The Bear Went Over the Mountain (12 page)

The entrepreneur frowned. He did not have time to waste. He worked hard each day the American way, to
buy big cars and little phones. “I got California sensamilla, mon.”

“Do you have pretzels?”

The entrepreneur’s eyes flashed angrily. Image was important in the park and he could not afford to be joked around. He jabbed a finger into the bear’s chest. “Hey, don’t be jiving me, mon, or I stick you in the guts.”

The bear’s eyes darted fearfully in the direction of the howling dogs and he moved away hurriedly, out of the park. Dogs had the power to unmask him, to turn him into a raging, desperate animal forced to make a stand in public, where he’d quickly be arrested and taken away to the zoo. I let my guard down, he said to himself. I got cocky. Remember what Bettina said, you’re not a star until they can spell your name in Karachi.

He continued through the Village, toward Gadson’s loft in SoHo. He’d visited it once before and the smells of its restaurants and shops formed a map in his brain, which he was following now, from Greek food to Italian food to Chinese food. At the entrance to Gadson’s loft building, he smelled the Clinique face scrub which Gadson used. He rang the bell and then climbed the stairs, toward a cloud of perfumes and colognes and the sound of voices.

“Hal, so glad you could make it.” Gadson met him at the door and showed him through a corridor hung with turn-of-the-century posters of gay nightspots—Little
Bucks, the Artistic Club, the Black Rabbit of Bleecker Street where the French Fairy had put on his remarkable floor show. There was a blown-up page from
The New York Herald
of 1892 describing activities at a Greenwich Village nightclub called the Slide where “Orgies Beyond Description” took place. The bear studied the posters, struck by the men in their evening attire, with canes and capes. He’d have to talk to Elliot about getting a cape.

Gadson was leading him into the main room of the loft, whose entry was decorated with tall ferns in slender vases. Converted gas lamps illuminated the walls, and the furniture was Victorian. The guests were mostly from the literary world, and had already heard rumors about Hal Jam’s forthcoming book and the sale to Universal. “He does look like Hemingway,” said more than one person, though some said it was just a superficial impression, not a true likeness.

Bettina appeared like the queen of the bumblebees, her gold and black dress clinging to her buzzing little figure, and her eyes bulging with the feverish fires that ruled her. Her path through the room was erratic, for she wanted to be everywhere at once. A tortilla chip attached itself to her flying scarf as she pivoted past the buffet table, and Chum Boykins removed it with a compulsive nip of his fingers.

Bettina waved to Eunice Cotton and joined her in a corner of the room.
Angels in Bed
had now sold a million
copies, and Eunice was everlastingly grateful for Bettina’s genius. Bettina had toured her heavily in Bible Belt country, and sales had soared, because Bettina had included a cute young male stripper on the tour. She’d had the stripper wear a short white tunic and gaze with impartial love at the ladies while Eunice read from
Bed
. During the book-signing session afterward, the muscular angel was especially attentive to Eunice, fussing over her, whispering to her, all of it stage-managed by Bettina, to give the impression of what angels actually did for people. Turnouts for the readings had been high, and the angel was now making promotional visits on his own to shopping malls. Gadson had signed him up to write his autobiography, tentatively titled
Tarnished Wings
.

“Hal Jam is here,” said Bettina to Eunice excitedly. “I was afraid he wouldn’t come.”

“That man is a saint,” said the angel writer.

“Can we go quite that far?” asked Bettina.

“He’s above it all, Bettina. You told me yourself he doesn’t care about publicity.”

Bettina had to admit this was true, to her great puzzlement. She’d known writers who were indifferent to politics and even to sex, but she’d never met one who was indifferent to publicity.

Eunice tilted her head back slightly and closed her eyes. “It happens the minute Hal Jam appears. I’m hearing my angel.”

“What’s he saying?” asked Bettina with real interest. She desperately wished she had an angel but she knew she’d never qualify. She felt like the remains of a broken travel agency, had sent too many people off on trips peddling books. Her eyes swiveled to the door. “That’s Zou Zou Sharr walking in. Do you know her? She’s a killer Hollywood agent.”

“I used to do my hair that shade of red,” said Eunice. “I used to do a
lot
of people’s hair that shade.”

