Very Old Bones Page 15

  “Do you think we married too soon?” I asked.

  “I didn’t,” she said.

  “You seem so certain.”

  “I never make a wrong decision on things like that.”

  “Are there any other things like that?”

  “I know what I want,” she said.

  “And do you have it?”

  “I have some things. I have you.”

  “Well, that’s true enough.”

  “Why do you want to talk? Why don’t you make love to me?”

  “I’m discovering what a noble creature you are. I understood it at the baths in Wiesbaden but I didn’t put the word to it until now. Noble. How you carried that remarkable body of yours, the way you sliced the water with your arms when you swam, the way you sat beside me on the bench in the steam room with all those other ignoble nudes, enveloped in clouds of love and heat, and you a presence as brilliant as the fire that heated the rocks. The way you looked when you lay on that cot behind the white curtain to take your nap, the erotic extreme of your arched back when I knelt by your cot and offered you worship.”

  “Nobody ever made me explode the way you did then. If I said skyrockets you’d scold me for using a cliché. How did you learn so much about women?”

  “I’ve been a lifelong student.”

  “I wonder what will happen to us.”

  “Everything,” I said.

  “It must be valuable.”

  “Very true. If it isn’t valuable it’s a malaise.”

  “I don’t ever want to do anything to hurt you.”

  “But you might.”

  “You really think I might?”

  “Giselle is an undiscovered country.”

  “So is Orson.”

  “No, not anymore.”

  And this was true. I knew what was in store for me, felt it coming. I decided to blot it out and I pulled Giselle toward me.

  “I am desperately weary of contemplating the fact that I have nothing to contemplate except the weariness of having nothing to contemplate.”

  The sentence took form in my mind as I sat in the anteroom of the publishing house that had hired me to edit the pretentious subliterary drivel of Meriwether Macbeth. On the walls of the anteroom, whose floor was covered with a solid dark red carpet suitable for red-carpet authors, I looked up at the giant faces of writers whose work had been published by this house, and who had very probably trod this carpet, or these bare floorboards in pre-carpet days, hauling in their MSS in briefcase, suitcase, steamer trunk, wheelbarrow, or perhaps only jacket pocket if the author was a poet. A pantheon is what one might call the epiphany on these walls: Dreiser, Dos Passos, Yeats, O’Casey, Wharton, Frost, Joyce, Steinbeck, Sherwood Anderson. We or our work have all passed through these hallowed halls, they say; and we are what hallowed them. Which boards, which carpet will Orson Purcell hallow in his future? None at all should my present frame of mind continue, for I knew that line of mine—I am desperately weary et cetera—was hardly the mind-set required of hallowed hangables.

  My editor was in conference but would be available soon, the receptionist said. I waited, trying to conjure a way out of the conversational cul-de-sac any statement about literary weariness would lead me into, and returned always to the magnificence of my morning romp on Giselle’s sacred playing fields. But it is written: one may not raise with one’s editor such uxorious delight unless one’s editor raises the subject first. Better to speak of the upcoming Hemingway, the Salinger phenomenon.

  I walked to the rack of books on display for visitors, found the Cassirer, leafed in it, always wanted this. I’ll ask Walker for it. I went back to my chair, opened the book randomly to an early page, and read: “No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see it, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances. Instead of dealing with the things themselves man is in a sense constantly conversing with himself.”

  A book about me, I thought, and I put it in my pocket. The use of the word “symbolic” brought Malachi to mind, and also what Peter had said when I asked if Malachi really was a madman, as Mother had suggested.

  “The man had madness thrust upon him,” Peter said. “The poor son of a bitch lost his cow to a Swedish cardsharp in a poker game and never got over it, blamed his wife, the devil, all Swedes, half his relatives. I never got the full story, just hand-me-down snatches from Sarah and what Molly got from Mama. As to madness in the family, Tommy’s not all there, but that’s not madness. And who’s to say I’m not nuts? We’re an odd lot, boy, we Phelans.”

