The Return of the Black Widowers (2 page)
We played a little game with each other. Because I was (somewhere in my lazy soul) truly chagrined at interrupting another writer at his creating, knowing it was a pain in the ass, even as such calls cheese me off when
I'm
working, I would try to make "reparations" by either telling him a new joke, or by assuming one of the myriad accents and timbres I use when recording spoken word performances. The more shamefaced I felt, the more complex and well-sculpted the bogus identity:
"Is this Dr. Isaac Emisov?" The voice of a petty functionary. A tax collector. An assistant bank manager. A collection agency goon.
"Asimov. This is Isaac
Asimov."
"Ah, yes. Dr. Esimov, this is Walter Cuthbert at Manhattan Central office of the Internal Revenue Service ..."
A pause. (Had he caught on yet?) Then, a tiny clearing of the throat, and the response in a deeper, more pillar-of-the-community tone. "What may I do for you, sir?"
"Well, to be frank, sir, quite a lot. We've taken under examination your tax returns for the years 1967 through 1990, and we've found sufficient, uh, 'irregularities' that the class auditors have passed it on up to my attention."
Caution. (The man was no fool.) (But with whom did he think he was playing here?) (Without mercy, one
must
be, if one is to pull it off.) "What, precisely, Mr. Cuthbert—" he said, pronouncing my name from perfect memory, as opposed to my relentlessly calling him Emisov, Akisov, Etceterasov,"—do you mean by 'irregularities'?"
"Well, Dr. Uh—"
"Asimov."
"Mm-hmm. For instance, we see in the years 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, you claimed 'entertainment deductions' in an aggregate of $877,463.89; but your total income during that period was only $775,012.44. Don't you find that a bit, well,
perplexing,
sir?"
"Who is this?"
Shit. He was on to me. "Walter Cuth—"
"None of that," he said, now honked-off at being wired up by some nitwit stealing his time, "who
are
you?”
"Would you believe Ty Cobb?"
"HAAAARRRRLLLAAANNNN!" In exactly the same voice, I'm convinced, was used by Judge Roy Bean when he yelled, "Hang the sonofabitch high enuff so's I can see his boot soles!"
I am not ashamed simply to state that I adored Isaac, before I actually met him, though we famously crossed paths not more than a year or two after I first read him. (And I will not reprise that meeting, which Isaac misremembered at the top of his voice for more than four decades, despite my clearing up the errors an infinite number of times, in person and in print.) Suffice to say, for the
last
time, I did
not
mean to insult him. I was a brash teenager, and I merely misspoke myself as a result of confronting my idol in the, er, rather abundant flesh, for the first time. Snip me some slack, okay?
But as Isaac wrote in a letter to me on 27 August 1973 (which you can find reproduced on page 113 of Stanley's 1995 epistolary compilation,
Yours, Isaac Asimov).
I am constantly asked about my feud with you, and I always answer that you and I are good friends. But it doesn't help. As long as we love each other, however, who cares.
He meant that, of course, in a real manly guy sort of Iron John bonding love kind of way. Not that there's anything wrong with, oh crap, forget it. Where was I?
With three thousand miles between us most of the time, and with Isaac's refusal to fly, we got together a lot less frequently than either of us would've enjoyed. Conventions through the years, conferences, academic gigs. And when I'd be in Manhattan, we would usually grab lunch. Once in a while, with Janet and my Susan, dinner at the Chinese joint down the block from their apartment. But one lunch Isaac and I shared in the late '70s, before I met and married Susan, is relevant to my being selected from among all the possible candidates to write this Foreword. It was mid-afternoon, in the Spring, if I recall correctly, and Isaac said, "C'mon, let's take a stroll over to The Tavern on the Green." That's Central Park. Nearby.”
So we moseyed on over, and we were waiting to order, and he says to me, he says: "How do you justify your existence?"
Oh, yeah? I thought. Gonna run that one on me, are you? As if I hadn't read the first three Black Widowers books. So I responded smartly, "My existence itself justifies my existence."
"Tautology!" he ripostes, trying to sneer, not pulling it off.
"I am unique; a rare jewel existent in the universe in the number of one."
"Hooey," he was, trying desperately for a Nero Wolfe moment.
"I am unique, thus justified in my existence, by what I do, that no other can do."
"And what is it that you do?"
"What it is that I
do
... is what I do."
He muttered something into his appetizer, but I'm not sure what it was; I think the word "slippery" was in there somewhere with the caramelized onions.
And it was at that lunch tryst that I said to him, "Listen, Toots, you use Lester in those Black Widowers stories, and Sprague and Don Bensen and even Lin Carter, but you've never used me as a character. Howzabout?"
Now, you will, I hope, remember that Isaac appropriated me as the paradigm for the most likeable character in
all
his books, the charming, witty, urbane and insightful Darius Just, 'tec avatar of
Murder at the ABA.
You
do
recall that, am I correct?
So Isaac smiled that lovely son-of-a-Brooklyn-candy-store-owner smile, and he agreed to bring Darius Just in for dinner with the Widowers. The fourth collection,
Banquets of the Black Widowers.
The story is "The Woman in the Bar."
I asked the editor, Mr. Ardai, if he might add that most excellent piece of work to the already-submitted table of contents, but whether the traitorous and untrustworthy Ardai chose to accede to this pathetic, tiny request is something I will not know till I see the finished volume.
(Ardai's own presumptuous story, the penultimate entry in this
book, contains veiled references of a most painful nature to your humble essayist. I choose not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but as Montresor said to Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado":
"Nemo me impune lacessit."
