The Cry of the Sloth (11 page)

Love,

Andy

¶

In the desert. A woman with two men. A man with two women. A boy, one of the crowd of children, is lying on his back in the hot sand, sweltering in his dark-blue sailor suit. A man and a woman look down at him, eyes filled with pity, and then glance quickly at each other. The boy will remember this later. He will recall that glance as somehow “inestimably peculiar.” The man is the man with two women. The woman is the woman with two men. A complex web is being woven. There is also a woman with a cat, and two women with one dog. They fight. The man and the woman who had been looking down at the boy, it could be a lifetime ago, draw apart from the others, to stand together, but not touching, on the sandy bank of the river. Behind them, sounds of continuous quarreling. Looking out at the water, speaking to the man, though not turning her head to face him, the woman says in a voice without inflection, and yet, for this very reason, charged with meaning, “Through the desert of tedium flows a river of dread.” Horrified, the man realizes that this is true.

¶

Dear Harold,

You are probably right, I
am
working too hard. It’s difficult to keep things in proportion sometimes. Like everyone else I have my up days and down days. But I discern a trend: the trend is downward. I always used to have an orderly mind, never put things in jars without labels, and would scold Jolie for keeping important papers under magnets on the refrigerator. I hated opening the door and having some unpaid bill or vital phone number sail loopingly off in the direction of the floor, sometimes in a slanting dive that would send it slithering beneath the refrigerator from whence it would have to be extracted with a broom handle. I sometimes had difficulty containing my rage when this happened, if Jolie was not home and I had to be the one to get down on my knees and bang about with the broom. I finally had no choice but to take all the magnets off.

Furthermore, I always had files. Whatever wasn’t filed in a labeled folder in one of five metal cabinets (in drawers I kept so well oiled they slid in and out with scarcely a whisper) was filed in my mind in tiny cabinets arranged along the walls of my skull. I always at every instant of the day knew exactly where my toothbrush or my copy of
Tropic of Cancer
was. I wanted something, I had only to put out my hand and grab it. So how is it possible that I have started losing things left and right? That is not in keeping with my character. You surely remember my character. I have a tidy nature. You remember how tidy I kept our dorm room. You remember how I made you stand on the bed while I mopped the floor. I’m afraid something organic is going on in my brain, due perhaps to a severe lack of oxygen. The brain uses twenty percent of the body’s total supply of oxygen. That’s a lot more than one would think, considering what else is going on in there, the organic wheels and pistons churning and grinding all the time, every little cell screaming for a slice of the pie. I have to take deep breaths all the time now.

I was sure I had placed my cup of coffee—the first of the day—on a box in the living room. It was a pale blue mug with daisies; there was steam coming out of it. The coffee stood just below the halfway mark, or would have had there been a mark; it was level with the bottom daisy. The box on which I had placed it was the topmost box in the second stack of boxes to the left of the front windows. It previously had contained four dozen Scott towels. This information was displayed in large blue letters on the side of the box. I say all this to show that I have an
exact picture
of the location in which I had placed the cup. I had been holding it in my left hand. In my right I held four small galvanized nails, and I placed those on the box as well, right next to the cup. They clinked against it. I can see my hand as I reached out to place the cup on the box, the knob of my wristbone inching forth from its hiding place in my sleeve, the hairs on my wrist springing erect as they escape the pressure of the cloth. That was just before going down to the basement in search of a hammer with which to nail tarps up over the front windows. The sun was very bright. The tarps were blue.

That was ten mornings ago. It was late in the afternoon three days later when I saw the coffee cup again. I was sitting on a plastic milk box in the upstairs hall. I was pulling books out of one of the two large bookcases up there and placing them in boxes. I had clasped a row of small paperbacks between my palms and was lifting them, still in a row, off the shelf, and there behind them—I almost wrote, “crouching there behind them”—was the cup. It had been three and a half days, the milk had curdled, and a dead roach was floating on the scummed surface. I noticed then that one of the books behind which the cup had hidden was Peterson’s
A Field Guide to Insects
. While I remember shaking with laughter at this coincidence, in retrospect I am not able to see anything funny in it. The cup had been cleverly concealed, the entire shelf of books moved forward a couple of inches so the row of books in front of the cup would not stand out. I poured the coffee out in the bathroom sink, forcing the roach down through the drain sieve with the handle of a toothbrush.

