Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories

by Thomas Berger

  Millicent’s newscasts at the end of her run were not only the least-watched of the mainstream programs but consistently trailed the leading cable network; Mabel’s had risen to the top within six weeks of her debut. By the end of her first year, the President of the United States, having endured a period of unpopularity owing to a brief recession, begged her for an interview but was turned down. When a certain secret enemy of his, embedded in a West Wing office, leaked this story to the media, President Billy Hancock became the current laughingstock of late-night talk shows, so reliably deridable that comedy hosts could evoke orgiastic screams from their audiences by simply uttering his name.

  When Hancock in the following year was defeated for reelection by a candidate even his followers confidentially admitted was pathetically inadequate, Mabel Bodge was given a significant part of the credit by the political cognoscenti, as having provided the first shove at the top of the incline. Her next contract gave her the kind of money commanded only by the hottest of movie stars or the latest New York Yankee.

  But, to show you the kind of person Mabel remained, her closest friends were those she had had all her life, her family and the pals of her girlhood in a small town in Idaho, all the latter being female except for a gay fellow named Hal Twerly who was the local optometrist. The fact was that Mabel had never had a date with any man but Hal her life long, and of course it was not really a date to be with him, who could be put into the affectionate category of an old pair of slippers, as for that matter she was to him despite her celebrity.

  The problem had always been, and had grown much more so by now, that Mabel was far too attractive and gifted to be tolerable on the intimate level to any heterosexual male, and in consequence, having no inclination toward Lesbianism, she was a stranger to any kind of intimacy aside from the familial. This learned, sophisticated, powerful woman knew nothing about sex from experience, and such pornography as she had scanned or glimpsed appalled her with its bad taste. When she said as much to her friend Hal, he replied, “That’s its point. The bad taste is what’s exciting.” But Mabel found this irony absolutely foreign to her. On the other hand, neither could she identify with the conventional concept of romantic love in which all the gasping, sweaty stuff could be transformed into something acceptable that might serve a reproductive end, the only justified purpose for sexuality.

  Not that Mable felt any deprivation, being above an emotion that she considered unworthy of someone with her natural advantages. She was also, for the same reason, immune to envy, jealousy, spite, and fear of any kind but that of physical harm, which was understandable in her profession, given the threats routinely directed toward anyone in the public eye. Not a day went by without anonymous promises, via telephone, e-mail, and the postal service, of death and dismemberment in retaliation for her reporting certain news stories, speaking certain phrases, or simply looking the way she did on the TV set of the fanatic du jour. She believed it only prudent to be accompanied everywhere by a six-four bodyguard who carried a Glock in a shoulder holster. There were those who took this man to be her lover; he was anything but. Hulking brute though he appeared to be, Jerry was so intimidated by his employer that he hardly had the courage to shake her svelte hand when, along with the Xmas bonus, it was proffered.

  But being the superior person that she was, Mabel had no idea there were people in the world, even among those who admired her, who wondered why she had little or none of what was commonly thought of as a private, i.e., romantic or at least sexual life, until she finally assented to the reiterated plea of many years from Muriel Spawn for an interview. Mabel’s network colleague, Spawn was famous for probing, invasive yet empathetic questioning, often too subtly malicious for the subject to understand at the moment of occurrence but recognized by all when the edited product was broadcast. Warren Doakes, the celebrated giant of industry, famous for generosity to charitable causes, somehow emerged from his session with Spawn as, given his enormous wealth, a pinchpenny. Actress Holly Parks, who had risen to fame playing charming airheads, as herself came off as not stupid but rather a suffocating bore, who unless a script called for it, could not even perform her ingratiating giggle. Barton Fitzgerald, who had served with distinction as charismatic US ambassador to the United Nations, was somehow manipulated by Muriel Spawn into reflecting unfavorably on certain elements in the undeveloped countries in terms that verged on bigotry.

  Why Mabel agreed to speak publicly with Spawn remained a mystery, unless perhaps it was an uncharacteristically competitive urge to take on and dominate the other leading diva at the network and establish once for all who was Numero Uno. The only condition asked by Mabel, who was professionally aware of how raw tape could be edited to result in a product that differed significantly from the intent of what had originally been stated, was that she be permitted to see the interview before it was aired. Breaking with precedent, Muriel assented.

