I laid low with the Farbers for almost a month. It was one of those situations that seem to create themselves, a natural balancing out. Addy nourished herself with complaints and requests, I lost thought in the tasks, swam lap after lap in the pool, and Vic was free to disappear for days at a time.
I took Addy’s temperature each morning, pretending it was other than normal. I squeezed grapefruit, administered cool cloths and tablets, massaged her spasmed muscles, read aloud to her from gothic novels. Addy liked to pout and sulk so I would coax her out of it.
“This just isn’t worth it,” she’d say, twisting into the pillows. “I shouldn’t wake up anymore.”
And why was I expending my compromised resources trying to persuade this willful, bone-white crank to take a walk in the sun? I suppose because that was the part in which I’d happened to be cast. Everything bright like the yellow grapefruit and the red marbleized countertops I sponged before and after each meal.
Vic came by to drop off grocery money. He looked fit and refreshed, tighter around the eyes. We stood on the little concrete condo balcony and watched a fat boy pour chemicals into the pool. It was dusk, warm and wistful.
“So how’re you and Addy getting on?…Super, super.” He ran his hands along the railing as if smoothing something out. “I guess you can see how much she needs someone. She can be hard to follow sometimes, but there’s so damn much there.”
The vehemence took me by surprise. He couldn’t get out of there fast enough. But he was back at 3 a.m. with an Australian showgirl and a gram of coke. The freshness was gone from his face, his eyes droopy again. The girl was going to spend the weekend, he said. An old friend. She looked at me vaguely and cupped the crotch of her motorcycle pants.
On Saturday Addy threw a tantrum, sobbing and calling us all parasites, until a doctor arrived to give her a shot. Vic paid him in cash. A Panamanian knocked out a French Canadian in a televised welterweight bout. Addy slept. Vic and the girl emerged from the shower. Out on the balcony, they grilled salmon steaks and argued. Vic popped out to the liquor store. The girl came over to my sofa. She talked about convent school in Canberra while she masturbated me. Addy slept. Vic opened the Medoc and sang “Falling In Love With Love.” I took four aspirin before curling up on the sofa.
Very early Sunday, the girl jostled me awake.
“This scene is too bloody sick,” she said. “I think we should both get out of here.”
There were warming sunspots on the backs of our heads as we headed west in her Trans Am. It was good to be moving again, even back the way I’d come. I started to talk some talk, feeling shrewd.
“Sister!” The girl clicked her tongue. “I can’t believe you fell for that schtick. They’ve been married seventeen years.”
29
ONCE, WATCHING GULLS WHEEL over the drilling rigs off Long Beach, I was told by a friend zealously colorless save for the ownership of an armadillo-skin guitar from Paraguay, a hawker of Spartacist magazines frequently shoved, occasionally decked, outside factory gates, that “All information is propaganda.” As absorptive as any generalization, probably more useful than most. I have been put upon and overworked; my theoretics, in turn, have been overindulged, my brain peptides allowed to swash and roil, perhaps to overflow. My desk is littered with papers where blanks are to be filled and boxes checked while I Wearily ponder such imponderables as: Connection between listening groups organized around radios in the street by market research pioneer J. Goebbels and coin-op TVs now ubiquitous in airports and bus depots across U.S.? I evoke my friends here now, the apparitional strumming of some coal miner’s anthem on his armadillo guitar, and his warm bath of certainties. I hear him say: “Communications technology is a byproduct of empire, developing out of military/industrial operation. As simple as the acronyms. OSS. RCA. NASA. COMSAT.”
Today, as I said, has been excessive, an overlapping of the tiresome and the inflammatory, a granular, unedited movie of unstable colors beginning with a two-car head-on barbecue half a mile from the facility entrance. Breakfast cereal arrived in my duodenum like bark chips. A lobby stooge who didn’t look old enough to vote compelled me to pass through the metal detector. I received in the mail an academic paper titled “The Protestant Supernaturaclass="underline" I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian,” and by phone a reprimand from a drone, who wouldn’t give his name, for failing to undergo the biannually required medical exam.
And so to work, a mild trepidation, admittedly with some precedent, that I was going to pick up interference — portents not only unnecessary but undesirable — dropping over me like a mist net. Two of my work orders had been urgently annotated with red felt marker. I slipped these to the bottom of the stack and spent more time than I had to on an abstract of the early sixties quiz scandals. I reviewed, on microfilm, the news play (son of prominent literary historian weeps in disgrace), and scanned a few of the culprit programs, Dotto, Twenty-One, etc. (“Welcome our returning champion and art lover, Gunnery Mate Bill Gwynn!”). How quaint all the shock and indignation now seemed, these elementary manipulations drawing a hot bewilderment like that of children discovering their parents in bed. The day’s first imponderable: Innocence lost or skepticism earned? Had the Apollo moonwalk actually been faked in a studio?
Chewing antacid mints, I moved on to a little project slugged SENSITIVE by the always chary Assignment staff. Evidently, a midwest interactive cable system — with, I assumed, a few pols in the background — wanted to move in the direction of the viewer-response political referendum. Your living room a voting booth! Should the administration continue its support for the Israeli occupation of Crete? Press now. Data enter. Suffrage by remote control seemed logical enough; all the wiring was in place. My task was to search out and analyze extant paradigm models, that is to say, see if anything similar had ever shown up on a TV show. A complex and detailed indexing system is in force here, but I didn’t know if it was up to this feckless job. Shit or Shinola? Was there a difference? I put it off on a pliable Third Tier researcher and went to see Ellen with mixed, vagrant feelings.
I found her watching Tommy Sands sing “Teenage Crush” on Kraft Theatre.
“My dreamboat.”
“Is this work?” I asked.
“What the fuck isn’t?” she said balefully.
Then, as if her mouth had been formed around speech long before I came in, as if the speech had been long thought out, if not definitively composed, she began to describe a week of compulsive pickups, of kneeling on car seats, lost clothing, fear in public parks. Her voice was low, smooth, cold. She spoke with a balance of obfuscation and detail that made my stomach clench and my cock stiffen, dropped finally away into glaring silence. I canted my eyes away, occupied my hands with a cigarette, thinking: She moves far outside your gravity, in a path too clean and swift for you. Don’t think it. Don’t even think it.
Ellen resumed her speech. “And all for the stupidest reason. Because my father married again. His fourth.” Pause. “A little thing from Dothan, Alabama. A platform diver.” Long pause. “Shit, it’s not that. Not that unsavory, secret Daddy love they paint on women with a stencil. I don’t care who he fucks. But the gratitude, the catering — to me, I mean. God, all that sugar water. The reminders are enough to choke me.”
“Reminders?”
“That he doesn’t have the slightest idea who I am.”
“So you have to go out and show him.”