Amalie in Orbit

by Gloria DeVidas Kirchheimer

  The sterility of the exterior was deceptive. Inside was a hotbed of hedonism, if not downright debauchery which seemed to be promoted as the best way to get the job done. Hospitality suites were everywhere, every organization was issuing invitations to parties, gifts were being handed out—shopping bags, calendars, bumper stickers, books, T-shirts, mugs. An island of diplomatic immunity where there were no censors, bosses, or spouses to monitor behavior. This freedom from obligation must have been what Stewart enjoyed when he went to his conferences, though she hoped it was tempered by a little guilt,.

  The revolving rooftop lounge, with a seventy-five-mile view, was the perfect place to start something. Amalie could suggest it to Ed. Then they’d see. But what about his wife? Yes, what about her? Maybe they were experiencing some problems. Amalie was glad she’d never met her. She was still an abstraction, to be respected or ignored (or both). The worst thing would be to meet her and to find that Ms. Fielding was a charming, vibrant person. (“You’d like her,” Stewart often said when speaking of a colleague, which immediately sent Amalie’s antennae up.) But there was another problem: suppose Charlie’s putatively pregnant Endive was indeed Ed’s daughter. Sleeping with Ed could be viewed as a novel form of incest. Interesting concept. She’d float it past him. Easy to make up scenarios while he was still airborne.

  Amalie was at the booth, writing up an order placed by a librarian for the complete novels of Benjamin Disraeli on microfiche when Ed appeared.

  “I saw the mini-series,” said the librarian who was wearing a gardenia in her hair, “but you’re the first person I’ve met who’s actually read any Disraeli.”

  “Just a fluke,” Amalie said.

  “You’re too modest,” Ed said when the woman had gone. “Take credit whenever you can and cc the boss. Don’t you want to climb the corporate ladder?”

  “I’m looking for a shortcut,” she said, then realized he might misinterpret what she meant. But the clod Ed smiled at her and praised her for having done so much already, singlehandedly.

  He complained about the small print on participants’ badges. “I find myself staring more than I usually do at women’s bosoms. How else can I decipher their names?”

  “You could ask.”

  “This way is more fun.”

  Please feel free to stare at mine, Amalie felt like saying.

  The booth was quiet now and Ed suggested she take some time to visit some of the other booths or attend a panel discussion. They hadn’t figured out who would do what and she didn’t want to cramp his style so she agreed to leave him alone for a while. Maybe later she’d take him up to the revolving lounge.

  There were a number of choices for this time slot. “Heuristic Reasoning in the Sentient Anfractuousities of Ross MacDonald,” “The Role of Kitchen Novels in the Literature of the South Jersey Shore,” “The Virgin in Doonesbury Culture,” as well as “Stasis and Iconography in Clint Eastwood’s Cinema.” And here was a session on “The Failure of Alterity in the ‘Ballades’ of Christine de Pisan.” Well, Amalie didn’t know about the alterity part, but the Ballades were beautiful. She closed her eyes and remembered: “Seulette suy, en ma chambre enserrée / Seulette suy, sanz ami demourée.” I’m all alone, locked in my room, alone without a friend…No thanks, she’d skip that panel. Out of nostalgia, maybe she’d pop into a talk on “The Gaze of the Other in Translinear Empowerment: Pornographic Comics as Transgendered Praxis.”

  The meeting room was packed, standing room only; the place seemed to have been sprayed with Bombay Gin room freshener. The lecturer had projected some slides depicting nude figures in various slippery poses and was reading the French captions and then their English translations. There was something familiar about those texts. Of course. Amalie had done the translations. The lecturer was not attributing them to anyone. On the one hand Amalie was indignant. Shouldn’t she be given credit for the work? On the other, did she really want to be identified with it? Her credibility here as a representative of a staid academic micro-publisher would be nil. “Je ne veux plus entendre,” she murmured, shoving aside a mouth-licking Francophile from Catholic University in Washington.

