Alan, the lobbyist, jokingly despairs, “I don’t dare ask any more school questions or we’ll wind up thrown out on the sidewalk by a big bouncer.”
“Just ask one more question!” Kirky insists, excited, still a little breathless from the last, his polka-dot bow tie now tilted clownishly. “Let’s do physics!” He points at Whitney like an emcee. “It’s all yours, Whit!”
The wonderful lobbyist turns his grin on blonde ponytailed Whitney.
Whitney raises a finger. “For first-grade physics? Want the four properties of matter?”
Kirky again throws up a hand toward her. “In a nutshell,” he says in a jolly way.
Everyone smiles slyly and looks at Whitney, as she explains, “The four interactions of matter, or events . . . are nuke force, electromagnetic force, weak force, and gravitational force.” She smiles. Though Whitney is a handsome girl in that blonde straight-nosed broad-faced sort of way, her smiles undo it all. Her nose grows preposterously. Her chin disappears. Her mouth goes goofy. All of it glued together with a dog-like humility. “My favorite is weak force, or rather weak interactions. The speed of its reaction is really slow.” She grins. “One billionth of a second.”
A few chuckles reward her here and she looks over at her mother, Penny, who says, “I wish I could be that slow doing my share of the dishes and floors.”
More chuckles.
Ivy Morelli is remembering very well that Whitney was one of the “important” teenagers of the solar crew, one who knew her Peak Oil stuff, and her how-to-make-Ivy-feel-like-a-stupid-ninny stuff. Are Ivy and Whitney on the same team tonight?
Now Whitney says, “When you sit a minute alone and think about the gravitational interaction, which is what holds the earth together, the earth not being a big round ball at all, but a collection of countless particles and pieces of objects . . . thinking about this, you can really feel the meaning of everything . . . especially love.” She slides her deep-set green almond-shaped eyes around the tables in a way that would put you to mind of the sweep of a lighthouse beam, her chin up. Eyes brushing eyes, each face of the family reflects the light.
Alan, the lobbyist, says earnestly, “A very sciency woman, you are.”
Whitney snorts and says in a friendly way, “It’s just life. The nature of life.”
He nods and smiles. “Well, okay. But I guess this school of yours doesn’t do Bible studies.”
“Sure we do,” one of the line-faced women replies.
Gordon pushes his sticky dish across his place mat.
Michelle says, “We learn everything.”
Whitney adds, “And we doubt everything. At least once.”
Ivy Morelli chimes in, “That’s Marx, right?”
Michelle shakes her head, “Descartes.”
“They both said it,” Bree murmurs.
Alan looks at Gordon with a suspicious squint. “These your best students, or do they all talk like this?”
Gordon says, “There are no best students.”
Alan smiles. “Well, you know what I mean. Are these your honor students?” He gazes dreamily at Michelle and Whitney.
Gordon says evenly, “You mean like those real schools would have the USDA stamper for their haunches?”
Senator Mary sighs. “There are many lobbyists who are urging even more tests.”
Samantha half shouts, “To break the public schools, then privatize-profitize them?! That haunch stamper has turned out to be a weapon and the path to someone’s wealth!”
Alan looks carefully over at Senator Joe and Senator Mary. Then back at Samantha, her Apache-Comanche-style head rag tonight a galvanizing blue, her hair, as ever, moon-colored. Then his eyes grip Gordon. “Come again?”
Gordon looks down at his hands a long moment, so Alan, impatiently but ever so cordially, moves on to ask a different question of someone else and the question is answered simply, and when Gordon looks up, Alan’s bright dark eyes are again fixed on him.
Alan watches Gordon’s hands opening and closing once, then again there on the table like the squeezing of fists while giving blood. Or bracing for a fight. Or what? The big “schoolmaster” guy’s face is so tame. So friendly. But there’s some inner upheaval it seems. What’s wrong with him? Alan wonders. Gas?
Now Gordon lunges into one of his “jags,” and all the while, Alan’s bright gaze lays hard on Gordon, on his forthright duplicity. The attentive lobbyist swears there are tears in the big boy’s eyes.
Gordon goes on rambling. Words like “institutionalized” and “industrialized” and “desolate” boom from his whiskery mouth. His hands are ferociously busy, shaping and punctuating. He has been sucked in. The lamb!
