The Cry of the Sloth (3 page)

Since that day I have received reports that Elaine is “getting even” with Mama, tormenting her in numerous aggravating ways. I recognize that some of Mama’s complaints are evident exaggerations. None of us think it plausible that Elaine has let hundreds of rats loose in Mama’s room. And even if she had, how could she have made them disappear in the morning? But still, I think we cannot be too careful where fragile old people are concerned. I am not at this time demanding the dismissal of Mrs. Robinson. I ask merely that you keep an eye peeled and make
qui vive
your motto.

With filial concern,

A. Whittaker

¶

Dear Vikki,

I’ve read your latest batch, only wish I could print all eight of them. Since that ain’t possible, I want to use “Sally at the Pump,” “Calypso,” and “Needles and Pins.” Lots of terrific stuff in the mailbox lately, stuff I just couldn’t turn down. As a result, the mag is way overbooked and I can’t work yours in before next summer, at the earliest. Sorry about that and I promise and hope to die no hard feelings here should you want to try someplace else. Overbooked and underfunded—that’s it in a nutshell. The result of the last mail appeal was, frankly, disappointing in the extreme. I know everybody is thoroughly fed up by now with my pleas for handouts, so I’m all the more grateful to the handful of loyalists like you and Chumley and a few others who have stuck by me over the years. I’ve put so much blood and treasure into the magazine, when it hits a rough patch I get just frantic. With the two of you gone, and Jolie gone, I’m more isolated than ever down here. The fact is I’m unspeakably lonely at times. Things have gotten much worse between me and Fran and the swarm of toadies at
The Art News
. We don’t even
pretend
anymore. When I cross one of them in the street, he or she (in fact, it’s always she) looks the other direction. I love the way their ponytails flick to the side when they jerk their heads around so as not to look at me. I usually send a raspberry after them when they do that. Sometimes they answer by swinging their hips in an exaggerated manner as they stump off, a female gesture that, I must confess, I have never understood. Do you? All this would be just laughable if it were not so infuriating. And of course, aside from not inviting me to their parties, thank God for that, they’re doing everything in their power to prevent my symposium project from ever getting off the ground. I have it on good authority that Fran referred to it at an Arts Council Grant Committee meeting as “Andy’s aberration”—she’s going to make damn sure I don’t get one red penny from them. The
Rapid Falls Current
ran an article last week on the local scene. They didn’t even bother to contact me. I’d love to just forget the whole business, take a couple of weeks off, and drive up and visit you two. But with money this tight, plus a million things to do here, there’s no way I can swing it. I’m forty-three years old. I’m not supposed to be doing this. Give Chumley a punch in the snout from me, and tell him to send me some photos of the stuff he’s doing.

Missing you both,

Andy

¶

Dear Mr. Freewinder,

Yes, I did receive your earlier letter, and I want you to know that we are, as you suggested, taking vigorous steps, that I personally am taking them. Indeed, things are happening even as I write. This may not be apparent, since they are happening mostly behind the scenes, so to speak, and in small increments, little bits at a time, which are nevertheless accumulating. It is true that The Whittaker Company has hit a rough patch. The problem can be traced to an unusually long run of low-quality tenants, and not to my casual management style, as you describe it. I am working vigorously to root those low-quality ones out and to get better-quality ones in. As you can well imagine, this is difficult to bring off as long as the poor-quality ones are still there, sitting on the steps in their undershirts. It will take time. We are upgrading at every turn. If you can persuade American Midlands to suspend the loan repayments for a few months, you will all be pleasantly surprised.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

The Whittaker Company

¶

Dear Mr. Goodall,

Thanks for letting us read your collection of poems “Swinging the Mattock.” After careful consideration, we have reluctantly concluded that the work does not meet our needs at this time.

