The manuscript was still in the typewriter on a cold March morning with puffs of wind shaking off pollen-clouds in an offhand early-spring planting; a knock on the door about eleven—I had forgotten to reverse the Press’s SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED to COME IN, WE’RE OPEN (not many needed to know)—a firm knock, not loud but confident, on the winning team, and a young woman put her bare head in the door and said, “Cotton Lane Press?” with a big-mouthed smile, pushing back a handful of oak-colored hair.
I said, Yes it was, and she said, “I have an appointment with a Mr. Otis. Will you tell him I’m here, please? Farmer,” handing me a card (well printed) that seemed to read (without my glasses), Sanders-Erwin, Printers, “Becky” Farmer, Traveling Representative.
I said I was Mr. Otis, would she please sit down, which opened her eyes as if to accompany her “Oh!”; sitting down then, briefcase on the floor leaning like a friendly cat against the slope of slanted neat leg, and going on that she was a little late. “Hard to hit it right on the button from eighty miles.”
We got along all right on a commercial level, a narrowish lively face with eye-whites like chips of eggshells (conscious of that maybe from the weathered pinks of my own), hair that she flung back from time to time; not the sort of details you’re expected to see in a business encounter but I have my frailties, as my ex has observed, and the whole meeting took on a different tone for me when she said in a by-the-way manner, searching in the briefcase, “‘Cotton Lane Press,’ I like that,” probably the instant (11:21 a.m., March 19, 1983—data for a birth certificate, handy for astrologers) that the Press came into this world—particularly auspicious for me in the light of Lucinda’s contempt for the Press, in the big time as she was, fishing with live bait while I fished with worms, (though she claimed to have given up “fishing” altogether, claimed that her analyst had cured her: “I’ll give you his name, Bob, a dear man, he lost fifteen pounds straightening me out”). Neither here nor there, the Traveling Representative handing me a book that Sanders-Erwin had manufactured, saying, “Baskerville, eleven on twelve, I like Baskerville. But we have lots of others. I’ll leave our Type Specimen Book with you,” producing it from the briefcase and flipping it open. “The Caslon True-Cut is very nice. And the Goudy too. I love that ‘W’.”
I said, “Yes,” (as if I could see them), and we discussed various professional matters, offset, letterpress, binding, typography, extra sinkage on chapter openings, and so on. “Cost? We’d have to see the complete manuscript and the specs. Of course that sets your retail price, which you’ll have to make four to five times your unit cost; but you can handle that later.” I said, “Quite so,” as if I had thought of that, which naturally I hadn’t.
It was almost twelve when I said, who usually lunch at two, “Now you’ll have lunch with me of course, there are some other things we need to cover,” she thanking me with a practiced professionalism that suggested she had met that gambit before: she had other stops to make, it would be night before she got back to Rockbridge, holding out her strong hand with a smile that seemed more than a smile because of her big mouth. She drove away, I noticed from my window, in a faded VW Beetle.
Talks with Mr. Sanders, by phone, then, one morning, face-to-face (Miss Farmer—Mrs.?—on the road that day I was annoyed to find out), Mr. Sanders a printer from pre-hightech days of hot type and calloused fingertips rattling in the type-nests; “I like the smell of ink and type and paper,” says he. “Walk in of a morning and it’s like a garden, like the garden of smells my wife planted, tea olive, medlar, banana shrub,” smiling in a way that said to me, mindful of such things, he had had a good marriage—pre-hightech.
“Specs” by mail (Trim Size, Quantity, Type Face—Goudy Old Style 11/12—etc., etc.) based on the penciled notes of my last copy editor, and one morning Miss Farmer in the door again: “Hello, Bob, I was in the neighborhood,” (“Bob,” if you please). “Brought by some color samples for the binding. We’ll have to order the cloth, take about a week. I’ll leave them with you. Look them over; your wife may have some ideas.” (I let it go.)
And then, sitting down with her gray-flannel knees together, pants that day, and letting her eyes wander about like a pair of my semi-domesticated wasps, “I’ve read one of your books, Bob.”
This was such an overwhelming thing to hear in a Southern environment where the most you can hope for is “Haven’t had a chance to read it yet,” so overwhelming I neglected to ask her which book and tried to cover my embarrassment by offering her a glass of my special-guest sherry, which she accepted indifferently, adding, “I thought I should read something if we are going to print one. It didn’t tell much about you, Bob.” The big-mouthed smile again and, “I read it, honestly, Bob, to see what sort of person a story-writer is. I’ve never seen one before. I’m not a book reader, Sci Fi mags for me.”
“And you found out?”
“Contradictions, Bob. You couldn’t be all those different people and have anything left over for yourself.”
I covered up by asking her if stranger things didn’t happen in her Sci Fi mags and she laughed and said, Yes they did. “Maybe you’ll come out clearer when I read the one over there in the typewriter, I read proof when I’m not on the road. Once There was a Fisherman. About a fisherman, Bob?”
I said, In a way it was—superstitious about things still in the typewriter, giving them too much sun. She said with a watchful smile, “‘In a way’ doesn’t tell much. ‘In a way’ says ‘yes and no,’ doesn’t it?”
I said, “In a way,” and we both laughed as if we had tripped on the same stone, she adding, “I’ll read it to see what way,” finishing her vintage sherry as offhandedly as a Coke and handing me the swatch of color samples. She said she was off to Wilkes City, turned in the doorway to say she knew a charming bookseller there, she would tell him about the Cotton Lane Press. “I’ll tell him to watch out for Fisherman too. Look, Bob, how are you going to market the book? How is anybody to hear about it? We’re just printers, you know.”
I wanted to say, That was when the cheese got binding, but I’m too old-fashioned; I mumbled something about that was what separated the men from the boys.
