by John Sladek
‘What do you remember about your mother, Norm?’
Norm jammed on the brakes, and the car skidded to an oblique stop. Tears were streaming down his face. ‘You keep that up and you can just get out and walk. You hear me?’
Roderick looked out at the bleak, icy road, the mountainous snowbanks, the blackness beyond. They were somewhere in the edge of a suburb, and there was nothing to be seen but falling snow and the darkness that might be trees. Large wet flakes drifted through the headlight beams.
‘I’m really looking forward to this party,’ he said. ‘Who’s giving it?’
Norm started driving again. ‘Mr Moxon. He’s a friend of my um Dad.’ Soon the car turned off the icy road into a long, heated drive. They drove on, past snow sculptures of men in top hats and women in bonnets, past massed evergreens with programmed lights, past everything, faster, racing headlong like the fastest troika imaginable.
The room was L-shaped, and large enough to accommodate more than one source of music. Around the corner a jukebox glowed from within a fireplace, radiating snatches of warm music to a small circle of admirers (though General Fleischman had located the secret volume control and kept turning it down). At the far end of the long gallery, a man with blue hair and a mirror monocle touched the keys of a white piano and sang:
When lovely woman stoops to polyand-ry
She ends up with more dishes in the sink
And greater loads of melancholy laundry
She’s less appreciated than you think.
The room between was beginning to fill up with life: talking faces, scanning eyes, hands clutching glasses or elbows or sketching in the air with cigarettes, voices scribbling in one another’s margins.
‘But that’s what I mean, Everett’s friends are all tired grey businessmen or engineers or something, and Francine’s all seem to be mumbling poets with pimply necks, God it’s all so – so haecceitic. I could’ve gone to Nassau …’
‘… was going to New York …’
‘… went to Prague …’
‘… doubled back down Dalecrest Boulevard, see, to catch the Hilldale Expressway through Valecrest, but guess what?’
‘Silicon, darling. Or do I mean silicone? Silly something, anyway. H.G. Wells said it was the basis of all life, imagine!’
Someone liked Rodin’s Thinker, someone complained of sinus trouble in Prague, someone else had lost money selling KUR shares too soon, so who said there was a Sandy Claus?
Father Warren, looking lean and aescetic as always despite the splendour of his black leather cassock, accepted a glass of sherry and glided on to the jukebox area to speak with General Fleischman.
The general was a tall, broad-shouldered old man with a deep tan and frothy white sideburns. Since his retirement from the Army he had been running a bank, but he still hoped for a job in Washington – maybe as a minor White House adviser. At the moment he was holding forth on puppet governments to Dr Tarr’s secretary, Judi Mazzini. She looked as though she’d rather be doing her nails.
‘Ruritania? General, I couldn’t even find it on a map.’
‘Nobody can, honey, that’s the trouble with we Americans. We tend to devisualize backdrop situations, we play down the role of unhostile puppets – Oh hello, padre. Like to have you meet Judi …’
But with a smile of apology she escaped, all but colliding with an Oriental waiter who managed to recover without spilling a drop of the foamy pink cocktail he was carrying the length of the room to a jowly woman in purple who said again:
‘But don’t you just love his Thinker?’
The boy with the straggly beard was cautious; he believed they were talking about a Japanese movie monster: the giant flying reptile Rodan. ‘His thinker, eh? Well I guess I maybe missed that …’
She now tasted the foamy drink and waved it away, her hand glittering with amethysts. ‘No I’m sorry but I just can’t drink that. Toy, you won’t be angry with me?’
The waiter smiled. ‘Not at all, Mrs Fleischman.’
‘Now you just take that back to the bartender and tell him it’s just too oh never mind, just bring me a gin and ton.’
When the waiter was not quite out of earshot she said, ‘Toy’s a treasure, wonder where Francine found him? He even pronounces my name right. I thought he’d be calling me Mrs Freshman, most of these, these people – but anyway, what were you saying, sweetie? How could you talk about Rodin and leave out his Thinker?’
The bearded boy stammered out something about Tokyo burning and special effects, adding, ‘Not that I guess it’s exactly Hugo material but –’
‘Yas, yas, his Hugo did have a lot of problems and finally they never did put it up at all – oh here’s Everett. Everett, sweetie, I want a word with you.’ Her ringed hand snagged the sleeve of a well-cut dinner jacket.
