"I really do feel," Gwyn was saying, angling his head to accommodate the photographer who crouched at his feet, "that the novelist has to find a new simplicity."
"How, Gwyn, how?"
"By evolving into simplicity. By deciding on the new direction and heading for it."
"To where, Gwyn, where?"
"How about if we loop the Post guy," called the publicity boy, "and he can just watch you do the radio spot?"
"To fresh fields. Okay: the guy from EF can listen to me do the TV spot-from the audio booth. And pastures new."
"So have the signing after the reading but before the meeting.?
"Have the meeting during the signing. And I can get photographed while I'm getting photographed. Phyllis Widener. Richard Tull."
Richard knew from his Amelior Regained publicity pack that Phyllis Widener had a bold-print twice-weekly column in one of the New York tabloids: personalities, arts, local politics. Wry seniority was her thing; she was meant to be twinkly and unfoolable. That's what you got when you were old: experience. And maturity too. In person, Phyllis seemed to be the kind of American woman who had taken a couple of American ideas (niceness, warmth) and then turned up some dreadful dial, as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit- the range had no top to it-and just went on getting bigger and better as you lashed them toward infinity. Only her colleagues and superiors knew that the pieces she wrote, over many hours and many cups of strong coffee in her small and memento-strewn apartment on Thirteenth Street, often and increasingly turned out to be unusably vicious . . . Richard found a bit of hotel notepaper and a hotel biro and dragged up a chair. He was immediately rewarded with a good bit for his piece: Gwyn pausing mid-word, actually mid-syllable (halfway through "unsophisticated"), like a machine himself, when Phyllis's tape clicked off at the end of its spool; he sat there with his mouth open, on pause, while she replaced it. Meanwhile too it became clear that the energies of the publicity boy were directed not to the further accrual of publicity opportunities but to their radical attenuation.
"Unsophisticated approach, then that's their opinion. I prefer to liken it to carpentry."
"Are you a carpenter, Gwyn?"
"With wood, a poor one, Phyllis. With words, well, I have my molds and templates, my spirit level, my trusty saw."
"I think it's so beautiful the way you say that."
"You know. Pottering away."
The interview ended, and the room thinned out, and Gwyn, who looked fresh enough to Richard, went to freshen up next door. So he was left alone with Phyllis; he sat there, rinsed in her entirely embarrassing gaze, and duly began to interview Phyllis about her interview with Gwyn. After a minute and a half he had no more questions.
Preceded by the publicity boy, Gwyn passed through the room. He was expected downstairs in the restaurant, to be interviewed.
"I have been busy," he said to Richard, "on your behalf. How's your
schedule? There's a press interview in Miami and a big radio slot in Chicago. And a reading-signing in Boston. I was wondering if you could work them in.?
"Why's this?"
"I'm double-dated all over the place. I offered them you. It's all fixed."
Gwyn's was a non-smoking suite, on a non-smoking floor. Over half the hotel was non-smoking. Whereas Richard had dedicated his life to the cause of non-non-smoking. He had laid it down, his life. They sat in silence until Phyllis said,
"You two are old friends."
He gave an economical nod.
"You know, he admires your work deeply. I heard him. Telling everyone on the phone what a truly marvelous writer you were. He loves you very dearly."
"No he doesn't. He might want you to think he does."
Surprisingly she said, "You think he's trying to hurt you?"
"He doesn't need to. The world will do it."
You live alone, right? This was what the greeters and credit-card ratcheters of American hospitals said to the pungent phantoms of the reception desk-to those rendered unpresentable by neglect, to those singled out and quarantined by neglect. Phyllis looked okay. Richard didn't understand that much about other people. But he understood neglect.
"You live alone, right?"
She made her blue eyes rounder and her closed lips wider; she gave him rich assent.
"Never any husband or anything?"
It made him despair twice over. Because he had believed, until then, that he wasn't ready for despair. Suddenly Richard thought of Anstice- but saw himself living with Phyllis: rigid among the chintz and dimity of her bedroom, in new pajamas (the pajamas, perhaps, were a key part of this fresh beginning), with Phyllis leaning over him and applying a moistened washcloth to his brow …
"I'm sorry," he said, and sat up straighter.
"That's okay," she said. "Now can I ask about Gwyn?"
The piece she intended to write was going to be borderline hostile anyway-before Richard even got started. As it turned out, Phyllis's editor would get no further than the end of the second sentence before deciding, with a practiced shrug, that the Barry profile had better be quietly spiked. In fairness, Richard never thought that Phyllis's piece would be influential enough to be worth contaminating. He was just getting in shape for later on.
Broadly satisfied, he left Phyllis in the lift and returned to his room. Over a club sandwich he roughed out a 550-word review of Time's Song: Winthrop Praed, 1802-1839 and then curled up with AntiLatitudinarian: The Heretical Career of 'Francis Atterbury. At one in the morning, by which point his day was twenty-five hours old, he went out into New York. A brief turn, in his mack, along Central Park South.
He knew American fiction, and he knew that fiction, considered in aggregate, would not lie. For him, coming to America was like dying and going to hell or heaven and finding it all as advertised. Take helclass="underline" black fire and darkness visible, the palpable obscure-and ice, to starve your soft ethereal warmth: the anti-universe of the damned. New York was out there and he didn't have any time to think about it. But he knew, the instant he arrived on its streets, that New York was the most violent thing that men had ever done to a stretch of land, more violent, in its way, than what was visited on Hiroshima, at ground zero, on day one. He looked up. He looked up and saw no difference: the usual metropolitan sky with its six or seven stars weakly guttering. Raw land can do nothing about them but cities hate stars and don't want their denizens to be reminded of how it really goes with ourselves and the universe.
"So!" said Leslie Evry, settling back in the swivel chair with his hands interjoined behind his head. "What brings you to our fair land?"
Richard had to hear this again. This was great. The whole adventure had lasted five seconds. And here he was: wiped out.
"I beg your pardon?"
"What brings you," repeated Leslie Evry, with brio, "to our fair land?"
Richard had been asked this question several times already-by liftmen, by barmen. Now he was hearing it from Bold Agenda. He was hearing it from his own future. Of course, Richard liked to think of himself as a virtuoso of rejection; his history of humiliation was long-was long and proud. The humiliated are always looking for consideration and getting the unconsidered, the offhand and ready-made. So Richard sat there, devastated, wiped out, by a reflexive banality from Leslie Evry.
"What brings me to your fair land? I somehow ran away with the idea that I had a novel coming out in your fair land."