Bettina zipped across the room and slipped her arm through the bear’s. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. If he likes your work it could help enormously.”

She introduced him to Kenneth Penrod, professor of English at Columbia and the author of
The Decline of Literature
. Penrod found the bear unusually taciturn and liked it. Penrod waited, wineglass in hand, as the bear struggled to express what was on his mind, glancing in the direction of Washington Square Park with haunted eyes. Finally the bear said, very slowly, “I’ve heard the howling of the dogs.”

The depth of feeling in the bear’s voice was not the idle stuff Penrod generally heard at functions like this. “I know exactly what you mean,” answered Penrod. “Our literary values are being totally corrupted by men like Ramsbotham over there.” He pointed to the other prominent critic in the room, Samuel Ramsbotham of NYU, whose book
The Literary Revolution
had been outselling
Penrod’s two to one. “Dogs? You’re absolutely right. They’re howling at our door.”

The bear’s gaze shot toward the door of the loft, and the ridge of muscle at his neck swelled. “I hate dogs.”

“There’s always one or two who show up, usually with an entourage of sycophants.” Penrod cast another disdainful glance toward Ramsbotham.

The bear’s neck muscles quivered. “I’ll tear them apart.”

“I hope you do.” Penrod was impressed. This man Jam lived his beliefs. So rare. So very, very rare. “I’m eager to read your novel, of course. I’ve heard a great deal about it already from Bettina and Elliot.”

The bear nodded, but his eyes kept returning to the door, and then to the window. His indifference to talking about his own book further impressed Penrod. He’s not consumed by ambition, reflected the critic. He’s concerned, as I am, about the crisis in literature. “I think you might get something out of my
Decline
,” said Penrod. “I’ll have the publisher send you a copy. It’s pioneer work, of course, but there are
some
points with which you’ll be in sympathy.”

“How are you two getting on?” asked Bettina, returning in a whirlwind and spilling champagne into Penrod’s vest pocket, where it gave a good soaking to his heirloom pocket watch.

“Oh god, Ken, I’m sorry,” said Bettina, trying to soak up the spilled champagne with her scarf.

“Quite all right, Bettina,” said Penrod. “You’ve been spilling things on me for years. I look upon it as something of a ritual.”

The bear went to the window of the loft, looking anxiously in the direction of Washington Square, through which he could never walk again. “Dogs,” he said to himself.

“What about them?” asked Gadson, coming up alongside him.

The bear struggled to say more, but couldn’t express the nuances of a hostility that was ancient. “Talking is hard.”

“I know,” said Gadson. “I was three years old before I spoke a single word. I had the words in my head, but I was making sure of my listeners.” They moved at the edge of the crowd, along a library wall that was lined with Gadson’s collection of first editions. “Books were always my best friends. As I’m sure they were yours. You were raised in a rural area, and I don’t suppose you saw many people.”

“I saw a man through a window.”

Gadson was at a loss. “And did you get to know him?”

“I hung around,” replied the bear, trying to express his memory of the time, because human beings did that,
they talked about things that’d happened to them. The past is unimportant to a bear, but he wanted to become human, so he attempted to describe it. “He had something I wanted.”

Gadson wondered: Was Jam’s peculiar shyness simply a matter of him not being able to come out of the closet? He drew Jam to the end of the room, near a painted screen that framed the doorway, the screen depicting two Japanese sailors and another man, in shadow, along a waterfront.

“I wanted his meat,” said the bear. “He left it around.”

“You wanted … his meat?”

“I couldn’t help it.”

“And?”

“I grabbed it.”

Gadson suddenly saw it all, a warm summer afternoon, and the unknown man stripped to the waist, possibly tossing hay around, sinews rippling. It sounded idyllic.

“Meat,” repeated the bear, remembering more clearly the hunk of venison he’d romped off with. “Sweet buck meat.”

“How frankly you put it, Hal.”

The bear’s long tongue came out and lapped over his snout. “Tasty.”

“Hal, my dear friend, if you ever feel the need of another … hunk of meat …”

The bear was pleased by the seriousness with which his editor treated the subject of meat. He put his paw on Elliot’s shoulder. “You understand.”

“Oh, I do, Hal, I do. I understand completely.” This unexpected kinship with Jam gave Gadson a warm glow. They’d risked intimacy and had found a new footing. “But will you ever write about this? Because with your touch, it could be beautiful. It could be your next book.”

“The next book …” The bear’s forehead creased in a frown.

“Don’t force it, Hal. It’ll come.”

“I can’t find it.”

“It could begin with your seeing that man of yours through the window. We need a book like that, Hal. Just think if Hemingway had told us what his sex life was really like.”

Zou Zou Sharr appeared, coming hesitantly toward them. There were other people in this room she should be chatting up, but she only wanted to be with Hal. Gadson stretched out his hand to her, and she stepped under a star-shaped lamp with them, its beams of light falling onto her power hair. “How are you, Elliot?” she asked, but her eyes were on Jam’s, looking for a sign of his affection.

The bear sniffed the female. It was the female he’d
rutted with, which meant she was his Hollywood agent who’d sold his book for a million and a half dollars. He smelled her desire. Very good stuff, he said to himself. Light. Exquisite. Indirect. Not the heavy, knockout odor you get from female bears, who leave their scent hanging in thick clouds in the woodland corridors. It shocked him to remember that his heart used to race when he encountered that coarse smell; one whiff of it and he’d start to search frantically around for the direction it was coming from, ready to kick the ass of any other male who was following it too. Human females laid their rutting scent down so much more subtly, spraying other scents on top to make it harder to identify. And then covering it all with frilly panties. That was evolution. Lady bears had such a long way to go they’d probably never be wearing frilly panties.

“I must leave you two for awhile,” said Gadson with a glance toward newly arriving guests.

“Hal, I’ve missed you so terribly,” said Zou Zou as soon as Gadson withdrew. She pressed herself against Jam. The incredible power of his lovemaking, she said to herself, has drawn me across the continent. That and several deals which I need for my retirement, I mustn’t forget the deals, I should be working the room, but god I can’t stay away from this
man
.

The bear’s back was tired. He wished he were home watching cartoons. He would make his polite good-byes
now, and go. He put out his hand to the female. “Well,” he said, “good-bye.”

“Hal, please, you can’t say that.”

“I can’t?”

“No, you simply can’t.”

Confused, he tried another of the forms of good-bye he’d learned. “How about—up your ass?”

Zou Zou was momentarily taken aback by his suggestion, then gave a sudden squeeze to his paw. “If it’s what you want, darling.”

The bear turned and walked away, with Zou Zou walking beside him. “Are we going?” she asked. “Right now?”

“You bet,” said the bear. He walked toward the door of the loft, a movement that was quickly noted by Gadson and Bettina.

“Well,” said Gadson, “she beat me to it.”

“It wouldn’t have worked for you, Elliot,” said Bettina. “He’s not
that way
.”

“Great sportsmen are
all
a little that way, dear.”

“Penrod likes him.”

“Well, Penrod’s
certainly
that way.” Gadson hurried to say good-bye to his writer, joining him and Zou Zou in the hallway. “Good night, Hal, let’s do lunch this week.”

“Sure,” said the bear, who liked the way humans made plans to eat together, in the certain knowledge that food would be there when they arrived. He descended the
stairs, thinking about it, how they had food everywhere, waiting. Bears could not do this.

“Such a crisp, cold evening,” said Zou Zou as they stepped onto the sidewalk. “Can we walk a little?”

The bear sniffed the air for dogs, but there were none in the immediate vicinity. There was dogshit around, of course. There was dogshit all over Manhattan. Dogshit was the dominant smell in the city. Dogs had staked a very large claim in the human world with their crap. He understood that it was necessary for reference purposes, but they’d carried it too far.

Zou Zou was taking sidelong glances at him as they walked, her heart still waiting for a real acknowledgment from him. “It’s been too long,” she said, trying to prod him a little. “And too far. At nights I wake up staggered by the physical distance between us.”

The bear nodded with only vague understanding and still vaguer interest. Events mattered if they hit him in the face. Things at any distance lacked reality. What was real at the moment was his hunger. He shouldn’t have left the party without eating his fill; now he’d have to eat on the move, and there weren’t any restaurants on this block. Maybe he could catch a rat. Or even a handful of ants, which had a nice, vinegary flavor.