“So you are capable of feeling gratitude, it seems.”
“Glad you see it that way. But let’s stop exchanging posies and get on with the story.”
#
He opened the front cover of the little book. On the flyleaf he read
To Leslie,
with my love,
Felix
As he quickly clapped the book shut, his heart leaped up What a…
#
“No, no, no, governor. That will never do.”
“What won’t?”
“The heart leaping up. It’s ruinous. Hearts don’t leap. They beat. Unless you’re a stiff. And as a metaphor it’s stolen. What do you think you are, doing what—a poet beholding a rainbow?”
“It seems you’re an educated fellow after all. Passing yourself off as an autodidact, a Jackie-Come-Lately London or Kerouac, you had me believing the reason you weren’t venturing to tell your own story was, not having read much in the way of literature and not feeling comfortable with words, as the idiom of your conversation sometimes suggests—look, I’m not trying to insult or demean you. Perhaps you present yourself that way for self-protection, as a disguise. Increasingly it’s become evident that actually you’re a well-read man. Not inarticulate by a long shot. Maybe you’re inhibited by what’s called ‘the anxiety of influence.’ Perhaps you’ve read too much.”
“I take no offense. But your speculating’s far off the mark. Since you raise the question, I’ll tell you why. Distance, governor. When a story takes you over, possesses you, you can’t split yourself in two—the one it’s happening to and the one who’s telling it. So it has to be turned over to someone else, the somebody who summons you to prod him, or her, to tell the story for you. In this instance, for better or worse, you’re the one. Verstehst du?”
“Could it be you’ve misidentified the person you were summoned by, as you call it? Samuel, you might remember, in the Old Testament book that bears his name, was deceived about who was calling him. Maybe you ought to find someone else and ask that person whether you were summoned to hear her, or him, tell your story. Someone who would tell it as you want it told. Exactly.”
“Now don’t sulk, governor. Or go into a funk under pressure. You’re too thin-skinned. What you’re going through happens to the storyteller all the time—finding it hard to get started, stopping, running out of energy, doubting whether it’s worth going on even if you can, digging deep inside yourself to find a reason to, as well as to tap a source for more energy. Look it’s time for a break. We’ve made more progress by midmorning than you, not having the whole story in your head yet, as I have, can measure. And, as we’ve agreed, the first part is the hardest. Soon the tale will being telling itself. You’ll merely be speaking and putting down words. Believe me, I’ve been through this before. Now go fix yourself a fresh pot of mocha that’ll put another shot of caffeine in your system. Since you’ve designated this place a hootch-free zone, I’ve stashed a couple of Granola bars in the pocket of my raincoat. Quick energy. I need a pop as badly at you do. You ought to try high protein, governor.”
#
When I force myself to reenter my study after a lunch that’s anything but re-energizing, I see his head has dropped onto the top of my reading chair. Which has been transformed into a listening chair. His glasses lie on the lamp table beside him, and his eyes are closed. Presuming he’s fallen asleep, I tiptoe to my desk. As I ease myself into my swivel chair, being as quiet as I can, he suddenly starts, then slowly tilts forward, dangerously so, it seems to me.
Spotting no Granola bar wrappings on the table or in the waste basket beside my desk, I realize it is possible he’s stuffed them into one of the deep pockets of his raincoat. That leads me to ask myself two questions. Can this grungy piece of flotsam be the soul of neatness? and why is he wearing a raincoat when it’s sunny and warm outside? As it was yesterday. The blue-green-lined yellow sheets on which I’ve been scribbling away haltingly have not been disturbed.
“There now, governor,” he rasps, after clearing his throat so audibly and crudely, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised were he to disgorge onto the floor of my study what he’s hawked up. Disgustingly fascinated, I watch him fit his glasses back on his cauliflower ears and dart-board nose.
“Sounds as if whatever you happened to have in the pocket of your raincoat has done more for you than caffeine has for me.”
