Shelf Monkey (18 page)

“And so,” Kura said, wrapping up his inordinately long introduction, “it is my privilege, my honour, and my good fortune to introduce to you now, a lady of grace and elegance, a major talent by any standard,” my eyes were now insisting on rolling themselves upward, “I present to you, Winnipeg, Miss Agnes Marie Coleman.” Page bounded to her feet. The noise of the largest herd of buffalo ever to gallop the open plains erupted, as hands slapped hands until blood blisters formed, a sonic blast of love urging Agnes to leave the safe confines of the break room, come forth, bless us, love us, blow us kisses, blow us. It swept her up in aural waves of mania, carrying her to the stage. I swear, she floated; her feet never touched the ground. The sermon from the bookstore was about to begin.

“Thank you, oh thank you so much!” she squealed as Kura took her hand to help her up the stairs, then hugged her in welcome. Page offered her hand in greeting, and instead found herself ambushed and struggling in an emotional three-way full-body squeeze play with Agnes and Harold. Even when star-struck, Page simply did not like to be touched. She controlled the impulse to shove Agnes off the stage, slowly extricating herself from the fleshy sandwich. Agnes faced the crowd. “I love you all, oh this is too much, please!” She held a hand to her chest, a show of humility, all for me, you shouldn’t have, oh, stop. The crowd lapped it up.

In person, Agnes is just about the least dynamic person you could ever hope to see. A combination of ultra-expensive silks and pastels adorned her squat frame. It was the wardrobe of the recently insanely rich, a mixture of decadent fabrics that people born to wealth would never be caught in public in. She dressed the way she
thought
rich people dressed, highlighting how out of place her money was to her upbringing. The sort of awful taste only significant financial backing
can achieve. Hopefully, she’d wise up and hire an image consultant to berate her into style. Without access to the camera filters and Vaseline fogging provided by Purvis personnel on his program, her overabundance of patchwork makeup was clearly visible. Still, she appeared content, which I could never say for myself, so who knows? Maybe the application of dense blankets of pancake about the face and neck leads to happiness. I made a mental note to stop at a drugstore on my way home.

“Gosh, oh gosh, thank you,” she panted as the applause subsided. “This makes it all worthwhile, this is why I came. To be here, meeting real people, kind people, good, good people.” She emphasized the
good
, a likely attempt to downplay her disastrous appearance at Book Expo America the previous week. Kura had somehow convinced the Expo producers to squeeze Agnes into a panel discussion on “The Purpose of Fiction After 9/11.” She wound up sitting between Alice Sebold and Rick Moody, alone and ignored. After an hour of disoriented silence on her part, Agnes had been roundly booed by all in the room after she said she had not only never read anything by any of the eleven panel members, but never read anything not recommended by Munroe Purvis, period. John Irving and Tom Wolfe postponed their feud to jointly release a statement of condemnation. Maya Angelou herself called Agnes an abomination and an insult to her craft. It was an extraordinarily beautiful moment, an exquisite case of
schadenfreude
for all involved. Needless to say, Aubrey had immediately procured a videotaped copy of the event, which played in a near-constant loop on his television, Agnes’s vacant stare a classic of silent Keatonesque comedy. She would have gnawed off her leg if it might have allowed her to flee the room any sooner.

She cracked open the book that lay before her on the podium. “I thought I’d start with a small reading from my latest novel,
Baby I Was Nothing Before You
, before taking some questions. That is, if you don’t mind,” she tittered, as yet another blast of frenzied clapping filled the air. “This is from Chapter 7, where my heroine Marjorie is telling her son Quinn about his life-threatening illness.” She cleared her throat. A muffled series of squeaks arose as the acolytes leaned forward in their chairs, a few hurriedly rifling through pages of their copies in order to follow along.

Marjorie played with her left ear-bob, knowing that the moment had finally come. “You see Quinn, my precious, oh-so-precious love Quinn,” Marjorie explained to her beautiful son, her heart aching with sad sorrow, “sometimes, when your stomach hurts, it’s not because you’re hungry.”

“It’s not?” Quinn asked, his trusting eyes watching Marjorie with love.

“No, honeypie. Sometimes, you see, God has a different plan for some of us . . .”

