[Erlist] New excerpt from the Book: A Novel

[Eric]

This is Eric Rosenfield. My novel, The Book: a Novel is scheduled to be 
finished by the end of the summer. The ending is already written, but 
there's some stuff in the middle and a lot of rewriting I have to do 
before the end of august. It'll be around 600-700 pages long.

Included here is an excerpt. This is a major rewrite of the excerpt I sent 
out to you folks maybe two years ago (it's crazy to think I've been 
working on this thing for that long but there it is). Those of you who 
remember that version can compare it to this version to see how the 
process has been going. Needless to say, it's much better now.

Enjoy,
Eric

PS. There has been some confusion in my switch of mailing list servers. If 
anyone has any questions or wants off this list for any reason, there 
should be unsubscribe info at the bottom, or you can just reply to me and 
ask me to take you off, and I will.
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	Maxine turned the Spongebob Squarepants squeeky bathtoy over in her hands and then put it back on the rim of the the tub. It left two reflections in the black ceramic, one sharp and crisp and the other faint, a yellowish blur that might really be anything at all. She kneeled on the cold floor, looked it in its big, friendly eyes. So warm, so innocent, she shook her boobs for it half-expecting it to blush. She looked at her legs and then sat back on the floor to take her stockings off, felt the firmness of her thighs, her calves' hard edges. She folded the stockings onto the tub next to Spongebob. She heard faint snoring from the other room. She stood and padded barefoot to the toilet, pulled down her panties, pissed. In the black tile another Maxine pissed, netted with grout-lines, and also a third ghost that was little more than a pale smudge. The crisp one's thin arms crossed over her lap, nude shoulders awash with freckles that drained down between her raised collar bones and brushed the beginnings of her bare breasts. The darkness of the tile merged with her hair and bridged across her face in freckles. Maxine imagined what she must've looked like to Rupert while he was shuddering beneath her, and punched herself in the thigh. Her breathing came a little easier.
	She wiped and got up, flushed, pulled up her panties. She walked on the cold floor past Spongebob and onto the hardwood of the bedroom. The light from the bathroom cast a wedge shape on the floor that met a long sliver from between the curtains of the glass balcony door and made the shape of a 'K'. In the dim room before her, Rupert's legs were tangled in silk sheets that snaked up his massive gut, his foreshortened head barely visible at the other end. His body was covered in mats of black hair, and he sounded like the jungle, like elephants caught in toothy steel traps, male hippos low throated warnings to potential hippo competitors, occasionally the nasal squeal of the captured weasel.
	She parted the curtains and slid open the door to the balcony, looking up over the nearby buildings to where the Chrysler Building rose up above them. She stepped out, touched her hand to the glass-topped table flanked by patio chairs and noticed she was crying. She climbed up to the top of the balcony's concrete wall and took a deep breath before her dive to the pavement.

	It hadn't taken her long to figure out that Rupert only went to the bookstore to see her. Every week he came by, and bought a single book or 'zine or whatever happened to be on display, and tried to make a little conversation with her as he gave over his credit card. Rupert standing there in his tucked shirt and chinos buying the latest issue of WWIII magazine or a book of erotic fiction with his platinum credit card. One time he bought a collection of poems by Goethe in the original German. "You know German?" she had asked impressed, putting the credit card slip on the table for him to sign.
	His eyes bulged, "I'm uh... I guess, I'm learning." He signed the paper.
	He put the book under his armpit, hunched over and headed out. "/Auf wiedersehen/!" Maxine called after him pleasantly. He looked back but kept walking. For months this went on; there'd be the tinkling of shop bells and Rupert'd lumber in past the consignment racks and disappear into the shelves, breathing heavily under his own girth.
	Maxine had had guys come in before who seemed more interested in her than the printed word. There they were peeking around shelves or through the windows when they thought she wasn't looking or asking her about her clothes or jewelry, complimenting her, making haphazard passes at her as they checked out. Rupert was far the ugliest of the lot, his face a cometoid of lumps, acne scars and rosacea. His nose stuck round and firm from his face, a bright red burr. His whole body quaked with Californian shock-waves as he walked; sometimes Maxine made up little stories in her head about how Rupert's mother had come to procreate with the landscape -- had she been taken up in a tidal wave of earthen passion? Stood over a geyser at the just wrong time? Cursed to hopelessly love a particular boulder of a certain, convenient shape? Had she been swept off her feet by an avalanche or had her heart blown away by a tornado? Just what kind of unnatural confluence had brought Rupert into this world?
	One day she was having a cigarette outside when Rupert ambled up. It was a warm day and he was shivering.
	"So," Maxine smiled.
	"So," he said.
	"How did you like that Maya Angelou book you bought last week?"
	"It was... I think it's very..." distracted, stumbling for words, "delectable."
	Maxine laughed through her nose, "Delectable?"
	"Listen," he leaned in, eyes wide, brow knitted, "I think you're the most beautiful girl in the whole world."
	"Um... thanks."
	"Wow. Now that I've said it, I feel like I could just say it over and over again. You're beautiful. You're so damn beautiful."
	"Ha," she punched him playfully in the arm, "you're so funny. Okay, I'm going back in..."
	"I'll give you a thousand dollars to have sex with me."

