For example: “Gill Morton really, really liked you,” Jack said. “I think he’s sweet on ya.”
“On me? Seriously?” I didn’t get that vibe from Morton when we met.
“Yeah, he went on and on about you when he and I spoke.”
Gill Morton—by all accounts a square, old-fashioned, family values kind of guy—being attracted to me? What a laugh that was. Obviously he had projected some illusion of a woman on me and didn’t see the real me at all. This often happens to television personalities. People see you on TV and construct a fantasy about who you are. Hey, I do it all the time myself with my favorite television personalities. Normally, when this happens, I just open my mouth and let my real personality come out, thoroughly shattering any illusion my misbegotten suitor has about me. But with Gill Morton, it would be tough. I didn’t want to offend him and jeopardize my series or Jack’s business, but I didn’t want to lead him on either.
Damn. Why am I so irresistible?
“Too bad about Mandervan,” he said. “I heard he turned you down. But at least someone on our team is getting the exclusive.”
“What? Who?”
“You hadn’t heard. Oh. Solange Stevenson is getting an exclusive with Mandervan as soon as his new book comes out, which should be next spring. Quite a coup. Lot of strange stories going around about Wally Mandervan. You heard that he collects his own hair and toenail clippings?”
“Yeah.”
“You heard the rumor that he’s trying to clone himself?”
“Yeah, that’s a good one,” I said, and mustered a smile, thinking, that lousy story-stealer Solange hadn’t shown any interest in Mandervan until I went after him.
“Speaking of Solange … you get along with her well,” Jack said.
“I do? I mean, how do you know that?”
“I watched you two talk at the cocktail party,” he said.
What conversation was he watching, I wondered. Not the one where Solange and I were politely skewering each other.
“Well, too bad about you not getting Wally, but you know, a door closes, a window opens. Gill Morton really likes you. You might just be the ingredient we need to get our hands on some of his advertising money.”
“He’s pretty successful, Gill Morton,” I said. “Is he doing well these days?”
“Better than ever. Has more money than I do. But my building is taller,” Jack said. “And I have more power, because media is ultimately more powerful than cleaning products and hardware and whatever. You got a pen and paper with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Take some notes. I have some questions,” he said, and began with, “You been watching the coverage of the women’s conference?”
“I’ve been kind of busy with other things,” I said.
“Interesting stuff. Some of those Third World women at the conference have incredible stories, bride burnings, dowries, arranged marriages, clitoridectomies. How stupid is that? Cutting off the clitoris so women can’t enjoy sex. It’s cruel to the women, and to men too. Women not enjoying sex causes a lot of problems for men. You know, I should mention that in my speech. Write that down, will you, Robin?”
I did.
“Still, I think nature made men to want a variety of sexual experiences. Shonny says women feel the same way, but suppress it,” he said, referring to his ex-girlfriend, and he suddenly teared up and looked out the window. Actress Shonny Cobbs had been Jack’s “girl” for three years when she abruptly split from him and took off to Asia to make a movie.
“Do you think women are monogamous and men polygamous?” he asked.
“Depends on the woman, I think,” I said. I was feeling a tad uncomfortable, being a mouthpiece for my entire gender, though Jack had a way, through his own outspokenness, of making me feel all right about speaking my mind. “I’d say women are polygamous, but men are more polygamous, and freer to exercise it than women.”
“Yeah, that’s what Shonny says too,” Jack said. “So how come women seem to find it easier to control than men? Is it all that, uh, social conditioning?”
“Partly that. But studies now show that a woman’s brain has to be engaged in the sexual act for it to be satisfying for her, but blood actually rushes from a man’s brain when he’s aroused. Maybe that contributes to the differences in behavior. There’s a lot I don’t understand about men.”
“There’s a lot I don’t understand about women. I get mixed up about their signals. I’m expected to just understand things without them being spoken. Why can’t women just say what they really mean? Isn’t your gender the one that believes in expressing feelings?”
“Men do that too, though,” I said. “Send mixed signals, don’t say what they really mean.”
“Well, what about double standards? Women complain about double standards, but they’re guilty of perpetrating them. How come women expect men to be understanding of PMS, but if a man says anything about women’s hormones they jump all over him?”
“Women’s hormones were used to freeze women out of jobs for a long time. You know, some men say women are in the grip of their hormones a week a month.…”
Some men. Jack himself had said this publicly in the early 1970s. To be precise, what Jack said at that time was that he thought those primitive cultures that put their women in huts at the edge of the village during their “time of month” were on to something. (And, hey, I can see his point. If I was a woman menstruating in the wilderness a thousand miles from the nearest Midol or Tampax dispenser, and I had a chance to go away for a few days, I’d have my bags packed and by the door when the happy day arrived every month. Let me see … stay home and deal with a husband, kids, backbreaking menial labor, and cramps … or go to a hut at the edge of the village to chill out for a few days with nothing to do but rest and drink a tea made from the bark of some intoxicating root? Tough choice.)
“And the feminist response to that,” I went on, “is that men are in the grip of their hormones three hundred and sixty-five days a year, which often impairs their judgment. But we still let them handle sensitive and demanding jobs.”
