Private Novelist (16 page)

The price was outrageous—“Extremely rare,” the bookseller said, snatching it away in distress. My buttery fingers had left a halo of translucency around each word I had touched, and a greasy radiance still emanated from the page where the inspector had written “Mary,” underlined many times by my amazed index finger. In the bookseller's eyes I seemed to see the calf, emaciated, his swollen belly heaving, lying on bare ground in a place where the prairie had been parted as if by a comb. A burying beetle paused in a corner of the scene, unsure where to start.

“Did you also know Mary?” I asked the bookseller.

He closed his eyes and faced the back of the shop. A
musky odor, as if he seldom bathed, rose as he turned and his untrimmed nails clicked on the tiled countertop. I sang softly to his reddening ears: “Merry comrades, I belong to you. Swiftly the river flows, carrying us onward together. Never mind where: Has anything a source or destination?” The bookseller fled the shop, and I slipped the book into my pocket and took it back to the boat to read.

While I walked I sang the other song: “Where are you going, little child, in the woods? At home, your parents wait for you. Yet you hurry onward, head down, appearing to seek for something in the carpet of needles. Why do you walk at dawn toward the western darkness?” I lay in the boat and ate buttered rolls. I thought of singing the love song without words, but finished the sack of rolls instead.

I read further. “Once experienced, Kalda's brutal deceptions instantly drain a man's life of all possible meaning. This thesis being difficult to prove without reference to the all-too-personal, I beg you to place your full confidence in me on this point. The sensitive reader will easily deduce Kalda's effects and refrain from further inquiry as to its causes. Respect for my father's memory demands nothing less.” Dropped over the side, the book sank quickly. I lay back, admiring the sharp outlines of the clouds overhead. I kept imagining the roar of an approaching waterfall, but there was none. The river was broad and placid as a serving plate.

AFTER TRYING OUT ONLY THIRTY-FIVE
thousand words, I learned that I had, through blind luck, happened on one utilized by Shats. He writes:

An albatross features in my
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
a specific one named Albert (details: www.zetnet.co.uk/sigs/birds/albert.html). Mary mocks the protagonist's attempt to use it as a literary symbol of something.

The URL refers to the pathetic story of a solitary black-browed albatross, a species whose proper home lies in the far Southern Hemisphere. In Shetland, northernmost of the British Isles, Albert's chances of finding love and starting a family are slim, but he returns nonetheless every year to a cliffside nook from whence he makes clumsy passes at neighboring gannets. He has become a tourist attraction.

Shats has also helped clarify two rather more urgent issues. Close reading of the excerpt above reveals: (1) that Mary is not the protagonist of
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
and (2) that “Zetland” and “Shetland” are very likely the same place. The translator of Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff, also provided the text for a lovely picture book about Scotland [note that this
is false; the book about Scotland is by Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk], and when I was still quite small, I memorized its list of the seven crofting counties and resolved to visit each one. They were:

Argyll

Caithness

Inverness

Ross

Sutherland

Orkney

and
(suspiciously)

Zetland

Even as a child, I could tell there was something un-Scottish about the name “Zetland.” It tainted the entire list for me. I never suspected that it had anything to do with the quaint, rugged, and picturesque “Shetland” of pony fame. And indeed, perusal of the Internet's “Zetland” pages makes clear that the inhabitants are eager to cast off all associations with Scotland in favor of a putative Viking heritage. Yet even the briefest look at the accompanying illustrations puts the lie to their charade: The ships supposedly employed by the Vikings in their voyages of conquest were made of wood. There are no trees on Shetland.

Legends of Scandinavian seafaring have an obvious motive. Readers of authentic tales such as
Hrafnkel's Saga
will recall the monotony of clan warfare as it was carried on by poorly armed louts mounted on horses that came up to their waists. Bravery may be possible under these conditions, but glamour certainly is not. Ambitious young men were well advised to head south in rowboats, returning several weeks later laden with exotic riches such as (I'm guessing now) spoons. Leif
Ericson may or may not have crossed to North America in a Viking ship, but Thor Heyerdahl most certainly crossed the Pacific on a reed raft powered by guesswork, which just goes to show you that any number of failures receives less publicity than a single success, especially if all the failures drown or can't get their books published. After all, it took over a hundred years for the classic Scandinavian adventure “Slow Death by Balloon” to find the publicity it deserved.

