Nowhere (12 page)

“Uh-huh. And it doesn’t strike you as strange to have such employment as you do?”

“Not at all. You see, I am therefore utterly unbiased. One book is as good as another to me.”

“You don’t really have many books at the library, do you?”

“Not now.”

“At one time there were more than the
Encyclopaedia Sebastiana?
”

“A good many,” said the librarian. “I gave them all away.”

The rickshaw man was waiting at the curb. His head was down and he seemed to be dozing as a horse might in the same situation.

“To whom did you present them?”

“I gave one to each person, but sometimes, when I was told that several constituted a set, I gave those that belonged together to the same person, relying on his honesty, for of course I was unable to identify the titles except by ear.”

“Extraordinary,” I said. “And may I ask why you disposed of the collection of the public library of Saint Sebastian?”

“It seemed to make little sense to keep all the books with me, who could not read, when they might each find a good home with someone who would make use of them.”

“Yes, but people generally do not reread the same volume constantly unless it’s a religious scripture and they are fanatically devout,” I told him. “Most readers go from one book to the next.”

He was shaking his head. “Not in this country.”

“Come now, you don’t mean to say a Sebastiani reader remains with the
same
book?”

“With all respect,” said the librarian, “if your practice is otherwise. But my literate countrymen believe that, going from one book to another, the reader can never get more than the most superficial sense of what the author has taken the pains to write.”

I was not insensitive to the point being made, having myself in my pedagogical days taught a survey-of-world-lit. course at State, in which in the space of barely eight months the students were obliged to pretend they had read the major works of some twenty centuries (I confess their instructor had to fake a few himself). “There is much to be said for that argument if the books concerned are masterpieces,” I noted. “But
every
volume in the library? Would you not have had some titles of negligible value: the mendacious memoirs of film stars, the apologias of ex-statesmen, once famous muckrakings made pointless by time, first-aid manuals for personality disorders now out of fashion, and the kind of narratives our forebears found risqué but which nowadays would anesthetize with ennui a novice nun?”

“Sebastiani readers do not make such distinctions,” said the librarian. “If a book is printed and bound, it’s good enough for them.”

It occurred to me to ask, “Would the books concerned have been the work of Sebastiani authors?”

“Indeed they would,” said he.

“Might it be possible for me to meet one or more of your writers? There are some extant?”

“Certainly. The pink house just there is their quarters.” He indicated the building next to the library.

“When you say ‘quarters,’ do you mean they live there in a kind of colony?”

“Of course. That is the law.”

“When you say ‘law,’ do you mean that they are obliged to live there?”

“Not unless they want to practice that profession,” said the librarian. “No man can be forced to become a writer, but if he does become one, he must live here and not amongst the populace.”

“What is the purpose of that law? For whose benefit was it enacted? The public’s or the writer’s?”

“Both, I should think,” the little librarian said. “Thus neither is polluted by the other.”

“I’m not sure what that means. By ‘polluted,’ do you mean—”

“I’m sure it’s a fancy way of saying ‘bored,’ don’t you know,” said he. “But here we are.” We had reached the doorstep of the two-story building in pink stucco. “The authors will be having their... let me see, which meal will it be? Breakfast, Postbreakfast, Lunch, ah yes, this would be Postlunch without a doubt. I’m sure you will be most welcome in the dining room.”

W
E ENTERED THE PINK
house and went upstairs to a dining room that occupied most of the second floor. Its central feature was a large round table, at which about dozen men, one or two young, one or two old, but most of them in middle age, sat silently drinking what would seem from its color, and the shape of the glasses, to be sherry.

“Gentlemen,” said my sponsor, “you have a visitor from New York. I know you’ll want to make him welcome.”

One of the writers, a flabby-cheeked individual with the melancholy eyes of a hound, gestured with his forefinger. “There’s a place there, next to Spang.”

I assumed it was Spang, a sallow, longlipped man, who moved so that I might slide into the chair beside him. But when I said, “How do you do, Mr. Spang. I’m Russel Wren,” he replied, in a high-tenor voice, “Oh, I’m not Spang. I’m Hinkle.”

