Sibella & Sibella Read online

  “Bingo,” said Myron, “transom is a word that refers to crucifixions and executions and thus it applies perfectly to my publishing house?”

  As you can tell, he was exhausted or hungover or something and not making a whole lot of sense. Plus, he was rubbing the top of his head, for lack of a more precise term, nostalgically. I have known guys who lose their hair (not the old boyfriend poet yet, unfortunately), and when they think nobody’s looking, they rub the top of their heads, as if one day hair will magically reappear there, that some benevolent force will correct this cosmically cosmetic misunderstanding. The lack of hair that is male-pattern baldness might work like phantom limbs on amputees. Now, that is an inappropriate association, politically incorrect if not inconceivable, which reminds me I will need to get my visa stamped in order to cross the hipster checkpoints that let you pass into Park Slope so you can covertly spike some blonde scheming bitch’s non-fat goy decaf latte.

  “How long, Sibella, you been working here?”

  “It’s a little after nine, so like about forty-five minutes?”

  “No, since you started your job at the house?”

  I told him, and I instantly felt very, very old. If I was a tree and Paul Bunyan stepped out of a Castro Street bar and chopped me down, the number of rings inside me would exponentially explode. That’s how old. I felt my shoes curling up around my toes like elfs’ booties old. I felt my shirt go right out of fashion on my back. I remembered when I got that ink during the weak moment that was my two years of college old. Ancient.

  “Time I give you a new position, Sibella. You’ve earned a promotion? From now on, you’re my junior editor?”

  I counted to ten and gently broke the news to him.

  “Oh, I thought you were an intern?”

  So there I was in San Francisco but it could have also been Los Angeles, it doesn’t matter a whole fuck of a lot, as you will see, which is the first and last time you will ever read that the difference between SF and LA is moot, but then again the birthers will find out I’m a New Yorker the way Obama was not Kenyan, so like I fucking care because I will never be a Cali Fornian, and neither will most of them because they never stop name-dropping Brooklyn. (Try to find a book jacket author photo caption these days that doesn’t conclude with “and now lives in Brooklyn.” This brings up for me an unrelated and equally annoying grievance: the girl. As in The Girl in Every Fucking Book Title. I said it was unrelated.) I’m no Raymond Chandler, so I’m not going to try very hard to mask everything and make a Maltese Falcon out of a sow’s ear, and I know that’s On Dancer On Prancer On Dashiell Hammet, give me a break. Myron’s story of his publishing house might end up a mystery in the end, you’ll have to wait and see and then tell me.

  In any event, I didn’t want to burn any bridges in case I needed a job in the industry in the future. It was impossible for me to determine how that career choice would ultimately fit into my hundred-year plan. Anyway, here goes what happened that morning when I got a new promotion to the job I already had. And honestly, trust me, Myron did look like shit.

  The Heart is a Lonely Sibella

  Time out. You’ll never guess who had written me. I mean, how the fuck could you?

  My ex sent me an out-of-the-blue email that morning, before I exercised the duty of astutely advising Myron he looked like shit. The three-hour difference, East Coast and West, often accounted for a bustling inbox when I logged in. I wish the computer had caught on fire and I would have had no choice but to reach out to our tech guy wearing one of his two hundred sweat-stained grimy baseball caps, a guy who chuckles over jokes he tells himself and holds normal people like me (admittedly a weak example) in greatdainful contempt, another story. And why do these guys always wear baseball caps? If they were handed a bat and a glove, I swear they’d try to download a ball.

  Here’s what Oh Junior My Junior Our Tearful Trip Is Done wrote me:

  ✴✴✴

  Ciao, bella Sibella,

  How are you, Sibella sweetheart? I am disappointed we didn’t see each other before you peregrinated abruptly for California and publishing stardom at Hard Rain. What a plum job. I am proud of you. I hope we can get together when you’re home for the holidays to see your folks or when you have a business meeting in the Big Apple. It will be good to catch up. Let’s go to Eataly or to Maialino in Gramercy Park, which you like, or this cool place Carbone in the Village where my agent took me. It’s a restaurant straight out of “The Godfather,” our favorite movie.