She said, “One man we made a history book for put a hundred in his car and set out round the State. Sold them all in ten days. According to him. If your Sales Department wants to talk to him I’ve got his phone number, someplace,” waving and running surefootedly down my dim stairs.
And leaving me thinking, not about selling and printing problems in this unexplored land I had stumbled into but about how she seemed to have no shortage of men-friends, “boyfriends”; booksellers, stationary and peripatetic, and Lord knew who else. All knowing more about her than I did, she and her friends in a world that had been discovered since my day, when you helped a woman into her coat, pulled out a chair for her at the table, left her at her door with a handshake, or not much more; in any case, left her at her door. Now, from what I read and heard—
Too old for that sort of thing, and very badly informed on the new-world obstructions I’d have to overcome. All sorts of up-to-date barriers, I didn’t doubt—transistors at their fingertips, semi-conductors, micro-circuits, laser beams, what not—but none of them, I thought, so inherently baffling that it (or its historical equivalent) hadn’t been circumvented for thousands of years. The truth is, I value barriers; for me, as the steamship posters used to say (and the airlines naturally neglect to), “Getting there is half the fun.” You need a net for tennis, sandtraps for golf. Obstacles didn’t bother me but not knowing what they were, where they were located.
Too old to search them out, I knew that, but I seemed unable to replace such an ingrained weakness with something more becoming and I planned, plotted, as soon as I had the manuscript in shape to phone Traveling Representative that I was bringing the copy and would like to go over a few spots in it with her if she could manage to meet me for dinner some Friday—throwing a few things in a suitcase just for insurance; if I couldn’t get anything moving in such a short time nobody would know they were there. If I could, well, I wouldn’t be missed for a few days, allowing Saturday for pinning down just what and where the resistances were and Sunday for overcoming them, the occupation of doing that appealing in itself—deuces wild spoiled the game. The details of the venture I would have to leave in that unimagined state you encounter in a story where for the time being there is no way out.
And as you sometimes wake up in the morning with the “way out” there in the very ring of your alarm clock, the way out this time seemed to be handed to me in the ring of the phone quite early Thursday at the Press—sometimes it doesn’t ring for weeks and I call up and make an appointment with the dentist just to keep the lines open: “Bob, this is Becky.”
She was calling from Rockbridge, not in the office, downstairs at a pay phone. “Shouldn’t be telling you this, Bob, but here I go. We’re winding up a job, have another one waiting that could take six weeks, maybe longer. You hear what I’m saying?”
“He might run me in ahead of the other one?”
“I didn’t say so, Bob.”
I told her I would bring her the manuscript tomorrow afternoon. “What time do you leave?”
She said tomorrow she was leaving a little early, if she wasn’t there to put it on her desk. “If everybody’s gone drop it through the slot. Mark it Attention Becky’.” I said (my plan, plot, in mind) that things got misplaced, I’d feel better to hand it to her, and she said, “Well, all right, bring it to The Starlite.”
“To where, please?”
“The Starlite Rollerway, Bob. I’ve got a skate-date with Number Two.—And oh! Bring your skates, Bob.”
Skates—mind making a twenty-year leap to skates that might be in my attic, or might not, straps brittle in any case, steel rollers rusted. I said I’d have to see about that, it might be simpler to leave the manuscript at the office. She said, Oh, I must come, and I said, I didn’t like to crash in. “Oh Bob, it’s only Number Two and he has to go home early to work on his Master’s.”
This sounded promising—if I wouldn’t have skinned up knees and elbows by then or broken something, and we left it that I would get the manuscript to her one way or another (depending on how big a fool I was), adding to myself that it was good of her to include old “Bob,” to post him on the printing schedule, old on-his-last-book Robert.
My ears were still tingling from Doshia’s call (she’s a little deaf and assumes everybody else is) when the phone rang again so quickly I thought she had forgotten something. But it wasn’t Doshia: “Hello, Bob. Eastman here.”
“Eastman!”—swallowing two or three times as when your plane hits a pocket (used to, maybe they don’t hit pockets any more, I’m not up on planes, don’t fly well). He said he had been talking to some cousin or other, didn’t catch her name.
I said, Doshia, maybe? and he said, “I guess so. Wants us all to stay with her. I said okay, but, Bob, I can’t stay in a house with three women.”
“Three women to wait on you, Eastman! You’ll love it,” dating myself back in the days of women as willing helpers, “Helpmates” indeed; never such contentment among them since. He said he ended by telling her “the girls” would stay with her. “I said I’d be staying with you. It’s much better that way. That’s all right with you, isn’t it? We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
I said I had to be out of town on business for a few days, and he said, shocked, “But you’ll be back for the service, of course.”
I said, Oh yes, I certainly expected to be but I might not be there when he arrived to let him in. “You’re coming tomorrow, I suppose?”
He said, Tomorrow, he thought; possibly the next day, there were still some details to be “finalized.” He said if I would be away I could just leave the keys next door (these Yankees! or whatever he was now). I said the place was a wreck, painters coming in; “There’s a leak in the roof over the guest room,”—I had had it fixed but there had been. “You’ll like it at Doshia’s. Big house, four or five bedrooms—”
“You mean it’s not convenient to stay with you?” hurt feelings beginning to vibrate down the eight hundred miles like words.
“Oh good Lord no, Eastman, not at all. I’m just thinking of you. You’d be so much more comfortable at Doshia’s.”
“I don’t know Doshia, never saw her in my life.” I said he’d love Doshia, “salt of the earth,” meaning it in the old sense before everybody got high blood, but he ignored it, maybe didn’t hear it through his wounded feelings, going on to say, “Very well, Robert, I’ll make other arrangements. It does seem to me, if you don’t mind my saying so, in a situation of this kind, after all these years—”
