The Cry of the Sloth (9 page)

At a crowded press conference in a downtown hotel, Andrew Whittaker, editor and publisher of
Soap
and one of the coordinators for the event, announced that the theme for this year’s festival will be “Inside the Outside.” Mr. Whittaker explained: “We want to increase the dialogue between contemporary cutting-edge writers and the general public, to try and bring an end to the hostility and suspicion prevalent on both sides. It’s a two-way street.” At another point he described the conflict as a “big misunderstanding” and a “nothing burger.”

Mr. Whittaker says he expects this year’s event to draw “three dozen plus” writers and poets from across the nation and Europe. Unlike other literary festivals, which, according to Whittaker, have been “proliferating like fleas” in small cities around the country, none of the writers showcased at the Soap Festival will be publicity-hungry wannabes. “I’ll personally see to that,” he said. He declined to name the wannabes, saying only that “they know who they are.” A tall burly man, he seemed to be at home in front of the jostling crowd of journalists, joking at times with a young female reporter who appeared thoroughly charmed by his wit and exuberance. While he declined to give a firm figure concerning the number of visitors expected, when pressed he said he would “not be surprised” to see “twelve or thirteen thousand” over the five days of the festival, adding “there are going to be traffic problems for sure.”

In addition to attending (for a small fee) any of numerous workshops, lectures, readings, and book signings, visitors will be able to stroll freely about in what Whittaker calls a “county-fair atmosphere,” with live music, free balloons, and stalls selling book-related novelties and souvenirs.

Saturday will bring the potluck “Picnic in the Park” to which the general public is invited, followed by a firework display after sunset. Sunday, the fifth and final day, will witness the festival’s culminating event: the presentation by Mr. Whittaker of The Soap Lifetime Achievement Award to a literary figure of world renown, followed by a formal dinner and dance at the sumptuous Coolidge Ballroom. Whittaker declined to reveal the name of the recipient of this year’s award, saying cryptically, “You’ll find out when the little bird sings.” He declined to say what bird he was referring to. The award itself will be a framed photograph of Marilyn Monroe in a bubble bath. Whittaker described the photo as “about the size of a breakfast tray.”

¶

Maria,

Don’t bother cleaning upstairs. I have a touch of something and have decided to stay in bed. Also, please do not run the vacuum. There’s a broom in the basement closet. Do the best you can. I apologize for the mess in the bathroom. You may leave that if it seems too much. Do not throw out any bottles that still have something in them. Gracias

¶

Dear Jolie,

What do you think of this?

I am standing in a street, looking up at the door of a brick building, a rundown apartment house or tenement of some kind. Some of the windowpanes have been knocked out and replaced by pieces of brown cardboard. Several metal trashcans, bent and overflowing with garbage, are lined up at the curb. They look fake, like trashcans in a comic book, put there to show that this is “a place of poverty.” I have the feeling of having “arrived at last” at the end of a long search for just this building. Lifting my feet with difficulty—they feel weighted with lead—I climb the several steps to the door. The wood around the latch is scarred and splintered, as if someone had tried to break in. I expect it to be locked and am surprised when it opens to a gentle push, as of its own accord.

I step directly into a large low-ceilinged room, like a church basement. The walls are yellow, and the light in the room is oddly yellow as well. It occurs to me, in the dream, that this color is commonly referred to as “urinous,” a word that, in the dream, I find comical. The air is thick, almost liquid. On a green sofa in the center of the room sits a very small man, a midget or a dwarf. He is watching television on a tiny black-and-white set that sits on a straight-backed chair in front of the sofa. There is no other furniture in the room. The dwarf, or midget, is middle-aged, broad-shouldered and stocky, with a flaccid, characterless face. He is neatly dressed in a dark pinstriped suit, a bow tie, and a bowler hat. I’m aware that he has escaped from a circus, and that I’m supposed to capture him and take him back there. I know this is an “important task,” and the prospect of failure fills me with anxiety.

