10:45 Sophie

I write novels is what I told people I did. This was a new policy: to be more up front, proud and not so squeamish about other’s reactions. I write novels. Boom. Or at least attempts that convince me the pieces will one day fall into place and begin to act like one. And I recently received a check for $25 for winning a contest. I photocopied the check and sent a copy to my parents to verify my existence, my pursuits. But was it enough? The mere act of sending the check answers that question firmly in the negative. You go to visit them and you say, “So what’d you think?” And they react with a kind of empty stare and they bob their heads vaguely in the affirmative like those back-window wire-necked football helmeted heads you see in the backs of Oldsmobiles and Plymouths. They’re not embarrassed by your accomplishments, they just don’t know how to be proud of a chapbook or an article in a magazine they’ve never heard of of. Or that’s what I keep telling myself. “Nice.” They say and I’m too embarrassed for them to ask them if they read it, knowing they haven’t.

Sophie, as opposed to other women, believed all writing was a sign of weakness or disease just this side of tertiary syphilis. And any time she saw fit she would accuse me of not quite being a man. Like one obviated the other. Like every sentence led nearer to my total emasculation. What she really thought it would do, however, is taunt me into becoming more solvent, to work normal jobs, earn a living. But, if anything, it had the opposite effect. Every word written was a few centimes less earned.

So I gave up trying to communicate with mere mortals. I decided the only ones who would respond appropriately would be beautiful women who had already applied for the occupation of goddesses.

I wrote in notebooks and then sent intimate rewrites to the women who were included in these adventures. Is that a novel or a come on? Was it life being swallowed by words or the other way around, words so enamored of life that they compliment life, flatter it to death? The more I wrote these women into these adventures the more the writing urged them to become more and more outrageous, bold, flamboyant, meaningful. Isn’t that called coercion? But isn’t all that good?

I got back at Sophie too, you know. Started insisting she had said things that she had not “Don’t you remember what you said?” And in no time her certitude went flimsy. The holes in her already sieve-like memory had grown to the size of eye sockets. Her sharp features of hair-pulled-tight haughtiness would suddenly go wind mussed and over time she began doubting everything, every word, her memory, her instincts, her identity.

Anyway, it would only be a matter of time before even Suki would begin accusing me of compelling her to do things against her will. She had already intimated that this whole process of scripted transgressions beyond the dignity of her character was a kind of brute force, a diminishment of character, like rape. And that she could start a legal process. What would she do, show ink stains on her panties? Haha. I was laughing now. But would I be laughing later, she wanted to know.

Anyway, that’s the magic of immortality. It makes people think monumental, big time, life and death. They think twice about their actions. You (if you were to sit in front of it) begin to alter your natural or inscribed behavior patterns to become twice as flamboyant about it all if you feel it is being documented. Your straight path begins to swerve. Turn a television camera on someone and watch their behavior change. These pages torn from journals, typed on an old typewriter, each key almost hammer-and-chiseling its message into the A-4 20-lb. paper, made my life as a writer look like the cliché of the writer in a bad TV movie – hair mussed, wads of paper all around me, bottle of scotch (or cheaper – bottom-shelf pastis or cough-syrupy liquors in dusty bottles) to the right of the typewriter. These photocopied excerpts were not simple lies but complex interweavings of fact and fantasy, things I insisted they had done that they did not remember doing with me insisting that they in fact, did do those very things, which led them to feel OK, even enthusiastic, about doing more of these particular things. Some even looked into changing their noms de romans. Call them by what they were called in that other realm. Others preferred to keep their own names. Still others – like Sonja – insisted that not only her and my real names be used but that our actual lives, in our own words be inserted. There was already a name for that: roman-à -clef-porte-ouverte, meaning a novel with a concordance, a key, to all the names of characters, in other words a novel with a key that opens the door for everyone who knocks.

“Yuh gotta control the surroundings which try to control you. Grab it by the spools. This you learn on a film set. Who is making the film? Is the film making you? Language is there for us to communicate facts izzn’t’at right?” Sonja could become so enamored of her own ability to wax theoretical. But at the same time earnestness would instantly fold into total sarcasm. She did not believe in facts. No way. If she did, she’d have to recognize she was no filmmaker except for the flicks she shot through her eyes and spooled up in her mind. The mere fact she was saying it and lying about it put all that to rest. But not me.

