by Anthology
“Why don’t you and your husband have a division of labor? He greets, you send them on their way.”
“My trouble is,” she said unresponsively, “I’m capable of just so many smiles per day. With a crowd, my quota of smiles gets used up the first 10 minutes, then I’m left with an unfunctional face.”
“I’d say your face was functional.”
“Oh, keeps teeth from hanging out, provides setting for the eyes, yes. But it’s not going to smile any more tonight. Your face is very functional.”
“Keeps siroccos out. My ears from merging.”
“I see it on the news. You report wars from various places. Vietnam. Chasing Che in Bolivia.”
“Yes, we’re not short on wars.”
“Those are the big parties, crowds invited, nobody sends them on their way. Last time I saw you you were covering, let’s see, the Sinai campaign.”
“When it wasn’t covering me. That’s a joke. They have sandstorms in the desert, not all of Jewish origin.”
“You covering a war in Los Angeles?”
“The war against war, most of its general staffs out here. Doing a special report, documentary, on anti-Vietnam moves, on campuses especially.”
“Some fight war while the rest fight wars. We can use that division of labor. I’d better be getting back to my own wars. Hear the enemy popping more champagne corks. Good documenting, Mr. Arborow. Many thanks for the privileged sanctuary of your porch.”
Two days later he saw her again. Low-gearing to his driveway, he discovered her putting something in his mailbox. There was an eerily beautiful dog erupting around her feet, a female Siberian husky with medieval mummer’s mask, eyes of glacial blue in the slant of the world’s first dynasties, total grin.
“Hello there,” the woman said. “I wasn’t stealing your mail, I was adding to it.” She retrieved her envelope and handed it to Blake. “It’s an invitation to come over and drink some booze those people forgot to drink the other day.”
The blatantly gorgeous dog kept jumping at her hands as at lovely bones, she kept saying, “Down, Bisk,” and bucking the animal away.
“For somebody who doesn’t like parties you give a lot,” Blake said as he got out of his car.
“This isn’t a party, just some people for drinks. When Greg heard who our distinguished neighbor was he said you had to come over and have a snort, down, Bisk. You may not be aware the word snort is still used in some circles, down, Bisk.”
“Wives don’t altogether approve of their husbands in some circles.”
“In some circles wives get the feeling they’re not engaged in a marriage but covering a war. When’s the last time you approved of a war you covered? Not Vietnam, you never quite kept your lips from curling all the time you reported from there. Bisk, damn you, down, I said.”
“Why’s the dog named Bisk?”
“Short for b, i, s, q, u, i, t. You want to see something whorish and altogether delightful? Call her by name, then ask if she wants one of those things I spelled.”
Blake leaned close to the dog, now sitting as on a throne, smiling as at a circus, and said, “Good girl, Bisk, want a bisquit?”
Bisk went out of her mind. Mouth exploded with sounds of highest romp. Tail beat a tattoo of paternosters on the tar, the pup form of rosary. Tongue came out to lavish love up the full length of Blake’s jaw. Then she whipped over on her back and lay still, front paws bent and held together in the beg position, back legs similarly crooked but spread, face a panorama of flooded happiness. Her Arctic blue eyes were full on Blake as she made deep, prolonged throat vowels of agony and expectancy into his face. Blake rubbed her teat-lined belly, her soft, soft neck, feeling the surge of urgent vowels inside.
“Isn’t she the neighborhood tart, isn’t she unbelievable,” Lady of the Manor said.
Blake thought of the woman this way. The only other designation he could think of was, Master Greg’s Mistress, Mum of Greg Areas.
“Is it the neighborhood style?” he said, stroking the fable-faced animal’s tumulted chest above the spread legs.
“Oh, it’s a mixed neighborhood, Mr. Arborow, some tarts, some cream-puffs. Try to make it on Friday, won’t you? The Gibsons will be dry and I can promise the small talk’ll be practically microscopic. A war correspondent should be made aware that there are more wars to cover than are dreamed of in his network’s philosophy. Come on, Bisk, quit plying your trade, we’re going home.”
The note said simply, We’re having some people for drinks this Friday at five. Is it possible you can come? We would be delighted. I give you my categorical guarantee that nobody will ask if you’ve seen any interesting wars lately. Do come.
Blake was feeling broken into, potently sucked at. Mum of the Manse, Greg’s Lady Lean, was named Mari Selander.
