A Visit From the Goon Squad

by Jennifer Egan

  Dolly received a generous lump sum from the general shortly after his rendezvous with the photographers. “A gift to express our immense gratitude for your invaluable guidance, Miss Peale,” Arc had said over the telephone, but Dolly had heard his smile and understood: hush money. She used it to open a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual cheeses, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights Dolly designed herself. “This feels like Paris” was a comment she often heard from New Yorkers who came on weekends to their country houses.

  Now and then Dolly would get a shipment of star fruit, and she always made sure to put a few aside to eat with Lulu. She would bring them back to the small house they shared at the end of a quiet street. After supper, the radio on, windows open to the yawning night, she and Lulu would feast on the sweet, strange flesh.

  Forty-Minute Lunch:

  Kitty Jackson Opens Up About

  Love, Fame, and Nixon!

  JULES JONES reports

  Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.

  Actually, small isn’t the word; she’s minute—a human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, “highlighted,” my ex-fiancée calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kitty’s) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big blue eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I can’t pinpoint exactly—the same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Green’s) highlighted hair—this unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.

  She’s still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.

  Finally she signs off, folds her phone into a disk the size of an after-dinner mint and stows it in a small white patent-leather purse. Then she starts to apologize. It is instantly clear that Kitty belongs in the category of nice stars (Matt Damon) rather than of difficult stars (Ralph Fiennes). Stars in the nice category act as if they’re just like you (i.e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them, a strategy that is almost universally successful despite every writer’s belief that he’s far too jaded to fantasize that the Vanity Fair cover is incidental to Brad Pitt’s desire to give him a tour of his house. Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.

  The waiter takes our order. And since the ten minutes of badinage I proceed to exchange with Kitty are simply not worth relating, I’ll mention instead (in the footnote-ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into pop-cultural observation) that when you’re a young movie star with blondish hair and a highly recognizable face from that recent movie whose grosses can only be explained by the conjecture that every person in America saw it at least twice, people treat you in a manner that is somewhat different—in fact is entirely different—from the way they treat, say, a balding, stoop-shouldered, slightly eczematous guy approaching middle age. On the surface it’s the same—“May I take your order?” etc.—but throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiter’s hysterical recognition of my subject’s fame. And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us.1 Everywhere, people are swiveling, craning, straining and contorting, levitating inadvertently from chairs as they grapple with the urge to lunge at Kitty and pluck off tufts of her hair and clothing.

  I ask Kitty how it feels to always be the center of attention.

  “Weird,” she says. “It’s so all of a sudden. You feel like there’s no way you deserve it.”

  See? Nice.

  “Oh, come now,” I say, and lob her a compliment on her performance as the homeless junkie turned FBI gunslinger/acrobat in Oh, Baby, Oh—the sort of shameless bit of fawning that makes me wonder whether I might prefer death by lethal injection to my present vocation as a celebrity reporter. Wasn’t she proud?

  “I was proud,” she says. “But in a way, I didn’t even know what I was doing yet. With my new movie, I feel more—”

  “Hold that thought!” I cry, though the waiter has not yet reached our table, and the tray he bears aloft is probably not even ours. Because I don’t want to hear about Kitty’s new movie; I couldn’t care less and neither could you, I know; her prattle about the challenging role and the trusting relationship she had with her director and what an honor it was to work opposite such a seasoned star as Tom Cruise is the bitter pill we both must swallow in exchange for the privilege of spending some collective time in Kitty’s company. But let’s put it off as long as possible!

  Luckily, it is our tray (food arrives faster if you’re dining with a star): a Cobb salad for Kitty; a cheeseburger, fries and Caesar salad for me.

  A bit of theory as we settle down to lunch: the waiter’s treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. In the same way, Kitty Jackson has some sort of bottom bread that is, presumably, “her,” or the way Kitty Jackson once behaved in suburban Des Moines where she grew up, rode a bike, attended proms, earned decent grades and, most intriguingly, jumped horses, thereby winning a substantial number of ribbons and trophies and, at least briefly, entertaining thoughts of becoming a jockey. On top of that is her extraordinary and possibly slightly psychotic reaction to her newfound fame—the middle of the sandwich—and on top of that is her own attempt to approximate layer number one with a simulation of her normal, or former, self.

  Sixteen minutes have passed.

  “Rumor has it,” I say, my mouth full of half-masticated hamburger in a calculated effort to disgust my subject, thus puncturing her prophylactic shield of niceness and commencing the painstaking attrition of her self-control, “that you’ve become involved with your costar.”

