" 'Thanks'?" Heather laughed.
"Not that we're implying that smoking is harmful to their health. But you don't want to take any chances where children are concerned. I mean, they're the future, right?"
"Wow," Heather said.
" 'Wow'?" Nick said. It was her admiring tone that threw him off balance.
"I… " she flushed, "this is awkward for me."
"Please," Nick said, almost taking her hand, "tell me."
"It's a little embarrassing."
"You don't have to be. Really."
"I find this all very… stimulating."
"What do you find stimulating?"
"Your total absence of morality." She sounded excited. Her eyes looked dreamy behind the glasses; she was leaning in close to him. "I get the feeling you'd do anything to pay that mortgage."
"Well, within limits."
"I was raised Catholic. Maybe that's why I find evil so refreshing."
"Evil?" Nick said with a nervous laugh.
She reached over and with her thumb and forefinger started playing with his silk Hermes tie. "But rarely have I seen it so attractively packaged." Her eyes raised slowly from the tie to his. Dimples. "Sick, isn't it?"
"Oh," Nick shrugged, "I'm not much into judging."
"I've actually gone to shrinks about it. They say it's all bound up with my feelings about religion and authority. Some women are turned on by dirty talk. I'm turned on by moral degenerates."
"Well, I don't really see myself as—"
"Oh," she said huskily, "shut up and tell me again about your plans to get more children to smoke."
"Don't you have it backwards?"
"Oh no," Heather said, dipping into her zabaglione and putting a custardy finger into her mouth, "I don't think so."
"Off the record?"
Her chest swelled. "What about very… deep… background?"
"Check." Nick waved to the waiter.
10
A Thoroughly Modern Merchant of Death: Nick Naylor, Tobacco's Chief "Smokesman".
An Evil Yuppie or Merely a Mass Enabler to 55 Million Smokers? Claims He Is 'Proudest' of ATS's Anti-Underage Smoking Program
BY HEATHER HOLLOWAY MOON CORRESPONDENT
Robby Jay and Polly were waiting for him at their usual table by the fake fire at Bert's. Bobby Jay was wearing a smirk the size of the Trump Tower. Polly appeared not to have drawn a conclusion yet about the full-page story in the Moon's "Lifestyles" section, but she looked at Nick as he sat down — late — with more than usual curiosity. "You look tired," she said pointedly.
"Rough morning," Nick said. "Advertising-ban strategy session, sick-building-syndrome position paper to get out, radio debate with Craighead. Get this — Helpless, Hopeless, and Stupid is going to start using the phrase 'tobacco and other drugs' in all its literature. So now we're just like heroin. Or alcohol," he tweaked her.
Nick ordered a vodka negroni. It was nice, these Mod Squad lunches. You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.
"What's with him?" Nick said. Bobby Jay was poring over Heather's article, running his hook down the columns of ink as though he was looking for something crucial.
"I can't quite figure out if I won my hundred bucks," Bobby Jay said. " 'Merchant of Death,' huh? Well I guess she got that right."
"You didn't… " Polly said with a look of latent ferocity. "Of course not. What do you take me for?"
"I'm not," she said, tapping loose her cigarette ash, "entirely sure." Bobby Jay read aloud from the Moon:
" 'Morality is not the issue here,' Naylor told the Moon. 'Tobacco is a hundred percent legal product that nearly sixty million American adults enjoy, just as they do coffee, chocolate, chewing gum, or any number of other oral refreshments.' "
" 'Oral refreshments'?" Polly snorted. "That's new."
Nick winked. "Sounds like a breath mint, doesn't it?"
Bobby Jay continued:
"Even his adversaries, and there are many of them, admit that Naylor is a formidable opponent. 'He's very, very slick,' said Gordon R. Craighead, head of Health and Human Services' Office of Substance Abuse Prevention, the tobacco lobby's principal federal opponent, 'and very, very smart, and that makes him very, very dangerous. This is an industry that kills about half a million Americans a year, and this nicely dressed, smooth-talking, BMW-driving Joseph Goebbels manages to make it sound like we're against free speech.' "
"The BMW-driving bit really hurt," Nick grinned.
Fortunately, Dr. Wheat had had a cancellation and was able to see Nick after lunch. Though his delicious evenings with Heather went jar toward stress reduction, and were a darn sight more fun than Prozac, the Larry King phone threat, plus having bodyguards, had gotten to him.
Nick had been going to Dr. Wheat for about a year. Dr. Wheat had a lot of clients in high-stress jobs. Occasionally, Nick's neck had a tendency to kink so that he couldn't swivel his head, and since part of his job involved being a "talking head" on television, it behooved him to have a head that swiveled. He'd tried neuromuscular massage, yoga, acupuncture, electronic relaxation machines that emitted bleeping noises and had pulsating red lights that supposedly persuaded your brain that you were relaxed, when in fact you were extremely alarmed; also Valium, Halcion, Atarax, and other state-of-the-art calmer-downers, some more controlled than others. Finally someone — the chief spokesman for the Savings and Loan Association, who had herself been coping with stress — suggested that he go see her D.O., or osteopath, who, she assured Nick, were real doctors. So Nick went and Dr. Wheat, a pleasant young man — Nick noted with some chagrin that he was now not only older than most policemen, but also than many doctors — felt his neck, tsk-tsked, and performed a series of high-velocity, low-impact maneuvers on him, each of which resulted in a terrible crrrack of various bones, but which afterward allowed him to rotate his head almost like the girl in The Exorcist. Nick had become quite a fan of OMT, or osteopathic manipulative technique; in fact, he had even done some pro bono work for their trade association. It was he who had come up with the successful slogan for their ads: "D.O.s Are People Doctors."
Dr. Wheat felt Nick's trapezius muscles (anterior and posterior), the suboccipitals, and his sternocleidomastoid. By now he knew these muscles as well as suburban Arlington, which is on the whole much more complicated than the human anatomy.
"Boy," he said — he was very chipper, Dr. Wheat, mid-western and good-natured—"if I didn't know better, I'd say rigor mortis had set in. What have you been doing to yourself?" He did a few HVLIs, but was not satisfied with the result, and disappearing, returned pushing a disturbing-looking device on wheels. It looked like something that the Iraqi secret police would use on someone caught writing saddam sucks on a public wall; it had straps and electrodes. Dr. Wheat rubbed jelly on parts of Nick's chest, attached the electrodes, and said, "You may feel a slight burning."
It felt like he was being struck on the back with wooden mallets. He realized that he was in fact arching off the table with every jolt of current like a frog in a high school biology class experiment.
"H-how m-many v-volts?"
"We're at three-thirty already. Very impressive. I don't like to go much higher than four hundred. The smell of burning flesh alarms the other patients." Dr. Wheat was prone to black humor. He explained that this was DC current that was coursing through Nick's body, that being preferable to AC, which would have the effect of stopping his heart and cooking him. After fifteen minutes, he turned it off and tried to rotate Nick's neck, pronouncing himself still unsatisfied with the result.