Ivy Morelli watches him as he further accelerates, almost levitating off his seat. She understands everything he is saying but with the lobbyist’s eyes warmly and wonderfully cutting through Gordon’s jugular, it seems like Gordon is just spluttering out nonsense. His fierceness is embarrassing.
Alan is trying to get in a word edgewise now. Gordon is leaning toward him, over the table, one hand open almost in Alan’s face, fingers spread like a big pink star. And on and on, Gordon overflowing. Now he leans back, placing an open hand on each thigh. He squints at Alan, wags his head in that fawning and goofy manner Ivy has seen before. His apology?
Other restaurant patrons rustle past these tables but seem far away. Piano music has returned. It’s tinkling is so earnest.
Alan takes a gleamy-eyed hospitable shot at Gordon’s world. Another query darts straight out of Alan’s world, his insistence on “assessment” and “excellence” and “globalism’s opportunities” and “keeping up.” Gordon says in a friendly snarl, “This education thing . . . it’s not something for a test score. It has more to do with . . .” Gordon flounders, drowning in emotion, “. . . with life and death!”
Alan stares at Gordon. Something moves across his smooth cheeks, a kind of series of pulses. He says, “In other words, you’re bad-mouthing progress on an obsessive level and you’re . . . dragging down truly gifted people by burdening them with those who aren’t smart, in order to create a totally worthless society where everyone is mediocre?” He has stopped smiling.
Senator Joe busts in with, “Let’s take this outside, boys!” He laughs, fingering his colorful kite-cloud tie, then gives Alan’s shoulder a soft playful punch.
Ivy’s lips and teeth almost form the words, Let me write this story! Let me give you a forum, Gordon. And I can condense your rambling! And . . . uh . . . paraphrase it. Yessssss! And she turns and sees the rows of Settlement women along the other tables . . . their home-sewn outfits, smocking and embroidery, all staring at Gordon and Alan. Ivy thinks Bonnie Loo is the best, those fox-color (yellow-brown) eyes really glare at the fun lobbyist and ol’ Gordo both. It is the greatest of all to have Bonnie Loo on your side!
Meanwhile, old, old Reggie Lessard glances from face to face, smiling cross-eyed. None of this tense conversation has interfered with what’s in his own head, those imploring brass sounds and tumbling deep monster notes of the Kotzschmar, which still push and pull, seethe and pound and breach the infinite. His shoulders are squared. He has not ordered dessert, only black coffee. His shaky hand raises the cup for another deep swallow, which jerks along down inside his rumpled neck.
And the restaurant’s piano tinkles on witheringly, like falling stars, like the universe folding up again into a reverse bang, now more like a barely existent gray flicker.
And Chris Butler, he, too, is seeing, hearing, being with the Kotzschmar at city hall. Before him, the golden facade rises as if from mists, the organist’s back in dark gray pumping, feet pumping, small man together with the great beast and a greater god, all moving together in an orgy of spiritual muscle. He does not hear the restaurant’s piano, nor the conversations near or far.
The fringe.
The forlorn trickle of piano keys seems to be struggling to get out from behind the brick walls, captured there, scant ghosts of the unwanted.
Alan smiles. “But then you smash them, the views not suitable to you, that is.”
Gordon smiles, a bigger smile than Alan’s. “When you live with questions, weak assumptions fall by the wayside in a natural way.”
“You sound born again.”
Gordon leans back. “You could say that about your Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys. And the usurers. A certain belief. And Hitler! And the bankers who financed both sides of that scene. And the other slavers . . .” The Settlement women at the next table look anguished. A couple of them are trying to catch Gordon’s eye, turning their heads from side to side to signal to him to lower his voice. Seems he doesn’t notice this, nor does he catch one of them making “calm down” hand signals.
Suddenly, Ivy feels surrounded by WEIRD PEOPLE. There is a born again glow around Gordon. His passion. It’s too sticky. While the Wall Street religion is spanking clean and pleasantly cool to the touch. More American.
