Chapter 38

(Epilogue)

Whatever contest there may have been, with success or girls or whatever, between Joe and Eddie, Eddie pulled ahead in terms of success, or maybe it’s better to say, continued pulling ahead. Even the ten years of no hits had accompanied ten years of Joe not writing bestselling novels. MIRE’s latest album had ended up topping the charts, an unexpected sleeper hit pulling it there. And the live videos became a phenomenon. When broadcast, the marathon full length video brought in an unprecedented audience, and the shorter follow up sort of rebroadcasts attracted nearly as much. Sales followed the trend, though in reverse. More money for the complete set, but only because it cost a lot more, so people tended to pick and choose which part of it they wanted. Rhonda’s portion surpassed the MIRE portion, partly because of her popular new CD and partly because of the award winning documentary done by the precocious Bob included. Though MIRE’s latest CD had hits, the earlier music only really had one that made any significant inroads in the charts. The Monsters portion, though, sold the most. They did have lots of hits.

Joe had his success as well, just not nearly at that level. The novel had stayed high in the charts for months, and it stirred sales of his earlier works. The play, inspired by Alejandra, probably had a more personal success than financial. Both in terms of critical response, which, for Joe, was unusually nearly unanimous, and for audience. It probably had more sold out shows than any non-musical in quite a while. Alejandra’s performance and presence was breathtaking. And Joe actually found a young actress that could nearly match it who looked remarkably like the young Alejandra. To the point that in the most remarkable effect of the show, Joe projected Alejandra’s actual movie scenes when she was a budding actress on the scrim in front of the stage, and Sylvia, the actress who played her young self, looked as if she emerged from the film.

It became one of Morpheus’s longest runs. Probably would have been the longest if either actor could have been substituted. And Joe could have done it. The play itself had its own strength. Other theaters clamored to perform it, and Joe let them. Community theaters and a couple of major regional theaters. But for Joe, it would never be the same without those two actresses. And Alejandra had her limit. Six months it turned out.

It had been a star turn for both actresses. Other roles followed. Alejandra after a couple months break. Sylvia pretty much right away. A musical on Broadway, which also featured her costar in the play, Charlie. She was a triple threat as well. And then movies later. For Alejandra it was movies right away. Small roles. But fairly frequent. To the point that Joe had two aging beauties to visit in LA.

Katrina wasn’t disappointed she didn’t get the prime role of the young Alejandra. Not after seeing Sylvia’s audition. But she did well in the supporting role. And she and Sylvia became best friends. And lovers sometimes. Sylvia preferred women. Joe was never part of any sexual aspects between the two friends. He, unlike Jonny, never fucked his actresses. Unless, and Katrina was unique that way, at least since his earliest days of being a playwright/director, there was a relationship beforehand.

As far as sexual success, Joe had always had the lead compared to Eddie just as Eddie had the lead in popularity and financial success. Though Eddie did father Celia’s daughter, conceived most likely on their wedding night.

And the wedding, despite the supposed subterfuge, had been a lovely and even loving ceremony. On the balcony at Eddie’s studio, beginning at sunset, a gentle cool breeze further reminding everyone of the beauty and the innate spirituality of the setting, it became a wonderfully memorable moment.

Sexually, Eddie settled down. He had his male lover in Jack. He remained friends with his first boyfriend, Trevor, but the sexual relationship had ended. He had Rachel. He shared Celia with Joe, and sometimes Jane. Rachel too, though always separate. He shared Jill with Rachel. That was it.

Ginny or Ginger had become like Shawna with him. Close friends, even deeply close, but no longer lovers. Ginger would end up with Joe and, most often, Raven.

Joe on the other hand never settled down. Girlfriends would continue on for years, like Maria and Alejandra. His wives grew in number as well. Consuela. Katrina. Who ended up divorcing José. And ended up petitioning and getting American citizenship without resorting to marriage. There’d be much briefer affairs like with Cassandra, his publisher, which lasted a few months, and they got together no more than once a week before she met another man, cuckolding her husband a lot more openly. Others would follow. Women who needed to be loved. To be appreciated. To have really great sex. And would move on and expect it from their next lover.

Over the next ten years, both Joe and Eddie sustained their success, though Eddie’s was more with his concerts than his albums. Only a couple more real hits with those, and CD sales dwindled. The reductive MP3, which Eddie hated, was taking over. But his annual, and later biannual spring and summer international tours had become legendary, and nearly always sold out, though playing auditoriums, or the smaller theaters he preferred rather than stadiums may have helped with that.

The second and third novels of Joe’s sex slave trilogy were each more popular than the last, and just as controversial. Each had a heroine, the second one a pure invention of a prostitute beginning her career at the tail end of mafia controlled brothels, whose Russian heritage enables her to be a sort of madam, watching over the imported Russian girls, eventually becoming subversive about it when the cruelty of the Russian mob becomes too much for her. The third one, with Rachel’s acceptance, was loosely based on her. A true anti-heroine. He even included himself as a sort of sexual father confessor. Reality and fiction were closely tied, but not just the differences made Joe unafraid of repercussions. The once powerful syndicate was coming apart. People like Al were dying off. The network of illicit businesses was losing its connectedness. Rachel’s part in enhancing that network, in making it profoundly more successful, had lost its traction. Rachel had retired. Sort of. She kept the sex planes flying, though she assured Joe none would include slaves like Celia. And because of self-interest, meaning protecting Eddie, she sustained the security part of the business.

