So, who knows, Fabian, whether you will simply drive your life away, ever hopeful, or whether you will now and then stop and apply yourself to some matter or study or discipline and do the hardest thing—which is to ignore the siren call of these strange creatures we have perfected and which offer, so easily, to spirit us away into a kind of forgetfulness.
But then these liberal democrat moments—the media are subtle in their poisons—I snap out of usually in a matter of seconds, and all seems right again. Go for it Fabian, I think, and drive your head off. Don’t listen to their moans of envy and spite. Pump that gas. Press that pedal. Fasten your seat belt. And make it the ride of your life.
While searching for your mother, Fabian, regarding some last minute preparations for my birthday, I popped into your room to make certain there were no more depredations to your collection, much diminished as it was by the tennis court massacre of some time ago now. I had surmised that all was well and I was about to turn away from the display case when I noted a certain fuzziness about the models, my first thought being that my glasses needed cleaning. However, the fuzziness persisted through cleaned glasses. I approached closer and opened the glass doors and reached in and picked up the models one after another and felt a frisson of anger zip up and down my thighs: these were not the carefully handcrafted models I had so painstakingly collected for you at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars, with their opening doors and hoods and trunks and convertible tops, lights that switched on, and little manikins of your grandmother and me and you and Rowena within. These were cheap plastic models mass produced by the millions in Honduras or somewhere and outrageously marked up, and quite hollow inside, light as a feather. My thoughts, as you can imagine, spun round and round.
The housekeeper told me she thought you were down at the pool with that Christopher friend and a couple of other boys—all probably, like that Christopher, from dot-com trash families that have begun to infest your end of Fairlawn-Fairview Lake Estates. The bright sunny air cleared my thoughts as I strode down the flagstone path toward the pool, concealed behind a maze of stone walls, hedges, and fences. It was becoming clear that a fake collection had supplanted your real one because of some deal with that Christopher of yours—that very likely he was serving as your fence in order for you to be able to cash in on your collection in order to buy something, but what? Drugs? Not likely, given the frequency with which the dog-sniffing service your parents subscribe to visits the house and most of the neighborhood under that new federal program. I do not approve of your father’s insistence of keeping your allowance deliberately low to encourage you to seek other sources of income—which clearly you have begun to do, in engineering a hostile takeover of your collection by another. Is nothing sacred anymore? The answer came soon enough.
I have never understood your parents’ desire to enclose their swimming pool at the center of a maze, albeit a light-duty one easily penetrated after the first false steps into dead ends. I quickly arrived at the last hedge, a gap in which presented me with a startling view of a fully mature young man diving naked off the board into the pool—and who I only realized after he had surfaced and scrambled up on to the tile was your friend Christopher. I will not describe the condition of his penis as he bent over and picked up a bottle of beer and threw his head back and guzzled the contents and then threw it into the hedge on the opposite side of the pool, bursting into a shouted, off-tune rendition of My girl has ginger hair underneath her underwear. … You, Fabian, then sailed off the board in a similar condition followed by two other boys equally inflamed, the last with a lit cigarette between his teeth as he plunged beneath the water. This then led to a parade of divings off the board with flowers and other forms of vegetation tucked between stiffly held-together legs, vegetation inserted fore and aft, poorly concealing the condition you were all in. Paralyzed to find myself in this situation, I could not immediately decide whether to withdraw and have it out with you later, Fabian, or step out on to the tile and confront you all. In my state of mind, I was unable to recall the other verses to the song which you had all obviously learned very well. But when an empty beer bottle clipped my ear and smashed on the flagstone behind me—a gleeful Ooops came from over the hedge—I realized I had to act.
I stepped forcefully out on to the blue tile apron at the shallow end of the pool, where a skinny gangly kid paddled, watching agog, but with his trunks still on, possibly the Supreme Court Justice’s grandson who lives down by the lake. Except for an area immediately below the diving board, the pool was filled with every object the four or five of you were able to shove or toss into the water from the cabana and dressing rooms—tables, the grill, towels, clothing, loungers, chairs, their cushions bobbing on the surface.
Fabian, I bellowed, attire yourself at once!
Everyone froze. Erections immediately flagged as towels and swimming trunks were scrambled for.
A tire?
Put on some clothes or something. Put on your trunks. Put on your shirt. Put on a towel, for all I care. But put something on. And come here.
Dripping, you thrust your feet into the leg holes of your maroon trunks and padded over to me, splashing through a thin film of water on the tile. I confess to having to admit to myself that indeed you were now probably slightly taller than I was, as your mother has repeatedly tried to point out to me. You stared at me with a calm blue-eyed insolence, your large teeth gleaming malevolently, as if to say, what was I doing here trying to spoil a moment of—boys being boys?
And you, I pointed at the Christopher fellow. He already had chest hair. He already had muscles. A minute ago they were all kids. Overnight they had become vicious gangsters. And you, clean up the broken glass over there. And everyone else. Every last sliver. And you, I pointed to another one, get all that crap out of the pool. Then I faced you. And you, Fabian, I’ll talk to you later.
