She raises her glass to me. “Kentucky bourbon for me, straight. Cheers, Gavril’s cousin. Life’s on the up-and-up and I want someone to celebrate with. Come over here and sit by me—”
I take the far edge of the couch and she smiles at my hesitancy, extending her feet so her toes touch my slacks.
“What happened to the American Apparel sponsorship?” I ask. “There aren’t commercials blaring from you.”
“That’s Mr. Waverly,” she says. “He pays for commercial-free living. What are you doing here, anyway? I wouldn’t have taken you for a big baller. Shopping for birds, like everyone else? You look like shit, by the way—”
“I think it’s a mistake that I’m here at all,” I tell her. “I came with a friend, I guess to stream the federal executions. I usually stream this thing with Gavril, because it kicks off Fashion Week—”
“Executions? You think that’s why they’re all here?”
“Why else would they be here?”
“Pussy,” she says.
“Christ,” I tell her, and finish off my brandy.
“I love how bashful you are,” she says. “Look, you’re blushing—”
“It’s just the drink—”
“I won’t need American Apparel soon, anyway,” she says. “I’m having a series of brilliant fucking breaks that’s lighting up my career. You ever have a run of luck like that? What is it Plath says? ‘I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.’ I fucking am, that’s what my heart’s screaming right now—”
“Someone hire you for another ad campaign?”
“I’m Theo Waverly’s favorite girl,” she says. “Steady work until I’m too fucking old, that’s what that means. His company placed me with American Apparel, placed me with Gav. His request for the red hair, do you like it?”
“It resonates—”
“He has me up to an eighty-three percent click-through rate in the streams, that’s pretty fucking unbelievable. Chanel and Dior already contacted his company about me. Everything’s happening so fast—”
“I thought you were interested in poetry,” I tell her. “You texted me a while ago, asking for poetry recommendations—”
“Just because a girl gets looked at doesn’t mean she can’t think,” she says. “I finished that Adelmo Salomar book you recommended to me, by the way. I’ve never been much for Surrealism or automatic writing, all that stuff. I’m much more interested in the ‘Confessional School,’ all that Surrealism rings heavily of bullshit—”
“Salomar was writing about the Chilean Revolution—those poets had to invent ways to write around the censors, so they readapted Surrealism. ‘Tonight I write the voice of a serpent devoured by a thousand doves.’ Liberation Theology—”
“Well, anyway, poetry’s immortal, but beauty’s devoured by a thousand doves,” she says. “Plenty of time to study Chilean Surrealism once no one wants me to wear their clothes anymore—”
“I’d actually like to read some of your poetry,” I tell her, but before she answers, Waverly finds his way into the room with a bottle of wine.
“There you are,” he says. “Timothy was afraid you’d gotten lost—”
“Not yet,” I tell him.
“Why don’t you run along back to the party,” he tells Twiggy.
She swallows the rest of her bourbon and leaves the glass on the end table. “Makes me shivery,” she says.
“Dominic, let’s freshen up your glass back at the office,” he suggests. “We’ll finish up our business for the night so we can relax and enjoy ourselves—”
“Mr. Waverly, I actually have something I need to discuss with you about my employment—”
“Over drinks,” he says. “Not here—”
Waverly’s office is in a lower tier, through another frosted glass hallway, down a flight of stairs. A techie’s paradise—VR cams, an editing suite, a Bride 3120 stack with a fifty-two-inch monitor on the desk, a rat’s nest of ports and Adware jacks, sets of Adware like a tangle of mesh and a workbench with a soldering iron and motherboards and spools of wires and cable. One wall’s covered with built-in shelves stacked with books, leather-bound classics—Hesse, Blake—some Baudrillard, Schopenhauer, and yellowed paperback technical manuals, manila folders of printouts. A few framed photographs are propped up among the books—some shots of the Pittsburgh skyline, more of Waverly sailing on The Daughter of Albion, another of the woman I take for his wife, sitting on the lawn of the Frick near a rosebush in bloom. One of the photographs is a group portrait, Waverly with other suits—they’re clustered around a young Meecham, a radiant blonde electric with her pageant-trained smile.
“You’ve met her?” I ask.
“I know Eleanor very well. Let’s see—that must have been taken fifteen years ago or so,” he says. “We were at a campaign event in Canton, Ohio—at the McKinley Grand Hotel. This was during her first presidential bid—”
“You were with her from the beginning of her career, then?”
“She was just a stray before I adopted her,” he says. “I’m sorry, that sounds harsh, but Eleanor wasn’t realizing her full potential. She was shallow, but we saw potential in her. She was articulate—we knew that from the pageants—intelligent when she wanted to be. Compassionate. Much of politics is simply manipulating broad symbols. Here was a beauty queen who grew up not far from Pittsburgh, conservative politically, a Christian. She was what the country needed at the time. Still does—”
“Timothy says you’ve figured out how people will behave, can manipulate the outcome of their free will—”
“I see no reason why Eleanor Meecham would ever lose an election,” he says. “The ammendment passed with enthusiasm, and the votes are there—”
Another photograph. “I recognize this picture,” I tell him, of a view of a house in Greenfield, in Pittsburgh, a part of the neighborhood that cuts toward the river called the Run. A clapboard Victorian huddled with other houses in the shadow of the 376 overpass, worn out and unpainted, odd because of a whitewash cross and a Bible quote slathered in white paint on the broad side of the house: Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God. “We used to call this the Christ House—”
Waverly sits at his desk, tinkering with wires that have been pulled from a miniature motherboard—in his slumped posture, I think I see what he may have looked like as a young boy, lonely, I’m guessing, or maybe I’m reading too much into what an old man looks like when drunk.
“It’s a church,” says Waverly, “or was. You remember that house? I guess with the lettering, it doesn’t surprise me it’s somewhat infamous. Tact and lying low were never that congregation’s strong suit. My wife’s congregation. Speaking in tongues, that sort of thing. An old farmhouse. Most of the rooms were used as a Christian women’s shelter. That was my great-great-grandfather’s first house in America. My family came from nothing. My great-great-grandfather came to Pittsburgh for the mills, and eventually my father owned the mills—Pittsburgh, Birmingham. I bought back that house, and when Kitty asked for a place to start her shelter, a place for her congregation to meet, I signed it over.”
“You don’t have any pictures of your daughter—”
“No,” he says. “I don’t. I don’t display any pictures of my children here. They all passed away in Pittsburgh, all three. I prefer to keep my past and present separate, private—”
I find another photograph of Meecham—taken shortly after Pittsburgh, during what must have been a tour of one of the FEMA camps in West Virginia they set up for people like me, the refugees and homeless.