And then there’s the case of the lost notebook. It was one in which I had been jotting bits and pieces for a couple of stories I am working on. The house was really quite bare, most of the smaller things—books, pictures, most of the clothing, most of the
debris
—packed in boxes in the living room, rugs rolled up and shoved against the walls, empty drawers stacked on top of dressers, etc. Few hiding places of the usual sort remained except under all the papers, photos, and magazines strewn on the desk and floor, and this was the first place I looked. It was not there. After combing the house up and down, I became convinced that in my haste to get everything packed up I had inadvertently stuck the notebook in one of the boxes. I could not see any other explanation. But which box? I knew it had to be in one of the half dozen or so I had packed since last seeing it a few days before, yet I had no way of distinguishing the suspect boxes from several dozen similar ones with which they had now become mingled. You see, whenever I finish a box I don’t simply place it on top of a stack, heave it up there and just walk off. Or rather, I do that, but then I always come back later and move it. I often rearrange my boxes, for a variety of reasons, and I must have restacked them all several times before it dawned on me that the notebook was almost certainly in one of them, and by that time there was no way I could possibly
deduce
, just by standing there thinking about it, which of the many boxes (at this point they were more than forty) was the culprit. From that point of view they were identical, and all I could think to do was unpack them one at a time. Once I had decided on this course of action, I tore through them like a madman, flinging the contents helter-skelter onto the floor, along with huge quantities of balled-up newspaper. The hunt took most of a day and by the end of it the entire surface of the living room was covered with
stu
ff. And it’s that way still; I haven’t had the heart to repack any of it. I had emptied every single box, I had individually examined every item, shaken every book before flinging it, all in vain. Then yesterday evening, just as I was preparing to sit down to supper—a salami and tomato sandwich and a small whiskey—I noticed the notebook lying in full view on the kitchen table.

It’s interesting that you have taken up writing. Who hasn’t these days? I’ll be glad to look over your MS, if that is what you’re asking.

Andy

SEPTEMBER

Dear Bob, Eric, and Juan,

I have received another complaint about the noise. You will have to turn it down after 10 or find another place. Wear clothes when you go to the basement with your laundry. Think of the people in the other apartments, who are not as young as you are, have to get up and go to work, and are religious to boot. None of that is their fault.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

The Whittaker Company

¶

Dear Fern,

I have the new poems and photographs.

They came in the same mail as a letter telling me of my mother’s death. It was an expected death, one that mercy would have sent sooner, though it has left a small gap nonetheless. The world tilts at an odder angle, and at night I dream of boats.

So I guessed correctly—the self timer was the problem. The new photographs are
much
improved, so much so that I made the mistake of propping one of them up on my desk, the one of you with the cat on the sofa. I ought to have known better. I am, as you have probably guessed, a single man, practically the archetypical “confirmed bachelor,” and the abrupt appearance on my desk of a large photograph showing an attractive young lady on a sofa, in an attitude that can only be described as languid, provoked a spate of good-natured teasing from some of the staff, the older women especially. They are loveable old hens in the main, so I tried not to show my irritation, but needless to say, your pictures now resides harmlessly in a drawer.

I am not sure I understand what you mean by “loosening it up”—what
it
are you referring to?—but I do sense more spontaneity in the poems and the photos, and this I consider a good thing, since spontaneity can induce surprises. I myself enjoy being surprising, becoming startling just when people think I am asleep, or, contrariwise, falling asleep while they are waiting to be surprised. Please convey my compliments to your school friend. It’s the true photographer who can pick out the exact right moment to press the button. I suppose she knows the work of Cartier-Bresson, the best of the slice-of-life school, where knowing when to push the button is pretty much all there is to it. If not, I’d be happy to pass along an edition I have here at the office, as that stuff doesn’t really interest me.

