Cadence took the remote from Chadley’s hand, skipped past a few titles with Hustler in them, and found the next page of possibilities. “Amateurs? I mean, Jesus, there are some people you just shouldn’t see naked.”
Chadley snorted a bit. “Like who?”
“I don’t know. Anyone who looks like a high school P.E. teacher. Some guy with a mustache who takes his wife to a swingers’ party for her birthday. You know, the ones right at the cutting edge of fashion.”
Chadley nodded as if he knew what she was driving at. “If it was 1978.”
“Exactly.” She clicked to another choice. “And just who is this Rocco guy anyway? Is that the one who calls every girl he meets a whore? Charming. There’s nothing hot about a guy who stuffs it into you and says, ‘Take it, bitch.’”
Nothing could be more of a buzz kill than a woman who wanted to discuss the politics of erotic art on New Year’s Eve, but here she was, thinking in terms of exploitation, coercion, the hegemonic and male-driven industry of pornography promoting an image of women’s bodies—tan, enhanced, hairless—that could be achieved only through the diligent patronage of plastic surgeons and aesthetic technicians. She wanted to impress upon Chadley the absurdity of the situation, ask him to read books she hadn’t thought about since college, Sexual Politics, Backlash, The Feminine Mystique. She wasn’t opposed to pornography. She was simply opposed to situations, the situations of most of those movies and the situations she found herself in now, their contrived nature, this boy next to her with the insistent cock and utter lack of romance.
She could forgive the cock. The body was always the body, and wanted what it wanted; the people who spoke of what the heart wanted were often proven fools. Lately she had been dividing humanity into two categories: those who were fools and those who weren’t. At this moment, she was realizing in which category her recent behavior had placed her.
So, like countless other women in the course of history, she knew the rest of her trip had become something to endure. She pressed the Purchase button for what felt like the most innocuous choice, and the screen filled with two couples fucking side by side at a swimming pool somewhere in the plastic diorama of the San Fernando Valley.
Chadley turned the volume down a bit. “We should make our own movie. Get a camera and a tripod. You can see what it really looks like.”
“I have a pretty good idea what it looks like.”
“Only in your head. It would be more interesting if we were in it.”
“Maybe,” Cadence said, knowing that even though Chadley was still as enthralled with her as he would be with any new lover, he’d likely take her reluctance as a disappointment. “Maybe it would help you to learn what it looks like when it’s real.”
Just then the camera went back to a shot featuring a preeminent view of a guy’s muscular and completely hairless ass. “Okay, that’s real, but that’s disturbing. The guy has a tan line. From a thong,” Chadley said, punctuating his thoughts with an eeeeeewww. The camera focused on the first couple, the man sitting on the edge of the pool deck, dangling his feet in the water, while the woman lowered herself on top of him.
Cadence laughed, knowing he’d missed the point of her comment. “And what’s up with the way she’s shaved?” The woman’s pubic hair had been whittled down to a single, pencil-thin line that ran a half inch straight up and down.
Chadley said, “We live in an era of intricate grooming. What do they call that anyway?”
“Whatever you call it, it’s awful.” Cadence nestled into the crook of Chadley’s left arm. “That girl is just straight-off-the-bus-from-Topeka skanky. Those press-on nails could put an eye out. But Christ, this is boring. They’re not even really showing anything.”
She knew in her heart that she didn’t mean that the movie was boring; it was the company. She’d thought she had the temperament for a meaningless fling, someone who would be attentive and grateful, and here Chadley seemed bent on being neither. Cadence knew too she would become a story told to his friends, guys he played pickup basketball with, whatever he did to fill up his Saturdays; she’d be the older woman who’d curled his toes for a while, a tale to be told, the same way her father, when he finally put down the drinking for good, substituted stories of his drinking for an actual drink.
And that’s when it hit her—Chadley already was a story, one she hadn’t quite finished. But she knew how it would end. Just then, one of the men reared up and announced that he was going to come, and Chadley and Cadence stopped talking as the camera moved in for a close-up of his eyes as they wrinkled tightly shut.
