“My brother-in-law,” says Carmen.
Carmen and Vera came to This Week around the same time but didn’t become friends till a year or so later when Vera called in sick to take Rosie to the circus, and there on line for cotton candy was Carmen, clinging to some guy with slicked-back hair and a satin baseball jacket. Figuring she’d called in sick, too, Vera pretended not to see her. But they met head on in the menagerie. Carmen kissed Vera’s cheek with sticky lips and said, “This is Frankie, my fiancé.” Up close, Frankie was handsome in a slightly reptilian way, with eyes to match his jacket—such an unnatural, Emerald-City-of-Oz green that Vera couldn’t help asking if they were real. “Hey, where’s she from?” he asked Carmen. “Outer space?” The next day Carmen told Vera that Frankie played sax in a salsa band and his friends called him the Lizard.
Now, four years later, Carmen and Frankie are still engaged, though recently Frankie’s had a fight with a conga drummer and, out of spite, enlisted in the army. Carmen hopes it’s for the best; he’s promised her and his parents he’ll train as a physical therapist. Vera still wants to warn her: “Carmen, don’t marry a man called the Lizard!” Still thinks of the headline, I MARRIED AN IGUANA, and a lead paragraph about a bride who discovers—too late!—her new husband’s body covered with scales. But she’s learned her lesson from Hazel: Some stories are better unwritten. Besides, what good would it do? Carmen believes in her soul that she and Frankie have been paired by God to walk hand in hand up the gangplank to Noah’s ark.
Now she says, “Carmen, qué pasa? What’s new with Frankie?”
“Oh God.” Carmen sighs. “He called last night from Fort Benning. He’s already quit physical therapy and switched to band. He’s so lazy,” she says, with so much love and pride that Vera has to look away, up over Carmen’s head at the THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING sign on the wall. Those words used to make her feel murderous. But in Carmen’s case, she senses something well meant and gracious and even beatific about them, something to do with purity and the body as a temple of the Holy Ghost.
“We’re no good on the phone,” says Carmen. “Long distance. I get things wrong and then we hang up and…I don’t know. Qué pasa with you?”
“Nada,” says Vera.
“That’s what you think,” she says.
At first Vera thinks she’s showing her the same kindness she’s shown the wild boy, telling her what she needs to hear, that her life can’t go on like this—just This Week and Rosalie and nada else except odd longings toward boys with beautiful hands on the subway. But gradually, as Carmen goes on, she understands that the news she has for Vera is anything but reassuring, is in fact so disturbing that the only way Vera can calm herself is to shut her eyes and picture that Texaco station with those fifty cartons of cigarettes just waiting to be dragged off to some safe, cool burrow in the piny woods and smoked five or six at a time.
VERA HAS A SPECIAL feeling for Bigfoot. At This Week, everyone wants to make the front page, and Vera’s first front-page story was I MARRIED BIGFOOT. It told of an Oregon housewife, missing and long presumed dead, who reappeared claiming to have been kidnapped from her kitchen by Bigfoot, whose patient vegetarian ways—so different from her carnivore human hubby’s—won her heart. Bigfoot taught her the secrets of the forest; she taught him the harmony line to “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” Then gradually Bigfoot’s passion cooled. He began spending more time away in the wilderness, until one night he went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.
Vera has no idea where this story came from, except that when Shaefer and Esposito hired her, they gave her a stack of old This Weeks, and she noticed how Bigfoot stories appeared at least once a month. Mostly these were reports of sightings and such, so that I MARRIED BIGFOOT was a kind of landmark in Bigfoot literature, changing the focus, bringing Bigfoot home. What pleases Vera is that she was able to write it without coming close to her own Bigfoot fantasy, which is this:
Vera and the people she loves most—Rosie, Lowell, her friend Louise, her parents—are (and this is the hardest part to imagine) camping in the forest. One morning Bigfoot appears. And though they’re surprised, not even Rosie is scared. His approach is so hesitant and mild, he could be a fifteen-foot two-legged dog come for love. He brings them trout and honey and watercress salad; he cooks breakfast. Then, purposely shortening his stride, carrying Rosie so she won’t trail behind and fall into his footprints, he leads them to his lair. It’s one of those phantasmagorical rag-and-branch kingdoms hermit folk-carvers build, only Bigfoot’s is better hidden. He treats them like guests from a foreign country whose language he doesn’t speak. He teaches them what he can. After a week they leave, more closely bound by their memory of those seven days than by love itself.
