by Ruth Ozeki
Elliot braced himself. This new belief system did not bode well.
“Read an interesting article in the Post, Rhodes.” It was always bad when Duncan used surnames. “Business section,” he said, rotating the monkey slowly in his hands. He glanced up at Elliot and frowned. “By a female.”
“Oh?” Elliot said. He felt he should attempt to participate in the conversation. He tried hard to look interested but not terribly concerned. “Yes?”
“Oh, yes.” Duncan nodded slowly. “An article about the Cynaco Pie Incident. Which is not particularly noteworthy in itself, since everyone wrote about the Cynaco Pie Incident.”
“The Post?” Elliot said, reminding himself to breathe. “I think I must have read that.”
“You must have.” Duncan placed Hanuman back down on the desk. “What made this woman’s article particularly interesting to me was that she not only mentioned the name of Duncan & Wiley, she also mentioned you. Specifically.” He sat back in his leather chair and brought his hands together in prayer position. “And do you know what I find really odd about this?”
Elliot really didn’t want to know.
“You used to fuck her.”
Elliot choked.
“Jillian Davies. You used to fuck her.”
“Excuse me?” This was not what he’d imagined. It was worse.
“Yes. And now she’s fucking you.”
“I’m sorry, but . . . ?” He should have seen it coming.
“Don’t apologize to me,” Duncan said. “Save it for her.”
“For Jillian?”
“Oh?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Are there others?” He opened a file on his desk and took out a newspaper clipping. He skimmed the article. “Ah, here we go. ‘Elliot Rhodes, who coordinates Cynaco’s strategic operations for the public relations firm of Duncan & Wiley, was in his Washington office when he received news of the pie-ing. “Tofu crème?” he responded limply.’ ”
He put the clipping back down on the desk. “I hate dangling adverbs.” He cocked his head and fixed a sad gaze upon Elliot. “Was it a performance problem?”
“Performance?”
“Listen, I honestly don’t care who you go to bed with, but if you’re going to fuck the press, you’ve got to fuck them well. And thoroughly. No prickless little bumps in the night. Finesse, Elliot. Precision. You got her riled, so go out and placate her.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll take care of it.”
“See that you do.” Duncan picked up the elephant again and turned it over in his hand. “I want to stress that this Pie Incident was highly embarrassing, not to mention a deeply wounding experience for our client on a personal level. We’re in the business of information. Why weren’t we informed? These Seeds of Resistance were your people. You had a private investigator positioned to watch them. You had an informant on the inside sending you intelligence. What went wrong? Were you fucking her, too? What were you doing in Idaho all that time?”
“I’ll take care of it,” Elliot repeated. He couldn’t think of anything new to say.
Duncan sighed. “I’m worried about you. Are you paying attention to your diet? Are you getting enough exercise? Are you unhappy?”
Elliot hesitated. It couldn’t hurt to try. “Honestly, Duncan, I hate to bring it up, but it’s . . . potatoes. I just don’t feel I have a connection with them. Rice, yes, but—”
Duncan held up his hand. “Please. Not Tokyo again.” He stood and walked over to the large tinted window that ran along the entire back wall of the office. “Japan is over, Elliot. Look at the markets.” He gazed out over the government buildings. “The future lies in the Third World. In Mother India. That’s where the starving populations are, who need our help. And now that you mention it, maybe we could move you over to Cynaco’s rice division in Delhi once this potato situation is in hand.”
“Actually,” Elliot said, backpedaling now. “You know, I guess Idaho really isn’t so bad. . . .” This was the problem with Duncan. Bad could quickly bypass worse and head directly toward debacle.
“In the meantime,” Duncan was saying, “try some yoga. Maybe your doshas are out of balance. Book a consultation with my Ayurvedic doctor. Sedona will give you her number.”
“Great,” Elliot said. “You’re absolutely right. I’ll be more careful.”
Duncan turned and examined Elliot’s face as though searching for some evidence of candor and sincerity. Finding none, he prompted, “You’ll be more careful of . . . ?”