Despite the success of his previous novels, the three trilogies and the first two he wrote but published after the first trilogy, Joe decided he was chosen for the Nobel Prize in Literature because of his magnum opus. His Ulysses. His War and Peace. His Gravity’s Rainbow.

It was nearly 1000 pages and took him three years to complete. The working title was Kitchen Sink, a joke, because he threw everything in it but it. That is, everything he’d done before as a writer. Characters and concepts. Plot arcs and writing styles. Including his poetry and plays. And more than any of his other novels, it involved the magic realism of his plays. Rooted in realism, and yet dreamy. Surreal. It was the biography of a schizophrenic, but one who had embraced her illness, which, loosely based on the beliefs of the sixties psychiatrist R.D. Laing, to her it wasn’t an illness at all, but a gift. A way of viewing the world differently. Uniquely. And the shifts in reality allowed him to include poetry in the text and playwriting. It was by far the most difficult of his novels to read. Which made it only graze the top of the bestsellers briefly. But also made it a book that would continue to be bought over the years. And studied. It also made it available to receive the National Book Award.

His magnum opus. The one closest to it as the major work of a writer and in similarity to it was probably Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Like it, Joe began at the end of his heroine’s life and immediately arched back to the beginning, and had many arches within it. Studies had called Proust’s opus a cathedral with its arches, and Joe’s was similarly constructed. But inside there were other influences. Ulysses with its shifts in style reflective of content and theme. Having a play within it for instance. And it had some of the complete weirdness of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. But it was like Proust in being one long look back at a life. Joe thought of it as a sort of Curriculum Vitae. Not intended to get a job of course. But to make the case that the woman had a life of significance. That her life made a difference in the world. And he decided to call it Vitae because of that.

And what made her case? It was the first time in a novel that Joe expressed his philosophy of love and relationships. Of honesty and trust which allowed multiple lovers who could have other lovers as well. It was the root struggle of her life, because her schizophrenia necessitated solipsism within it. Seeing reality with a hallucinatory overlay can’t help being unique and contained within one mind. How to share it? With others with similar illnesses or gifts. Or women or men with normal minds who she managed to connect with despite it or even because of it. But mostly with a schizophrenic boy in which it felt much more like an illness. Her first love, and the one she wanted most to cure. Not to remove his hallucinations, but to embrace them. The main struggle of the book. Other struggles, other relationships, other situations in which her handicap needed to be worked through or worked with, became the experiences that would lead her to his cure. That effort being the novel.

His wives disagreed about Vitae being the reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

“It’s not just the novels, or just Vitae,” Joanne insisted. “Your plays, so many of them, have been published, noticed, examined and revived.”

“And don’t forget your poetry,” Liang pointed out. “Both collected works have stayed in print. Your epic as well. Just like we studied Kelly’s the Loom before in your class, a lot more students are given your epic to study.”

And the Nobel committee seemed to agree. He was proclaimed as a master of three disciplines: prose, poetry and playwriting. None lesser than the other.

“To tell you the truth,” Joe said in his speech at the award ceremony, “I was very surprised by this most generous and of course prestigious honor. And by the way, the generosity, the substantial money which accompanies the award, I will be donating to the causes aligned with my last trilogy. That is, those organizations who counsel abused women and especially the women and girls who have suffered the horrors of white slavery.” After applause, he continued, “What surprised me is the controversy that more often than not accompanies my novels and my plays and even a poem or two. I don’t consider myself a lurid writer, but many of my critics would disagree. A few have even called me a pornographer. Brave of the Nobel committee to honor a pornographer.”

After laughter, Joe continued, “Sexuality is a bit of a balancing act. Writing about it, one has to balance between the blatantly explicit and the ridiculously demure. Of course everyone that has passed through that most difficult and awkward time of adolescence is well aware of the act of having sex. Either fantasized or, hopefully, experienced. Which means, unless you are a pornographer, and the point is to be explicit, one really doesn’t need to go into details, unless of course it’s important to the work. To understand abuse for instance. But even then we all know the biology, so it becomes the terrible pain and horror and the reverberations which become the focus so as to express to the reader the state of mind of the victim caused by that most horrid of events.

“But at the other side of the spectrum, where sex is welcomed and desired, where it attains that most elevated of human experiences, making love, how does one express that artistically? Where the loins, the heart and the mind all meet, literally so to speak? Again, anatomical details aren’t necessary. We know how tab a goes into slot b, and hopefully about the other things that happen, kissing and caresses and so forth, which brings forth the ecstatic moment, and in lovemaking, not just physically or chemically. What needs to be shown to express the moment? Not the explicitness of a pornographic movie. Nor, I would argue, the usual Hollywood version of soft focus and obvious movement and quick if smooth editing. Which can attain the level of absurdity when the woman still wears her damn bra! Not the dubbed in ridiculous moans in pornography, nor a bit of heavy breathing and a sensuous sounding moan or two. So, some place between that, where intimacy is expressed, and a deep level of communication is rejoiced. It needs to be somewhere between explicit and demure. A most difficult balancing act, especially considering how often it has been described and how hard it is not to be utterly clichéd about it. So maybe I do deserve this honor just for being able to navigate effectively through those most difficult passages. Thank you.”