‘Hello, Thelma,’ he said, smiling. ‘Let me rustle up a drink for you.’ He moved on quickly, past the white piano, past voices expressing disappointment with an old city, delight with a new diet, faith in a second-hand religion.
‘That’s Everett,’ said someone.
‘Who?’
‘Our host, Everett Moxon.’
‘Isn’t his head small?’
‘Small?’
‘I don’t mean he wears a doughnut for a hat, I don’t even mean he’s a new Anatole France. I just meant – I think I must need a pill with this scotch.’
A pillbox was offered. ‘Here, have one of mine. Libidon this side, Solacyl that side.’
Moxon veered past the South sofa and paused to smile on the beauty of Mrs McBabbitt.
Connie McBabbitt was breathtakingly beautiful. Usually at a party she found a place to pose gracefully and remained there for the evening. Tonight she reclined with one elbow on the arm of the sofa, her hands clasped and her chin lifted upon a forefinger. The idea was for men to spend the evening lusting and longing after the curve of ivory cheek, throat, breast, the voluptuous swathe of black velvet, the old-fashioned obviousness of her perfection. If she did resemble a 1950s model, it was because that was the era of preference of the plastic surgeon who had created her.
Ten years of surgery, stage by stage, beginning with a resectioning of her pelvis and finishing with a quantity of fresh skin, had tightened the screw of beauty turn by turn until no more could be done – she hardly used makeup.
‘Everett, what a gorgeous party.’ Her voice too had been adjusted to a slight huskiness. ‘You seem to know so many people – didn’t I just see Edd McFee a minute ago? The painter?’
‘Could be, Connie. I sometimes feel a little lost at these affairs myself. Let me introduce you to Mr Vitanuova.’
The little square, thick man almost bowed over her hand. ‘Call me Joe,’ he said, regarding her through his grey eyebrows. ‘May I say that you are the most beautiful woman in the place? If not in the city? No offence to the other classy dolls, but you are class.’
‘Thank you, Joe. What do you do? Sculptor, maybe?’
He spread his wide face in a smile and his wide hands in a kind of blessing. ‘Not exactly. I’m in garbage, mainly. Okay, laugh if you want.’
A faint blush tinged the ivory. ‘Why should I laugh?’
‘Everybody does. Not that I care, I’m not ashamed. I got me two incinerating plants now, sent all my kids to good schools out East, and now I branched out into a lot of other diversified interests …’
Behind him Mrs Doody was saying, ‘Oh, Everett and I are old friends, old buddies. See my ex married his ex’s first husband’s widow, if you can work that out! You wouldn’t by any chance have a ciggy, would you?’
Beyond her someone turned to catch a drink off a passing tray, saying, ‘Systems analyst? I thought you said he was a lay analyst,’ to someone already turning away to catch a glimpse of Indica Dinks in the crowd that was condensing around her even as she moved to the bar.
‘Is there any difference? Some people want to systematize the world, others just want to lay it, is there any difference?’ The fi
gure in a heavy grey cowled sweater turned its back on the celebrity. ‘Maybe Wells was right, then, maybe silicon is the basis of all life; you keep meeting people who act as if they had silicon chips in their heads …’
And in independent efforts to ignore the celebrity, others raised their voices across the room:
‘… well I can well conceptualize that people have trouble finding Ruritania on a map, that should not blind us to the facts about non-hostile puppet …’
‘Isn’t that Lyle who just came in? Lyle whatsisname, the sculptor?’
‘Naw, Lyle’s got this godawful birthmark.’
‘… like you to meet Harry Hatlo, Harry is now a behavioural choreographer, but he used to be in food technology, right? On the research side was it, Harry?’
Feeling for his hairpiece, Mr Hatlo risked a nod. ‘I was what you might call a snack inventor. Only my ideas kept getting more and more kinaesthesic, you know? Like I might sort of start with seeing a new kind of crunch first, and then build a product around it, you know?’
Mr Vitanuova nodded. ‘I know. Like saltimbocca, means jumps in the mouth.’