	"Honestly, what was I gonna do, ask you out?" The folds of his furry body lay in sweat that pooled on the satin sheets, "Seduce you maybe? What does that even mean, 'seduce'? I have no idea," he shook his head and shoulders together, "Risking the punch in the face was my only option." He cradled gut with his pudgy hands. "Christ, I'm such a fat, ugly fuck."
	"I'm sorry you're a fat ugly fuck, Rupert," said Maxine, completely in his shadow, naked, head propped on one hand, "it doesn't seem fair."
	Having sex with Rupert was like riding a giant sack of hairy goo. Afterwards he would hold her to him trying to spoon, but he was so big she always felt more like a teddy bear than a lover. The first night she woke up to him crying hysterically into her neck, and though they never spoke about it, she didn't sleep over after that. She would wait for him to fall asleep, extricate herself and go home.
	Over the weeks, as she dented the bank account he had from a career of computer programming, she could see him changing, becoming more relaxed, confident. He bragged to her about how he had started talking in meetings, interacting where before he would sit silently in the corner. He told her how he was starting to socialize more with people in his office.
	"Hey, maybe you can even find a real girlfriend," suggested Maxine.
	He shook his head, eyes down, like a dog shaking off water, "Oh no... I lo..." he looked up at her and trailed off. Changed the subject.
	What was she doing? Rupert was sweet and kind and protective, in addition to the money he gave her little gifts, perfume, jewelry, clothing, and it was nice to be able to start paying off her student loans. She could get used to this. Maybe that was what scared her. She could get used to Rupert, his obsessions with Spongebob Squarepants and videogames, the way he got so passionate talking about that programmer Stallman or Stillman or whatever his name was. She suspected she was the first girl he'd ever been with, and even that was a little sweet. But buying things to distract himself, to forget his life, this was Rupert's existence, the movement from one product to another in the quest for temporary self-nullification, a process that never quite allowed him to evolve past the emotional level of a child prodigy. If he was sitting in his chair and dropped something, he would let out a dog-like moan and start pointing at it. He would whisper callous insults to her about people he'd seen that day who were handicapped or deformed or otherwise "funny-looking". (She could only imagine what he'd say if he saw himself walking down the street.) He tried to get her to read these ridiculous fantasy novels about amazonian women in chain-mail armor fighting dragons and so on, insisting they had "strong female characters".
	Her life wasn't supposed to be like this. In truth Rupert was just the latest in an unending sequence of bad decisions, the final remaking of herself and her useless life into that "w"-word her mother had always threatened she would become. She couldn't say no to Rupert now, to watch the light disappear from his eyes, but then, she had trouble saying no in general, didn't she? Here she would make a stand, saying no this once, no to everything and everyone. She would stand. She would fall. She took a deep breath, felt the wind on her bare skin, lifted her arms above her head and looked down. As the vertigo hit her, she realized that looking down was another bad decision, and just as she was about to take a step back off the wall, she saw someone there on the sidewalk, five stories below her.
	"What are you doing there?" It shouted. He shouted: it was a man's voice, with sharp consonants and the clear diction of someone who knew how to project.  She put an arm over her chest, and the other across her crotch. 
	"Nothing," she yelled, "Go away."
	His head tilted to one side. "Go!" She shouted again. She held herself harder, dug her fingers into her skin. He sat down cross-legged on the sidewalk.
	"What?" he yelled up, almost like an afterthought.
	She stared at him.
	"What?" he repeated.
	She looked back at the door of the balcony, saw Rupert's feet on the bed from between the curtains. He snored.
	When she looked back down the man was gone, but her relief was short-lived as she soon spied him dangling off the bottom of the fire-escape. He must have jumped up there off of the little wall separating the sidewalk from the grass that surrounded the building. He climbed up, slowly at first, then faster until he reached her floor, vaulting over the balcony wall, feet smacking on the concrete. Maxine backed up a step, poised to go over.
	He grinned. He was wearing a European cut black suit, white shirt, and a thin, rectangular black tie. His pants looked like they were just a little too small on him, coming up over his Beatle boots, and his hair was sculpted into a perfect pompadour held like stone by whatever product he was using. Tucked into his lapel was a small, purple flower. His hand went into his coat and he pulled out a brown cigarette, his other hand producing a silver Zippo. "Mind if I smoke?"
	Without pausing for a reply he lit the cigarette behind a cupped palm, and puffed it a little as he pocketed the lighter. He gave her a long look and she noticed her mouth was open. He raised an eyebrow. "What?" he asked, "You want one?"
	She spoke without thinking, "I don't smoke."
