The New Book

             The New Book



   Malcolm Fauder lived on the top floor of his apartment building six months a year and in the basement the other six, thus avoiding the sizzling heat under the roof in summer and the cold of the basement in the winter. He could manage this bi-yearly shift because the caretaker was an old friend from his school days and because the building had a high turnover rate. The studio apartments he lived in were identical throughout the building so his rent remained the same. His possessions, other than bookcases jammed with several thousand books, were few and required only one long day to be shifted from one place to another. After some difficult negotiations, some years before, the rental company had agreed that his original security deposit would stand despite his migrations. Malcolm managed, after a period of deep suspicion on the part of the office manager, to convince her that receiving and then returning two security deposits a year would only add to her workload without giving any benefit to the company whatsoever. He had often heard her complaining that she was overworked and figured this line of reasoning would win the day. It did.

    There was an unforeseen result of Malcolm’s discussions with the office manager. While speaking with her in the office one day, he noticed beside her desk a small pile of books lying on their side. He surreptitiously tilted his head and read the spines. They were all science fiction titles, and good ones too. No junk. When they had concluded their negotiations he asked her about the books and the manager talked at him for twenty minutes hardly taking a breath. She was obviously a science fiction addict and since he was too they soon became friends.

   They took to having coffee together twice a week.  Every Tuesday and Thursday at ten in the morning they exited the building, crossed the busy intersection just outside its doors and walked to a café down the street. They were a strange couple. Louise, the office manger, middle aged with a bouffant hairstyle, pancake makeup, long artificial fingernails painted red and a vigorous, aggressive personality which made her large body seem even larger than it actually was, tall, a little over six feet and Malcolm, small, thin and short, twenty four years of age, mild mannered, intellectual and sporting a shaved head winter and summer. Louise proceeded along the sidewalk with the august bearing of a Duchess about to inspect the kitchens. She took long strides and the short-legged Malcolm trotted along at her side much like one of those little dogs who accompany society matrons on their walks.

   After a number of these regular meetings they decided the time was not enough for the things they had to say. As well as bi-weekly coffee they began to have supper Friday nights at the Vietnamese restaurant next door. At the third of these suppers Malcolm asked Louise if it would be all right if he invited Stephen, the caretaker, the next week. Louise was reluctant. Although she didn’t say in so many words, Louise considered Stephen to be grumpy, uncooperative and uncouth. She and he got along reasonably well on matters of business but their relations were conducted across a minefield of topics to be avoided at all costs. However as Malcolm was insistent and as he obviously knew Stephen better than she did, after a brief resistance she gave in.

   Louise was surprised when Stephen arrived for supper. Not only was he freshly showered and well dressed but he seemed to bring a new personality, one she had not seen before. She had not realized he was a deep reader. She had thought the face he presented to her, that of the gruff workman not about to be put upon by a bossy woman, was the only one, and was deeply surprised at his quick mind and sense of humour. Malcolm had thought that the mixture would work but when he saw that it actually did he was truly delighted. That his two dear friends could find enjoyment in one another’s company was almost too much to be expected. They had a rattling good time and ate together every Friday night thereafter. Sometimes they went back to Stephen’s for a cup of coffee.

   Malcolm wrote fantasy books published by a large firm in London. The publisher’s representative tried to get Malcolm to move to that great city where, the representative claimed, he would be both intellectually and erotically stimulated. The representative, Vali P. Magnamity, originally from a small country in the Balkans where the women are small and dark skinned, had never recovered from his first sighting of English Valkyries, resplendent with peaches and cream complexion. If allowed, at least to fellow males like Malcolm, he would talk about them obsessively. Malcolm did not allow. Although mild mannered, deferential even, when important matters were at stake, in this case that he not be bored to death by a man who he had no choice but to do business with, he could be quite blunt.

   “Stop it Vali! Call one of those women who put their names up in phone booths!”

   Vali took this very well. He was very light on his feet and did not take offence easily. After a few attempts to usher Malcolm to ‘hot night spots’ where there was ‘major action’, he eventually settled for inviting Malcolm to dinner at his home in a middle class suburb where, despite his craziness about well padded Valkyries, he had an Albanian wife and three children. The children, nine, ten and twelve, all girls, soon came to adore Malcolm who read them stories, took them to children’s plays, wrote plays which they performed in the living room, plays full of dragons, demons, monsters and troubled heroes, and watched sci-fi movies with them late week end nights on Vali’s big screen TV. Stella, Vali’s wife, loved anyone, male or female, who so delighted her children and took them off her hands for whole evenings and weekends at a time. As well Stella and Malcolm shared a similar sense of humour, imaginative and absurd, and thus enjoyed time spent in one another’s company. Of course when Malcolm was on the scene, Vali was at home, and not in bars pursuing ephemeral dreams of statuesque English beauty.