  I wasn’t sure whether I was included in that grouping; and I let it pass.

  Walker Pettijohn, venerated editor, emerged from his inner sanctum with the durable particularities of his presence in place: the wild crown of the whitest of white hair, the face flushed not from booze but from the wrong shaving cream, the corporate stomach made round by the most exquisite restaurants in New York, the smile known round the world of international publishing, and the genuine glad hand that was as reassuring to me as the very light of day when I awoke at morning. The Pettijohn handshake drew me into the sanctum and toward the boar’s nest of books and paper that was the workspace of this legendary discoverer and shaper of American literature.

  “Did your wife arrive?” he asked me.

  “She did. Indeed.”

  “And all is well?”

  “Let’s not get into wellness,” I said. “She may go to work for Life magazine.”

  “How fine.”

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  “Ah, you’re in your gloom still.”

  “It’s gloomy, this life.”

  “Meriwether Macbeth had a good time all his life.”

  “All right, we’re around to that.”

  “Are you ready to talk, or should we do this next week? I can wait.”

  “Now is the time.”

  “Then what I need is more of that wildness of Meriwether, that silliness, that absurd boyishness that kept him floating in that crazy, artistic, and erotic world of his. Peter Pan de Sade.”

  “He wasn’t really erotic. He was just a satyr.”

  “Same thing in print.”

  “No. He’s an asshole.”

  “Of course, that’s his charm.”

  “Assholes are now bookishly charming?”

  “This one is. He did whatever came into his head.”

  “Infantile behavior to be cherished.”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Orson. Don’t get remote. Use that brilliant brain of yours.”

  “If I were brilliant I wouldn’t be dealing with this fool.”

  “What I want is more of the stupidity of the man’s life, the empty nonsense, the ridiculous logic, the romancing of worthless women, the publishing of rotten poetry. I think of that masterpiece you tossed out: ‘Naked Titty Proves God Exists.’ ”

  “My life is full of error,” I said. “I stand corrected.”

  “We’re not trying to be objective here about poetic values, we’re revealing Macbeth for what he was, and if we do this book right the whole world will have a fine old time seeing through his façades.”

  “They’re not worth seeing through.”

  “Orson, you’re being difficult. You don’t want to quit this, do you?”

  “Of course not. It’s my life blood.”

  “If you say you’ll do it we’ll move on to more serious matters, like your own work. Shall we do that?”

  “Let’s do that.”

  Pettijohn reached into a pile of manuscripts and pulled out one bound in a yellow cover (after Giselle’s hair), and opened it, revealing handwritten notes clipped to the first page of the manuscript. He looked at me and I instantly understood that here would come a true judgment on my would-be work and my surrogate self. Now would come the revelation of my flawed brain, errant heart, rapscallion soul. The eradication of the future was at hand.

  “This is absolutely brilliant
,” Pettijohn said. “I love it.”

  I was stunned.

  “There’s a very original voice in these pages,” said Pettijohn, “and nobody writes dialogue better than you. You’re the best since O’Hara.”

  I could not speak.

  “There’s a potentially great book here,” said Pettijohn, “and I want you to know I’m behind it one thousand percent.” He paused, stared me in the eye. “But I can’t get anybody else in the house to back me up. Nobody sees what I see in it.”

  The iceman finally cometh.

  “I’ve made notes on it, and I’ve included what others say about it, so you’ll know the negatives.”

  “Then you’re rejecting it.”

  “Not I,” said Pettijohn, “not I. But I’m only one opinion here, and one opinion does not a novel publish.”

  “A rejection by any other name.”

  “Consider it temporary. Let me see it again when you’ve gone further with the story.”

  “What do people fault?”

  Pettijohn cast his eyes toward the ceiling. I anticipated a rain of slush from anonymous editorial heights.

