“I met my wife in graduate school,” I said to Sandy Sterling. “She was getting her Ph. D.”
Sandy Sterling was having a little trouble with my train of thought.
“We were just kids. How old are you?”
“You want my real age or my baseball age?”
I really laughed then. Gorgeous and understanding and funny?
“Fencing. Fighting. Torture,” my father said. “Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Truths. Passion. Miracles.”
It was 12:35 and I said, “One phone call, okay?”
“Okay.”
“New York City information,” I said into the receiver, and when I was through I said, “Could you give me the names of some Fourth Avenue bookshops, please. There must be twenty of them.” Fourth Avenue is the used and out-of-print book center of the English-speaking chapter of the civilized world. While the operator looked, I turned to the creature on the next lounge and said, “My kid’s ten today, I’d kind of like for him to have this book from me, a present, won’t take a sec.”
“Swing,” Sandy Sterling said.
“I list one bookstore called the Fourth Avenue Bookshop,” the operator said, and she gave me the number.
“Can’t you give me any of the others? They’re all down there in a clump.”
“If yew we-ill give mee they-re names, I can help you,” the operator said, speaking Bell talk.
“This one’ll do,” I said, and I got the hotel operator to ring through for me. “Listen, I’m calling from Los Angeles,” I said, “and I need The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern.”
“Nope. Sorry,” the guy said, and before I could say, “Well, could you give me the names of the other stores down there,” he hung up. “Get me that number back please,” I said to the hotel operator, and when the guy was on the line again, I said, “This is your Los Angeles correspondent; don’t hang up so fast this time.”
“I ain’t got it, mister.”
“I understand that. What I’d like is, since I’m in California, could you give me the names and numbers of some of the other stores down there. They might have it and there aren’t exactly an abundance of New York Yellow Pages drifting around out here.”
“They don’t help me, I don’t help them.” He hung up again.
I sat there with the receiver in my hand.
“What’s this special book?” Sandy Sterling asked.
“Not important,” I said, and hung up. Then I said, “Yes it is” and picked up the receiver again, eventually got my publishing house in New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and, after a few more eventuallys, my editor’s secretary read me off the names and numbers of every bookstore in the Fourth Avenue area.
“Hunters,” my father was saying now. “Bad men. Good men. Beautifulest ladies.” He was camped in my cranium, hunched over, bald and squinting, trying to read, trying to please, trying to keep his son alive and the wolves away.
It was 1:10 before I had the list completed and rang off from the secretary.
Then I started with the bookstores. “Listen, I’m calling from Los Angeles on the Morgenstern book, The Princess Bride, and…”
“…sorry…”
“…sorry…”
Busy signal.
“…not for years…”
Another busy.
1:35.
Sandy swimming. Getting a little angry too. She must have thought I was putting her on. I wasn’t, but it sure looked that way.
“…sorry, had a copy in December…”