   Malcolm thought notions of intellectual stimulation and cultural richness connected to the life of certain large cities to be largely illusory. He had among his acquaintance from his visits to London, a dozen or so refined cultural denizens. Well read, well schooled, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, literature, the historical flow of ideas, far beyond his own eccentric, episodic engagement with such areas of knowledge, when all this was stripped away what you got was an endless series of witticisms and a long trail of dinner parties. Malcolm, an occasional participant in London dinner parties himself, enjoyed them tremendously. They were like lowering oneself into a warm bath of bright, pleasurable titillation. But the gods of this milieu were gossip, irony and sharp comment whose aspirations never rose above bright repartee.

   Once, Vali came to Malcolm’s city for a three-day visit. Vali was obviously appalled at the poverty of Malcolm’s lifestyle but much too polite to say so. The conversations Malcolm had with fellow tenants in the halls seemed completely incomprehensible to him. Vali saw the city as a vast dark dungeon, peopled by gnomes and troglodytes, desperate in their personalities, many close to insane. “A perfect home for a sci-fi writer dear Vali!” said Malcolm but Vali seemed to think that Malcolm would be consumed by such a malignant atmosphere, seemingly devoid of all the finer things in life. Since the visit went over a Tuesday and Malcolm’s coffee dates with Louise were sacrosanct, he took Vali along with him to the café. He tried to prepare Vali with a long talk on Louise’s children, ex husband, nieces, nephews, etc, which formed perhaps half of Louise’s conversation, but such knowledge is best infused incrementally. During the hour and a half talk Vali was totally at sea. Louise seemed to him like a beached Fellini character and the episode like a gruesome cut from a Hollywood film noir.

   Every summer Malcolm rented a cabin on an isolated lake north of the city. Most summers Vali, Stella and the children came for a visit. Stella and the girls loved it there and moaned that they could only stay three weeks and not the whole summer. Vali seemed mildly depressed. He didn’t like to swim. He didn’t like to sail. He didn’t like to sing songs under the stars beside an open fire. He found all this ‘a little Mark Twainish’ which Malcolm found a stretch but at the same time understandable. Vali was urban to the core and he wilted away from the lights and noise of a big city. Being stranded in a provincial place, at a cabin by the lake, was, for him, like being a fish suddenly plucked from a flowing stream and cast gasping onto the shore.

   Malcolm had a prejudice against those who wrote in the morning. It was his theory that morning writers were will driven and their work mediocre and formulaic. From his biographical reading he gathered information to support his case. If he discovered that a popular writer of romance mysteries wrote in the morning he was filled with delight. If he found that a best selling thriller writer who produced such quantities of text that one suspected him of being a corporation staffed with obedient ghost writers, wrote between five AM and noon, his joy knew no bounds. Kafka, he was sure, wrote in the afternoon, Tolkien late at night, Stevens on vacation evenings by the pool or in Pullmans with lights outside the windows passing by. Hemmingway, he was sure as well, wrote early mornings, with a hangover, after pushups, deep knee bends and a vigorous shower. Malcolm himself wrote in the mornings sometimes but not often. Usually it was afternoons and early evenings.

   Occasionally a letter from one of his readers would ask. “Do you write in the morning?” He knew this because Louise, whom he had contracted to answer his mail, gave him a monthly file of representative letters. He instructed her to answer them thusly – “No, I do not. Morning writing is to be avoided at all cost. The morning mind is much too full of illusory clarity to produce good writing.” Louise had answered with these sentences so many times she could repeat them verbatim as she could many of the other stock answers with which he supplied her. When he first gave her his morning writing answer she said, “But you write in the morning, sometimes.” Malcolm replied, “They are not looking for ambiguities, Louise. They want absolutes, sureties, gilt edged investment certificates. They want, in fact, the clarity of the early morning mind. So we give it to them but at the same time lock them into a creative timeslot more likely to be fecund with confusion and mental interrelations. Trust me. Granted we are telling a white lie but in doing so we are doing them a big favour.  When and if they find out it will be too late and, besides, they will forgive us for we do what we do from motives of benevolent paternalism, maternalism in your case.”