Andrew Whittaker, Editor

¶

If I could see myself clearly for one moment; even in the mirror. One day I behold there an imposing man of considerable dignity. He ought to sport a gray fedora, but I don’t have one for him. Of course he would not wear a hat indoors anyway, unless he happened to be a policeman. If he were a policeman, it would be some kind of detective, homicide probably. I love the way he shrugs. They say, “we love his slow shrug.” That shrug is a perfect mingling of confidence and disdain, with just a smidgen of despair. He is not the kind of man to use a phrase like “smidgen of despair,” though. He would not say “smidgen” or “despair,” and certainly not both together. What if he wanted to put a little something in something? He wouldn’t cook, so it couldn’t be salt, though if he did he would say “dash.”

And sometimes I see a different man, one who is not imposing but lumbering, bloated; I want to say he is
receding
. I notice how his cheeks puff out. He doesn’t seem to have a definite shape, or the shape has blurred edges. He is not clever with his hands, I am sure of that. He is always breaking things, like lockets that people have asked him to fix. He snaps the delicate gold chain, and the locket slips off and gets lost down a heat vent; it contains her only picture of her grandmother. His piano teacher called him sausage fingers. He doesn’t have a hat either, though he ought to wear one, because his hair is thinning; under the fluorescent light in the room with the mirror his scalp is blue-gray and scaly. In the case of the first man, words like “adamantine” and “steely” come to mind. In the case of the second, the words are “gooey,” or maybe “runny” and “amorphous.” His—or their—jaw “juts” on the one hand, “hangs” on the other. A man without qualities. I remember Jolie saying she would never marry anybody as
ambiguous
as I am.

¶

Dear Dahlberg,

A note to let you know that the larcenous literary postman who you feared had made off with your MS has apparently had a change of heart. It arrived this afternoon, battered but intact. I had not expected anything quite so
huge
; we might have to spread it out over several numbers. I can’t look at it now, as I’m on my way out. Just want you to know I have it and am looking forward to reading it.

Andy

¶

PLACE ALL TRASH IN METAL RECEPTACLES LOCATED AT THE BACK OF THE BUILDING

¶

Dear Mr. Stumphill,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to read your work. The story has some fine parts, though it is much too long, not just for our magazine but for most readers not familiar with apiculture. The bees have a lot of personality, but there are too many of them and their names are confusing. The murder, while gruesome, is not plausible, since how could the bees know which brother had taken the shirt? Bob Curry lives up your way. If you run into him, transmit my greetings.

Sincerely,

A. Whittaker, Editor

¶

Dear Sirs,

This morning I woke to discover that my telephone is no longer making a friendly buzzing sound when I press it to my ear. It makes no sound at all, and that is a VERY BAD THING. I am aware of the sum I owe you, I do not dispute the legitimacy of your case. Whenever I could I have sent little sums which were more than pocket change. I have showed good faith. I have a business to run. It may not look like a business to you, but it is one to me. If it is not advertised in the yellow pages that is only because I could not AFFORD to advertise it in the yellow pages. You should have thought of that. I explained to Mrs. Slippert in person that if she cut off my phone I would probably NEVER be in a position to pay you. That was an appeal to your self-interest, and the fact that it had no effect rebounds to your credit. So now I appeal to your heart. I am on my knees. This is painful to my pride. PLEASE restore my service. Six more months and I will pay you in full. You have my word on that.

Very sincerely,

Andrew W. Whittaker

¶

DO NOT THROW CIGARETTE BUTTS IN FLOWER POTS

¶

Dear Fern Moss,

After careful consideration the staff at
Soap
has reluctantly concluded that your poems are not a good fit for us at this time. However, I don’t feel comfortable returning them to you with only a rejection slip for company. While we endeavor to make these rejections as short and painless as possible, we were all young writers once and know from personal experience the deep wounds they can cause, wounds which in some cases fester for years unseen, only to burst drunkenly forth at someone’s publication party later. Your work has a bold freshness I would hate to see squelched by a thoughtless act of ours.

I want to say right off the bat that I am surprised Mr. Crawford recommended a journal like
Soap
as the best place for you to start, though that is certainly testimony to his high opinion of your efforts. Am I wrong in assuming that you have in fact never examined a copy of our publication? Frankly, I fear you would find most of the things we publish quite depressing, if not downright baffling. Some of it you might find offensive. This of course, while regrettable, cannot be helped.

