Citing bridgework, Atwater again declined the half piece of gum that Mrs. Moltke offered. All the parked car’s windows ran in a way that would have been pretty had there been more overall light. The rain had steadied to the point where he could just barely discern the outline of a large sign in the distance below, which Amber had told him marked the nitrogen fixative factory’s entrance.
‘The man’s conflicted, is all,’ Mrs. Moltke said. ‘He’s about the most private man you’d ever like to see. In the privy I mean.’ She chewed her gum well, without extraneous noises. She had to be at least 6'1". ‘It surely weren’t like that at my house growing up, I can tell you. It’s a matter of how folks grow up, wouldn’t you say?’
‘This is fascinating,’ Atwater said. They had been parked at the little road’s terminus for perhaps ten minutes. The tape recorder was placed on his knee, and the subject’s wife now reached over across herself and turned it off. Her hand was large enough to cover the recorder and also make liberal contact with his knee on either side. Atwater still had the same pants size he’d had in college, though these slacks were obviously a great deal newer. In the low barometric pressure of the storm, he was now entirely stuffed up, and was mouth breathing, which caused his lower lip to hang outward and made him look even more childlike. He was breathing rather more rapidly than he was aware of.
It was not clear whether Amber’s small smile was for him or herself or just what. ‘I’m going to tell you some background facts that you can’t write about, but it’ll help you understand our situation here. Skip — can I call you Skip?’
‘Please do.’
Rain beat musically on the Cavalier’s roof and hood. ‘Skip, between just us two now, what we’ve got here is a boy whose folks beat him witless all through growing up. That whipped on him with electric cords and burnt on him with cigarettes and made him eat out in the shed when his mother thought his manners weren’t up to snuff for her high and mighty table. His daddy was all right, it was more his mother. One of this churchy kind that’s so upright and proper in church but back at home she’s crazy evil, whipped her own children with cords and I don’t know what all.’ At the mention of church, Atwater’s facial expression had become momentarily inward and difficult to read. Amber Moltke’s voice was low in register but still wholly feminine, with a quality that cut through the rain’s sound even at low volume. It reminded Atwater somewhat of Lauren Bacall at the end of her career, when the aged actress had begun to look more and more like a scalded cat but still possessed of a voice that affected one’s nervous system in profound ways, as a child.
The artist’s wife said: ‘I know that one time when he was a boy that she came in and I think caught Brint playing with himself maybe, and made him come down in the sitting room and do it in front of them, the family, that she made them all sit there and watch him. Do you follow what I’m saying, Skip?’
The most significant sign of an approaching tornado would be a greenish cast to the ambient light and a sudden drop in pressure that made one’s ears pop.
‘His daddy didn’t outright abuse him, but he was half crazy,’ Amber said, ‘a deacon. A man under great pressure from his own demons that he wrestled with. And I know one time Brint saw her take and beat a little baby kittycat to death with a skillet for messing on the kitchen floor. When he was in his high chair, watching. A little kittycat. Well,’ she said. ‘What do you suppose a little boy’s toilet training is going to be like with folks like that?’
Nodding vigorously being one of his tactics for drawing people out in interviews, Atwater was nodding at almost everything the subject’s wife was saying. This, together with the fact that his arms were still out straight before him, lent him a somnambulist aspect. Wind gusts caused the car to shimmy slightly in the clearing’s mud.
By this time, Amber Moltke had shifted her mass onto her left haunch and brought her great right leg up and was curled kittenishly in such a way as to incline herself toward Atwater, gazing at the side of his face. She smelled of talcum powder and Big Red. Her leg was like something you could slide down into some kind of unimaginable chasm. The chief outward sign that Atwater was affected one way or the other by the immense sexual force field around Mrs. Moltke was that he continued to grip the Cavalier’s steering wheel tightly with both hands and to face directly ahead as though still driving. There was very little air in the car. He had an odd subtle sense of ascent, as if the car were slightly rising. There was no real sign of any type of overhead view, or even of the tiny road’s dropoff to SR 252 and the nitrogen works that commenced just ahead — he was going almost entirely on Mrs. Moltke’s report of where they were.
‘This is a man, now, that will leave the premises to break wind. That closes the privy door and locks it and turns on the exhaust fan and this little radio he’s got, and runs water, and sometimes puts a rolled up towel in the crack of the door when he’s in there doing his business. Brint I mean.’
‘I think I understand what you’re saying.’
‘Most times he can’t do his business if there’s somebody even there. In the house. The man thinks I believe him when he says he’s going to just go driving around.’ She sighed. ‘So Skip, this is a very very shy individual in this department. He’s wounded inside. He wouldn’t hardly say boo when I first met him.’
Following college, Skip Atwater had done a year at IU-Indianapolis’s prestigious grad journalism program, then landed a cub spot at the Indianapolis Star, and there had made no secret of his dream of someday writing a syndication grade human interest column for a major urban daily, until the assistant city editor who’d hired him told Skip in his first annual performance review, among other things, that as a journalist Atwater struck him as being polished but about two inches deep. After which performance review Atwater had literally run for the privacy of the men’s room and there had struck his own chest with his fist several times because he knew that at heart it was true: his fatal flaw was an ineluctably light, airy prose sensibility. He had no innate sense of tragedy or preterition or complex binds or any of the things that made human beings’ misfortunes significant to one another. He was all upbeat angle. The editor’s blunt but kindly manner had made it worse. Atwater could write a sweet commercial line, he’d acknowledged. He had compassion, of a certain frothy sort, and drive. The editor, who always wore a white dress shirt and tie but never a jacket, had actually put his arm around Atwater’s shoulders. He said he liked Skip enough to tell him the truth, because he was a good kid and just needed to find his niche. There were all different kinds of reporting. The editor said he had acquaintances at USA Today and offered to make a call.
Atwater, who also possessed an outstanding verbal memory, retained almost verbatim the questions Laurel Manderley had left him with on the phone at Ye Olde Country Buffet after he’d summarized the morning’s confab and characterized the artist as catatonically inhibited, terribly shy, scared of his shadow, and so forth. What Laurel had said didn’t yet add up for her in the story was how the stuff got seen in the first place: ‘What, he gives it to somebody? This catatonically shy guy calls somebody into the bathroom and says, Hey, look at this extraordinary thing I just pooped out of me? I can’t see anybody over age six doing that, much less somebody that shy. Whether it’s a hoax or not, the guy’s got to be some kind of closet exhibitionist,’ she’d opined. Every instinct Atwater possessed had since been crying out that this was the piece’s fulcrum and UBA, the universalizing element that made great soft news go: the conflict between Moltke’s extreme personal shyness and need for privacy on the one hand versus his involuntary need to express what lay inside him through some type of personal expression or art. Everyone experienced this conflict on some level. Though lurid and potentially disgusting, the mode of production in this case simply heightened the conflict’s voltage, underlined the stakes in bold, made it at once deep and accessible for Style readers, many of whom scanned the magazine in the bathroom anyway, all the salarymen knew.