  Leave the gun, take the cannoli, Sibella.

  Tell Sibella it was only business. I always liked her.

  As for me, things have been crazy crazy crazy since the book of poems came out. Reviews, interviews, requests for new work, it’s all a little bit dizzying. You know me, how I hate celebrity.

  And all along I thought you meant celery!

  Nobody knows better than you what it was like for me to write those poems, more than a few of which I began writing, well, in bed with you, my Muse, figuratively speaking. If you don’t mind my saying so.

  No, of course, sweetheartless, your All Mused Up Muse Sibella finds such an observation on this side of amusing and doesn’t mind, and then why don’t you fuck the fuck off, fuckuratively speaking. The bed you a lewd to was one in which I marked up those early drafts of yours and rewrote every other so-called line. That was also the very same bed where you introduced your Brooklinear Skank to the quaint concept of your Junior while I was out of town and she was on her Latter Day Sluts Mission. How many immortal poems did that cheat bang generate?

  Thanks for the kind words you wrote me on that so-you postcard about my little book of poems I sent you. Yale has been great to me, and I am kind of humbled to see my name alongside all the illustrious poets who began their careers as Yale Younger Poets. It makes me happy to know I am on your shelf and that there are no hard feelings anymore. I truly admired the mature way you dealt with our breakup. I wish it could have been easier for all three of us.

  All three of us? You mean you, me, and your Junior? Because don’t put me and that rich bitch in the same sentence, not if you want your Junior to grow up one day to be Senior. But, ah, I truly doubt you caught the import of my so-me selected postcard. It was of the Vietnam War Memorial, which I unearthed in my peacenik protestor dad’s scattered desk drawer. Think about it. You know how to think, don’t you? Put your lips together and blow me. And yes, Junior, don’t you worry your pretty little Junior. Your book’s right here on my office shelf. Indeed, I keep it safe and warm in an urn, and when I say urn, I mean used illy coffee can. That is the receptacle where I collected its ashes after I torched your prizey book to a delicious award-winning crisp.

  You’ll never guess what, Sibella.

  Bitch gave you herpes? I warned you.

  Remember I told you that I could never imagine writing fiction, that I was a poet and poetry was my life? Well, things change, don’t they?

  They certainly do, you two-timing weasel.

  I wrote a novel!

  Quick, stop the depresses!

  It came fast, in a rush, six weeks, 300+ pages. And I got an agent in like two minutes, and she loves it. She was about to ship it off to the usual NY suspects, but I put my foot down, and told her, Sandy, let’s first try Hard Rain Publishing, where my dear college friend Sibella is an editor. I mean, a big publishing house would be nice, and a six-figure advance, but money’s not that important

  Now that you sold your soul and munch bon bons and plagiarize Gerard Manley Fucking Hopkins all your thirty-minute working day. My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird. A bird-brain like you.

  and it will be nicer getting close attention from you and your fantastic cutting-edge publishing operation. I took the liberty of attaching a file. Hope you will want to read it, and I hope you like it. My agent sees a great movie in its future.

  A movie Sandy sees in its future?
Did you ever catch The Departed, Junior?

  But be gentle, I’ve been hurt before. J

  Has anybody ever told you how fucking adorable you are? I didn’t think so.

  That’s all for now. My deets are on the title page with my new Brooklyn address. Can’t wait to hear from you, Sibella. Have you learned to surf yet?

  As Emily D, Belle of Amherst, came oh-so-close to saying, “My life had Stood a loaded Pun.”

  Love always,

  Me

  ✴✴✴

  Did I jettison Me’s self-absorbed, tone-death Junior email off into junk mail intergalactic Junior land, where it belonged? You may not know me yet, but you can readily welcome this much: I didn’t toss it, which would be unprofessional for a junior editor. In fact, I did open the attached file containing the novel that he and I both supposedly thought he was too sensitive to ever compose, but I could only get as far as the dedication page. Right there, that’s all I wanted to see, being a gluten-free for crime and punishment. A sentence was instantly branded onto my cattle-hide brain:

  To Chantal, who makes everything possible.