	The guy peered over at the street below, "Yeah, I guess you've got to consider your health."
	"Listen," she said, almost in a whisper, acutely aware of the wetness on her cheeks, "don't try and stop me. You probably think you're being a hero or something, but you're not. I just want to be alone."
	"Well, you can't kill yourself while I'm here. It'd traumatize me terribly, and you wouldn't want that on your conscience. Besides which, look at this," he considered the cigarette standing at attention between the fingers of his flattened hand, "this is a Nat Sherman's Natural, one hundred percent pure tobacco with no additives for the finest in luxury smoking. It's taste is unique, sort of warm and full and frankly, I'd really hate to think you died without ever knowing what it was like."
	Whatever she had expected him to say, this was somewhere to the far side of the moon from it, "Who are you?"
	The man stepped forward, reaching up to where she was standing and grabbed her limp hand to shake it vigorously, "Nick. I'm Nick Moriarty."
	"Maxine," she said absently, "so are you part of a really aggressive marketing campaign for Nat Sherman's or what?"
	"Oh, far from it," he hoisted himself up onto the wall next to her, "I just like the cigarettes," he took a deep breath and looked out at the city, "Ah, but doesn't it feel great to be up here? Exhilarating. Good to be alive. Have you ever had sex on a balcony? Last time I got these burns on my knees, but, you know, it all depends on how you position yourself. It was worth it though - the streets below you, the wind on your nipples, squeals of orgasm against the fabulous skyline. Do it at dusk when all the lights are coming on and it feels like you're just turning on the whole city."
	She shook her head, "I don't believe this."
	Nick exhaled smoke, "Believe it, baby."
	Maxine sat down on the wall, legs dangling over the street below, and Nick came down to join her.
	"Fine," she said.
	"Fine, what?"
	"Fine, give me a cigarette."	
	He took one from the pack in his coat, bypassed her hand and put it directly between her lips, then lit it with a flick of his Zippo. She felt the smoke in her chest, imagined the tar painting her lungs half a shade darker. She took another drag. Nick was staring at her.
	"What?" she asked.
	"You have a fallen eyelash," he reached out a finger towards her eye and she closed them instinctively, then she felt lips pressed against hers, a tongue snaking along the crease of her mouth. Eyes wide she pushed him away, both of them almost toppling into the street below.
	"What the hell?!"
	He shrugged, "If you kill yourself I'll never have another opportunity to kiss you. And I wanted to kiss you. Clearly, I had no choice."
	"Jesus, don't tell me, you go around looking for suicidal girls because you figure they have low self-esteem and will be easy to get in the sack, right?"
	"You call this easy? We /both/ almost died just there."
	Almost to herself, taking a drag off the cigarette, "This is the weirdest talk-down ever."
	"You've tried this before, then?"
	And then the dam burst, the tears were pouring out of her. She tried vainly to sniff them back and wiped her nose on her bare arm, muffled her voice half-way through the sentence, "Listen, suicide's just another thing I've failed at repeatedly, alright?"
	"You don't want to kill yourself," he said, perfectly calm, not even looking at her, "At least not here. Not when there's this wall over by the water that'd be so much better. You'd get this amazing view of Queens on the way down. Alright, I admit, maybe Queens isn't necessarily what you want to be the last thing you ever see - I was really thinking of it because it's near this bar that has a fireplace," then he looked at her, "Do you like fireplaces? And it has all these big couches that feel like they wrap all around you and you can sit by the fire all cozy and sip - what do you like to drink?"
	"Merlot," she sniffled at him.
	"Oh, I love Merlot, and we could sip Merlot and just get all warm and comfortable. You know I think I'll go there right now. I'd ask you to go with me, but you're probably too busy with the suicide and everything."
	"Listen... Nick, you're nice and all, but I'm really not looking to get picked up right now."
	"Come now. I'd say cute guys who are, I must say, impeccably dressed," he straightened out the collar of his label, "trying to pick you up is a very good reason to stay alive."
	She sighed and threw the half-smoked cigarette over the side, "Nope. Nope, I'm going to kill myself. You don't change anything. No one changes anything, not ever. Please don't try to stop me."
	"Of course I'm going to stop you."
	Their eyes met, "Good-bye, Nick," and her palms against the wall where she was sitting, she pushed herself off
	but not before Nick got an arm around her waist and pulled her back in, off the wall, the both of them tumbling together onto the floor of the balcony, Nick somehow pivoting his body around so that one foot landed solidly down, cradling her in his arms. 
	Maxine breathed. A car passed by somewhere far beneath them. Rupert snored. They were close enough that she could feel his breath play across her lips.
	Nick crouched into a seated position and lowered Maxine onto his lap, where she buried her face in his shoulder and cried.
	After a while he whispered in her ear, "Merlot's on me, then?"


