The Cry of the Sloth (19 page)

The award will be presented, or bestowed, at the end of an invitation-only banquet at the historic Grand Hotel. I will make a speech and then you will make a speech. All will then adjourn to the ballroom.

You have the choice of taking a room in that hotel for the duration of your stay (we would hope you will come out for at least a couple of days) at our expense or, better, staying as an honored guest in my home. Your wife is of course welcome too, if you have a wife. I personally do not have a wife. I do have a maid, or had until recently, so you do not have to worry that you will be staying in a filthy bachelor pad. The house is quite large and sits on a pleasant tree-lined street. I was intending to move into a smaller place, and to this end I packed everything up in boxes, except for the few items I need for personal use, which is really just one plate, one cup, and so forth, and of course the furniture. But if you are coming, as I truly hope you will, I will revise my plans. Rest assured, all the stuff will be set back out by the time you get here. There is, however, no way I can put back all the really nice vases and paintings and such my ex-wife took when she left, despite having nowhere to put them, insufficient walls and mantels and such. She has to keep them in storage, which is just an additional unnecessary expense. She does not live that far from you, and if you wanted to find out more about me, you could go and see her. I of course will also answer any questions, for what that’s worth.

Mr. Mailer, I want to be frank with you, as I want you to be frank with me in your response, if there is one, as I hope there will be; that is only common courtesy. Perhaps you have a secretary who will respond, or not, as the case may be. Perhaps only a secretary will read this. Perhaps only a secretary
is
reading this. If that is the case, I am not talking to you, but to someone I know even less than you, since he (she?) has not written any books that I have read, or else why would he (she?) be a secretary, even to a famous author. And there you have it. That’s always the problem with letters. On the telephone I could say, Is that you, Norman? Of course, having not the least idea what you sound like, I could still be tricked. It is very difficult to get to the bottom of this.

I have not worked out all the details. There is such a chattering in my mind of dates and times, schedules and program notes, it is like having a head full of talkative mice. Of the festival itself I’ll just say that it’s going to be big. “How big?” you ask, as well you should. Let me drop this small hint in lieu of an answer: there will be elephants.

I look forward to your visit. I anticipate that we will hit it off. The weather will probably be fine and we can sit out in the yard. When my wife was here, we had flowers. After she bolted, I had no time for that. I ran the mower over them and now there is nothing out there but a little grass; it is austere, but I think you will find it agreeable. As I said, there are trees. I don’t interact with the neighbors, so I don’t think you will have to worry about hordes of autograph hunters racing over. I was on good terms with a crippled lady across the street, but she seems to have moved away. There is also a woman with a blowtorch, and a wounded writer who wants to straighten me out. I do not expect them to impinge on your visit. Though I am not pugilistic, I am quite large.

Should you not be able to accept this award perhaps you know someone who can.

Sincerely,

Andrew Whittaker

¶

Dear Vikki and Chum-Chum,

Just ignore what those people say. I promise, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I am convinced I have reached a turning point in my life, despite everything, a moment we will all one day look back on as “the threshold of his fruitful years” or something like that.

Much love to you both,

Andy

¶

To the Editor:

Not long ago you were kind enough to print a letter from me in which I sought to convey to your readers my impressions of the “real” Andrew Whittaker—not the controversial author but the neighbor across the street. I certainly never thought I would feel compelled to write again so soon. But a week or so after I mailed that letter you carried a long reportage by Melissa Salzmann on the annual Arts Furtherance League Picnic. I was distressed to read about Andy’s breakdown in front of all those people, and I think it was very wrong of them not to let him speak. While I don’t for a minute doubt the honesty of Miss Salzmann’s description and am sure some people probably were throwing things, I cannot accept that Andy was among them. I just cannot imagine this gentle vegetarian “snatching up a platter of cold cuts.” Furthermore, when it comes to behavior toward the female sex, he is the most courtly of men. It boggles credulity that he would deliberately smear two large chocolate handprints on the front of Eunice Baker’s blouse, as your reporter alleges. Nevertheless, it seems the police were called, and poor Andy was led away in tears.

This account simply does not jibe with the Andy I know.
That
Andy is a quiet, dignified, private man. The sort of emotional eruptions your reporter describes—shouting, “giving the finger,” throwing food, and weeping—are outside the pale of his character. He is a thoroughly old-fashioned English-type gentleman right down to the accent. I know he makes some people feel uneasy when he talks to them in that accent, as they suspect it is some kind of joke but are not sure enough of this actually to laugh. Yet even if, as they suspect, he is being insufferable on purpose, there is a big difference between that and throwing things.

So reading your article I was faced with a dilemma. Either your reporter was mistaken to the point of mendacity, or Andy has suffered a grievous breakdown. I have been a
Current
subscriber for many years and find it impossible to believe that one of your employees would intentionally tell lies, so I am forced to contemplate the latter explanation. In my previous letter I was reluctant to delve into Andy’s private life for fear of losing his trust and affection. But now, with this new scandal, I feel, for his sake, that I must speak out whatever the cost. Otherwise, how will people
ever
understand him?

In that letter I described the many kindnesses he has shown me since an accident left me alone and without the use of both legs. He was married during most of this period, and I could not help observing that it was not a happy marriage, though he never actually spoke of it. He probably thought I had enough troubles of my own without having to listen to his. His wife was a woman of callused sensibilities, vain, avaricious, and strikingly beautiful in a brittle way. Her beauty must have blinded poor Andy. He treated her like a princess. Though never a wealthy man, he owned a thriving business which could have kept them both in modest comfort had she restrained herself a little. But she always had to have more—more clothes, including a leather suit, bigger cars, more lavish vacations, a bigger television. It didn’t take her long to “ruin” poor Andy, and then to cast him off like an old shoe. He struggled to keep the business afloat—and his wife in the pink—and this effort devoured the time and energy he needed for his real work. And that is the tragic part. The world will probably never know what it lost in those years.

Though Andy showered me with daily kindnesses—always something, if only a smile—his wife never showed the least consideration for an afflicted neighbor. She would stroll past my house on her way to sunbathe in the park (she was always deeply tanned) and would not even look my way, no matter how loudly I tapped on the windowpane. And I saw things. While I would never spy, she was scarcely private. And she knew I was at the window, even if she refused to acknowledge my taps. It broke my heart to see her comings and goings with men half her age, and then later to see him arrive home, whistling as he walked, lost in a literary cloud perhaps, or studying a leaf he had picked up from the sidewalk. Those were the early days, of course, before he found out. I think I should not say more.

Later, after he knew, after the stormy months, and her eventual departure by motorcycle for greener pastures, I could see the changes in him. No more whistling in the street. Yet he kept doggedly at his work, at his desk at six a.m. every day, even on weekends. I have many solitary hours to while away, and the antics of the little brown birds I sometimes see in the trees and bushes outside my window have helped keep me amused. For this reason I have a pair of powerful binoculars always at the ready. Fearful for Andy ever since his wife left, I would sometimes seize him in the lenses of my instrument as he worked at his desk by an upstairs window. I hoped in this way to catch his downward dips before they had gone too far. A few years ago, I would have seen a man calmly writing, perhaps pausing now and then to stare thoughtfully out the window, the kind of man an earlier age would have dubbed “a literary gent.” He might, at most, chew the end of his pencil or scratch a wayward ear. No more! Now what I often see is a face twisted in response to what I can only surmise are unbearable inner torments. His expressions and gestures have become outsized, exaggerated, even grotesque—they reminded me of the histrionic contortions one sees in old silent movies. He will open his mouth and draw his lips back from his teeth in a hideous leer, or he will work his lower jaw back and forth as if testing it for injury. At other times he tears at the little tufts of hair on the sides of his head, just above his ears, as if trying to pull his poor skull apart. He snaps pencils and even ballpoint pens in two, sometimes with his teeth, and throws or spits the pieces out the window. He writes madly for a few minutes and then crosses out what he has written, crosses it out so furiously his upright elbow wiggles in the air as if he were stirring a bowl of thick batter. Sometimes he balls up the page and stuffs it in his mouth. It is horrible.

Meanwhile, the attacks on him have only gotten worse. Because of my affliction, I no longer attend art events. But still I have always made small annual contributions to our Area Arts Furtherance League, even after Andy told me it was a racket. In return for those contributions I received a subscription to
The Art News
, their monthly newsletter. A year or so ago they began a cartoon series called “The World of Winkstacker,” which is obviously based on Andrew. He is cruelly pictured with a huge body and a little bullet head, always in shorts that are much too tight for him, and he is made to say the most idiotic things. These are hurtful caricatures, and vulgar as well, with all sorts of sexual overtones, and I don’t know how the person who draws them can sleep at night. Next year I am not going to give the Area Arts Furtherance League one penny of my money. I don’t understand how those people, many of whom probably go to church, where they worship a god who was persecuted by people just like them, can have so little sympathy for Andy.

