The London Lover by Clancy Sigal

Author:Clancy Sigal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408885826
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2018-03-13T12:57:30+00:00

PART THREE

The Stationmaster

IN THE NEWS

Simon & Garfunkel’s ‘Sound of Silence’ at #1. US draft-card burners first arrests. In London, Ronnie Kray is convicted of shooting a rival gangster in the Blind Beggar pub. First B-52 bombing of North Vietnam.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, IT’S A WONDERFUL TOWN!

It’s said that astronauts behave oddly back on earth after they’ve been to outer space. Who is weirder, the space voyagers or the earthlings they left behind?

Scene: Upper West Side, Manhattan. Summer of Love, a day after I’ve flown in. A sparkling dinner party hosted by a celebrated editor-and-author married couple with stellar guests from law, academia and publishing. Without warning a guest, the Judge, a heavyset man with a beard and a steel hook for a hand, lurches across the dinner table and grabs my throat with his hook, screaming: ‘Stalinist!’ Say what? I rear back, dragging his 250 pounds across the table and smashing plates – I’m in better shape than I thought – as we both crash to the floor in an absurd wrestling match.

Note: not one person moves to stop the assault. They all watch impassively like zombies in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ‘Get this fucker off me!’ I scream. Eventually, the Judge tires of clawing at me and conversation resumes around the table. That is, goes on without any reference to the brawl that scattered china and cutlery all over the dining room.

And I’m the crazy one?

It’s three years since I was last here. I’m too restless to settle. Antsy as a Calaveras County frog, I jump all over the city from borrowed apartment to nothing to Lower East Side to Park Avenue to 97th and Broadway to 271 Central Park West to miserable little hotels where I drape my wet undies on the steam radiator, sleep wherever I can including Central Park benches and Tompkins Park, and when it rains all day curl up in the balcony of the New Yorker movie house on 84th and Broadway. Its owner Dan Talbot likes my work and lets me in for free.

I’m homeless because my first sanctuary caved on me.

The Levines are the Manhattan couple who visited me in London to soak up my holiness. Having money – Art owns gas stations – they invite me to mentally dry out with them at their Upper East Side apartment. Slim and dark, Dorothy is an aspiring literary wife who graciously surrenders her office and typewriter to the Visiting Great Writer and seems to be content to linger in the doorway, gazing and sighing her admiration. Grateful for a refuge, I pound her typewriter just to hear the noise. What she can’t see, because I cover it up, is that I’m not writing but on long rolls of Associated Press copy paper copy the names of every writer I can think of so that it looks like

Proust

Fielding

Hergesheimer

Colette

Hamsun

O’Hara (and so on, over and over again)

Dorothy Levine hangs about the open door to her office staring hard at the genius at work, seeing this manic activity as something it is not, serious literary productivity, which drives her crazy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.