   Louise answered the letters on a separate laptop Malcolm provided. She did some at work when things were slow in the office but most she did in the evenings and on weekends. She took the laptop home with her. When she first took this over there were about three thousand letters a year. “If I answered all these,” Malcolm said. “I would have no time to write.” Louise provided him with a set of letters and answers for his files together with a file of representative letters. Sometimes he browsed the full file but for the most part he spent one morning a month reading the representative file. That was enough.

   When Louise first began the taking over the correspondence, they read and answered the letters together. Louise was a quick study and was not burdened with the modern obsession for ‘self expression’. She was quite happy to put on Malcolm’s persona as if it were her own and answer the letters. After six months of collaboration, Malcolm sometimes had difficulty making out whether an answering letter was written by himself or by Louise. When this happened he turned the whole thing over to her, monitoring the process by his reading of the representative file. Sometimes they received a letter of unusual complexity. These he answered himself, some of the writers eventually turning into regular correspondents. Malcolm gave them a separate post office box number and their letters moved outside the regular channels altogether. Malcolm hated E Mail and would have none of it. Other than for making appointments he seldom used even his telephone. “People should talk face to face,” he would say to Louise, “or, if not possible, they should take the time to write a letter. E Mail is by its very nature illiterate, barbaric, superficial and gossipy. Great for an insert but not to be confused with the august body of text.”

    When he talked like this Louise smiled. Malcolm was a passionate man, full of judgments, dictats, and eccentric obsessions. This was what she liked about Malcolm. He was occasionally exasperating but never boring.

   Louise had a wonderful memory. Something said on the fringe of her consciousness, listened to with perhaps ten percent of her attention, she could repeat verbatim three months latter. Many of Malcolm’s opinions she absorbed into her memory and reproduced in letters to readers. This delighted Malcolm. “Louise, you are more me than me!” he would say.

   There was the problem of the signature. Malcolm didn’t want to sign three thousand letters a year. When he was out of the country or spending most of the summer at the lake, a bottleneck would occur. He would return to a day of writer’s cramp. As well the volume was increasing. Malcolm could see a day when the numbers would reach five or six thousand. Impossible. The answer was to produce a signature which Louise could easily sign herself. They worked up a few drafts and then finally settled on an M with a straight line followed by an F with a squiggle. It looked like the signature of a bank president or a CEO of a large company and had the advantage of being reproducible with little effort. Using the new signature Louise could sign a hundred letters in no time at all.

   After Louise had been signing the letters for a year or so, when they were drinking coffee in the café, she asked, “What about if someone wants to collect your letters one day? That’s what they do with writers, isn’t it?”

   “Sometimes.”

   “Wouldn’t me signing most of the letters with one signature and you signing your regulars with another be confusing?”

   “I suppose it would. But somebody will figure it out if they really want to.”

   “It’s a trick.”

   “No Louise, it’s not a trick but a necessary extension of persona. No human being can write three thousand letters a year and still do his work. Essential self is not given out in writing letters to readers but rather a mask, a kind of constructed self. You and I have constructed this self together. Actually, when it comes right down to it this is the same with writing text, the creation of a series of shifting masks, behind them a primal force which gives them dynamic, compelling energy. The romantic tradition says that text is created in the service of the self expression of a unique individual. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Text comes from both the tradition and from a great clamoring of conflicting selves. In a sense it is communal activity, a cooperative effort. As for the letters, let those who are obsessed with literal notions of authorship figure it out. It will give them something to do.”

   “Then you wouldn’t mind if someone found out I answer the letters?”

   “No, not at all.”

   “OK, that’s all right with me then.”

 
   Malcolm’s publishers paid him very well for his books and he in turn paid Louise very well for answering the letters. Over time the numbers increased to the point where Louise found it difficult to continue her rental managing.

   “How many buildings do you manage?” Malcolm asked her.

   “Five.”

   “And you want to continue?”

   “Yes, but not so much. If I just answered letters who would I talk to all day? I could be holed up in an office on top of a tall building and not see anyone week in week out.”

   “Well, what if you had only one building to manage, say this one?”