That said, I consider your series “Self Portrait in Five” to be exceptional work for someone so young. Mr. Crawford is certainly right that it has “sparkle,” and you deserve all the A’s he can give you. While the poems are not the sort of thing
Soap
normally publishes, they have genuine poetic energy and real charm. I believe the ones that mention horses would have a good chance of acceptance at
Corral
or
American Pony
. My dentist carries both magazines, and I have noticed they regularly publish verse on equine themes, most of it inferior to yours. And there is nothing wrong with starting out small. You make a reputation there and then you move on. That’s how we all did it.

I am only too aware how painful it is to have one’s work rejected. It is most painful the first time it happens, before one has acquired the requisite carapace of cynicism. For that reason I want to insist that I see genuine potential in your work. I am truly sorry that we can’t use your submission this time. We will of course be happy to consider your work in the future, though I recommend you familiarize yourself with the sort of writing we publish before sending along anything else.

Best wishes,

A. Whittaker, Editor at
Soap

¶

Egan Phillips stood on the front porch looking out over the turgid water of Lake Michigan. A yellow cardigan caused him to stand out against the grayness of the day and to be noticed by a woman on a bicycle. She biked this way every day to take milk to an old woman, biked past this house. In fact, she had biked past it from time to time since she was a child, when she had also driven past it with her father on a tractor. He let her ride on the tractor when he thought her mother would not find out. This was a secret between them. She was surprised to see someone standing on the porch, since the house was scarcely better than a ruin. Something about the figure in the yellow cardigan, something dark, caused her to put out her feet, and sliding them on the gravel on the roadside, to come to a complete halt in front of the house, though safely on the opposite side of the road, for she did not know what the figure might portend. The man on the porch noticed how she stopped by sliding her feet on the gravel, and it reminded him of someone long ago. The wind was blowing yellow strands of blond hair across her face. Now this girl, silhouetted against the heaving breast of the tumid lake, hallooed in his direction.

¶

To All Tenants:

As specified in your contracts, rent is due on the first business day of each month. This means it is due
in my office
on that day. Being somewhere in the postal system does not count. Beginning August 1, a surcharge of two dollars ($2.00) will be added to the subsequent month’s rent for
each day
your rent is late.

The Management

¶

Dear Willy,

I count on my fingers, can it really have been eleven years? We promised to keep in touch, and yet … I suppose even in California you now and then get wind of our doings back here, things that people in your area would be interested in if they could get over certain regional myopias of their own. But of course you know that. I snap up your books the day they appear. Well, “snap up” is probably not the word, since they don’t exactly “appear” here; I have to order them from New York, which I do the moment I learn a new one is out, which is sometimes months later. And now and then I catch a review of one of them in some small periodical. I myself wrote a very positive little essay on your third novel for
The Glass Stopper
—an interesting little mag while it lasted. Unfortunately the guy who was putting it out killed himself before the issue containing my article could appear; he jumped off the roof of a parking garage in front of a bus. Otherwise I would have sent it on to you. In that essay I argued that
Cadillac Waltz,
Buttocks,
and especially
Elevator Ping-Pong Raga
belong right up there with Simon Kershmeyer’s best stuff. I can probably dig up a carbon if you are interested. Each time I see a favorable mention of your work I experience a salience of warm pleasure at the spectacle of an old friend doing well, a pleasure mingled, I confess, with a small measure of personal satisfaction. And why should it not be? It was I after all who led our little group in those experiments which you especially have honed to such perfection. I like to think of myself as the spark that lit the conflagration. By the same token, I am thoroughly exasperated by the denigration of your last novel in the
New York Times
, the
New Yorker
,
Harper’s
, the
Saturday Review
, etc., especially when I consider the deference those same people pay to that buffoon Marcus Quiller, from whom oddly enough I received a card just last week. I’m happy to report that he is as he was: smug, affable, and looking out for Number One.