“Super,” said Lenore.
“Here’s that seltzer,” said Alvin.
“Frozen pea?” asked Clarice.
“Thanks.”
“Treat you right around here or what?”
Spatula accused Stoney of sneakily moving his game piece — a laughing little plastic Buddha of a baby with a pencil-sharpening hole in its head, given out by the gross at Stonecipheco stockholder meetings — from a position in which a chute-fall was imminent to a position in which a ladder-climb was imminent. There ensued unpleasantness, while Lenore ate some frozen peas. Clarice soothed Spatula while Alvin worked on the vertical hold of the giant-screen television.
Order was restored, and the vertical hold was looking good. Alvin rubbed his hands together.
“So how’s CabanaTan?” Lenore asked Clarice over her drink. Clarice owned and managed five Cleveland franchises of a tanning-parlor chain called CabanaTan. She had bought in originally by selling the Stonecipheco stock she’d gotten for a graduation present, something which had pissed Lenore and Clarice’s father off, a lot, at first, but he had calmed down when Clarice married Alvin Spaniard, whom Stonecipher Beadsman liked, and respected, and whose father had been at Stonecipheco all his life, too, and things were especially good now that Clarice, who obviously worked, and Alvin, who obviously also worked, had made an arrangement whereby they left the children during the day in the care of Nancy Malig, at the Beadsman home in Shaker Heights, the same Nancy Malig who had been Lenore and Clarice’s governess when they were children.
“CabanaTan is thriving,” Clarice said. “It’s been a cloudy summer, you know, and people feel the need to supplement. We’re gearing up for the fall rush. There’s always a fall rush, as people start losing the summer tan and get tense. We should have most of Cleveland roasting nicely by November.”
“And Misty Schwartz?”
“Can’t talk about it. Legal stuff. Other than Schwartz problems, it looks like a banner fall coming up.”
“Terrif.”
“And how about you? How’s the switchboard? How’s the bird?” Clarice asked. Lenore saw that Alvin was holding Spatula high over his head in the center of the living room, while Spatula laughed and kicked her legs.
“Sort of need to talk to you, for a bit, if we could break away, here, maybe Chutes and Ladders later…”
“Family theater in ten minutes, is the thing.”
“Maybe after, then, we could just sort of…”
On the big-screen television, shots of people running in slow motion ended. Stoney threw a Buddha-baby at Spatula. It missed, rang out against a bronze flowerpot. An announcer’s head filled the television.
“We’ll be back with a look at… gymnastics, and a live conversation with a… certain someone,” the announcer grinned mysteriously.
“Kopek Spasova,” said Lenore.
Alvin looked up. “You sure?”
“I feel in my marrow they’re going to have Kopek Spasova,” Lenore said.
“Holy shit,” said Alvin, “I’ve got to get a notebook.”
“Alvin, family theater in eight minutes.”
“I have to take notes. This is supposed to be Gerber’s nuclear weapon.”
“It is pineal-extract, you might say,” said Lenore.
“Jesus,” said Alvin, rummaging through his briefcase. Stoney and Spatula had been sucked into the television’s intake; they sat, Indian-style, staring at the screen. Lenore nonchalantly nudged the Chutes and Ladders game under the sofa with her foot.
“I’m going to go get the props, so we can start just the minute she’s done,” said Clarice. Lenore drank some seltzer and ate a bit of lime pulp floating on top.
Ed McMahon came on the television, doing a commercial for a line of tiny vaccum cleaners that were alleged to suck even the stubbornest lint out of your navel. “Sell it, Ed!” yelled Alvin Spaniard, grinning admiringly at the television.
“Is that regular, or cable?” Lenore asked.
“I think it’s network. I think that’s Curt Gowdy, doing the recap. OK, all set.” Alvin sat with his glasses and a yellow legal pad and a pen.
“You’ve sure got a lot of equipment on that television,” said Lenore.
“We’re a family that takes its home entertainment very seriously,” Alvin said. Stoney looked up at Lenore and nodded, and Alvin ruffled his hair.
“We’re back live,” said the announcer on television.
“Hurry Mommy, we’re back live!” shouted Stoney.
“Sshh,” Alvin said.
“I’m standing here with the brilliant Soviet — former Soviet gymnastics coach Ruble Spasov,” said the announcer, “and with the equally brilliant former Soviet gymnast and certainly not former Olympic and World Championship gold medalist Kopek Spasova, Mr. Spasov’s daughter.” The camera panned down from the adults’ heads to their stomachs to get Kopek Spasova in the shot. She was a thin, blond-haired, hollow-cheeked girl with enormous black circles under her eyes.
Clarice came in with a load of masks and cardboard cut-outs and some personal items in a box.
“Well, at least she’s not pretty,” said Alvin.
“Sshh,” said Spatula.
“Ruble, Kopek, how did it feel to win all the big ones?” asked the announcer.
“Who is this person?” asked Ruble Spasov, looking to someone behind and off to the side of the camera.
“It felt good to win,” said Kopek Spasova.
/b/
3 September
Monroe Fieldbinder, a successful six-foot estate attorney with a fine lawn and a two-hundred-pound body as fit and taut as it was exceptionally attractive, returned one Wednesday night from the home of his gorgeous Wednesday mistress to find his house in flames and his house surrounded by the pulsing lights of fire and police engines of fire engines and police cars and saw that his house was in flames on fire and that his bird, Richard the Lionhearted, who lived inside, was probably dead, in his iron cage.
As Monroe Fieldbinder watched his house burn, he felt all the order and unity of his life melt away into chaos and disorder. He grinned wryly.
How explicit need we make this burning? Need we a reference, or just a picture? “Grinned wryly” seems most potent when used in reference to a picture. Pictures do things. Show, don’t tell.
Do pictures tell? I have a color Polaroid of Vance at seven and Veronica at twenty-nine traversing a rickety dry-gray dock in Nova Scotia to board a fishing boat. The water is a deep iron smeared with plates of foam; the sky is a thin iron smeared with same; the mass of white gulls around Vance’s outstretched bread-filled hand is a cloud of plunging white V’s. Vance Vigorous, as he holds out his white little child’s hand, is surrounded and obscured by a cloud of living, breathing, shrieking, shitting, plunging incarnations of the letter V; and I have it captured forever on quality film, giving me the right and power to cry whenever and wherever I please. What might that say about pictures.