It was a manse, all right. Bucking for the apprentice-castle rating. Walls of the roomy vestibule and king-size salon were inundated with hunt and turf prints, engravings honoring marlin on the leap, woodcuts of the better known whaling ships, oils of Nantucket weltering under a nor’easter, antique wooden eagles in emblematic profile, crossed dueling pistols and sabers.
The men talking in corners over vermouthed Bombay gins had the wind-toned faces of sportsmen, the aroma of leather chairs and massages. Their wives, looking worked-over by expensive hands, in clothes built around their specifics, chatted about Acapulco and Mrs. Reagan’s decorating tastes.
Greg Selander was doggedly, programmatically, the boy, under a crew-cut of iron filings. His halfback face was essentially what it had been in its third year at Princeton except for signs of going fluid at the jowls, the drinker’s drip of flesh.
Mari Selander, again in velvet, cinched this time to a miraculous gaunting at the waist and falling inches short of the knee, again seemed somewhat vagued. Blake took the measure of those yearling legs that seemed to go on forever. He considered how they might be in full, urging use.
Greg Selander immediately had Blake in a gaming alcove, explaining that in spite of his appearance of the varsity athlete he’d played no football at Princeton, preferring squash and for a time shot-putting. He might have gone out for lacrosse but it took too much time, besides, lacrosse players had collisions and bad spills.
“Secret’s out,” Mari Selander came close to say. “You’ve let Mr. Arborow know he’s in a den of nonconformists.”
“I don’t care what you look like, your looks can’t dictate your action and direction,” Greg Selander said. “That’s the blight today, outer direction, government taking over your breathing and chewing.”
Blake considered what a big man going in for football might have to do with excessive government, went back to Mari Selander’s legs.
“Greg reads Reisman after his Dow and before his Jones,” Mari Selander said. “Whatever takes dim view of the outside, he’s for. Ask him why he takes a dim view of everything on the far side of his skin.”
“Dark out there,” Greg Selander said. “Dim’s the one view you can take.”
“That’s where the masses are, out there somewhere,” Mari Selander said. “They sense how many of your dark looks are meant for them. They don’t elect dim viewers to office, as Barry found out.”
“I was explaining why I never went in for body-contact sports, Mari,” Greg Selander said. “Goldwater’s a different subject.”
“What’s your objection to contact sports?” Blake said, looking at the wife’s legs.
“Taking the dimmest view of the human race, you’d want as little contact with its units as possible,” Mari Selander said. “That’s why the right-of-rights play so much squash, put so many shots.”
“Mari talks lefty to shake me up,” Greg Selander said. “Likes to play devil’s advocate.”
“God and Barry have all the high-priced attorneys they need,” Mari Selander said. “The devil could use a few more legal minds.”
“It wasn’t God incited the riots out to UCLA today,” Greg Selander said. “Goldwater wasn’
t anywhere on the scene.”
“It’s because God wasn’t on the scene, just the recruiter for Taybott Chemicals trying to recruit students to make napalm, that’s why they had the riot,” Man Selander said. “The recruiter might as well have been Barry, Barry’s a friend of napalm. Were you at UCLA this afternoon, Mr. Arborow?”
“Yes, with our cameramen,” Blake said.
“What did you think of those kids chasing the Tayhott man up on the roof and throwing stinkbombs at him?” Greg Selander said.
“My job’s not to assess facts so much as get them.”
“But you must have had some thoughts. Impressions, let’s say.”
“Well, I thought the students’ running was good and their aim fair, though spotty. I got the impression they’re not opposed to body-contact games. If they’d gotten their hands on the man they might have welcomed the contact, and tried to widen it.”
“I approve of you, I’d like to widen the contact, Mr. Arborow,” Mari Selander said, linking her arm with Blake’s. “How would it be if we sat?”
They took places with the other guests in the conversational arc before the vaulting fireplace. A fire big enough to roast a family of pigs whole was blooming in the baronial pit. When Greg Selander positioned himself to the left, Mari Selander made for the right, to balance on an ottoman no distance at all from Blake’s knees. Greg Selander’s reaction to his wife’s scrupulous avoidance, as to her earlier baiting, seemed to be, as nearly as Blake could give it a name, scrupulous nonreaction.
Blake looked for a conversational move toward the husband which would be, by implication, away from the wife.
“Your theory that football players are Democrats to New Lefts,” he said. “I wonder if a Harris or Gallup Poll would back you up.”