Of course, she’ll never write OUR WEEK WITH BIGFOOT. It’s too private and lacks all the juicy details that This Week readers have come to expect. Still, Vera likes to calm herself by imagining it on nights when she can’t sleep and at difficult moments like this one, when Carmen’s just given her the bad news. Today she adds smoking cigarettes with no harmful physical consequences to the list of things she and her loved ones and Bigfoot will do.
The bad news is that Frank Shaefer and Dan Esposito were on the phone with some lawyer at eight this morning. Then they called their own lawyer; then they went out. What Carmen and Vera don’t have to say is that Shaefer and Esposito never leave. They send out for lunch. They’re the first to arrive, the last to go home, and when they do, you can almost see something sticking and stretching and breaking like bubble gum on a shoe.
Now Frank’s left instructions for Vera and Mel Solomon, the staff photographer, to be in his office first thing after lunch. “What’s it about?” says Vera, knowing Carmen’s overheard more than she’s letting on. “It’s probably nothing,” says Carmen.
It takes Vera less than a minute to walk to her office and even less than that to jump to the conclusion that she’s written something libelous. She’s feared—been taught to fear—this since her first day at This Week, when Frank Shaefer told her the cautionary tale of how her unlucky predecessor was fired for writing about a silent movie queen returning from the dead, only to learn that the actress was still alive and well enough to sue. “The bottom line,” Frank had said, “is to know who’s alive and who’s dead.” Vera assured them she was a journalist; she had principles, ethics, checked facts. Facts? Shaefer and Esposito exchanged knowing looks, and then with a rueful little smile Dan said, “Look, it’s better all around if you make it up.” “What Dan’s saying,” explained Frank, “is that we’re mostly concerned with that gray area—it could be true, it just isn’t true.”
Since then reminders have appeared on Vera’s desk, xeroxed clippings from other papers. Vera’s favorite dates from when E. Howard Hunt was working for the CIA, writing spy thrillers on the side, and having to submit his final drafts for security clearance because his most fantastic scenarios so often turned out to be classified information. Scrawled over the clipping is Frank Shaefer’s note: “Too close for comfort!” When Carol Burnett sued the Enquirer, Shaefer and Esposito called a meeting to remind the staff their search for truth need take them no further than the Teletype. Let the wire services take the heat. They hadn’t started a paper like This Week to have reporters yelling, “Stop the presses!” Whole nations might be changing hands in the jungles of Asia and Latin America, but the only jungles that matter here are those remote pygmy hideouts where the brontosauruses still graze. And so while the competition delves ever deeper into celebrity scandal, This Week never mentions a famous name unless the context is innocuous or inspirational (DEBBY BOONE: I GAVE UP JAVA FOR JESUS) or, on rare occasions, disguised as letters to the editor (“Dear Sirs: If you ask me, somebody should lock up those Charlie’s Angels and throw away the key till they put on underwear like decent Christian women”).
Of course, for every Washington Wild Child who shows up at the office, three more write letters containing the line, “I have contacte
d my lawyer.” Presumably their lawyers are charging stiff fees for what Carmen does for minimum wage: convincing the insulted and outraged they don’t have a case. The same person rarely writes twice. So if Shaefer and Esposito are seeing their lawyer, someone has something solid.
Suddenly Vera’s seized by the urge to go home and get into bed and start the day over again. She thinks of how, in primitive cultures, magicians often advise bewitched clients to undo spells by doing everything backward. She considers backing down into Herald Square, onto the subway, and up to her apartment. Perhaps she could take it even further, back before she came here to work and wound up where she is now—dreading the prospect of facing Shaefer and Esposito, of losing a job she doesn’t want and doesn’t want to lose.