  Flagrant foul, two shots and the ball.

  But everything? Not so fast, Junior. There was one thing chère Chantal would not make possible, not if I could help it.

  Here’s what I rashly composed by way of reply:

  I would sooner bake LeBron’s tennis shoes parmigiana than read your book.

  I would sooner moonwalk across the Mojave at high noon.

  I would sooner swim with the sharks.

  I mean I would sooner you swam with the sharks.

  But genile reader, I didn’t transmit that email. Ding.In flagrante deleted.

  As I once heard, publishing as well as junior editing brings out the asshole in everyone. But unlike revenge, contempt is best served flambéed. Junior didn’t teach me a whole lot I could use, but he gave me a PhfuckingD in rejection.

  Sibella the Scrivener

  It was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

  Technically, it was winter in San Francisco, which is a season that reminds me of lovely October in New York, and nowadays clocks don’t strike anything anymore.

  But that’s how 1984 opens, to me an altogether meh book I was assignated in high school. Who are the starchy lab-coated pedephilogogues who cherry-pick those classics for secondary school inmates? Eric Arthur Blair’s pennamed book was taught by a Ms. Redburn, a smart, sprightly lady who sincerely urged me to “apply” myself to other academic disciplines if I wanted to attend a good college like hers, which was Sarah Lawrence, Sarah being no apparent relation to D. to the H. Lawrence. (“John Thomas says goodnight to Lady Jane, a little droopingly.” Honest to God, the goateed hack wrote “droopingly” of his John Thomas Junior. And again, I must imp lore what’s with guys’ baptizing their Johnson?) Sarah’s institution of higher ed was not the one that recklessly offered me a full basketballian ride, so I never did attend what was to her a good college. Redburn wore cowboy boots and shirts and bolo ties to her run-on-sentence-extermination occupation at the Spence School and she religiously affected British pronunciation. Every week or so she mentioned how she took a “grand” summer school class at Cambridge (CALM-bridge), which could account for how she availed herself of any opportunity to articulate Nicaragua and Jaguar. You would be surprised how frequently she contrived (no con-TROV-er-see here) to reference Ni-Car-Ah-Gyu-Ah (she never was a turista) or Jag-U-Ar. She didn’t drive that canonical British automobile or any other, not even a prep school standard-issue Prius. Besides, Spence is on the Upper East Side, where cars seeking parking places go to die.

  Nonetheless, it wasn’t April and thirteen o’clock the morning that began a new—I suppose I have to say a new link between Myron and me, for reasons that will become medievally oblivious.

  Whan that April with his showres soote

  The droughte of March hath perced to the roote

  That’s the day Myron formally fingered me as his confidante.

  ✴✴✴

  That came out wrong, but I am on deadline and you get what I mean. Believe it or not, he wanted me to write a book about his favorite subject: himself. He evidently ruled out the editor in chief, whom he called Young Goodman Brown, or YGB for short, for reasons initially puzzling to me. But if you ever chanced upon the spooky stories of Moby Dick’s envious buddy, you might hazard a conjecture or two. And “hazard” was Downtown Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  (I hope you’re enjoying our little collusion pastime, Kelly, while you’re getting your weekly mani-pedi. I’d promised Myron to listen to his sad story and take careless notes, and I had to amuse myself somehow.)

  To be clear, “Publisher’s Confidante” was never bullet-pointed on my job description, which I hasten to remind you (but never reminded Myron because why bother?) had, to that day, not been presented to me. Why did he enlist me? Probably the same reason you should trust me, I would argue.

  Perhaps, in the end, I was the one Myron could trust because I believed half of everything he told me and the whole of everything he did not. Hemingway bragged famously about his access to what he called a bullshit detector. Sure, nothing is what it seems to be, including the first part of this sentence. Therefore, doubting everything and believing everything gets you to the same place, that is, nowhere, but if that is so, then nowhere is the place you can make a stand, which is what I am doing in Myron’s story, which he believed I would be willing to write, if you can credit that, and to this day I don’t.