The dwarf takes no notice of me when I enter, but goes on watching the television and laughing loudly. He even laughs at the ads. I am wondering how to get his attention, when suddenly he glances up—I think he has heard my thoughts—and pats the sofa cushion next to him. I understand he wants me to sit and watch television with him. I shake my head no. At the same time I hold up a short piece of rope. He sees it, and his eyes widen in a grotesque parody of fear. Then he sticks his tongue out at me, slithers off the sofa, snatches up the little TV set, and holding it in the crook of one arm, the cord and plug trailing on the floor behind him, scampers into another room. I’m astonished at how fast he can move, his short legs whirling in a blur beneath him like a figure in a cartoon. I struggle after him, my own feet still terribly heavy, into what looks like a room in a cheap hotel. I feel as if I’m swimming in the thick urinous air, and I move my arms like a swimmer. I know he’s hiding in the room somewhere. I search under the bed, in all the drawers, behind the window curtains, even back of a cracked mirror on the dresser. Finally, I catch sight of the television’s cord protruding like a rat’s tail beneath a door. I yank the door open and spy him crouching at the back of a deep closet. He’s fiddling with the knobs on his TV, which sits propped on a pile of women’s shoes in front of him. I drag him, giggling, out by his feet. I’m trying to stuff him head first into a cloth sack when he begins to scream.

I woke up to the whine of a garbage truck in the street. The dream was tenacious, and all day long snatches of it have been breaking in on my thoughts. It had an odor of anxiety clinging to it at first, but that has dissipated finally.

My eyes are not better. Among the things I brought up from the basement were a half-dozen plastic tarps, and I’ve nailed those over the living room windows to cut the glare. The room is now wonderfully blue.

I saw Fran on Monroe Street a few days ago, as I was leaving the bank, and I followed her, forcing her to walk faster and faster until, in evident panic, she ran up the steps of a house and beat with both fists on the door. I passed by without even a glance in her direction, as if I had no idea that she was in front of me. I wonder if she even knew the people in that house.

Love,

Andy

¶

Adam had come to this place to be alone, to be alone and not think, and to wait for his younger brother Saul. He thought of Saul and spit. The spit landed on the floor, where it formed a whitish mound in the dust. He remembered Saul’s mocking eyes, his greasy hair, his crooked goatee, and his snakeskin boots. He lay back on the mattress, fell back heavily upon it. He could hear the wind soughing in the tall grass in the yard. He could hear the ragged cries of the gulls wheeling along the lakeshore, white handkerchiefs turned and tossed by the wind. He thought of other shores, other birds. He thought of other grass …

Flo leaped from the high truck cab to the ground, slammed the door, and walked to the back of the truck. She dropped the rear gate, dragged out the two rough-sawn timbers that served as a ramp, and jammed the bottom ends into the dirt, stamping them firmly in with her foot. She then carefully maneuvered the green John Deere mower down the ramp and onto the gravel at the side of the road. She did not look in the direction of the house, but she could feel his gaze upon her.

For the whump of the tailgate had roused him from the bed where he had lain all morning, while the sun climbed in the sky and the noise of the gulls grew ever more insistent, mingled as it was with the distant barking of a dog. He had been lying with his eyes open staring up at the yellowish water stains on the plaster ceiling. He had managed to pick out the outlines of Britain, along with several stains that looked amazingly like giant cauliflowers, and above the window he had found a large frog with a tennis racquet in its mouth. This last had made him remember the frogs at Wellfleet and the wonderful clay courts they had there. And this had made him remember yet other things: the house, the black Mercedes, and Glenda sunning in the deckchair. He remembered walking out from the house, a drink in his hand. He had stood over her and seen his own reflection in her sunglasses, twice. She had removed the glasses. Her laughing eyes had flickered uneasily. He was reflected in them as well, though strangely small. “When I drove up last night,” he said, “there was a man standing on the deck.”

Now once again he thought of the figure on the deck, a man in an overcoat, and he looked for it among the scattered stains on the ceiling. But the stain was not on the ceiling! He turned in the bed and coughed uneasily. The silhouetted shape had seemed strangely familiar, though wrapped in the large coat it might have been anyone. Anyone! But there had seemed to be something hanging from its mouth, a piece of toast perhaps, or a dark goatee! The figure had turned and strode with rapid strides out onto the beach, to vanish in the rising fog. For reasons obscure even to himself Adam had said nothing to Glenda that night. He had waited for her to speak first, hoping against hope that she would say something to allay his worst fear. She could have said—and he would have believed her, he would have forced himself to believe her—that she had just received a visit from a neighbor, from old half-crippled Carl Billcamp next door or from Susan, their painter friend, who in an overcoat could look like a man, or even that he had imagined it all. Anything, even madness, would have been better than the coiled silence which had lain between them all that day, somnolent and menacing like some dreadful beast that neither dared disturb.