“Since when are you not Spang?” asked the sad-eyed man who had first spoken to me.

“I’ve never been Spang. He’s deceased.”

“If that’s so, then why have you never mentioned it before?”

“There’s never been an occasion to do so,” said Hinkle. “You’ve never called me Spang before.”

“But
I’ve always thought you were Spang.
Can’t you get that through your thick head? Simply because I’ve never had to use your name before doesn’t mean that I was not certain what it was.”

“Well, what do you want me to do, for God’s sake?” Hinkle asked. “Change it to Spang so that your usage is legitimized?”

The flabby-cheeked man smirked. “Well, aren’t we getting toplofty?”

I looked towards my neighbor on the left, but he did not return the favor. He was a beetle-browed sort, with a hard-looking jaw. He stared malevolently into his sherry.

No one did anything about getting me a glass. The librarian had taken a silent leave.

I began, “You see, my own work has been for the theat—” but was interrupted by a curly-headed author across the table, one of the younger men.

“Leave it to you assholes to make an issue of something so inane. Who cares who’s Spang and who isn’t?”

Hinkle said, “You wouldn’t be happy if someone got your name wrong, Boggs.”

“I couldn’t care less!”

“All right, then, I’ll call your bluff. From now on, I’ll refer to you as Sprat.”

The curly-haired man frowned. “Now, wait a minute. That’s insulting. I don’t have to take that sort of thing.”

“You phony,” Hinkle growled in disgust. “It’s simply a name I made up out of the blue. What’s insulting about it?”

“It’s the name of a tinned fish, as you very well know!”

Some of the others were sniggering now. A well-constructed young Blond waitress appeared behind a serving cart full of soup bowls. She began to distribute the soup, starting with me, then moving on in a counterclockwise direction towards Hinkle.

“You’re being oversensitive, Boggsy,” said a man whose dark hair was plastered flat to his scalp and parted in the middle. “My name is Merkin, but I’ve never been embarrassed by it. It was good enough for my old dad and it’s good enough for me.”

“Of course that’s an archaic word,” said the only man yet to have addressed me,
viz.,
he who had directed me to a seat. “You’d feel different if you were called Cunthair. I think Boggs has a point.”

“Well,” said Merkin, “ ‘bog’ meant ‘shit’ in the olden time, did it not?”

Someone else asked, “Verb or noun?”

I saw with astonishment that the large-nosed author next to Hinkle had slipped his left hand up under the skirt of the waitress as she bent to place his soup before him, and was obviously massaging her buttock. No one but me, including the young woman, paid any attention to this.

When I looked again at Boggs, he was plucking up a roll. He proceeded to hurl it at Merkin. Merkin with amazing speed lifted a fending palm, and the roll bounced off it and soared to fall into the soup which the waitress had placed before the large-nosed man while he was fondling her behind.

The victim seized the nearest basket of rolls and began to hurl them one by one at Boggs, who ducked some but was hit by several. When the fusillade had ended, Boggs asked the man next to him to pass the boat-shaped glass dish that held olives, black and green, and sticks of celery.

The author with the flabby cheeks protested. “Now, hold on, Boggs. I’m fond of olives and don’t want to eat them off the floor.”

Boggs carried the dish to this man and emptied it on his head. “Eat your fill, then, Buzzle.”

The waitress had now reached the man on my left, but the cart was empty. There had been just enough bowls for each of the regulars. My presence had thrown off the count. With an extended finger she enumerated the bowls she had served, shook her head, and burst into tears.

Buzzle had been furiously gathering up as many of the olives and celery sticks as he could, after they had rolled and bounced off his head, no doubt with an angry intent to launch them at Boggs, who had returned to his seat, but the weeping girl distracted everyone for the moment.

Hinkle was first to speak. “You idiot,” he cried to her, and then he shook his head at various of his colleagues and even at me. “It’s an outrage that almost every day our meal is marred by some stupidity on the part of that Blond.” He addressed her again. “You fool!”

She sobbed into her hands and then peeped out with two blue eyes. “Is brinkink twelf as alvays.”

Merkin shouted, “Count them, you silly bitch!”