“That’s worse than stupid guitar-player face,” Cadence said.
She was willing to let Chadley fuck her one last time and managed not to worry about her makeup, or that she was down to a last pair of clean underwear. She touched herself discreetly to make sure she was ready, then climbed on top of Chadley, who immediately began with his usual furious grindings. As she took his fingers from around her neck, she finally found a way to say it to him. “Can we just fuck like normal people for once? Make an effort at normal anyway?” And when Chadley raised himself up to argue with her, she pressed a finger to his mouth, which he licked a few times, stopping only when she told him, “Spare me the histrionics.”
He extracted himself from under her, and she fell back on the bed. He kissed his way down across her stomach, and that’s when she touched him under the chin, pulled him back up until his head came to rest on her shoulder, and told him that was enough.
12
THE VOICE on the phone kept referring to Ash as Warren. He bit his tongue. He hated to be called Warren.
A doctor was explaining, and Ash kept telling him to go back to the beginning, which he obligingly did. That was how Ash knew it was bad. The hospital, the doctor said, has Warren Eugene Ashburton, thirty-four, lately of Salt Lake City, Utah, on record as the possessor of both durable and medical powers of attorney over his mother, Geneva. He was the sole contact in case of emergency.
Warren listened as the resident physician explained the events of the morning. Apparently, his mother had been suffering some nonspecific confusion (Warren wrote a note to look up what exactly Lewy body dementia was). The resident had diagnosed Geneva with three possible fractures—each wrist (X-rays would later confirm cracks in the hamate and sesamoid bones of the right wrist, which had absorbed the brunt of the impact) and the left hip. There was more news to come, and the news would get worse before it got better.
The hip would be problematic, an orthopod would need to see the film, but, he was explaining on the phone to Warren—Can I call you Warren?—Geneva was likely to spend New Year’s Day having emergency surgery to insert a series of screws into the compromised socket of her hip.
The guilt of children too, with regard to the treatment of their elderly parents, is commonplace, as was Ash’s first thought upon hearing of his mother’s injury; her broken hip was retribution, karmic payback for his decision not to travel home to Texas for Christmas. He was studying for the bar, after all, an excuse that two weeks ago had seemed legitimate. Guilt on this scale is what makes the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the Saturday before Christmas the busiest travel days of the year.
But Ash and Sherri hadn’t flown to Texas this year. Instead they’d spent thirty-seven dollars to send a large box overnight, and the box had arrived on Christmas Eve, its tardiness making Geneva wonder if her only child had even bothered with a token remembrance of her for the holiday. She’d said as much on the phone, I thought you’d forgotten about me, in a depressed yet even tone that reminded Ash of Eeyore and his end-of-the-world pronouncements.
The fact that she’d said all of this while narrating her unwrapping of a cashmere cardigan sweater in her favorite color (lilac) made Ash wish that he’d done nothing at all, not even made the phone call. If he’d shown up with a catered dinner, a marching band, and the president of the United States in tow, Geneva would have complained about the fuss. Whatever he managed was n
ever enough.
What made it worse was that she knew how tough it was on Ash and Sherri. Sometimes Geneva resorted to a particularly passive-aggressive kind of blackmail, sending money for one plane ticket, not two; Ash suspected that his mother knew that he had neither the cash nor the available credit to buy a second ticket for his wife.
Ash asked the doctor, who spoke with the lilt of colonial India in his voice, to run through the probabilities again.
“It is almost certainly surgery,” the doctor said. He had a four-syllable last name that Ash hadn’t caught. “She will need to start physical therapy as soon as possible after surgery if she wants to continue to walk unassisted.”