From various sources it is becoming clear that a ship in a bottle must soon play a decisive role in my plot. On the cover of Shats' first edition (I assume there will be corrections for subsequent editions), a ship in a bottle appears, perched on a copy of
Lolita.
My assumption, grounded in hearsay, is that some character or another builds ships in bottles as a hobby, and I hereby elect that character to be Zohar. For the past few days, he has been unwinding from the stress of his Himalayan escape at the World Ships-in-Bottles Convention in Honolulu.

Ships-in-bottles conventions, like science fiction conventions, manifest only very tenuous links to ships in bottles themselves. In large hotels on suburban bypass roads, women dressed as figureheads exchange pleasantries with men dressed as old-timey sea captains, through endless rounds of parties and receptions. Downstairs are displays, competitions, and panel discussions while upstairs ship-in-bottle enthusiasts swarm from open bar to open bar, engaging in discussions even more pretentiously formal than those taking place downstairs. As a rule, formality, once undertaken, increases with drunkenness, which lengthens the gaps between utterances, allowing time for exponential increases in ponderousness and gravity. Men in ragged frock coats, with waxed black goatees, debate the merits of competing shipyards, solemnly exchanging business cards that read:

HERMAN GOOCH & SONS'

SHIPBUILDING AND DRY DOCK

17 Norma Court

Indianapolis, IN

and

JIM “ROB” FRANK

Tackle—Bollards—Belaying Pins

445 W. 22nd St., #12P

New York, NY

On Saturday night everyone goes downstairs for the “masquerade,” at which the more exhibitionist elements of the costuming crowd come into their own. Waving fluttering white pennants, an ex-Rockette in a flesh-colored catsuit reenacts the first America's Cup race. A line of well-rehearsed children spell a holiday message with signal flags to a standing ovation. A bearded man stands very still while a friend hoists sails all over his body. The bewildered crowd applauds politely. By midnight the rooms upstairs are packed with convention-goers who long ago stopped stirring their drinks. They sip the vodka off the bottoms of highballs through little red straws, and gossip about what happened at the last convention. In one such room, in a corner, out of the way and minding his own business, sits Zohar, listening attentively, through headphones, to a talk radio call-in show. Every so often someone approaches, shuffling and slightly bowed, as though requesting an audience from a despotic czar.

“Your name?” Zohar asks.

“I am Gary Blaine, the chief operating officer of ______
Bank, and Mr. Schmidt told me you might have something of interest to us.”

Nodding, Zohar removes his latest work from his pocket and unwraps its protective tissue paper. “USS
Essex
CV-9,” he says modestly, letting the tiny ship, built entirely of cardboard matchsticks inside a crack vial, rest in his palm. Tiny P-47s, their wings folded upward, populate the deck, joined by a legion of weary swabbies whose mops really move, in circles too small for the naked eye. The bank officer, sweating, asks for a jeweler's loupe and watches in silence as tiny ensigns oversee routine maintenance on the catapults. “A million dollars. Take it or leave it.” Nervously, the bank officer asks for more time. “I have something else really special, for the right customer,” Zohar will add, opening a slip of waxed paper with tweezers to reveal the Haganah ship
Exodus
under steam in the harbor of Famagusta, carved on a grain of rice.

“Too rich for my blood,” the sap will say, retreating. I always told Zohar if he'd lower his prices a little he might sell something now and then, but he has very firm ideas about art.

Zohar has asked me to put more of his friends in my book, so I will add that at his elbow stood a mysterious, slender figure, thirty years old, ineffably beautiful and sexy, dressed like a French gamine and smoking a wickedly potent cigarette. “Zohar,” she said impatiently, “I'll give you a million dollars myself if you'll just give up and come to bed.”

He sighed. Though he saw her only at conventions, she was still managing to wear him out with her incessant sexual demands. He thought longingly of the comforts of marriage and home, and then obeyed her, which after all was easier than making a scene.

