“Yes. But even as sick and hung over as I was, I knew perfectly well who the Fornit was.”
He ticked off the points on his fingers.
“First, Bellis was my mother’s maiden name.
“Second, that phrase el bonzo seco. It was a private phrase my brother and I used to use to mean crazy.
Back when we were kids.
“Third, and in a way most damning, was that spelling of the word ‘stupidity.’ It’s one of those words I habitually misspell. I had an almost screamingly literate writer once who used to spell ‘refrigerator’ with a d —
‘refridgerator’ — no matter how many times the copy editors blooped it. And for this guy, who had a doctoral degree from Princeton, ‘ugly’ was always going to be ‘ughly.’ ”
The writer’s wife uttered a sudden laugh — it was both embarrassed and cheerful. “I do that.”,
“All I’m saying is that a man’s misspellings — or a woman’s — are his literary fingerprints. Ask any copy editor who has done the same writer a few times.
“No, Bellis was me and I was Bellis. Yet the advice was damned good advice. In fact, I thought it was great advice. But here’s sorrre”-ing else — the subconscious leaves its fingerprints, but there’s a stranger down there, too. A hell of a weird guy who knows a hell of a lot. I’d never seen that phrase ‘co-drawer’ in my life, to the best of my knowledge… but there it was, and it was a good one, and I found out some time later that banks actually use it.
“I picked up the phone to call a friend of mine, and this bolt of pain — incredible! — went through my head. I thought of Reg Thorpe and his radium and put the phone down in a hurry. I went to see the friend in person after I’d taken a shower and gotten a shave and had checked myself about nine times in the mirror to make sure my appearance approximated how a rational human being is supposed to look. Even so, he asked me a lot of questions and looked me over pretty closely. So I guess there must have been a few signs that a shower, a shave, and a good dose of Listerine couldn’t hide. He wasn’t in the biz, and that was a help. News has a way of traveling, you know. In the biz. So to speak. Also, if he’d been in the biz, he would have known Arvin Publishing, Inc., was responsible for Logon’s and would have wondered just what sort of scam I was trying to pull. But he wasn’t, he didn’t, and I was able to tell him it was a self-publishing venture I was interested in since Logon’s had apparently decided to eighty-six the fiction department.”
“Did he ask you why you were calling it Arvin Publishing?” the writer asked.
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him,” the editor said, smiling a wintry smile, “that Arvin was my mother’s maiden name.”
There was a little pause, and then the editor resumed; he spoke almost uninterrupted to the end.
“So I began waiting for the printed checks, of which I wanted exactly one. I exercised to pass the time.
You know — pick up the glass, flex the elbow, empty the glass, flex the elbow again. Until all that exercise wears you out and you just sort of fall forward with your head on the table. Other things happened, but those were the ones that really occupied my mind — the waiting and the flexing. As I remember. I have to reiterate that, because I was drunk a lot of the time, and for every single thing I remember, there are probably fifty or sixty I don’t.
“I quit my job — that caused a sigh of relief all around, I’m sure. From them because they didn’t have to perform the existential task of firing me for craziness from a department that was no longer in existence, me because I didn’t think I could ever face that building again — the elevator, the fluorescents, the phones, the thought of all that waiting electricity.