«Oscar season again,» sighed Ivan. «Is it March already?» They were in the back seat of a car, being driven to Century City for a morning legal meeting. Ivan was immaculately dressed and his skin had the shine of eight hours of drugless sleep. John's face looked like a floor at the end of a cocktail party.
«What are we up for this year?» asked John.
«Don't be facetious, John.»
John was doing lines of coke from a small oval of safety glass he stored in his attaché case. He noticed Ivan give him a glower. «So what is your point, Ivan? I've got to stay awake. You know lawyers hit me like animal tranquilizers.» Ivan waited.
A flatbed loaded with jumbo gold statuettes was headed off to the venue — a tourist's dream photo. The truck paused beside them at a light. John caught Ivan eyeing the statues. «No, no,no, Ivan. I can see that “I wish we had an Oscar” gleam in your eyes. Well,forget it. Oscars are for freaks.»
«You can't honestly believe that, John.»
«Oohhhhh, look at me — I've got a little statue for being this year's token Brit, or this year's on-screen hooker with a disability.Oohhhhh, look at me — in twenty-four hours nobody's going to remember my name.Oohhhhh, the studio can put lots of little Oscar™'s all over ads for my movie — not simply Oscars but Oscars with the little trademark ™'s up on top:Oscar™ 's.» He chopped up a crystal. «Oops — excuse me, I forgot to put the ™ at the end of it. Off to Alcatraz we go.»
«John …» Ivan adapted his baby-sitting voice. «Go easy on that stuff. The guys we're meeting are ball-breakers.»
«Oscars …» John began to mumble, not a good sign. Ivan began to brace himself for a crash-and-burn morning, and downgraded his expectations for the upcoming meeting accordingly. Ivan, like John, had been seduced by the rewards and extremes of filmmaking, but unlike John, he wanted a traditional life now. In his mind he was «officially disgusted» with his life up to that point. He was «officially through with carousing» and was now ready to begin «officially looking to settle down.» And it was at this point that he saw Nylla, at the foot of an office tower, tears trickling down her cheeks, swaddled in a printed silk scarf that fluttered over her right shoulder. Running up her neck and into her cheek was a mottled scar left by a massive jellyfish sting from off the Australian coast two years previously. Its trace had nipped her acting career in the bud. Her new agent, Adam Norwitz, had seen her jellyfish scar a month before and had finally succeeded, just minutes prior to her appearance on the sidewalk, in breaking her spirit. He convinced her that the scar would keep her out of work, «unless you want to do soft porn, in which case a scar like yours could be a definite asset.»
Ivan stared at her silk dress, patterned with gardenias, fluttering in a warm wind, and he felt sorry for her. Meanwhile, behind him, John's sinuses and lungs clapped and glort ed. Ivan watched Nylla chew her gum. She removed it from her mouth, and instead of flicking it onto the hot concrete, took a small paper from her purse, and placed the gum inside the paper, and tucked the result in her purse. It was the cleanest thing he'd ever seen anybody do.
«Look, she's crying,» said Ivan, entranced, as though witnessing the world's smallest rainstorm. He got out of the car.
«Ivan,» John said, «isn't the meeting in the next tower over?» He heard Ivan ask Nylla if she was okay, and then say to her, «Can I help you out here? I'm Ivan. I'm on my way to a meeting, but I saw you here and …»
She said, «Oh God, I must look like an idiot.»
«No you don't. Not at all. What's your name?»
«I'm Nylla.»
«That's a nice name.»
«It's spelled N-Y-L-L-A. My father came to the States from Europe after the war. He wanted to name me after New York State because the States had been so good to him. My mother wanted me named after her mother, Bjalla. And there's the result.»
«I'm Ivan.»
And they were married six months later.
Chapter Seventeen
Eugene Lindsay, Ford dealer of the gods, was alone in bed making a list in a small notepad:
No. 63: You can get almost any food you want at any time of the year.
No. 64: Women do everything men do and it's not that big a deal.
No. 65: Anybody on the planet can have a crystal-clear conversation with anybody else on the planet pretty well any time they want to.
No. 66: You can comfortably and easily wake up in Sydney, Australia, and go to bed in New York.
No. 67: The universe is a trillion billion million times larger than you ever dreamed it would be.
No. 68: You pretty well never see or smell shit.
He was writing a list of things which would astound somebody living a hundred years before him. He was trying to persuade himself that he was living in a miraculous world in a miraculous time. Having taken early retirement from his job as a local TV weatherman, he'd subsequently retreated for a decade inside his mock-Tudor house in Bloomington, Indiana. He made art from household trash and watched TV. He jotted the occasional thought in his notebooks, such as the evening's list. And in his basement he used a Xerox 5380 console copier and a CD-ROM—based computer to execute far more elaborate mail scams than he had ever dreamed of in the eighties.
His wife, Renata, had years ago moved to New Mexico, where she paid the bills burning herbs for neurotic urban refugees. She abandoned decades of starvation dieting, and had grown as big as a pile of empties on the back stoop. She wore no makeup and made a point of letting people know it. When she divorced Eugene, she had asked for nothing, which confused and frightened him more than a nasty divorce fight would have done.
No. 69: We went to the moon and to Mars a few times, and there's really nothing there except rocks, so we quit dreaming about them.
No. 70: Thousands of diseases are quickly and easily cured with a few pills.
No. 71: Astoundingly detailed descriptions of sex acts appear on the front page of The New York Times, and nobody is ruffled by it.
No. 72: By pushing a single button, it's possible to kill 5 million people in just one second.
Eugene looked at number 72. Something was wrong — what? He figured it out:buttons didn't exist a hundred years ago. Or did they? What did people do back then — did they pull chains? Turn cranks? What did they have that they could turn on? Nothing. Electric lights? Eugene didn't think so. Not back then. He made a correction:
No. 72: By pushing a single lever, it's possible to kill five million people in just one second.
He looked at his clock — deepest night — 3:58A .M. He dropped his pen and marveled at his body, lying on the bed, still well proportioned and lean, still dumbly beautiful and betraying no evidence of inner weariness.
His bedsheets felt dry but moist, like the time he lay down on a putting green in North Carolina. Surrounding him was that month's art project — thousands of the past decade's emptied single-portion plastic tublets of no-fat yogurt, their insides washed squeaky clean, stuffed inside each other, forming long wavy filaments that reached to the ceiling like sea anemones. The finished piece was to go inside Renata's old gift-wrapping room, a concept she'd stolen from Candy Spelling, Aaron Spelling's wife — a whole room devoted to wrapping the nonstop stream of trinkets and doodads from her old gown business.