(Hephaestus)

“We did not expect you today. We had to use the table,” Jeffrey said, and he gestured east to where six of Glenn’s women were seated.

They saw him and each shifted slightly away, their faces displeased or made blank. Jill looked shocked and then lowered her eyes to the white safety of the tablecloth.

Glenn left before they could start their whispering, and he was glad he had not checked his coat when he came in and not invited a companion.

“Another time,” he told Jeffrey, but he knew he would not be back and Jeffrey knew it too and, for a moment, was sad. The writer had added so much to the room and, even now, when he was in disgrace, he was still important. Especially important, Jeffrey admitted to himself. Talent of all sorts filled his restaurant, none like the little man.

He watched Glenn limping to the door with his familiar rocking gait. He would not have been comfortable in this room today, he thought, looking around to console himself. Not only were the ladies there, grim now, but also a few of the others Glenn had horrified with the recent excerpt from his book in The New Yorker. Real names and actual secrets told were always a mistake.

Glenn had thrown his thunderbolts and as a consequence was exiled from all the sets that had mattered to him. It had happened almost immediately.

Glenn got into a cab and went to Sardi’s, where his caricature was on the wall, where it was late enough to be almost empty and he would know no one and it was not dangerous.

Even as he sat, the waiter removed his water, put down his triple vodka and soon brought him his club sandwich with chicken instead of turkey, two layers instead of three.

Glenn thought of his afternoon project with a chuckle on which he choked, thinking back on the six sulky faces. He knew two of them had been married to the same man, another two slept together every Wednesday, and that each of them was bound in her own beautiful misery.

After the fat sucking tubes and the sutures, he had sat at Jill’s bedside trying to amuse her, but not too much because of the bandages. And now the angry eyes, the shunning. When she had looked up, Jill looked shattered, that was the word.

He washed down his stroke pills with the vodka. After lunch, he would begin his next snakebox kit and he was especially looking forward to this one.

Were they still scared? He hoped so for he had more secrets to tell in his new medium. No one knew he had finished writing and instead was making collages on the real snakebite kits he had ordered from Florida.

He had not known exactly why he ordered thirty of the kits. He liked the way they looked stacked next to his antique Chinese snake and one day he had picked one up, turning it round and begun his project. Each kit, the size of a shoebox, had a theme or it was a person worthy of his revenge.

Collecting the pictures and bits for the collages kept him busy now that he was not writing at all. He’d sit on the floor with his glue pot and magazine scraps and old postcards and put them together. They were as wicked as his writing and easier fun. A glass was by his side and he would struggle up only to refill it, watching the vodka pale his juice. In many ways it was like writing, putting bits together to tell a story, adding little elegant notes as Marcel Proust had done until the very end. His bits were memory, random words captured from elsewhere, scraps of his past, a big one at that, long swaths stolen from his journals kept before he was banished.

Then would come the dead evenings. This would be the second month that Glenn was not invited to anything other than a commercial event. Even those invitations sent before the excerpt might not come another time.

He had looked up purdah and being cast out long before he had submitted the excerpt when he was already anticipating.

Another drink appeared now, the waiter was attentive.

“Working on another book, Mr. Gabriel?”

“Always working.”

“I’m a big fan, sir,” the waiter said and bowed his way off through the dining room, empty now.

Purdah was a curtain used for screening off women. Glenn Gabriel had dropped the curtain round himself. A screen, a curtain, a veil, a high-walled edifice built by his words all of which were true and therefore hurt so. He looked at himself, all pink and bow tied across the room and, for a few seconds, hated that grinning fool for losing the love he’d had, forcing him out now into these places with his own invisible burqa, ever suspected and isolated.

Feeling still enshrouded, he left Sardi’s and took a cab home, hailing it with his cane. He hated being lame, needing the built- up shoe that gave him his rocking gait so he would always be noticed for that if nothing else.

This afternoon, he would put Claudine on a new snakebox. He would sit next to his Chinese snake twined around the ancient tree trunk five feet high, mouth open on a forked tongue. He had that postcard of a snake in an eighteenth century princess dress holding a fan. Human body, snake from the neck up, like a sphinx. Claudine was a man-crushing sphinx, she had helped to ruin him, she had abandoned him before he published that story and had broken his heart long before the others.

That bitch. He still kind of loved her.

