by Hob Broun
I cataloged my pretensions and deceptions in rigorous, forensic detail. I overlapped and interlocked disparate strands like a weaverbird building its nest. Nothing was too distant in time for my construction, too petty, too confused. In this I began to take a habitual type of pleasure, began to anticipate the warming rush that came with a newly incorporated perfidy. But at the same time I recognized that all my raveling up was pulling me to pieces, and uselessly.
Violet, usually at the high end of the spectrum, advised normalcy. “Not simplistic; simplified. Otherwise, you’re boring anyone that comes near you.”
“To philosophize is to learn to die,” I quoted.
“Why not try something new?”
A little later I drifted into Bullock’s, and here, where sedative music played, I saw the effort that went into choosing towels that would coordinate with bathroom decor, the ecstasy of a first bathing suit. I saw newlyweds frightened by the price of sofas, an old woman icily dissatisfied with the gift wrapping of a pen-and-pencil set. This normalcy was so dreamy, so foreign, as to seem almost paradisiacal. All I could do was watch.
In the appliance department I found a bank of televisions all tuned to the same channel, a crystalline arrangement. The show was called Open Market, and pitted four contestants against one another in the trading of international commodities. The set looked like a State Department nerve center. The emcee wore a vested suit and a watchchain. His name was Troy.
“Sorry, Gladys, but that spin means a rollback in world soybean prices and disaster for you.”
How much normalcy could I buy with their fifty-thousand-dollar grand prize? Enough to keep me from stealing fruit, I thought. At the end of the show they gave an address and phone number which I memorized by repetition on my way to the library, where for the next couple of weeks I would study climatology, currency fluctuations, rates of consumption. I read journals containing the work of speculative econometricians and slept in a moribund Ford belonging to Violet’s graduate assistant. I made daily calls to the production office to ask about auditions and kept up my energies with so much coffee it must have stained my bladder brown.
From the American pulpit: The relentless man gains result, if not always reward. So, inevitably, my time arrived, like some tiny glacial shift. Violet drove me out to Studio City for my pre-interview and said I was more boring than ever.
“They don’t want scholarly, they want telegenic,” she said. “You ought to know that.”
“Me Mr. Citizen,” I answered, caught up in last-minute cramming.
Violet’s good-luck kiss was grudging. “I’ll be busy for a while. You’re on your own.”
The Open Market office was somewhere in a reclaimed manufacturing plant—high windows, lots of exposed brick. Somewhere. I waded through an open call for a diaper commercial, blundered into a photo session involving scuba gear. Everyone seemed irritated. The receptionists, every one an album-cover slut analog, were too preoccupied with health shakes, the trades, furtive phoning, to offer assistance.
“Interviews, right,” one finally said, an androgynous redhead browsing through a tropical fish magazine. She pointed down a fern-choked hall. “The brown door with the porthole.”
I had expected a younger, less formal man. And I was puzzled by words chalked on the blackboard behind him.
Data Search
Continuity
Diagnosis
Amplitude (testing)
Total Coverage
“You’re late. I’m afraid you missed the slide presentation.”
In fact, I’d come early, but I wasn’t about to argue. Not for fifty grand. The man parted his gray hair down the middle and wore rimless glasses. Was he trying to look like Woodrow Wilson? He sighed.
“All right, you might as well tell me about yourself.”
I had a bio all ready, the novel and the ordinary mixed in exact proportions.
He looked hesitant. “And your video experience?”
Telegenic, not scholarly. I couldn’t decipher the aim of this question, but determination drowned out unease and I gave a deftly exaggerated account of my stint with CBS News.
My interrogator was visibly pleased. He reviewed his notes, underlining several items.
“And how much do you know about us?”
I enthused over the exciting and imaginative concept, the genuinely educational thrust behind…
Eyes of comparable grayness appeared to bubble outward toward the rimless lenses, and, inescapably, our cross-purposes came clear. He was recruiting manpower, I was spinning my wheels. He indicated rather huffily that he had never even heard of Open Market, and I said there would now be no need for the personal information I’d given. Our chairs scraped on the linoleum.
