"In what sense, if any, are you publishing Untitled?"
"Excuse me?"
"Well let's go through this one step at a time. Are you distributing it?"
"Not directly."
"Have you sent out copies for review?"
"We have sent a number of copies out to certain . .. outlets."
"What number? I know. One! Zero! How many did you print?"
"There's a run on reserve. They're not bound, not as yet."
"How many did you print'?"
Regretfully Leslie indicated the mail sack that Richard still wore on his shoulder. "That's it."
"Who made the decision to publish my novel-to print the typescript and bind it between hard covers? Where's Chip? Where's Chuck? Where's Roy Biv?"
"Ah, Roy," said Evry, shaking his head. "Roy Biv! Tell me. Did he ever
sign himself Roy G. Biv? . . . He changed his name to that. If you were American, you'd understand. It's a mnemonic. The rainbow. Red,orange, yellow, green. Blue, indigo, violet. He wanted to please everyone. That's Roy. Poor Roy."
"Someone published it. On what criteria? Please tell me the truth. This is a literary life. Of a kind. Tell me the truth. On what criteria?"
He felt Frances Ort's young hand on his arm. He turned. The friendly spaces of Bold Agenda were still taking shape for future use, whatever was necessary, kindergarten, rape hotline, health-crisis center. Its cubbyholes and cord carpets-its pro-bono feel, like a clinic. And he could of course see himself there, sitting quietly on a low sofa, awaiting counsel for all his pains and his ills.
"Basically," said Leslie Evry, "basically to balance the list. We felt the mix was wrong and may look badly. We felt it might imperil our funding."
"Because," said Richard, "everyone else was called Doo Wah Diddy Diddy or Two Dogs Fucking. And you needed …" On the wall, he noticed, was a framed poster of the Bold Agenda flyleaf or bookmark. With recognition, with love, Richard saw that one of his fellow authors was called Unsold-Unsold Inukuluk. "Christ," he said. "A token honky-not even Gwyn bothered with that. Why me? Why not someone from Boston?"
"It's our policy to represent the most authentic possible-"
"Did anyone read it? Did anyone? Did Roy?"
"Roy? Roy never read anything, /read it."
"You read it all?"
"Not exactly. I had a-I'd just gotten into it when I had a …"
"Leslie was hospitalized with suspected meningitis," said Frances Ort.
"Okay. Okay. Well, I'm going to leave this here, if I may. I'll just take-no. Here." Richard looked from face to face. And he remembered. He said, "Richard Of York Gains Battles In Vain. That's it. That's it. That's the difference between the cultures. Between the new and the old. Between you and me. Richard Of York meets Roy G. Biv. It's no contest. It's no contest."
"We're sorry," said Frances Ort.
"I'll find my own way out. So long."
So long, and no longer. He stood on the sidewalk, outside the Lazy Susan. Whose windows .. . Even the windows of the Lazy Susan were
telling him, with American emphasis, that if you do the arts, if you try
the delirious profession, then don't be a flake, and offer people something-tell them something they might reasonably want to hear. He feltlight. He felt light because there was nothing to carry, nothing to grip and tote, nothing to heave and buckle under.
The first bar he hit was selling vodka and milk to old black men for $1.25.
By the time he reached Central Park South he had driven this up to ten bucks a pop, and came out of the Plaza, where they wouldn't serve him, in some disarray. As he staggered about, among shoeshine and fountain spray, a phalanx of civilians streamed past him in distinct amateur-military style, and on their faces-well, he took his last look at it: American resolve. Their mission was simple. They intended to embarrass the horse-and-carriage trade of Central Park South. Across the road they surged, raising their daubed placards, all of which had something pithy or rhyming to say about the incompatibility of beast and city: how the two didn't mix. The horsemen, slaves of tourists, dressed in low-caste colors (and there was a horsewoman too, not that old but her face grimily lined, wearing what looked like an entire tepee over a body as thin as a ridgepole): the horsepeople watched their advancing adversaries with a loathing that lay at the limit of human fatigue. Swept along, Richard now disengaged himself and pushed his way toward the railings. A horse halted his progress-a horse and its sightless stare. The animal, the blinkered clipclop, cause of all the fuss, raised its head in pompous indifference, and then dropped it again, wholly preoccupied, it seemed, by the task of wiping shit from its shoe (not dog shit but horse shit-in a class of its own, really, as shit went), and doing this not as humans do it, heel-first and backwards, but as horses do it, toe-first and forwards. So the charioteers in the ethnic heft of their patchwork and motley, in their gypsy jackets, averted their gypsy chancer's eyes, and the horse scraped its shoe, not minding. Agony, of which there was much in the air, found expression only through the cars: the delivery vans, the Plaza limousines, the yellow cabs. Deliberately obstructed for now, until the police showed up and cleared the scene, the beasts of burden, made of metal and serving the concrete city, twisted and shuddered, blaring blue murder with smoke coming out of their ears. Beyond, exhaustively deconsecrated, lay the enchanted glade of Central Park.
Making his last move he sideswiped his way east, across Fifth and Madison, on to the avenue of sun and gold. To the north the prospect was seized in the city's grid, locked and channelled by the buildings on either side and their stiff-chested measure. The vista looked infinite, and entirely unknown, like the open sea to the first traversers of the Atlantic (when gods and terrors were still young and strong), ever ready tobecome the end of the world, where water became waterrall, oceanfall. Richard realized that he would have to stop saying he had never been to America. To that distinction-his main accomplishment and claim to fame-he could no longer pretend. He had been to America. He had been to America.
PART FOUR
Gwyn awoke. He had slept, as always, now, in what Demi called not the spare room or the guest room but the visitors' room, which faced the master suite on the first floor-where Demi slept. With a brisk clearance of the throat he turned over onto his back, and then over onto his side. The nearer pillow of the other twin bed was evenly scratched with strands of straight black hair: hair belonging to Pamela, his research assistant. A section of her sharp-shouldered back was visible, and even through the curtained blur of early morning he could see the fine indentations her hair had made on her impressionable flesh. For half a minute or so he tried to think of a good way of describing this sight. Other men, other writers, might have started off with-who knows?-map contours or shallow estuaries; but Gwyn had decided some time ago that there weren't going to be any descriptions of women's bodies, or anyone else's, in what he wrote, because some bodies were "better" than others (and Pamela's body, as it happened, was better than most), and although Gwyn felt the way everyone did about bodies (always complaining to Demi about her body and telling her to get it fixed), he knew that comparisons were odious (and nearly always unflattering)-so why waste valuable time? Gwyn sat up and drank a tumbler of bottled water. The water was called Elixir and its ads promised you eternal youth.