Read an Excerpt
The Typewriter Satyr
A Novel
By Dwight Allen Terrace Books Copyright © 2009 Dwight Allen
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-299-22990-0
Chapter One All the Things She Knew
Annelise was hungry. She wanted a grilled cheese sandwich and pickles and a vanilla Coke and a slice of banana-coconut cream pie, all of which, she knew, could be found at Moon's Luncheonette, four blocks away. She put on her sunglasses and went out the back door of WOOP, the radio station where she worked for measly wages as a late-night deejay (and daytime receptionist and dogsbody). She walked up the alley, toward Fond du Lac Street, humming a Woody Guthrie song called "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key," about an ugly boy who charms girls with his voice. One of the nice things about doing radio-or lefty, shoestring radio, anyway-was that you could be gangly and goggle-eyed and no listener was the wiser. (Not that Annelise was either.) Your voice was all anybody could "see." On her next show, she would pour Woody Guthrie (or Billy Bragg singing Woody Guthrie) into the ears of her listeners. And then she would do her monologue, maybe tell a story about how she was walking down an alley early one summer afternoon, hungry for sugar and pickles. No, she was not pregnant.
It was garbage day in this part of Midvale, Wisconsin, but the garbage men hadn't ventured into the alley yet. Among the things awaiting them were a plaid dog bed and a scrap of green shag carpeting and a three-legged chair from which the stuffing was spilling. On the chair was a man's white plantation-style suit, somewhat the worse for the wear. Annelise, who was thirty-one, whose closet and car were full of things she'd picked up at garage sales and scavenged from the curb, didn't know any men who might be willing to wear a white suit. Her boyfriend, a Republican, had a sense of humor, but he wasn't going to dress like Tom Wolfe or Big Daddy.
A little farther on, she saw a typewriter on top of a garbage can. It was a manual typewriter, a Royal, a relic from at least before her parents were born. Somebody had put out a cigar on the platen and left the stub in the typebar basket. Several of the keypads were missing. There were streaks of Wite-Out-or was it bird droppings?-on the housing surrounding the typebar basket. She pressed the space bar and the carriage moved along, in a jittery, hesitant way. A little bell rang before the carriage reached its endpoint.
Annelise shook the cigar butt out of the typewriter and carried the machine back to her car. Its heft, all that dense metal from the last century, would have made it just the thing for hammering out a manifesto or a love letter as serious as a poem. Not that she felt the urge to do either at the moment. (The last time she'd felt compelled to tell somebody that she loved him, she'd done it via text message.) But she had a side that was preservationist or maybe just sentimental.
She put the typewriter next to a stack of LPs that would melt in the heat if she didn't get them out of the car soon. Then she walked back down the alley to Fond du Lac Avenue and on to Moon's Luncheonette. When Mr. Moon stopped talking to her in his rapid, Korean-inflected English, she thought about Rolf, the man she was living with, who worked for a company that made stents. She was not sure she and Rolf were a good match. She looked at other men all the time, not only out of curiosity. Rolf had a birthday coming up, his thirty-eighth. She could get him a shirt, maybe even one with a little color, or she could give him a typewriter on which he could type love letters to her. Though, of course, love letters (or even, for that matter, text messages) were not his strength. But the Marvin the Martian toothbrush she'd given him had amused him, and so had the transistor radio.
Annelise licked the last coconut shaving of Mrs. Moon's pie off the fork, tipped Mr. Moon a dollar, and stepped out of the air conditioning into the midsummer heat. She thought she'd sweat off half the pound she'd just put on by the time she got back to the station. She adjusted her sunglasses, cheap ones with big frames; she always felt better behind them.
Despite her sugar habit, she didn't need to lose weight. She was short but lean and narrow everywhere, except in her bottom, which was a little wide and quivery. Sometimes she could not help admiring her legs and even her bottom, and sometimes she wished they were not hers, or rather, she wished she wasn't theirs. Her posture was less than erect, and it and her gait, a slink with some droop in it, suggested she had secrets that weighed her down.
As the commercial districts of Midvale went, Fond du Lac Avenue was a bit of a backwater. On the block where Annelise was walking, there was a business that sold wheelchairs and prosthetic devices and a tavern called Popp's (the owner was a socialist who ran for mayor every four years) and a tattoo parlor and a typewriter repair shop called The Typing Poole. Annelise had walked by The Typing Poole often enough to be mildly annoyed by the pun in its name, a pun you might imagine was a typo if you had failed to notice on the door the small print (in a font called Bookman Old Style) below the larger print (in Bookman Old Style, too) of the shop's name: O. W. Poole, Prop. The Typing Poole didn't promote itself with much flair. The window display consisted of three typewriters garlanded by two thirsty-looking spider plants.