So that was it? No, we had begun a ritual, reiterative process and could only see it through, like some form of hormonal imprinting that cancels volition.
“No such prize, but we offer a very generous benefits package.” He paused fractionally between words, as if in fear of damaging his remarkably small teeth. “A long-term relationship.”
In cajolery and salesmanship we contested, seesawing in our chairs, only slightly less non sequiturious than before. The Wilson man described the new undertaking in terms of Utopian splendor.
“Your own satellites,” I said thoughtfully.
The Wilson man drew something in the air with his pencil.
“Yeah, I got in on the periphery of some of the microwave research they were doing at RPI a few years ago.”
“RPI?”
“Isn’t it remarkable that the same thing that roasts your holiday turkey can send a Liza Minnelli concert to Brazil?”
The Wilson man scribbled. “We always have ham.”
On and on we went, like men of stature talking over the noise of a bar car, constantly assessing, never really warming to each other. In the end, the deal closed, we couldn’t say goodbye fast enough. Aimless at ritual’s end. Spent.
“Take care now.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank you.”
I carried away a Ziploc info kit and instructions to phone headquarters in a month. I took away the very latest thing in normalcy, and all at no charge.
Violet took the news rather badly.
“But isn’t this what you meant? Something new?”
“What I meant was…What I meant was…”
Cursing me for a male moron, she hung up. I thought: This must be how your mom acts when you enlist in the Marines.
31
THE OVERSEERS ARE LONG on application, short on things to do. Telephone numbers and parking spaces are continually being reassigned. Arriving today, a directive on bulletin boards (no personal messages, solicitations to buy or sell, clippings, or cartoons), and report of heated committee wrangling over which hue of stationery will best set off the new logo. This sort of thing is placed under the heading of Systems Maintenance. Is this what we’re learning from the Japanese?
Sometimes it is useful, even imperative, to go below, to reach the shiny, packed, irrefutable innards of this place and rest.
The archives are housed in a core of hexagonal cells running three levels deep, this supremely efficient design tactic plagiarized from the bee. Loose-leaf catalog binders are chained like pens in a bank, and against white styrene walls the black cassettes achieve blunt grandeur, the cold authority of a vault. Form fascinates function.
I clang down one of the narrow iron stairways—curious anachronism—and find Ellen at the bottom.
“Hiding?”
“No. More like hibernating.”
Padded shoulders, full skirt, black stockings, noncommittal mouth. Why do I feel intimidated? Like I’ve been caught out? Ellen swings a big leather carry-bag at me. In a satiric sort of way, she’s been trying to take weight off in the employee gym. I’ve watched her run in the rubber suit and the ankle weights and it’s not flattering. This is the idea, she tells me.
Nothing to sit on but the floor, so we drop down, facing
one another.
“Don’t look up my skirt,” Ellen barks. “You know there’s no future in it.”
She’s annoyed, but doesn’t change her posture any.
I’m stung. “Well, I see you’re not getting any thinner.”
“No, I know. And now I’m reading the worst magazines. ‘Bolstering Your Style Awareness.’ Recipes with seaweed, ads for panty-liners. What do you suppose is the matter with me?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, use your imagination.”
“I don’t know. Random jumps? Venus envy?”
For a moment she looks timid, swallowed up in tiers of videotape, a refugee in a ship’s dark hold; then her leg shoots out to kick me hard.
“Really, you’re okay. Strength to spare.”
Ellen rolls her eyes, then looks away. “Have you ever wanted eminence? Ever cast yourself as a star?”
“Once. At sixteen, I was going to solve the Kennedy assassination. I made charts. I did a concordance of the Warren Report.”
“And?”
“I got to be seventeen.”
“I think it’s the biggest thing between us. That we share that ambition deficiency.” She stretches, waggles the sole of her shoe against mine. “Come on, why don’t you drive me home.”
