His assailant—a victim of senile paranoia—had almost managed to shoot him. But Oscar couldn’t seem to connect. The facts weren’t registering. He was numbed.
He went upstairs to his third-floor office. He unlocked his desk and retrieved his super-special crisis notebook. Also, a vintage Waterman pen. At times like this it always helped him to make a list. Not on a screen. With his own hands. He placed the journal down on his Eero Saarinen desktop, and began to write.
Priority A. Become Bambakias chief of staff.
Reform Collaboratory. Internal coup. Purge. Remove entire old guard. Cut budget drastically, reform finances. Note: with luck a success here will obviate any need for second committee assignment.
Huey. Is deal possible? Consider full range of countermeasures.
Augment personal krewe. Stop desertions. Note: Buna hotel must clear profit. Note: engage new security director at once. Must be trusted implicitly.
Return bus to FedDems, must pay for new paint job.
Greta. More sex, less email. Note: Boston Visit Imminent!!! Fly krewe members in for conference support, prepare total makeover. Note: use ALL extra days, insist on this. Note: prepare groundwork within Buna while she is OUT of lab—feigned illness gambit. PS I think I love her.
Need house-sitter.
Return stupid animal to Buna, arrange good cover story. Note: avoid corruption entanglements.
I really must stay alive and not be shot thru netwar harassment. Note: this issue needs much higher ranking.
Who the hell sent that demolition mob to the bank in Worcester? Note: rational game strategy not possible when pieces are invisible, intangible, or immaterial.
Emergency committees must go. They were basic source of Bambakias/Huguelet contretemps. American political situation basically impossible when constitutional authority flouted by irresponsible usurpers. Note: even chief of staff position is fatally subject to their caprice.
Sen. Bambakias—hunger strike physical state depression?
Oscar gazed at his list. He had already used up half the alphabet, and he could feel the very air around him swarming with the unforeseen. It was all just too much. It was chaos, madness, a writhing nest of eels.
It was just too complex. It was utterly unmanageable. Unless…unless somehow the process was automated. With more specific goals. Some reengineering. Critical path analysis. Decentralization. Co-optation. Thinking outside the box. But then there were so many other people. They all depended on him. He had to deputize…
He was stymied. He was surrounded. He was through, finished, crushed. There was no possibility of coherent accomplishment. Nothing was ever going to move.
He had to do something. Just one thing. Get one single thing accomplished, put one issue finally away.
He picked up the desk phone. Lorena’s secretary fielded the call. He fought his way through.
“I’m sorry, Oscar,” Lorena told him, “I have Alcott on another line. Can I call you back?”
“This won’t take long. It’s important.”
“Yes?”
“There’s news. Moira is in jail, here in Boston. I tried to reason with her about the situation. She lost control, she got violent. There happened to be a policeman handy, luckily for me. The Boston cops have nailed Moira on a domestic battery charge.”
“Good Lord, Oscar.”
“I don’t plan to press charges against her, but I don’t want to tell her that. I want you to handle it now. It’s time for you to take over. Moira’s in the slammer, I’m playing the angry heavy, and you’re her forgiving guardian angel. You see? You’re going to smooth it all over for her, keep it all quiet. That’s how we have to play it with her, because that’s how it’s going to work.”
“Are you kidding? Let her rot!”
“No, I’m not kidding. I’m handing you a permanent solution here. Think about it.”
A long and thoughtful silence. “Yes, you’re right, of course. That is the best way to handle it.”
“I’m glad that you see it my way.”
“I’ll have to grit my teeth a little, but it’s worth it.” A meditative pause. “You’re really amazing.”
“Just part of the job, ma’am.”
“Is there anything else?”
“No. Wait. Yes. Tell me something. Does my voice sound all right to you?”
“For an encrypted line, this is a great connection.”
“No, I mean, I’m not talking really fast? Not, like, a high-pitched squeal?”