Elliot hesitated. “Of my doshas? ” he ventured.
“Precisely.” Duncan turned back to the window.
It seemed he had finished, so Elliot stood to leave. He crossed the thick carpet. But just as he placed his hand on the brushed-chrome doorknob, Duncan spoke again.
“And who you choose to fuck. Don’t be a slut, Elliot.”
The skin on the back of Elliot’s neck prickled as he slipped out the door.
Yummy’s phone call provided a pathway to redemption.
“The whole thing seems ridiculous,” she said. “They’ve gotten everyone all worked up—Phoenix thinks he’s a young Che Guevara, and Lloyd’s gotten this Terminator business mixed up with his right-to-life agenda, and he’s all in a lather. They’re planning two big demonstrations, one at the potato-processing plant in Pocatello and another in one of our old fields—Cassie’s husband farms it now. He’s growing some kind of genetically engineered potatoes, and they want to lead the whole group into the field and tear up the plants if they can get it televised. Will’s threatened to call the sheriff, and after what happened with Phoenix, I’m worried.”
“I’m sure it won’t get out of hand,” Elliot said. His heart was racing. “I’m so glad you called. It’ll be great to see you. What else did they say?”
He brought it straight up to Duncan.
“Idaho Potato Party?” Duncan said, raising his eyebrows. “Pretty minor league, don’t you think? I don’t see why someone local can’t handle this.”
“According to my informant, they’re trying for major media coverage.”
“Trying for and getting are quite different. A pie in the face of one of America’s most powerful CEOs at the Future of the World Forum in San Francisco is one thing. But some small farm town in Idaho? I think this is a molehill, Elliot. Not a mountain.”
“They’re planning to tear up a field of NuLifes.”
“So? Let them. If it doesn’t get covered, it doesn’t exist.” Duncan slid Elliot’s report back across the desk. “I can see you’re not convinced. Okay, what do you propose?”
Elliot took a deep breath. “Well, it occurred to me that it could be a good opportunity to implement some aggressive countertactics from the Proactive Management Strategy. We need victims on our side, and the guy who farms those fields is perfect. He’s even a Vietnam vet, for chrissakes. I can see it playing as a story of domestic terrorism—honest American farmer, salt of the earth, his crops targeted by the antiprogress forces of the Luddite left sort of thing. A vicious attack on the American way of life. I happen to know that the Seeds of Resistance run a pornography Web site, and one source in the community tells me that we can count on church support.”
Duncan nodded. “Interesting.” He picked up the flying monkey and dangled it from his forefinger.
Elliot pressed his advantage. “It’s an excellent opportunity for developing our affiliations with grassroots and local special-interest groups. I just have a hunch I should be there. In case an opportunity presents itself.”
“A hunch.” Duncan sighed. “Well, you might be right. Go, then. Fly away, Hanuman. Bring me back a mountain.”
Elliot took his report and went. But when he reached the door, Duncan spoke again. “Just so we’re clear, Rhodes. Whether this Potato Party of yours does indeed become a mountain or simply stays a molehill, I leave entirely up to you. Do as you see fit. But if you choose the mountain”—and here he made his hands into a steep peak, with the tips of his fingers touching i
n front of his forehead—“I want it to tower, as lofty and insurmountable as Everest. And if it stays a molehill, I want it to just go poof and vanish, silently. I do not want to see or hear anything more about it.”
He let his hands part, drifting downward, and he made a broad, smoothing motion above the slick surface of his desk, as though calming turbulent waters.
After a storm.
It was a very good time to be out of the office, Elliot thought.
Once the plane had taken off, heading west, and he was able to sit back and enjoy the distance growing between himself and the ever mounting pressure at work, he felt an odd sensation, like the loosening of something hard and constricting, as though he were about to shed a skin. He took off his jacket and removed his tie, letting his mind travel on ahead, and that’s when the thought of seeing Yummy again hit him full on. It washed over him, causing his chest to expand. He hadn’t allowed himself to look forward to this, nor had he realized how much he’d missed her. This sense of loosening continued until touchdown in Pocatello, where he felt the first skin shed, shriveling upon contact with the dry desert air. A hot, dry wind blew it away.
