‘I don’t know,’ THE THUMB’s head intern said. ‘My parents pass gas in front of each other. There’s something sweet about it, like it’s just another part of life together. They’ll keep right on talking or whatever as if nothing happened.’ THE THUMB was the name of the section of Style that contained mini reviews of film and television, as well as certain types of commercial music and books, each review accompanied by a special thumb icon whose angle conveyed visually how positive the assessment was.
‘Although that in itself shows there’s something different about it. If you sneeze or yawn, there’s something said. A fart, though, is always ignored, even though everybody knows what’s just happened.’
Some interns were laughing; some were not.
‘The silence communicates some kind of unease about it.’
‘A conspiracy of silence.’
‘Shannon was on some friend of a friend thing at the Hat with some awful guy in she said an XMI Platinum sweater, with that awful Haverford type of jaunty misogyny, that was going on and on about why do girls always go to the bathroom together, like what’s up with that, and Shannon looks at the guy like what planet did you just land from, and says well it should be obvious we’re doing cocaine in there, is why.’
‘One of those guys where you’re like, hello, my eyes are up here.’
‘Carlos says in some cultures the etiquette actually calls for passing gas in some situations.’
‘The well known Korean thing about you burp to say thank you.’
‘My parents had this running joke—they called a fart an intruder. They’d look at each other over the paper and be, like, “I do believe there’s an intruder present.”’
Laurel Manderley, who had had an idea, was rooting through her Fendi for her personal cell.
‘My mom would just about drop over dead if anybody ever cut one in front of her. It’s just not even imaginable.’
A circulation intern named Laurel Rodde, who as a rule favored DKNY, and who wasn’t exactly unpopular but no one felt like they knew her very well despite all the time they all spent with one another, and who usually barely said a word at the working lunches, suddenly said: ‘You know, did anybody when they were little ever have this thing where you think of your shit as sort of like your baby and sometimes want to hold it and talk to it and almost cry or feel guilty about flushing it and dream sometimes of your shit in a little sort of little stroller with a bonnet and bottle and still sometimes in the bathroom look at it and give a little wave like, bye bye, as it goes down, and then feel a void?’ There was an uncomfortable silence. Some of the interns looked at one another out of the corner of their eye. They were at a stage where they were now too adult and socially refined to respond with a drawn out semicruel ‘Oooo-kaaaay,’ but you could tell that a few of them were thinking it. The circulation intern, who’d gone a bit pink, was bent to her salad once more.
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 th
inks 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.
Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.
Only the third shift attendant knew that R. Vaughn Corliss slept so terribly, twining in and out of the sheets with bleatings of the purest woe, foodlessly chewing, sitting up and looking wildly about, feeling at himself and moaning, crying out that no he wouldn’t go there, not there not again no please. The high concept mogul was always up with the sun, and his first act after stripping the bed and placing his breakfast order was to erase the disk of the bedroom’s monitor. A selected few nights’ worth of these disks the attendant had slipped in during deep sleep and copied, however, as a de facto form of unemployment insurance, since Corliss’s temper and caprice were well known; and the existence of these pirate disks was also known to certain representatives of Eckleschafft-Böd whose business it was to know such things.
It was only if, after sheep, controlled breathing, visualizing IV pentothal drips, and mentally reviewing in close detail a special collector’s series of photographs of people on fire entitled People on Fire, Corliss still could not fall or fall back asleep that he’d resort to the failsafe: imagining the faces of everyone he had loved, hated, feared, known, or even ever seen all assembling and accreting as pixels into a pointillist image of a single great all devouring eye whose pupil was Corliss’s own.
In the morning, the reinvented high concept cable entrepreneur’s routine was invariant and always featured a half hour of pretend rowing on a machine that could simulate both resistance and crosscurrent, a scrupulously Fletcherized breakfast, and a session of the 28 lead facial biofeedback in which microelectric sensors were affixed to individual muscle groups and exhaustive daily practice yielded the ability to form, at will, any of the 216 facial expressions common to all known cultures. Corliss was in constant contact via headset cellular throughout this regimen.