Sighing, I tuned her nasal droning out, busying myself by mentally rehearsing the questions I had prepared for the occasion. Aubrey and Warren were similarly occupied. We had spent the better part of a week preparing our dream questions for Miss Coleman, bandying possibilities back and forth across Aubrey’s living room. We weren’t just your average book readers, we told ourselves. We were not just people who couldn’t abide her books. No, we were warriors for justice, balancing the scales for every struggling artist who couldn’t find an agent. Books were our armour, arcane knowledge and esoteric definitions our weapons of choice. It was cruel to be sure, but then, war always is. The illiterate gorillas who stomped my books into papier mâché fodder were about to receive the holy retribution of an avenging angel.

In a roundabout way.

“So I’m not going to be alive for Christmas?” Quinn sobbed. “I won’t get to see Granny again, or Uncle Martin?”

Marjorie wept with heart-rending grief. “No, sweetiepookins, no.” She grabbed Quinn and held him with all the love a strong and loving mother can provide. “No, you won’t make it, but we’ll have Christmas early, OK? With Granny and Uncle Marty and all your cousins, they’ll all come to see you before…before…” Marjorie wailed.

“Mommy?” Quinn wiped at his eyes. “Mommy, why does God hate me?”

Members of the audience were openly weeping by this point in
Agnes’s narrative. The room filled itself with the distinctive yet indescribable sound of snot forced out of hairy narrow tubes and damply colliding with thin sheets of tissue. Christ, I had a lump in my throat. It was mob mentality of the Big Brother hate rallies and Oprah Winfrey screamfests; if one of us screamed, we all screamed. If one cried, we all broke down into quivering masses of emotionally needy jelly. Agnes’s face looked to be succumbing to natural erosion, the saltwater from her ducts digging canyons through her makeup, joining forces with liner and blush to congeal under her eyes, lending her the air of a very effeminate football player, a place-kicker, say. Harold Kura leaned forward, holding his face in his hands, his elbows atop his knees. He was audibly bawling.

“And when you meet God, Quinn, when you stand next to him at the Pearly Gates, you tell him that you understand, that you know his love is all-encompassing, all-compassionate, and that you are happy to be in his loving glory.”

“I will, Mommy,” Quinn said. “I’ll make you so proud of me, Mommy.”

She shut the book, her eyes closed. “Thank you,” she said, her voice hoarse. There was nary a dry eye or non-runny nose in the building, save Aubrey and Warren. I silently cursed the medications, sure that they were to blame for the slight mistiness of my tear ducts.

Kura stood up and embraced Agnes in his arms. “No, thank you, Agnes,” he said.

And the crowd went wild. People hugged each other. Strangers hugged strangers. Terrorists laid down their arms. Nations united. A new order of peace and goodwill was at hand.

All right, that never happened. But I guarantee you, the United Nations never had an audience as emotional as Agnes Coleman had that night.

“Miss Coleman will now field some questions, and then we’ll have a signing,” Kura announced. That was our cue. Our arms immediately shot into the air, only preceded by the six hundred or
so arms of everyone else. Clearly, it was going to be difficult to win this arms race. “Yes, you,” said Kura, singling out one appendage from many. A small elderly woman rose to her feet, as the sea of arms reluctantly dropped.

“Yes, Miss Coleman,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you how much your novels have meant to me.”

Agnes clapped her hands together. “Oh, gosh, thank you
so
much!” she squealed. “I’m so happy, you don’t know how important it is to me for my words to touch someone! Thank you!”

“Thank you, Miss Coleman,” said the woman, tears flowing down an already damp face. “I love your books. I love you!”

“I love you, too!” Agnes tweeted. The crowd applauded as the woman sat back down, her shoulders heaving with emotion.

Warren nudged my side. “I don’t know about you, but her book left me feeling a bit touched too. I threw up all night.”

“Miss Coleman! Miss Coleman!” Aubrey was yelling as the arms began to rise again. “Miss Coleman! Agnes!” But Agnes had already moved on to the next obvious questioner, an equally aged woman who could barely contain herself. “Fuck,” Aubrey whispered. He jittered in his seat. “C’mon, c’mon.” As soon as the woman finished her list of platitudes, he shot back up.
“AGNES!”

Kura motioned toward Aubrey. “Yes, the excitable gentleman with the hair, yes.” The crowd chuckled appreciatively along with Kura as Aubrey composed himself, affording the audience a full view of his mane. On stage, Page visibly stiffened, her lips pursing themselves into a bloodless white scar.

