The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories

by Kit Reed

  Then we get inside and it’s: Hasn’t she ever heard of IKEA?

  I mean, Mariel barely scratched the surface here. It’s all about vintage shag rugs in bad colors and milk crates stuffed with magazines and board-and-brick bookcases like kids make in graduate school, which makes me wonder whether all her taste is in her mouth or if she downplays the decor to make Archie feel at home. Jacket photos notwithstanding, Ashley Famous is no kid either, now that we see her up close. But she ushers us in glowing as though she is completely unaware. Then dear God she says, “Things of this world are only things of this world so why bother,” so we know she knows.

  She sits us down and brings us steaming cups of cambric tea which our grandmothers remember vaguely and used to offer when we were small.

  You don’t exactly talk to Ashley Famous, you listen, which is how we find out why people fall down and worship her and follow her anywhere. It’s a foregone conclusion, voilà, tout de suite, when she starts going on in that thrilling voice. Actually, although it’s a little embarrassing, we follow her upstairs into the loft. It’s her meditation room, she says, and somehow the three of us end up sitting on that hard, hard floor in lotus position—or something like it for Beth and me—it’s a little harder for Beth as certain parts of her have begun to spread. We sit facing the new Sheetrock wall Arch put up for her and we meditate, or Ashley Famous does, while Beth and I stare at the wall as instructed and try to empty our minds and see into the beyond, which is what she seems to expect. It’s not easy to do when you’re wondering if she’s gone out of her mind and into the Presence while you’re still sitting there worried about how long you can be on this floor in a fixed position without screaming and offending her and whether if you got up and tried to leave, she’d know.

  Can you really meditate with us watching?

  Still, it is an honor to be hunched in a row like this, contemplating eternity. Imagine, contemplating. Us!

  Just being here makes Beth and me feel special, and definitely close to the source—although of what—well, it’s pretty ineffable. We’re only beginners, after all. I guess we’re expected to stare at that wall until we’re cross-eyed, which if you do for long enough actually does move you to a higher plane unless that’s all the blood leaving your head and pooling in your butt. Whatever it is, I could swear that something happened, so when Ashley Famous says, in hushed tones, “Can you feel it?” Beth and I both manage a breathy, “Yes” and for the moment and after we go limp and it stops hurting, we believe.

  Then she kind of flows up while Beth and I creak and groan miserably and struggle to our feet, humiliated because we’ve failed. But, how glorious. Whatever we are suffering, Ashley Famous must be mysteriously transcending, because she says, “Wasn’t that wonderful!” and rakes us with that white-light smile.

  Ergo, voilà, mirabile, we are friends. We’re invited back tomorrow, Ashley says she sees great promise in us, which is borderline divine. I’m sitting right down and reading every one of her books as soon as I get home.

  When we come back on Wednesday Arch is there; I can’t help hoping he’ll come up in to the loft with us because once I get the hang of this, maybe we can meet on some astral plane. Failing that, I’ll have something good to look at while our minds are traveling out and beyond. But when she asks him, “Are you?” his face shuts up shop, so I know I’m right about them, although Beth doesn’t pick up on it.

  Then Arch goes off wherever he goes to write and we’re back on that wretched floor maintaining fixed positions until I think I see paisley lights, unless I’m on the first step to the next level as Ashley promised and my life is about to change. I can’t help it, I have to peek.

  Surprise, Beth is peeking too and if you believe in that kind of thing, Ashley Famous looks pretty much transfixed, unless we’re both giddy with hunger because she didn’t give lunch before she sat us down to meditate. It’s like seeing one of those intricate Chinese ivories with the light bulb inside, my God! She looks lit from within, but only for a second. In the next she yips and hits the floor like a felled log. Beth and I are gnawing our knuckles and reaching for our phones when she sits up with her eyes blazing and asks, “Did you see it? Were you there?”

  We don’t know what to say, exactly, so we don’t.

  “Well,” she says in that breathy tone that enchants thousands, “there you are.”

  Who are we to say otherwise?

  On the way home Beth says, “Did she just … “

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did we?”

  It’s amazing, I am thinking not really but I have to say, “I don’t know!”