Though it turned out that we never did have that talk, as I suspect you blamed me for getting in trouble with your parents—But we were going to clean it all up, being the limp excuse reported to me afterward—and because I became embroiled in negotiating through my lawyers with your Christopher’s parents to return the remains of your valuable collection. They claimed it was strictly a business matter between their disreputable son and you, Fabian, with you apparently refusing to return the petty sums of money you were willing to accept for your priceless collection, along with the worse-than-useless cheap models intended to lull me into thinking all was well within your display case.
The remedy is, of course, simple but severe. With one more model, your collection would have been brought up to date, a model I intended to give you on the occasion of my big one. With a stroke of the pen—or with 134 strokes of the pen, to be exact—I have removed you from the rolls of the world’s wealthiest individuals, which you may not notice for a while—and which could eventually be repaired, should you finally ever mature into a sober young man respectful of your elders and solicitous of their needs and demands and having assumed a political persuasion compatible with substantial wealth.
You are now, it is clear, leaving the luminous rooms of your childhood and entering the dark ages of adolescence and youth, for which I will presume to offer, even if with a sense of futility, a piece of advice. By now your Christopher has surely proven how unreliable and dangerous friends can be, how they can lead you astray, fleece you of what you should value, and so on. My advice is simple. Make things your friends. Things will never let you down, they will not betray you or take advantage of you, they will not envy you, and conveniently, you can dispose of them at a moment’s notice, without excuse or guilt, trading them in on newer and better models, of which there will always be a great abundance.
All I can do now is to wish you the best of luck, in the fond hope that when you finally emerge from this dark age—if you do emerge, for many don’t—as a responsible young man, that you and I will now and then be able to sit down after dinner, swirling our brandies next to the fireplace, and remini
sce about the old days, and even laugh about them. I do look forward to those moments and in particular to inquiring discreetly if you might still happen to remember the rest of the verses to that delightful old song, My Girl Has Ginger Hair. It has taken me weeks to get the damned thing out of my mind.
But I jump ahead of the day. The worst was yet to come. In some ways. I was unable to complete the account on my night flight to Cape Town due to a flurry of calls but I hope there will be time to do so on this return trip.
To resume, I had no sooner settled myself in behind the inlaid walnut steering wheel of my brand new Bentley Azure convertible parked in front of your house, Fabian and Rowena, a pre-birthday present to myself, and was sinking into its soft leather seat—just getting inside that car and inhaling the fragrance of wool, wood, and leather makes everything else entirely worth it, the constant pushing, the endless legal skirmishing, the poring over the numbers again and again and again, the 3:00 A.M. wrestlings with the next mergers or the next de-acquisitions, the damned restlessness of it all—and I was struck as if by lightning by the awful thought, I’ll bet the rascals have got her collection too. I immediately shut off the ignition and let the automatic seat and steering wheel de-position themselves to let me out and then I strode across the lawn and in through the front door where the housekeeper told me she thought you, Rowena, were still out with your mother down at the village. So I proceeded straight upstairs to your room and pushed open the door and planted myself in front of the glass case which houses your collection and almost fainted when I detected the same fuzziness hovering about your models. Quickly I picked them up one by one and flipped them over. All empty, cheap imported plastic imitations, some not even the right year and model. The scoundrels had indeed got away with the lot. I was devastated.
I can’t believe you were complicit in this fraud, Rowena, but even if not I am astounded that you let your valuable collection be spirited away probably one item at a time, without noticing that something was wrong, probably not even noticing that the case was unlocked, its lock probably picked by that Christopher kid.
You can imagine the mood I was in when I slipped from your room, not improved by the sound of belching coming from the half open door to your brother’s room across the hall, his sopping wet trunks left in the middle of the carpet. So much for the long-planned driving lessons and the purchase of his first car, not that there had been much doubt for the last hour or so. I went downstairs and returned to the Bentley where I sat for a good fifteen minutes without starting it, reflecting on the fragility of all our hopes for the next generation, who seem unable to accept our gifts, indeed all our wealth and treasure, or to perform even the most perfunctory displays of gratitude. Thank god, I thought, at least I still have myself to thank for all I have helped bring into the world. For the myriad things I have created out of almost nothing. For the financial Everest heaped up out of all those one-hundredths of a cent. Thank you, I said to myself, thank you.
But even this glowing moment was to come to an end when for the first time in years—such has been the pace—I was visited by images of my simple, unambitious parents and their little house, so sparsely furnished, on a tree-lined street where their few friends seemed larger and more life-size and dramatic than today’s pygmies. They still lived in a world where nothing was automatic, nothing powered, where the work of us engineers was mainly to design things to run a little longer and prevent them from burning up or flying apart. And in a time when all the world was left to desire, long before things changed and we ended up having everything, with nothing left to want, nothing lacking, and hundreds, indeed thousands of people waiting to carry out my every whim. But what happens when you don’t have any more whims? When you are whimless? Whimmed out? Perhaps this is something like the simple life your grandmother Deirdre endlessly hankers for, a life like an old black-and-white movie with a tent and an old car and an aluminum teakettle perched on blackened rocks over a smoky flame, and men and women wearing stained gray cotton clothing and having earnest discussions about money, while the kids play tag in the trees.