  Next, she walked into “Spatial Entropy in Aristotle’s Poetics” in the middle of the first panelist’s presentation. It was very warm in the room and the atmosphere was one of somnolence. The presenter seemed to be reciting a long poem and sweating profusely. “Cognitive and tutored reflection,” he said and paused. “Landscapes of the grasped given…” Amalie glanced at her program. The speaker taught poetics at Tampa State and had several books to his credit. “Organized praise transmutes into a Socratic debriefing…” Pause again. “We must want to look,” he said in a choked voice and looked beseechingly at the audience of eight. Maybe he was hoping that someone would offer him a drink of water. “Clarity,” he begged and waited for a second or two. “Helping us to optimize psychic dissonance.” Again he paused. Then he crumpled his papers and sat down.

  A hand shot up. The questioner, a young woman in a flowing flowered skirt could barely contain her awe. “How did you determine where the pauses would occur in this work? And how did you choose what specific words would follow the pauses? It’s—” she couldn’t contain herself “—a brilliantly structured innovative piece of work about the narrative gaze.”

  The presenter mopped his brow. He probably wished he was back in Tampa where the air conditioning never broke down. “Truthfully,” he said in a choked voice, “I’m always so nervous when making a presentation that I have to stop after every few words to take a deep breath. It’s just stage fright.” He smiled wanly.

  “Oh you’re just being modest,” the flowered girl said as Amalie left the room.

  When she returned to the booth, she suggested that Ed take off and make some rounds but he seemed content to remain in the small space with her.

  “Does your wife mind your being away from home?” she asked, fussing with some brochures.

  Ed took a while to answer. “Let’s just say that lately there’s been an absence of domestic felicity.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Amalie meant it. There was nothing to be gained from his unhappiness. And she didn’t want him on the rebound. But why kid myself, she thought. He hasn’t made a move in my direction. But from booth to bed was not such a long way. She tried it mentally: booth, boot, bolt, belt, bet, bed. It was the only word game she’d ever played because she always won, beating Stewart the English teacher handily.

  “Your admirer from the Library of Congress came by to invite you to a workshop on—pardon the expression—‘Oral Knowledge: A Confabulation of Tongues.’” He showed it to her in the program index. Just above it was “Oral History as Reflexive Sociology,” due to start in a half hour.

  That sounded like something Amalie’s father might have devised. Yes, there he was, listed as a consultant. Amalie wondered if he was here with his latest inamorata.

  Not many people were stopping by the booth, many probably had started their serious cash bar activities. Ed checked his watch. “How about dinner later. I hear there’s a revolving restaurant.”

  “Sounds great,” Amalie said, “but I don’t need to be enter-tained.”

  “Call that entertainment? Last year a bunch of periodicals people went skinny dipping in the hotel fountain.”

  Was he trying to titillate her? She certainly wouldn’t mind skinny dipping with him but not with 500 library administrators. They agreed to meet later for dinner in the revolving lounge. And since Ed insisted on staying at the booth and wrapping it up, she took off for the Oral History session, looking forward to surprising her father.

  The conference room was dark when Amalie slipped into a seat. The whirring of a defective 16mm projector was going to be a problem if one was to understand the narration of the sound track for Ojibwa Sands: The Timeless Return. The only light in the room came from the tiny gleams made by the penlights of people taking notes though only the main title had appeared on the screen. Wouldn’t her father be surpri
sed if he knew she was actually looking at some of his work.

  An American Indian chant, poorly recorded. If I close my eyes and then open them again, Amalie thought, there will be a desert, a highway, mountains, and cactus in close-up. Oh so predictable—except that there is no cactus. The music breaks off abruptly. Cut to the interior of a ramshackle house, the kitchen dominated by a large television set.

  Off-camera narrator: “We’re talking with Estelle May Ojibway. You can see her preparing tea in her Fargo, North Dakota kitchen.” Zoom in to mangy dog asleep on a rag rug. Sounds of clattering dishes, a voice coming probably from the television news describing a twister that has just uprooted eight mobile homes. “Bill, can you bring the camera in a little closer so we can see Mrs. Ojibway making tea?” (What’s the big deal? Amalie thinks. This isn’t the Japanese tea ceremony.)