“I catch your insinuation. No, it’s an outright accusation. But don’t you recall, governor, when I asked you yesterday whether you might have a splash of prairie juice to help a man get through, you de-clared this room off-limits. And I didn’t protest, did I?”
“What better way to throw me off …the scent.”
“Come now, do I strike you as being a devious fellow?”
“The crookest and trickiest it’s ever been my misfortune to have got myself involved with.”
“But as one hapless human being to another, surely you’d understand if…well, best let it rest. Now while I was providing myself with a tad of sustenance, my brain roamed back over what we’ve done so far. Reluctantly but realistically I’ve concluded it’s not possible to persuade you to give up your embellishing. Lord, governor, I implore you, out of deference to that great Southern novelist who pointed out there are no adjectives in nature, to control your predilection for what’s decorative but damagingly extraneous. What say you set a limit on your transgressions—like half a dozen details and particulars, a dozen modifiers, per every five hundred words. Not only will the story be cleaner, purer, but you, the storyteller, will too.”
“Well, it just so happens that, while I was waiting for my coffee to brew, I too was thinking things over. I became certain that, given our irreconcilable differences, I was right in my conviction that the summons you claim you received did not come from me. So I’ve decided I’m not…”
“Please, governor, please. Recognize this is a time of testing. What’s needed at this crucial moment is determination, the will to persevere. Even though we agree we’re not altogether on the same page, perhaps wavelength is a more apt metaphor, be resolved that somehow we can muddle through. Think what we’ve already accomplished, even while still working out an accommodation. Don’t go stumbling into the Slough of Despond or, worse, fall into the hands of Giant Despair and land in Doubting, really in our case it should be called Self-Doubting, Castle.”
“Ah ha. I had your number, all right. You are sailing under false colors. Or I should say you’re putting an antic disposition on.”
“No matter. Just cross out those four worn words we stopped on before our little pick-up. Whatever you want to say about the emotional response to finding the inscription, which is incidental anyway, will be in there if it needs to be. Without your pilfering from Willie Wordsworth. Now onward, if not upward.”
#
…what an ironic happenstance! After working his way through scores of secondhand bookshops and stalls dotting the face of our nation, like pustules of chicken pox, and finding only twelve copies, none of them inscribed or signed, out of, what was it, a couple of hundred printed…to come across the Leslie book. To think, with all the others moldering in somebody’s attic or basement or gone to the dump, he’d just about resigned himself to give up on what was beyond his reach. However many remained, he’d done his best.
But the Leslie book! To stumble on that. With Leslie, the last he knew, which was what? a decade or so now, still alive somewhere on Madagascar, how in the whole wide world did that, the first complimentary copy of the seven the publisher had provided, land in this bookstall in this Midwestern town? With all contact broken, could it be…
#
“Glad you stopped, even though you’re just barrel-assing along. I was on the point of breaking in on you.”
“To proceed, I need a pronoun. For stylistic reasons. I can’t go on using a given name time after time. I need a gender pr
onoun. Immediately.”
“Gotcha, governor. Not knowing whether Leslie’s a hot dog or a doughnut, you’re not sure whether you ought to use the boy or the girl pronoun.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, you go right ahead and use whichever you feel comfortable with. If you like you can even use the hot dog pronoun in one instance and the doughnut in another. Won’t make a damn bit of difference. I can guarantee you sex won’t rear its ugly head in this tale.”
“What? It has to matter, man. The reader has to know whether the character in focus is a male or a female.”
“Have it your way—in any other story you might tell. But in this one the woman in the green dress might just as well be a man in a jockstrap, the two males who are coming up, women in the raw. Trouble is, governor, you’re wandering by the wayside. That’s why if you hadn’t drawn up just where you did, I’d have had to bring you to a halt. Fact is, you’ve been misled into thinking the inscription ‘with love’ is a pyrotechnic at the heart of the story when it’s nothing but a zit on the skin. What with the conditioning imposed and the expectations raised by the stories that get told these days, yours is an understandable mistake. Sex sex and more sex. Implicit and explicit. Discreetly clothed or nakedly revealed. In pairs or in a daisy chain. Single-sexed, double-sexed or triple-sexed. Making use of every orifice, including the ear and the big toe. Exclusively involving Homo sapiens or embracing other physiologically capable species. But it just so happens in the tale you’ve summoned me to hear told, in my story, sex and love are both unspoken, off the page. Unless a book can make love and have sex.”
