In the wake of a slow moving front, the area’s air was clear and dry and the sky a great cobalt expanse and Tuesday’s overall weather both hot and almost autumnally crisp.
The Moltkes’ home’s bathroom door, a fiberboard model with interior hinges, was shut and locked. From its other side issued the sound of the sink and tub’s faucets intermixed with snatches of conservative talk radio. Her husband was an intensely private and skittish bathroom individual, Mrs. Moltke had explained to the MD and photographer, due without doubt to certain abuses he’d suffered as a tiny child. Negotiations over the terms of authentication had taken place in the home’s kitchen, and she had laid all this out with Mr. Moltke sitting right there beside her — Atwater had watched the man’s hands instead of his face while Amber declaimed about her husband’s bathroom habits and childhood trauma. Today she wore a great faded denim smock thing and seemed to loom in the periphery of Atwater’s sight no matter where he looked, rather like the sky when one’s outside.
At one point in the negotiations, Atwater had needed to use the bathroom and had gone in there and seen it. He really had had to go; it had not been a pretense. The Moltkes’ toilet was in a small de facto alcove formed by the sink’s counter and the wall that comprised the door jamb. The room smelled exquisitely of mildew. He could see that the wall behind the sink and toilet was part of the same east load bearer that ran along the hallway and sitting room and conjoined the duplex’s other side. Atwater preferred a bathroom whose facilities were a bit farther from the door, for privacy’s sake, but he could see that the only way to accomplish this here would have been to place the shower unit where the toilet now was, which given this shower’s unusual size would be impossible. It was difficult to imagine Amber Moltke backing herself into this slender recess and settling carefully on the white oval seat to eliminate. Since the east wall also held the interior plumbing for all three of the room’s fixtures, it stood to reason that the bathroom on the other side of the duplex abutted this one, and that its own plumbing also lay within the wall. For a moment, nothing but an ingrained sense of propriety kept Atwater from trying to press his ear to the wall next to the medicine cabinet to see whether he could hear anything. Nor would he ever have allowed himself to open the Moltkes’ medicine cabinet, or to root in any serious way through the woodgrain shelves above the towel rack.
The toilet itself was a generic American Standard, its white slightly brighter than the room’s walls and tile. The only noteworthy details were a large crack of some sort on the unpadded seat’s left side and a rather sluggish flushing action. The toilet and area of floor around it appeared very clean. Atwater was also the sort of person who always made sure to put the seat back down when he was finished.
Evidently, Ellen Bactrian’s brain trust had decided against presenting a short list of specific works or types of pieces they wanted the artist to choose from. The initial pitch that Laurel Manderley had been directed to instruct Atwater to make was that both the MD and photographer would be set up in there with Brint Moltke while he produced whatever piece he felt moved on this day to create. As predicted, Amber declared this totally unacceptable. The proffered compromise, then, was the presence of just the MD (which in fact was all they’d wanted in the first place, Style having no possible use for in medias photos). Mrs. Moltke, however, had nixed this as well — Brint had never produced an artwork with anyone else in the room. He was, she iterated once more, an incorrigibly private bathroom person.
During the parts of her presentation he’d already heard, the journalist noted in Gregg shorthand that the home’s kitchen was carpeted and deployed a green and burgundy color scheme in its walls, counters, and cabinets, that Mrs. Amber Moltke must almost certainly have had some type of school or community theater experience, and that the broad plastic cup from which the artist had occasionally sipped coffee was from the top of a Thermos unit that was not itself in evidence. Of these observations, only the second had any bearing on the piece that would eventually run in Style magazine’s final issue.
What had especially impressed Ellen Bactrian was Laurel Manderley’s original suggestion that Skip pick up a portable fax machine at some Circuit City or Wal Mart on the way down from Muncie with the photographer — whose equipment had required the subcompact’s seats to be moved forward as far as they would go, and who not only smoked in the nonsmoking rental but had this thing where he then fieldstripped each cigarette butt and put the remains carefully in the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt — and that the unit be hooked up to the Moltkes’ kitchen phone, which had a clip outlet and could be switched back and forth from phone to fax with no problem. This allowed the MD, whose negotiated station was finally fixed at just outside the bathroom door, to receive the piece fresh (‘hot off the griddle’ had been the photographer’s phrase, which had caused the circle of Moltke’s digital mudra to quiver and distend for just a moment), to perform his immediate field tests, and to fax the findings directly to Laurel Manderley, signed and affixed with the same medical authorization number required by certain prescriptions.
‘You understand that Style is going to have to have some corroboration,’ Atwater had said. This was at the height of the ersatz negotiations in the Moltkes’ kitchen. He chose not to remind Amber that this entire issue had already been hashed out in the enmired Cavalier two days prior. ‘It’s not a matter of whether the magazine trusts you or not. It’s that some readers are obviously going to be skeptical. Style cannot afford to look overcredulous or like a dupe to even a fraction of its readers.’ He did not, in the kitchen, refer to the BSGs’ concern with distinguishing themselves from tabloids, though he did say: ‘They can’t afford to let this look like a tabloid story.’
Both Amber Moltke and the photographer had been eating pieces of a national brand coffee cake that could evidently be heated in the microwave without becoming runny or damp. Her forkwork was deft and delicate and her face as broad across as two of Skip’s own placed somehow side by side.
‘Maybe we should just go on and let some tabloid do it, then,’ she had replied coolly.
Atwater said: ‘Well, should you decide to do that, then yes, credibility ceases to be an issue. The story gets inserted between Delta Burke’s all fruit diet and reports of Elvis’s profile in a photo of Neptune. But no other outlet picks up the story or follows it up. Tabloid pieces don’t enter the mainstream.’ He said: ‘It’s a delicate balance of privacy and exposure for you and Brint, I’m aware. You’ll obviously have to make your own decision.’
Later, waiting in the narrow and redolent hallway, Atwater noted in Gregg that at some point he and Amber had ceased even pretending to include the artist in the kitchen’s whole back and forth charade. And that the way his damaged knee really felt was this: ignominious.
‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was standing next to the trayless fax machine, and the editorial intern who had regaled the previous day’s working lunch with the intracunnilingual flatus vignette was seated at the other WITW salaryman’s console a few feet away. Today the editorial intern — whose first name also happened to be Laurel, and who was a particularly close friend and protégé of Ellen Bactrian — wore a Gaultier skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck of very soft looking ash gray cashmere.