  “People like the story up to a point, but they think the writing lacks the necessary poetry. And they say it lacks a verve for life, that it’s life seen through a black veil of doom. The truth is, Orson, that people do occasionally laugh, even on the gallows. But this book is absolutely joyless all the way. This doesn’t bother me, but others it does. To hear them talk you’d think nobody had ever written negatively about life before you. But my arguments convince nobody about this manuscript.”

  “No poetry, no verve for life, eh. They should’ve seen me in bed this morning. I was poetry in motion.”

  “A wonderful way to avenge yourself on your enemies. Fuck them all to death.”

  I stood up and so did Pettijohn, who picked up the manuscript.

  “You want to take this?”

  “I’ll get it another time.”

  “What about these notes?”

  “Their essence is enough for one day.”

  “You’ll fatten up Meriwether’s book, won’t you?”

  “I’ll make it obscenely obese.”

  We nodded and shook hands across the desk and then I found my way out through the warren of corridors to the waiting room. I kept my gaze level and steady, did not glance upward toward the epiphanic walls.

  Lacking in my work, and perhaps in the deepest reaches of my person, the necessary poetry, the necessary verve for life, I decided to acquire some of each, or, that being impractical, to discover, at the very least, where, how, and from whom verve and poetry were dispensed to seekers.

  When I came out of the lobby of my publisher’s building and stepped onto Fifth Avenue I felt the pulsation of a new vibrancy, putting me at one with possibility in the land of opportunity. I knew this was a wholly unreasonable attitude in the face of what I had just gone through, but one must not look too closely at what liberates one into excitement. I assayed the sky and found it clear, blue, and glorious. I welcomed the snap in the early spring breeze, and I crossed to the sunny side of the avenue to confront the warmth and light of the noonday sun, which was just slightly past its zenith.

  I was hungry and I envisioned food of delectable piquancy, served in luxurious surroundings by punctilious and servile waiters. I would order veal, possibly venison, perhaps duck. But I did not yet want to become stationary, however tempting and elegant the atmosphere. I would walk now, but where? I had almost three hours to spend before meeting Giselle. I’d told her to meet me about three o’clock in an Irish bar on Sixth Avenue, not far from her point of rendezvous with the editors of the greatest picture magazine in the world. Should I now walk north to Central Park, embrace the natural world of trees, of soft spring earth and new greenery, or weave my way among the sumptuous lobbies and cafés of the hotels on Central Park South? No, I longed for something grander and with more verve than those, something even more poetic than nature.

  I strode southward on the avenue and knew the instant pleasure that came from the high elegance of the windows of the great stores. In Saks’ window I saw a suit that I instantly coveted, a double-breasted gray glen plaid, one of the grandest-looking suits I’d ever seen. In the window of The Scribner Book Store I found two books that suited my mood: Life Is Worth Living by Fulton Sheen and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, wise men both. I would buy both books when I had the money. I turned, decided to say hello to Jesus at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and I remembered the flustered Methodist cleric who protested to his Irish taxi driver that he had asked not for St. Patrick’s, but for Christ’s Church, and the driver advised him, “If you don’t find him here he’s not in town.” There’s verve.

  I crossed the avenue at 49th Street and walked west between the British Empire building and La Maison Française toward the sunken plaza in Rockefeller Center. I stopped and read the credo of the great John D. Rockefeller, Jr., carved into a slab of polished black marble: “I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character—not wealth or power or position—is of supreme worth.” Wonderful. And more: “I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free . . . I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world . . .” And so do I, John, so do I.