HAVING ALLOWED A MISSILE WITH
sexual content to penetrate
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
I feel I should mention
Gravity's Rainbow,
but I won't.

Yigal never liked Pynchon either. He had been traumatized early in life by his friend Elad Manor, one of those Pynchon fanatics who call you in the middle of the night to say, “I just got to page 332!” In bed with a notebook, the pencil in his hand poised over the word “Swedenborg,” Yigal would answer the phone only to find Elad in the advanced state of mental decomposition that later became known as “deconstruction.”

“Dewey Gland!” Elad would giggle before begging, nay, ordering Yigal to immerse himself likewise in Pynchon's interminable
tableau vivant
.

“Get a girlfriend,” Yigal would advise him patiently. “Better yet, see a whore. Rub some coke on your dick and you might last long enough to get your money's worth.” With his left hand Yigal would smooth out the wrinkled reproduction, clipped from a newspaper by a distant pen pal, of Picasso's
Guernica
and return to his private thoughts.

To Yigal's astonishment, the easily led Elad would later accomplish several daring media pranks, most notably his
facilitation of Avner Shats' meteoric career as a poet.
Back when Amir Or first organized the Mishkenot Sha'ananim poetry workshop,
Shats explains,
he published this ad calling young, unknown poets to apply. I sent some poems signed ‘Elad Manor,' because I was already very famous at the time, or so I thought. . . .
In gratitude for his performance in Jerusalem, Shats awarded Manor the leading role in his first novel,
Sailing Toward the Sunset
.

This rankled Yigal, who had received assurances the role was his, but he remembered Manor without bitterness. If Elad Manor, he thought, is the sort of Pynchon-loving soft-butch lapdog these postmodern novelists want, then they can have him. He had never read
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
but based his entire assessment of the situation on his youthful memories of Manor, which over time had become conflated with the feelings of irritation he had experienced from his position in the family as an only son with five younger sisters. The girls, doctrinaire feminists, were passionate about their careers, and it didn't seem to have crossed anyone's mind that Yigal, with the world at his feet, would persist in avoiding anything resembling commitment until, late in the course of his last philosophy degree, a professor took him aside and indicated to him that, with his qualifications, academia was out of the question. “But you really seem to know how to mind your own business, don't you?” Yigal shrugged. “I mean, I'm your adviser and I can't claim to be privy to the subject of your thesis. Have you considered becoming a Mossad agent?”

“No.”

The professor grasped Yigal's shoulder and looked deeply into his eyes. He spoke of Rome, of Paris, of Tokyo, of the French South Sea nuclear-testing islands. . . . It was a bit like the scene in
Gigi
where they're trying to convince innocent
little Gigi to accept Gaston for the travel opportunities, except that what the professor was describing to Yigal opened up such undreamed-of new vistas of whores, gambling, and cocaine that Yigal was almost dumbstruck.

“Cannibals?” was all he asked, rather cryptically.

“Promise me you'll call them. Do this for me, and for your future. I don't want to see you in ten years living in a tent on the beach.” Then he said a special Aramaic code phrase I'm not allowed to share, and kissed and hugged Yigal with the secret kiss and hug before shaking his hand with the secret handshake. Obviously they're all faggots, Yigal thought. But, come to think of it, they must have thousands of telephone operators and secretaries—I'll be like the only straight man in a ballet company. He imagined the Mossad as a gigantic network of girls' boarding schools into which he would be smuggled to be secretly shared and enjoyed by thousands of hungry junior assistants to diplomatic attachés, all fresh out of the army—the diplomats themselves would be flaming queens, agog over clothes and parties, oblivious to the foment taking place in the souls of their nubile stenographers. He imagined an Israeli girl, a kibbutznikit with her hair in braids, on her knees begging him to stay away from the Milanese whorehouses he'd wanted to visit ever since reading
Catch-22,
and his proud refusal.

