The Grapes of Claude
DEAR GOD, Father O_____, my confessor, as you are aware, back in the third grade, used to tell me that everything happened for a reason. Everything fit together. Because the priesthood existed, for example, you had made him a homosexual. Father O_____ insisted that it all added up in the end. When it didnt, and you noticed, it still added up, except you didnt see it, because you lacked that divine article called faith. Yet I am beginning to think that Fr. Presently Incarcerated might have been right. Things have been adding up lately. When the police arrived, their warrant was not only made out in the name of CLAUDE LE BANDARIAN (a good lawyer, not that I have one, would have made hash of any arrest) but it was also lacking that crucial AKA ALFRED LONGWOOD which would have meant serious, climacteric trouble for your narrator.
The omission was obviously divine. Since in your wisdom Lord you have also made me a master of many dialects (a great actor was lost in Claude: all good novelists are actors, as you know, having made us, down to the hyperconsciousness, the cigarette ash all over the desk) I was able to convince the police, after a few minutes difficulty on the landing (I was coming back from the shower, inconvenienced by precarious towel, soap-on-a-rope in the form of Sneezy the Dwarf), that I was not "Claude Le Bandarian," blackmailer, but a paperless German anthropologist named Andreas Kluth. Of course the police came back upstairs, later, but by then I was off like a cheap suit. Where to go? That was the question. Increasingly it is always the question. Mounting the autoscooter I recently purchased, I buzzed quietly off into the night, deciding that the airport was definitely out of the question and that it was time to take Monahan up on his (recently reiterated: you see how everything works out) offer of a drink. Doubtless there was an "APB" out for me but if you are looking for one Claude La Badarian you dont assume he was the helmeted fat guy in a poncho who just buzzed past your cruiser on a go-ped. A 15-minute ride brought me into the deep, dinner-hour mysteries of the Polack mill town where Monahan has his studio or atelier. The scooter farted out in front of a looming building where women in long dresses once made Army boots, neither left nor right foot distinguished, for the Civil War. The building in which Monahan has his office, as you know very well, having put it there, and having put him in it, stood castellate and blackened over a road which ran past the mill pond. It showed one light on its second floor: Monahan.
Bats whirled around a once-fancy cupola whose copper roof was stained with moonlight. The heavy front door was locked. Like Huck Finn I chucked small rocks at the lighted window until a pumpkin-sized head and fridge-shaped torso appeared in the window. Monahan held up a hand, and then came downstairs (lights coming on sequentially in the landing) and opened the door. The non-genius was wearing socks, a pair of destroyed shorts and a shirt covered with deck paint advertising a brand of Bermuda rum. No velour smoking jacket and hair tucked behind the ears like the old days. The fucker now looks like a thyroidal South Boston union boss. "Claude," he said, neutrally, neither welcoming or whatever the opposite thing is (I am having trouble thinking of words: ungood for a literary person), and took me upstairs, climbing the squeaking brass-hatched stairs to the 3000 sq. ft. office for which he claims to pay $150 dollars a month.
I have dreamed of an office like this. The building stands on the edge of dereliction. Thats important. In the hallway a "bubbler," the masterpiece of that slow anti-plumber, Time, shoots water a full three feet beyond the stained rim of the basin. You could rollerskate in the huge, well-mopped hallways, pausing occasionally to have dinner off the floor. In Monahans studio, he has a couch, an armchair, an emergency futon laid on against the possibilities of journalistic all-nighters and/or domestic upheavals, an electric kettle, all books extant, and three desks. Hes set up like Sir Richard Francis fucking Burton in the old photographs, lacking only hookah and camel saddle. The ceilings are almost 20 feet high. Like all 19th-century buildings, this mill seems to have been built for a race of giants: The oak wainscoting, smelling of a recent application of Murphys oil soap, is as high as a Watusis ribcage.
I was quite impressed by Monahans workspace. Of course youve got your usual genius-litter of overflowing ashtrays and so forth, but he looks like he makes an effort finally, and frankly, Henry, you couldnt come across a better studio or atelier anywhere at any price. Plus it has a dartboard. A man with one of these things could leave his wife at any time: no spending a night under a kiddie pool for Monahan if things go south back at the ranch. Theres no "working on the relationship," boyo, when youve got an office like this. With an office like this I could rule the world. Actually, no: it would be filled with bottles, forgotten brassieres, unfinished novels of every possible type.
Still: A man could write in a place like this. Dorm-fridge, hotplate, small basin to wash in. Easy enough: Christ, with A.S. Longwoods extensive cash-advance ability, fused brilliantly with his non-existence, I could take the whole third floor of this place and turn it into my personal empire. If things ever got tight I could fish in the mill pond like the hispanics (why is it always hispanics fishing, wherever you go?) are doing right now, going mira mira mira, and dragging tiny cancerous fishes out of the purling oak-brown water where the millrace plunges beneath the road. Well, at any rate Monahan gave me a brandy. I conveyed my recent personal history and more recent random thought about more or less permanent sanctuary in an office like this one. See how everything works out? It all adds up.
"You could do that," he said. "Why not?"
Indeed why not? Why wander the earth, or the ether, the La Badarian firmament, unfirm as it is, when one can have