Читать книгу Leaving Word - Steven Boykey Sidley - Страница 9

Joelle stared at the sobbing, nameless intern and stood up, her attention now having expanded completely to fill the gap between wanting someone—anyone—to die, and then having it happen. She walked out of the office and strode briskly up the corridor, where various members of staff were standing about with hands over mouths, wildly texting or frozen into various attitudes of shock and incomprehension. Joelle sailed past them, vaguely hoping that fast walking would somehow make some unspecified difference. She had only ever once faced death at close quarters. Her mother had fallen under the hammer of early demise when Joelle was sixteen, in their family home in Simi Valley, a dry and hopeful and disappointed bedroom community about an hour north east of Los Angeles. It was a heart attack—a cruel expression of her mother’s heart-weakened ancestral lineage. She had dropped dead in the kitchen, while making Joelle’s lunch. Sort of stopped, looked oddly at the cheese-and-tomato sandwich she had carefully assembled, and sank to the floor on her knees, carefully putting the plate down before tumbling forward. Joelle had walked quickly then too, but that was to a neighbor’s house for help, and she had not yet realized that her mother was dead. But now fast walking and death had fused in her brain. She had made a mental note to dawdle everywhere, but was violating that now. Fast walking can only lead to trouble.

She stepped into the deputy publisher’s office. Clayton Delaware was on the phone. He motioned her to sit. He put his hand over the mouthpiece and whispered, ‘Speaking to the lawyers.’ Then he returned to his conversation, his voice squeaked to high pitch.

‘I fucking found him, that’s who. He was sitting on his chair. Eyes open. How did I know? I’ll tell you how the fuck I knew. He didn’t greet me. Then he didn’t answer my questions. Then I realized he wasn’t looking at me. Then I raised my fucking voice. Then I realized something was fucking wrong. So I stood up and put my ear to his mouth, like in movies. There was no breath. What? How the fuck would I know? Jesus. Get some people here. Fuck. Police, doctors, his rabbi, his brother, whoever. Not the press. Fuck. Fuck.’

He put the phone down.

‘Jesus. Fuck.’

‘What happened?’ She concentrated hard so as not to sob. Nobody likes a sobber.

Clayton was a loquacious and scrawny weasel of about fifty who had worked his way up from event management and who wore a bowtie and who fancied himself a literati, a connoisseur of fine things. As far as she knew, he had never read a single book that the company had published but rather gobbled up synopses and regurgitated them eidetically at dinner parties and meetings. But since Buddy had arrived he had suddenly gone mute, his corporate ladder clearly in a state of tip and fall. She would have preferred distance, but publishers and editors must co-operate, collaborate, drink together and kibitz. She did all with equal dollops of distaste. Clayton’s saving grace was that he did not ask her out. She imagined that his attempts at consummation were mainly committed on himself. He was so awful that she occasionally looked forward to their interactions, as one might look forward to the hall of horrors in a wax museum. She wondered if Buddy’s death had stabilized his ladder.

Clayton turned to her. ‘Don’t ask me anything. I know nothing. I found him. He’s dead.’

‘Yes, but how? What?’

‘Jesus, Joelle, I know nothing, I told you.’

‘Was he murdered? A heart attack?’

‘Fuck! You’re asking questions I can’t answer again!’

‘Can I go and see him?’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s not a good idea.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if he was murdered, then you’d be trampling on evidence.’

‘HE WAS MURDERED? WHO WOULD WANT TO MURDER BUDDY?’ She felt herself losing control.

‘Joelle! Get a grip. How the fuck would I know if he was murdered? Go home. I’ll call you later when the cops have come.’

Joelle exited and consciously slow-walked back to her office lest someone else die. She grabbed her bag and left the building and drove her nondescript little car back to her place in Santa Monica, her head a cacophony of emotional whatnot. She lived about five blocks back from the beach, a small apartment, overpriced and underwhelming. When she had moved from head office in New York to pet and stroke and seduce the West Coast cadre of literary talent, of which there was plenty, she had decided to sprout roots again after all those years as an East Coast émigré. This was a decision assisted by wanting to be close to her sister Karina, and pushed over the line by a feeling of existential drift, so she decided to throw in with solidity and overpay for the honor of landed gentryship. She had insisted on only one thing, a view—even a poor view—of the sea. After all, what was the point of living near the beach if the sea was out of sight? Fifth Avenue enjoyed a slight topological rise in elevation above the other avenues, so a view she got, albeit from a tiny balcony that could barely accommodate a table for two. But after the clutter of New York she went on a merciless throwaway, determined to live light. Her apartment was indeed that, a bare minimum that would make Marie Kondo proud—other than the overflowing book-piled surfaces. Kondo clearly did not love books as she did. Unread books, much beloved books, partially abandoned books, gift books, friends’ books, loaned books. Books she loved and books she hated. Books she had edited and books she wished she had. Periodically neatly categorized on shelves by genre and author but always and often chaotically exploded after just a few months of quiet military discipline. And now she was pacing around the small but otherwise neat space, wishing for more chaos and clutter to distract her. She had a small Japanese refrigerator, the icebox of which cocooned a frosty bottle of expensive Absolut, unopened, patiently awaiting an occasion, now presented. She poured a tumbler, neat and cold, and called her sister.

