Guy simply rises and walks out of this one, bringing Cratty scurrying at his heels.
“Guy! What can I say? They are havin evry one of us fo breakfiss since Irvin fucked it up for evrybody with that fuck-ass Howd Hughes book. Fake it! I don care. You are goin to have a Irish settah rampant across your spine! The spine of your book, that is! I swear it!”
“We seem to be experiencing a bugger of a connectivity problem,” says Hume. “Occurs each and every time I ring you up, it does.”
“Maybe you should talk to the transatlantic operator.”
“Ho!” says Hume, delighted. “I’m in South Florida, I am. Let me relate a thing or two about me life in this earthly paradise. At this very moment I’m watching a bloke wrestling this absolutely smashing marlin onto the dock of the marina whilst seated in a plastic chaise longue. He’s seated, that is. I’m on me feet, riveted, steaming up one of the floor-to-ceiling glass windows here in me bleeding breakfast nook, a glass of fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice from concentrate in me hand. The brute must weigh twenty stone. He’s a real brute, he is. Soon I’ll step out onto the deck to rub coconut oil on me pale British flesh, submit it to the blandishments of the tropical sun. This is far in excess of what I dared imagine for meself, for me future, as a small lad growing up in a gloomy scheme, it is. Far, far indeed.”
“Try the operator,” says Guy. He hangs up.
Adventure No. 2
Small & Grey asks for the book. But there is no book. “I have got to have something to give to sales,” says the editorial director, Jane Pancake. “If I don’t have something to give to sales, they’ll laugh me out of their tiny, windowless offices. Loud eruptions of braying laughter accompanied by derogatory comments about the way my legs look in sheer hose, which really is nothing I can control. When I was at Wellesley, we weren’t even allowed to say ‘hose’ except during Punt Hill Week. There’s nothing to be done about these men. So, no, gaga as I may be over the concept, I simply can’t go to the salespeople on this one empty-handed. Though I think it’s got all the makings of a sure winner.”
The next day the phone rings. “I was caught between floors in the elevator with a large, lupine specimen of our sales staff, and he smacked his lips with loathsome satisfaction as he advised me that he’d heard that I’d rejected what promised to be one of the Blockbuster Books of ‘76. I’m not sure which book he meant. Perhaps it was yours. ‘Pack up your desk, piano legs.’ That’s what he said, nice as you please. So do you think you could dash off something that I could cringingly tender to the sales oafs and messenger it over here? One colorfully descriptive page, single-spaced, ought to do the trick.” Phone rings. “Try as I might, I simply can’t see those chattering rifles, that flaming tumbledown bungalow, those writhing wounded, those oppressed masses — though surely I would like to. Really, how can you ask me to put myself on the line with those storm troopers in the dimly lit realm of sales? They call me ‘Chain Pantsuit,’ did you know? Everyone knows. I’ve devoted my adult life to the kind of quality literature that possesses a strong potential for a mass-market paperback sale, but they don’t care. Look up scumbag in the dictionary and there’s a group photo of our crack sales staff. A bunch of chauvinists who can’t stand the fact that a young woman from Larchmont with big feet and several small but nonetheless persistent obstacles in her path has managed to rise very near if not actually to the top in a man’s game. According to them, I should have gone into educational television programming, if you can believe it.”
A letter arrives the next day telling Guy to meet Pancake at her office off Union Square. “Look out the window. See those junkies down there in the park? One of them is actually Ed Sforenza, ‘our’ sales manager. How does a man like this come to represent the interests of the old buttoned-down gentlemanly house of Small & Grey? A house with its origins in the decorous wards of Boston’s Back Bay? If I dared to show my face wearing a soiled overcoat like that I’d never be invited to another book party again. These men don’t care about book parties. They loosen their ties and drink canned beer out of paper bags right on the sidewalk. This is what I’m up against. This is a fact many people are aware of. Even if they are afraid to say a single word. What have you got for me?”
She sits on the edge of her desk and pulls the typewritten proposal from the envelope, breathing, “Onionskin,” disenchantedly, before settling in to read, fidgeting and slapping the empty envelope against her thigh. She looks up abruptly.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to hurry out of my office and down the stairs if you please. If anyone spots you, tell them that you work in maintenance or that you’re simply a mugger lying in wait for a slow-moving elderly person ironically taking the stairs for his health. Don’t mention my name under any circumstances. Honestly, if you haven’t yet come up with something that I can deliver to the sales staff without ducking, I don’t think we’ll be playing music together, that’s the phrase?”
Guy shrugs.
“They’ll be Xeroxing dirty pictures of my private parts on interoffice memo paper again. Drawings, I mean; highly exaggerated and inaccurate drawings. Hurry now. Get out.”
That afternoon the telephone rings. “I don’t know why you stormed out the way you did. Can you resubmit? Give me back that glorious and promising proposal, and I promise we’ll have a competitive offer on the table by tomorrow afternoon.”
The next afternoon the receptionist at Small & Grey advises him that Jane Pancake has left the company to become a literary agent.
Guy picks up the ringing phone.
“Mock, mate.”
“Can I help you?”
“It’s the other way round, mate. It’s I who can be helping you if the rabbit and pork is on the up and up. You get me?”
“What?”
“Talk, mate. Talk. Rabbit and pork is talk. Ach, how I yearn to get back to that sodden land where the women are women and the men are named Nigel.”
“What’s the talk?”
“Can’t say explicit like. Ah, bollocks. Who’m I fooling? No wiretaps on little old Roy Hume’s telephone. It’s not like I represent the bloody New York Times and their shining phalanx of bleeding Pulitzer Prizes. It’s not like I’m a revered national correspondent with the soi-disant Paper of Record, now is it then?”
Guy looks out the window. The bricks on the other side of the airshaft face him, textured in the morning sunlight. He sees a curtain move in the window above him and to his left, and then a woman’s arm, heavy and pale, emerges from the open window to overturn a full ashtray into the alley below, sending up a cloud of ash and cinders.
“Right,” says Hume. “What I want to know is whether there’s any truth to what I’ve been told about you and a certain young lady from the Coast who’s gone missing. That you are involved.”
Guy hangs up.
Adventure No. 3
BACCHUS
A DIVISION OF SEGAL & SOWER
12th Floor
30 Rockefeller Center