“My goodness!”
Agnes said. “Sir, I have got to introduce you to my stylist.” More guffaws ensued.

Aubrey waited out the laughter. “Miss Coleman,” he said, “I just wanted you to know just how deeply, deeply your book affected me. I can honestly say, I have never read a book quite as . . . moving.”

“Moved him all the way to the toilet,” Warren muttered.

“Where do you come up with such ideas?”

“Why, God bless you, young man!” said Agnes. “I’m just so overjoyed my novels can speak to people of your persuasion.”
Persuasion?
“My ideas, oh, they just come to me. Like magic. Very good question.”

“Uh . . . thanks,” Aubrey said. Arms began to rise about him as
Kura scanned the room for another potential softball. “Uh, I do have a follow-up question as well, Miss Coleman,” Aubrey called out.

“Oh. Yes?”

Aubrey cleared his throat, glancing at the index card he held in his hand. “Yes, Miss Coleman, I was just wondering, in your novel, when Marjorie finally convinces Uncle Martin to abandon his atheistic beliefs and come for Quinn’s early Christmas, was this, if I’m not wholly mistaken, your subtle commentary on the state of world politics today,
vis-à-vis
Marjorie’s persona being in fact a crafty representation of the American military complex, and likewise Uncle Martin the embodiment of the Iraqi government, in particular the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein?”

It was Christmas Eve. Not a creature was stirring. The question hung in the air between Aubrey and Agnes like the Hindenburg preparing to incinerate itself. All it needed was a spark. I could feel the waves of heat from Page’s gathering rage as she mentally commenced Aubrey’s disembowelment.

“I’m sorry,” Agnes said, “I’m afraid I . . . I don’t understand the question.”

“I apologize, Miss Coleman, I’ll try to be clearer. I’m not good with words, I’m not a novelist such as yourself. But the thematic subtext of Marjorie and Martin’s relationship, what with Marjorie’s duplicity in convincing Martin of Quinn’s desire to make sure his uncle had a place in Heaven when what Marjorie really desired all along was to impose her religious viewpoint onto Martin’s in order to make herself feel like she was truly accomplishing something in what would otherwise be a drab and uneventful life, this would, I believe, appear to indicate a desire on your part to present a
roman à clef
of George Bush’s religious hypocrisy in his declaring Iraq to be an evil empire, disguising his true motives of enhancing his power base through the control of the flow of oil.”

“. . .”

“Or have I read too much into it? Are you perhaps simply demonstrating the inherent possibilities of narrative as a satire unto itself, a self-parody, a post-modern metafiction on the level of David Foster Wallace?”

Agnes’s eyes took on the empty look of a rabbit caught in the
headlights of an onrushing bus. “I’m sorry . . . I . . . I’ve always supported our troops, of course —”

“I don’t mean to call your patriotism into question, Miss Coleman. If anything, I want to praise your resourcefulness in camouflaging your contempt of Bush’s policies underneath the facile nonsense that is your work. I applaud you.” Aubrey began to slam his hands together, the lonely sound swallowed up by the befuddlement his question had evoked from the crowd. “Good for you!” he yelled. “Bravo! Come on, everyone! Give her a hand!” Warren and I clapped along enthusiastically. A few other people nearby half-heartedly joined in, confused as to whether their applause was in praise or derision. Agnes flinched at every
CLAP
!
Her eyes beseeched someone to come to her aid.

Kura stepped up to the mike. “All right, I think that’s enough. Let’s —”

“Miss Coleman!” I yelled, leaping up to prevent Kura’s slick evasion of Aubrey’s nonsense. “Agnes, there are certain ongoing themes in your novels thus far regarding the intrusion of church into state politics. Do you envision yourself completing a third novel along the same themes, perhaps creating a trilogy forming an ongoing series of
bildungsromans
showcasing the political machinations of religious fundamentalists?”

“What?” Agnes’s shoulders twitched with suppressed sobs. “Roman buildings?”

“Are you making a sublime criticism through Martin’s pigheadedness of those among us who would seek to prevent the possible medical advances available through stem cell research?” Aubrey asked, raising his voice over the chorus of discontentment growing throughout the room.

“Are you pro-choice?” I called out.

“Do you support the euthanasia movement?”

“Where do you stand on mercy killings?”