  ✴✴✴

  He outlined his plan for me to write the book. Then I said, what you must understand I have patiently waited for like fucking forever for the perfect opportunity to tell somebody:

  “I prefer not to.”

  Myron may have never heard anybody voice such a view, or no junior editor at Hard Rain had ever resisted a direct assignment from the boss or ever read Melville’s dead letter clerk passive-aggressive genius named Bartleby, whom I quoted. Of course, he may have whiffed on my literary collusion. Which is sort of incredible, because Kelly herself might catch that one. When people don’t catch a collusion—I am hypostrophizing here, having never had the experience—they are usually touchy and who can blame them? I can be annoying to people, I realize, when it comes to books. But a tiger can’t lose its spots, and good, you are paying attention.

  “Bartleby?” I said, trying like a tall Girl Scout to help.

  “Whotleby?”

  This was not getting off on the right foot. I gently inquired of him as to why he desired a confidante in the first place. He looked shaky, no use making him more self-conscious.

  He said I would find out.

  I asked him why me.

  He said he was a lousy writer and it was agonizing for him to type on account of the Car Pal Tunnel, which did sound like a snappier name for the engineering wonder named after the Tulippicious Land of Holland and is the home of the twenty-four slash seven traffic jam beneath the Hudson River.

  I asked him if he wanted me to be his ghostwriter.

  No, he said, it would be my book. My book about him. Capitalizing on the material he would generously provide.

  I reminded him of the obvious: I had never published anything. I didn’t remind him that not everybody had a life story worth telling—or typing. And why would anybody want to read his? If he was conscious of his reasons, he didn’t share them.

  As for my having no publication history? No problem. He knew people who knew people, he said. (Let’s file that under publisher’s “humor alert.”)

  “Myron, are you fucking drunk?”

  I was the responsible one around here, he observed.

  “You are drunk?” But he may have had a point.

  “Plus, you can type beautifully?”

  Typing and writing are not the same thing, I told him, which I might als
o mention to all the writers taking up residence in my slush pile.

  But unlike him, I didn’t have carpal tunnel, he said.

  True enough, I regretted to admit.

  And he paid me my salary.

  “I rest your case?” I said.

  That exchange may serve as inadequate explanation for how it was that, in short order, he would be telling me his publishing life story and showing me the book that had been transmitted last night over the Ferris Wheel Transom of Time. The whole affair would get jumbled and garbled fast, and this is my best recollection of the real-time sequence, numbered one through ten for a bean-counter’s gaseous convenience.

  I came into the office in the morning, opened the email from Junior, threw up in my mouth, and contemplated how I could arrange for a hit man like Luca Brasi, and then come up with a rock-solid alibi that passes muster on any of the million indistinguishable episodes of Law & Order. (Love that show and all the spin-offs—they are so lusciously predictable—and is there any hour of the day or night when a rerun isn’t streaming or playing on cable TV? DUMM DUMM…)

  The editor in chief and I noticed Myron distraught and disheveled.

  We weighed the idea of dialing 911.

  Myron closed his office door, casting his editor in chief onto the vanquished plain, and began right then and there to tell me about his company and his life in medias resistible. His business and his biography turned out to be sort of the same thing, and our conversation would ultimately go on and on over the course of months, and he was working hard to enlist me to compose his story. He wanted me to be his amanuensis, he said, a fancy pants word I did not have to look up, but he should have, because it did not mean what he thought, though it is a cool old school word for secretary, which he just said I wasn’t going to be. Initially, I suspected he may have meant he wanted me to reshuffle the deck of his mental notes. In any case, he would put me in the middle of the most bizarre contract negotiations in unrecorded history and take me on a spectacularly stupid road trip that judgment-traumatized Jack Kerouac himself would have taken a pass on, all to the end of supposedly giving me a fuller picture, which despite his best efforts at camouflaging the truth, he finally did.