Lorena lowered her voice to a croon. “No, Oscar, you sound great. You are completely wonderful. You are handsome and charming, you are completely dependable, you are Mr. Realpolitik. I trust you completely. You have never, ever failed me, and if I had owned that goddamn lab in Colombia I would have cloned a dozen of you. You are the best in the whole wide world.”
Greta arrived after midnight, in an unmanned cab.
Oscar checked his door monitor. A Green-house nor’easter had come in, and fat snowflakes swirled in the conical glow of alerted streetlights. A wandering police drone zipped behind Greta’s head like a black leather swallow. Oscar unlocked his door, peering with a game and cheery grin from behind its bulletproof facing.
She stamped in with a face like a thundercloud. He rapidly abandoned the notion of embracing her. “You didn’t have any trouble getting here, I hope?”
“In Boston? Heavens no.” She yanked her hat off and knocked snow from its brim. “Boston’s so civilized.”
“There was a little trouble in the street earlier.” Oscar paused delicately. “Nothing too serious. Tell me all about your conference.”
“I’ve been out with Bellotti and Hawkins. They were trying to get me drunk.” She was, Oscar realized belatedly, very drunk indeed. She was plastered. He relieved her of her coat like a nurse removing a bandage. Greta was dressed in her best: knee-length woolen skirt, sensible shoes, green cotton blouse.
He hung her hat and rumpled coat inside the entrance alcove. “Bellotti and Hawkins would be the gentlemen studying fibrils,” he prompted.
Her scowl faded. “Well, it’s a pretty good conference. It’s just a bad night. Bellotti was buying us drinks, and Hawkins was shaking me down for lab results. I don’t mind talking results before publication, but those guys don’t play fair. They don’t want to reveal their really hot stuff.” Her lips thinned with contempt. “It might have commercial potential.”
“I see.”
“They’re industry hustlers. They’re all cagey, and edgy, and streetwise. They’re hopeless.”
He led her through the dayroom and snapped on the kitchen lights. In the sudden cozy glow, her face looked congealed and waxy. Smudgy lipstick. Loopy-looking crisp dark hair. The unplucked eyebrows were especially unfortunate.
She closely examined the pedestal chairs, the chromed table, the ceramic rangetop island, the built-in resonators. “This is some kind of kitchen you have here,” she said wonderingly. “It’s so…clean. You could do labwork in this kitchen.”
“Thanks.”
She settled with drunken caution into the white plastic shell of a Saarinen tulip chair.
“You have every right to complain,” Oscar said. “You’re surrounded by exploiters and morons.”
“They’re not morons, they’re very bright guys. It’s just…Well, I don’t do industrial work. Science is not about the money. Basic science is all about…Basic research, you see, it’s supposed to be for…” She waved one hand irritably. “What the hell was it?”
“For the public good?” Oscar suggested suavely.
“Yeah, that was it! The public good! I suppose that sounds totally naive to you. But I do know one thing—I’m not supposed to be stuffing my own bank account while the taxpayers pick up my tab.”
Oscar dug through the glossy sliding shelves of a Kuramata cabinet. “Would a coffee help? I’ve got freeze-dried.”
The scowl returned, settling into her eyebrows as if tattooed there. “You can’t do real science
and be a businessman on your weekends. If you’re serious about it, there aren’t any weekends.”
“This is a weekend, Greta.”
“Oh.” She gazed at him with an alcohol-fueled mélange of surprise and regret. “Well, I can’t stay with you for the whole weekend. There’s a hot seminar tomorrow morning at nine. ‘Cytoplasm Domains.’”
“Cytoplasm sounds very compelling.”
“I’m here for tonight, anyway. Let’s have a little drink together.” She opened her purse. “Oh no. I forgot my gin. It’s in my bag.” She blinked. “Oh no, Oscar, I forgot my overnight bag! I left it back at the hotel…”
“You also forgot I don’t drink,” Oscar said.
She cradled her forehead on the heels of her hands.
“It’s fine,” Oscar said. “Just forget about work for a minute. I have a krewe. We can supply anything you need.”
