Foul Matter (17 page)

“He’s just setting the
scene,
Chrissakes. So she looks in and sees this woman, Miss Fleming, who owns the joint:

Karl slid down in his seat. “Come on, C, get to the scary part.”

“Well, but this
is
scary, you think about it. To have everything changed just a
little,
just enough to make you think maybe it’s
her
that’s changed.” Candy sat back, pleased with this analysis. “Okay, I’ll leave out the beauty shop business—”

“Please do.”

“She starts walking.

“What in fuck’s Moorish architecture? I have a hard enough time with modern and Victorian and that crap.”

The writer at the next table was looking their way. Karl was about to say something emphatic—like “Fuck off!”—until he realized the fellow wasn’t really looking at them but through them. He was in his own head. Karl liked that.

“Okay,” said Candy, “I’ll just capsize some of the description; suffice it to say, there’s a
little
something wrong with each place she passes. So she walks along

“
Whoa!
That went right past me. You know you’re dreaming in your own dream?”

“Yeah.”

Karl shifted the toothpick back. “It’s a tautology.”

“A
what?
”

“Tautology. A kind of contradicting yourself. Like that.”

“Like what? Where’re you going with this, K?”

Karl shrugged.

“Well, don’t go there,” said Candy. Then he laughed; this book was really getting to him. He looked over at the writer. “Look there, guy’s still writing away. Only time he’s stopped is to drink his beer.”

“Maybe he’s like that writer in that King story, the Jack Nicholson one. Remember when his wife finds a whole stack of pages beside his typewriter with only one thing typed on them, one line: ‘All work and no play,’ et cetera? Remember that?”

Candy nodded. Swill’s was filling up even more. A little group with punk hair shades—electric blue, eggplant purple—were moving like a small squadron through the room. The girls seemed to be dressed in scarves, no hemlines or sleeves discernible, just a lot of material, bunched here and there or flowing behind. This squadron—three girls, two boys—sported enough body jewelry to open a branch of Robert Lee Morris. They stopped at the table where the writer sat. It was a table for four and the spokesman, a skinny guy with a rhinestone in his eyebrow and a fade haircut, was telling the writer to sit somewhere else because it was a table for four.

“Fuck they think they are?” Candy was incensed.

There were five of them, so they still needed another chair and quickly homed in on the extra one at Candy and Karl’s table. Candy immediately clamped his feet on the seat. Without a word, the skinny guy wrapped his hand around the third chair, the one that Candy had just stashed his feet on, and pulled. Candy’s feet stopped him in midpull.

“We need this, man,” said the skinny guy.

“Ever think of asking?”

The kid yanked and Candy’s feet hit the floor. Candy stood up. He was a head shorter than the kid, but that made no difference to the armlock Candy got him in. And twisted. The kid yelped like a puppy. Candy repeated it: “I
said,
ever think of asking?”

The kid blurted out a “Please” tacked on to an apology.

Candy let him go. “Punk.” He sat down again, scarcely noticing the attention he’d attracted.

Swill’s was packed for this hour in the evening when Saul sat down at the table in the window. It pleased them that most of the other regulars had accepted that this window table was Ned’s and Saul’s. Most of them, but not all. Whenever he had the chance, b. w. brill would flop there, take out a roll of foolscap, a pen, and his pipe. He would be joined occasionally by Freida Jurkowski, another poet, and they would try to top each other with their most recent recitals. b. w. brill was all over the Village coffeehouses where he made as much impact as the background music.

There was a pecking order in here, but it had nothing to do with Ned or Saul; no one could come anywhere within pecking distance of them. But b.w. and Freida liked to make it appear they could because they’d been published. True. Only there were certain terms of publication that didn’t impress even the unpublished (that is, nearly everyone in Swill’s). Paperback original was one (although more publishers were turning to it) and especially paperback original
romance.
The only thing worse was vanity publishing, Vanguard Press, one of those the writer had to pay to get his stuff published. Insofar as anyone knew, none of the Swill’s regulars had ever opted for it. Or if they had, certainly wouldn’t want to admit it, which pretty much undercut the whole idea of (modestly) flashing your book around. Then there were the “little poetry” reviews that weren’t of the
Sewanee, Kenyon, Prairie Schooner
caliber. The ones Freida could count as hers were chapbooks and ones with stapled pages. b.w. had published nothing since his book, five years ago, except a poem in a small review called
Unguentine Press. UP
had since folded, and b. w. brill had found no new home for his “verses,” which is what he liked to call them, as if self-deprecation would summon up admiration in his listeners, which, of course, it didn’t since everyone (except Freida and a couple of other poets) knew he was a horse’s ass whom it was impossible to deprecate too much.