  “I don’t either,” Beth says, “but wasn’t it grand.” Her voice drops so it’s more a statement than a question, and we leave it there.

  We get out of the car feeling somewhat exalted, and go back to our lives. I’d love to tell Richard, but there’s no way to explain it so he’d understand. Instead Beth and I go around feeling special, special, whether because of the experience or because of all Schuylerton society we alone are designated friends of Ashley Famous, it’s hard to say. We don’t talk about it because this is precious and we owe it to Ashley not to tell. Also, it pisses certain people off. Mariel and Stephanie of course, but they were never part of the inner circle. Jeannie because she wasn’t invited, and Gloria for sure.

  To make it up to them we decide to give a party at my house, nothing fancy: champagne with Gloria’s crudités and the satays and teriyakes the chef from Kang’s restaurant does on his row of hibachis, Jeannie’s chocolate cheesecake, Japanese lanterns in the woods, and to double-atone for being best friends with her and leaving Jeannie and Gloria and the others outside the loop, I get Arch to make sure Ashley Famous comes.

  We do these things so well that naturally she’ll understand this is nothing special, we give beautiful parties all the time. Beth and I are looking out at the terrace just before the first guests come and everything is perfect: glowing hibachis, LED lights winking in the trees and Japanese lanterns glowing in the woods beyond; the peonies are out and I tell her, “Look hard, Beth, so you’ll never forget what this party looks like. We’re going to remember this night for the rest of our lives.”

  Ashley and Arch come in late, and look at her! My, isn’t that the transformation? And don’t our men, who had zero interest in the matter until the party, collect like mosquitoes around the bug zapper on a summer night? Where she came to church in a T-shirt and those tawdry flowered jeans, tonight she walks in barefoot in a beautiful diaphanous thing that I swear is by Issy Miyake, and a wreath of gold on her head with bachelor’s buttons woven in. Her hair is flying and she looks like what she is: an ornament to the community, our star.

  Instead of pleasing one and all with our own personal famous writer, we’ve alienated quite a few, because the only men who aren’t glued to her are Bill Anthony, who foolishly wore the clerical collar, a turnoff for both of them, apparently, and the fourth Mr. Famous, who stalks the fringes looking every inch the poet, like Lord Byron under a cloud, but without the club foot.

  Still it’s a beautiful party, everyone has to agree. Beth and I knock ourselves out running around mingling, pulling outsiders from Hyde Park and Rhinebeck and Red Hook into the circle, mixing up couples with people they already knew; we are a storm, a flame of congeniality that seems to go out as soon as we turn our backs because Ashley Famous is sitting on the steps to the fountain barefoot, holding forth, and that’s where everyone is.

  This seems like the time to let Richard know that the gauzy Ms. Famous and I are kindred so I make my way through the throng and say “Ashley, dear!” Then she gives me the strangest look and does a one-two take. Who are you is quickly replaced by a manufactured smile and oddly, since Beth and I are, after all, giving the party—I mean does she not recognize us or what?—oddly she says, “How lovely, running into you here.” And practically in the same breath Richard—my Richard!—shushes me: “Please, honey. Ashley is in the middle of a joke.” />
  Not that anybody notices when I storm away. At my back I hear her trilling, “I think the two most interesting things in the world are sex and religion, don’t you?”

  Then, what is it the woman said to Bill Anthony, that hooked him and brought all this down on us? Right.

  Sometimes you. Just. Get. Tired.

  What I hate most is that I’m trying not to feel wounded, but I’m hurt. Feeling perhaps a tad bit guilty, Richard puts an arm around me and tries to pull me back into the social mainstream, but I do what any woman would do. I float out of the mainstream and drift along in the backwaters, among dropped napkins and abandoned plates. One of the Japanese lanterns in the woods has caught fire—nothing serious, it’s May, and too wet to burn long; Kang’s chef is gone and the hibachis have burned out. As I bob along I hear Gloria grumble, “You’d think being famous would be enough,” but I let it pass and drift on in the shallows until I fetch up against Arch, the lonely fourth husband, beached on the bank. I don’t do much. When we collide I plant my fingers on that broad, strong wrist, warm in spite of the fact that the night just turned cool.

