112
PARTISAN REVIEW
shoulders which were massive and were made still wider by the
bushy gray fur.
He finished and trotted across the room with amazing smoothness.
What an incredible number of hours had gone into perfecting thatl
Effortlessly he jumped up onto the sofa and, plucking his cigar from
the ashtray, said, "Give me a light."
Lutz struck a match and held it to the cigar. Lutz shook out the
flame, dropped the match, and heard the soft ping as it hit the ashtray.
Puffing away, Abbott stared up at him. He worked the cigar from the
end of his snout to the corner of his mouth, and Lutz watched his long
tongue slide along the snout, licking whisky from the fur and the
leathery black and purple mottled lips.
SPecial Yearning
had gone unnoticed-this the novel dedicated to
the memory of my wife who, halfway through the manuscript, in one
last hurried reading, told me in a note (cancer had taken her voice) that,
except for a blunder here and there, it was my best effort yet.
Honestly!-double-underlined.
That night, as I slept on the floor in
the next room, she died, the pages of the last chapter scattered among
the bedcovers with indecipherable notes she had been scribbling at the
end.
Finding a publisher for my book had taken some doing, but at last
it saw print. Months slipped by, and no reviews of it appeared-not
one. In desperation I used the name B. Arthur Lutz and, disguised by a
style that did a lot of huffing and puffing, wrote a piece on Hobart
Stull 's
SPecial Yearning.
But I was too late.
The day aft.er I mailed Lutz's essay, I received the first annual
statement from my publisher. He had moved seventy-one copies of a
printing of two thousand. Sixty-eight were complimentary copies he
sent to reviewers, editors, writers. He had sold three.
"Your novel is good, Hobart, " my publisher wrote, "strange, but
good." We had known each other for years but, as was the case with
most of my friends, only through our correspondence; we had never
laid eyes on each other. Still, I pictured my friend-not young and not
old, not large and not small, ink-stained and harried and shaggy with
words-sitting on a stool in a small office crowded with copies of
SPecial Yearning.
"We know it's good," his letter went on, "but no one
wants it.
It
has sunk like a rock. Now what? Do we try again? Do we
wait? What do we wait for? " I never heard from him again, and my
unopened letters returned rubber-stamped
No Such Person.
But B. Arthur Lutz penned his essay before I knew my novel was
out of print.
