Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

The next day the phone rings. “I was caught between floors in the elevator with a large, lupine specimen of our sales staff, and he smacked his lips with loathsome satisfaction as he advised me that he’d heard that I’d rejected what promised to be one of the Blockbuster Books of ‘76. I’m not sure which book he meant. Perhaps it was yours. ‘Pack up your desk, piano legs.’ That’s what he said, nice as you please. So do you think you could dash off something that I could cringingly tender to the sales oafs and messenger it over here? One colorfully descriptive page, single-spaced, ought to do the trick.” Phone rings. “Try as I might, I simply can’t see those chattering rifles, that flaming tumbledown bungalow, those writhing wounded, those oppressed masses — though surely I would like to. Really, how can you ask me to put myself on the line with those storm troopers in the dimly lit realm of sales? They call me ‘Chain Pantsuit,’ did you know? Everyone knows. I’ve devoted my adult life to the kind of quality literature that possesses a strong potential for a mass-market paperback sale, but they don’t care. Look up scumbag in the dictionary and there’s a group photo of our crack sales staff. A bunch of chauvinists who can’t stand the fact that a young woman from Larchmont with big feet and several small but nonetheless persistent obstacles in her path has managed to rise very near if not actually to the top in a man’s game. According to them, I should have gone into educational television programming, if you can believe it.”

A letter arrives the next day telling Guy to meet Pancake at her office off Union Square. “Look out the window. See those junkies down there in the park? One of them is actually Ed Sforenza, ‘our’ sales manager. How does a man like this come to represent the interests of the old buttoned-down gentlemanly house of Small & Grey? A house with its origins in the decorous wards of Boston’s Back Bay? If I dared to show my face wearing a soiled overcoat like that I’d never be invited to another book party again. These men don’t care about book parties. They loosen their ties and drink canned beer out of paper bags right on the sidewalk. This is what I’m up against. This is a fact many people are aware of. Even if they are afraid to say a single word. What have you got for me?”

She sits on the edge of her desk and pulls the typewritten proposal from the envelope, breathing, “Onionskin,” disenchantedly, before settling in to read, fidgeting and slapping the empty envelope against her thigh. She looks up abruptly.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to hurry out of my office and down the stairs if you please. If anyone spots you, tell them that you work in maintenance or that you’re simply a mugger lying in wait for a slow-moving elderly person ironically taking the stairs for his health. Don’t mention my name under any circumstances. Honestly, if you haven’t yet come up with something that I can deliver to the sales staff without ducking, I don’t think we’ll be playing music together, that’s the phrase?”

Guy shrugs.

“They’ll be Xeroxing dirty pictures of my private parts on interoffice memo paper again. Drawings, I mean; highly exaggerated and inaccurate drawings. Hurry now. Get out.”

That afternoon the telephone rings. “I don’t know why you stormed out the way you did. Can you resubmit? Give me back that glorious and promising proposal, and I promise we’ll have a competitive offer on the table by tomorrow afternoon.”

The next afternoon the receptionist at Small & Grey advises him that Jane Pancake has left the company to become a literary agent.

Guy picks up the ringing phone.

“Mock, mate.”

“Can I help you?”

“It’s the other way round, mate. It’s I who can be helping you if the rabbit and pork is on the up and up. You get me?”

“What?”

“Talk, mate. Talk. Rabbit and pork is talk. Ach, how I yearn to get back to that sodden land where the women are women and the men are named Nigel.”

“What’s the talk?”

“Can’t say explicit like. Ah, bollocks. Who’m I fooling? No wiretaps on little old Roy Hume’s telephone. It’s not like I represent the bloody New York Times and their shining phalanx of bleeding Pulitzer Prizes. It’s not like I’m a revered national correspondent with the soi-disant Paper of Record, now is it then?”

Guy looks out the window. The bricks on the other side of the airshaft face him, textured in the morning sunlight. He sees a curtain move in the window above him and to his left, and then a woman’s arm, heavy and pale, emerges from the open window to overturn a full ashtray into the alley below, sending up a cloud of ash and cinders.

“Right,” says Hume. “What I want to know is whether there’s any truth to what I’ve been told about you and a certain young lady from the Coast who’s gone missing. That you are involved.”

Guy hangs up.

BACCHUS

A DIVISION OF SEGAL & SOWER

12 thFloor

30 Rockefeller Center

New York, NY 10020

Richard Detective

Senior Editor

Dear Guy,

We’re more than merely interested in your proposal — we’re ready to clear the decks right now. Your project is poised to join the group of exciting books we currently have planned. We’ve acquired a California novel, Radical Desire, that has its thumb right on the frantically beating pulse of that bellwether state, and this dovetails ingeniously with our forthcoming The Black Panther Sex Manual, which — like the sort of long black Christmas stocking it’s intended to stuff — is packed with one sensuous surprise after another. A book exploring the lives, loves and unusual lifestyles of some of our most famous revolutionaries seems the perfect complement to these two arousing titles.

I wonder if you’d submit to a few probing questions, first. My thrust is, your proposal was a little on the dry side, a trifle too focused on politics, revolution, etc. Of course those of us who’ve paid close attention have been interested in those aspects of the story, yet one area of the case that demands to be deeply penetrated deals with the private lives of those who would assassinate our leaders, bring down our institutions, destroy our way of life, and so on: How, in short, do such people “get it on”? You promise to deliver a “candid account” of the underground life of the S.L.A., but I think it would be much better if we were all clear on this: Of what, exactly, does such candor consist?

So if it’s all right with you, I’d like a few explicit lines on the extent to which your project intends to directly address the erotic life underground. I think readers would like to know who is “doing” whom, and how often, and by what means. Are there S.L.A. orgies? Is there much “forbidden” sex involving mixing of the races? Is it true that some members of the S.L.A. are or were or will be lesbians? Do photographs exist? These are the sort of questions that we would need to find the answers to in a book we chose to publish concerning the S.L.A., or anyone else for that matter.

Anticipating your rapid response.

All good wishes,

Dick

“What we have here, is failure to communicate, ” says Hume, in a fair approximation of an American accent. He continues, “I have to admit I had been looking forward to the prospect of working with you. I can’t say I’m seeking full reciprocity. In me profession that’s a dangerous, dangerous folly. We maintain strict boundaries with all, be he source, informant, or stooge as the case may be. On Fleet Street we lived by a saying. Me first boss, Pobjoy, liked to drill it into me, he did. In a manner of speaking.”