T. T. Mandell locked his office door. As if from the abyss of authenticity, a voice came: “It doesn’t matter if you’re a nice guy.” Mandell listened. The voice continued: “I made the whale.” Mandell felt depressed — or deepened. In this mood, he made revisions.
Miss Nugent now wore glasses and walked faster. Leaving her typewriter to go pee, she always glanced at her wristwatch as if to confirm her need. She retyped The Enduring Southey, mailed it away again, then again. Mandell’s face had a greasy, dissatisfied quality now, impossible to wash or shave away, and his manner had gained spasmodic vigor. Once he interrupted a conversation between two colleagues, rushing up to their lunch table, driving a bread knife into the Formica top, and shouting, “You were talking about Moby Dick, right?”
The Enduring Southey had been mailed away for the last time. To Stuttgart. Miss Nugent believed the finest scholarly books were published there. Mandell could afford no more rejections, certainly none that might take long in coming, but Miss Nugent felt The Enduring Southey was hers as much as his. She wanted the last rejection to come from the best. The Enduring Southey was accepted.
A VW mechanic in Mandell’s neighborhood translated the letter for him. Mandell waved it at Miss Nugent and flung into a dance before her typewriter. She pummeled the keys and hissed, “Don’t let them have it. Tell them to screw off.” He gave her a look of terror and fled.
Der andauernde Southey was published. Mandell was given permanency. He mastered the ho-ho style of laughter and, at department meetings, said things like “What fun.” Discussing the book with students who, someday, would write one like it, he said it wrote itself. Nasty reviews appeared, but they were in German. Mandell was considered an expert and received manuscripts from university presses with requests for his opinion. His letters were always written with uncompromising and incisive hatred.
The Captain
HE SMILED AT HER. She smiled at him and ate dessert, her pinky so nicely hooked it tore my heart. Dessert was pear under chocolate and flaming brandy. It slipped from spoon to blubbery dissolution. When I tried to taste, I swallowed. Then came a flickering city of liqueurs. Then marijuana, a language green and gold popping around the table from mouth to mouth. Nothing went by me unlipped. Nothing tasted. From course to course I’d swallowed textures, not tastes, like a cat gobbling kill. I’d eaten; I wanted to eat. Other guests flashed marvels achieved, readiness to die. Music from the drawing room — black, full of drum — summoned us to further pleasure. Actual blacks, stationed around the table, stiff and smug in tuxedos, gleamed consummation. I assumed they’d pissed in our soup. Stanger smiled at Mildred. She at him. Above glass, silver, flowers, candles, and the ministrations of swift black hands, everyone at the table had smiled for the last two hours. Servants are the price elegance pays to pain. Alone, the Stangers couldn’t have made this occasion for forty guests; not without threatening every institution upon which society stands. To that sentiment, I drank piss. A ritual initiation. I’d never been to such a dinner party, but I could tell it was first-rate. Teeth stabbed out of my ass to eat the chair. However, the meal was over. Stanger rose. His hand claimed my wife’s lower back. They strolled to the drawing room, a sight flattering to me, the lovely valley of her back appreciated in his munificent hand. Yet it gave me a feeling I couldn’t understand, act upon, or use. Like Hamlet’s feeling in Elsinore. But this was no dingy, boozy castle in barbaric Denmark. This was Now Town, Sutton Place. Windows triangulated, above the East River, north to Welfare Island, south to the Statue of Liberty. I couldn’t make a speech or kill. I did what I could. I tried not to look at them, not to see. I joined the other guests, wondering what brought them here. Did they all want jobs? During our interview, Stanger said,“Come to dinner, Mr. Liebowitz. On Bastille Day. We’ll chat some more about the job.” I arrived. He nodded at me, took Mildred’s arm, then talked to her, no one else, and here I was, his dinner in my gut, his grass in my brain, talking to myself, thinking grass. How did you play this game? Like a delegate to my thinking, Mrs. Stanger swept boldly through the grass. “So, Mr. Liebowitz, you’re interested in publishing,” and she led me to a chair opposite hers. “You’ll make a lovely publisher.” Her shoes were gold, her dress was white material through which I couldn’t tell if I couldn’t see. Intimations of symmetry seesawed her voice. Slowly, precisely, she crossed her legs, sliding white skin beneath white, translucent membrane. Her shoe began winding in the air. I looked.
“You can have the shoe, Mr. Liebowitz. Are you a man who wants things?”
“Everyone must want your things, Mrs. Stanger.”
And that’s what I thought. Yet I had to beg Mildred to dress for this party, comb her hair, show me good girl in the aspect of sullen bitch:
“Do you want to walk so quickly, Phillip? Do you want to suppose Stanger won’t give you the job if we’re two minutes late? Is it thrilling to have people think you’re out with some whore? Is that what you want? Take my arm, you bastard, or I don’t go another step.”
A savage ride on the IRT, then worse in the crosstown cab.
“Two bucks for a lousy cab. But if I need, really need, a pair of shoes, you throw a fit. Tomorrow, I buy shoes. Hear me?”
She hadn’t wanted to go. I had wanted to rush. Stanger had nodded at me, taken her arm, and la-la — I looked — his hand was on her knee. Wanting not to go, she had a moral advantage. She could now blow him and lift a virtuous face: “Don’t give me that jealous crap.”
Mrs. Stanger, apparently, wanted symmetry. A social lady with a Viking face, symmetrical by instinct. The ghost of long bone figure, unexorcised by a life of such occasions, still fighting, giving good as it got. Perfect for Stanger. Why not for me? One thinks meat or languishes.
Her eyes were tiger-bronze. They looked at me; not across the room at them. She seemed to be saying, “Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?” And she was. Winding her shoe, stirring a golden pool of time. I had five seconds, perhaps, to seem not stupid. The mathematics of her face demanded speed and precision, answers in kind, not self-analysis. I clicked on the smarts:
Stanger wanted Mildred. His missus wanted me. I wanted the job. The question was, then: What could I get? The answer answered everything. If I couldn’t get only what I wanted, I had to want what I could get, to get what I wanted. Things equal to the same equal one another.
“Do you really want the job, Mr. Liebowitz?”
I said, “Let’s fuck.”
She blinked and shook her head. She sighed.
I had been too quick, too smart. I shrugged like a man with nothing more to say, and looked across the room at them, sitting close together on a couch, talking. To express life’s failure, I lifted a cigarette. Mrs. Stanger knocked it out of my mouth. “That’s a social disease, Mr. Liebowitz.” She stood up in a blur of dancing and a storm of jazz, turned, pushed through shuddering couples, and went around a corner, disappeared. Reappeared. Frowning at me. To my feet I leaped.