Mr. Whittaker
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Dear Jolie,
Here’s a postcard showing the new shopping center. I am writing it in the living room, which is piled high with boxes and awash in the blue light of tarps. I am very happy with the light, though not with the shopping center or the boxes. The radio sits on a stack of boxes beside me, and I switched it on a moment ago in the crazy outside hope of hearing Billie Holiday sing “Am I Blue.” I told myself that if this were actually to happen it would mean the world is all right. Of course, what I got instead was a hideous blast of rock and roll.
Much love,
Andy
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To the Editor:
Enough! For many years the Current has honed a well-deserved reputation for ignorance and Philistinism, but your most recent foray into the field of letters takes the cake. While your article (“Our City Shaking and Moving”) purports to be a “literary roundup” of “our best writers and where to read them,” what we really get is a fawning puff piece on The Art News, which your reporter describes as “irreverent” and “lively.” To which I say, “lively my keister!” It is a well-known fact that The Art News is nothing more than the in-house journal for a tiny clique of very conventional, very middle-class writers and painters, most of them ladies. “Semi-literate rag” would be a too charitable description of that publication. This reader would like to object that, since the article is explicitly presented as a “roundup,” it is under some obligation to rope in all the cows, including, I concede, such spavined, mange-stricken little doggies as The Art News. But does it bring them all in? It does not. For example, how many times does the article mention Andrew Whittaker’s Soap? The astonishing answer is not even once. Not one small mention of a publication that is without doubt the most imposing literary venue in our state, publishing pioneers like Adolphus Stepwell, E. Sterling Macaw, and Marsha Beddoes-Varlinsky. Have your readers heard of any of those writers? Probably not, and this is precisely why we need people like Andrew Whittaker, our one local writer whose name might elicit something other than “huh?” on the sidewalks of Madison or Ann Arbor. For ten years Whittaker has gone about his work, without remuneration, sustained by the conviction that he is serving a higher purpose, oblivious to the winks and snickers raining upon him from, among other places, the pages of your newspaper. Now, as if goaded by his continued indifference, you see fit to pepper him with silence. How loathsome!
Sincerely,
Warden Hawktiter, MD
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Dear Anita,
I’ve not been able to get your letter out of my thoughts. I sit down to work at my novel, and I find myself in imaginary conversation with you. It’s O.K. that you want to have “not the slightest whiff” of me in the future. I am not going to fly to Ithaca and howl on your doormat. But I am astonished at your distortions of the past. While it might not meet the current demands of your amour propre, it is still OUR past and not yours to fiddle around with. I was amazed that you could write the following: “As far as I am concerned, nothing happened during that weekend to make me want to reminisce now. I don’t recall damp sheets or lurid lighting on my ‘semaphores’ (God, you’re awful!). What I remember is a very young and very frightened girl trapped in a squalid motel room with a bullying neurotic.” You frightened? Isn’t “frolicsome” the word you want? Whose idea was the wicker basket? I’m sorry to be crude about this, but the person I was with in that “squalid room” was a rambunctious bawdy athletic broad. It’s obvious you meant your letter to be as hurtful as possible. And it was. How could you bring yourself to call my reminiscences “erotic treacle”? I am not going to forgive you for that.
Andy
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Dear Jolie,
Last Friday night I was lying in bed, still awake, when two firemen hammered on the door to tell me the Spalding Street building had burned to the ground. It had happened earlier that afternoon, but it took them till almost midnight to notify me, because I don’t have a telephone. We are fortunate that no one was in the building at the time; I don’t know what would happen if we had a lot of grieved relatives suing. The insurance money, such as it is, will all go to the bank, so don’t imagine that a big wad is going to sail through your mail slot. You of course hated the building for no good reason, just because you don’t like asbestos siding. Still, its demise means your next check is going to be smaller. I hope you are not going to argue about this. If you don’t believe me, send Fender out to look at the ashes.