The whump of the tailgate crashed in upon these memories like a fist crashing through a windowpane.

¶

Really, Dahlberg,

You are really overreacting. I don’t need a list of all the sharp things in your store and you should stop thinking about them. You have to find someone you can talk to, someone who can help you put things into perspective. And I don’t think it tasteful of you, at this point, to start referring to
Soap
as a “dingy little magazine.”

Andy

¶

Dear Fern,

I have the new poems and the pictures. The poems are much stronger than the ones you submitted before, occasionally quite striking in the way they capture the particularities of physical sensation—walking barefoot in the dew-sparkled morning and stepping on the “diamond-soft pins” of new-cut grass, squeezing a bar of water-softened soap and feeling “the greasy slithering of the soft white flesh” oozing between your fingers and recalling your dead grandmother making Christmas cookies, her wizened hand in the Crisco, etc. And you have a real gift for animate description, as in the poem about the dying bear. But sorry, still not quite what we are looking for. As for illustrating your earlier “Self Portrait in Five” with photos, I don’t see the point of that. It does nothing for the poem. And anyway,
Soap
doesn’t publish photos—much too expensive—in case that’s what you are thinking.

Let me also say, while I’m being frank, that there seems to me something a trifle “off” about the pictures themselves. Nothing technical like lighting or focus. I am thinking more of the puzzling expression you wear in some of them—a pinched, strained, almost scowling look. I don’t mean to be wounding, and I am not suggesting that you are anything but an attractive young woman (on the contrary), but I would not be exaggerating if I described you as looking “extremely sour” in these pictures. They certainly present a very different and, I have to say, less appealing person than the girl I saw in the snapshots you sent me before. The new photos, it seems to me, advertise bitterness and disappointment, as if
those
were the true themes of your work, even while your poem is saying just the opposite. At first I took them as reflections of your unhappiness at home, but now, having looked at them again, I see another explanation, one that is disappointingly banal, I am afraid, having to do with the camera’s automatic timer.

Consider the shot you pair with the section “Up and Down.” I imagine the following sequence. After setting the timer for, let’s say, a minute and a half, you take a seat on the swing’s little wooden platform and push off. Clutching a rope in each hand, you clamber to your feet. Now you vigorously agitate your pelvic and lumbar portions, if I may put it that way, along with your arms and shoulders. But the swing moves painfully slow; to force it higher you must “pump” with your knees. This would be great fun were it a matter of swinging any old way, just swinging for the hell of it, but you can’t let yourself relax and enjoy the ride, for even as you carry out the fore-described complex set of synchronized movements you are counting down the seconds with chronometric exactitude, perhaps saying to yourself, “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.” Your aim is to regulate the tempo of the swing in such a way that it will begin to fall from the pinnacle of its backward arc at the exact instant the camera’s shutter has been set to open, at which point the wind will lift your dress just as you describe it in the poem. No wonder you look sour! Your camera captures the precise contour of every muscle in your calves and thighs (I am guessing you play a wicked game of tennis), but it also, alas, accentuates all the telltale muscles in your face, which is now stamped with the pinched expression of someone doing difficult sums in her head. Perhaps “sour” is not the word. A better choice might be “desperate.”

I am guessing something similar was going on in the picture you pair with the section beginning “It’s morning, hurry”—a rather nice piece of writing by the way, with the image of the sun “razoring” open the face of the day. In that one, after setting the timer, I picture you jumping into bed and slipping quickly beneath the sheet. And now you must lie there, limbs outstretched, and count down the seconds, listening, perhaps, to the faint hum of the timer a few feet away on its tripod—it sounds like an insect in your ear screaming “18, 17, 16 …”—until at long last the moment arrives to toss the sheet into the air, where it will billow cloudlike above you at the instant of the click. I wonder how many times you tried that one before getting it right!