She was having a bad moment at the kitchen table: doubt and bitterness. “Let me show you my house,” Oscar told her cheerfully. “It’ll be fun.”
He led her into the dayroom. It had a Piet Heim elliptical coffee table, steel-and-birchwood cantilever chairs, an inflatable vinyl divan.
“You’ve got modern art,” she said.
“That’s my Kandinsky. Composition VIII, from 1923.” He touched the frame, adjusting it by a hair’s width. “I don’t know why they still call this ‘modern art’ when it’s a hundred and twenty years old.”
She carefully studied the glowing canvas, glanced at Oscar meditatively, examined the painting again. “Why do they call this stuff ‘art’ at all? It’s just a big mess of angles and blobs.”
“I know it seems that way to you, but that’s because you don’t have any taste.” Oscar restrained a sigh. “Kandinsky knew all the big period art krewes: Blaue Reiter group, Surrealists, Supremacists, Futurists…Kandinsky was huge.”
“Did it cost you a lot of money?” Clearly she hoped not.
“No, I picked it up for peanuts when the Guggenheim threw a fire sale. All the art between 1914 and 1989—you know, the Communist Period, the core of the twentieth century—that’s all totally out of fashion nowadays. Kandinsky is the very opposite of ‘modern art’ now, but you know, I find him absolutely relevant. Wassily Kandinsky really speaks to me. You know…if Kandinsky were alive today…I really think he might have understood all this.”
She shook her head woozily. “‘Modern art’…How could they get away with all that? It’s like some huge, ugly scam.” She sneezed suddenly. “Sorry. My allergies are acting up.”
“Come with me.”
He led her to his media center. He was particularly proud of this room. It was a modern political war room done in a period idiom. Chairs of pierced aluminum were stacked against the wall, there were modular storage units, swarms of flat displays. Danish shelving, a caster-trolley, bright plastic Kartell office baskets. Handsome Milanese lamps…No frills, no furbelows, no wasted motion. Everything pruned back, all very efficient and sleek.
“This looks all right,” she said. “I could work in a place like this.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that. I hope you’ll have that chance.”
She smiled. “Why not? I like it here. This place is very you.”
He was touched. “That’s very sweet, but I should be honest about it…It’s not my interior design. I mean, that Kandinsky canvas was certainly my choice, but after I sold my start-up company, I bought this house, and I brought in a professional designer…I was very focused about my house then. We worked on this place for months. Giovanna was very good about it, we used to absolutely haunt the antique markets…”
“‘Giovanna,’” she said. “What a lovely name. She must have been very elegant.”
“She was, but it didn’t work out.”
Greta gazed with sudden waspish attention at the tracklights and the gleaming tower of chairs. “And then there was that other person—the journalist. She must have loved this media room.”
“Clare lived here! This was her home.”
“She’s gone to Holland now, right?”
“Yes, she’s gone. That didn’t work out, either.”
“Why don’t they work out for you, Oscar?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He jammed his hands in his pockets. “That’s an excellent question, isn’t it?”
“Well,” she said, “maybe it’s an excellent question, but maybe I shouldn’t have asked it.”
“No, Greta, I like it when you show up drunk and confrontational.”
He crossed his arms. “Let me get you fully up to speed here, all right? You see, I’m the product of unusual circumstances. I grew up in a very special milieu. Logan Valparaiso’s dream home. A classic Hollywood mansion. Tennis courts. Palm trees. Monogrammed everything, zebra skins, and gold fixtures. A big playground for Logan’s friends, all these maquiladora millionaires and South American dope czars. My dad had the worst taste in the world. I wanted this place to be different.”
“What’s different about it?”
“Nothing,” he said bitterly. “I wanted my home to be genuine. But this place has never been real. Because I have no family. No one has ever lived in here who cared enough about me to stay. In fact, I’m rarely even here myself. I’m always out on the road. So this place is a fraud. It’s an empty shell. I’ve tried my very best, but it’s all been an evil fantasy, it’s completely failed me.” He shrugged. “So, welcome home.”