You don’t talk to me anymore, Deirdre, I finally said to her the other night after our twentieth silent dinner. I have been in the air 146 times already this year and thought it time to settle down for a few days.
What is there to talk about? she said with unusual severity. She has become an amazingly handsome old thing, finally sure of herself, even behind the wheel. We have everything we have ever needed or wanted. Our daughter is successful beyond all imagining, needs nothing. We have turned our grandchildren into spoiled, envious brats. You look down on everyone who has less than we do, which encompasses the entire world. We will live forever, our doctors successfully beating back disease after disease. So what is there to talk about?
In my theory of Industrial Sex, marriage is like a well-oiled and well-maintained internal combustion engine. Quarrels and quibbles and so-called misunderstandings are signs that the oil needs changing or some component is wearing out, a bearing or a bushing, and that in general the vastly complicated mechanism designed to control combustion, which is to say to keep combustion internal to the machine, is showing the first signs of breaking apart and spilling out inflammable substances toward open sparks. Poor maintenance inevitably leads to divorce. Our marriage clearly needed a major overhaul. I suggested a quick trip around the world—Hawaii, Bali, Thailand, South Africa, Paris, and so on—in our own 767. A truly carefree holiday. Just the two of us. Plus of course crew, translators, guides, a driver. And I almost forgot, a chef.
No, she said, looking away. Then she turned to me with a half-smile. But why don’t you come down to the shelter tomorrow over in Hartford where I’m on night duty?
I’ll take a rain check, thank you, I muttered, briefly afflicted with a hellish vision of row upon row of army cots sagging under the weight of their raggedly clothed occupants—and not bothering to explain it was out of the question because I had phone calls and teleconferences scheduled for the next forty-eight hours because of some nonsense in our Asian divisions about currency instabilities.
The irrelevant recollections faded and I was about to start the car when out of the bushes about a hundred yards away, from the north side of the maze surrounding the pool, three boys emerged running and throwing things and snapping their towels at each other, essentially naked, and shouting and laughing, trailed after by the gangly, bony boy who was at least decently attired in his swimming trunks. They were all headed across the grass toward the gatehouse. Then, a minute later, four girls in bikinis slipped out from the hedge not far from where I had been standing. They sauntered over to the house, holding their untied halters, such as they were, to their budding young breasts. I finally realized one of them was you, Rowena, head thrown back and laughing with the others and bumping and butting up against each other as you disappeared inside the house.
As soon as the boys had passed the gatehouse, each throwing something inside the door at, I gather, the security guard—popping sounds soon confirmed that the somethings were fire crackers and cherry bombs—and disappearing into the woods, I started the Bentley and slowly drove away, heading down the drive toward the smoke-filled gatehouse—the guard was standing outside trying to fan the smoke outside—deeply bewildered and saddened by the realization that your days of collecting fine precision model cars were, apparently, very much over.
Yet, after all the dust has settled, it has occurred to me that you two, Fabian and Rowena, have reached the age at which you might appreciate the insights of my General Theory of Industrial Sex. I would in fact present both of you with copies of a leather-bound edition but for the fact that your father has been dropping hints to the effect that my visits to the house have become too frequent for his taste and, more explicitly, would I please call ahead. I, who never call ahead. I, who have based a whole revolutionary management system on never calling ahead as laid out in complete detail in my best-selling The Never-Call-Ahead Management Technique: How to Conver
t Your Business to the “Surprise Visit” System and Triple Productivity and Profits in Ten Easy Steps. Probably so I won’t stumble on yet another of their interminable quarrels.
So that event will have to wait until somewhat later when I present you both with copies of this commentary to your model car collections—even though it’s fair to say that your collections no longer exist in any meaningful form, and this tome, which you will eventually hold in your hands, will be quite pointless without them. Or less meaningful. Christopher Burr’s parents have refused entry into their house by either me or my representatives—I find it hard to believe that their own connection with the upper echelon of the FBI could possibly trump my own, but there it is. Sweeps of Eastern Seaboard pawnshops and model shows have failed to recover a single model, leading me to believe that your Christopher is now the serious collector among your set, and that each night as he goes to bed he gazes fondly at an illuminated case which probably houses the forty-three surviving exemplars of your two collections.
Learning to drive, which is really a matter of learning how to control internal combustion engines, is the first and only formal lesson in sex you will probably every have. I regret that circumstances of your creating have forced me to withdraw my offer to teach you how to drive. I also seriously doubt you will be able to truly appreciate my various volumes, including this one, until you are well into your thirties if not forties. Be that as it may, after whatever lessons you do get, you are on your own. When boys, who eventually become men, tell jokes of a certain kind, they are really thinking about cars; and when they’re working on their cars, they’re really thinking about sex. This is at the core of my General Theory. This simple lesson I learned not from the words but from the actions of my own father, who kept car magazines in his bedroom and tacked photos from girlie magazines above his workbench in the garage.
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