He had the final ammunition for he had taken a special photograph of her. It showed her on a beach chair in front of the house her husband bought for her. On top of her was Sam Walters in the process of entering her. He had taken the photo from the upstairs window of the house where he came and went as a perpetual guest.

As he glued the photo onto the blue paper wrapping the box, he knew that the exposure would end her marriage. He tamped it down with one of his long tapered fingers, once again marveling at their beauty that never looked like it belonged to the rest of him. Those fingers were elegance themselves and he stroked his face with pleasure.

One more touch. He would label the photograph with Claudine’s names through all her marriages and the date and Sam Walters just in case anyone failed to identify the sliver of famous profile, the thin flailing limbs in the air under Walter’s lowered trunks.

He sat on the cushions on the floor, ice melting into the drink between his legs and thought of their summers, the people who surrounded them and looked at him with pleasure, even wonderment sometimes, all of them in his web as he spun on and on, inventing and embroidering shamelessly, wasting himself on them, never writing down a word of it. As the afternoons lengthened into orange dusk,  they were all still at the lunch table, the sweat on the rose bottles melted down to puddles, the mayonnaise congealed on the langoustines and all of them longing for a nap before their evenings would begin.

He could see Claudine across the table, her hair blowing lines across her sharp cheekbones, her teeth so white against her tan. She was always wearing the simplest t- shirt above her bikini. It was as though the right clothes fell upon her and the blond strands fell into the dark honey of her hair and the sun sparkled stars in her amber eyes. As the wind whipped the strands across her brow again, she pushed them back and gave him that special complicit look of theirs and he would rise and take her arm. The endless lunch was over.

His babe, his doll, his creation (if only in part) to ruin.

The late lunches, the food on the deck, the icy radishes in the blue bowl, the longest spaghetti thickened with hazelnut butter, the baby greens curled in surrender on the Biarritz salad, the remains of the artichoke soufflés collapsed into their ramekins, the circlets of cheese starting to stink. All of it over.

He leaned against the base of the snake, his head aching and heavy. Inside the snakebox kit was the thumb drive that contained his finished book, the one they had all been waiting for, the one he knew would be his last book, the one they accused him of dawdling over. Ten years of work interrupted by small projects, which his publisher always took with feigned eagerness for he was anxious for the masterwork.

Each of the boxes, wrapped, decorated, and contained within the Plexiglas shoeboxes he had had made for them, had a thumb drive with the completed book.

Glenn could not face more trouble. He could not bear going out to promote it. He knew how good it was and how it would be hated because of its strengths—the truth of it, its slithering ugliness. He slumped down onto the cushions confused about what he was doing.

Once, he would have called Claudine and she would have told him to put it out and stood by him and he would have been proud to do so. Then he thought of various chapters important to the whole and the immense fuss they would cause. There would be days nitpicking with the publisher’s lawyers to prevent lawsuits. The excerpt had been a rehearsal. He was so very tired and scared.

Perhaps if he went away for a while to that house in Bangor he had rented two summers ago. He would disconnect himself from his devices, pack his car with his Chinese snake and the boxes. He would stock up on supplies so he could avoid the local store. Soon he would have a beard and wear puffer jackets and L.L. Bean jeans and work boots and turn eighty on the porch with the fierce Maine sunlight glinting on his French bottle-tree filled with empty Absolut bottles or perhaps by then he would have switched to Bombay Sapphire. Pretty blue bottles webbed with frost.

A sense of accomplishment and no reviews. A well- developed fantasy was brewing. He scratched his face, feeling the stubble, feeling himself disappear and the woods coming closer.

 

The opening of Glenn Gabriel’s snakebox kits at the Larbredor Gallery in Chelsea was attended by all of those who had not forgiven him since his vanishing.

Priced at a modest $5000 a kit, the thirty boxes sold out in the first week of the show. Over time and after the reviews, their value mounted and they were resold for many times their original prices. Claudine’s husband demanded that her box be removed from the show and the gallery caved in. Unfortunately, it had already been seen and, while it lasted on its pedestal, drew even more people.

No one ever dared to open a single one of the sealed snake bite kits. They had become much too valuable to disturb.

Hephaestus (Vulcan) was the chief artificer of the gods and the architect of Pandemonium, the council hall of Hell. Hurled out of Olympus, he was lamed. He trapped his unfaithful wife in a fine net he had made and all the gods came to laugh.

 

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