I haven’t slept since then, or at any rate that’s how it feels to me, though I must have dozed off occasionally, twenty winks, if not forty. How else could I still be functioning even at the modest level at which I am functioning? I must be sleeping without knowing it, though I can’t imagine when it occurs. Probably not in bed at night, since that’s when I am most acutely conscious of being awake. I spend a lot of time looking at television. I suppose I might be sleeping then. By evening I am terribly tired. I am happy to be tired, thinking that now at last I’ll sleep. I drag myself up the steps and climb into bed. I stretch myself out like a corpse, and pop go the eyelids. It’s horrible. I can almost hear the noise the lids make as they slam up against the roof of my eye sockets. At the same time I feel my body going rigid, my fingers and toes splay, the muscles in my neck bulge. I lie like that for hours, until I can’t stand it any longer, and then I get up and wander around the house, the empty, absolutely silent house, surrounded by the screams of crickets. At those times I wish I had a telephone so I could call somebody up and yell at them.
I don’t care about the Spalding Street building, as a building, any more than you do. But its loss means that another trickle of income has been staunched, and I’m that much closer to complete bankruptcy. I don’t see why you can’t get a real job, at least until I can put things here back on their feet. The money I send you would just about do it. You can be an actress next year. Why can’t you be something else this year? After all, you already know how to type. I am struggling. I have several projects, but they all need time to bear fruit. I am working on a new novel, one I have been thinking about for a while, aimed at a wider public this time. I don’t see why I can’t do it without compromising my principles.
Yes, I did have a maid. She was coming once a week, and she hardly stayed long enough to make even a small dent in the mess, which is really like a nation of its own. I had a maid not because I had money to throw away but because I am now considered a charity case. I am considered this by people who ought to know, who have to deal professionally, on a daily basis, with cases like that, like mine. I let her go because I could no longer afford the sandwiches she ate for lunch. After poking around in the mess for an hour or so, while making little complaining noises in her native tongue, she would go home or back to church or wherever they go, and I would open the refrigerator and discover she had eaten my supper. I have to drink the cheapest whiskey now, and I never have wine. I tried to get the firemen to come in and have a drink with me. Do you ever have the thought that we might get back together when all this is over?
Love,
Andy
p.s. I don’t know what I mean by “all this.”
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Dear Fern,
I had not expected to hear back from you so soon. It is really too bad you were able to dig up only one old issue of the magazine, and too bad it had to be that one. Your obviously tongue-in-cheek assertion that you were “horribly shocked” suggests to me that you were in fact a little bit shocked. You can’t say I didn’t warn you! Even so, I would not have picked an issue containing Nadine’s “Crotch Poems” as the best introduction to the sort of writing we want. Nadine is quite the exception. And it’s too bad the same issue also contains my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer.” I do hope you understand that this piece was meant as a satire of a certain type of person, a lonely, aging, and desperate “loser” (to use a really nasty expression). It is, of course, a literary fabrication, a piece of fiction, and not a desc
ription of the sort of things I personally think about while I am in the tub. I insist on this point because of your remark that I am a “funny man.” To give you a more rounded picture of what we are all about, I enclose some other back issues.
Your poetry just keeps getting better—stronger, more confident, and edgier. Really amazing progress. I was, quite sincerely, astonished by some of them, in particular “Banjo, Bozo” and “The Circus Tent of Sex.” I’d like to include those two in our April issue. This is bold stuff from someone your age, and it’s sure to make some people uncomfortable when they find out just how young you are. But I suppose you’ve figured out by now that we don’t pull punches at Soap.
I’m relieved you did not take amiss my bit of advice about the self-timer. At least I hope you didn’t, and that you are joking when you accuse me of saying you look like a “sour person”? You know I was perfectly sincere in my remarks about your alluring aspects. Why wouldn’t I be?
