Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Let me buy you a drink,” said Rosen, resignedly. The streets were hot, and he hoped the bar would be cool.

“A ball of Bushmill,” said old Peter Martens.

The bar was cool. Bob had stopped listening to his guest’s monologue about what he had in his little old portfolio (something about spotting fashion trends way in advance) and had begun talking about his own concerns. By and by the old man, who was experienced beyond the norm in not being listened to, had begun to listen to him.

“This was when everybody was reading Aku-Aku,” Bob said. “So I thought for sure that mine would go over good because it was about Rapa Nui — Easter Island — and Peruvian blackbirders and hints of great legends of the past and all that.”

“And?”

“And it didn’t. The publisher, the only one who showed any interest at all, I mean, that publisher, he said he liked the writing but the public wouldn’t buy it. He advised me to study carefully the other paperbacks on the stands. See what they’re like, go thou and do likewise. So I did. You know the stuff. On even-numbered pages the heroine gets her brassiere ripped off while she cries, ‘Yes! Yes! Now! Oh!’ ”

He was not aware of signalling, but from time to time a hand appeared and renewed their glasses. Old Martens asked, “Does she cry ‘rapturously’—or ‘joyously’?”

“Rapturously and joyously. What’s the matter, you think she’s frigid?”

Martens perished the thought. At a nearby table a large blonde said, lugubriously, “You know, Harold, it’s a lucky thing the Good Lord didn’t give me any children or I would of wasted my life on them like I did on my rotten step-children.” Martens asked what happened on the odd-numbered children.

“I mean, ‘pages’,” he corrected himself, after a moment.

The right side of Bob Rosen’s face was going numb. The left side started tingling. He interrupted a little tune he was humming and said, “Oh, the equation is invariable: On odd-numbered pages the hero either clonks some bastard bloodily on the noggin with a roscoe, or kicks him in the collions and then clonks him, or else he’s engaged — with his shirt off, you’re not allowed to say what gives with the pants, which are so much more important: presumably they melt or something — he’s engaged, shirtless, in arching his lean and muscular flanks over some bimbo, not the heroine, because these aren’t her pages, some other female in whose pelvis he reads strange mysteries …” He was silent for a moment, brooding.

“How could it fail, then?” asked the old man, in his husky voice. “I’ve seen the public taste change, let me tell you, my boy, from A Girl of the Limberlost (which was so pure that nuns could read it) to stuff which makes stevedores blench: so I am moved to inquire, How could the work you are describing to me fail?”

The young man shrugged. “The nuns were making a come-back. Movies about nuns, books about nuns, nuns on TV, westerns… So the publisher said public taste had changed, and could I maybe do him a life of St. Teresa?”

“Coo.”

“So I spent three months doing a life of St. Teresa at a furious pace, and when I finished it turned out I’d done the wrong saint. The simple slob had no idea there was any more than one of the name, and I never thought to ask did he mean the Spanish St. Teresa or the French one? D’Avila or The Little Flower?”

“Saints preserve us… Say, do you know that wonderful old Irish toast? ‘Here’s to the Council of Trent, that put the fasting on the meat and not on the drink’?”

Bob gestured to the barkeeper. “But I didn’t understand why if one St. Teresa could be sold, the other one couldn’t. So I tried another publisher, and all he said was, public taste had changed, and could I do him anything with a background of juvenile delinquency? After that I took a job for a while selling frozen custard in a penny arcade and all my friends said, BOB! You with your talent? How COULD you?”

The large blonde put down a jungle-green drink and looked at her companion. “What you mean, they love me? If they love me why are they going to Connecticut? You don’t go to Connecticut if you love a person,” she pointed out.

Old Martens cleared his throat. “My suggestion would be that you combine all three of your mysteriously unsalable novels. The hero sails on a Peruvian blackbirder to raid Easter Island, the inhabitants whereof he kicks in the collions, if male, or arches his loins over, if female; until he gets converted by a vision of both St. Teresas who tell him their life stories — as a result of which he takes a job selling frozen custard in a penny arcade in order to help the juvenile delinquents who frequent the place.”

Bob grunted. “Depend on it, with my luck I would get it down just in time to see public taste change again. The publishers would want a pocket treasury of the McGuffey Readers, or else the memoirs of Constantine Porphyrogenitos. I could freeze my arse climbing the Himalayas only to descend, manuscript in hand, to find everybody on Publishers’ Row vicariously donning goggles and spearing fish on the bottom of the Erythrean Sea… Only thing is, I never was sure to what degree public taste changed by itself or how big a part the publishers play in changing it…”

The air, cool though he knew it was, seemed to shimmer in front of him, and through the shimmer he saw Peter Martens sitting up straight and leaning over at him, his seamed and ancient face suddenly eager and alive. “And would you like to be sure?” old Martens asked. “Would you like to be able to know, really to know? ”

“What? How?” Bob was startled. The old man’s eye looked almost all blood by now.

“Because,” Martens said, “ I can tell you what. I can tell you how. Nobody else. Only me. And not just about books, about everything. Because—”

There was an odd sort of noise, like the distant sussuration of wind in dry grass, and Rosen looked around and he saw that a man was standing by them and laughing. This man wore a pale brown suit and had a pale brown complexion, he was very tall and very thin and had a very small head and slouched somewhat. He looked like a mantis, and a mustache like an inverted V was cropped out of the broad blue surface of his upper lip.

“Still dreaming your dreams, Martens?” this man asked, still wheezing his dry whispery laugh. “Gates of Horn, or Gates of Ivory?”

“Get the Hell away from me, Shadwell,” said Martens.

Shadwell turned his tiny little head to Rosen and grinned. “He been telling you about how he worked on old Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup Account? Too bad the Harrison Narcotics killed that business! He tell you how he worked on the old Sapolio account. The old Stanley Steamer account?” (“Shove off, Shadwell,” Martens ordered, planting his elbows in the table and opening his mouth at Bob again.) “Or has he been muttering away like an old Zambezi hand who claims to know the location of the Elephants’ Graveyard? Tell me, where is fashion bred?” he intoned. “In the bottle — or in Martens’ head?”

Martens’ head, thinly covered with yellowish-white hair, jerked in the direction of the new arrival. “This, my boy, is T. Pettys Shadwell, the most despicable of living men. He runs — out of his pocket, because no one will sell him a hat on credit — he runs a so-called market research business. Though who in blazes would hire him since Polly Adler went respectable beats the Hell out of me. I’m warning you, Shadwell,” he said, “take off. I’ve had my fill of you. I’m not giving you any more information.” And with a further graphic description of what else he would not give T. Pettys Shadwell if the latter was dying of thirst, he folded his arms and fell silent.