I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.
Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the erudition, that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”
“I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let me throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing remotely. Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate thief.”
“You stopped at pop art?” asked Blumlein.
“Please. You have Mr. Pflug for that. That’s all there was when I began doing jackets-pop art.”
Blumlein and Ebdus had begun to seem a kind of vaudeville act, scripted at the expense of the fall guys who’d made the mistake of joining them onstage. The audience ate it up.
“Yet here you are, Abe, among us. LunaCon wasn’t to your liking, but you’ve spent a career among us, sharing your gift. You’re the guest of honor.”
“Look, that’s fair. You want an explanation. It isn’t pretty. If I were a stronger person I wouldn’t be here. I’m tempted by flattery, so I come. My work on film is hardly known. It’s unknown. You people have been very kind, too kind. I’ve grown fond, despite myself. My companion enjoys travel. There isn’t one explanation, there are several.”
“Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”
Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”
Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”
“I’m ashamed of myself,” said my father.
The applause grew. Buddy Green shot upright from his chair and led the clapping. Only Pflug refused the consensus, turning in his chair.
“I’ve wasted my life.”
This was the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering. The bohemian demimonde, as Abraham called it. My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost or abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled this crowd, and they’d obviously known it was coming. By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies.
And yet I felt his not entirely withheld affection too. Through his eyes I could even share it. I thought of my namesake’s “Chimes of Freedom”- tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I’d witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted with conferences, convocations, and “Cons” of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites.
The panel was over. Another man had made his way to the front and taken the left-hand microphone from Sidney Blumlein. Now he tapped it repeatedly to get our attention. The new arrival was as eccentrically dressed as anyone in the room, but to an entirely different effect. His clean blue pinstripe shirt with white collar and red bow tie, natty mustache and slicked hair-all suggested a Republican senator who’d run a calculatedly old-timey campaign bankrolled by dark and secretive private interests. His voice was incredibly loud.
“This is my first chance to welcome you to ForbiddenCon 7,” he barked. “What a beginning, hey? Mr. Ebdus is too modest so I’ll remind you myself, we have the privilege of a special screening of a portion of his film, tomorrow at ten in Wyoming Ballroom B. Really, don’t miss this, it’s a rare opportunity.”
“Him,” whispered Francesca. She tugged my arm. “He loves your father.”
It’s you who loves him, I thought but didn’t say. You’re projecting, Francesca, you see it everywhere. Seated beside her, the Cumulus of Love, I felt enveloped in perfume and emotion. Nevertheless, I contemplated this bow-tied man at the microphone, the one who stirred my father’s girlfriend to such a peculiar excitement.
“One more big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for our artist guest of honor, Abe Ebdus!”
It was my first glimpse of the man Francesca had called Zelmo the Chair. The important lawyer. An unlikely emissary for secrets pertaining to my whole existence, but he had a few.
chapter 4
The restaurant, Bongiorno’s, was bad and didn’t know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren’t savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter’s strained enunciation of a long list of specials. Zelmo Swift seized control of the wine list and addressed everyone by name, making sure we took the whole episode personally. “This is on me, not ForbiddenCon,” he stressed. “They wouldn’t know food if it bit them on the ass. They’re happy with that crap in the hotel. I know how gruesome that whole scene can get, so I always try to take the guests out once.”
“Nice,” I lied. At the table Zelmo still barked, his voice shockingly large. And he was master of the sudden conversational stop which demands tribute, his whole face and chest near to bursting with his readiness to resume once he’d been endorsed with a No kidding? or You devil, you!
“Dinner and real conversation,” he said now. “Real life. That hotel is full of mummies. God love ’em.”
Yes, and aren’t you the King of the Mummies? I wanted to ask. But I understood it was precisely Zelmo’s superiority to the gathering at the Marriott that our candlelit dinner was meant to authenticate.
“Also, I knew Madame Cassini would appreciate the best Italian food in southern California.”
Francesca, seated to Zelmo’s right, twinkled at the flattery. I was pretty sure her Italian heritage went not much deeper than knowing the difference between a Neapolitan slice and a Sicilian square in the pizzerias of outermost Brooklyn. But then I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be the best Italian food in southern California. Maybe in Anaheim.