Vera sits down at her desk and types out the Bigfoot story in roughly the same six hundred words she’d thought of on the train. After five years she can pretty much think in final-draft This Week-ese, and the typing is in itself a kind of pleasure that calms and distracts her. She retypes it till it’s perfect, then moves on to the next best thing, which is telling herself that losing her job at This Week may be a blessing. She never planned on staying so long, but despite how she worries about its effect on her, she’s made no move to quit. What she needs to remember and often forgets is that there’s a world out there, a world in which every dog isn’t eating newborn babies or posing for cute photos talking on the phone.
Pushing the Bigfoot piece to one side, Vera clears a place and climbs up on her desk. Her office dates from a time when office work wasn’t supposed to feel like typing in the gondola of a balloon swaying high over Manhattan. Vera’s sooty little window isn’t there for scenic views—just, grudgingly, for light. She can’t see out of it without getting up on her desk—an effort she saves mainly for days like today, when she so needs the sight of other lives that what’s visible from fifteen stories up is better than nothing at all.
Now, looking down, Vera wonders how many of those tiny specks ever dreamed they’d be doing what they’re doing. No wonder they go for This Week’s basic message: Fate can just pick you up and put you down someplace else. You can be eating breakfast and a tornado will move you and your family three counties over without breaking the shell on Dad’s egg.
So it is with Vera. Fabricating tabloid news was hardly her childhood ambition—not that her childhood ambition was any less absurd. Vera’s first love was Peter Pan, her first wish to be reborn in an Edwardian nursery with a sheepdog, frilly nightshirts, and Mr. and Mrs. Darling for parents instead of Dave and Norma Perl. Only now does Vera see how even this marked her as their daughter, DNA-encoded for desiring the impossible.
By the time Vera set her sights on something closer, her friends were setting theirs on infinity. By graduation, a girl in Vera’s college class had discovered a new galaxy. Vera’s friend Louise took lots of acid and wanted to write poetry and see God. By comparison, Vera’s wanting to be a journalist seemed modest, yet even in this her aims were so lofty she’d settle for nothing less than telling the true stories that revealed the profound and fantastic nature of ordinary lives.
Her first published article profiled recent Russian émigrés: dour, craggy-faced Brighton Beach Solzhenitsyns. The second dealt with a family of storefront fortunetellers. After Rosie was born, the need for steadier employment drove Vera to the Downtowner, a weekly give-away paper consisting mostly of restaurant listings and ads for neighborhood chiropractors. Her last attempt at serious journalism reported Louise’s experiences in the Ananda Devi ashram—yet one more story that would have been better untold. Recalling it makes her cringe, with guilt and with its power to suggest that her coming to This Week was not quite the lark, the lucky accident she likes to pretend. She was sick of the truth. Writing for This Week seemed much simpler—dispensing with facts while exercising her natural bent for daydreaming at the edge of probability, converting the most ordinary incidents into the most bizarre.
It all seems so distant. Ten years ago she was a fool for truth, her heart set on nothing less than all history and human connection revealed in a pattern neat and colorful as an argyle sock. Now she’s just another company slob. What saddens her is not just the innocence lost, the time wasted, but that the passing years have turned her brain into a complicated trash compactor, shredding her inner life into Grade B drive-in Grand Guignol.
The spiritual implications of this have Vera fired up to quit on the spot when suddenly Carmen appears in the doorway and sails four letters Frisbee-style onto her desk. Pleased with herself, Carmen rocks on her heels like one of those huts on chicken legs in Russian fairy tales, then makes the okay sign, thumb and forefinger joined. Where else, Vera thinks, where else in the world will her mail be delivered like this? The sharp, freefall drop of loss she feels is her first hint that her five-year romance with This Week might really be ending. That special clarity of vision, that nostalgia before the fact, the pain itself is specific to leaving: jobs, apartments, cities, Lowell.
“Carmen,” says Vera, “tell me. Are we being sued over something I wrote?”
“I don’t think so,” mumbles Carmen unconvincingly, and backs straight out the door.
