Potency is an ugly thing.
Still, thinking back, fathering was perhaps the source of erotic mystery for Adams — a sleeplessness beneath his pleasure with Pamela at night.
There was a park by the house where they lived in the days before Deidre was born. Adams walked there with Toby. In the evenings other fathers joined him. Softballs, footballs. The clink of skate keys against nickels and dimes, money for ice cream, in the fathers’ heavy pockets. He remembers a group of young women and men marching up the street past the park, carrying signs. It was the early seventies. The last legs of the youth movement, they were denouncing Richard Nixon with not much conviction. Their signs read STOP THE BOMBING IN CAMBODIA and ANDY WARHOL FOR PRESIDENT.
“Daddy, who’s Andy Warhol,” asked a neighbor’s daughter.
“No one knows, honey,” her father said.
Now that neighbor’s in Seattle — like other fathers, he hit the road in service of free enterprise. Hundreds of fathers balancing themselves on the white stripes of the highways, wives and children stacked on their shoulders as high as ice cream cones.
Other fathers have died. Adams misses them. He shared many terrifying moments with them, signing release forms in emergency rooms, squirming in metal folding chairs in recital halls. They taught the little girls how to blow their noses without bursting their eardrums, and the little boys how to scratch their balls, if scratch they must, in secret, through their pockets. They were good fathers, all of them, full of love for their wives and gratitude for a cold glass of beer, with failing legs but the courage to dive for any wild pitch that came their way.
He finds an excuse to visit the Records Office. As he’s thumbing through the photo file, he asks Jordan, “Everything all right?” “Yeah.”
“I think those visits with Mayer are a waste of time, don’t you? He says the same thing every time.”
“He’s all right,” Jordan says. “He isn’t a gung-ho company man like everybody else around here. It’s refreshing.”
Adams wonders if he has just been insulted. “Has he ever said anything you could use?”
“What business is that of yours?”
“Nothing. Wasn’t personal. I just don’t find his little profiles very helpful.”
Jordan puts down the stack of 8×10’s he’s been holding. “I don’t know what this thing is that you seem to have about me, Sam, but I wish you’d stop it. I’ve never seen your fucking yard, all right? And I’ll tell you something else, if I need to see Mayer, it’s because you’re driving me crazy.”
He pours himself a beer and opens a bag of chips. He walks to the living room, sits at his drafting table, studies his latest map of the property Carter has recently acquired.
Something is wrong. What is it?
The isohyet. What about it?
The ninety-eighth meridian.
Adams squints, sips his beer.
When someone fouls up, the volume of mail passing back and forth within On-Line increases dramatically. Interoffice memos travel between floors, beginning “Earlier we discussed …” or “In reference to last week’s conference …” Each department goes on record as having been clean.
The company library, containing a number of atlases and journals, is located in a niche off the coffee room. There, on a shelf along one wall, a row of legal books entitled Words and Phrases can be found. These volumes provide legal definitions for every occasion. When a problem arises within the company, the books disappear from the library.
Carter’s got his lawyers, Mallow and Vox, working overtime on the real estate deals. Vox is a tiny man, lost in his clothes. His face is as battered as a drum head, ravaged, it appears, from serious bouts with acne. Adams has never had a direct conversation with him, talks past him in meetings.
Mallow is nervous and pale. Adams hasn’t had occasion to work with him, either, but knows from the newsletter that he has lobbied in Washington with lawyers from corporations in their congressional district. In addition, both Mallow and Vox have formed, at Carter’s request, a Political Action Committee. Company policy states that management-level personnel must contribute to the committee. The rest of the employees are not required to do so, but know that failure to give is interpreted by Carter as refusal to support the company’s goals.
When Mallow comes around, pale hand hanging open, Adams makes a point of giving a little more each time.
The offending left hand: On the freeway Adams waves to the world. He signals waiters and cashiers with his left hand. With his left hand he acknowledges Jordan from across the coffee room. When he speaks to Pamela on the phone, he holds the receiver in his left hand.
“The other night Deidre woke me up and said a bad clown had come out of her coloring book and tried to stick his puffy cap down her throat,” Pamela says. “She couldn’t understand why I didn’t search her room. Then I thought, if she can’t tell the difference between waking life and dreams, and if there’s anything at all to Aristotle’s notion that the pleasure of art is imitation, then Deidre can’t appreciate art. She doesn’t know it’s imitation. So I bought a clown suit — ”
“Pam?” Adams says. “Are you terrorizing our daughter?”
Pamela laughs. “It’s true. There was no pleasure on her face.”
Mosquitoes swarm around his arms. He passes the Polish dance hall and the cemetery that round off one end of his neighborhood (it has never been zoned). Rosa the fortune-teller is standing on her front porch in a print dress, a purple scarf draped around her head. She picks her teeth with a toothpick, gazes at the tombstones across the street.
In the public library, two blocks from his house, Adams finds books on climatology, geography, and federal land grant programs. He carries the books to a wooden table and switches on the green reading lamp.
The ninety-eighth meridian. Of course.
At the turn of the century, American meteorologists drew a thirty-inch isohyet along the ninety-eighth meridian, indicating the westernmost boundary along which the annual rainfall averaged thirty inches. Thirty inches, along with rate of evaporation and seasonal distribution, was, according to the meteorologists, the bare minimum needed to grow crops. Carter’s property lies west of the line.
“You’re making an awful lot of noise about a thirty-inch line,” Carter says.
“That line could be very important to a number of families.”
“The county averages over forty inches of rain a year.”
“Yes, but the rainfall isn’t evenly distributed. In the fall, parts of the county experience droughtlike conditions. The land looks fertile, but those are limestone hills containing only surface soil. Those shrubs are stunted trees.”
“Granted, it won’t be easy to cultivate…”
“It’ll be impossible to cultivate.”
“Damn it, Sam, you’re too smart for your own good,” Carter says, leaning forward in his chair.
“I suggest — ”
“How do you like your computer?”
“I like it very much.”
“We’ve got to pay for it, hmm?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm?”
“Sure.”
“Then move the isohyet a quarter of an inch to the left,” Carter says.