If only this were the invitation it sounds like.
We’re zipping right along. No traffic at all. Ellen inspects my car like a detective.
“What’s this?” Fingering a brown potsherd glued to the dash.
“Found it out by the Salt River. It could be a relic with some spirit power or it could be nothing.”
“Spirit power? That costume doesn’t fit on you.”
“Why not?”
She tips back against the seat, rolls her head from side to side. “Too calculated.”
But I have a spot in mind where the power is hard to dismiss. Half a mile along the frontage road, then left. Castellated sandstone bluffs with a stream running slow underneath, colors enriched and outlines sharpened by the late sun. The air is light and perfumed with minerals. We drape over the warm hood, backs against the windshield.
“I’m learning to love the terrain,” Ellen says, teeth clamped on a barrette as she gathers her hair. “It frightened me at first. Merciless. Too raw. But I adjusted.”
“Where were you before?”
“Seattle. Lots of water, lots of green. Relaxing to the eye and ear.”
“Why leave?”
“I got toxoplasmosis. From our cat.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not. Parasitic microbes swimming around in your cells.” The way she folds her arms around herself it’s as though the story has to be squeezed out. “She really was a sweet little girl. I met her in a ticket line for La Bohéme. We had a house right by Lake Union with big bay windows and a plum tree in the yard. She played piano, I did some production for the PBS station. What a soft life. But I got a rash across my breasts, fevers of a hundred three, my throat swollen so I could barely swallow. Mono, they said at the hospital, and by the time someone really figured it out, I was in bad shape. The girl got scared and went back to Alaska. I got a permanent infestation of the kidneys. Little fuckers are in there now, latent, ready to activate anytime.”
Ellen slides’ over the fender and walks away, anomalous in her office clothes amid the scrub and rock. I watch her move down to the stream, squat to rub water on her face over and over. Powerful. And so much grief from a cat.
We stop at a place outside the city where the chili verde is supposed to be good. Ellen smokes irritably and leaves her plate full. I drink Tecate and lime and feel my admiration pass through stages, like an insect taking on protective colors, ending in spite. A distasteful image immobile in sepia, then disappearing into the noise of families all around us. The heart, I think, is just a muscle.
We drive in darkness now. Golden oldies are barely audible on the radio, but with spearing headlights and briefly impaled signs they substitute for conversation. “Don’t forget who’s taking you home and in his arms you’re gonna be…So, darlin’, save the last dance for me.” Abruptly, Ellen puts her hand on the wheel. I let go and she steers intently for several miles, her face a prow. But then it’s all relinquished. She fidgets with my lighter, thumbing silent butane at herself, loitering somewhere in her mind. I’d like to floor it, but we’ve reached the limits of the city. Ellen directs me in a flat voice, and on the radio a tractor pull is being promoted. She stares at adjacent drivers, some of whom speed up, some of whom slow down.
The apartment tower is unpleasantly sheer, an ugly spindle behind its landscaping. Some sort of complex tax deal for the company, Foley has intimated. Free rental to the workers and an open road for the accountants.
“Have coffee with me?”
I cannot allow myself to imagine…But as we cross the plaza and push through big glass doors, I feel like someone entering a seraglio in disguise. The lobby fountain gurgles. I am emboldened, elated by the odor of acrylic carpet and the glare inside the elevator.
“Home on the range,” Ellen says, letting me go in first.
So little in it, but a space that seems cramped. All the colors are pale. There are toast crumbs by the sink, smears of fat. There is a varnished bamboo screen by windows facing north toward the airport, a Max Ernst reproduction, dried berry branches in a blue bottle.
“Not much, is it?” she says, scuffling in the kitchenette. “I think of moving all the time, but that’s as far as I get.”
While the coffee drips, she shows me photographs, large color prints of wall murals over on the East Side. In some the artists stand in the foreground, raising their fists to la raza. She talks of Siqueiros and Diego Rivera with an excitement that lingers on my skin. But when all you do is watch, things pass by.