(No one harms me with impunity.
(Didn't think I'd notice, eh, Ardai? Thought your heartless little barbs would be politely overlooked, did you? Well, sir, not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but be on your watch, Ardai. Gardyloo, I say, sir, gardyloo! The moment of Divine Retribution slithers toward you through the hours, leaving a moist ebon trail of poison and rodomontade! Where was I?)
So that explains why I, the model for Darius Just, having been cast as a guest at one of the Widowers' banquets, was the humble, self-effacing, yet absolutely correct choice to write these words of introduction to the last collection of Black Widowers stories we shall see. Book six, curtain falls.
Isaac loved puzzles. Geezus peezus, that was a dopey thing to say. Of
course
he loved puzzles. Duh. Otherwise, why these six volumes, plus the novels, plus virtually everything he wrote, fiction or nonfiction. It was
all
in aid of solving the puzzles. Of fiction, of life, of the universe around us. And the universe out there.
He wrote sixty-six Black Widowers stories, of which these are the last few. In them, the character of Emmanuel Rubin, who was modeled after one of my earliest mentors, the late Lester del Rey, world-class pain in the ass, is not one scintilla as overbearing and anarchic as the template. Lester could make poison ivy nervous. The magnificent L. Sprague de Camp—Widower Geoffrey Avalon—is not a millionth as arresting and erudite as was the original . . .
(Pardon me yet another digression. This is a true story about Sprague, who was also a friend of mine, though separated from me by even more years than was Isaac. I'd used Sprague as the prototype for the character of the college professor in my story, "No Game For Children" and we'd gotten to know each other pretty well. But I'd met him years earlier, when I was still in high
school in Cleveland, and had come to New York under the aegis of Algis Budrys, who took me to a meeting of The Hydra Club, the fabled monthly gathering of the top science fiction professionals, where I met L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Sheckley, as well as, later, Cornell Woolrich; and on and on.
(So there I was, this urchin, and I'm hobbing as well as nobbing with the giants of the field, del Rey, Kornbluth, Pohl, Merrill, the lot of them. And right in the middle, tall and lean and elegant as an ebony sword-cane, was Sprague de Camp. And as I had located and read the novels he'd written with Fletcher Pratt, and as he was considered the most sapient humorist in SF at that time, I was especially observant of his actions, hoping AJ or Lester would introduce me. And I watched him as he behaved, well, rather oddly. He would stand at the outer perimeter of a group of people who were heavily into their conversation, and at some point—almost invariably when they broke up with laughter—he would jot notes into a small spiral-top note-pad. Then he'd move to another group of chatters, and the pattern would be repeated. This went on for an hour or so, until Jay Stanton [whose loft it was] grabbed him and, loud enough for everything else to come to a silent standstill, cried out, snatched the note-pad from de Camp's hand, and began leafing through it.
("What the hell is this all about?" Jay demanded.
("What's he been writing?" Lester wanted to know.
("He's been writing down everything we've been saying tonight!"
(Well, an explanation was chivvied out of the great sf-fantasy humorist, and it was this: Sprague had a formidable reputation for writing stories of great wit and humor. But he was, personally, a very proper, almost stiffnecked Late George Apley sort of guy, and apparently he hadn't the smallest clue as to what was actually funny. He hadn't, to be blunt, even the teeniest sense of humor. So he had been trailing around behind people all night, waiting for them to laugh, and then writing down the mots so he could take them back home and, at his leisure, codify, dissect, deconstruct and otherwise unriddle the essence of funny stuff.)
Geoffrey Avalon isn't nearly as idiosyncratic as Sprague. Nor is Mario Gonzalo AKA Lin Carter, who was—trust me on this—
really
weird.
Well, enough of that. But before I go, before I leave you to the familiar joys of this final Widowers banquet, let me drop in here just
one
of the unsolved puzzles passim these tales. In the story "Triple Devil," a few pages from the end, we find this passage:
Halsted said, "The usual image of the devil, with horns, hooves, and a tail, is drawn, actually, from the Greek nature god, Pan. Was it a book about Pan, or with the word 'Pan' in the title?"
"Actually," said Manfred, "I can't think of one."
I am puzzled by this. Isaac, who knew
everything,
who—in this story alone—demonstrates particular familiarity with a congeries of literary referents pursuant to the plot, from Thackeray, Trol-lope, Sterne, Wordsworth, Browning, H.G. Wells and Sir Walter Scott to Chesterton's Father Brown and Stephen Vincent Benet, has a character who is as literate and fecund as Isaac himself, say "I can't think of one." A novel with the name Pan in it.
Nor do any of the
other
characters, including the all-wise Henry, speak up and say, "Well, what about Arthur Machen's
The Great God Pan?"
A novel Isaac
had
to be as familiar with as he was with the works of Bierce, Blackwood, Charles Williams, and Wm. Seabrook.
I never got around to asking Isaac that. I suppose because I missed the story's magazine appearance in
EQMM.
But when I read it in the page-proofs sent to me by The Beast Ardai (I know-where you live, poltroon!), it struck me at once.
A puzzle.
Amid puzzles.
At the terminus of one of the great lives of our time. A final book, a hail and farewell, a kiss from out in the cold by The Good Doctor. For me, for you, for all of us.
When I call him tomorrow, I'll tell him you sent your best.
—
Harlan Ellison
THE ACQUISITIVE CHUCKLE
H |
anley Bartram was the guest, that night, of the Black Widowers, who monthly met in their quiet haunt and vowed death to any female who intruded—for that one night per month, at any rate.
