'I've only gotten one letter since he left, and all it says is how much he's taking care of a picture of me, and would I believe he kisses it? He didn't really like to kiss me. I could feel it.'
'The harnessed bundles of insulated wires all seem well connected to their burners' transformers, so I have to disconnect each bundle from its outflow jack on the distributor circuit and look at the circuit itself. The circuit is just too old and grimy and crude and pathetic to be certain about, but its AC-input and hot-current-outputs seem free of impediment or shear or obvious misconnec-tion. My aunt is conjugating French ir-verbs in the imperfect. She has a soft voice. It's quite pretty. She says: "Je venais, tu venais, il venait, elle venait, nous venions, vous veniez, Us venaient, elles venaient." I am deep in the bowels of the stove when she says my uncle once mentioned that it was just a matter of a screw to be tightened or something that had to be given a good knock. This is not especially helpful. I tighten the rusted screws on the case of the distributor circuit, reattach the unit cord to the input jack, and am about to reattach the bundles of wire from the burners when I see that the harnesses, bundle casings, and the outflow jacks on the circuit are so old and worn and be-gooed that I can't possibly tell which bundle of wires corresponds to which outflow jack on the circuit. I am afraid of a fire hazard if the current is made to cross improperly in the circuit, and the odds are (½)4! that anyone could guess the proper jack for each bundle correctly. "Je tenais," my aunt says to herself. "Tu tenais, il tenait." She asks me if everything is going all right. I tell her I've probably almost got it. She says that if it's something serious it would really be no trouble to wait until my uncle gets home, that he's an old hand with that devil of a stove and could have a look; and if neither he nor I could get the thing going we two could just go out and get a bite. I feel my frightening haircut and tell her I've probably almost got it. I decide to strip some of the bundles of their old pink plastic casings for a few inches to see whether the wires themselves might be color-coded. I detach the bundles from their harnesses and strip down the first two, but all the wires reveal themselves to be the same dull, silverfish-gray, their conduction elements so old and frayed that the wires begin to unravel and stick out in different directions, and become disordered, and now I couldn't get them back in the distributor circuit even if I could tell where they went, not to mention the increased hazard inherent in crossing current in bare wires. I begin to sweat. I notice that the stove's unit cord's cloth insulation is itself so badly worn that one or two filaments of copper 220-wire are protruding. The cord could have been the trouble all along. I realize that I should have tried to activate the main oven unit first to see whether the power problem was even more fundamental than the burner bundles or the circuit. My aunt shifts in her chair. I begin to have trouble breathing. Stripped, frayed burner wires are spread out over the distributor like gray hair. The wires will have to be rebound into bundles in order to be reinserted and render the burners even potentially workable, but my uncle has no tool for binding. Nor have I ever personally bound a system of wire. The work that interests me is done with a pencil and a sheet of paper. Rarely even a calculator. At the cutting edge of electrical engineering, almost everything interesting is resolvable via the manipulation of variables. I've never once been stumped on an exam. Ever. And I appear to have broken this miserable piece-of-shit stove. I am unsure what to do. I could attach the main oven's own conduction bundle to a burner's outflow jack on the distributor circuit, but I have no idea how hot the resultant surge would render the burner. There is no way to know without data on the resistance ratios in the metal composition of the burners. The current used to heat a large oven even to WARM could melt a burner down. It's not impossible. I begin almost to cry. My aunt is moving on to ir/iss verbs. "Je par-tissais, tu partissais, il partissait, elk partissait." '
"You're unable to fix an electric stove?"
'My aunt asks again if I'm sure it's no problem and I don't answer because I'm afraid of how my voice will sound. I carefully disconnect the other end of each bundle from each burner's transformer and loop all the wire very neatly and lay it at the bottom of the stove. I tidy things up. Suddenly the inside of this stove is the very last place on earth I want to be. I begin to be frightened of the stove. Around its side I can see my aunt's feet as she stands. I hear the refrigerator door open. A dish is set on the counter above me and something crinkly removed; through the odors of stove-slime and ancient connections I can smell a delicate waft of chili. I rattle a screwdriver against the inside of the stove so my aunt thinks I'm doing something. I get more and more frightened.'
'He told me he loved me lots of times.'
"Frightened of what?"
'I've broken their stove. I need a binding tool. But I've never bound a wire.'
'And when he said it he believed it. And I know he still does.'
"What does this have to do with anything?"
'It feels like it has everything to do with it. I'm so scared behind this dirty old stove I can't breathe. I rattle tools.'
"Is it that you love this pretty old woman and fear you've harmed a stove she's had since before Kennedy?"
'But I think feeling like he loved somebody scared him.'
'This is a crude piece of equipment.'
"Whom else have you harmed."
'My aunt comes back behind the stove and stands behind me and peers into the tidied black hollow of the stove and says it looks like I've done quite a bit of work! I point at the filthy distributor circuit with my screwdriver and do not say anything. I prod it with the tool.'
"What are you afraid of."
'But I don't think he needs to get hurt like this. No matter what.'
'I believe, behind the stove, with my aunt kneeling down to lay her hand on my shoulder, that I'm afraid of absolutely everything there is.'
"Then welcome."
MY APPEARANCE
I AM a woman who appeared in public on "Late Night with David Letterman" on March 22, 1989.
In the words of my husband Rudy, I am a woman whose face and attitudes are known to something over half of the measurable population of the United States, whose name is on lips and covers and screens. And whose heart's heart is invisible, and unapproachably hidden. Which is what Rudy thought could save me from all this appearance implied.
The week that surrounded March 22, 1989 was also the week David Letterman's variety-and-talk show featured a series of videotaped skits on the private activities and pastimes of executives at NBC. My husband, whose name is better known inside the entertainment industry than out of it, was anxious: he knew and feared Letterman; he claimed to know for a fact that Letterman loved to savage female guests, that he was a misogynist. It was on Sunday that he told me he felt he and Ron and Ron's wife Charmian ought to prepare me to handle and be handled by Letterman. March 22 was to be Wednesday.
On Monday, viewers accompanied David Letterman as he went deep-sea fishing with the president of NBC's News Divison. The executive, whom my husband had met and who had a pappus of hair sprouting from each red ear, owned a state-of-the-art boat and rod and reel, and apparently deep-sea fished without hooks. He and Letterman fastened bait to their lines with rubber bands.
"He's waiting for the poor old bastard to even think about saying holy mackerel," Rudy grimaced, smoking.
On Tuesday, Letterman perused NBC's chief of Creative Development's huge collection of refrigerator magnets. He said: