The Cry of the Sloth (10 page)

On a practical level, should you decide to continue with this project, I suggest you get a human assistant to operate the camera for you. It would be nice if all the photographs were at the level of the one with you straddling the porch railing. Your expression in that one is anything but sour. “Alluring” is the better word. But of course you know that. You might send some of the less “racy” poems to your local newspaper. Small-town weeklies, always desperate for copy, are sometimes quite welcoming to local artists.

Best wishes and good look,

Andy Whittaker,

Editor at
Soap

¶

Dear Maria,

Please accept my heartfelt apologies for what happened last week. When you didn’t show up on Tuesday, it finally dawned on me that you are truly offended. When I called you into the room, I had been sitting at my desk writing since before dawn and I had completely forgotten that I was not wearing any clothes. You probably find that difficult to believe, since I know you come from a culture in which people like to stay buttoned up, even at their desks probably, or zipped up, if that is what they have. But up here, especially in one’s own house, it is easy to forget. I suppose I made it worse by laughing, for which I am also sorry. I hope you will come back.

Mr. Whittaker

¶

Dear Jolie,

Here’s a postcard showing the new shopping center. I am writing it in the living room, which is piled high with boxes and awash in the blue light of tarps. I am very happy with the light, though not with the shopping center or the boxes. The radio sits on a stack of boxes beside me, and I switched it on a moment ago in the crazy outside hope of hearing Billie Holiday sing “Am I Blue.” I told myself that if this were actually to happen it would mean the world is all right. Of course, what I got instead was a hideous blast of rock and roll.

Much love,

Andy

¶

To the Editor:

Enough! For many years the
Current
has honed a well-deserved reputation for ignorance and Philistinism, but your most recent foray into the field of letters takes the cake. While your article (“Our City Shaking and Moving”) purports to be a “literary roundup” of “our best writers and where to read them,” what we really get is a fawning puff piece on
The Art News
, which your reporter describes as “irreverent” and “lively.” To which I say, “lively my keister!” It is a well-known fact that
The Art News
is nothing more than the in-house journal for a tiny clique of very conventional, very middle-class writers and painters, most of them ladies. “Semi-literate rag” would be a too charitable description of that publication. This reader would like to object that, since the article is explicitly presented as a “roundup,” it is under some obligation to rope in
all
the cows, including, I concede, such spavined, mange-stricken little doggies as
The Art News
. But
does
it bring them all in? It does not. For example, how many times does the article mention Andrew Whittaker’s
Soap
? The astonishing answer is
not even once
. Not one small mention of a publication that is without doubt the most imposing literary venue in our state, publishing pioneers like Adolphus Stepwell, E. Sterling Macaw, and Marsha Beddoes-Varlinsky. Have your readers heard of any of those writers? Probably not, and this is precisely why we need people like Andrew Whittaker, our one local writer whose name might elicit something other than “huh?” on the sidewalks of Madison or Ann Arbor. For ten years Whittaker has gone about his work, without remuneration, sustained by the conviction that he is serving a higher purpose, oblivious to the winks and snickers raining upon him from, among other places, the pages of your newspaper. Now, as if goaded by his continued indifference, you see fit to pepper him with silence. How loathsome!

Sincerely,

Warden Hawktiter, MD

¶

Dear Anita,

I’ve not been able to get your letter out of my thoughts. I sit down to work at my novel, and I find myself in imaginary conversation with you. It’s O.K. that you want to have “not the slightest whiff” of me in the future. I am not going to fly to Ithaca and howl on your doormat. But I am astonished at your distortions of the past. While it might not meet the current demands of your
amour propre,
it is still OUR past and not yours to fiddle around with. I was amazed that you could write the following: “As far as I am concerned,
nothing
happened during that weekend to make me want to reminisce now. I don’t recall damp sheets or lurid lighting on my ‘semaphores’ (God, you’re awful!). What I remember is a very young and very frightened girl trapped in a squalid motel room with a bullying neurotic.” You
frightened
? Isn’t “frolicsome” the word you want?
Whose
idea was the wicker basket? I’m sorry to be crude about this, but the person I was with in that “squalid room” was a rambunctious bawdy athletic
broad
. It’s obvious you meant your letter to be as hurtful as possible. And it was. How could you bring yourself to call my reminiscences “erotic treacle”? I am not going to forgive you for that.

Andy

¶

Dear Jolie,

Last Friday night I was lying in bed, still awake, when two firemen hammered on the door to tell me the Spalding Street building had burned to the ground. It had happened earlier that afternoon, but it took them till almost midnight to notify me, because I don’t have a telephone. We are fortunate that no one was in the building at the time; I don’t know what would happen if we had a lot of grieved relatives suing. The insurance money, such as it is, will all go to the bank, so don’t imagine that a big wad is going to sail through your mail slot. You of course hated the building for no good reason, just because you don’t like asbestos siding. Still, its demise means your next check is going to be smaller. I hope you are not going to argue about this. If you don’t believe me, send Fender out to look at the ashes.

I haven’t slept since then, or at any rate that’s how it feels to me, though I must have dozed off occasionally, twenty winks, if not forty. How else could I still be functioning even at the modest level at which I am functioning? I must be sleeping without knowing it, though I can’t imagine when it occurs. Probably not in bed at night, since that’s when I am most acutely conscious of being awake. I spend a lot of time looking at television. I suppose I might be sleeping then. By evening I am terribly tired. I am happy to be tired, thinking that now at last I’ll sleep. I drag myself up the steps and climb into bed. I stretch myself out like a corpse, and
pop
go the eyelids. It’s horrible. I can almost hear the noise the lids make as they slam up against the roof of my eye sockets. At the same time I feel my body going rigid, my fingers and toes splay, the muscles in my neck bulge. I lie like that for hours, until I can’t stand it any longer, and then I get up and wander around the house, the empty, absolutely silent house, surrounded by the screams of crickets. At those times I wish I had a telephone so I could call somebody up and yell at them.

I don’t care about the Spalding Street building, as a building, any more than you do. But its loss means that another trickle of income has been staunched, and I’m that much closer to complete bankruptcy. I don’t see why you can’t get a real job, at least until I can put things here back on their feet. The money I send you would just about do it. You can be an actress next year. Why can’t you be something else this year? After all, you already know how to type. I am struggling. I have several projects, but they all need time to bear fruit. I am working on a new novel, one I have been thinking about for a while, aimed at a wider public this time. I don’t see why I can’t do it without compromising my principles.

Yes, I did have a maid. She was coming once a week, and she hardly stayed long enough to make even a small dent in the mess, which is really like a nation of its own. I had a maid not because I had money to throw away but because I am now considered a charity case. I am considered this by people who ought to know, who have to deal professionally, on a daily basis, with cases like that, like mine. I let her go because I could no longer afford the sandwiches she ate for lunch. After poking around in the mess for an hour or so, while making little complaining noises in her native tongue, she would go home or back to church or wherever they go, and I would open the refrigerator and discover she had eaten my supper. I have to drink the cheapest whiskey now, and I never have wine. I tried to get the firemen to come in and have a drink with me. Do you ever have the thought that we might get back together when all this is over?

Love,

Andy

p.s. I don’t know what I mean by “all this.”

¶

Dear Fern,

I had not expected to hear back from you so soon. It is really too bad you were able to dig up only one old issue of the magazine, and too bad it had to be that one. Your obviously tongue-in-cheek assertion that you were “horribly shocked” suggests to me that you were
in fact
a little bit shocked. You can’t say I didn’t warn you! Even so, I would not have picked an issue containing Nadine’s “Crotch Poems” as the best introduction to the sort of writing we want. Nadine is quite the exception. And it’s too bad the same issue also contains my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer.” I do hope you understand that this piece was meant as a satire of a certain type of person, a lonely, aging, and desperate “loser” (to use a really nasty expression). It is, of course, a literary fabrication, a piece of fiction, and not a description of the sort of things I personally think about while I am in the tub. I insist on this point because of your remark that I am a “funny man.” To give you a more rounded picture of what we are all about, I enclose some other back issues.

Your poetry just keeps getting better—stronger, more confident, and edgier. Really amazing progress. I was, quite sincerely, astonished by some of them, in particular “Banjo, Bozo” and “The Circus Tent of Sex.” I’d like to include those two in our April issue. This is bold stuff from someone your age, and it’s sure to make some people uncomfortable when they find out just how young you are. But I suppose you’ve figured out by now that we don’t pull punches at
Soap
.

I’m relieved you did not take amiss my bit of advice about the self-timer. At least I hope you didn’t, and that you are joking when you accuse me of saying you look like a “sour person”? You know I was perfectly sincere in my remarks about your alluring aspects. Why wouldn’t I be?

I observe, in closing, that the poem “To an Old Writer” carries a dedication to me. I am flattered, and will print that one too, space permitting. I do, however, have a small bone to pick here: the stanza in which you imagine my “care-furrowed face” looking over your shoulder while you are writing suggests to me that you think I am
old
. While it’s true that I am an old hand at the writing game, I am not at all old in the doddering sense. If you and I were to stroll down a street together, for example, no one could mistake you for my daughter! And despite those muscled gams of yours, I imagine you’d find me more than a match on a tennis court, were we ever to meet on one.

Yours truly,

Andy

¶

Mr. Fontini—

I never suggested Archimedes or anyone else was taking baths with Mrs. Fontini, which, if you think about it, would scarcely be possible for anyone larger than a spaniel. And no, I don’t know his first name. Instead of worrying about the “Greek shit” in your bathtub, you should worry about sending me the money you owe. Forthwith. Or I go to court.

Andrew Whittaker

The Whittaker Company

¶

Dear Mr. Carmichael,

I have your letter telling me of Mama’s death. Of course, that death was not a surprise. In life’s dreary cavalcade of adjectives, “dead” does seem to follow hard on “old” with mournful regularity. Have you ever thought of it that way? So it was not, as I said, a surprise, and neither was it a jolt in the usual I-have-to-sit-down sort of way, but it was a little shock. I was shocked (slightly) not that she was dead—as remarked above, she was old, etc.—but at how little I cared. It was not that I didn’t give a damn, I didn’t give an
anything
. You will say that I am experiencing that numbness which always precedes grief—I can almost hear you saying it, almost see that peculiarly unpleasant pursing thing you do with your lips—but you are wrong. I don’t feel in the least numb. If anything I feel a whiff giddy. Two days later, and I catch myself smiling when I think of it, which is not very often. I think, “Mama has popped off,” and I grin.

Now back to the pursing thing. I suppose you feel this puckering bit adds gravitas to your mien, renders it harmonious with solemn phrases like “I regret that your dear mother has passed away.” I would like to believe you are doing it in order to suppress the giggles, but I know that is a long shot. You have been kind to Mama and me, so I think I should tell you that you are not fooling anyone. When someone begins a sentence with “I regret,” I always want to say “Oh, pooh!” I suppose you think that is very cynical of me. Why don’t you think instead that it is very
sincere
of me? After all, the distance between the two is no wider than a cat’s whisker.

Though I have made efforts to conceal it (for the sake of other people really, who would otherwise find my presence uncomfortable), I did not much care for Mama. She was a stupid, disagreeable, selfish woman. She was an awful snob as well. And now she is gone. What a mystery life and death are. How shall we ever get to the bottom of it? Please do not send me any of her personal belongings except jewelry. As for burial or cremation, do whichever is least expensive.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Dear Jolie,

Mama’s dead. I feel utterly unbereft. And yet I can’t stop thinking of her. Little things, like her passion for the 1812 Overture and the hideous yellow pants she wore to play golf.

I got the fire inspector’s report today. It was arson, as I thought from the beginning. It seems the fire started in four different places at more or less the same time. Those fellows are quite cunning, the way they can go through a pile of charred wood and brick and come up with a plausible story. If I could go through the ruins of my life and come up with a plausible story, we’d be in business. Furthermore the whole Brud family has disappeared. I can see that big homely woman striding through the house with a blowtorch, blasting a spot here, a spot there, while the little toad-like husband hops behind her croaking, “Darling, are you sure this is a good idea?” I’ve come to expect very little of people, but this is a family that I went out of my way to be kind to. The clouds of ingratitude rain fire upon us. Is that it?