Nine forty-seven a.m. Mountain Central Time, and Ash was on the phone making plans for an emergency trip to Dallas. Sherri moved past him to the bathroom and started the shower; only when he heard her turn the water off did he realize that he’d been on hold with the airline for more than ten minutes. The airlines made contingency plans for grieving relatives, half-off fares and customer service representatives who seemed to actually give a damn, but a broken hip was to them an everyday occurrence and didn’t have anything to do with whether Warren Ashburton possessed the $874 available credit for the ticket home.
While the customer service agent looked again for a cheaper fare, Ash thought about his mother. He hadn’t realized how nebulous a concept home could become. Home wasn’t where his mother lived; in the years since his father’s death, she’d shed nearly everything that had once belonged to the both of them. Once she’d moved into the care facility, she seemed to spend her afternoons handing off her personal items to whoever happened by for a visit; Ash himself had collected pot holders and odd photographs and stainless-steel flatware and a patriotically colored afghan that his great-aunt had knit out of acrylic yarn in celebration of the Bicentennial. The reservation agent apologized for having nothing cheaper, advised him to check at the gate; there was still time for him to make the noon flight if he was willing to hold the seat now with a major credit card.
Sherri exited the bathroom and walked naked to the bedside. Ash wrote flight numbers and a total on a blow-in card that had fallen out of her most recent issue of Vogue. She took the towel from around her head and wrung the excess water from her hair into it, and Ash pulled her close by snaking his left arm around her waist. He kept talking to the reservation agent, and even as he was confirming the expiration date of a MasterCard that was nearly at its limit, he was kissing his wife on the stomach, just above the hip bone, and then down toward the feathered tail of her appendectomy scar. He covered the receiver, whispered, “It’s Mom.”
13
FEAR. IT was part of the dialectic now, the foundation of the language. Fear of terrorist strikes, fear of the devaluation of currencies in the developing world, fear of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, fear of carcinogens lurking in our food supply, fear of Alar and malathion and sodium laureth sulfate, fear of nitrates and nitrites, fear of genetically modified foodstuffs, fear of high-fructose corn syrup, of partially hydrogenated oils, artificial sweeteners, fear of crumbling infrastructure, fear of human immunodeficiency virus and dwindling T-cell counts, fear of fear, fear of a vague and unidentifiable spot on a chest X-ray, fear of teenagers in hip-hop regalia crossing an unlit street, fear of sleeping alone, fear of the inevitable prostate problems and urinary difficulties, fear of a black planet, fear of a dwindling Nielsen or an irrelevant Q rating, fear of thinning hair and drooping jowls, fear of being discovered, fear of being ignored, fear of the hard truths, fear of death and dying and especially of dying alone. Fear was the exact way we were being taken apart, this fear that cleaved the country in two, the runny albumen from the solid core of the yolk, fear of us versus them.
And Richard’s entire professional life was us versus them. He wanted for once to find a way to win an argument without resorting to cheap stunts, theatrics, or rhetorical flourishes, or just by being lucky enough to get the last word before the commercial break. He dreamed of the day his opponent would simply scratch his head and say, “You know, you’re right,” a phrase he figured he had never actually heard uttered in all his years in Washington.
In other words, Richard MacMurray had qualms about the product he was selling.
He settled in for coffee and a survey of the morning news. One network thought the most important story of the week was the death of a comic actor—cause undetermined but suspected to be blunt head trauma, the result of a drunken fall in his own bathroom—as narrated by film clips and interviews with the coroner to the stars, who had managed to present himself and this theory on three different networks in just under ninety minutes.
Another network ran a story recapping a year’s worth of disappearances of young blond girls. The missing that year had always been girls, never any older than fourteen, affluent in their youth and beauty. From the moment they disappeared, it was even-money odds: for every family made whole, another would be left heartbroken, and somehow it all came back to the image. The anecdote of one rescue: The wife of a policeman in Fort Durango worked part-time at a local Wendy’s. From her perch at the register in the drive-through window, she saw a girl from northern Arizona cowering in the backseat. She couldn’t have been more than twelve.
