I
saac died (Janet abominates "passed away") at 2:30 am on an otherwise undistinguished Monday in April of 1992. It is close on eleven years, as I sit typing this, since my dear old pal went out through that final door.
Isaac died in '92. I called Isaac today.
I'd dialed the 1 and the New York city-code and the first two numerals of his phone number—still imbedded with the unforgettables—my social security number, my Army dogtag code, the date of my wedding anniversary—before I caught myself and hung up. I call Isaac at least a couple of times a month. And I guarantee you, I probably won't get through this Foreword to the last book of Black Widowers stories without crying.
Now let me clarify something. Do not for an instant think that I manifest the hubris, the nerve, the chutzpah to submit myself as one who misses Isaac more than Robyn or Janet or even Jennifer Brehl, who was his editor at Doubleday for years. Nor even more entitled to mourn than was Isaac's brother, Stan, now himself gone. But I knew him for more than forty years, since I was eighteen, and we were thick as thieves; and at least twice a week for many of those years, when I was mired somewhere in the middle of writing a story, and was stuck for a missing piece of information, rather than do the onerous research to find what I needed, I would punk out and call that number I knew as well as my own.
We played a little game with each other. Because I was (somewhere in
my lazy soul) truly chagrined at interrupting another writer at his creating, knowing it was a pain in the ass, even as such calls cheese me off when I'm working, I would try to make "reparations" by either telling him a new joke, or by assuming one of the myriad accents and timbres I use when recording spoken word performances. The more shamefaced I felt, the more complex and well-sculpted the bogus identity:
"Is this Dr. Isaac Emisov?" The voice of a petty functionary. A tax collector. An assistant bank manager. A collection agency goon.
"Asimov. This is Isaac Asimov."
"Ah, yes. Dr. Esimov, this is Walter Cuthbert at Manhattan Central office of the Internal Revenue Service ..."
A pause. (Had he caught on yet?) Then, a tiny clearing of the throat, and the response in a deeper, more pillar-of-the-community tone. "What may I do for you, sir?"
"Well, to be frank, sir, quite a lot. We've taken under examination your tax returns for the years 1967 through 1990, and we've found sufficient, uh, 'irregularities' that the class auditors have passed it on up to my attention."
Caution. (The man was no fool.) (But with whom did he think he was playing here?) (Without mercy, one must be, if one is to pull it off.) "What, precisely, Mr. Cuthbert—" he said, pronouncing my name from perfect memory, as opposed to my relentlessly calling him Emisov, Akisov, Etceterasov,"—do you mean by 'irregularities'?"
"Well, Dr. Uh—"
"Asimov."
"Mm-hmm. For instance, we see in the years 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, you claimed 'entertainment deductions' in an aggregate of $877,463.89; but your total income during that period was only $775,012.44. Don't you find that a bit, well, perplexing, sir?"
"Who is this?"
Shit. He was on to me. "Walter Cuth—"
"None of that," he said, now honked-off at being wired up by some nitwit stealing his time, "who are you?”
"Would you believe Ty Cobb?"
"HAAAARRRRLLLAAANNNN!" In exactly the same voice, I'm convinced, was used by Judge Roy Bean when he yelled, "Hang the sonofabitch high enuff so's I can see his boot soles!"
I am not ashamed simply to state that I adored Isaac, before I actually met him, though we famously crossed paths not more than a year or two after I first read him. (And I will not reprise that meeting, which Isaac misremembered at the top of his voice for more than four decades, despite my clearing up the errors an infinite number of times, in person and in print.) Suffice to say, for the last time, I did not mean to insult him. I was a brash teenager, and I merely misspoke myself as a result of confronting my idol in the, er, rather abundant flesh, for the first time. Snip me some slack, okay?
But as Isaac wrote in a letter to me on 27 August 1973 (which you can find reproduced on page 113 of Stanley's 1995 epistolary compilation, Yours, Isaac Asimov).
I am constantly asked about my feud with you, and I always answer that you and I are good friends. But it doesn't help. As long as we love each other, however, who cares.
He meant that, of course, in a real manly guy sort of Iron John bonding love kind of way. Not that there's anything wrong with, oh crap, forget it. Where was I?
With three thousand miles between us most of the time, and with Isaac's refusal to fly, we got together a lot less frequently than either of us would've enjoyed. Conventions through the years, conferences, academic gigs. And when I'd be in Manhattan, we would usually grab lunch. Once in a while, with Janet and my Susan, dinner at the Chinese joint down the block from their apartment. But one lunch Isaac and I shared in the late '70s, before I met and married Susan, is relevant to my being selected from among all the possible candidates to write this Foreword. It was mid-afternoon, in the Spring, if I recall correctly, and Isaac said, "C'mon, let's take a stroll over to The Tavern on the Green." That's Central Park. Nearby.”
So we moseyed on over, and we were waiting to order, and he says to me, he says: "How do you justify your existence?"
Oh, yeah? I thought. Gonna run that one on me, are you? As if I hadn't read the first three Black Widowers books. So I responded smartly, "My existence itself justifies my existence."