I observe, in closing, that the poem “To an Old Writer” carries a dedication to me. I am flattered, and will print that one too, space permitting. I do, however, have a small bone to pick here: the stanza in which you imagine my “care-furrowed face” looking over your shoulder while you are writing suggests to me that you think I am old. While it’s true that I am an old hand at the writing game, I am not at all old in the doddering sense. If you and I were to stroll down a street together, for example, no one could mistake you for my daughter! And despite those muscled gams of yours, I imagine you’d find me more than a match on a tennis court, were we ever to meet on one.
Yours truly,
Andy
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Mr. Fontini—
I never suggested Archimedes or anyone else was taking baths with Mrs. Fontini, which, if you think about it, would scarcely be possible for anyone larger than a spaniel. And no, I don’t know his first name. Instead of worrying about the “Greek shit” in your bathtub, you should worry about sending me the money you owe. Forthwith. Or I go to court.
Andrew Whittaker
The Whittaker Company
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Dear Mr. Carmichael,
I have your letter telling me of Mama’s death. Of course, that death was not a surprise. In life’s dreary cavalcade of adjectives, “dead” does seem to follow hard on “old” with mournful regularity. Have you ever thought of it that way? So it was not, as I said, a surprise, and neither was it a jolt in the usual I-have-to-sit-down sort of way, but it was a little shock. I was shocked (slightly) not that she was dead—as remarked above, she was old, etc.—but at how little I cared. It was not that I didn’t give a damn, I didn’t give an anything. You will say that I am experiencing that numbness which always precedes grief—I can almost hear you saying it, almost see that peculiarly unpleasant pursing thing you do with your lips—but you are wrong. I don’t feel in the least numb. If anything I feel a whiff giddy. Two days later, and I catch myself smiling when I think of it, which is not very often. I think, “Mama has popped off,” and I grin.
Now back to the pursing thing. I suppose you feel this puckering bit adds gravitas to your mien, renders it harmonious with solemn phrases like “I regret that your dear mother has passed away.” I would like to believe you are doing it in order to suppress the giggles, but I know that is a long shot. You have been kind to Mama and me, so I think I should tell you that you are not fooling anyone. When someone begins a sentence with “I regret,” I always want to say “Oh, pooh!” I suppose you think that is very cynical of me. Why don’t you think instead that it is very sincere of me? After all, the distance between the two is no wider than a cat’s whisker.
Though I have made efforts to conceal it (for the sake of other people really, who would otherwise find my presence uncomfortable), I did not much care for Mama. She was a stupid, disagreeable, selfish woman. She was an awful snob as well. And now she is gone. What a mystery life and death are. How shall we ever get to the bottom of it? Please do not send me any of her personal belongings except jewelry. As for burial or cremation, do whichever is least expensive.
Sincerely,
Andrew Whittaker
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Dear Jolie,
Mama’s dead. I feel utterly unbereft. And yet I can’t stop thinking of her. Little things, like her passion for the 1812 Overture and the hideous yellow pants she wore to play golf.
I got the fire inspector’s report today. It was arson, as I thought from the beginning. It seems the fire started in four different places at more or less the same time. Those fellows are quite cunning, the way they can go through a pile of charred wood and brick and come up with a plausible story. If I could go through the ruins of my life and come up with a plausible story, we’d be in business. Furthermore the whole Brud family has disappeared. I can see that big homely woman striding through the house with a blowtorch, blasting a spot here, a spot there, while the little toad-like husband hops behind her croaking, “Darling, are you sure this is a good idea?” I’ve come to expect very little of people, but this is a family that I went out of my way to be kind to. The clouds of ingratitude rain fire upon us. Is that it?