He drove to Liberty Falls and checked into the Falls Motel. When he picked up the phone to call Yummy, the second skin started to loosen. An hour later, when he opened the door and saw her standing there, lean and golden, it dropped away, pooling around his ankles like a puddle.
The third skin she drew gently from his body. She pinned him naked to the pillow and looked at him intently, an entomologist studying his molt, tracking the instar, and observing the possible emergence of a fully developed organism. He could not get enough of her. This, too, took him by surprise. Their sex just kept going and going, each time rolling into the next with barely a beat in between, until he lay beside her exhausted and knew that the constriction he’d been feeling in D.C. was more than just a stagnant job or a stale lover.
He listened to her breathe for a while. “It’s good to be here,” he said. His sensors were awake from their lovemaking, attuned to dips in her temperature and flutters in her pulse, but he wasn’t getting much of a reading now. “Even if I don’t get a story out of it. I mean, I doubt this action will amount to much. Who in their right mind would come to Liberty Falls, right?”
He was simply chattering to fill the silence, but still she didn’t answer. “Hey,” he said, trying to be casual. “Did you miss me?”
She continued to gaze toward the ceiling, as though she were seeing far beyond the acoustic tiles, all the way to heaven, while his question remained earthbound, trapped in the small motel room, making nervous currents in the air. The question itself was familiar, but coming from him, it sounded strange. Then he identified the problem: He sounded like a woman.
He’d never seen what a brave little question it was, hanging there, edged with fearful expectation and banking stubbornly on hope. His response had always been to buy time with silence, but in the end he usually lied—Sure I missed you. What did you think?—and then gotten up to pee or changed the subject. He had sensed, but never before experienced, the shadow questions: Do you love me? Is there any hope at all?
She turned her head. Her eyes were unreadable. “Sure,” she said. “I missed you.”
He felt such relief. Another skin dropped away, and the air that washed over him felt fresh and charged. It wasn’t love per se, but rather a trick of the pores, opening to release their little dew of sweat and then closing again while the body thrilled to the cool release of tension. But his heart marveled nonetheless.
Then she laughed. “But that was twenty-five years ago. I know better now.”
pre-potato
During the weeks leading up to July Fourth and the great Idaho Potato Party, I was treated like a pariah, denounced by my parents and my offspring for my lack of proper revolutionary zeal. Every time I expressed my concerns, I felt like I was committing thought crimes. Elliot was the only ally I had, and I took his interest in the action as a measure of his feelings for me. It never occurred to me that he might have other motives.
I was excited to see him, standing in the doorway of the tawdry motel room. But then we made love, and while the sex was good, something was starting to change. I felt myself becoming remote, moving further and further away until my perspective was like that of a celestial body. I was seeing more, and he was becoming less. He had always been the distant one, which of course had been terribly attractive. Now his new postcoital manner was fraught with an eagerness that made me feel nervous and mean. I thought I would explode if I stayed in that motel room for another second. I rolled out of bed and got dressed. I gave him a brisk kiss on the forehead to make me feel less guilty, then careened out the door. Once in the car I floored it, happy just to be outside in the warm summer night air, happy to be driving home with the windows wide open. I still had not gotten used to his cologne.
The house lights were blazing when I pulled in, and I could see the shadowy stage by the barn and the poles set up on either side where a banner would be hung. The sweet scent of baking cookies drifted from the kitchen. The Seeds had colonized the entire downstairs, and by the time I had skulked out of the house that evening, the party was in full swing and they barely noticed I was leaving. They had established work stations—food preparation, banner painting, and information assembly—and had tacked up huge sheets of paper on the walls, covering them with schedules and maps and assignments. The phone was ringing constantly, and they’d bought a fax machine. A computer was set up on Lloyd’s desk, and they were uploading information about the action to their network of friends and the press contacts who were expected to show up. They seemed to share a grand vision, which I couldn’t imagine, yet which filled me with dread, including as it did the rental of several hundred folding chairs, the small breakdown stage, half a dozen PortaPotties that were due to arrive the following day, and the services of a health-food restaurant in Oregon, whose catering truck was crossing the Cascade Mountains loaded with organic food and a couple of cooks.