  That gets her attention. I’ve rather sprung this on her, having learned the hard way that sidling up to the personal questions gives difficult subjects too much time to get their hackles up, and nice ones too much time to gently and blushingly sidestep.

  “That’s absolutely not true!” Kitty cries. “Tom and I have a wonderful friendship. I love Nicole. She’s been a role model for me. I’ve even babysat their children.”

  I unsheathe my Big Fat Grin, a meaningless tactic intended purely to unnerve and fluster my subject. If my methods seem unnecessarily harsh, I invite you to recall that I have been allotted forty minutes, nearly twenty of which have now elapsed, and let me add, on a personal note, that if the piece stinks—i.e., if it fails to unveil some aspect of Kitty that you haven’t seen before (as have, I’m told, my pieces on hunting elk with Leonardo DiCaprio, reading Homer with Sharon Stone and digging for clams with Jeremy Irons)—it might very well be killed, thus further reducing my stock in New York and
Los Angeles and prolonging the “bizarre string of failures you’ve been having, buddy” (—Atticus Levi, my friend and editor, over lunch last month).

  “Why are you smiling like that?” Kitty asks, with hostility.

  See? No more nice.

  “Was I smiling?”

  She turns her attention to her Cobb salad. And so do I. Because I have so little to go on, so few ports of entry to the inner sanctum of Kitty Jackson, that I’m reduced to observing and now relaying the fact that over the course of lunch, she eats all of her lettuce, approximately 2½ bites of chicken and several tomato wedges. She ignores: olives, blue cheese, boiled eggs, bacon and avocado—in other words, all of the parts of the Cobb salad that, technically speaking, make it a Cobb salad. As for the dressing, which she has requested “on the side,” she doesn’t touch it except to dip in the end of her index finger, once, and suck the dressing off.2

  “I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” I finally say, relieving the vibrato of tension that has been building at our table. “I’m thinking, nineteen years old. Mega-grossing movie behind her, half the world doing a rain dance at her window, and where can she possibly go next? What can she possibly do?”

  In Kitty’s face I see a number of things: relief that I haven’t said something worse, something about Tom Cruise, and mingled with that relief (and partly because of it) a fleeting desire to see me as more than yet another crank with a tape recorder—to see me as someone who understands the incredible strangeness of her world. How I wish it were true! I would like nothing more than to understand the strangeness of Kitty’s world—to burrow inside that strangeness never to emerge. But the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald impossibility of any real communion between us, and the fact that I’ve managed to do so for twenty-one minutes is a triumph.

  Why do I keep mentioning—“inserting,” as it may seem—myself into this story? Because I’m trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice; I’m trying to build a story that not only unlocks the velveteen secrets of her teenager’s heart, but also contains action, development, along with—God help me—some intimation of meaning. But my problem is this: Kitty’s a snooze. The most interesting thing about her is the effect she has upon others, and since the “other” whose inner life is most readily available for our collective inspection happens to be myself, it is only natural—indeed, it is required (“I’m begging you; please make this work so I don’t look like an asshole for assigning it to you”—Atticus Levi, during a recent phone conversation in which I expressed to him my despair of writing further celebrity profiles)—that the alleged story of my lunch with Kitty Jackson actually be the story of the myriad effects Kitty Jackson has upon me during the course of said lunch. And for those effects to be remotely comprehensible, you must bear in mind that Janet Green, my girlfriend of three years and my fiancée for one month and thirteen days, dumped me two weeks ago for a male memoirist whose recent book details his adolescent penchant for masturbating into the family fish tank (“At least he’s working on himself!”—Janet Green, during a recent phone conversation in which I tried to point out what a colossal error she’d made).

  “I wonder that all the time—what will happen next,” Kitty says. “Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now, and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or…or what?”

  And how exactly is “a great life” defined in Kitty Jackson’s lexicon?

  “Oh, you know.” Giggle. Blush. We’re back to nice, but a different nice than before. We’ve had a tiff, and now we’re making up.

  “Fame and fortune?” I prod.