The face was familiar only from the news broadcasts, but that had to be the missing girl, shaking gently against the restraint of her own arms, her hair already cut and dyed. Because this wife of a policeman knew the image—the slightly buck teeth, the coltish legs—the girl had been saved. The news had been broadcasting home video of the girl at a church picnic, shying away from her father’s camera; her picture had been superimposed behind the left shoulder of dozens of anchors. The image moved, evolved; in the case of this particular girl, the jump cut went to video of a tearful reunion with her parents, the father’s emotional thanks to a local sheriff, the refusal to speculate on what had happened to her in captivity, the usual wild gratitude.
More often, the girl, the body, was never found.
A family waited for answers that never came. A grieving mother gave a year-end interview, sitting on her plastic-wrapped couch; her daughter’s room remained a shrine, pristine, untouched. The only thing left was the image, the seventh-grade school portrait of a girl everyone knew was dead. The gap between her front teeth meant she wasn’t quite through her course of orthodontia, forever thirteen monthly payments away from the removal of her braces. The image was photocopied, faxed, emailed, broadcast; state troopers with creased hats stopped traffic at shopping malls and interstate on-ramps, hopefully comparing faces. Dogs used their noses to rout the undercarpet of desiccated leaves and moss in the nearest forest, their handlers hoping for the type of definitive answers that could only be provided by a body encased in the coroner’s black polymer bag.
The morning anchor did a live read promoting Richard’s next gig, an afternoon slot defending two Texas high school seniors who’d published an underground newspaper that even Richard thought fell on the wrong side of tasteless. For the past week, Richard had been giving it the hard sell, making the rounds of the cable news shows, pounding the same talking point over and over: Freedom of speech doesn’t stop at the front door of our public schools. It didn’t matter much that case law had proven him wrong on countless occasions, or that the two students in question were arrogant shits gifted with spectacularly bad judgment. It wasn’t the newspaper, just the kids and their preeminent sense of entitlement. Their little underground paper ended up in the legitimate news once the principal confiscated all its copies and suspended the pair indefinitely; the students got themselves called on the carpet by the local school board, which was rumored to be considering expulsion. And what was the crime, exactly? With its crude cartoons and sarcastic headlines, the stunt was hardly enough to foment revolution—the most controversial things it advocated were free condoms in the school clinic and the reinstatement of an assistant principal who had resigned after pictures of him were found on websites “promoting leat
her, motorcycles, and homosexuality.”
But because the week between Christmas and New Year’s was the dead time for the news—the top-of-the-hour broadcasts filled with B-roll video of dogs singing “Jingle Bells,” Good Samaritan stories about families who lost everything in a fire only to have their Christmas presents replaced by a millionaire benefactor—Richard had been on the air eight times on three different networks. The students were a spicy story that seemed to have a little of everything: race, class, the light and heat of a 1960s protest.
Richard secretly longed for marches in the streets and students seizing the university president’s office, putting their feet up on the desk, drinking his brandy, and smoking his cigars. He wanted flowers in rifle barrels and rioters overturning buses.
If these kids wanted to exercise their First Amendment rights, if they were willing to live up to the obligation to be truthful, then he would live up to his obligation to defend them. The principal had gone on Nightline and made the mistake of calling the paper libelous. Richard, in the following segment, told Ted Koppel, “There can be no such thing as libel when what you write is the truth.” Even though he didn’t much care for the attitude of his clients, he couldn’t help but egg them on; his advice was to do everything short of protesting at the school board meeting carrying sandwich boards that read I Am a Man.
Which meant that ever since Richard and his team of activists had taken up the cause, things had gotten worse for the two kids; their expulsion was upheld, and one of them had his acceptance to the University of Texas rescinded. The story’s place in the news cycle would soon be assumed by an outrage of newer vintage, but Richard’s strategy here was still slash-and-burn; he expected in every interview to throw out the word Nazi a time or two, mostly for the shock value, but also because it was one of the few ways to make a school board nervous.
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