"Tautology!" he ripostes, trying to sneer, not pulling it off.
"I am unique; a rare jewel existent in the universe in the number of one."
"Hooey," he was, trying desperately for a Nero Wolfe moment.
"I am unique, thus justified in my existence, by what I do, that no other can do."
"And what is it that you do?"
"What it is that I do ... is what I do."
He muttered something into his appetizer, but I'm not sure what it was; I think the word "slippery" was in there somewhere with the caramelized onions.
And it was at that lunch tryst that I said to him, "Listen, Toots, you use Lester in those Black Widowers stories, and Sprague and Don Bensen and even Lin Carter, but you've never used me as a character. Howzabout?"
Now, you will, I hope, remember that Isaac appropriated me as the paradigm for the most likeable character in all his books, the charming, witty, urbane and insightful Darius Just, 'tec avatar of Murder at the ABA. You do recall that, am I correct?
So Isaac smiled that lovely son-of-a-Brooklyn-candy-store-owner smile, and he agreed to bring Darius Just in for dinner with the Widowers. The fourth collection, Banquets of the Black Widowers. The story is "The Woman in the Bar."
I asked the editor, Mr. Ardai, if he might add that most excellent piece of work to the already-submitted table of contents, but whether the traitorous and untrustworthy Ardai chose to accede to this pathetic, tiny request is something I will not know till I see the finished volume.
(Ardai's own presumptuous story, the penultimate entry in this book, contains veiled references of a most painful nature to your humble essayist. I choose not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but as Montresor said to Fortunato in "The Cask of Amontillado": "Nemo me impune lacessit."
(No one harms me with impunity.
(Didn't think I'd notice, eh, Ardai? Thought your heartless little barbs would be politely overlooked, did you? Well, sir, not to make a big Who-Struck-John of it, but be on your watch, Ardai. Gardyloo, I say, sir, gardyloo! The moment of Divine Retribution slithers toward you through the hours, leaving a moist ebon trail of poison and rodomontade! Where was I?)
So that explains why I, the model for Darius Just, having been cast as a guest at one of the Widowers' banquets, was the humble, self-effacing, yet absolutely correct choice to write these words of introduction to the last collection of Black Widowers stories we shall see. Book six, curtain falls.
Isaac loved puzzles. Geezus peezus, that was a dopey thing to say. Of course he loved puzzles. Duh. Otherwise, why these six volumes, plus the novels, plus virtually everything he wrote, fiction or nonfiction. It was all in aid of solving the puzzles. Of fiction, of life, of the universe around us. And the universe out there.
He wrote sixty-six Black Widowers stories, of which these are the last few. In them, the character of Emmanuel Rubin, who was modeled after one of my earliest mentors, the late Lester del Rey, world-class pain in the ass, is not one scintilla as overbearing and anarchic as the template. Lester could make poison ivy nervous. The magnificent L. Sprague de Camp—Widower Geoffrey Avalon—is not a millionth as arresting and erudite as was the original . . .
(Pardon me yet another digression. This is a true story about Sprague, who was also a friend of mine, though separated from me by even more years than was Isaac. I'd used Sprague as the prototype for the character of the college professor in my story, "No Game For Children" and we'd gotten to know each other pretty well. But I'd met him years earlier, when I was still in high school in Cleveland, and had come to New York under the aegis of Algis Budrys, who took me to a meeting of The Hydra Club, the fabled monthly gathering of the top science fiction professionals, where I met L. Ron Hubbard and Robert Sheckley, as well as, later, Cornell Woolrich; and on and on.
(So there I was, this urchin, and I'm hobbing as well as nobbing with the giants of the field, del Rey,
Kornbluth, Pohl, Merrill, the lot of them. And right in the middle, tall and lean and elegant as an ebony sword-cane, was Sprague de Camp. And as I had located and read the novels he'd written with Fletcher Pratt, and as he was considered the most sapient humorist in SF at that time, I was especially observant of his actions, hoping AJ or Lester would introduce me. And I watched him as he behaved, well, rather oddly. He would stand at the outer perimeter of a group of people who were heavily into their conversation, and at some point—almost invariably when they broke up with laughter—he would jot notes into a small spiral-top note-pad. Then he'd move to another group of chatters, and the pattern would be repeated. This went on for an hour or so, until Jay Stanton [whose loft it was] grabbed him and, loud enough for everything else to come to a silent standstill, cried out, snatched the note-pad from de Camp's hand, and began leafing through it.
("What the hell is this all about?" Jay demanded.
("What's he been writing?" Lester wanted to know.
("He's been writing down everything we've been saying tonight!"
(Well, an explanation was chivvied out of the great sf-fantasy humorist, and it was this: Sprague had a formidable reputation for writing stories of great wit and humor. But he was, personally, a very proper, almost stiffnecked Late George Apley sort of guy, and apparently he hadn't the smallest clue as to what was actually funny. He hadn't, to be blunt, even the teeniest sense of humor. So he had been trailing around behind people all night, waiting for them to laugh, and then writing down the mots so he could take them back home and, at his leisure, codify, dissect, deconstruct and otherwise unriddle the essence of funny stuff.)