  I want to draw his attention to the clump of men and ask him who’s next but in our circle we don’t say the unspeakable and for all I know the poor boy has no idea that his time with Ms. Famous is growing short. I try, “Is she always like this?”

  He turns, blinded by misconception and glowing with God knows what. “You mean, radiant?”

  “Radiant, yes.” I am too well bred to say, Radiant, no. Voracious.

  “Ashley is … Well, Ashley.”

  He may be dazzled but he has not moved and my fingers are still on his warm, warm wrist, and I am thinking: well, I’ll show her! I make them curl to make a bracelet for him, like a gift. “Would you like to take a walk?”

  Look at our men, all gathering like cultists about to paint themselves blue and perform extreme acts. Look at my women friends, stewing in their own bitter juices. Look at me, bent on subversion, and look at Arch, grinning at me like a dirty boy. “Of course.”

  We push off from the ship of fools and head out along the driveway to Mill Road and I have to wonder if she even saw us go; well, when her man comes home smirched and guilty, she will damn well know it. He recites yards of free verse as we walk, and I make appreciative noises and we both feel good enough about ourselves, going along in the moonlight. Then I think: Now, and nudge him until we’re facing so I can take his hands. I tell him, “They aren’t all like her.”

  Then, oh! Heedless boy; when he says, “There’s nobody like her,” he is glistening all over again. I’m about to despair when he says, as if to redeem it, “You know, there is one thing.”

  This could still go the other way so I leave my answer wide open. “Yes?”

  “Ashley isn’t happy here.” He frees one hand and we turn back.

  “Oooooh. She isn’t?” When he doesn’t pick up on it I say, “That’s too bad.”

  “When she’s unhappy, it makes it hard for me.”

  “Unhappy. Hmmm …” I do this carefully, leaving a hole big enough for him to drive a forklift into, but he doesn’t follow up, he just trudges along even after I prompt him with, “And?” One unkind word and we can start on her.

  It’s maddening, walking hand in hand with an attractive kid who is too stupid to know what’s happened to him let alone what’s possible here, and too obtuse to explain why.

  The silence drags on until I am forced to say in tones controlled as tightly as I can squeeze them, “What. Ah. What’s gone wrong?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  I hate this. “Is it something we did?”

  “In a way. Sort of. Oh, this is embarrassing.”

  Right. He has been deputized. I try to make it easy for him. “What is?”

  It appears that when you’re the fourth Mr. Ashley Famous, nothing is easy for you. After a struggle he gets it out—well, part of it. “It’s something you haven’t done!”

  Try playing twenty questions on a country road in the middle of the night. Make that forty questions. It takes too long, but I manage to ask them all.

  As it turns out, Arch isn’t embarrassed; where you or I would be humiliated, fishing on behalf of somebody who doesn’t love you enough to stay by your side at parties, Arch says as though pointing out the obvious, “Your little party is nice and all, but Ashley … She’s very upset.” By this time he is strongly aware that I am done asking polite questions so he explains. “Usually when she comes to a new town people do something special, a concert, a dinner or a dance, something big, in her honor.”

  “Something big.”

  “Right. When Ashley Famous comes to town people get together and throw a great big party for her.”

  “Even though she hates parties.”

  “Oh, you know Ashley. She only says she does.”

  “At the club.”

  “Could it be black tie?” Even by moonlight there’s no missing the grateful smile and I still can’t say whether it’s triumph he’s exuding, or relief. “She loves to dress up.”