“Wrong. It’s like the apple is to Eve. I mean it’s there to persuade. Am I persuading you? It ain’t the facts but the flattery, the way words curve and redefine, chop and channel, blinder and magnify exactly what we’re not sure we’re seeing or experiencing.”

“What do you propose then, some regurgitated truths known as your short stories. Aren’t they just real life but there you’re trying to protect the voyeur-perpetrator inside you from being held accountable for poking around in other people’s lives? You just change their names a little. You could ruin them. If you shove their faces too much into the merde.”

“I could also resurrect them. I think when I say you are beautiful, edible even, I mean it but it is not the fact of it that persuades but the emotive resonance – the words to the ego’s needs – that the words are dressing you up in that counts. Tailor of the psycho-active.”

 My modus wasn’t alchemy, it wasn’t dishonest, it wasn’t lascivious – I got my modus workin’, baby – it was merely an attempt in this grey intimate zone between illusion and reality, this interstice between doubt and veracity, to find a very, very comfortable region in which to operate and for that I was well rewarded – and it’s workin’ overtime. Persuasion is just a cozy momentary détente of mutually suspended disbelief. Each fabrication and flattered femme encouraged further incursions into the exaggerations of life called adventure.

“Jodhpurs?” Sonja asked.

“Sure, why not.”

“I miss my jodhpurs.”

But, putting writing aside, for real money I did very odd jobs for old ladies, ladies with money and knowing not what to do with it except chemically alter their hair so that they all had these permanents that looked like forests on fire, like autumn upstate, like the color of a bordello sign in Nevada. Ladies with slender catalogs of cultural icons, phrases, charades that allowed them to convince themselves they were deeply involved in the lively marketplace of ideas and art. Ladies who had gathered around WACO [Women’s American Community Organization, the founder of which had indeed been from Waco, Texas] and WOOP [Women’s Organization of Paris] who took me to cafés in my work clothes, ladies that sat mystified by the passage of time, ladies who gathered in clubs to do good deeds for no good reason other than to get out of the house or advertise their souls via their magnificent benevolences, ladies rendered useless by their leisure who at once touted and complained about their men in expensive precisely-cut suits, (suddenly they weren’t husbands but something more generic – hims, the fathers of their children, absentee roommates), ladies, up to six of them, all with their own strong discount/expensive scents and the prowess of knowing where to get it at a wholesale price, confused about whether to hide who it was they were underneath all these scents or accent who it was they still wished they were. The clash of their fragrances was like an orchestra tuning up.  

I seemed to perk them up immensely. Their adoring wide-eyed attentions made me feel like a cute puppy rubbing against the legs of ladies at a Tupperware Party. I caused a stir, a bidding war. They blew smoke rings in the shapes of hearts, caressed my cheek with long, slender hands. It made me believe the very grandiose ideas I was entertaining in my journals – that every woman wanted me, desired me. That every femme had a thing for me. This led to some wobbly feelings of gratification and magnified self-esteem. It also gave me a sense of urgency. As managing director of desire I assumed new responsibilities. It meant grooming, hand-washed underwear, lists, quotas, pacing, flattery, presentation, posture, seminars, letterhead, chivalry, consultations, physical therapy, massage (where was my copy of The Art of Sensual Massage?). In short, it meant kama over to my house, Sutra.

Sometimes they talked about me in the third person impersonal – “my handyman.” And so I quoted lyrics “If your broken heart should need repair / Then I am the man to see.” It was a song they all remembered. Or politely acted like they did. The sentiments of the song made everyone at the table giggle a little, like the giggle that comes from drinking sparkling wine too fast. “I whisper sweet things, you tell all your friends / They’ll come runnin’ to me…” And one of the lady crew chimed in with: Come-a, come-a, come-a, come-a, come, come / Yeah, yeah, yeah…” with a little shake of her shoulders and a discreet – yet, wanting to insinuate a certain youthful friskiness.

I resigned myself to allocating time for technique development, total quality management, moderations of alcohol intake to enhance performance, pace the sequence of amour, monitor the bell curve of desire, synchronize variations in arousal, in other words the gigolo sciences, because every female was a myriad of different women, permanent patrons of the gyneceum, a lot of work, a lot of acres of flesh to hoe.