I had stayed safely out of it all, except to take Geek aside at one point and question him about the extent of Lloyd’s involvement. The two of them had been sitting side by side, heads bent cozily over a speech that Lloyd was writing. I could see that Geek was feeding him information, and I wanted to know what else was being traded. I called him out to the porch and demanded to know if Lloyd was funding the event. Geek sighed and shook his head.
“We’re not extortionists.”
“I don’t know what you are. But somebody’s paying. I want to know who.”
“We are. We’ve got sources of income.”
“What, dealing drugs? Selling pot? Distributing pornography?”
He looked hurt. “I told you we closed the Garden. And we promised not to bring pot onto your parents’ property.”
“You also promised not to engage in any political agitation within Power County limits. Excuse me if I’m finding it a little hard to trust you.”
Geek nodded. He could see my point. “I was hoping you could get behind this.”
“What my mother and father chose to get behind is their business. But I swear, if you get Phoenix or Ocean involved in any illegal shit . . .” I turned away and left the thought hanging—there was nowhere for it to go.
Now I picked my way across the porch, avoiding the boxes and crates and bins, then stood at the door and looked in through the screen. I could see Charmey and Ocean by the stove, surrounded by cookie sheets and mixing bowls. At the kitchen table Lilith and Phoenix were working on the banner that would hang over the stage. Heads together, they were concentrating on erasing an E that had found its way onto the end of POTATO.
“Ce n’est pas vrai?” Charmey asked. She had lettered the banner and had drawn smiley potato heads on either end. “I thought certainly there was the E.” She was wearing an apron above her bulging stomach and held a big wooden spoon, sticky with cookie dough. Geek walked in just then and overheard her.
“It’s oka
y, Charmey,” he said. “You can’t help it. You’re French.” She brandished the spoon at him, and he leaned over and licked it. “Mmm. Chocolate chip.”
“Carob chip,” she said. “And I am Québécoise.”
“Tastes good anyway, and that’s still a good excuse.”
I opened the screen door and stepped into the kitchen. Geek fell silent. The others all looked up, and then, as though on cue, they looked away again, concentrating on their tasks. I could see Phoenix’s cheeks redden, and I wondered if he guessed where I’d been. I hadn’t told anyone that Elliot was coming, though. Nobody seemed to have much to say, so I started to walk on through, when Ocean skipped up with a cookie in hand, waving it in front of my face.
“Look!” she said. “You can eat one, but you have to pay.”
“Okay. How much?”
“You pay what you can. It’s by donation.”
“How about a nickel?” I said, fishing in my jeans pocket.
She frowned. “It’s carob chip, Mom. It’s even better than chocolate chip, plus it’s got nuts, plus it’s got oatmeal and fiber, plus it’s organic.”
“How about a dollar?” I felt guilty, buying my daughter’s love, but I was pretty desperate.
“Really?” she said, impressed. She was still at an age where a dollar seemed like a fortune. You could buy a lot of her love for a buck.
“Sure. It sounds like it’s worth it.” I handed her the bill and took the cookie. “Mmm,” I said, taking a bite. It had the consistency of adobe and tasted like barely sweetened cardboard. “This is delicious.” The chips were okay.
Ocean looked at the dollar bill, then danced over to Charmey. “Look!” she said. “I made a sale! A dollar!”
“You paid way too much,” Geek said. “The recommended donation was a quarter. Fifty cents max.”
“It’s for a good cause.” I offered him the rest of the cookie.
“No thanks,” he said. “Do you mean that?”