Ivy looks down at the table, at her half-eaten dessert. And then at her shoulder bag on the floor. Inside it are pens and reporter pads. There’s no story here. Just hyperbole. RAVING CULT LEADER HOLED UP IN THE HILLS is a story, a great story. Ideas and processing ideas are not. She fingers her earring, all the wacky shapes dangling there. Her earlobe aches.
Alan flutters his eyes. “And you say that you . . . ah . . . don’t let people leave? Did I hear this? You don’t allow eighteen-year-olds to seek better opportunities outside your little snug community? Are you saying they’re not free to leave? I’m not clear on this. Could you explain that to me?” He leans with his elbow on the table, a palm cupping his chin, fingers open across one side of his face, his dark eyes now on Christian (C.C.) Crocker, who looks in every way like Huckleberry Finn, freckled and friendly and most notably restless.
Jane whispers to Gordon, “I’m bored.”
Gordon speaks again with pious softness, “Our kids understand that serving one’s community is one’s greatest achievement, a great honor, that the combined gifts of each of us will multiply into healthy interdependence. In this way, you best serve the world.”
Alan drops his hand with a thump. Looks directly at Gordon. “A little xenophobic, don’t you think?”
Gordon holds his stare. “Tell me how you come to that conclusion, my friend.”
“Well,” says Alan, fluttering the fingers of his right hand to erase a thought. “I call it xenophobia because essentially this is what you’re teaching. All those nervous paranoid boundaries.” His eyes get big like a doll’s. He inhales deeply, greatly burdened by the air around him, as if the atmosphere smelled of bad philosophy, bad policy, and wrong turns. “Maybe provincial is a better word . . . for now.” His kindly smile returns.
Gordon’s left eye is widening, the eyebrow raised, the right eye squinty. And there it is, one of his violent facial twitches. But he says absolutely nothing. Just sighs. His face and neck have gotten damp. He folds his hands prayerfully and says, as soft as silk, “In America, land of the freeee, it should be acceptable for a people to find their own way, right?”
Alan looks at his watch. “Yeah, sure, sure,” he says. “Sounds like progress. I wish you all the luck in the world.”
Ivy is thinking how a real reporter would be like this lobbyist. He or she would reach out of the modern no-nonsense professional vacuum and . . . well, just not take Gordon St. Onge seriously. Not for one split second. What is wrong with Ivy that she hears Gordon’s drum?
Leaning into Gordon’s side, Jane commands, “Shut up now.” And she reaches with one long bare golden brown arm, takes his lips into her long fingers.
“So how is Carol Gibbons?” Senator Mary flutters her eyes at the lobbyist. “Have you seen much of her these days? She wasn’t around last session and I thought I heard it was health-related.”
“Moved on up to better things. A regular tiger,” he says, his bubbly voice fully recovered. He again glances at his watch.
“Hmm. And what about Doug Griffith? What happened to him?”
“No hope,” he says with a smirk. “No hope there. Everything he touches leaves a slime like the oozing of a garden slug. Caspar Milquetoast all the way. Even in soft mud, he wouldn’t make a footprint.” He pretends to shiver. Now he glances around at all the faces, Settlement faces that have turned away now, mostly engaged in conversations among themselves. Butchie Martin is fussing with his kazoo, poking something into place with the little finger of his right hand.
The Record Sun reporter is staring at St. Onge, kind of in the middle of his shirt. Is she doing a column on these crazies, Alan wonders. Good to see it. The merciless bitch will toast ’em.
But what are the esteemed senators doing here? The puzzle of puzzles.
Young Jane says painfully, “Are we going? Or spending the night here?”
Alan turns his big smile on the senators. Senator Joe smiles back. They share a life in that teeming world under the grubby green but august dome fifty-five miles away. Sometimes a smile is worth a million words. Or a million dollars.
Jane pushes closer to Gordon now, almost in his lap. She fingers his newly trimmed beard, the long untrimmed mustache, feels his ear like he often feels hers, stirs her finger around in his dessert dish. “Gorrrrr-deeeee. Let’s gooooooo.”
Alan rises, holds a hand up, says to all, “Be well,” starts to turn, then, on second thought, swings around and reaches across the corner of the table to shake Gordon’s hand and Gordon stands up out of his chair, all six-feet-five inches of him, and offers his hand, and both men have a tight, overly long grip and Alan says into Gordon’s wild never-to-be-forgotten pale eyes, “Peace.”