‘I killed Buddy,’ she wailed.

‘What? What are you talking about?’

‘He’s dead. Buddy’s dead.’

‘WHAT? ARE YOU SERIOUS? WHAT DID YOU DO?’

‘I caused it. Shamanism. Demonism. Witchery. Necromancy,’ she sniffled.

‘Oh. You had me worried. I was already planning to bust you out of prison. Is he really dead? How?’

‘They don’t know yet.’

‘Why are you so upset? I thought he fired you for not sleeping with him?’

‘I may have exaggerated a bit. And I’m upset because I told you that someone needed to die. I didn’t mean Buddy.’

She refilled her glass and tried to understand why she was so upset. She hadn’t really dwelled much on it, but it was pretty clear now. Buddy was her mythical house on the hill. Someone she might, in her wildest dreams, have loved. Someone different enough to allow for vigorous sparring, from which they could emerge re-energized rather than exhausted. Someone who swam if not in, then at least proximal to her pool of intellectual passions. She wondered now whether she had seen something that was never there at all. She wondered about those moments when she caught him looking at her in a meeting. Or how he held her gaze when he talked to her. Or how he would call her at home about a business matter, and then just let the conversation range, tell her about things that are only the concern of friends and intimates, his fears, his insecurities, his sudden sadnesses and unbidden joys. He would ask her about herself, her loves and other lives, her mother’s death, her sad and isolated father, her smart sister. He would ask her her opinion, on everything, and remember it. At editorial meetings he would defer to her, support her against dissenting opinions. She could not have been misperceiving this. All that was missing was the call, a date, and the certainty of where it would lead. But he never went there. She always assumed it was simply a matter of timing. She remembered the stories of people, men and woman, who insisted that Bill Clinton was talking directly and meaningfully and sensuously to them alone in an auditorium full of people. Perhaps Buddy was just that, a man of practiced arts, a supernatural collector of fealties. She was more upset about his death than she was about losing her job, in which he certainly had a hand. She was more upset about losing the uncertainty of Buddy than what might have been the certainty of her career. In fact, he had personally come to her office to tell her. She replayed it.

‘Joelle, you have a minute?’ He stood uncertainly at her office door.

‘Of course, come in.’ Against her better judgment, her heart did a brief tango.

He lowered his ample frame down on the only other chair in her office, a little art deco number built for a smaller species. She prayed it wouldn’t collapse.

‘There’s no other way to say this, Joelle. We have to let you go. I’m sorry, the board has given me no option. We are, um, downsizing our book business.’

She felt herself stop breathing, and stared at him without expression.

He continued. ‘We’ve arranged a very generous package for you.’

‘How nice.’

‘Please understand—you know the reading trends better than I do. It’d be insulting to someone like you to be asked to edit, um, less weighty stuff. We would like you to stay for the month, and then, if you want, take your current projects with you and we’ll pay you as a contractor while you finish them up.’

‘I’m so grateful. I mean, not to be insulted. Thank you.’

He ran out of things to say, but sat there, dejected, avoiding her death stare.

‘Let me ask you something, Buddy. What are you reading these days? What’s next to your bed?’

‘Um, some non-fiction stuff.’

‘Like?’

‘Tech trends, business stuff, that sort of thing.’

‘So did you read the Russians, the Brontës?’

‘Most of them.’

‘And?’

‘They were very good. Some were much more than that.’

‘And so in your world, good fiction like that, what happens to them? The writers, I mean. You know, the imaginations you so articulately asked us to carry gently in our hands?’

‘Don’t make this harder than it is, Joelle. There’s a board, shareholders. I do their bidding. If there was a larger reading market with larger margins I wouldn’t be in your office. Maybe we could discuss this over a drink after work.’