“I’ve got a point, though, about double standards, and—” Jack said, interrupting himself to say, “There it is, the Morton estate. See it? All that beachfront property in Southampton. The guy has it good.”
Below us, the Atlantic glittered, deep blue in the bright morning sun.
“Anything you want me to say to Morton?”
“If you want to really get on Morton’s good side, ask him about the island he won in a poker game,” Jack said, and you could tell he wished he had his own island.
“He has his own island?” Mandervan had his own island too. Islands were the latest status symbol among the very rich, the very famous, and especially the very eccentric.
“Yep, he does. But my building is taller than his building. Did I mention that? Morton’s island is called Bald Scot Island. Ask him to tell you why. He loves that story. Oh, and better not bring up his wife. He was widowed a couple of years ago. He’s kind of sensitive about it, though he’s looking for a new bride.” He winked at me when he said that.
“So there really is an old boys’ network. All you moguls know each other.”
“Not all of us, but you run into the same rich guys, and rich gals, at a lot of functions. Gill belongs to my club.”
Jack’s club had been exclusively male by charter, until a few years back, when it succumbed to pressure and started admitting women. Of course the entry requirements—military service, Ivy League school, and a healthy financial endowment—eliminated most women, and the few who joined were not in the Inner Circle. I must have made a face at the mention of Jack’s club, because Jack said, “You don’t like a club that’s mostly men, do you? We got women reporters in the locker room, women going in to use men’s rooms because the lines for the ladies’ rooms are too long, there is nowhere a man can go just to be with other men without being accused of shutting out women and denying them opportunities.… Wha
t do you gals think we do at these clubs?”
“Homosexual sex,” I said, and then realized that this wasn’t just my pal Jack, a guy I could rib this way. This was the man who owned the company.
But he laughed. “What else?”
“Cook up schemes to keep women and people of color down and take all our money.”
“Well, I can’t say definitively that those things don’t go on at my club, but I’ve never seen ’em,” he said.
We hovered over Morton’s estate for a moment like a hummingbird, and then descended onto a helipad. Gill Morton was waiting for us with a bunch of big, beefy men.
They all had guns.
“Good to see you, Jack. Nice to see you again, Miss Hudson,” Morton said, and he smiled at me.
“And you, Gill,” Jack said.
“Change of plans,” Gill said in his dubbed voice. “Pipe burst and the golf course flooded. So I thought we could go hunting for lunch. You hunt, Robin? Or would you rather wait at the house?”
“I’ll come with you,” I said. Hell, I’m a journalist, I told myself, and even if I don’t like what I see, I can’t avert my eyes from it. Union rules.
“Most women can’t handle it,” Morton said.
“I can,” I said, keeping the sarcasm out of my voice. After all the corpses I’ve seen, I thought, what’s a little hunting?
“You know how to use a rifle? It’s got a decent kick to it.”
“Yeah, I have an Enfield at home,” I said.
“Come on then.”
As we tramped off into the woods, I thought to ask, “What are we hunting?”
“Doves!” was Morton’s enthusiastic reply.
A queasy look quickly crossed Jack’s face and then it was gone. We hung back from the group a bit.
“Don’t shoot any doves,” Jack said to me.
“I don’t intend to. I hate this. What are we gonna do after lunch? Stomp bunnies? Kick Buddhists?”
“You might have to eat a dove for lunch, to be sociable,” Jack said. “You should have told him you were a vegetarian.”
“Come on, you lag-behinds,” Morton called. We followed him and his men to the edge of a clearing, where dozens of white doves were held in big cages. At the side of each cage was a small (jockey-size) man in the same outdoors-men gear.
“Ready,” Gill said, and he and his men all raised their shotguns to their shoulders, aimed at the sky. Jack did, too, so I followed suit, keeping my safety on.
“Release the first doves,” Gill commanded, and the jockey-sized men opened the cages, released the doves into the air. Before I could ask about it, guns were firing and doves were falling.
When the shooting stopped, Morton said, “Retrieve those,” to the two jockey-sized men.
“You think you hit anything?” Morton asked me and Jack.
“Could be,” Jack said, while I shook my head.
“Most of them flew toward the woods,” said one of Morton’s men.
“Let’s spread out, cover more territory, get some of the stragglers,” Morton said.
While the men spread out, I dawdled. I found myself a nice lichen-covered log at the foot of a tree and sat down and waited. Where is the sport in a bunch of men tracking helpless doves and then shooting them with high-powered guns? What was Morton trying to do? Impress me with his masculine hunting skills? It made me kind of ill and I put my head between my knees and breathed in the moist, green air. A line of ants crawled around my boots. Hunting was one of those things that seriously tested my theory that women are just as good as men and as bad as men. Somehow, I just couldn’t see even the toughest, most macho women I knew choosing to stalk small woodland animals with shotguns in their spare time.
Gunshots echoed around me. More doves to the slaughter. Dove hunting, I knew, was big among certain sections of the upper classes, particularly down in the genteel south.