	"You have such pretty ears."
	"Hm?"
	"They're like Celestial Fuchsias - soft, delicate, red fading into milky corollas."
	"Fuchsias?"
	"You know, there are those who say the orchid is the sexiest of flowers, and the snapdragon has always been identified with lust, but to me there's something indescribably lurid about the way the fuchsia drools it's petals around all those stamens. Like tendrils of spilled cream."
	"You're serious."
	"Insanely serious. How's the Merlot?"
	"It's good. You were right, this is a great place. I'll have to remember it."
	"It feels almost like being underwater. With all the blue."
	"I know. And then the fire, that shock of yellow, you know? I like it."
	"I can't remember the last time I was here. Wait, I do - I was with this girl I was dating who had never had an orgasm."
	"Yeah?"
	"Yeah. Younger girl. After the first time we had sex, we're lying there in post-coital bliss - okay, I'm in post-coital bliss - and she rolls over to me, the arc of her side like some perfect peach-hued horizon, and she says, 'you know, I don't think I've ever had an orgasm.' For a while there she thought she was having them, but after talking it over with her friends it seemed clear that nothing she had experienced was worthy of the kind of cardiac pause, face flushed, inability to breath descriptions they casually related to her.
	"Now, if another girl I had been with had been non-orgasmic, I sure hadn't known about it. Honestly, I was really glad she had told me because I think worst thing a girl can do is fake an orgasm. It's every woman's right to make the guy work for it. So I became really intrigued and maybe a little obsessed; the more I thought about it, the more giving this girl an orgasm became a mission of polio vaccine importance. We tried positions and techniques, made short work of books like the Joy of Sex and the Kama Sutra; we tried all kinds of sex toys; I became a policeman, fireman, Grecian hero, sea pirate and giant purple bunny rabbit; we tried sadism and masochism; whips, chains, silk and fur; I ate her softly and sodomized her roughly, then I sodomized her softly and ate her roughly. Nothing. I had made an appointment to visit an Indian guru who was in the country for the first time in decades so that I might uncover the secrets of tantra, when a friend told me about the Prince Albert."
	"Wait, that's when they put a stud in your..."
	"Yes, exactly. See, supposedly the Prince Albert, properly placed, snuggles right up against the woman's g-spot and massages it just so... well, the more research I did about it, the more I decided it was exactly what I was looking for, and so one day I ended up at the local piercing salon, ready to perforate my manhood for the cause, sitting next to the holiest man alive.
	"That is to say, the man, of the men alive, with the most holes. There was just nothing left without a hole - metal studs, hoops, spikes, crystal and stones jutted from him like the shell of some ungodly crustacean. I said to my self, 'Self, here is a potential master, someone who knows all the ways of the Prince Albert, a veritable resource book of tips and tricks for it'. Yet the words 'Prince Albert' has no sooner left my mouth when all the color drained from his face and he told me, whatever you do, do not ever get one of /those/.
	"See, he had once had this girlfriend, a very passionate girl, the kind who might take some time to warm up to someone, but once she had all the stars and planets of her universe just stopped clear in their paths and made a bee line for boy orbit. For her, everything revolved around him. And she loved his Prince Albert, like an addiction. She would wake up in night sweats craving it."
	"Night sweats. Really?"
	"So he said. Which sounded great to me, and I told him so, but he shushed me and said: Listen. She thought I was cheating on her. She got it into her head that I was cheating on her. I asked him if he had been cheating on her, but he pretended he hadn't heard me.
	"And then I think he started extrapolating a bit because he went into this really almost psychotically detailed description of what was going on inside her head as she imagined that Prince Albert love all over the other girl's g-spot, /her/ Prince Albert, inside some whore, and then, in the midst of the expletives, an awful, unholy idea comes to her.
	"She goes to his apartment, she puts on her most ever so sweet eyelash-batting manner, pushes him up against the wall and kisses him lightly on his lip studs. She kisses his cheek studs, kisses down his rows of neck bolts, one by one, runs her lips over his chest studs, his nipple rings she teases with her tongue. She kisses down the bars that have replaced the line of hair below his navel, and expertly opens his fly. She runs her nose through the rings all through his pubic hair, kisses her way up his manhood, and then finally, breathlessly, wrapping its mushroom head in her lips like some fleshy blow-pop she hooks her teeth under the Prince Albert. And yanks.
	"After I had stopped cringing and finally managed to get my legs unclenched so that I could walk again without looking like some kind of penguin, I leapt up thanking the poor holy man with firm handshakes and rushed out of there. I never gave a thought to the Prince Albert again."
	"So what happened between you and the girl who couldn't get an orgasm?"
	"Her? She eventually had one the old fashioned way."
	"Straight sex?"
	"Female superior position, double penetration."