Love,
Andy
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In the desert. A woman with two men. A man with two women. A boy, one of the crowd of children, is lying on his back in the hot sand, sweltering in his dark-blue sailor suit. A man and a woman look down at him, eyes filled with pity, and then glance quickly at each other. The boy will remember this later. He will recall that glance as somehow “inestimably peculiar.” The man is the man with two women. The woman is the woman with two men. A complex web is being woven. There is also a woman with a cat, and two women with one dog. They fight. The man and the woman who had been looking down at the boy, it could be a lifetime ago, draw apart from the others, to stand together, but not touching, on the sandy bank of the river. Behind them, sounds of continuous quarreling. Looking out at the water, speaking to the man, though not turning her head to face him, the woman says in a voice without inflection, and yet, for this very reason, charged with meaning, “Through the desert of tedium flows a river of dread.” Horrified, the man realizes that this is true.
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Dear Harold,
You are probably right, I am working too hard. It’s difficult to keep things in proportion sometimes. Like everyone else I have my up days and down days. But I discern a trend: the trend is downward. I always used to have an orderly mind, never put things in jars without labels, and would scold Jolie for keeping important papers under magnets on the refrigerator. I hated opening the door and having some unpaid bill or vital phone number sail loopingly off in the direction of the floor, sometimes in a slanting dive that would send it slithering beneath the refrigerator from whence it would have to be extracted with a broom handle. I sometimes had difficulty containing my rage when this happened, if Jolie was not home and I had to be the one to get down on my knees and bang about with the broom. I finally had no choice but to take all the magnets off.
Furthermore, I always had files. Whatever wasn’t filed in a labeled folder in one of five metal cabinets (in drawers I kept so well oiled they slid in and out with scarcely a whisper) was filed in my mind in tiny cabinets arranged along the walls of my skull. I always at every instant of the day knew exactly where my toothbrush or my copy of Tropic of Cancer was. I wanted something, I had only to put out my hand and grab it. So how is it possible that I have started losing things left and right? That is not in keeping with my character. You surely remember my character. I have a tidy nature. You remember how tidy I kept our dorm room. You remember how I made you stand on the bed while I mopped the floor. I’m afraid something organic is going on in my brain, due perhaps to a severe lack of oxygen. The brain uses twenty percent of the body’s total supply of oxygen. That’s a lot more than one would think, considering what else is going on in there, the organic wheels and pistons churning and grinding all the time, every little cell screaming for a slice of the pie. I have to take deep brea
ths all the time now.
I was sure I had placed my cup of coffee—the first of the day—on a box in the living room. It was a pale blue mug with daisies; there was steam coming out of it. The coffee stood just below the halfway mark, or would have had there been a mark; it was level with the bottom daisy. The box on which I had placed it was the topmost box in the second stack of boxes to the left of the front windows. It previously had contained four dozen Scott towels. This information was displayed in large blue letters on the side of the box. I say all this to show that I have an exact picture of the location in which I had placed the cup. I had been holding it in my left hand. In my right I held four small galvanized nails, and I placed those on the box as well, right next to the cup. They clinked against it. I can see my hand as I reached out to place the cup on the box, the knob of my wristbone inching forth from its hiding place in my sleeve, the hairs on my wrist springing erect as they escape the pressure of the cloth. That was just before going down to the basement in search of a hammer with which to nail tarps up over the front windows. The sun was very bright. The tarps were blue.
That was ten mornings ago. It was late in the afternoon three days later when I saw the coffee cup again. I was sitting on a plastic milk box in the upstairs hall. I was pulling books out of one of the two large bookcases up there and placing them in boxes. I had clasped a row of small paperbacks between my palms and was lifting them, still in a row, off the shelf, and there behind them—I almost wrote, “crouching there behind them”—was the cup. It had been three and a half days, the milk had curdled, and a dead roach was floating on the scummed surface. I noticed then that one of the books behind which the cup had hidden was Peterson’s A Field Guide to Insects. While I remember shaking with laughter at this coincidence, in retrospect I am not able to see anything funny in it. The cup had been cleverly concealed, the entire shelf of books moved forward a couple of inches so the row of books in front of the cup would not stand out. I poured the coffee out in the bathroom sink, forcing the roach down through the drain sieve with the handle of a toothbrush.