Annelise continued on to her car and then came back to The Typing Poole with the Royal in her arms. (In addition to cigar, it smelled of pee and a back-alley odor that she, despite her excellent nose, couldn't identify. Rum, maybe.) The Typing Poole's reception room was cooled by a ceiling fan. Its furnishings included a sales counter; gray industrial-style shelving holding typewriters and typewriter innards and adding machines; an orange vinyl armchair; a framed poster of an early-twentieth-century woman with her fingers poised above an Oliver typewriter; a side table with a Christmas cactus and a copy of The Nation on it; and a hat tree on which a gray fedora and an umbrella were hung. The Typing Poole smelled of dust and machine oil and Asian takeout. The proprietor was not to be seen. Annelise took off her sunglasses. On the sales counter was a bell and next to it was a handwritten note that said, "Please ring." Annelise rang, once, a polite tap that wouldn't have awakened a flea from a nap. She heard music-trumpets and trombones, and behind them, gravelly, scratchy voices harmonizing-coming from behind a door that led into the back of the shop. She rang the bell again, twice, quickly, hoping she wasn't conveying urgency or impatience. She thought a man who repaired typewriters in 2004 A.D. might be testy, that he would have as firm an opinion about etiquette as, say, a florist might. (The calendar on the wall behind the counter had a flower theme. Were those lush June sexpots peonies? Wasn't today July 18?) She imagined that the man-she assumed it would be a man; a woman might choose to repair zippers or shoes or watches but nothing so nearly obsolete as a typewriter-who came from behind the door would have silver-rimmed glasses perched on his nose and hair growing out of his ears and a scowl to scare away the curious. And if it were winter, he would be wearing a cardigan stained with soup. But it was summer, hot as blazes, and she was sweating under the arms of her T-shirt.
She rang once more, this time as if she meant it. When he appeared, a tall man whose head skimmed just under the doorway, she took a step back from the counter, as if ceding it to him. He was wearing a green eyeshade and looked to be half-asleep. Tawny, gray-streaked hair fell over his ears. He wore a blue polo shirt that had a spot of sweat at the sternum. The fact that he looked at her from a height-from an altitude, really; she came up to his Adam's apple-may have explained why he didn't look directly at her when he spoke. Or perhaps it was the sight of the Royal and the smells that emanated from it that distracted him. The first thing he said to her was "What can you help me with?" As far as she could tell, he wasn't trying to be funny. He pushed the bill of his eyeshade upward with his forefinger and said, "Let me do that over. What can I help you with?"
She said, "I found this typewriter."
He gave the platen a half-turn, pressed down on the Shift key. "A Quiet De Luxe. Hemingway used this model, I believe. It was quite popular in its day."
He gave her a smile that didn't even reveal the tips of his teeth-maybe it wasn't even a smile-and it was right then, she supposed later, with those two ancient voices (one, she knew, was Louis Armstrong's) singing in the background, that she decided she wanted to explore this man's disappointments and desires. This was less a conscious decision that she articulated to herself than it was like something that spasmed way down inside her, though maybe that was only gastric turbulence. But some moments later, when he was again fiddling with the bill of his eyeshade like a baseball pitcher looking in for a sign, while she was babbling about her interest in old-fashioned things, the feeling that she might like to know him had spread up into her shoulders and neck. She felt the skin on her chest and throat pinkening, as if with desire (or embarrassment that her desire might be too visible). She liked the sound of his voice, she liked the shape of his mouth (small but not pinched), she liked the silver spider-web-like hairs that flourished in the hollow at the base of his neck. She liked that he knew who the other singer was (Jack Teagarden) and the name of the song that Teagarden and Armstrong were singing ("Rockin' Chair"). She liked that when she said (a bit more forwardly than was her custom) that she did a late-night radio show and that maybe she would play that song on it, he said, "I'd listen, if I didn't go to bed so early."
He said he would have the Royal fixed up within a couple of days. "I'll clear a space on my schedule for it." Perhaps this was a joke. He didn't seem to be swamped by work.
It worried her that she liked a man so immediately, though this worried her less than did the fact that he appeared to be married. (The fact that he was older, a good decade and a half older, she guessed, didn't trouble her that much. Older men were a weakness of hers and she didn't try to fight it.) She thought later that his wedding band might have deterred her, but when she went out the shop door and the heat smacked her in the face, she didn't reconsider. She wanted to see him again, right away, which was possibly why she'd left her sunglasses on his counter. When she went back in to retrieve them, he asked at what hour her radio show came on.
She said, "Eleven on Thursday."
He said, "Maybe I'll take an extra-long afternoon nap so I can stay up late that night."
She gave him her card, something a friend had designed and that she had never handed out to anybody, as far as she could remember.
He said, "Annelise Scharfenberg." He said it again, as if he was trying to figure out how to get his mouth around all of it. "Do you get a lot of mail from listeners?"
She said, "I get an occasional e-mail, mostly from this one guy who hates that I play so many old fogies and dead people."