‘Right. And when I invented the dipless chip, the real breakthrough was when I mimed the whole routine myself, in my office – that was how I realized what a downer chip dip can be. See first you gotta buy the mix and take it home, dump it in a bowl and add water, stir it around – and all this is just leading up to the real dipping experience. Which is all that really counts, funfoodwise.’
‘My mother used to make fresh spaghetti –’
‘Yeah, well, so I put the dip on the chips, people just dip ’em in water and get all the fun right away. It was that simple.’
Vitanuova turned away briefly. ‘Hell, there’s one of my boys from the demolition company. You wouldn’t believe the goddamn lawsuits that company is getting snarled up in, probably have to liquidate before –’
‘Work, yes, work situations.’ Hatlo performed a shrug. ‘I applied the same thinking to my own job situation. It turned out that my real job satisfaction wasn’t into food tech at all, but movement, you know?’
‘Usually follows food,’ Vitanuova said.
‘These kinaesthesic ideas grabbed me more and more, until finally I got a chance to resign and start a new career in dance.’
‘Yeah I remember your firm going broke on research costs, you got squeezed out when Katrat Fun Foods took over Dipchip International, as I recollect. Excuse me, I better have a word with my employee there.’
Hatlo immediately enjoined conversation with Mrs Doody, who was borrowing a cigarette from the man in dark glasses.
‘My hubby’s got all mine,’ she explained, tearing off the filter and accepting a light. ‘He always does this, goes off with my ciggies – thanks. What did you say your name was?’
‘Felix. Felix Culpa.’
Hatlo, holding on his toupee, said, ‘Hiya, Felix. I was uh just telling Joe there how I got around to dedicating my life to the dance you might say. The name’s Harry Hatlo.’
‘Dedication,’ said Felix Culpa. ‘Discipline. The ultimate cruelty of precise articulation – the curve of arm like a scorpion’s tail.’
Mrs Doody spat out a crumb of tobacco. ‘Thanks for the ciggy, Felix. See you.’
Culpa nodded, apparently looking elsewhere. ‘Take Les Noces, almost a celebration of rape there, and starts off with that cruel hair-brushing scene –’
Hatlo said, ‘Well see most of my work is more in the line of therapy, I work for the city see and —’
‘But the point is, Stravinsky actually scored it for pianolas. It’s like a demonstration of the marriage of pain and precision. Machine cruelty.’
Judi Mazzini turned around. ‘I think I read something like that not long ago, The Machine Dances by some sociologist named Rogers.’
Culpa hesitated a second. ‘Yes, yes I’m familiar with that. And it does sum up a fascinating overview –’
‘Not very well thought out,’ she said. ‘It’s easy to point out a lot of machine arts stuff in the Twenties. I mean we all know George Grosz with his pictures of leering automata and their sexy brides. We’ve all seen Metropolis starring a steel girl with doorbells on her chest. But so what, it doesn’t mean you can really compare the Rockettes to an assembly line, or Isadora Duncan to a Chrysler Airflow – that’s anachronistic anyway.’
Culpa said, ‘Well I think his central concern was the er depersonalization pressures of modern societal parameters, people into robots, dancers into machines, wouldn’t you say?’
Judi Mazzini said, ‘I grant you they did a lot of mechanical ballets around then, like Machine of 3000 with the dancers all dressed like water boilers, and George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique scored for airplane props, anvils and car horns. But are they anymore significant than other stuff? Plays, there was R.U.R. and The Adding Machine – why single out dancing?’
‘Isn’t that Allbright who just staggered in?’ someone said, and heads turned to watch a shaggy, hollow-eyed man in an old torn storm-coat limp into the living room and set down his large briefcase. His heard was iced, and his dirty hair blended into the fake fur on his coat collar. One lapel of the coat was torn and hung down like a withered breast.
‘Goddamnit, where’s the Christmas of it?’ he shouted in the sudden silence. After a pause to pick yellow ice from his moustache, he shouted again:
‘I said where’s the Christmas of it? Where’s the holly and the ivy, the running of the dear Saviour’s birthday to you, Merry gentlemen upon a Christmastime in the city, silver bells jingle all the way in a manger no crib for Santa Claus comes tonight – where is it?’ There was an oil-slick of grime on the hand with which he snatched a drink from the nearest tray. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you – birth!’