She has a little Dutch cigar with her coffee and speaks softly. “Part of the Seattle thing was having something under me. A kind of scaffolding. We were much involved up there. Aid for Guatemalan refugees, the Fremont Women’s Health Collective, volunteer time at the food bank. But the biologists say altruism doesn’t exist. I realized all that righteous solidarity was a way of comforting myself. Moral obligations were really emotional ones.”
She winces at herself, looks to me for a reaction. I am desperate in my obligations, seeing her once again as she squats beside the stream. I yearn for the dizziness of abjection, the smell of her secrecy.
“So how do I replace these things? With a practical attitude? Run your laps, cash your checks. Cut down on sugar and red meats.” She surrounds her empty cup for warmth. “Retreat, retreat. Rehearse yourself. There are all sorts of things to give up, but I don’t see anything pious in being solitary. Where are the fucking replacements?”
Clearly, she wants words and not my arms.
I say, in the irrelevance of my desire, “This is not a tender age.”
“Okay. What do we do about that?”
“We’re supposed to ‘play hardball’ and ‘stonewall it.’”
Ellen moves to the window and looks out. “You are a complacent, gutless asshole.”
“Yes, but I’m other things too.”
She ignores my hand on her back, glaring hard into the distance where runways are long and flat, where tower lights spin tirelessly and never retreat.
It begins to rain as I reach the car. A cold wash. Wipers and defroster on, I head through the strip zone for home, past a chain of mansard roofs, floodlights blaring on wet asphalt and chrome, savannas of plate glass, a fiberglass drumstick rotating atop a pole. The city’s population has doubled in the last ten years. In another five it will double again, pouring out hydrocarbons and sucking up the aquifer. I bless the sterility of the desert.
32
WHILE MANY MARCHED SMARTLY, even proudly, through the era of the airline hijacking and the happening, of self-immolations, lettuce boycotts, astrological medallions, and the aluminum can, I straggled. My hands were slack, my eyes un-watchful. I chainsmoked to the monoto
nous beat of history. Disposable history, as I discovered.
I was a tender of newswire machines, those tireless contraptions which, on white cylinders like massive rolls of toilet paper, recorded and arranged the soot-black dung smears of the day. The richly fertilized sheets which I distributed were inhaled and combed through for special nuggets; they were segmented and scribbled on, spiked on the wall, and soon enough balled up in the Dumpster. Event revealed Trend which grew into Crisis, all of which evaporated as soon as the next movement of tanks, the next celebrity drug arraignment, the next violated child thrown from an apartment rooftop. There really was no keeping up, so I straggled. And sometimes things turned up in the litter at the end of the line.
Also under my care was a wirephoto machine which, by some electronic process I could never grasp, transmitted images simultaneously to subscribers great and small. Unfurling one afternoon from its slowly turning drum was a picture of a former First Lady arriving at or departing from some airport, her glamorously delicate breasts clearly visible behind a gauzy blouse. Its caption was followed by the parenthetical slug “Editors please note: This photo may contain offensive material.” What, I pondered, could possibly offend? Those royal breasts, curiously upturned like a pair of Persian slippers, with their intimations of…All right then, into the wastebasket, so disposed. On to the next historical square—a ditch full of corpses or a race driver grinning in victory lane.
The wire machines were equipped with a simple menu of alerts: One bell for, say, the World Series final, two bells for a major disaster, natural or manmade, three bells for the assassination of a head of state, and four bells, which could only mean a nuclear exchange, so that every time the system kicked in it brought on a Pavlovian apprehension that this would be The Time, and that fourth bell would go off. What relief to find that it was nothing more than a prime minister fatally slashed.
Yes, many and varied were the mental contortions necessary to the profession. How, for example, to maintain the traditional hardbitten, seen-it-all demeanor alongside reverent gravity for information control and the public trust? How to reconcile instinctive skepticism with the “objective” approach? Much wiser to straggle.