She held in outraged laughter. Now? Now you want to fuck me? You think now is a good time to ask me out? I was available last week, you dick.

But she just looked at him, hoping that her face betrayed nothing.

‘Sorry. No. Now you’ll have to excuse me—I have a lot of work to finish if I am to be out of here before the end of the month. But thanks for stopping by.’

For a while he sat there like a scolded child, and then heaved himself out the chair and backed out of the door. Joelle breathed deeply, stood up, went to the bathroom, locked herself in the stall and waited for a Category 5 cry. It didn’t come. Perhaps the milk had long been spilt.

He was right, of course. Companies need to go where the big profits are, even if it means going to places where they have never gone before, like virtual reality, an experience she was determined never to have. Pivoting, they called it. No need for sentimentality. Everything is a product—an item whose value is negotiated between buyer and seller. Nothing man-made rises to the level of deity. All is commodity, impermanent, transitory, degradable. Potatoes, shirts, cars, great art, mobiles, pencils, great literature, newspapers, ex-boyfriends, great music, vacations, toothbrushes. Fuck it, she’d do something else. Something with margin, dammit. Import and sell Ethiopian coffee. Start a porno site. Write erotica. Open a flower shop. Pet shop. Sell her labor on a farm. Go back to college and study finance and buy and sell companies. It’s all the same. Oh, and growth. She forgot about growth. She must grow. Profits are not sufficient. No pathetic three percent revenue and profit growth for CrossMedia. Oh no, they need to grow like a tumor. Our companies need to grow, like our countries, our populations, our ambitions, our self-regard, our usage of this planet, which, sadly, cannot grow. More, more, more. Was there no end to it? She remembers reading, who was it? Naomi Klein? In which the author said, simply, if you don’t want to crash the planet in a number of unpleasant ways, stop growth. Companies, countries, cities, populations, GDP. Just stop. We’ll be fine. What a dumb idea, Joelle had thought at the time.

And what of art? What audacity. What arrogance to think she could contribute. And the artists themselves? Who the hell did they think they were? Some quintessence of human achievement? Their works covenants between man and God? Guernica? Pah! Chopin’s Prelude in E minor? Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring? Oh please! Don Quixote? Hamlet? Ulysses? Middlemarch? Ha! Scribblers making up shit. These people should have worried about margins. Revenue. EBITDA. Growth. Damn parasites.

She had gone back to her office, and had sat down and opened Word.

Dear Buddy,

I would like to thank you for the opportunities offered me during my tenure at CrossMedia. It has been a privilege to serve the writers who have passed through my care and to learn the lessons between the pages of their books, and when fortune smiled, to rejoice in their critical and commercial acclaim.

The craft that I have acquired started early, before I was even a teenager. Reading was my friend and guide during both the happy and sad times of my youth. Then after I got to college and stepped into the deep end, they became more; they became the ground on which I walked, every day, from then until now.

So I thank you for alerting me that all of this effort amounts to a cell in an Excel spreadsheet, and that the great works of writing that I have enjoyed and worked on are to become faded sepias (‘peopling our archives’, as you once remarked in a more promising time), while the world turns its eyes to smaller globes of swifter satisfaction. I guess I should simply be grateful to have felt the warmth of some great authors and their books over a lifetime of editing.

I can die happy now, reading and rereading all the works that have shaped me. You, on the other hand, can bask in the achievements that I know will be yours, as CrossMedia Publishing seeks and conquers newer challenges, and finds brighter suns under which to warm.

I had hoped you were letting me go because I wouldn’t fuck you, which I eventually would have. But you never even tried. Why didn’t you try? Because I am too old, not tall enough, not cute enough, not whatever? The fact that you never even tried, notwithstanding an occasional moment that may or may not have passed between us at an editorial meeting, is distressing. Should I have tried? Should I have reversed the gender roles that have become so entrenched? We will never know. Distressing, indeed.

But being told that my life’s work is of insufficient further value to the organization (‘going forward’, as you businessmen say), well, that is another matter over which I will no doubt ruminate without pleasure for a long time.

Goodbye, Buddy. I wish you, what?

Justice?

She had read it, and reread it, and edited this way and that, and then deleted it, satisfied, and left to have coffee and a vape with Karina at a small coffee shop at the beach.

Now Buddy was dead and she sat on her tiny balcony with a tumbler of chilled vodka thinking what the fuck just happened to my life.