  Camera jiggles, then focuses on gnarled fingers holding a commercial teabag. Man’s voice: “Git that thing outa my face.”

  Zoom in to very old cheerful dark-skinned woman. The upper part of her head is cut off on the screen (scalped—the cameraman’s revenge?).

  “When did you come to North Dakota, Mrs. Ojibway?” (Title on bottom of screen says “Pseudonym.”)

  The old woman laughs heartily. “I told you already.”

  “Tell us again, for the benefit of the audience.”

  “I come to North Dakota in the year…” (she is facing what she thinks is the camera but she is in profile) “…in the year of the blizzard.”

  “When was that exactly?”

  “Where did you put your ears? I just told you.”

  The camera swings over to the perplexed interviewer, a nervous young man fingering his lavaliere microphone as though it were a rosary. Maybe he’s worried about the tornado which, judging from the sounds coming from the TV, is approaching the woman’s kitchen.

  “What did your father do?”

  “When?” Now she is seen full-face. She’s drinking beer out of a bottle and a cat seems to have found the tea cup.

  “What kind of work did he do, Mrs. Ojibway?”

  “You call me Estelle, my American name.”

  “OK, Estelle, tell us what kind of work he did.”

  “Smith.”

  “Smith? But I thought—one second, we’re having a little trouble with the equipment. Bill, can you just untangle—”

  “He had a forge.”

  “Ah—” with evident relief “—he was a blacksmith. You know that poem, Mrs. Ojibway—Estelle? ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands…’?”

  “Plague took the chestnut trees that year.”

  “Tell us about it.”

  “Cheyenne come and raid the farms.”

  “Cheyenne! What happened?”

  As she starts to speak, Herb Marcus’s voice comes on, overlapping that of the woman. “The twentieth century is very much in evidence here…” The familiar pompous tone, the slight accent.

  “…Cheyenne raid burned up all the houses—you like tepee better?”

  “…with television and the latest pickup truck.” Cut, of course, to the pickup. Either the camera or the earth is trembling. “The elements have not been kind to this area,” Professor Marcus continues.

  “Those fellas come on horses and lassoed my little brother. One of them picked me up and carried me across the river.”

  Herb Marcus again: “In 1960 there were seventy-five farms here. Now there are only four.”

  “This fella, he took me to his village and tied me to a tree—” With sudden inspiration, the camera pans to a tree right outside the door. “—Then he paints my face. And then they give me something sweet to drink. Taste like Pepsi Cola. I had a good time.”

  Herb Marcus takes over with a list of statistics about health, employment, family structure. His German accent seems more pronounced than ever. Maybe that’s what happens as people age, Amalie thinks.

  Now the first narrator: “Thank you very much, Mrs. Ojibway—Estelle.” He recites the credits, details about sponsorship, locations, names of laboratories—all of which are already listed in the rolling title. Fadeout with the sound of glass shattering (Mrs. Ojibway’s beer bottle?).

  The lights went on. Amalie’s father stood in the doorway and was immediately surrounded by well-wishers.

  “His work is so cutting edge,” said the woman next to Amalie. “I feel privileged to be exposed to it. Oh, he’s looking this way. Maybe he remembers me from the last conference.”

  But Herb had spotted his daughter and broke away from his admirers.

  “Hi, Dad. I figured I’d see you here.” Amalie was torn between wishing she had left before the lights came on and wanting to hug her father.

  Herb Marcus was a tall bony man with a sallow complexion. One side of his face was a little caved in as though, in passing him by, life had dealt him a terrific blow. He stretched out his arms. “My God, here’s my little girl.” Always performing for the audience, Amalie thought. The amphitheater of students, the graduate assistants, the corporate moguls who forked over thousands of dollars to find out that their secretaries liked to have plants on their desks. Even as he embraced his daughter, his eyes were searching the room.

  “Did you come with a friend?” Amalie asked, disengaging herself.

  He pointed to a young woman in her twenties who was busy rolling up some wires.