Swill’s clientele all gave the impression they weren’t aware of anything but their own projects—novels, short stories, poetry, screen and TV treatments, or pilots for new sitcoms, written on spec. But they
were
aware, maddeningly and jealously, of success.

So when Ned and Saul walked in, Freida and b.w.—although they tried to make a leisurely job of leaving—made sure to vamoose. They could be ostracized. To be ostracized in Swill’s was a novel experience since (as stated) no one wanted to be thought to care what the other guy was doing. The novelty arose from the low-key fashion in which the ostracizing was carried out. You could hardly put your finger on it; indeed you
couldn’t
put your finger on it if you were not the object of it. There would be that ever so slight push or a back turning at the bar, that hard to be seen curl of the lip, that minutest raising of the eyebrow or flicker of the lid.

So Frieda and b.w. hopped it and Saul and Ned sat down.

Saul looked the room over and saw the same two men he’d seen in the park, now without the suits. The suits had been swapped for jeans and leather jackets. They were still carrying the books. While he was watching them, Ned came in.

Ned Isaly they recognized from both the photo in Michael’s Restaurant and the dust jacket. He was at a table in the window now back-lit by the blue and green top of the Chrysler Building. He was sitting with the fellow Karl thought he remembered from the park. There was also a tall dark-haired girl standing by the table, looking as grim as a process server, the one who’d been putting the coins into the jukebox, playing that ear-splitting song again and again.

“Look at him,” said Candy, nodding in the direction of a nearby table. “Fuckin’ everybody in here’s writing a goddamned book, it looks like.” This one was a man probably in his early thirties seated with several notebooks spread out across the table, writing in one.

“Novelist wannabe?” said Karl. He lifted his shot of whiskey, said, “Cheers.”

“Likewise,” said Candy, lifting his beer, watching the moisture condense on the glass.

Karl said, “I wonder what it’s like to write a book.”

Candy was quiet for a moment, thinking this over. “Well, look, it can’t be that hard if everybody in here’s doing it. I mean the ones that aren’t into art, you know, painting. Hard thing about writing a book is you’d have to think up something to write about. Enough it’d take up a whole book, couple hundred pages. That’s a pretty tall order.”

“Couple hundred? You must be joking. This”—he tapped Ned’s book—“is three hundred eighty-four pages. And Giverney’s must be over a hundred more. Nearly five hundred. That’s a hell of a lot of pages to fill.”

“Well, yeah, if you’re talkin’ novels. These are novels. Made-up fiction.”

“I know what fiction is, C. I’m talking nonfiction.”

“If it’s only facts you got to report, then that’d be a lot shorter. You wouldn’t have to put in all this description and the, you know, insights. Still, it’d be hard, looking up all that shit . . .” Candy took another pull at his beer. Then he leaned back, chair tilted, and watched the ceiling fans creaking circles.

“Even so, you’d still have to put in the small stuff,” Karl said.

“What small stuff?”

“Like the fly up there,” said Karl. “Two flies. You’d have to put them in.”

“You wouldn’t have to put the flies in.”

“Yes, you would. It’s how you describe something like this room so people would see it. They ain’t gonna see it if you don’t put in the flies. No way.” Karl grabbed the Giverney book, leafed through it, scanned a page, and read:

“Or here:

Candy thought about these passages. “I don’t see any small stuff in it.”

Karl said, “Well, what about the bird in the tree? Or the ribbed glasses and so forth?”

In his annoyance and impatience, Candy pushed back his chair. It collided with one behind him. A woman in big horn-rimmed glasses looked over her shoulder.

“Hey! Watch it!”

Candy had to smile. People just didn’t know that a
Watch it!
to either of them could get you a choice site in a cemetery. Oh, well, when in Rome. He mumbled an apology, repositioned his chair. “All I’m saying is, who’d want to read about some dame going
mano a mano
with a fucking bird?”

“That’s not
mano a mano,
for Christ’s sake; that means a face-off, one-to-one’s what it means.”

“So, yeah.” Seeing his glass was empty, Candy lost interest in the bird. “You want another one?”

“Yeah.” Karl picked up
Solace.
While Candy was at the bar, Karl checked on Ned’s table, where the jukebox-playing, the “Cry”playing woman was sitting down. She had dark hair done in that crazy curly way that was popular. Or maybe that was just the way it came. Christ, but her hair was black; it shone black as licorice. She wore designer jeans and a white silk shirt and a lot of jewelry. He couldn’t tell what color her eyes were; he could only see her profile. Her hands were clasped on the table, fingers heavy with rings. He would recognize her now anywhere, just as he would Ned Isaly and the other guy. If one of them turned up off a tramp steamer in Port Said, he’d know him.

 

 

“That guy over there,” said Saul, “three tables back, the one staring at you—no, don’t look. Wait . . .
now
you can look; he’s reading.”