Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(57)

In due course Jack finished the last chapter and slept for twelve hours straight, dreaming of nothing. Then he turned his attention to the peddling of his manuscript, because if he didn’t show some alacrity in his efforts to make up the past and future rent owing he might still find himself ignominiously evicted. Though nobody could say he wasn’t industrious. He’d gone all out on the typing part – Irena was his witness, he’d covered the pages – so maybe he’d get brownie points from his roommates for trying.

There were several publishing houses in New York that specialized in horror and terror, so Jack purchased some brown paper envelopes and mailed off the manuscript to three of them. Sooner than he’d expected – in reality, he hadn’t expected anything – he received a terse reply. The book had been accepted. An advance was offered. It was a modest advance, but large enough to cover the rent owed, with enough left over to pay for the rest of his term.

There was even enough for a celebration party, which Jack threw, Irena assisting. Everyone congratulated him and wanted to know when the masterpiece was due to appear and who was publishing it. Jack dodged these questions, smoked some dope and drank too much Old Sailor Port and vodka punch, and retched up the cheeseballs baked by Irena in homage to his talent. He wasn’t looking forward to the publication of his own book: too many cats would come swarming out of the bag, and his roommates were sure to recognize the funhouse mirror distortions of themselves he’d thoughtlessly inserted into his tale. Truth to tell, he hadn’t believed it would ever see daylight.

Having recovered from the party, and with his obligations fulfilled and his degree just barely obtained, Jack was free to get on with the rest of his life, which turned out to involve advertising. He had a facility with adjectives and adverbs, he was told, which would come in handy once he’d learned the ropes. Though the four roommates had given up their house and found separate abodes, he was still seeing Irena, who’d decided to go to law school. Sex with her was an ongoing revelation to him. The first time had been rapturous for him, not to say jubilant, and repeated encounters were the same, despite Irena’s traditional man-on-top parameters. She was a woman of few words, which he appreciated – more words for him – but he wouldn’t have minded a phrase or two as to how he was doing, not having anything to compare his own performance with. Wasn’t she supposed to do more moaning? He had to content himself with her blue-eyed gaze, which he found unreadable. Adoring? He certainly hoped so.

Although it was obvious from her dexterity that Irena herself had the wherewithal for comparisons, she had the tact not to mention it, another thing he appreciated. She wasn’t his first love – that had been Linda, a pigtailed brunette in second grade – but she was his first sex. Like it or not, Irena had been a milestone. So whatever else, she exists in a mental grotto consecrated to her alone: Saint Irena of the Holy Orgasm. A plaster saint, as it’s turned out, but still there in his head, posed in the act of removing her pragmatic black panties, her thighs incandescently white, her eyes downcast but sly, her half-open mouth smiling enigmatically. That image is quite different from the later image of the flinty, grasping harridan who cashes his cheques twice a year. He can’t fit them together.

Over the next months, Irena bought him a set of mixing bowls and a kitchen garbage pail because she said he needed them – translation, she needed them in order to cook dinner for them over at his place – and she cleaned his bathroom, more than once. Not only was she moving in on him physically, she was beginning to dictate. She disapproved of his advertising job, and felt he should begin a second work of art, and by the way, wasn’t the first work of art – which she was longing to read – due to be published soon? Meanwhile The Dead Hand Loves You lay doggo, and Jack hoped that the publisher had left the manuscript in a taxi.

But no such luck; for, like the severed hand of its title, The Dead Hand Loves You clawed its way to the surface and made its debut on the drugstore shelves of the nation. Jack had some furniture by then, including a beanbag chair and a good sound system, and he also had three suits, with ties to match. He regretted that he’d used his real name for the book instead of a nom de plume: would his new employers think he was a deranged pervert for writing this stuff? All he could do was keep his head down and hope no one noticed.

Again, no such luck. There was a chilly row with Irena when she discovered that his masterwork had in fact appeared and he hadn’t told her. Then there were more stiff words when she read it and saw what kind of masterwork it was – a waste of his talent, a sellout, and a shameless act of slumming, so very much beneath him – and that the characters in it were thinly disguised portraits of his three former roommates, including herself.

“So this is what you really think of us all!” she said.

“But Violet is beautiful!” he protested. “But the hero loves her!” It cut no ice. The love of a dried-up hand – however devoted – was not in any way flattering, according to Irena.

The final blow came after she’d been nosing through his mail when he was out – he never should have given her a key to his apartment – and realized that he was banking his royalty cheques rather than dividing them with his fellow shareholders. He was not honouring their contract! He was a crappy writer, a crappy lover, and a criminal cheat of a human being, she said. She would be contacting Jaffrey and Rod immediately, and she could imagine what they would have to say about this.