“Quite a rant. Why you’re a purer puritan than Cotton Mather. Or his father, Increase. You know, it’s becoming more and more evident that I’m nothing but your scribe and mouthpiece. You led, I should say misled, me into believing I summoned you because I was to tell your story.”
“Drop the ‘nothing but’ and you say true. Yet consider, without your telling there wouldn’t be any story.”
“Okay, let’s get it over with. Forget the gender question, though I raised it merely for a literary reason. The way it set you off makes me suspect your smoke and mirror act is just…well, never mind. I’ll manage somehow. And will back up and get off the primrose path. But I must say, a story about a little book with a liver-colored dust jacket isn’t likely to win…”
“Of course it isn’t. But that’s the story you’re stuck with. Before you pick it up, governor, let me tell you you’re doing better and better. I do believe we’re getting to the place where you can proceed on your own. Wrong-minded as it might seem to you, just keep your focus on the book, which in fact does have a liver-covered jacket.”
#
After checking and finding the woman in the green dress still facing away from him, her nose buried in the volume she’d removed from the trough, he turned over some pages of the book he was holding. They’d yellowed to the color of straw. Yet when he tested the paper by rubbing it with his forefinger and thumb, it didn’t seem to be deteriorating. Another glance behind him. There she was. All at once…
#
“Look, governor, as I just said, you’ve done pretty well getting to this juncture in the story. But now you’re rowing with one oar, going around in a circle, protracting and wasting time, trying to tease your listener into attending, your reader into going on. Forget about those ‘all at onces’ and ‘suddenlys’ to keep it going and trigger surprise. Just get on with it.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong. If dramatic moments, climaxes, epiphanies are to be effective, you must approach them craftily, as if nothing unexpected is coming. Then you spring them, like a trap, so they come as shock.”
“Effect is dreck. You’re not telling a story to morons. Show some respect for your audience. Preserve the good faith necessary for a tale to be properly told. Give up the clichés and gamesmanship.”
“Scrupulous and pure as you present yourself, the truth is you’re a supercilious, self-righteous, know-it-all son of a bitch.”
“Please, governor, please. By this time you at least ought to know my character’s not at stake. Doesn’t matter in the least, has nothing to do with the story. Think of the personal depravity of Villon, de Sade, and Genet, to cite three Frenchies who just happen to pop into my head. You didn’t summon me to evaluate the me outside the tale as a moral or immoral being or to commend me for my sweetness and light or to re-proach me for my sourness and darkness. ‘I yam what I yam,’ as the man who’s invisible pronounces after breaking the skin of a street-roasted yam with his teeth and savoring its juicy pulp. The story, the tale of the book is what you have to tell. Now get on with it.”
#
…he slipped the slender volume into the left-hand pocket of his raincoat. Having turned the trick a dozen of times before, he knew better than to go darting off. Instead, he plucked a standard-size book from the shelf at eye level and broke it open. Although he hadn’t the least interest in the text, whatever it might happen to be, he couldn’t help noticing the indentations of lines and the spaces between stanzas. Without taking in a single word, he stood staring at the page for what he judged was close to five minutes, sufficient time, in case any eyes were on him, to make it seem the book was commanding his intense interest. Before replacing the volume on the shelf, he turned the page and a few seconds later faked a fit of coughing as…
#
“Just want to compliment you, governor. Well done. The coughing fit’s a deft touch at this moment. Never would have occurred to me to use it.”