  Oh, we’ll give her a party all right, if that’s what she expects, and it will be the biggest and most beautiful party ever to go down in the annals of the Schuylerton River Club. Before we’re done it will rival the best efforts of the Vanderbilts and the first Roosevelts back in the day, a masterpiece of planning and execution, all in honor of our brand new local celebrity, Welcome, Ashley, now you are one of us, and naturally it will be black tie so the bitch can come in high drag without putting the rest of us in the shade, for we clean up nicely and put on our diamonds for events like this. Then the lovely Ashley Famous can float into the room in her most expensive designer-Whatever, and I hope she has the good grace to blush at Bill Anthony’s welcoming speech, after which she will truly be in our midst, surrounded by admirers, secure in the knowledge that where apparently we’ve been remiss without knowing it, we’re pulling out all the stops, including picking out her name in dwarf roses on top of one of Tempest’s most beautiful cakes. We will show Ashley Famous every way we know how that this whole beautiful, expensive evening is all about her. Before we’re done, she will have drunk from champagne fountains and danced to the Tippy Little orchestra and cracked lobsters in the driveway with the heel of her most elegant shoe; on her big night she will wine and dine and whirl around the dance floor at the center of attention in spite of her reclusive qualities, the cynosure of all eyes, and when that soft pink glow in the sky above the Hudson warns us that sunrise comes next we will by God do what you do for the GOH at any bacchanal; we’ll chase our maiden up into the woods overlooking the River Club and push her backward over a slab of granite and cut out her heart.

  —The Kenyon Review, 2009

  Monkey Do

  Every writer wants to be famous, at least just once. I’ve been at it since before the dog died, but it’s an animal planet, so what do you expect? If a hundred monkeys typing for a thousand years would probably produce a novel, what could one monkey do with a computer and the right software?

  That is, a computer-literate monkey like Spud.

  I never liked the monkey. I brought it home because I was stuck on certain points in my monkey planet novel and needed a specimen to observe first hand. In a one-room apartment, gorillas are out of the question and chimps are too annoying to have around. Plus, baboons are evil incarnate, which you’d know if you’d ever looked one in the eye. Ergo, Spud.

  He was quiet, he was small enough to fit in a shopping bag, if he scrunched, so what could go wrong?

  He had bad habits, his breath was vile but I thought, cool. Bestseller at any cost. Instant movie. Fame! I finished the book OK, I even got paid. I did all the right things to promote it even though they weren’t paying squat. I touched all the miserable bases, up to and including being snubbed at cons and sitting at bookstore tables for hours waiting to sign Rhesus Planet for fans who never showed up. Nice poster featuring Spud attracted a few ladies, but they awwww-ed and moved on.<
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  My novel tanked but the monkey is still around.

  It’s not like I wanted to keep the monkey. It sat around scratching its belly and mocking me, and I could swear it was grunting, failure. I saw pity in its eyes.

  You bet I was over Spud. In fact the first thing I did after the book was done was take him back to the pet store for a refund but the dealer said he didn’t accept returns. I tried to trade him in for an anaconda, but a sarcastic, second hand rhesus monkey with white eyebrows and a white goatee and white hair on its butt like a second beard around its asshole turns out to be a drug on the market.

  So I donated him to the local zoo. They took him on a trial basis. We hugged goodbye. I thought good riddance but he was back on my doorstep in less than a week. There was a note attached to his carrier: BAD INFLUENCE. I was embarrassed, but not surprised.

  I tried to take him out in the wild and set him free, and he was OK in the car until I turned off the freeway. Stupid jerk, he started to cry. Never mind, I found him a nice field with lots of growing things that he could eat if he wasn’t so fussy, a nice pond and trees he could jump around in. God knows I tried to turn him loose. I put him down and gave him a little pat on the butt. “Go, be free!” Instead he locked his arms and legs around my shin and no matter how hard I kicked to shake him off he clung, going ook-ook-oook so pathetically that I picked him up and we went home.

  As a result Spud is still around, a constant reminder of whatever is the most recent failure and believe me, there have been a few too many since Rhesus Planet, the unsuccessful Cockatoo Nation being one. At least the dealer let me turn in the bird for a goldfish, which mysteriously disappeared the day I brought it home.

  Never mind. I did what you do in the wake of failure, which pretty much happens every time I try. I sat down at the computer and started another novel, but when nobody likes you it’s hard, thinking up new words to push around the screen.

  You get distracted, and the monkey was no help. Spud got bored or jealous or some damn thing whenever I sat down to write. Worse, every time I walked away to get coffee or look out the window for inspiration, which was often, he hopped up on the table and started bopping away at my keyboard with his little fists, bonka-bonka-bonka, and one day when I came back from gazing into the bathroom mirror, I found words.