When she did as instructed, most of the writers joined her in pointing at the bowls and announcing the numbers aloud, in chorus. They arrived at twelve.

“I don’t understand it,” said Hinkle. “There
are
enough bowls.” They repeated the process, this time without being joined by the waitress, who stood silent and humble alongside her cart.

I finally said, “May I explain? You see, I am the ex—” At this point Buzzle hurled two handfuls of olives at me, and Merkin began to pelt me with rolls. I was also the target of odd names as terms of abuse: “Barber!” “Dentist!” “Accountant!” And so on.

For a moment I was taken aback to be so treated when I was supposed to be their guest, and I crossed my arms across my face and sank beneath the table, out of the line of fire. But then, since I hadn’t really been hurt, indignation soon became my dominant emotion. I came up fighting. I lifted my bowl and hurled the soup across the table into Boggs’s face. I picked up from the floor some of the rolls thrown at me and fired them at Hinkle, Merkin, and Buzzle. I snatched up olives and celery and dashed them into the face of the grumpy-looking man on my left, though in truth he had not been one of the aggressors against me.

“You shits!” I cried. “You call yourselves writers?” Perhaps this had nothing to do with the issue at hand, but surely one need not justify what one says when exercised.

Eventually it struck me that from the moment I went on the offensive, the authors became peaceable, and by the time I had committed several acts of violence against them they had begun to assume expressions I could not but identify as admiring, perhaps even downright obsequious. For example, the man on my left wiped his face with a napkin, rose, and came meekly to me.

“Sir,” said he, “please accept my apology for having offended you as apparently, though without intention, without indeed having, to my memory, been aware of your presence until this moment—unless, to be sure, it was that very ignorance for which you gave me what was surely a merited punishment and if not was yet no doubt deserved according to that principle enunciated by the Bard,
videlicet,
which amongst us could escape the noose were justice to be honored more in the observance than the breach?” He offered his hand. “Your servant, sir. I am Barnswallow.”

“Wren,” said I. I transferred to my left hand the roll I had been holding and shook with him: he had a weightless but clinging sort of grip, which one half expected to have to scrape away.

“Welcome to our little convocation,” he said. His paunch hung over his belt. It now occurred to me that all these authors wore matching navy-blue three-piece suits, most of which were rumpled, stained at the vest, and sprinkled with dandruff at the shoulders and even the lapels. Barnswallow was one of those whose vests were unbuttoned so as to offer a modicum of liberty to their extra flesh.

Hinkle was next to offer his welcome. The others around the table were beaming and intoning, “Hear, hear.”

I finally lowered my roll to the tabletop. I was not yet prepared to be extravagantly genial, but I did say, grudgingly, “Well, all right, I suppose I can accept the apology. But I’ll strike back if I am the recipient of any more aggression. I realize I am an uninvited guest, but you might simply have asked me to leave.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Wren,” said Hinkle. “It would have been rude by our lights to ask you to go, you see. As it was, we proved you were welcome by treating you as badly as we treat one another!”

Again the “Hear, hears” were sounded around the table.

“All right,” said I. “I’m willing to put the misunderstanding, if such it was, behind me. Now please resume your usual activities. I assume these lunches are normally the occasions for discussion of your works in progress?” I sat down now, as, following my lead, did those writers who had sprung up earlier.

“Actually,” said Boggs, across the table, after the chair legs had stopped squeaking, “we talk almost exclusively about inconsequential matters, as it happens. Never do we mention to any of our colleagues what we’re working on at the moment, lest he steal the idea and complete the work before the man can whose original idea it was.”

“Then you don’t trust one another?”

Buzzle snorted. “Certainly not! We writers are the most unscrupulous people in the country. We’re well known for that. Not only will we steal one another’s ideas. We mingle with the crowds in the marketplace, shoplifting and picking pockets. If someone is still naïve enough to invite any of us to dinner, we’ll swipe what we can: silverware, family heirlooms small enough to slip into a pocket, dirty underwear from the bathroom hamper—

“Male or female underclothing?”

“Either,” said Boggs. “As long as it’s been worn recently.”