   “That would be perfect.”

   “OK,” said Malcolm and he had a lawyer open negotiations with Louise’s company. Six months latter he bought the building. It was purchased in the name of a numbered company. The three directors of the company were Louise, Stephen and Malcolm. Malcolm paid for it in a complicated way suggested by his financial manager but in effect the set up meant they each owned a third. Louise and Stephen were astonished.

   “Stephen does research and bothers me from the realm of ideas. Louise too and she does the letters and you both run over text with me. So what’s the big deal? You are getting some of the proceeds of this process, that’s all.”

   They had the roof redone, this time with double the usual insulation. New windows, the best triple pane. Floors sanded. Kitchens and bathrooms re-floored. Exterior walls gutted, new plumbing, new electrical, foam insulation with double the normal R factor, new drywall. Halls re-tiled, walls patched and painted. Exterior oak doors stripped and re-stained. New Balconies with roll up bamboo screens. The rents were raised only to meet inflation. When Malcolm’s financial manager complained the building would not be making money, Malcolm said, “In fifteen years the company completely owns the building in effect paying back everything put into it with interest. By then, conservatively estimated, the building will be worth three million dollars. And you say we are not making money?” What the manager meant, of course, was that they were not making as much money as they could be making but Malcolm, Louise and Stephen were not interested in that.

    Malcolm moved into a renovated two-bedroom apartment on the top floor. He had a balcony overlooking the roofs of the smaller buildings forming a jumbled arrangement of shapes for a block until interrupted by the next street. Beyond this was a long, meandering line of trees along the bank of the river going off like a shining green snake into the body of the city to the west. Here, in the warm season, he had his morning coffee. He didn’t mind the stink of the city. He didn’t even mind its squat proletarian ugliness; in fact he liked it. The décor of the coffee shop below had not been changed for forty years. Every so often the owner closed for two days to repaint it. Other than that it remained the same, glorious in its stark functionality. The modern world of overly bright surfaces transformed regularly into the newest fashion of overly bright surfaces, depressed him. There was no continuity, no familiar wear and tear to it.



   Stephen, Louise and Malcolm were drinking coffee in the café.  Spring and the strong sun were setting afire the front windows. Stephen and Malcolm had just returned from building a cabin on land Malcolm bought on an isolated lake north of the city. They had come early for coffee, just after the lunch crowd moved on. There was a table of stragglers in the corner but otherwise the place was empty.

   Malcolm was restless. He had thoroughly enjoyed building the cabin but it meant two months away from his desk and he was eager to get back to work. The time in the country was of use to him, however. An interlocking series of ideas had presented themselves to him and he had spent hours in the evenings sorting them out and taking notes.  He had not spoken of them to Stephen who spent his evenings reading Chinese poetry and designing a new circuit board from a pile of old computers he brought with him. When Stephen brought the tray of coffee mugs Malcolm asked the other two,

   “What about an agricultural society with information technology?”

   “Machines?” asked Louise.

   “Some, but scaled down, simple, woven into a small scale agricultural context.”

   “Somebody has to mine to get the metal for the machines,” said Stephen.

   “And some body has to build freighters to carry it.”

   “And harbors to dock them in.”

   “Financial centers to supply and administrate the money.”

   “Yes, yes, but couldn’t these be also be scaled down, made sustainable, be woven into a society not driven by industrial giganticism?”

   Stephen took a sip of his coffee. “If you answer the question from a reading of history, no. Technology develops when craftsmen, thinkers, engineers, etcetera can be supported on surplus agricultural production. Technology is the result of the drive to control and exploit. Inevitably industrial agriculture reaches the point where less than three percent of the population can feed everyone, the place where we are at right now. Once you arrive there, why go back? What would be the trigger?”

   Louise stirred her coffee with a spoon she brought with her. She didn’t like the plastic stir sticks the café supplied. “Yes, Stephen, but what you are saying is a literal mechanistic view of the whole thing. If we put on the mechanistic blinders then no fundamental changes would ever occur. Things just continue along as they are, perhaps more and bigger but basically as they are. This, too, goes against a reading of history. What about the Romans for instance? “

   “A failure of the state?”

   “Yes but what is the state but an organized system of administrated technology. After all, the great majority of people couldn’t care less about the ideologies politicians make up. They go on the ride for the practical, material benefits the system provides them. Metal technology which makes their everyday lives easier. Storage of agricultural surplus eliminating famine, sewers, clean drinking water. The Romans had all that and yet walked away from it over a period of several centuries. The cities emptied out. Why?”