  “Somewhat. But also just—happiness. I want to find true love, I don’t care how corny that sounds. I want children. That’s why, in this new movie, I bond so strongly with my surrogate mother…”

  But my Pavlovian efforts to suppress the PR component of our lunch have succeeded, and Kitty falls silent. No sooner have I congratulated myself on this triumph, however, than I catch Kitty glancing, sidelong, at her watch (Hermès). How does this gesture affect me? Well, I feel slopping within me a volatile stew of anger, fear, and lust: anger because this naïf has, for reasons that are patently unjustifiable, far more power in the world than I will ever have, and once my forty minutes are up, nothing short of criminal stalking could force the intersection of my subterranean path with her lofty one; fear because, having glanced at my own watch (Timex), I’ve discovered that thirty of those forty minutes have elapsed, and I have, as yet, no “event” to form the centerpiece of my profile; lust because her neck is very long, with a thin, nearly translucent gold necklace around it. Her shoulders, exposed by the white halter top of her sundress, are small and tan and very delicate, like two little squabs. But that makes them sound unappealing, and they were phenomenally appealing! By “squabs” I mean that they looked so good (her shoulders) that I could briefly imagine pulling apart all those little bones and sucking the meat off them one by one.3

  I ask Kitty how it feels to be a sex goddess.

  “It doesn’t feel like anything,” she says, bored and annoyed. “That’s something other people feel.”

  “Men, you mean.”

  “I guess,” she says, and a new expression flickers over her comely face and alights there, a look that I would have to designate as abrupt weariness.

  I feel it too: abruptly weary. In fact, generally weary. “Christ, it’s all such a farce,” I say, in an unguarded moment of self-expression that has no strategic purpose and which, therefore, I’ll doubtless regret within seconds. “Why do we bother to participate?”

  Kitty tilts her head at me. I sense that she can detect my general weariness, possibly even guess at some of its causes. She is regarding me, in other words, with pity. I am now perilously close to succumbing to the single greatest hazard of celebrity reporting: permitting my subject to reverse the beam of scrutiny, at which point I will no longer be able to see her. With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then—ah yes—I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head. Kitty looks terrified; she shrinks from me while I sort out the mess.

  Disaster averted. Or at least forestalled.

  “You know,” I say, when finally I’ve managed to swallow my bread and blow my nose at the cost of nearly three minutes, “I’d love to take a walk. What do you say?”

  Kitty springs from her chair at the prospect of escaping into the open air. It’s a perfect day, after all, sunlight leaping through the restaurant windows. But her excitement is immediately tempered by an equal and opposite degree of caution. “What about Jake?” she asks, referring to her publicist, who will appear when our forty minutes are up and wave his wand to turn me back into a pumpkin.

  “Can’t he just call and meet up with us?” I ask.

  “Okay,” she says, doing her best to simulate the first wave of genuine enthusiasm she felt, despite the middle layer of wariness that has intruded. “Sure, let’s go.”

  I hastily pay the bill. Now, I’ve orchestrated our debouchment for several reasons: One, I want to filch a few extra minutes off Kitty in an attempt to salvage this assignment and, in a larger sense, my once-promising, now-dwindling literary reputation (“I think she was maybe disappointed that you didn’t try writing another novel after the first one didn’t sell…”—Beatrice Green, over hot tea, after I threw myself sobbing upon her Scarsdale doorstep, pleading for insights into her daughter’s defection). Two, I want to see Kitty Jackson erect and in motion. To this end, I follow behind as she leads the way out of the restaurant, weaving among tables with her head down in the manner of both exceptionally attractive women and also famous people (not to mention tho
se like Kitty, who are both). Here’s a translation of her posture and gait into English: I know I’m famous and irresistible—a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity—and I know that you in this room are helpless against me. It’s embarrassing for both of us to look at each other and see our mutual knowledge of my radioactivity and your helplessness, so I’ll keep my head down and let you watch me in peace. While all this is happening, I’m taking in Kitty’s legs, which are long, considering her modest height, as well as brown, and not that orangey brown of tanning salons, but a rich, tawny chestnut that makes me think of—well, of horses.

  Central Park is one block away. The time elapsed is forty-one minutes and counting. We enter the park. It is green and splashy with light and shadow, giving the impression that we’ve dived together into a deep, still pond. “I forget when we started,” Kitty says, looking at her watch. “How much more time do we have?”

  “Oh, we’re okay,” I mumble. I’m feeling kind of dreamy. I’m looking at Kitty’s legs as we walk (as much as I can without crawling beside her on the ground—a thought that crosses my mind) and discovering that above the knee they are flecked with hairs of finest gold. Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered from the gratuitous cruelty of others, so unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself, merely startled herself and the world with her own premature accomplishments, Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is perfect. And by “perfect” I mean that nothing hangs or sags or snaps or wrinkles or ripples or bunches—I mean that her skin is like the skin of a leaf, except it’s not green. I can’t imagine such skin having an unpleasant odor or texture or taste—ever being, for example (it is frankly inconceivable), even mildly eczematous.