Animal Appetite

to which prose can sink. As for Decision, mine would’ve been to burn the manuscript.
    Instead of saying or asking like normal people, the characters were always interjecting, interpolating, querying, or essaying. The women were forever crying out. The men kept ejaculating. The creative process, I should explain, had transformed the real publishing house into a fictional house of prostitution. Maybe the novel was supposed to be an allegory. The narrator was one Stellina Brandt. Jack Andrews appeared, I thought, as a lovable client named Mack Sanders. Shaun McGrath, in contrast, was cast in the role of a sadistic pimp called
    Seamus McPhee. Especially considering the book’s theme, 1 was, for once, happy to discover a complete absence of dogs. The only animals, other than most of the human characters, were rats. Poison figured in the story. Leather abounded. Characters of both sexes were always getting their bottoms slapped. A rabbi kept suffering flashbacks about a homosexual encounter on a submarine. The brothel was raided by the police, most of whom were regular customers of the establishment. In crucial scenes, Stellina repeatedly gasped, shrieked, sighed, moaned, sobbed, wailed, groaned, whimpered, or giggled sillily, inchoately, or even hermeneutically, as the mood took her, “More! Yet more!”
    “If you’d had to read this book,” I told Steve late that same Saturday night, “you wouldn’t want to have sex, either.”
    I finished the manuscript the next afternoon. At a loss as to what to say to Estelle about a work she was still polishing after eighteen years, I decided to describe the novel as “complex.” My judgment of writing is merciless, but when it comes to writers, I’m all sympathy. Estelle’s eager voice on the phone inspired me. “Complex!” I cried out, sighed, or perhaps gasped before shrieking in triumph, “Hermeneutic!”
    By then, I’d looked up “hermeneutic” in the dictionary. I didn’t really understand the definition—something about principles of interpretation—but at least I knew how to pronounce the word. Estelle was so pleased that she invited me to her house for herbal tea.
    An hour later, having managed to park in a spot unoccupied by traffic cones, lawn chairs, or, of all things, another car, I was seated at Estelle’s kitchen table choking down sips of the true explanation for her prose. I came close to advising her that the way to get published was to switch to coffee. The kitchen walls had been painted white sometime around 1965, I guessed. The psychedelic-orange trim on the windows probably memorialized someone’s bad trip a few years thereafter. The old white gas stove reminded me of the one at Professor Foley’s. The refrigerator dated to the same era as the stove. The chipped white sink was clean and empty. Arrayed neatly on open shelves were a great many bottles of food supplements, together with boxes and jars of seeds, beans, and whole-grain cereals. Between the kitchen and the living room, in place of a door, hung numerous long strings threaded with ziti and elbow macaroni. The kitten was having fun batting at the pasta. The liquid in my mug looked and smelled like samples that cat owners deliver to Steve in specimen cups.
    “The rats in the cellar were typical,” Estelle said in disgust. “So was the irresponsibility about the poison.” Today, she was fully dressed in a sort of sari or toga that seemed to have been fashioned from an Indian bedspread. Her eyes were a beautiful shade of bright blue, but the whites were shot with red, and the pouches underneath were yellow and puffy. “Jack was really a sweet, charming man, but in a lot of ways his mind was off in space somewhere. The place was always in chaos. The doorbell was broken—it was gone, missing—and there were a couple of wires dangling out that you had to put together to make it ring! Fortunately, most of the time, the door was open, unlocked, and people just walked in. The files were a mess. The supply cabinet had a million beat-up manila folders you were supposed to reuse, and no pens except green, and then maybe three or four five-pound bags of sugar and a few dozen cans of coffee! And that was where Jack was storing the poison!”
    “With the food?”
    Estelle nodded. “And the cellar! The first day I was there... I was there a week. I started the Monday before Shaun murdered him. I was there the whole week. And the following Monday, too, the day Jack was murdered. So, the