One day, the lovers “ran off” to live together, love together, hump each other crazy, and do this forever and ever, et cetera.For some reason, they headed in the man’s somewhat exhausted car, a nauseatingly green Ford Granada, to his home town, Lawton, Oklahoma. He had been born and raised in this burg, in which his parents and sister, washed in the blood of the lamb, still lived in a clapboard house, “the old homestead,” as the whole family liked to call it, smilingly: they might well have been the salt of the earth, or a pinch of it, anyway. The couple fucked their way, delirious and exhausted, through many motels, and on many occasions, pulled off the road to satisfy their enduring itch. They were, it goes without saying, seized by Paphian mania. The birds sang for them, and the sunshine glowed upon their stunned and unsated faces. There had never been a love like this in the history of the world, never.
When they reached Lawton, and the woman had been introduced to Dad, who did and liked as hobbies, and Mom, deeply involved in, and Sis, a member of the Something and the Whatever; and after the shock of this surprise visit to the old homestead, it became almost immediately clear to the folks at home that this somewhat desperate-looking woman of forty or so, in a too-tight sweater and dirty jeans, was not, she was most assuredly not the prodigal’s wife; and, soon after, they realized that, even more damning, she was someone else’s wife. These sinful revelations were squeezed out of the couple over two or three days, the family working as an inquisitorial team, their Christian smiles of love and understanding slowly fading, fading, fading into masks of righteous and gray anger: sic transit gloria caritatis. On the third day, the woman got up and sat on the back porch, smoking and looking out over the grim landscape, seemingly good for growing nothing but spite and hatred. She knew that she had already surrendered.
It will probably come as no surprise that the man, the seducer, the lover, he who would sacrifice all or at least some for his Helen, obeyed his family’s injunctions, their orders — given him with many tears and prayers by the bushel — to, well, ditch the whore tramp and beg Jesus to forgive him. The next afternoon, while his lover, who had slept on a mattress on the floor of a closet during their stay, was watching an old movie on TV, he came to her, falling to his knees in front of her, weeping and praying, and begged Jesus to forgive them both, and to wash them clean in his Sacred Blood that would always and as well as for all Eternity! She went upstairs, packed her nylon overnight bag, put her dirty clothes in a paper shopping bag, and sat on the floor: she was thirty-nine years old and had been — was it possible? — bewitched.
That night they left for New York, and although they stayed at many of the same motels while en route to Lawton, the chastised sinner slept in bathtubs or in the car, with a pillow, of course, under his noble head, lest Satan steal upon him in the reaches of the night with soft music, delicate perfumes, and filthy images of the recent past. He and the woman spoke to each other, but as if he were a chauffeur to a slightly demented and dying patient. She directed him to an apartment house in Kew Gardens, and he left her standing in front of it, not before hoping that Jesus might enter her heart with his and, and soon. Then he was off, and she looked after the car, hoping that God, any God at all, would see to it that he died in a crash on the way back home. She entered the lobby, and rang the bell of an old friend, long divorced, hoping that she was home and hospitable. Then she’d see about calling her husband to explain — explain? If he even knew she’d left.
— XLVI —
One morning, working fitfully on a story that he knew was not going to be any good, and that each gluey additional phrase made more awkward and unwieldy, and, worse, egregiously literary and important, the old writer put his pen down and lit a cigarette, although he had just about completely given up smoking; he had no idea why — oh, to live longer and with zest and verve, and to make happy the health corps.
He was tired, very tired, and too old and immovably marginalized for the story to make any difference to his life: what he had come to, in his mid-seventies, he had come to. He was respected, yes, he had known and been friends with many famous writers and artists, right, he had won a prize here, an award there, sure, odds and ends of distracted attention on the part of the fame machine. His current publisher, a kind of career “literary person,” had started his self-important little house with a young woman of very substantial means and a deep love of literature, of course. Their office “suite” was in Yonkers, magically transmuted to Bronxville on their letterhead. Yonkers/Bronxville was less than an hour from the city, so they could keep up (as they said) with things, yet it was quiet and relaxed, removed from the publishing frenzy (as they said) of New York. So they said and said again while they published salutary but soporific books of what one and all agreed was true literary merit. The publisher had spent his life so far working as an editor at two or three of the big mills, and had been responsible for many books of literary merit by many a spear carrier, some of whom had made back their wishful-thinking advances. But now he was an independent publisher, backed by his partner’s and, it should be known, lover’s money. He had left his unhappy wife and spoiled, unhappy children, who were, of course, really bright, for her. She understood him and his needs and hopes. The song goes on.
The new house, eponymously Solomon & Sorel, published, it so turned out, the same sorts of books for which he had been responsible in the frenzied world of Publishing, Inc. They were respectable, they did no harm, they exhibited to a degree the shopworn tropes and humanistic razzmatazz beloved of reviewers (“as if we have lived with these confused characters through their so-human travails,” etc.), and they were much like the bunk published by the latest thirty-year-old genius with the fresh eye and astonishing grasp, the one who makes us look anew at literature, but they were, to the chagrin of S&S, destined for the great void. Perhaps soon they’d luck out, although this phrase in its vulgar candor, was not used.
The house — Solomon was the publisher, Sorel the wealthy lover named, in exchange for the rent, “editor-in-chief”—picked up on the old writer, who is as we know currently smoking; they told him that if he didn’t have a current publisher — this was but a courtesy comment — S&S would be honored to be his outlet; he was marvelously this and courageous that and unfairly the other thing and tra la la la la. S&S (known already, cruelly, as So-So House) offered him an advance that would, he calculated cynically, cover his rent for not quite two months, an amount so modest, as they had no shame in saying, that it seemed to be a kind of honorarium presented him for being alive.
So they would publish the novel that had been rejected thirty-seven times, and after the novel, a collection of his short stories: with four or five new ones added to the twenty or so he’d published in his lifetime, they’d have a very attractive book, their phrase. The writer agreed, although he knew that he had very little creative juice left. His good early work was all o.p., and when he looked at it, he couldn’t recognize any of it as his. His energy had been left in bars and beds, in quarrels and envies, in bitter disappointments. He was written out, and knew it.