In the appliance department I found a bank of televisions all tuned to the same channel, a crystalline arrangement. The show was called Open Market, and pitted four contestants against one another in the trading of international commodities. The set looked like a State Department nerve center. The emcee wore a vested suit and a watchchain. His name was Troy.
“Sorry, Gladys, but that spin means a rollback in world soybean prices and disaster for you.”
How much normalcy could I buy with their fifty-thousand-dollar grand prize? Enough to keep me from stealing fruit, I thought. At the end of the show they gave an address and phone number which I memorized by repetition on my way to the library, where for the next couple of weeks I would study climatology, currency fluctuations, rates of consumption. I read journals containing the work of speculative econometricians and slept in a moribund Ford belonging to Violet’s graduate assistant. I made daily calls to the production office to ask about auditions and kept up my energies with so much coffee it must have stained my bladder brown.
From the American pulpit: The relentless man gains result, if not always reward. So, inevitably, my time arrived, like some tiny glacial shift. Violet drove me out to Studio City for my pre-interview and said I was more boring than ever.
“They don’t want scholarly, they want telegenic,” she said. “You ought to know that.”
“Me Mr. Citizen,” I answered, caught up in last-minute cramming.
Violet’s good-luck kiss was grudging. “I’ll be busy for a while. You’re on your own.”
The Open Market office was somewhere in a reclaimed manufacturing plant — high windows, lots of exposed brick. Somewhere. I waded through an open call for a diaper commercial, blundered into a photo session involving scuba gear. Everyone seemed irritated. The receptionists, every one an album-cover slut analog, were too preoccupied with health shakes, the trades, furtive phoning, to offer assistance.
“Interviews, right,” one finally said, an androgynous redhead browsing through a tropical fish magazine. She pointed down a fern-choked hall. “The brown door with the porthole.”
I had expected a younger, less formal man. And I was puzzled by words chalked on the blackboard behind him.
Data Search
Continuity
Diagnosis
Amplitude (testing)
Total Coverage
“You’re late. I’m afraid you missed the slide presentation.”
In fact, I’d come early, but I wasn’t about to argue. Not for fifty grand. The man parted his gray hair down the middle and wore rimless glasses. Was he trying to look like Woodrow Wilson? He sighed.
“All right, you might as well tell me about yourself.”
I had a bio all ready, the novel and the ordinary mixed in exact proportions.
He looked hesitant. “And your video experience?”
Telegenic, not scholarly. I couldn’t decipher the aim of this question, but determination drowned out unease and I gave a deftly exaggerated account of my stint with CBS News.
My interrogator was visibly pleased. He reviewed his notes, underlining several items.
“And how much do you know about us?”
I enthused over the exciting and imaginative concept, the genuinely educational thrust behind…
Eyes of comparable grayness appeared to bubble outward toward the rimless lenses, and, inescapably, our cross-purposes came clear. He was recruiting manpower, I was spinning my wheels. He indicated rather huffily that he had never even heard of Open Market, and I said there would now be no need for the personal information I’d given. Our chairs scraped on the linoleum.
So that was it? No, we had begun a ritual, reiterative process and could only see it through, like some form of hormonal imprinting that cancels volition.
“No such prize, but we offer a very generous benefits package.” He paused fractionally between words, as if in fear of damaging his remarkably small teeth. “A long-term relationship.”
In cajolery and salesmanship we contested, seesawing in our chairs, only slightly less non sequiturious than before. The Wilson man described the new undertaking in terms of Utopian splendor.
“Your own satellites,” I said thoughtfully.
The Wilson man drew something in the air with his pencil.
“Yeah, I got in on the periphery of some of the microwave research they were doing at RPI a few years ago.”
“RPI?”
“Isn’t it remarkable that the same thing that roasts your holiday turkey can send a Liza Minnelli concert to Brazil?”
The Wilson man scribbled. “We always have ham.”
On and on we went, like men of stature talking over the noise of a bar car, constantly assessing, never really warming to each other. In the end, the deal closed, we couldn’t say goodbye fast enough. Aimless at ritual’s end. Spent.
“Take care now.”
“Thanks.”
“Thank you.”
I carried away a Ziploc info kit and instructions to phone headquarters in a month. I took away the very latest thing in normalcy, and all at no charge.
Violet took the news rather badly.
“But isn’t this what you meant? Something new?”
“What I meant was…What I meant was…”
Cursing me for a male moron, she hung up. I thought: This must be how your mom acts when you enlist in the Marines.
31
THE OVERSEERS ARE LONG on application, short on things to do. Telephone numbers and parking spaces are continually being reassigned. Arriving today, a directive on bulletin boards (no personal messages, solicitations to buy or sell, clippings, or cartoons), and report of heated committee wrangling over which hue of stationery will best set off the new logo. This sort of thing is placed under the heading of Systems Maintenance. Is this what we’re learning from the Japanese?
Sometimes it is useful, even imperative, to go below, to reach the shiny, packed, irrefutable innards of this place and rest.
The archives are housed in a core of hexagonal cells running three levels deep, this supremely efficient design tactic plagiarized from the bee. Loose-leaf catalog binders are chained like pens in a bank, and against white styrene walls the black cassettes achieve blunt grandeur, the cold authority of a vault. Form fascinates function.
I clang down one of the narrow iron stairways — curious anachronism — and find Ellen at the bottom.
“Hiding?”
“No. More like hibernating.”
Padded shoulders, full skirt, black stockings, noncommittal mouth. Why do I feel intimidated? Like I’ve been caught out? Ellen swings a big leather carry-bag at me. In a satiric sort of way, she’s been trying to take weight off in the employee gym. I’ve watched her run in the rubber suit and the ankle weights and it’s not flattering. This is the idea, she tells me.
Nothing to sit on but the floor, so we drop down, facing one another.
“Don’t look up my skirt,” Ellen barks. “You know there’s no future in it.”
She’s annoyed, but doesn’t change her posture any.
I’m stung. “Well, I see you’re not getting any thinner.”
“No, I know. And now I’m reading the worst magazines. ‘Bolstering Your Style Awareness.’ Recipes with seaweed, ads for panty-liners. What do you suppose is the matter with me?”
“Nothing.”
“Oh, use your imagination.”