   “Barbarians from the north?” asked Malcolm.

   “Maybe,” said Louise, “but Rome had for many centuries either rebuffed or absorbed barbarians from the north so why not continue to do so?”

   “I think it was Christianity, Louise,” said Malcolm. “It pushed a view of the world as a fallen place, a view which found eager ears in the corrupt and degenerate Rome of late empire. And it offered to the barbarians in the north a vision of communal, natural living which fit into their tribal traditions.”

   “True,” said Stephen, “but the trigger we were looking for is not so much the new religion but the fact that the late empire was corrupt, degenerate and violent, a place where the old republican values were a joke. It was no longer a very nice place to live so people started looking for another.”

   Louise looked at Stephen with a mischievous glint in her eye.

   “You are not going to say that word, are you Louise?” he asked her.

   “O yes I am Stephen. Spiritual.”

   Stephen put his fingers in his ears. “Awwwggghhh.”

   “Spiritual, Stephen. The people got tired of the old materialistic vision offered them by empire as riddled as it had become by violence and corruption. They wanted a new vision, one which had depth and would allow them to live in peace.”

   “Yes,” said Stephen, sardonically, “and I noticed that they got it too.”

   “But they did, young lad, at least in some measure. Modernity has a bias against what they call the dark ages but the truth is that, relatively speaking, people in Europe lived in peace. Wars were limited by the lack of political structure required to gather surplus.  There was much more power and control at the local level and people lived in connection with nature which brought to their lives a depth which modern people are totally lacking. But I would say the trigger for that transformation was a spiritual one. The late empire gave them nothing but corruption,war and strife. Christianity gave them a vision of union both with their fellow human beings and with nature.”

   “Perhaps that’s true, Louise,” said Malcolm, “but Christianity, in its present state, is incapable of offering people that.”

   “I totally agree!” said Louise. “Christianity presently is utterly bankrupt. That’s what you get for riding the wave of European imperial triumphalism. When it’s over you are over too.”

   “Well, what could offer that today, then?”

   “ Buddhism,” said Stephen. “There are twenty million Buddhists in America today, fifteen native born. It has a monastic tradition, an agrarian monastic tradition, and one which is developing a tradition of equality between men and women. From the point of view of idea structures Buddhist thought has more or less taken over much of psychological and psychiatric thinking.”

   “Why?” asked Malcolm.

   “”Because of its depth,” said Louise. “Buddhist thought is profound and compelling. In a period of superficial, egocentric thinking serious people are attracted to the profundity. Plus, its social thinking, partly stolen from Confucius, posits a society based on harmony and mutual respect. Not that far away from Christian social thinking in, say, the year nine hundred.”

    “I know almost nothing about Buddhism,” said Malcolm.

   “Stephen does,” said Louise. “ I think he may be a secret Bodhisattva.”

   “Which means?”

   “I certainly am not a Bodhisattva, secret or otherwise. Louise is pulling your leg. But a rough colloquial translation would be ‘A wise one out among the people’.”

   So Stephen gave Malcolm a list of books. After six months of reading and thinking, Malcolm started in on his new book.


   Vali wanted to go south to Greece that summer instead of ‘roughing it’, as he called it at Malcolm’s cabin. ‘Roughing it’ was inaccurate for the cabin was very comfortable with compost toilets, a more than adequate solar electrical system, gas cooking. But, needless to say, for Vali was outnumbered four to one and those four relentless campaigners for a common goal, his only taste of Greece that year was travel brochures. 

   “Greece is overrated,” Stella claimed, “overpriced, crowded, jammed with phonies in period costume.”

   “And what about Culture, Stel?  Are the girls going to become lumberjacks or travelers of the wintry wastes? I hardly think so.”

   “What most modern people know about Greece and ancient cultures could fit into a thimble. Reading the introduction to a half dozen text books would suffice. And nobody talks about that kind of stuff anymore. Gossip, celebrities and fashion will suit you out for most dinner parties today better than a tour of tumbled down rocks with a tired old academic much more interested in the glories of the girl’s cleavages than the glories of ancient Greece. I can’t see what’s so interesting about all that anyway. Wars and then more wars and then a lot of weepy tragedies ending up with everybody dead.”  

