Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“What’s the saying?”

“Oh. ‘Y’haven’t got any friends.’ Some such. Years ago, it was. I’ve toiled many a day since, under the glowing tan and worldly manner still just an ink-stained wretch in a naff suit of clothes, I am. Still haven’t a friend in this slithery world either, I’m quite happy to say. Now. We were about to speak of your involvement with a certain Miss X.”

“What sort of involvement?”

“I would be lying, mate, if I didn’t admit that it would be to me advantage if the involvement were romantic in nature. The betrothed heiress in the arms of the bolshie jock. However, we do not invent the news. We create it when necessary, but we do not invent what isn’t there. I’m fully prepared to take what I can get, I am. Toward that end I have been authorized to extend a very generous offer in your direction. That’s right, checkbook journalism. A dirty word to the bloody New York Times, but not to the humble Eye and Ear, moiling away to serve the needs of the silent majority. Sometimes you have to put aside your high-mindedness and get down in it. And there’s a certain beauty to it, there is. What I have in mind requires absolutely no face-to-face meetings, no divulging of confidences. All I require is a token from the young lady in question. Say a soiled pair of knickers, a chicken bone from her dinner plate, or a used shell casing.”

“What for?”

“We secure the item in a bank vault, an event to which our solicitor, a chartered accountant, and meself bear eyewitness. Then we poll our far-ranging network of paranormal adepts: What exactly is this highly personal memento? What state of mind does it bespeak? Have at it, fork benders! Their correct answers shall make for a very nice spread and of course enhance the value of our offer to you.”

“So what if they don’t identify it correctly?”

“Well then of course it wouldn’t be worth quite as much, now would it then?”

Guy very gently puts down the telephone. He leans on his hands on the windowsill, peering down the airshaft at the dark alley below. Directly beneath the window across the way there is a small mound of ash and butts that has accumulated over many a day.

Guy takes the subway downtown and climbs out at Twenty-third Street, leaving the deep, long rolling rumble of the train behind him. He strolls past the residence for the blind, who feel their way into the noontime traffic on the avenues, tap tap. Guy knows how they feel. Twenty-five thousand miles on the road, and here’s where he ends up, still chasing a decent advance.

Well, not quite here. The restaurant is near Madison Square. (Next time a cab.) Outside, workers from nearby insurance companies walk the streets carefully, conscious of the grim actuarial promises latent in every sight and sound. Haverford Dodd meets Guy at the bar, though “his” table is unoccupied and awaits him. At Dodd’s signal, the headwaiter moves forward to seat the two himself, moving the table aside so that they can settle into a plush banquette of deep red and then handing them menus in leather covers. The staff moves silently, with darting grace, like a school of rare tropical fish.

Guy has gotten Dodd’s name from a friend, a journalist whose two books had been edited by Dodd, one of which had done rather well on the basis of an ultimately empty and insubstantial rumor that it was to be well reviewed in the Times. The rumor alone had lent a kind of strength and momentum to the book, and Dodd had presided over it all as the book went into a second printing and sold to paperback even before its pub date, as if shoppers wanted possession of the book prior to its event, wanted themselves to be at the nexus of that event, a celebration of prescient consumerism that validated its standing as our primary avant-garde.

How depressing. No wonder Dodd would be interested in a book that discusses how much its authors wish to destroy him: it’ll never happen. This restaurant, these waiters, the chef will not permit the revolution to come to pass. The waiters wear fucking brocaded jackets. He’ll bet that no one in the SLA could make a decent basic white sauce if their lives depended on it. It’s all a joke. Guy feels a wave of cynical ennui, familiar from the last several days, wash over him.

Guy notes that Dodd appears cultivatedly weary, as if he were making a slow but spirited recovery from devastating intestinal illness. Guy can’t decide whether Dodd would look more at home on a horse or bundled up in an Adirondack chair on the porch of some puritan sanatorium. He has graying blond hair, watery blue eyes, and a deeply cleft chin. Guy can’t tell if he’s thirty — five or sixty.

“So,” he says, “are you enjoying spring in the city?”

“Oh, nice,” says Guy.

“I was out on the Island again this weekend. The solace of the off — season: no guests. Just a little time alone with the muse. You and your wife will have to come out sometime. The beach is fringed by magnificently precarious houses and token stands of the woods destroyed toward their fabrication. One such house is my mother’s, weathered and rotting in a prosperous seaside way, like a rich old woman.”

Dodd laughs into his handkerchief at his own joke. He has a rasping, dry laugh; it makes his shoulders shake and his chest rattle. Waiters break their stride, carefully arranging expressions of concern on their faces, until they realize that what Dodd is doing is laughing.

“Of seven estates, which together formed an elongated ellipsis of faded gingerbread, rickety widow’s walks for the vigilant Dutch wives of popular antiquity, and pale erosive land, ours is the last remaining. Now, beyond the dunes and the wayward pickets demarcating their perilous swollen rises, there are evenly laid-out cottages, newly made, of aluminum and plastic. Built, I imagine, to capitalize on the attractions the place holds for the newly affluent, which I would characterize as a perception of stolid ‘authenticity’ and ‘char — acter’ on the part of its year-round people — qualities which I can assure you are entirely mythical — and a desire to passively partake of the xenophobia historically to be found in such a place.”

The waiter arrives with two fresh martinis and a steaming appetizer. Dodd laughs as he sets them down.

“Now, on my part of the Island the sights are magnificently decrepit, void of utility, void of any trace of this century, white hot and peeling in the sun: the church, the jetty, the seawall, the lighthouse. These places exist solely as monuments to averted catastrophe, of— ferings to the angry gods of the elements, and they now creep with the most primitive of organisms. Jellyfish, the wives of Jewish businessmen, and so on.”

Dodd seems nearly about to shake himself apart with the cannonade of laughter this provokes, and the restaurant’s din hushes for a moment as he comes to himself. Guy is still and very quiet.

“You said something about the muse?”

“Oh, yes. I work when I can, indeed I do. Oh yes yes yes. Not as often as I’d like; the editorial work is so demanding. Nothing terribly elaborate, mind you. Good old-fashioned stuff. A beginning, an end. A man, a woman. A conflict, a resolution. It seems to me that so much contemporary writing resembles the sort of undertaking that dark intent little persons should be working on in laboratories in Massachusetts and California even as we speak. Thoughtful little intent dark persons doing thoughtful things, with the aid of blackboards and slide rules. And yet I see myself as a writer who happens to pass the time as an editor. The thing is, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy it a great deal. I love to wrest rough, promising work from the hands of an arrogant young writer and mold it into a sleek piece of salable work. It just isn’t any fun otherwise.”