By now Vera’s reduced to folding her hands on her desk and plotting out her morning, overcarefully, like a drunk planning a trip to the bathroom. First she’ll read her mail, saving the most interesting letters for last. Then she’ll hit the coffee room. On the way back she’ll stop and see Mel Solomon or Mavis Biretta or whoever else is around. Then she’ll head for the morgue and look through back issues until she figures out which story Frank Shaefer and Dan Esposito are at this very moment dissecting line by line with their lawyer.
BEGINNING WITH THE MOST boring, Vera starts with a letter from some politician whose name she doesn’t recognize. Still, she opens it to kill time and on the chance that its bulk-rate-mailing look is deceptive, that inside is a personal note from Eighteenth District Representative Terry Blankett inviting her to write his speeches. Inside is Blankett’s voting record on power-company tax credits. Though the brochure’s printed in purple, Vera can tell that in real life Terry Blankett’s skin is pink. Light-haired, stout in the face, he grins up at her from behind the gapped teeth and clipped moustache of a German burgher. Automatically, her mind goes to work on a story about a Hamburg city councilman busted for wearing fat ladies’ lingerie. Then she remembers Howard Hunt’s talent for outguessing history and the possibility that at this minute, history is dressing Herr Councilor somebody-or-other in a lace bra and pink rayon tap pants.
As Vera opens the second letter, an overstuffed business envelope from West Myra, Illinois, grease spots hint at what’s inside—a sheaf of folded xeroxes and on top this note in ballpoint on looseleaf paper:
Dear Vera Perl,
I write this in the hope that there will be a miracle. I hope to be rescued. I hope this will reach the courtroom. I am the victim of a Nazi KGB game to do away with my life. They have a well-hidden operation going on. They use sight and sound from a distance. There is also ultrasound, I’ve heard, but it is more like heavy air pressure. They can also control certain body functions via astral projection. All this is mind control. Radio and TV waves.
The xeroxed pages include a programming guide to mind-control broadcasts, the names of fifty secret operatives, all in West Myra, Illinois, and letters from the FBI, the FCC, the attorney general, and various network news chiefs. Vera’s struck by the grace of their language:
In response to your letter of August 21, the Federal Communications Commission does not have jurisdiction over communication by sound waves. Your information concerning unlicensed radio operation has been noted and appropriate action will be taken.
Yours truly,
Richard C. Craney
Director, Public Relations
and by the knowledge that Richard C. Craney is a better person than she is. At least he bothered dictating a reply, instead of stuffing the whole thing in the wastepaper basket like Vera.
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br /> The third letter is an invitation to the annual convention of the American Cryptobiological Society, to be held this year at the beautiful Ghost Circle Lodge on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. Clipped to the top is a note:
Dear Miss Perl,
My colleagues and I wish to take this opportunity to invite you to our annual meeting. Perhaps you might check with your employer about the possibility of a tax-deductible “jaunt.” If there’s any information or assistance we can provide, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Best wishes,
Ray Bramlett, President
American Cryptobiological Society
All that courtly concern for Vera’s finances and travel plans—who would guess that Vera and Ray Bramlett have never actually met? Still, they’re pen pals of sorts. He first wrote to Vera after her byline appeared on a story called SASQUATCH COMES HOME, about a Vancouver Indian cultural center that was having trouble keeping its employees because Sasquatch kept pressing its big hairy face against the window. Ray’s letter congratulated Vera on her rare sensitivity to Sasquatch’s Indian heritage, granted her honorary membership in the American Cryptobiological Society—which, it informed her, was dedicated to the scientific investigation of unexpected life forms—and, while acknowledging This Week’s unflagging interest in matters of cryptobiological concern, expressed the wish that such questions be taken more seriously. Had the Vancouver incident been listed as an official sighting by the Bigfoot Study Group? Vera was intrigued enough to write back.
From what she’s been able to gather, Ray Bramlett’s group consists mainly of academics from small colleges, forestry and agricultural schools, retired engineers and their wives. Like any scientific organization, they hold meetings, present papers, publish newsletters and journals, award an occasional grant. Now, looking over the conference schedule, she feels the presence of all those fervent cryptobiologists, each with a championed yeti or giant squid, and the effort to satisfy them all:
Bigfoot Dreams Page 2