	It was morning when Nick and Maxine stumbled out of the cab onto the little street off Grammercy Park. They shared a sloppy kiss on the sidewalk and then up, into Nick's apartment building, smelling of red wine and body odor, somehow they made it up two flights of stairs and into his apartment, across his kitchen's pre-war tiles and through the swampy humidity and grow lights of his indoor greenhouse, into his bedroom, falling on cool sheets, kicking off shoes. Maxine reached for his pants, but Nick's hand on hers stopped her and they lay there drifting to sleep under the sunlight filtering through the blinds.
	"I'll probably tie you up and have my way with you in the morning," said Nick quietly. Maxine smiled into her pillow.

	Nick woke in the early afternoon. He stretched, felt the cold floor beneath his socks. He looked over and saw Maxine's eyes moving in REM under her eyelids. He got up, walked into the greenhouse and turned the knob activating the sprinklers. He felt their mist on his face. He walked back into the bedroom. Maxine was lying in a fetal position. He carefully took her wrists and brought them to the silk cords tied to the bed posts, binding them. He did the same with her legs. He opened his nightstand and removed the blindfold which he tied over her eyes and then the ballgag he fit snugly into her mouth. He bunched her t-shirt up over her breasts, and then deftly unhooked her bra. He took one of her breasts in his hand, felt its shape and pliancy. From the nightstand he brought out the battery powered vibrating nipple clamps (her body shifted under them, but maybe less than he expected. Her breathing had changed perceptively and he wondered at what point she had woken up). He unbuttoned her pants, hooked his fingers under the band of her panties and worked them both down to her knees. He took out a very large vibrator, with a curved, additional attachment designed to stimulate different inside of the vagina. He took out the petroleum based lubricant which he used to grease it. He switched it on and let her hear the hum of it fill the room before he inserted it. Then he dipped two fingers into the lubricant and put them into her anus, worked them around. Once that was done, he brought out the vibrating butt-plug, lubricated and inserted it. Then he took out a leather harness strap which he wound through her legs and around her waist and snapped closed. He pulled at it to make sure it was secure, everything kept in place, then he ran one finger slowly down her cheek (her nostrils already dilating with sharp breaths) and went out to get a sandwich.