Mr. Poole said, "I didn't used to have a computer as a matter of principle, but now I do. I keep it in back, out of sight. Maybe I'll send you a fan e-mail." And then he asked her who the three people on her T-shirt were.
She looked down at her bosom and said they were a local band called No Shoes. "I know the drummer, the one in the middle with the glasses. He was in my Shakespeare class in college. I play them on my show sometimes, so the younger listeners won't abandon me completely. No Shoes does moody, jangly, retro-psychedelic, retro-folk-rock, post-grunge stuff, kind of like My Morning Jacket. Do you know My Morning Jacket?"
Mr. Poole said he didn't, but he was looking at her in a way that suggested he wanted to know all the things she knew.
Chapter Two Dog or Coyote
Oliver Poole dabbed his nose with shaving cream. Two hairs had sprouted on the ridge, a little north of the swollen tip that a softball had plunked the other evening during a game between the Melody Bar Savages and the Old Hatters. This happened in the third inning. Oliver, the left fielder for the Old Hatters, had reached first when the Savages' third baseman, an electrician named Crabbe, booted a grounder. It was a tricky grounder, fast and side-spinny, and Oliver would have scored it a hit, but the official scorer, the wife of a Savage, put it down as "E-5." The next batter, a used-bookshop clerk named Garr, hit a blooper over the head of the Savages' shortstop, and Oliver got it into his head that he could reach third base without even drawing a throw.
Oliver was tall, six-foot-six on most days, a bit shorter during eclipses and tornado watches and before and during airplane rides. He was thin, too, ten pounds thinner than he'd been twenty-two days ago, before he fell in love. When he was younger-he was fifty-one now-he ran like a veldt animal, eating up ground with his long strides, his shaggy, not yet gray hair flowing out from under his cap. Five or six years ago, he'd fallen off his bike and banged up his left knee. Now he ran with a bit of a limp. Sciatica afflicted him from time to time, too. The Old Hatters' shortstop, Murray Gleason, a fifty-six-year-old painter known as the Rabbit Master and Oliver's best friend on the team, said, "O-Man, some day we'll trade your ass to the glue dealer, but in the meantime you're our left fielder. Take lots of ibuprofen and hang in there."
The moment before it had occurred to Oliver to sprint for third, he had been thinking about his lover's ears, about how small and delicate they were, the lobes hardly big enough to hang earrings from, the rims like tracery. Annelise's thirty-second birthday was coming up, and he had bought earrings for her, silver ones he'd paid a fortune for. When Garr hit that blooper, Oliver's mind was full of the whorls that were Annelise's ears, and then he was hoofing it across the hard infield dirt (it hadn't rained for weeks in Midvale), one eye on the left fielder, a stocky, lugubrious, gap-toothed plumber who was all stick and no glove. But Belcher, the plumber, came in on the ball more quickly than expected, and Oliver, who had by then mindlessly rounded second, realized that his chances of reaching third safely had diminished. He heard someone shout, "Go back, you idiot, go back!" It was a kid's voice. It might have been the voice of one of his boys-he had four, and all but the seven-year-old tossed the term "idiot" around freely-though none of them had come to the game. But it was too late to stop. Oliver saw Crabbe, with his red Fu Manchu and his jersey emblazoned with the Melody Bar mascot (a neon green Neanderthal with a club in one hand and a martini in the other), waiting for him at third, crouched like some bristly, thickset housecat watching a mouse hole. Having already crossed the line into unreason, Oliver decided to slide headfirst. He had not slid headfirst since high school, on a cold, sodden day in April of 1970, when the ground was just beginning to thaw. He had been in love then, too, with a girl who claimed to have a freckle on the bottom of her big toe and about whose green eyes he had written a poem, and it was at least possible that on that April day in 1970 love had figured into his decision to dive headfirst into the ungiving earth. (He was out by a mile, and a week later Karin turned him down when he invited her to go to a Unitarian church basement to hear a folk music duo called Phil & Sue.) When he dove on Wednesday evening, thirty-four years later, he felt as if pricked all over by love's arrows, arrows tipped with adrenaline and crazy juice. His nose arrived at Crabbe's lowered knee the instant the softball did. But the ball dribbled away from the butter-fingered third baseman, and Oliver was safe.
After the game-the Old Hatters lost-Murray got out his dope pipe and offered it around, to Savages and Old Hatters alike. Oliver took a pass. Hal Sveum, the Old Hatters' third baseman and a writer for the alternative weekly, who took Pub & Grub League softball more seriously than anybody, marched off toward his car, saying, "We're a bunch of dope-smoking cripples." Crabbe patted Oliver on the back and said, "Take good care of that proboscis, Poole." Oliver, dizzy with thoughts of his lover, said, "OK, thanks, I will."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Typewriter Satyr by Dwight Allen Copyright © 2009 by Dwight Allen. Excerpted by permission.
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