She looked stricken. “Look, I didn’t say any of that.”
“Well, that’s what you were thinking.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know what I’m thinking.”
“I agree that I can’t outthink you. Not from a dead start. But I do know how you feel.”
“You don’t know that, either.”
“Oh yes I do. Of course I do. I know it by the way you talk. By the way you move your hands. I can see it in the way you look.” He smiled. “Because I’m a politician.”
She put her hand over her own mouth.
Then, without warning, she embraced him and printed a damp kiss on his upper lip. He slid his arms around her lean torso. She felt magnetic, hypnotic, absolutely compelling.
She bent backward in his tightening grip and laughed.
He pulled her toward the inflated couch. They fell together on it with a bounce and squeak. He buried his face in the sweet juncture of her neck and shoulder.
She slid her narrow hand through the open collar of his shirt. He nuzzled her jawline. Those wondrous cavities beneath her earlobes. The authentic idiosyncrasy in the tendons of her neck.
Their lips parted stickily. She pulled back half an inch. “I like feeling jealous,” she said. “That’s new for me.”
“I could explain all that, you know.”
“Stop explaining. I’d bet anything Clare’s dresses are still in your bedroom closet.” She laughed. “Show me, I want to see.”
Once upstairs, she spun in place, swinging her purse, tottering just a little. “Now, this room is amazing. Your closets are bigger than my dorm room.”
He set to work on his shoes. He stripped off his socks. One, two. He started on his cufflinks. Why did it always take forever to strip? Why couldn’t clothes simply vanish, so people could get on with it? Clothes always vanished in movies.
“Are these walls really white suede? You have leather wallpaper?”
He glanced over. “You need some help undressing?”
“That’s all right. You don’t have to rip my clothes off more than once.”
Six endless minutes later he lay gasping in a nest of sheets. She sidled off to the bathroom, her hairdo smashed and her collarbones flushed. He heard her turning on the bidet, then every faucet in the room—the shower, the tub, the white sink, the black sink. Greta was experimenting, running all the local equipment. He lay there breathing deeply and felt weirdly gratified, like a small yet brilliant child who had snatched candy from under a door with a yardstick.
She came padding fr
om the shower, black hair lank and dripping, her eyes as bright as a weasel’s. She crept into bed and embraced him, clammy, and frozen-footed, and reeking of upscale shampoo. She held him and said nothing. He fell asleep as if tumbling into a pit.
He woke later, head buzzing and muddled. Greta was standing before an open closet door, examining herself in its inset full-length mirror. She was wearing panties, and a pair of his socks, which she had jammed, inside out, onto her narrow, chilly feet.
She held a dress before herself and studied the effect. Oscar suddenly recognized the dress. He had bought Clare that sundress because she looked so lovely in yellow. Clare had hated the dress, he now realized groggily. She’d always hated the dress. Clare even hated yellow.
“What was all that noise just now?” he croaked.
“Some idiot banging the door downstairs,” Greta said. She dropped the dress on the floor, in a pile of half a dozen others. “The cops arrested him.” She picked out a beaded evening gown. “Go back to sleep.”
Oscar turned in place, scrunched the pillow, grabbed for slumber, and missed. He gathered awareness and watched her through slitted eyes. It was half past four in the morning.
“Aren’t you sleepy?” he said.
She caught his eye in the mirror, surprised to see him still awake. She turned out the closet light, crossed the room silently, in darkness, and slid into bed.
“What have you been doing all this time?” he murmured.
“I’ve been exploring your house.”
“Any big discoveries?”
“Yes, I discovered what it means to be a rich guy’s girlfriend.” She sighed. “No wonder people want the job.”
He laughed. “What about my situation? I’m the boy-toy of a Nobel Prize winner.”
“I was watching you sleep,” she said wistfully. “You look so sweet.”
“Why do you say that?”
Distraction Page 20