“You’ll remember the Kennedy gang played a lot of touch football,” Mari Selander said.
“Touch isn’t tackle,” Blake said.
“Barry people are least of all touching,” Mari Selander said. “Of course, Kennedy people can be all over you.”
“I didn’t put that forth as a thesis,” Greg Selander said. “I was saying, because you’ve got the football build, and people expect you to play football, is no reason to do the thing, it’s just a personal feeling of mine.”
He helped himself to another Martini offered on a tray by a maid mostly starch. He had to be aware that the others had stopped their localized talk and were listening.
“If you don’t like being manipulated, you don’t let yourself be manipulated by eyes, either,” he added as he sipped from his new drink and made a quick survey of the visiting eyes turned manipulative.
“Leaving aside the question of whether you can be handled, which is what manipulated means, by eyes,” Mari Selander said, “can you in all honesty claim you were never the least bit manipulated by Barry’s eyes, Greg?”
“By his ideas, policies, Mari. Which are against manipulation. By agencies, bureaus, eyes, all the outside structures. Well. War correspondent. You have one of the more interesting jobs, Mr. Arborow.”
“Some people in my business say, see one war, you’ve seen them all,” Blake said.
“Don’t get that feeling from Hemingway,” Greg Selander said. “He went to wars as though they were different.”
“His last was different,” Blake said. “Himself and himself the combatants. Toss-up as to who won.”
“Lonely crowdsmanship,” Mari Selander said. “Lonely crowdsmen read Hemingway for the drama of their plight, Reisman for the ideology. When not giving parties.”
Blake felt his knees touching his hostess’s with no initiative from his side. He moved them, crossed his legs.
“I spent an afternoon with Hemingway arguing this point,” he said. “I said wars are so alike they get monotonous, so if you write a lot of books about war they can get monotonous. He said people die differently in different times and places, it was my thought they die more or less the same, from rocks, or arrows, or napalm.”
“Or boredom,” Mari Selander said. Her words were becoming runny, her green eyes, diffused.
“Hemingway died like his father,” Blake said. “Tradition meant something to him.”
“That’s the point I can’t buy,” Greg Selander said, scrupulously to Blake. “Our boys in Vietnam don’t die like Communists, it’s for something positive and what’s more, they know it.”
“It’s hard to tell from the body counts,” Blake said. “Maybe I’ve been to too many.”
“I’ve been in Vietnam myself,” Greg Selander said. “I was there just last August, for the Defense Department, saw them in the hospitals, some dying. I can speak to a certain extent firsthand here.”
“Eyes will handle before anybody speaks with a hand of any number,” Mari Selander said. “Allowing for the deaf who use sign language. Many deaf and dumb speak firsthand.”
“What were you doing in Vietnam?” Blake said.
“I’m in defense production, Mr. Arborow,” Greg Selander said. “A-V-A Components, the letters are short for Aviation, we subcontract parts for planes and choppers, mostly military right now. I went over to help assess how the choppers are carrying out their missions. Naturally, I looked around.”
“Greg reports the choppers are chopping fine,” Man Selander said. “Chopping some and burning some, with the help of napalm. Naturally, VC’s burn differently from freedom fighters. Burn up, our fellows burn down.”
“There are better things to joke about than napalm, Mari,” Greg Selander said, with the air of pointing out a detail that might otherwise be overlooked.
Mari Selander looked lengthily at her husband. Her lips thinned, followed by her eyes. She pulled in a long, careful breath.
“Napalm’s so unjocular,” she said. “I was out at UCLA myself this afternoon. Probably in half the footage Mr. Arborow got. Hope they shot my good profile. I was one of the people chased the Taybott man up to the roof of Kerkhoff. Didn’t throw stinkbombs but that was mainly because I didn’t have any.”
The guests were carefully listening, though not surprised. Expecting rough games, they got rough games. It remained to be seen which passes would be completed, who would come out first in yards gained.
“You were going to the Balenciaga showing at I. Magnin’s,” Greg Selander said.
“Nobody throws stinkbombs at Magnin’s,” Mari Selander said.
“I won’t go into the politics of it, Mari, Let’s leave politics out. Let’s just say, it’s inconsistent to demonstrate against napalm in Paris and Rome clothes paid for by the manufacture of helicopters that deliver napalm.”
“I could stop yelling my head off against napalm, you’re right, Greg. Or you could stop being involved one way or another with napalm.”