I couldn’t help noticing that, in addition to the relaxed smile on your face, you have made other changes to the photos—I mean, of course, the garment you have on in the shot that shows you throwing off the covers, if “garment” is not too big a word for such an exiguous item. I would not have thought you could buy a thing like that in Rufus. You’re a very remarkable girl indeed. Such contradictions! Talking to a friend the other day, I described your earlier poems as “childlike and ribald.” I hope you don’t mind. I don’t know what to call these new ones. What
have
you been reading? I suggest you don’t hand any of
these
in to old Mr. Crawford! And in your person too, there is the contrast between your face, wide-eyed and youthful, and the rest of you, which, as you surely know, seems amazingly developed. Where are your parents while all this is happening?

I am delighted you found my “Meditations of an Old Pornographer” exciting, even on a second reading, though I did wince at one thing you said. I called the story a literary fabrication, it is true, but that does not mean, as you assume, that it is therefore “insincere” or “just some made-up stuff.” In an extenuated and yet profound sense every writer of fiction has to become, indeed must be already, every character he creates. So
of course
I harbor somewhere, if harbor is the word, impulses and desires similar to those of the old pornographer, including the ones you call “fantastically kinky,” by which I suppose you mean the soap and cucumber thing or the stuff with the rubber band. Though I don’t want to pry, I would be interested in knowing, when you say the story was exciting, whether you mean a general sort of literary excitement or something else. One is always uncertain, and of course always curious, about how people of the opposite sex are going to take things.

So you really like Dahlberg Stint’s work. I had forgotten the issue containing his piece was among the ones I had sent you. Sorry, though, I can’t send anything else of his—the story you read is the only thing we’ve published, or that anyone has published, as far as I know. You are right—it is intense stuff, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call him an incredible genius. These days I think of him more as a sad case. The stuff he has submitted lately is so bad some of us are convinced he couldn’t possibly have written those hardware stories. Of course, we’d love to know who the real author is, but we hesitate to ask Stint directly, since he seems to be only marginally sane.

If you have taught tennis at summer camp, you must be good at it. I play a fair game myself, though some people won’t play me on the grounds that I am too aggressive.

I have been publishing
Soap
for seven years. It has meant personal sacrifice and a lot of drudgery, and many times I have wanted to throw the whole thing up and concentrate instead on my own work, which currently sits in neglected heaps on my desk at home, in boxes shoved under beds, and in the case of a couple of short stories, in a filing-cabinet drawer which is stuck hopelessly shut. But then, just when I am saying to myself, “Andy, why not chuck the whole thing?” I come across a talent like yours, and it all seems worthwhile again. I felt I ought to tell you this.

With contributors all over the country, plus conferences and lectures, I am forced to travel about rather more than I would like. I can’t tell you how many poems and stories I have started while sitting in hotels and airports. Looking at my schedule I see that next month has me passing by car just a stone’s throw from Rufus. It occurs to me that I could stop by and say hello, perhaps meet you somewhere in town. You might like to join me for coffee or lunch. I hope you won’t feel I am being forward. I could bring my racquet. What do you think?

Sincerely,

Andy Whittaker

¶

Dear Dahlberg,

I think you would find it a lot easier to get people to like you if you made an effort to think of someone besides yourself. I’ve gone out on a limb for you. You can’t imagine the kind of shit I had to put up with after publishing your work. While that does not mean that I regret having done it, it was still a lot of shit and you might show some gratitude. IT HURTS AND DISTRESSES ME to read the stuff you keep sending. I think you should be made aware that I am not a young man. I am under tremendous pressure all the time. I have noises in my chest. So why don’t you just fucking lighten up?