‘By quality you’re still referring to how good it is.’
It is difficult to shrug on an elliptical trainer. ‘Good quote unquote.’
‘Then the answer again is that what we’re interested in is human interest, not some abstract aesthetic value.’
‘And yet isn’t the point that they’re not mutually exclusive? How about all Picasso’s affairs, or the thing with van Gogh’s ear?’
‘Yes, but van Gogh didn’t paint with his ear.’
By habit, Ellen Bactrian avoided looking directly at their side by side reflections in the mirrored wall. The executive intern was at least three inches taller than she. The sounds of all the young men’s legs working the StairMasters were at certain points syncopated, then not, then gradually syncopated again. The two editorial interns’ movements on the elliptical trainers, on the other hand, appeared synchronized down to the smallest detail. Each of them had a bottle of water with a sports cap in her elliptical trainer’s special receptacle, although they were not the same brands of bottled water. The fitness center’s sonic environment was basically one large, complex, and rhythmic pneumatic clank.
Between breaths, an ever so slightly peevish or impatient tone entered Ellen Bactrian’s voice: ‘Then, say, the My Left Foot guy who painted with his left foot.’
‘Or the idiot savant who can reproduce Chopin after one hearing,’ the executive intern said. This was an indirect bit of massaging on her part, since there had been a WITW profile of just such an idiot savant in an issue the previous summer — the piece’s UBA was that the retarded man’s mother had battled heroically to keep him out of an institution.
Under the diffused high lumen lights of the cardio fitness area, the executive intern’s quads and delts seemed like something out of an advertisement. Ellen Bactrian was fit and attractive, with a perfectly respectable body fat percentage, but around the executive intern she often felt squat and dumpy. An unhealthy part of her sometimes suspected that the executive intern liked exercising with her because it made her, the executive intern, feel comparatively even more willowy and scintillant and buff. What neither Ellen Bactrian nor anyone else at Style knew was that the executive intern had had a dark period in preparatory school during which she’d made scores of tiny cuts in the tender skin of her upper arms’ insides and then squeezed reconstituted lemon juice into the cuts as penance for a long list of personal shortcomings, a list she had tracked daily in her journal in a special numerical key code that was totally unbreakable unless you knew exactly which page of The Bell Jar the code’s numbers were keyed to. Those days were now behind her, but they were still part of who the executive intern was.
‘Yes,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘although, although I’m no art critic, Skip’s guy’s pieces are also artworks of surpassing quality and value in their own right.’
‘Although of course all the readers will get to see is photos —’
‘Maybe.’ Both interns laughed briefly. The issue of publishable photos had been one they’d all agreed that morning to table — there were, as the WITW associate editor sometimes liked to quip, bigger fish on the front burner.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Although remember that even photos, if Amine’s to be believed, if absolutely properly lit and detailed so that —’
‘Except hold on, answer this — does this person have to actually be familiar with something to represent it the way he does?’
Both women were at a node of their computerized workout and were breathing almost heavily now. Amine Tadic´ was Style magazine’s associate photo editor; her head intern had served as her proxy in the morning’s email confab.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘According to Laurel, this is a person with maybe like a year or two of community college. How on earth would he know Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, or what Anubis’s head looks like?’
‘Or for that matter which side the Liberty Bell’s crack’s on.’
‘I sure didn’t know it.’
Ellen Bactrian laughed. ‘Laurel did. Or she said she did — obviously she could have looked it up.’ Ellen Bactrian was also, on her own time, trying to learn how to type completely different things with each hand, à la the WHAT IN THE WORLD section’s associate editor, for whom she had certain feelings that she knew perfectly well were SOP transference for an intelligent, ambitious woman her age, since the associate editor was both seductive and a textbook authority figure. Ellen Bactrian liked the associate editor’s wife quite a lot, actually, and so took great pains to keep the whole bimanual thing in perspective.
The executive intern was able to reach down and hydrate without breaking rhythm, which on an elliptical trainer takes a great deal of practice. ‘I’m saying: Does the man have to see or know something in order to represent it? Produce it? Let’s say that if he does and it’s all totally conscious and intentional, then he’s a real artist.’
‘But if he doesn’t —’
‘Which is why the unlikeliness of a Roto Rooter guy from Nowhere Indiana knowing futurism or the Unique Forms is relevant,’ the executive intern said, wiping her forehead with a terry wristband.
‘If he doesn’t, it’s some kind of, what, a miracle? Idiot savantry? Divine intervention?’
‘Or else some kind of extremely sick fraud.’
Fraud was a frightening word to them both, for obvious reasons. One consequence of getting Mrs. Anger’s executive intern in on the miraculous poo story was that Eckleschafft-Böd US’s Legal people were now involved and devoting resources to the piece in a way that Laurel Manderley and Ellen Bactrian could never have caused, even given the WITW associate editor’s own background in Legal. BSG weeklies rarely broke stories or covered anything that other media hadn’t already premasticated. The prospect was both exciting and frightful.
The executive intern said: ‘Or else maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn’t.’
‘Is it the colon that determines the whole shape and configuration and everything of the. . you know?’
The executive intern made a face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it.’
‘What is the colon, anyhow? Is it part of the intestines or is it technically its own organ?’
Ellen Bactrian’s and the executive intern’s fathers were both MDs in Westchester County NY, though the two men practiced different medical specialties and had never met. The executive intern periodically reversed the direction of her elliptical trainer’s pedals, working her quadriceps and calves instead of the hamstrings and lower gluteals. Her facial expression throughout these periods of reversal was both intent and abstracted.
‘Either way,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘it’s obviously human interest right out the wazoo.’ She then related the anecdote that Laurel Manderley had shared with her in the elevators on the way back down from the 82nd floor early that morning, about the DKNY clad circulation intern at lunch telling everybody that she sometimes pretended her waste was a baby and then expecting them to relate or to think her candor was somehow hip or brave.
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of two syncopated elliptical trainers. Then the executive intern said: ‘There’s a way to do this.’ She blotted momentarily at her upper lip with the inside of her wristband. ‘Joan would say we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been thinking about the subject of the piece instead of the angle for the piece.’ Joan referred to Mrs. Anger, the Executive Editor of Style.