Francine Moxon was beside him quickly, shoving him firmly into an armchair. ‘Allbright, we’re not hiring any Dylan Thomas acts today. Now you sit here and shut up and I’ll see you get enough to eat and drink. But behave yourself!’
‘Merry Christmas, you gorgeous piece on earth,’ he murmured, and tried to kiss her ear, before she swept away to a group where someone was explaining the difference between a lay analyst and a lay figure.
At the piano the blue-haired man sang:
Talkin’ ’bout the pyramids
Talkin’ ’bout the pyramids, baby,
Of the Old
And Middle
Kingdoms, yes yes.
They was Zoser and Sekhemkhet,
Khaba and Seneferu …
Other voices rolled on, full of pride in a new vehicle, scorn for an untried idea, trust in a dubious therapy. A waiter brought a frothy drink to Mrs Fleischman, who tasted it and waved it away. ‘No, Toy. No, Toy …’
Father Warren settled himself beside Mrs McBabbitt, his leather cassock rustling like batwings. ‘Yes I guess you could say I’m in the camp of the enemy here, heh heh, I am the pro tern chairman of the local branch of the New Luddites. And I realize almost everyone here is connected with computer science in some way. But where else can I find converts? Our Lord made his mission among evil persons.’
She broke a pose slightly to look at him. ‘You think computer people are really evil?’
‘Not necessarily. I just meant –’
‘Because I’ve got this real good friend, he’s very big in computers, and he says the only evil is being poor. And when you look at that guy over there with the dirty beard, you kind of get the idea – just look at him!’
Father Warren craned around, only to catch General Fleischman staring at him with a look of distaste.
Someone else glowered at Indica. ‘I knew her when she was plain old Indica Franklin, just another faculty wife who wanted to be a dancer. She made it, too. Got to be a dancing pizza-flavoured taco on TV.’
‘Maybe he is a priest, maybe he ain’t,’ the General said to Roderick. ‘You can’t hardly tell the clergy from anybody else these days, they go around wearing drag and smoking pot just like human beings.’
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‘I guess they are human beings, General.’
Fleischman looked at him to see if this was a joke. ‘Yeah. Last priest I listened to was good old Father Cog on the radio. Before the war.’
‘The war?’
‘Okay, sure, maybe he went a little far, using Goebbels’s speeches for his own sermons. You ain’t Jewish, are you, Rod?’
‘I’m not anything.’
‘Good boy. If you ever need a job, we can always use a smart young fella like you at the bank. You just see Personnel, tell ’em I said to give you a job. Now what was I saying?’
‘Before the, er, war …’
‘Crazy times, Rod, crazy times. You know somebody even kidnapped Charlie McCarthy? In 1939 that was I always wondered if maybe Father Cog knew something about that, only they wouldn’t let him speak out, you know? Then, well the war came along and they shut him up. You can’t go around telling people the truth in wartime.’
Edd McFee, who was across the room talking to Francine, turned to glower at Roderick. ‘Who is that guy, anyway? He’s been talking to old Fleischman a hell of a long time.’
‘What do you care?’
‘Me? I don’t care. Only I wanta get the general to back my new project, I figured I’d get a chance to soften him up a little here. He brushed out a wrinkle in his new Army fatigues. ‘I wanted to explain to him how important it is for his bank to get deep into the visual arts, to really communicate the visual the impact of the visual –’
‘Don’t give me the sales talk,’ she said laughing. ‘What’s the project?’
‘I want to set up this satellite link between a dozen different artists all painting in different locations, see? Like one can be in the desert and one even in the middle of the ocean on a raft, one in the mountains, one in New York and so on – and all of them have two-way visual and audio all the time. So all of them just paint what they feel – the total group experience.’ He paused. ‘You don’t like it?’
‘Where do you come in, Edd?’
‘I direct. I tell everybody what to do and I watch them do it. So the whole thing becomes really my work, see?’ He looked over at Fleischman again. ‘I got a really good story for the general. Did you know that Whistler went to West Point?’