Good-byes.
After he is gone and the two legislators fill everyone in on the humongous and ruthless corporation Alan’s firm represents, Gordon asks Whitney and her mother, Penny, if there’s room for Jane in the car they came in, or do Bonnie Loo and Patricia have space? “Or Butchie, what about you? You got room for the secret agent?”
“Nooooooo,” Jane protests. “I’m going with you, Gordie.”
Gordon says he is going to be in town late, needs to give the press a ride home.
Ivy is fondling her earring. It looks like the weight of it is setting her earlobe on fire.
Gordon is whispering something nobody else can hear in the fifteen-year-old Bree’s ear. She giggles. He smoothes the scrambly miracle of her thick hair back, so that both sides of her face show. She pulls her head away from him so the hair slips back again. Her shoulders are squared though, her breasts high. She is comfortable with all of her body. After all, her reptilian face is one story, her body another.
Everyone gets up. They crane their necks around like seeing the place for the first time.
They call for the check, but the waiter tells them smilingly that the check has been taken care of, compliments of Duotron Lindsey International.
“That shit head!” snarls Senator Mary laughingly. She seems flattered by Alan’s prank. What is the right way to feel? Normally a gift from Alan would be from Alan. This mention of Duotron Lindsey seems to be Alan needling Gordon. But Gordon just looks tired and goes ambling off to the men’s room. When he’s back, he bows low to kiss little Senator Mary Wright on top of her shining black hair. Then he bows abruptly to his right and lifts the end of Senator Joe’s tie of clouds and kites and then he kisses it. Are the senators corporatists like all the rest? Let us recall how Mussolini once said corporatism and fascism are the same. Seems the senators tonight are duly forgiven.
Lots of goofing and screeching and cackles and fun and the passing of caps and purses. Someone presses Reggie’s ornately carved cane into his smooth shaky hand and people at other tables watch this all from the corners of their eyes or they just stare outright.
Gordon smooches Jane on both ears. She ignores him, pouting, arms folded.
Gordon hugs Whitney and Penny. He hugs Bonnie Loo. He
whispers something to Bonnie Loo. She looks up at him gravely. He whispers again, not into her ear but close between her eyes. She whispers something back. He laughs. She laughs along but her eyes aren’t laughing and instead of glaring at Ivy now, she simply doesn’t look at Ivy at all. Then she takes old Reggie’s arm and helps him through the narrow channel between table and wall.
To fifteen-year-old blonde and happy-faced Whitney, to Oceanna, to Butch, to Montana, Gordon says in a soft way, “You made me proud tonight.” Then Whitney assures him, “You made us proud, too, Gordon.”
Now he gathers up Bree and lifts her, her feet leaving the floor. A big squeeze. A cheek smooch. “This is only the beginning,” he tells her. “Do you love us yet?”
She giggles, “Yes.”
Obviously, this Bree is not a Settlement old-timer, Ivy observes.
And then he is hugging Kirky’s head, little going-out-of-style pigtail contorting between the big fingers; Kirk does not flush or fight this like you’d expect. He has wrapped an arm around Gordon and pats Gordon’s back.
One of the strapping broad-faced thirteen-year-old boys actually gets a light kiss on the mouth from Gordon, and then another steps up for his quick on-the-mouth kiss and head hug from Gordon. Would you think this a family reunion or a wedding? You would, wouldn’t you? Not just a “see you in the morning” kind of thing, which is what it actually is.
Now Butchie Martin is out on the sidewalk playing a kazoo solo of “Midnight in Moscow.” Every time the door opens, you hear the enthusiastic Old World buzz of it.
One of the quiet, stern, lined-faced, handsome women has Jane by the hand. Jane glares at Gordon now, her eyes filled with beautiful, sorrowful, light-flashing tears.
Gordon picks Ivy’s bag and camera off the floor next to where she had been sitting, hands them to her, and murmurs deeply as he stuffs a big bill under one of the plates, “Tonight, baby, I drive.”
Ivy Morelli uncovers the facts of life.
Up along Congress Street, Gordon mashes his face to a store window and says, “Guess.”
She says, “Dickens.”
Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves Page 41