I had noticed in the past month or so a new glint in his dull gaze. I knew it was the sign of a man being driven to the edge. To the edge of what I could not tell exactly, though the glint resembled only too closely the one my husband had in his eyes the night he got behind the wheel for the last time. From your article I learned that in Andy’s case it was the edge of breakdown! Let those who hate him snicker. The rest of us will grieve.

Sincerely,

Dyna Wreathkit

¶

Dear Fern,

Scarcely two weeks have gone by since I last wrote. In that letter I was still able to talk of the festival with my usual pugnacious gaiety. Nothing has happened since then, and yet everything has happened, and the sentiments I blurted out there seem now as outdated and as indecipherable to myself as yesterday’s old newspaper left out in the rain and turning to pulp on the lawn. I have not been frank with you. I have not been frank with myself. The fact is, my life’s vehicle seems to have swerved into a cul-de-sac. I have run it against a brick wall. It looks just like the wall behind my elementary school, where they used to make me stand while they threw things at me. I do not wish to stand there any longer.

I have fought for other writers—for Art itself—for over ten years against the puritanical and philistine efforts of the so-called educated class of this state to kill it. Enveloped in the stiffened corduroy of their prejudices, I was practically suffocated, though I struggled against them even as I was strangled. I have been reviled, ridiculed, reduced, and, yes, rendered in crudely drawn cartoons by time-servers, lickspittles, and female baboons. I dug a foxhole—it was called
Soap
—and from it I fired upon the armed phalanges of the Citizens for the Promotion of Pleasantness, the sinister brigades of the Arts Furtherance League, the skirted hordes from the Poets and Painters Mutual Regurgitation and Masturbation Cliques. And all the while, to keep body and soul together while I did this work for which I have never received a penny, I have been compelled to go door to door in an effort to collect absurdly low rents from ungrateful and malingering tenants who have no regard for other people’s property, who think nothing of responding to doorbells in their torn underwear, and who, when I show any signs of weakness, attack me with incendiary devices and large pieces of concrete. Wherever I turn, the eyes of the police are on me, while deranged authors are allowed to lurk in the bushes behind my house. I have fallen down, and no one has picked me up. I have seen my trigger finger permanently mangled by a medical charlatan. I am surrounded by boxes. And now finally I have had enough. I have learned to spell B-A-S-T-A! I shall without shame abandon the field to my enemies, fertile as it is with their gore. I say, Let them chortle. Let them whinny with satisfaction. I have my books to write. I am going to think of my own happiness …

I don’t know how to go on with this letter, or even if I should go on with it. I wonder, wouldn’t it be better to ball it up, as I have several others, and toss it onto the little pyramid in the corner? As each crumpled wad lands on top of the pile, and rolls inevitably to the bottom, I think what a metaphor for my life that is, landing on top and rolling helplessly to the bottom. What Author, I wonder, has tossed me here? I look up, as have many before me, hoping to find an answer Up There, but discover only a cracked plaster ceiling and a lampshade of frosted glass enveloped in cobwebs. I live, as perhaps I’ve told you, alone in an old Victorian house. There is an ornate and stately gloominess about it. And tonight it is so very quiet. The proverbial pin, should it drop, would fall like thunder here. I can hear my own breathing. Stertorous, labored with emotion: were it not my own it would frighten me. Apart from this, the only sounds are the ticking of the grandfather clock—which always reminds me of Mama, since it was her clock—and the dull thud of my slippers as I pad to the bathroom or trudge numbly into the kitchen in pursuit of another drink. Another drink to give me courage! I sit and think. I write with a ballpoint, so there is no ancient scratching of the quill or even fountain pen, and no ticking of snowflakes at the windowpanes either, as there would have been were I Chekhov and this Russia, though now and then there is the dry rustle of paper. That at least has not changed. I raise the glass to my lips, and I am startled by the bitter cachinnation of the ice cubes. How can I, whose business is words, be suddenly at a loss for them? I chew my pen tip. I gnaw and I dream. I have strange fantasies. I see you sitting in a rocker, in a blue flower-print nightgown, your feet in slippers, perhaps those comical little slippers made to look like bunnies with plastic eyes and pink ears, while I read to you from my translation of Catullus. Does that seem far-fetched to you? You say nothing about the discrete words of affection I inserted in two previous letters. I am bewildered. Were they too subtle, and you overlooked them? Were they too strong, and you cringed? Were they too clumsy, and you tripped over them? In my anguish I gnaw furiously and spit bits of plastic onto the floor.