Unlike most driven business visionaries he was not, when all was said and done, an unhappy man. He felt sometimes an odd complex emotion that, when broken down and examined in quiet reflection, revealed itself to be self envy, which appears near the top of certain Maslovian fulfillment pyramids as a rare and culturally specific form of joy. The sense Skip Atwater had gotten, after a brief and highly structured interface with Corliss for a WITW piece on the All Ads cable channel in 1999, was that the producer’s reclusive, eccentric persona was a conscious performance or imitation, and that Corliss (whom Atwater had personally liked and not found all that intimidating) was in reality a gregarious, backslapping, people type person who affected an hermetic torment for reasons which Atwater’s notebooks contained several multipage theories on, none of which appeared in the article published in Style.
Atwater and Mrs. Moltke were now unquestionably breathing each other’s air; the Cavalier’s glass surfaces were almost entirely steamed over. At the same time, an imperfection in its gasket’s seal was allowing rain droplets to enter and move in a complex system of paths down his window. These branching paths and tributaries were in the left periphery of the journalist’s vision; Amber Moltke’s face loomed vividly in the right. Unlike Mrs. Atwater, the artist’s wife had a good firm chin with no wattles, though her throat’s girth was extraordinary—Atwater could not have gotten around it with both hands.
‘The shyness and woundedness must be complex, though,’ the journalist said. ‘Given that the pieces are public. Publicly displayed.’ He had already amassed a certain amount of technical detail about the preparation of the displays, back at the Moltkes’ duplex. The pieces were not varnished or in any way chemically treated. They were, however, sprayed lightly with a fixative when fresh or new, to help preserve their shape and intricate detail—evidently some of the man’s early work had become cracked or distorted when allowed to dry completely. Atwater knew that freshly produced pieces of art were placed on a special silver finish tray, an heirloom of some sort from Mrs. Moltke’s own family, then covered in common kitchen plastic wrap and allowed to cool to room temperature before the fixative was applied. Skip could imagine the steam from a fresh new piece fogging the Saran’s interior and making it difficult to see the thing itself until the wrap was removed and discarded. Only later, in the midst of all the editorial wrangling over his piece’s typeset version, would Atwater learn that the fixative in question was a common brand of aerosol styling spray whose manufacturer advertised in Style.
Amber gave a brief laugh. ‘We’re not exactly talking the big time. Two bean festivals and the DAR craft show.’
‘Well, and of course the fair.’ Atwater was referring to the Franklin County Fair, which like most county fairs in eastern Indiana was held in June, quite a bit earlier than the national average. The reasons fo
r this were complicated, agricultural, and historically bound up with Indiana’s refusal to participate in Daylight Savings Time, which caused no end of hassles for certain commodities markets at the Chicago Board of Trade. Atwater’s own childhood experiences had been of the Madison County Fair, held during the third week of each June on the outskirts of Mounds State Park, but he assumed that all county fairs were roughly similar. He had unconsciously begun to do the thing with his fist again.
‘Well, although the fair ain’t exactly your big time either.’
Also from childhood experience, Skip Atwater knew that the slight squeaks and pops one could hear when Amber laughed were from different parts of her complex foundation garment as they strained and moved against one another. Her kneesized left elbow now rested on the seat back between them, leaving her left hand free to play and make tiny languid motions in the space between her head and his. A head nearly twice the size of Atwater’s own. Her hair was wiglike in overall configuration, but it had a high protein luster no real wig could ever duplicate.
His right arm still rigidly out against the Cavalier’s wheel, Atwater turned his head a few more degrees toward her. ‘This, though, will be very public. Style is about as public as you can get.’
‘Well, except for TV.’
Atwater inclined his head slightly to signify concession. ‘Except for TV.’
Mrs. Moltke’s hand, with its multiple different rings, was now within just inches of the journalist’s large red right ear. She said: ‘Well, I look at Style. I’ve been looking at Style for years. I don’t bet there’s a body in town that hasn’t looked at Style or People or one of you all.’ The hand moved as if it were under water. ‘Sometimes it’s hard keeping you all straight. After your girl there called, I said to Brint it was a man coming over from People when I was telling him to go on and get cleaned up for company.’