some sort of aquatic mammal, an insincere seal corrupted by long association with a carnival, perhaps.

  The wedding ceremony itself was brief. Both Lily and Bingham were as excited as children at a costume party.

  Some people, Philip thought, never lose their enthusiasm.

  Driving home from the wedding, Philip squinted into the descending sun and reflected on how very flat and unappealing his own life had become. Life had occasionally seemed hopeless when vast, malignant creatures were manipulating humanity for their own inscrutable purposes, but the monsters now seemed trumped by the unbearable weight of daily existence. Reality's bored visage... this was more dreadful than the star-shaped face of Cthulhu himself. Philip resolved to stop taking his medication.

  On Sunday, Philip read the help-wanted ads and circled several. He was sick of temp jobs, folding envelopes or wrestling with unfamiliar computer software.

  Over the course of his life, he had learned to interpret the language of want ads. "Entry level" meant a dismal minimum wage job that never evolved into anything else since even the toughest and most desperate of employees only lasted a month before quitting. "Go-getters" were solicited for sales positions hawking products like life insurance and shared vacation time. "Must love people" was a clear warning that the customers were difficult, perhaps psychotic. "Industrious" people were requested to apply for work at sweatshops filled with dispirited, bitter employees. Ads offering work in the "entertainment" industry were invariably seeking clerks for video stores.

  On Monday, Philip called a company that was seeking a full-time word processor, and he went to their downtown offices and filled out an application. He was called that same afternoon and scheduled for an interview on Wednesday.

  The interview was conducted by a pale, multi- chinned man whose dark hair was firmly slicked down. He rattled Philip's résumé and leaned forward.

  "Says here you've written and published a novel," the man said.

  "Yes," Philip said. He had debated adding this information to his r6sum6, but the help-wanted ad had asked for someone with writing skills. The published novel, Philip reasoned, might be a credential for such a job.

  "This position we are offering is not glamorous like writing novels," the man said. "I don't know that you would be happy typing up letters and reports after writing novels."

  Philip assured the man that he would be happy with steady work.

  "I'll be candid with you," the man said, displaying yellow teeth, "we have got seventy- two people applying for this job. I can't hire but one. Should I take someone who has been laying back making up stories, sleeping till noon, living off big checks from New York and maybe taking enough drugs and booze to kill a rhinoceros?" He raised a pink hand to stop Philip from interrupting. "I know, I know, you are gonna tell me you aren't anything like that, but I'm saying I got seventy-two people hungry for this job, and some of them have been steady, solid word processors for years now. They are sharp with a lot of software packages, and they wouldn't read a novel much less write one. They are reliable, matter-of-fact people. What am I gonna do?"

  Philip realized the interview was at an end, thanked the man and left.

  He kept his novel on his resume for three more interviews, then deleted it. The final decision to do so came when Philip was interviewed by a thin, nervous man who had, himself, written three novels, none of which had been published, because New York publishing was now ruled by faggots and militant feminist lesbians. The man maintained that anyone who could get a novel published was a pervert or a pussy-whipped lackey.

  In his dentist's office that weekend, Philip read a magazine article, a survey of various jobs rated according to prestige. Being a writer was in the top five percent.

  #

  On Monday Philip's temp agency, On Time, sent him on a new job. He found himself entering data on a computer lodged in a small office that was being used as a temporary storage space for moldy boxes of old paperwork and large coils of electrical wire. Somewhere above him his beloved Amelia chatted with coworkers, stopped for a drink at the water fountain, spoke on the phone, conferred with her boss. Philip was at Pelidyne.

  His first day at Pelidyne seemed excruciatingly long. He was convinced that Amelia would think he was spying on her if she saw him. An explanation was on his tongue all day long, ready to be blurted.

  But he did not encounter her.

  When he drove home from work, exhausted, a woman jumped up from the curb in front of his apartment and shouted his name.

  She ran up to him. "I'm Sissy Deal," she said, snatching her sunglasses off and smiling. She winked. "Recognize me with clothes?"

  3.

  Actually, she did look slightly different with clothes. She was wearing a dress— which is not what Philip would have expected—and it was a sort of old- fashioned, matronly dress, dark blue with small white dots. The dress didn't seem to fit properly. Later, Philip came to realize that Sissy was one of those beautiful women who did not wear clothes well, thus giving men an aesthetic as well as a sexual motive for urging her out of them.

  "I should have called or something," she said. "But I got in a fight with Dirk. I was gonna go down to St. Petersburg and stay with Leda, but I got to the bus station and asked How much for Austin and it was reasonable, so I said Sold!"

  "Come on inside," Philip said. He picked up her suitcase and she followed him up the wooden stairs to his apartment.

  In the room, there was only the chair and the bed, so he sat her in the chair and went and made tea.

  "You look a hundred percent better without that mustache," Sissy said.

  "Well, thanks. You were right about the mustache. It was a bad idea."

  "Sometimes a beard is good if a man has a weak chin. But mustaches are sort of pointless and kind of, no offense, vain."

  Philip nodded. "You're right. You're right."

  Sissy got up and came into the kitchen to watch Philip pour the hot water into cups.

  "I know I should have called or something," she said.

  "No, that's fine," Philip said. "Really fine."

>   "I didn't think it through."

  "I'm impulsive myself," Philip said, handing her a steaming cup.

  "On the bus I sat next to this red-faced guy in a suit, and we started talking, I don't know, about the weather and stuff and how his wife hated him and wouldn't give him a blow job. I tried to change the subject, so I told him about your book and showed him it—I brought it along for you to autograph—and he said—can you believe it?—that he didn't go for books that had monsters or fantastic things in them. He liked books that were just like life. Why would anyone like books that were just like life? So he told me about this book he had read that he thought was great about this businessman on a bus who meets this redheaded woman and they do all kinds of sexual stuff, right on the bus, very explicit, cock- this, pussy-that, you know." Sissy paused, lowered her tea cup from her lips. “I bet there isn't any such book. What do you bet?"