  “God, Stella.”

   “Besides. I don’t know why you are suddenly so interested in Greek Culture. Other than a few sleazy restaurants with supper time strippers, I’ve not noticed much interest before.”

   “The Aegean, Daddy, is a vast sewer seething with chemicals and excrement,” said Cornelia, his oldest, now nineteen. “If we go there we will no doubt come home with some dreadful disease and it will be all your fault.”

   “Sailing and swimming and finding coyote tracks,” said the second. “That’s what we do at Uncle Malcolm’s. Much more fun than sitting on a smelly tour bus full of creepy old ladies wearing pancake makeup.”

   “I like the ponies at Uncle Malcolm’s and finding bird’s nests. And watching beavers build dams. Greece would be like when we went to Spain. Hot and full of dirty old men feeling Corny’s bum on the buses.”

   After some weeks of this and the criticism of his position becoming more and more personal and acerbic, Vali gave in. The girls wanted six weeks but after some negotiation they settled on four. They were ecstatic. They thought the most they would get was three.


    When they arrived Malcolm picked them up at the airport in a rented van and they drove directly to the cabin, an hour’s drive. Everyone (including Vali who was good at pretending) was delighted with the new cabin – shining surfaces, newly laid flooring, balcony across the front overlooking the lake. They pulled up in the late morning. After the inspection and lunch the girls argued their way into a choice of bedrooms (there were five so they each had their own) and then went down to the lake to swim. Although Malcolm had lain in provisions, Vali and Stella insisted on driving to the nearest little town, twenty minutes away, and buying more. They took the van.

   As soon as the van left, Cornelia came up from the water. Malcolm was reading in the living room. She came in draped in a bathrobe, sat down and engaged him in conversation. This became a pattern in their stay. When Malcolm, a man of regular schedule, went for his morning walk, Cornelia went with him. When Malcolm, in the afternoon say, decided to go sailing and no one else wanted to go, then Cornelia suddenly decided to go too. Every evening she read a book Malcolm lent her from his library and these books provided the subjects for their conversations. Cornelia was intelligent and quick, quite the match for Malcolm’s own quickness of mind. At first he was a bit ambivalent about Cornelia’s approaches. After all she was no longer the young child he used to take to the London Zoo, but her thirst for his conversation was so genuine and his enjoyment of her company and wit (and beauty if the truth be told although Malcolm, something of a puritan, would not have admitted it) so intense, that he soon forgot his ambivalence and started looking forward to the time they spent together.

   Cornelia was wise beyond her years. She had already decided, some years ago in fact, but she sensed that Malcolm would be frightened off by a too direct approach. She was willing to bide her time. She made no sexual move towards him at all, not even a casual touching. If they were in the living room together she did not sit beside him on the coach but across from him on another chair. When she was alone in the cabin one afternoon, she searched his room and was greatly relieved to find a small pornography collection in the bottom drawer of his dresser. Some of the magazines were a bit kinky but she knew from going out with boys in England that the male imagination tended toward the kinky. More importantly the images were female. She was afraid that he might be gay.



   On the day they were leaving Cornelia found Malcolm alone at the edge of the lake. She pulled out a card with some writing on it and handed it to him. When he started to read it she said,

   “Put it in your pocket.”

   He did so.

   “It’s my cell phone number.”

   “Ah,” said Malcolm.

   “I’m in my room to study every weekday at nine. I don’t go to bed until one or so. That’s between 2AM and 6AM your time. Do you stay up late?”

   “No, but I get up early. Usually at five.”

   “Good then.”  Then she turned on her heel and walked back to the cabin.

   Vali and Stella watched this from an upstairs window.

   “What do you think she’s up to?” Vali asked.

   “Him, I’m afraid.”

   “You are kidding.”

   “No I’m not.”

   “Well, I suppose old Malcolm can handle himself.”

   “ I wonder. It seems to me that Malcolm is a Peter Pan. If that little minx decides she wants him then I don’t give him much of a chance.”

   “Will you say something to her?”

   “You’ve got to be kidding. If I said something she would only do it all the more.”