  I continued my walk through the Center, the greatest concentration of urban buildings in the world. I remembered coming here with Peter when I was a child to see the tallest Christmas tree in the world. I followed my shoes and found myself in the lobby of the Time-Life building, home to the greatest concentration of magazines in the world, and considered going up to the office where Giselle was being seduced away from me, but descended instead into the underground world of Rockefeller Center, the most labyrinthine subterranean city since the catacombs, passing stores and restaurants and murals and sculpture, far more exciting to a refined sensibility than any underground passageway anywhere, including Mammoth Cave, or the sewers of Paris. I took a stairway up into the RCA building, home to the greatest radio and television networks in the world (and next door the Associated Press building, home to the greatest news service in the world). Nothing in urban, suburban, or rural history could compare with this achievement, and as I moved through the magnificent corridors I noted shining brass everywhere: in the floors, the hand railings, the revolving doors; and the thought of the cost of such elegance exalted me.

  The very idea of selfless munificence in the service of the architectural imagination was surely a pinnacle in the history of man’s capacity to aspire. And aspire I did, assuming the poetry of all this grandeur into my eyes, my ears, my sense of smell, the poetry of man the master builder, the poetry of man who climbed to the skies with his own hands, the poetry of Babel refined into godly and humanistic opportunity and respect and mortar and stone and endeavor and joy and love and money and thickness and breadth and luxury and power and piety and wonder and French cuisine and the American novel and jazz music and (oh yes, Meriwether, oh yes) the naked titties of ten thousand women. Oh the immensity of it all!

  I taxied back to the apartment where Giselle and I were staying and, from the desk where our host kept his financial records, expropriated two checkbooks, two dozen of the host’s business cards, several letters that would verify my identity if the business cards and the checkbooks did not, assorted press credentials from the U.S., West Germany, the Soviet Union, Brazil, and an Arab nation whose name I did not immediately recognize, all identifying the owner as a writer for Life magazine. I folded these items into one of the host’s several empty breast-pocket wallets, dialed the number at Life Giselle had given me, and left a message for her: “Meet me at either the Palm Court or the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel, the greatest hotel in America, when you are free,” and I then set out in further quest of poetry and verve.

  The first thi
ng I did was register and establish my credit with the Plaza’s front desk, then equip myself with ready cash. I engaged a corner suite that looked out on Fifth Avenue, Central Park, and the Grand Army Plaza, and then I descended to Fifth Avenue and on to Saks, where I bought three new shirts and ties, pocket handkerchiefs, shoes, belt, socks, and the gray glen plaid suit I’d seen in the window; but I would accept it all, I told the clerk, only if alterations were done within the hour (cost not an obstacle) and delivered to my suite at the Plaza, which they were.

  I bought two pounds of Barricini chocolates for Giselle, and back at the suite ordered two dozen yellow roses from the hotel florist and four bottles of her favorite French wines from room service. I went back downstairs and explored the lobby, found the Palm Court too crowded, sought out an empty corner of the Oak Bar, and ordered my first drink in five and a half months, a Scotch on the rocks with water on the side. I sipped it with care, waiting for my system to feel the first alcoholic rush of the new year, and wondering if Dr. Tannen’s prophecy would be correct: that, should I ever again drink alcohol, the flood controls of my brain would let the madness cascade back into my life.

  I affirmed my disbelief in this diagnosis with another sip of whiskey, and only then did I look about me at this walnut-dark, wood-paneled male saloon, with its murals out of the storied past of the Plaza—a horse and carriage in a snowstorm in front of the old hotel, water spilling out of the fountain’s dish while a full moon is all but covered by clouds. By the light from the room’s wall sconces and copper windows this country’s Presidents, giants of capital, movie stars, and great writers had drunk for half a century. I recognized no one. I took another sip and knew the ease that drink had always provided me, a flow of juices that wakened dormant spirits and improbable values. The first sips alone did this. Consider, then, the potential of an entire bottle.

  For months I had not seen anybody through the auroral brilliance that those summoned juices could generate. My life had been repetitive ritual: rise from narrow bed, dress in sordid clothing, eat meagerly and without relish, go out into the world to edit a book you loathe, confront what you now knew to be an unpublishable novel of your own making, come home in darkness to reinhabit your father’s bohemian gloom, and write your daily letter to Giselle.