As I turned my head, suddenly, there was a whistle and a thunk right by my left ear. I looked behind me. A bullet had lodged in the tree. People were running and soon I was surrounded by big men. One of them examined the bullet.
“Who shot that bullet?” Morton demanded angrily. His face grew all red, so red that it showed up through his blond brush cut, making it seem orange.
“Not one of ours,” a guy who looked like Dobie Gillis said to Morton.
“Well, go find out what happened. Whoever shot it might still be out there. Bud, Gary, get the local cops out here, ask them to take the bullet for testing.”
“Yes sir.”
“You okay, Robin?” Jack asked.
“Yes, are you okay?” Gill asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” Traveling under a curse, but fine other than that. I looked in the direction of the shot and saw nobody. Someone was trying to kill me and it scared the shit out of me, but fear was something successful men didn’t show, I’d noticed. I wasn’t about to either.
“We’d better get out of here,” Morton said. “In case the shooter is still hanging around. I’m very sorry.…”
“It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Probably one of the neighbors, shooting at targets, shot went wild. People next door are hobby shooters,” Gill said. “We’re going to get it all checked out for you.”
I was still shaking, and trying not to show it, when we got to the house, a sprawling two-story yellow-and-brown-brick monstrosity. As soon as we walked in a woman’s voice said, “Hello, Gill. Welcome home!”
There was no woman there. Gill Morton was using the same smart-card technology in his house as he had in the Workplace of the Future, so his house talked to him.
Morton chuckled and Jack chuckled, too, but it just made me feel sad for poor widowed Gill Morton.
“The voice is computer-generated,” he said. “I can reprogram it to say anything I want. Follow me.”
While the “help” prepared the doves, Jack, Gill, and I repaired to his den to discuss business and eat goat cheese canapés. Well, I didn’t discuss much business. Taking my cue from Jack, only speaking when spoken to, I sat back and observed. But I politely drank some brandy-spiked tea and ate the goat cheese canapes, though normally I have a firm rule about not eating anything that comes from a goat.
Jack didn’t kiss ass, he approached Gill as the equal he was, as a guy who had something to offer Gill—worldwide advertising for the price of domestic, and with great demographics. Gill listened with interest, pointing out potential pitfalls in advertising on Jack’s network, and it reminded me of a shopping expedition I went on with an Indian exchange student in college. The salesman tried to sell her a carpet, she pointed out its flaws to him and tried to bring the price down. Jack and Gill were playing a similar game. It was very cordial, though I suspected that had I not been there, the dialogue would have been rougher and more manly, more David Mamet or Martin Scorsese than Miss Manners.
“We’d get better numbers on the broadcast networks,” Gill said.
“Ostensibly,” Jack said. “But they are confined to domestic coverage. You’re a worldwide company. Overall, you get greater global numbers with us. And let me tell you, we have very high demographics among women overseas. Women are still your biggest customers, Gill. Have you been watching the coverage of the women’s conference? You know, India has a huge middle class, which is rapidly growing, and a lot of disposable income, and they love ANN.”
“And what do you think, Robin?” Gill asked, and he leaned over toward me so our knees touched. I was sure it wasn’t a mistake. He liked me.
“I think you can’t do better than to advertise on our networks, because you reach people of influence all over the planet,” I said. Was I the Company Girl or what? I didn’t even pull my knee away.
“I may just listen to you,” Morton said. “It was your request for our archive materials that got me thinking about our next ad campaign. We’re gonna update those old twenty-first-century ads from the fifties and sixties. We’re gonna show a new vision of the future. Want to see the sketches? Ju
st got them couriered out last night.”
“Sure,” Jack said.
Gill leaned over to a flat panel on an end table and pressed a button. “Roger, bring in that portfolio the messenger brought last night. It’s in my bedroom.”
So puffed up was I by Morton’s praise, I almost forgot he was a polluter who kept and killed doves. Oh, how we come to love our flatterers. Jack’s interest in me wasn’t as flattering, because he has these whims and elevates people to his confidence fairly often—one of the cafeteria ladies, a video editor named Valerie, a philosophy Ph.D. Jack sat next to on a commercial flight and now introduced as his “official ethicist,” all these folks were part of Jack’s loose-knit, wide-ranging “feedback network.” But Gill Morton was different, and suddenly I wasn’t a mid-level manager going nowhere fast. I was consultant to moguls. When I talked, moguls listened, and all because I got drunk one night with Jack Jackson.
“Have you seen these?” Gill asked, handing me a different portfolio of print materials while we waited for the new portfolio. “This was the magazine campaign we ran in 1959, post-Sputnik.”
More RetroFuture stuff. If the Madison Avenue seer behind this campaign was to be believed, in the year 2001 Dad and Son would wax the family rocket with Morton Gleamwax, while Mom, Sis, and a team of robots prepared Space-Age Tuna Casserole on a Morton “atomic” range from a recipe provided by the Morton Family Test Kitchens. I’m not sure what made it “space-age.” The canned tuna, macaroni, Morton creamy cheese soup, or canned peas?
“In the year 2001, you and your family may take a vacation to Mars!” said the caption in an ad that had run in Life magazine.
The Last Manly Man Page 14