 
   When Cornelia arrived back in England she refused to spend the remains of the holiday, August that is, with her mother in Scotland as she usually did. Stella shrugged her shoulders and went off with the other two girls. But Malcolm didn’t phone. Cornelia was not too disturbed. She correctly figured that first Malcolm would dismiss the idea of phoning her completely but still he would not throw away the card. Later, on occasion, he would take it out and look at it but then put it away again. Then one night he would both stiffen his resolve and give in to temptation and phone. When he did she could tell it was him from the call display.

   “Hello, Malcolm.”  They spoke for several hours. After that he phoned twice a week. He complained to her that her father’s firm refused his latest book. But he was continuing work on it anyway, while starting another more along the lines of his previous books. Cornelia commiserated. They talked about the technology in his Buddhist book, as he called it. Cornelia, in the fall, would be receiving a degree in the history of technology. She had started out in English Lit but was dissatisfied with the way it was taught so switched over. “I don’t think anyone at the University actually reads original text,” she complained. “They read criticism and criticism of criticism and theory and criticisms of theory but they find text much too vulgar for their tastes. Things actually happen in text for example. Very deplorable that, things happening, events occurring. So concrete and vulgar, don’t you know.” This made Malcolm laugh. “Well, that’s why I’m a writer and not an academic.”

   When she picked up her degree in September he remembered the date and, although it wasn’t one of his usual nights, he phoned. After the formalities of congratulation the conversation became awkward and ground to a halt. Cornelia waited for a time, allowing the silence to grow and then she said.

   “Did you find them, Malcolm?”

   “Yes.”

   “Do you still have them?”

   “Yes, I do.”

   “Where?”

   “In the bedroom.”

   “I suppose I should get on a plane then.”

   “Yes.”  Two days later Cornelia boarded a plane at Heathrow. Malcolm picked her up at the airport. At Cornelia’s insistence they drove directly to his apartment and went to bed. There they stayed, with brief excursions for food and showers for almost a week. Then Malcolm went back to work and Cornelia wondered about the town, exploring. She bought a bus pass. Every day she took a new bus and rode it until it came back to her original point of departure. Sometimes she got off and explored a spot on one of the rivers (the city had three) or went into a restaurant and had coffee. She downloaded a map and used it to explore the downtown on foot. She visited the art galleries. She had lunch at sidewalk cafes.

   When she arrived back at Malcolm’s he would be preparing supper. If the weather was good they ate on the balcony. One night Louise came for supper. Another Stephen came. After three weeks of this Cornelia announced.

   “I can do supper every second night.”

   “Fine,” Malcolm replied.

   “I copied some of my mother’s recipes before I left.”

   “Good. Have you spoken to her?”

   “Yes.”

   “And how is she taking all this?”

   “She expected it all along she says. But I believe she thinks it rather naughty.”

   “And your dad?”

   “Livid.”

   “Really?”

   “Yes. But I expected that. Daddy is a terrible chauvinist. He thinks his daughters should do exactly as he says.”

   “And what exactly does he say?”

   “Marry a stockbroker. Become a London matron, a giver of dinner parties, that sort of thing.”

   “No hanging out with writers in far away provincial cities?”

   “Certainly not. Especially one who is a friend of the family and thus committing incest by bedding one of the daughters.”

   “So Vali thinks of me as a pervert?”

   “Yes but I wouldn’t worry. He’s perverted himself with his strip clubs and the magazines full of big breasted babes he keeps in the basement where he thinks them safe from prying eyes. He’ll come around after he blows off his self-righteous father steam. After all, Malcolm, you are his best selling author, his claim to glory and fame at the firm.”

   Fortunately there was no outstanding business between Malcolm and the firm for several months and they could avoid speaking to one another without difficulty. But that time soon ended. Translation rights for one of his early books into Spanish had to be dealt with and one morning when Malcolm picked up the phone Vali was on the other end.

  “It’s me Malcolm, the injured father.”

   “Hello Vali.”

   “I hope it’s not a regular MO of yours to befriend lonely businessmen so you can gain the opportunity of molesting their daughters.”

   “I’m afraid, Vali, that it is equally the case that your daughter is molesting me.”

   “That’s what her mother says but mothers often have a cynical view of their daughter’s motives. But what are your long term intentions, Malcolm?”

   “Entirely honourable, Vali. More than honourable.”

   “Marriage, then?”

   “If it’s up to me but there is another involved who may be in it just for the short term thrills.”

   “I don’t think so. Stella says Corny is the very serious type in such matters. Dalliance is not her style.”

   “I would think so too, Vali, but I haven’t asked yet.”