  “You remember Fiona, don’t you?”

  “Ah yes, Fiona Ransom. ‘Re-Visioning Mega/Meta T- Group Dynamics.’”

  “Such a good memory!”

  Amalie also remembered that when Stewart died her father took off right away after the funeral, to which he was late. “Forget all this,” he had told her. “Don’t get morbid.” His idea of condolences. He went away with some Fiona-like girl, away from unpleasantnesses like death and reality. Because Amalie’s grief didn’t fit any of his statistical studies.

  “How did you like Mrs. Ojibway? She’s part of the cohort for my comparative study of Native American families. It’s my first oral history.”

  I can tell, Amalie almost said, but he wasn’t interested in her reaction since she wasn’t obviously complimenting him. But others were coming up and shaking his hand. “Great movie…” “A landmark…” “It’ll be part of the canon.”

  Amalie’s father turned to her again. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “Are you training to be a librarian or what? The three of us should have dinner. Fiona, I don’t think you’ve met my daughter.”

  The diplomatic Fiona said, “He talks about you and his grandchild so often.” Playing it safe, didn’t say grandson because she probably wasn’t sure of the gender.

  “Are you his secretary?” Amalie asked. “There was a time when my dad felt all women should become secretaries or grade-school teachers.”

  “I’ve done a little teaching,” Fiona murmured. “Just an introductory sociology class.

  “I fooled him,” Amalie said. “Instead of secretarial work I did porno translations. Dad, remember how you’d read me the secretarial ads at the dinner table?”

  Herbert chucked his daughter under the chin. “Times were different then, Liebchen. Isn’t she lovely?” he asked the remaining bystanders, though Amalie didn’t know if he was referring to her or to Fiona, who trailed them out of the room.

  #

  “Alex Dobrin! He’s your neighbor? I can’t believe it,” Herbert said.

  It was fortunate that Amalie had agreed to have dinner later with Ed in the revolving restaurant. The most she could endure now was a cup of coffee in the overpriced hotel cafe.

  “I would give my egg teeth to see him,” Herbert continued. Fiona was keeping a straight face. “But tell me, Amalie, are you seeing anyone?”

  She decided to ignore the question. “Why don’t you call once in a while. We never know where you are. You could have come to Charlie’s graduation.”

  “Now you are not being fair, Amalie.”

  “Herbert,” Fiona said, “I think I�
��d better leave you two together.”

  “Stay, Fiona,” he said. His hands were shaking. “I don’t like to worry you, Amalie. Fiona has looked after me, thank God. If not for her…”

  “He had a triple bypass,” Fiona said proudly.

  Amalie gritted her teeth. Beware the guilt trip. The maximum allowable capacity has been exceeded. She tried to control her voice. “Don’t you think it’s incumbent upon you to notify me, your next of kin, when there’s an emergency?”

  “He didn’t want to upset you.” Fiona was speaking for both of them. Herbert was swallowing hard. Was that a tear in his eye?

  “Damn it, Daddy.” Amalie punched his shoulder awkwardly. “For someone who studies human nature, you have some terrible blind spots.”

  “Didn’t I send Charlie a present? For which, by the way, I never received an acknowledgment. In my day you would send thank you notes, but far be it from me to interfere in the upbringing of your son.”

  “Yes, very far, as far away as possible,” Amalie flared up. “You took off for Malaysia the day he graduated though you could have put off the trip. He was so hurt.” That was a lie. Charlie understood far better than she. “The old man can’t stand real emotions, that’s all,” he said. “They scare him. That’s why you could never argue in your house or yell or criticize. What we do is much healthier.” “I wonder,” Amalie had said. “I really wonder,” thinking of the many slammed doors and Charlie’s tears.

  Fiona had had enough and excused herself. Herbert looked around wildly. He seemed fearful of being left alone with his daughter.

  “You’re not going to pull another heart attack on me, are you, Dad? Though I imagine that Fiona is an expert at CPR.” Surely that was in her repertoire of physical skills.

  Herbert leaned forward and lowered his voice. “How are your finances? Do you need any money?”