“I could. But you’re fond of Rome and Paris clothes, if I didn’t make the money to buy them you wouldn’t like it. You don’t approve of napalm but you’re dressed with, in, and by, napalm.” By way of footnotes, to record the minutiae that can get overlooked.
“And it burns,” Mari Selander said.
“And it’s self-applied, you dress yourself in the morning,” Greg Selander said, still in the spirit of marginalia. “Mr. Arborow, wouldn’t you say napalm in Vietnam’s about the same situation as the bomb with Hiroshima? Saves more lives than it takes?”
“I’m told that,” Blake said.
“I didn’t ask what others tell you.”
“It’s tricky. I see the lives it takes and cripples, I don’t see the ones it’s said to save.”
“But you allow for the possibility?”
“I listen to information officers’ releases, and official briefings, and report what I hear. Along with what I see. Even when there’s a gap between what’s audible and what’s visible. If you go along with McLuhan, the sights in our world are winning out over the sounds. That could mean we’re being manipulated by eyes, our own.”
“Not answering my question, Mr. Arborow.”
“No, and I don’t think I said i
t was.”
“You could pass things along without necessarily believing or allowing for them yourself.”
“I was more or less implying that.”
“Mr. Arborow, are we using napalm to win a just war with the least human cost, or aren’t we? You’re a guest in my house and I’m trying to nail you down, for that I apologize, but with some matters we can drop amenities.”
“As quick as we drop napalm,” Mari Selander said.
“As quick as some throw stinkbombs,” Greg Selander said.
The guests were absorbed. You can’t know in advance what plays will be tried and what the final score will be. It could be speculated that collision games were nothing new in this apprentice castle, and did not always concern politics.
“I’m a reporter,” Blake said. “That means my best trained parts are my eyes. I’m paid not for the opinions in my head but the pictures on my trained, 20-20 eyes. I’ve got a surplus. Many pictures piled up on my trained eyes my employers don’t want. An assortment of my firsthand sights they don’t care to see, and have other people see. Very manipulative sights.”
Blake was just now collecting another sight The outrageously beautiful Bisk had wandered in and taken a seat alongside her mistress, all dripping grin under the hard-edged, archaic mask, ready to pull sleds for any who cared to travel out of gin disharmonies through whatever snowdrifts of rough games. Lady Lean had bent to whisper something in her ear Blake had heard, “Girl, sweet thing, want a bisquit?” The animal had collapsed insanely on the carpet, front paws urging, back paws validating, mouth at maximum curl to announce that anything offered was all right because catering love was the wide world’s one stuff. Mari Selander was now leaning low over the dog, moving her incredibly elongated fingers up and down Bisk’s two lines of nipples, whispering, “Oh, you tart, spread for all comers.” Blake was trying not to see those furred legs abandoned to the air, Mari Selander’s stalky legs exposed to the lap and flamboyantly parted too.
“You’re still hinting rather than saying, Mr. Arborow,” Greg Selander said.
“I’m saying, in stages. Five correspondents ducked this napalm assignment before the network brought me back from Sinai. I wanted to duck it, too. We all know we’ve stored up more sights than the network cares to distribute. Not opinions about napalm, sights of napalm. In action. Carrying out its missions. On bodies. Bodies shouting and running. Eighty-year-olds and two-year-olds shout and run the same. Napalm is the answer to the generation gap. I’ve been in helicopters 100 feet from the burning, shouting bodies. Helicopters you probably made parts for. You make good parts, bring a man with trained eyes to within 100 feet of the napalmed, after dropping the napalm. I feel how jellied petroleum works on bodies, how they crisp up, speeding back and forth, their sound effects, is a vital part of the napalm story, which my eyes are equipped to tell, no opinions, just pictures. I was on the phone for an hour after I got back from UCLA this afternoon, telling my home office I have to go back to Vietnam to get close-up footage on the burning, running, loud bodies. They don’t see it. They think that to show these diminishing, toasting bodies right now would be playing into the hands of the enemy, as footage of the 70,000 bodies in Hiroshima would have in 1945. You asked for my opinion. My opinion is, I’ve got informative information on the subject of napalm on my eyes, and it burns, and I want to shout, and I’m being ordered to withhold this information, which is against my training. My first opinion is that this information all over my eyeballs isn’t my private property. Your opinion and my opinion as to the privacy of some types of property may differ.”