   “Better do so soon, young lad, or her mother will be forming a league of outraged British mothers who will demand the navy shell your coastal cities.”

   “Yes, Dad.”

   “O goodness, don’t call me that.”

   “Sorry, Vali.”

   “Quite all right, old boy. Age has its ruins and ravages and one must learn to live with them. But Vali will do just fine.”


 
   In September Cornelia entered one of the local universities, post grad. “I’ll have a reading year first. I want to do a thesis on the relationship between mainstream literature and sci-fi. I have some ideas and one of the profs likes them.”

   “Tricky stuff, Corn.”

   “If it isn’t tricky then it would be boring. The prof seems broad minded enough and likes sci-fi. He reads you. I didn’t tell him, of course, that I know you and that we do sexual things to one another in the evenings.”


  Christmas, that year, Malcolm and Cornelia spent at home. Vali, Stella, et al stayed in England. “Things must be regularized,” said Stella to Vali in a keeping up the standards tone he had not heard before. Vali, wisely, said nothing. “And,” Stella added, “tarting around in the colonies is not exactly regular.” They told friends and family that Cornelia was touring North America with unnamed companions of her high school days. Everyone pretended to believe this for form’s sake but they all knew it to be untrue. The eavesdropping younger sisters told anyone who would listen the salacious details. They themselves saw Cornelia as a daring adventuress capturing the heart (and body) of a famous foreign writer. They combined a sense of Victorian melodrama with the modern taste for pornographic detail, a potent cocktail. Their parents were old fashioned prudes whose own sexual glories were so far in the past as to be irretrievable even in the small portion necessary for nostalgic empathy. Their long dead libidos had been replaced with stock options and foreign currency accounts.


   One evening in December, Cornelia, after removing her parka, scarf and enormous snow boots and placing her briefcase on the kitchen table, said to Malcolm who was frying something fishy in the wok at the stove, “So do we make peace with the old country, Malcolm, or what?”

   “Make peace Corn. Always the best policy.”

   “How?”

   “Marriage, Corn. Become proper, respectable social units. Then the stories of incest will gradually die out, hopefully before our children become teenagers on the sniff for sins and scandals.”

    “JP or Church?”

   “Up to you.”

   “JP.”

   “OK.”

   In May a JP did the service in the local community hall. One wall was lined with tables laden with goodies catered by the neighborhood Anglican Ladies Group. Vali, who paid for the reception had vigorously lobbied for something more upscale but was successfully resisted by Malcolm and Cornelia who wore aggressively ordinary clothes and ate their reception dinner at plywood tables from paper plates. The two younger sisters were chatting up two of Stephen’s nephews, who, to begin with, resisted because they had been told by friends that all British girls were frigid and confined their sexual activity to the two or three times necessary to conceive children. Eventually the girl’s liveliness and beauty won out over this ignorant stereotyping and they sat at a table together and flirted outrageously.

   Later in the evening, seated at a table in the back of the large room, Vali asked, “Have you finished that strange book you were working on, Malcolm?”

   “You mean the Buddhist book.”

   “Yes.”

   “I have.”

   “Perhaps you might send it to us again. Certain of the brass have been rethinking its rejection and asking about it.”

   Cornelia, who was seated nearby and listening, said, “Too late, Daddy. The local University Press is publishing it in the fall.”

   Vali raised both eyebrows. “What kind of sales will you get out of that, Malcolm?”

   “I don’t really care, Vali. If it sells a few thousand, that’s OK with me.”

   “And one of the larger publishers might decide to pick it up somewhere down the line.” Cornelia said.

   Vali looked at her with some surprise.

   “Did you place it Corny?”

   “Yes, Daddy, I did.”

   He looked across the table at Malcolm but he was looking at his new wife with a glazed, amused affection. So Vali returned his eyes to Cornelia who was watching him with cautious attention. He smiled a sudden, genuine full out smile and said, “Well then, we should have a talk about that before we leave, Corny.”

   “Sure,” she said, “but you should know he decides. Sometimes I talk for him because he’s busy and doesn’t have time. But it’s his work and he’s the one who decides.”

   Then Stella, who was seated beside Vali but not listening to the conversation, engaged as she was in watching the table occupied by her younger daughters and Stephen’s nephews, said,  “My God, look at them! They are all but climbing over those young men, the shameless hussies!”