“Much obliged. But don’t imagine for a minute your few and far between expressions of approval compensate for all you fault-finding, chastising, bullying, nagging, meddling, obstructing, instructing, demeaning…well, let’s just call it what it is, crude riding herd on me when, for Christ’s sake it’s your story I’m trying to tell.”
“My, oh my. Seems you’ve stored up a chamber pot full of black bile when I’m only doing what I must to make it a mite easier for you to do properly what you’re obliged to. Best way to relieve yourself—trust me on this, governor—is to go on telling the tale.”
#
…a way of attracting the attention of the woman in the green dress. That would make it seem he had nothing to hide. While sliding the volume of poetry back in place, he prolonged the coughing. When he looked around, the woman in the green dress was gone. Sauntering out to where the alley met the sidewalk of the avenue on which the bookstall and bookstore were situated, he nonchalantly fell in with the flow of pedestrians. He hadn’t taken but half a dozen steps before he heard a shout.
“Officer, stop that man! He’s just committed a theft.”
Coming toward him, as chance would have it, was a hulking man in a dark blue uniform. Above the peak of the blue cap he was wearing was a silver badge. A nightstick hung from his belt. Strapped to his thigh was a pistol in a holster.
The policeman planted himself astride the sidewalk. As pedestrians flowed by on either side, the burly blue body blocked his path. To prevent a collision he had to stop short.
“That’s the man, officer,” he heard in a trumpetlike voice from
behind him. “The one in the black raincoat”
“Whoa there, big daddy,” the policeman sang out, extending his huge arms as if to embrace him. Even while realizing the words were ominous, he heard a mellifluousness in the policeman’s voice.
Finding himself staring eye level at the top brass button of his coat let him know the policeman was of a height to ram his icebreaker of a jaw into his forehead. Quickly he swung his head around and spotted the woman in the green dress. She was pointing an index finger at him as she approached. With a narrow face that gave her a horsey look, she reminded him of someone he’d had to do with many years ago, someone with whom he’d had some trouble. She was taking long loping strides as she came on.
Scurrying behind her was a gnome with the fac
e of a cherub and pure white hair, fluffy as a Bichon’s. He was wearing glasses with heavy black frames and had on a vanilla-colored smock, white shirt and a peacock blue and green bow tie. The woman in the green dress towered over the gnome as the policeman did over him.
“What’s this all about?” the policeman asked to be told as the woman in the green dress and the gnome arrived.
“He stole a book,” the woman in the green dress proclaimed. Her j’accuse was stentorian. “He took it from a shelf in the bookstall and slipped it into the pocket of his raincoat, then shuffled off without paying inside.” Although her corrugated face suggested she was beyond her middle years, she held herself as though she had an I beam for a spine. A small crowd was collecting around the foursome.
“Did you walk off with a book without paying?” the policeman asked, frowning so that his forehead which had been smooth as polished bronze looked like brown corduroy. For such a big man to have a voice that might have sung countertenor was disconcerting.
“I did not steal a book,” he proclaimed emphatically. His own voice came out more hollow than he wished.
“What!” the woman in the green dress exclaimed with feigned surprise. “I suppose I was hallucinating.”
Seizing his elbow in his powerful fingers, the policeman declared, “You’re going to have to come along with me to the station…”
#
“No, no, no. You’ve got it all mixed up. That’s another story. Happened at a bookshop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The gendarme in this tale is a gentle, compassionate human being.”
“But if you remove the center of conflict, you drain all the drama out of the denouement.”
“We’re not after drama, governor, we’re telling truth. The way it happened. Without pepper or spice. No buts about it, you’ve got the wrong ending.”
“You know, you’re not really a pest, like a fly. Nor even a mosquito. You’re a cobra. Striking with venom on your tongue.”
“Not very nice. Not nice at all. What you still don’t seem to grasp is that when I give you no choice, it’s because I have no choice. No ill will or malice is intended. There are dictates that must be obeyed. Now be an agreeable fellow and back up to ‘I suppose I was hallucinating.’”