I slipped out from under her leg and turned off the TV. I went naked down the stairs, carrying my shoes and clothing. I wanted to wake up alone; it was a characteristic of mine, which many women learned to despise down through the years. My apartment welcomed me, dim and silent, the red-wine flavor of paintings and rugs, the fireplace and oak paneling, the black leather upholstery, old and comfortably cracked, the dull copper mugs on the mantelpiece and the burnished ale tone of the desk lamp-all warm and familiar and needing no acknowledgment, all reminding me that solitude asks no pledges of anyone. I took a shower and went to bed.
4
Weede Denney's head, prematurely bald and freckle-brown, repeated the suave circular bareness of his coffee table. It was as though the office decorator had devised them both, head and table, in a triumphant demonstration of ideal harmony between an executive and his furnishings. He stood for a second, dipped his knees slightly-something my father always did when his underwear got stuck in some netherland crevice, instructing me, a mere boy, that this was the civilized alternative to manual extrication, that boorish hobby of the underprivileged and the insane-and then sat down again in the black and ivory barber chair, refreshed and jacketless, his steel-drum chest eliminating any slight pleat or wrinkle from the muted blue shirt he was wearing. It was nine sharp, time for the Friday review, and we were all there, with pencils and note pads: Richter Janes, Mars Tyler, Walter Faye, Jones Perkins, Grove Palmer, Paul Joyner, Quincy Willet, Ted Warburton, and Reeves Chubb, who was wearing the same shirt, tie and suit he had worn the day before. Weede's secretary came in and took coffee requests, a process that consumed at least five minutes, most of them devoted to a mass clarification of Reeves Chubb's order, which included a large coffee, black, one sugar cube; a cream puff but not the kind with chocolate frosting; a fruit cup without the cherries if that was possible; and a packet of mentholated plastic-tipped cigars. Weede's face tightened somewhat during this scene and when it came my turn to order I graciously declined, saying I had already eaten my breakfast, and was rewarded for this lie by a rare Weedean pope-nod.
"Let's begin," he said. "Grove, I think we'll start with you. Ratings on the warcasts are way down."
"I've been in Tripoli," Grove Palmer said.
"Of course you have. No inference meant or intended. But the problem is there and we have to face it. Pressure is being exerted."
"I'm in favor of live satellite pickup. I've been in favor of live satellite pickup since my pre-Tripoli days."
"We'd never get permission," Quincy said.
"Don't bet on it."
"It's ghoulish," Warburton said.
"As Weede says, the problem is there and we have to face it. They're exerting pressure. I say let's exert pressure in return. Hepworth bought the half-hour for impact frequency. I say let's give it to him. I think we can get clearance for certain battle zones. Obviously you don't want to use tight shots if you can help it. And in any kind of live situation you don't want to use the kind of hard rock background we've been into. But in the brief time since my return from Tripoli, I've done some exploratory work and I think we can get clearance in zones where the tide is in our favor."
"It's ghoulish beyond belief," Warburtori said.
Warburton was the oldest man in the room and, as such, had assumed the position of tribal conscience. This was done with the unspoken approval of everyone. He was the eldest among us, the most informed, the tallest and grayest, the least feared in terms of power potential, idea smuggling and sheer treachery for its own sake, and, as everyone had undoubtedly heard in the twenty-some-odd hours since Jones Perkins passed the word to Reeves Chubb, the victim of a rare blood disease. Nobody ever paid the slightest attention to Warburton's pleas on behalf of humanity and good taste but we all felt, I think, that he was indispensable. He elevated our petty issues to a cosmological level and by so doing made it easier for us to ignore the whole thing on the grounds that we weren't qualified to deal with such high moral questions. It was nice to have Warburton around. He was so tall and gray and dignified. He rounded out the group photo we carried around in our calfskin heads. Without Warburton, we might have been a delegation of insurance salesmen at the annual get-together in Atlantic City-top men, of course, each a member of the million-dollar club, but still insurance agents; with Warburton (third row, center), we were the United States diplomatic mission to the Court of St. James's. Weede Denney referred to him both privately and publicly as his secretary of state. This remark was always accompanied by one of Weede's breathsucking chuckles, meant to indicate he was well aware that the joke was really on him. As the meeting began to melt away in my inner ear-drone-fests, I called these Friday affairs-I jotted down my version of the memo Weede would compose when poor Warburton died.
Re: Theodore Francis Warburton
It is always a sad occasion to lose an old and trusted employee. Theodore Francis (Ted) Warburton was more than that. He was a valuable friend, an invaluable advisor, a staunch advocate of the basic decency of man. Such qualities are rare today. I, for one, consider his passing a great personal loss. It is not often that we come across a man who possesses Ted's humanistic approach to the problems of our age. His untimely death diminishes all of us. I know everyone joins me in wishing his widow the very deepest of sympathies. No man is an island. We owe God a death. The torch has been passed. Ave atque vale.
"Let me ask you this," Mars Tyler said. "What's wrong with Grace Tully?"
"Old image," Walter Faye said.
"Exactly my point. Exactly what we need."
"Her appeal is vegetable. The vegetable kingdom cherishes her. She's their vegetable queen. Look, they're sitting there with twenty-two pounds of the Sunday Times spread all over the floor. The man is about forty-seven years old, wears glasses, never buys a paperback book that costs less than two and a quarter. He's leafing through the special men's wear section, having fantasies about a gold mohair dinner jacket. The woman is sitting there with the magazine section, wondering why the fuck somebody doesn't call them up and invite them over for whisky sours because it's so goddamn boring hanging around the house reading about ghettos and urban sprawl. That's the vegetable kingdom."
"Apropos of nothing," Paul Joyner said, "I understand Grace Tully makes it with anybody and everybody-man, woman or beast of the field."
"Let me ask you this," Mars said. "One, how does the vegetable kingdom differ from any other segment of the audience? Two, I still don't see why Grace Tully and her old image, as you call it, isn't exactly what we need for this particular sector as you yourself defined it. Three-we'll come back to three."
"The vegetable kingdom sits and stares," Walter said. "The animal kingdom just scratches. Basically it's as simple as that."
"There's something counter-productive about this discussion," Quincy said.
"Point well taken," Weede said.
"What was three?" Walter said. "You said there were three points."
"Let's come back to this," Weede said. "I want to generate a little heat on the Morgenthau thing."
"The Morgenthau thing is just absolutely fine," Jones Perkins said.
"What about Morgenthau himself?"
"What about Morgenthau himself," Jones said. "Well, he has just about made up his mind to do it and get it done and the hell with the haircream people."
"But has he definitely committed?"
"I would say he has just about definitely committed."
"In other words we have rounded the buoy."
"Weede, I would go even further than that. I would say he has just about definitely committed."