Megabride
At the same time you will send a copy of all this material, with a cover letter, to the renowned Detective Merkouros, one of the few Private Investigators who specializes in cases of literary fraud and piracy, asking him to try to uncover further evidence of editorial complicity with Pompas and perhaps even physical evidence of Pompas’s cannibalizations of your manuscripts. You have read of Merkouros’s peculiar claims to be a visitor from another dimension. Amusing as this whimsicality of his may be, however, you have been forced to conclude that it is precisely his disarming zaniness, and not any magical relationship to the space-time continuum, that is responsible for his outlandish success as a snoop. You first heard of Merkouros in connection with the Oval Evil scandal, which focused national attention on him at the time. It was Merkouros who discovered that the best-selling book detailing the sexual exploits of the last President of the United States was not a hoax perpetrated upon the ex-President by a group of politicos seeking to compromise the rival party (as the ex-President charged), but was rather a shameless piece of literary exhibitionism on the part of the ex-President himself, who is still suing Merkouros for revealing State secrets even as Merkouros still patiently countersues for the same exact sum, no more, in fact, than the unpaid fee for the investigative services that the disrobed author originally hired him for. How do you expect to pay such an outstanding investigator? Obviously, the sum you will be awarded in pursuing your case to its end should be enticement enough. Meanwhile, you can surely scrape up something for an appropriate retainer.
You must write to Ida about all these latest developments. She will surely be more sympathetic to your struggles this time around than she shows herself to be in this last letter of hers still open on your desk beside her framed photograph. You are certain that if she would only agree, finally, to a physical meeting with you she would come to embrace your sense of reality with much less of the reserve she maintains through the device of a “relationship” with you conducted solely, so far, via correspondence. You hardly expected to become emotionally involved with a woman through a series of interchanges of letters and a snapshot showing mischievous brown eyes, a fine, intelligent nose, and full, ironically curling lips topped by an elegant upsweep of auburn hair. You suspected you were falling hard for this woman, whose essence she conveys through her style, when you began to comb her letters repeatedly for signs that she was more than casually attracted to you. For the first time in your life you were moved to respond to a “Personals” notice in The Village Voice (‘WF, 30, loving, nurturing, challenging, in process of divorce, longs for many-leveled relationship with discreet man, pref. writer or artist, in touch with self in mind, soul, and body.”) and you find that your little initial caprice of writing to a mere box number has developed into a routine of verbal intercourse that / daily deepens its Circean grip // draws you more each day into ineluctable dependency /// each day seems more indispensable to your mental equilibrium.
You have no idea where Ida lives. You write to each other at post-office box numbers. She insists that it’s “safer” that way. She types her letters in italics, then underlines her italics for emphasis! This annoying little tic of hers, plus her use of “+” for and, is not nearly so irritating, however, as her / damnable // presumptuous /// forthright tendency to act as your literary critic. But you accept that as you do the asymmetry in the curve of her nose, as a fault that paradoxically enhances her total allure in the famished eye of your soul. You have reread her last letter at least a dozen times, seeking beneath her sudden intimacies, her swift acerbities, the underlying pulse of her being.
Dear Herman, she writes, to meet you face to face just now (+ I’m sure that the face in your photo merely hints at the depths I wish to explore) might jeopardize the progress of my divorce. Have patience! Or will you, too, turn out to be too self-centered to relate to a woman on the several levels through which her own self seeks expression? Please don’t disappoint me!...
...but I find the story hermetically sealed. The reality barely peeks through the verbal mist. Word should manifest world, don’t you think? You flaunt style like a stripteaser who stops just a hankie short of the final revelation. You might let your characters inhabit a little more of our common ground, a little less of their minds. More matter, less art! said the queen, + for God’s sake, Herman, this is now the third version of the same H.Q. Silver story! When you tell me that you withdrew your last version for further revision after submitting it to The Hopeless Maze…!!! Even Flaubert would finally cut the cord + let baby suck breath in the fog + filthy air. Let go! You seem frighteningly anal-retentive! Frankly, I liked your second version better because you allowed your reader an occasional narrative perch between logocentric abysses. Might I suggest, also, that shorter paragraphs would provide additional needed perches for the hardworking eye?
Yours,
(signed) Ida Craig