“Take me as I am,” Yigal said aloud by accident, remembering his long-lost moment of puerile grandiosity. He was sitting alone in Café Basel, not far from his apartment, drinking a cappuccino and watching a cat cross the street while pretending to concentrate on a passage from Sartre's
Saint Genet:

There is no more effective defense against the temptation to have
everything
than to own something.
If you have only a crumb that has fallen from the table, your life will be spent in defending that crumb, in convincing others and yourself that it is the best of crumbs and that, in the last analysis, it contains the universe.

Yigal's eyes took in the expanse of Basel Street, Tel Aviv's current
rive gauche.
The scene had aspects of a miniature: The rife and chaotic antiquarian bookshops of Paris were represented by a single orderly retail store. Its pitchers of Ricard were replaced by a glass of lemonade, its riot of
caniches
by a Chihuahua which sniffed at one of two potted geraniums, its women by a teenage girl perched on a traffic barrier, waiting for her small taxi. In one of these cafés, Yigal thought, a single anarchist sits reading
Charlie hebdomadaire,
wearing his one black T-shirt.

He tore off a corner of his croissant and dropped it to the pavement. A pigeon with a clubfoot walked toward him, then walked away. A wren-like, striped sparrow with round black eyes crept out from behind a geranium and began to peck at the gravel loose on the sidewalk. The Chihuahua walked to the middle of the street and stood there. If I close my eyes, Yigal thought, I could imagine myself in a little village where no strangers go, where I was born and which I have never left.

(A clarification with regard to Yigal's substitution of “Whores, Gambling, and Cocaine” for a similar list he believed had been compiled by Kafka: Kafka's list consisted of “Hatred, Envy, Avarice, and Greed.” I apologize for any inconvenience.)

Mary sat in a diner to write a letter to Taylor.

Dear Taylor,

I bet you're surprised to be getting a letter from me, but I just wanted to let you know everything is doing great! I'm still in New York, but maybe I'll go back to Tel Aviv soon. I know you think that's wrong, but there's so much you don't understand. Why would you? I met a man the other day who knows more about silkies than any other human being on earth, except that adds up to just about ZERO. It's like somebody saying he knows about vampires because he read
Dracula
. When, as I'm sure you know, vampires are really just nasty sacks of gooey icky stuff, like old cucumbers, and they smell totally awful, so the idea of a vampire being sexy or anybody wanting to TOUCH a vampire is like totally beyond me. So anyhow this guy—wait, I forgot I never told you I am a silkie—do you know what that is? If you want the details, I mean the cool fake details which are way more interesting than the truth, talk to a demonologist, but here's the boring facts: Some girl seals turn out to like men—I hope it doesn't hurt your feelings that I didn't like you. It doesn't, does it? Now you're back where you belong and I'm so glad. So being a silkie is an easy life, I think. I don't know what to compare it to. I don't remember being a seal very well, because being a seal is so easy that you sort of lose track after a while, you can't focus your thoughts, and compared to people, who are always after something amazingly specific like “I'm going to become a certified public accountant so I can drive a 500-series Mercedes,” your brain turns
to mush. Did you ever think about that? People say dolphins are smarter, but it's only because dolphins are always after something. TRUST ME. Seals try not to be. We admire most the people who are never after anything, such as: Kelp. Jellyfish. Starfish! Have you ever really watched a starfish? Some have fifty arms! They move so slowly, and patiently, and they are beautiful like flowers. Seals try to sit still but we were born to play. Lots of people go to starfish school but I think it's just the dumbest thing—imagine 20 seals trying to sit still. I am told that if you ever really sit still you will receive the most frightening hallucinations, so I am not in a hurry to try it. Did you ever see a flock of tuna? Their huge silver sides flash in the sun, they swim as fast as motorboats. If you get a chance to spend some time in the ocean, you should do it. I would like to visit the Sargasso Sea. There are no starfish, but crabs that walk on the water, and so much kelp it's like islands, or like the bogs on the moors, where you can walk if you want but you have to watch and make sure your foot doesn't go through, at which point you will be dug up only after 3,000 years—well, I don't think you can actually walk on the Sargasso Sea, but I am a strong swimmer. A VERY strong swimmer. Well, I think I've written enough for one letter. Say hi to your wife for me!

