New York, NY 10020
Richard Detective
Senior Editor
Dear Guy,
We’re more than merely interested in your proposal — we’re ready to clear the decks right now. Your project is poised to join the group of exciting books we currently have planned. We’ve acquired a California novel, Radical Desire, that has its thumb right on the frantically beating pulse of that bellwether state, and this dovetails ingeniously with our forthcoming The Black Panther Sex Manual, which — like the sort of long black Christmas stocking it’s intended to stuff — is packed with one sensuous surprise after another. A book exploring the lives, loves and unusual lifestyles of some of our most famous revolutionaries seems the perfect complement to these two arousing titles.
I wonder if you’d submit to a few probing questions, first. My thrust is, your proposal was a little on the dry side, a trifle too focused on politics, revolution, etc. Of course those of us who’ve paid close attention have been interested in those aspects of the story, yet one area of the case that demands to be deeply penetrated deals with the private lives of those who would assassinate our leaders, bring down our institutions, destroy our way of life, and so on: How, in short, do such people “get it on”? You promise to deliver a “candid account” of the underground life of the S.L.A., but I think it would be much better if we were all clear on this: Of what, exactly, does such candor consist?
So if it’s all right with you, I’d like a few explicit lines on the extent to which your project intends to directly address the erotic life underground. I think readers would like to know who is “doing” whom, and how often, and by what means. Are there S.L.A. orgies? Is there much “forbidden” sex involving mixing of the races? Is it true that some members of the S.L.A. are or were or will be lesbians? Do photographs exist? These are the sort of questions that we would need to find the answers to in a book we chose to publish concerning the S.L.A., or anyone else for that matter.
Anticipating your rapid response.
All good wishes,
Dick
“What we have here, is failure to communicate,” says Hume, in a fair approximation of an American accent. He continues, “I have to admit I had been looking forward to the prospect of working with you. I can’t say I’m seeking full reciprocity. In me profession that’s a dangerous, dangerous folly. We maintain strict boundaries with all, be he source, informant, or stooge as the case may be. On Fleet Street we lived by a saying. Me first boss, Pobjoy, liked to drill it into me, he did. In a manner of speaking.”
“What’s the saying?”
“Oh. ‘Y’haven’t got any friends.’ Some such. Years ago, it was. I’ve toiled many a day since, under the glowing tan and worldly manner still just an ink-stained wretch in a naff suit of clothes, I am. Still haven’t a friend in this slithery world either, I’m quite happy to say. Now. We were about to speak of your involvement with a certain Miss X.”
“What sort of involvement?”
“I would be lying, mate, if I didn’t admit that it would be to me advantage if the involvement were romantic in nature. The betrothed heiress in the arms of the bolshie jock. However, we do not invent the news. We create it when necessary, but we do not invent what isn’t there. I’m fully prepared to take what I can get, I am. Toward that end I have been authorized to extend a very generous offer in your direction. That’s right, checkbook journalism. A dirty word to the bloody New York Times, but not to the humble Eye and Ear, moiling away to serve the needs of the silent majority. Sometimes you have to put aside your high-mindedness and get down in it. And there’s a certain beauty to it, there is. What I have in mind requires absolutely no face-to-face meetings, no divulging of confidences. All I require is a token from the young lady in question. Say a soiled pair of knickers, a chicken bone from her dinner plate, or a used shell casing.”
“What for?”
“We secure the item in a bank vault, an event to which our solicitor, a chartered accountant, and meself bear eyewitness. Then we poll our far-ranging network of paranormal adepts: What exactly is this highly personal memento? What state of mind does it bespeak? Have at it, fork benders! Their correct answers shall make for a very nice spread and of course enhance the value of our offer to you.”
“So what if they don’t identify it correctly?”
“Well then of course it wouldn’t be worth quite as much, now would it then?”
Guy very gently puts down the telephone. He leans on his hands on the windowsill, peering down the airshaft at the dark alley below. Directly beneath the window across the way there is a small mound of ash and butts that has accumulated over many a day.
Adventure No. 4
Guy takes the subway downtown and climbs out at Twenty-third Street, leaving the deep, long rolling rumble of the train behind him. He strolls past the residence for the blind, who feel their way into the noontime traffic on the avenues, tap tap. Guy knows how they feel. Twenty-five thousand miles on the road, and here’s where he ends up, still chasing a decent advance.
Well, not quite here. The restaurant is near Madison Square. (Next time a cab.) Outside, workers from nearby insurance companies walk the streets carefully, conscious of the grim actuarial promises latent in every sight and sound. Haverford Dodd meets Guy at the bar, though “his” table is unoccupied and awaits him. At Dodd’s signal, the headwaiter moves forward to seat the two himself, moving the table aside so that they can settle into a plush banquette of deep red and then handing them menus in leather covers. The staff moves silently, with darting grace, like a school of rare tropical fish.
Guy has gotten Dodd’s name from a friend, a journalist whose two books had been edited by Dodd, one of which had done rather well on the basis of an ultimately empty and insubstantial rumor that it was to be well reviewed in the Times. The rumor alone had lent a kind of strength and momentum to the book, and Dodd had presided over it all as the book went into a second printing and sold to paperback even before its pub date, as if shoppers wanted possession of the book prior to its event, wanted themselves to be at the nexus of that event, a celebration of prescient consumerism that validated its standing as our primary avant-garde.
How depressing. No wonder Dodd would be interested in a book that discusses how much its authors wish to destroy him: it’ll never happen. This restaurant, these waiters, the chef will not permit the revolution to come to pass. The waiters wear fucking brocaded jackets. He’ll bet that no one in the SLA could make a decent basic white sauce if their lives depended on it. It’s all a joke. Guy feels a wave of cynical ennui, familiar from the last several days, wash over him.
Guy notes that Dodd appears cultivatedly weary, as if he were making a slow but spirited recovery from devastating intestinal illness. Guy can’t decide whether Dodd would look more at home on a horse or bundled up in an Adirondack chair on the porch of some puritan sanatorium. He has graying blond hair, watery blue eyes, and a deeply cleft chin. Guy can’t tell if he’s thirty — five or sixty.
“So,” he says, “are you enjoying spring in the city?”
“Oh, nice,” says Guy.
“I was out on the Island again this weekend. The solace of the off — season: no guests. Just a little time alone with the muse. You and your wife will have to come out sometime. The beach is fringed by magnificently precarious houses and token stands of the woods destroyed toward their fabrication. One such house is my mother’s, weathered and rotting in a prosperous seaside way, like a rich old woman.”