I realized there was something to be mined when I heard them picking and pecking away at me from around the café table. Quibbling like petty slave masters in a market square. Some smoked with all the elaborate gestures of youthful empowerment and connivance. Like jezebels because they were smoking against the wishes of their … their whatevers. What delicious decadence too; communicating with the likes of me via their Gitanes and Rothmans. At once naive, willing and ... fatigué ... world-weary washed out, pissed off, demanding, willing to discuss or argue as long as I had the charm to know my best-kept place and all looking younger than their years. Preserved, mounted, pickled, uplifted, tucked, professionally made up. Some were no more than 5 years older than me but had lived such a mature gentrified lifestyle for so long that they, in their silk scarves and business suits and encrusted Rodin and Chagall broaches, looked exactly as kept as their lifestyles had kept them.

“He’s yours on Sunday. I’ll wager he’s not cheap. What can you do for me?” Each phrase and question filled with innuendo and insinuation. And don’t think I was immune to all this. I was very prone to the afflictions of flattery. There are things you can take for flattery but most of them involve some level of deafness.

“Doesn’t he remind you of Jan Michael Vincent?”

“More like a young Rutger Hauer.” Speaking as if I were not really there except in some inorganic, holographic form, like they were discussing an urn or some antique spittoon and fed their forlorn sex lives on innuendo, double entendre, and leveraged passive-aggressive charm.

“Or that guy in Jules et Jim ...”

“You mean Oscar-Meyer Wiener?”

“No, haha, don’t make me laugh, Oskar Werner. Don’t you think?” What is that particular spiritual state between annoyance and swagger, between satisfaction and ennui?

They hired me to do odd jobs, to accompany them, sit in cafés and talk so they could convince me and themselves they were a lot more with it than some of the others in the group, or I’d take them to bookshops, recommend books and chapbooks by people I knew or had read. They promised publication of my every word and fart. They promised to invite me to parties. To Herald Tribune affairs. One of their husbands or whatever she called him, worked for McGraw-Hill. When I noted they did text books, she responded by saying that he knew people everywhere. I forgot to ask why he would want to do anything for the guy he might perceive is threatening his marital stability.

They looked at my poems like they might the genitalia of rams at a livestock auction. They watched me hang blinds for them in my shorts as they walked around their spacious apartments wielding a curling iron or something like it. Or they kept me company as I painted their kitchens, inspecting my work periodically, leaning in the doorway, arms akimbo in weirdly incongruous pret à  porter costumes. Ladies who prowled about, insinuating gestures, suggestive postures, intonations suggesting the prowess of knowing what taste should feel and look like, gazing down at their own painted toenails, wistfully inquiring if I liked their color.

These were women buried in their awesome baubles, in their absolute destitute worthlessness and the hopeless activities that might temporarily obliterate that fact. Women who felt free to brag about their childhood devilishness, their liberties, skinny-dipping, a car for college graduation, their libertine-ness. Women absolutely mortified of being alone. They even read books together. This wasn’t friendship this was tribal behavior. Money is always wasted on the rich. I don’t remember who said that. Maybe it was Orwell. But he’d be proud to see that I was determined to help redistribute some of it.

I wasn’t about to say anything controversial like the fact that painting your toenails different colors was a teen thing. You could hold your breath and listen to the slow unravelings of long dormant feelings, Mrs. Robinson, the way Lauren Bacall held a cigarette, tips from Romy Schneider, Jeanne Moreau, Rita Moreno, Joan Collins. Ladies who would then offer refreshments exotic cheeses like Boulette d’Avesgnes from Picardie with herbs and a fat content of only 45% from a silver tray and then something from their Louis the-whatever splendid lacquered little liquor cabinet and later a drink in the local brasserie in their bejeweled sunglasses by Dior or Omigh. Tawdry in Silk would be the name of this story.

[Sighile: “You never knew what he did for work, if he did any at all. I mean you just had the sense he floated along or was being kept or just did odd jobs and then just never bragged or complained about them. I mean, there’s all these people who complain about their work but in a way its like their little bragging cross to bear them into some elite. I think maybe he mentioned he was doing investigative work as maybe a private investigator or something. I mean this could’ve been his own imagination or his own way of making lecherous behavior – voyeurism, eavesdropping, my god! – seem warranted. Or maybe I’m way off base. Help me here.”]