                                                                 
Very truly yours,

                                                                   
Mary

She began a letter to Yigal and then ripped it up. Then she leafed through the
New York Post
for a while. What's the
Gowanus, she thought, and who is the Son of Sam? How is he connected with Alexander Hamilton? She read an adorable personal and considered drafting a sympathetic response, even though the person wanted a widowed man in his sixties or seventies, but then she just sealed $10,000 into an envelope anonymously. She read a real estate feature, then some crossword clues, then she wrote in five answers, and then she saw the single-column ad, near the comics:

ALONE? PREGNANT? SCARED? SILKIE?

ADOPTION IS THE OPTION

If you are a silkie aged 18 to 35 in weeks 7–28,

your expenses can be PAID IN FULL for the

duration of your pregnancy and you will receive

a consideration of $40,000.

She ripped it out and took it over to the phone. Instead of calling the number on the ad right away, she changed the last three digits to zeroes and tried for their main reception desk. It was the Defense Logistics Agency. That's so pathetic, she thought. The notion of a silkie “alone” and “scared” was too much for her, and she burst out laughing. All the same, she had a sudden urge to fly to London and retrieve her skin. She wrote another letter to Taylor on the plane.

Dear Taylor,

I know I'm writing you an awful lot, but maybe you'll just have to get used to it. Who else can I write to? I don't have a mom, you know—isn't that sad? I remember her, sort of, except I always got her mixed up with somebody else. They say we all have unique smells and cries, which is all very well assuming we remember what they are. I mean, every
human on earth has unique smells and cries, but could you use them to find your mom in Times Square on New Year's Eve? Because that's what these nurseries are like, imagine ten or twelve bazillion little baby seals all rolling around yelling at one time. They're really cute, humans keep telling me. They're attractive because of some maternal instinct thing involving big eyes and short noses, but what do most people do with baby animals? They EAT them, that's what! Baby animals taste the best, everybody knows, so I think it's just a load of crap that they're always saying they're attracted to them because they look like human babies—guess again! Since when do human babies have big eyes? They have little pinhead eyes. Also, they have no fur. I mean, for example, let's say your choice was eating cats or kittens—well, maybe kittens aren't the best, but I bet they taste better than full-grown cats, who live off garbage. Same with goats. I personally never eat anything but fish. Actually I eat all sorts of stuff, especially sweet rolls, candy and cereal which are not readily available in the sea. Anyhow, I'm going to London now. Then I have to pick: Shetland or Tel Aviv? I know what you'd say. Well, maybe not, you didn't know I was a silkie, so it depends what sort of guy you are. If you're a sort of conservative guy, a Confucianistic kind of guy who thinks everything has its proper place, you'd say, “Mary, return to your home, the sea!” But if you're a conservative guy, you might also say, “Return to your husband and try to work things out!” I saw the craziest ad in the
newspaper: They wanted silkies to sell their babies to the government. I thought, THIS is fucked up. Just so you know not to worry, believe me—silkies never worry. Maybe it's something we picked up from being seals, but short of killer whales, of which there are precisely NONE WHATSOEVER in New York City, London, and Tel Aviv combined, there's not really much to worry about. If you're ever in a bad mood, that's something you can think about when you're walking around New York. Are there any killer whales here? Then look around, look up, look down. The answer will always be no!

                                                                 
Your friend,

                                                                   
Mary

She wrote another letter on the plane to Tel Aviv.

Dear Taylor,

London is so WEAK. First, it's rainy and cold, almost as rainy and cold as stupid Shetland. That's fine if you're wrapped up in sealskin and have heat-conserving ears inside your head where they don't poke out, but otherwise it sucks. When I picked up my skin I was tempted to put it on and head for the water—well, actually that's what I went to London to do, but then I thought of my nice friends in Tel Aviv, plus my husband if he shows up. I was going to go down to Cornwall and put on my skin and eat some fish, but I didn't. I feel about boy seals now just about the way I feel about the Runts. Not that it matters much, because about 98% of the time they don't know you exist, and neither does anyone else,
and actually when you're a seal you don't even care. But I cared, because I wasn't a seal yet. It's like people being afraid of dying.