  Mabel subsequently underwent almost five hours of Spawn’s questions, from which an hourlong program was skillfully edited, which was to say forty-seven minutes of airtime, allowing for commercials and announcements. Watching the result, alone in her office, Mabel gave it her imprimatur as being keen but fair, not by any means softball—with plenty of Spawn’s trademark edginess (“Would you call yourself a babe?” “How’d you get the job, with no experience?” “Do you dislike men?”)—but nothing underhanded or conspicuously snotty. Indeed, Mabel wondered whether it would do Muriel’s career any good to be seen as essentially deferring to a younger woman who was her chief rival: might she not be thereby displaying a weakness?

  But in fact, because of a series of events that neither Muriel Spawn nor any possible co-conspirators of hers at the network could have managed, though they were quick to take the advantage so offered, that version of the interview was never broadcast. In the week for which it had been scheduled, a middle-aged senator who promoted the space program as a solution for overpopulation was found dead in the aftermath of what seemed a sexual orgy with several teenaged boys; a privately funded team of female astronauts landed on the moon to shoot an infomercial for some new and improved sanitary products; and a black man became archbishop of Canterbury. In its weekly hour the network’s news magazine could hardly do justice to the big stories; the interview with Mabel Bodge was shelved for a less eventful period.

  When one came a month hence, the program that reached the air was not that which Mabel had previewed but rather another version incorporating material previously left on the cutting-room floor, offering a portrait, in her own damning words and body language, of a woman spurned personally by those she dominated professionally: not understanding that state of affairs, she displayed a naive wistfulness incongruous in someone at her level of achievement, as well as an unattractive, perhaps even contemptible vulnerability.

  Mabel had no memory of saying that she looked forward to having children when the time came, yet there it was on videotape, and worse: “the whole nine yards, Muriel, the picket fence, the SUV, the Golden Retriever.” “But that’s some time in the future?” asked Spawn, her thick eyebrows making it even more dubious. At which Mabel’s face fell visibly in merciless close-up, illustrating the faltering reply, “Looks like it.”

  Fortunately Spawn’s office was on the floor below hers, else in her fury next morning after the broadcast Mabel might well have gone on a vis-à-vis attack, for while her sweetness was not bogus it shared her character with certain other emotions that she had never had to use thus far in life but turned out to be available in full vigor in a time of extremity. Her hand clutched at the telephone but eventually withdrew without placing the call. Spawn would only have been gratified to learn how deeply her talons had penetrated. The wisdom by which Mabel had come so far, so quickly, prevailed. When she finally phoned Muriel she was complimentary though not so fulsomely as to sound disingenuous, with the intent of confusing Spawn, who was given to interpretations so obvious she could present them as delicate. For example, when she asked the Central
American tyrant what had become of the brother with whom he had originally shared power and he answered, “He’s on family leave,” Muriel smiled sweetly and said, “But he hasn’t left the family?”

  “I just hope,” Spawn said now to Mabel, “I made it clear what a fan I am.”

  “You did, you did,” Mabel replied, “and I want to thank you.”

  Reflecting afterward on the event, Mabel admitted to herself that though she probably did not deserve another favor, having been granted so many since birth—but then is fate a game that is supposed to be fair?—she really wished that, if only for the record, she could have a love affair, but only one that would not interfere with her career or involve her so deeply as to be a potential source of discomfort, or, or, or... The conditions proliferated to the point of no return: it was a ridiculous thought for an adult to entertain.

  Yet, at the end of the day, when her bodyguard came to escort her home, she suddenly saw him in a new light. Not only was he assertedly virile in appearance, conforming ruggedly to her sense of male beauty, which despite her time in the big city remained provincial, he was suitably diffident in manner. True enough, he was an employee, but Mabel had never been a snob, having loved a father who had worked all his life as a meter reader for the water company.

  When they reached her apartment and Jerry had performed the ritual inspection of every room for intruders—he had found one such, three months earlier, hiding under Mabel’s bed with a digital camera, broken his arm, and had him arrested—pronounced the all-clear and was about to leave, Mabel pointed to the Chinese-lacquered highboy that was the liquor cabinet and said, “Pour us both a glass of cabernet, Jerry, and come sit down here with me.”

  Jerry proved to be just what the doctor ordered, to use the phrase that was still current with her mother, and Mabel amazed herself by actually falling in love with him though she came to understand that what he felt for her was at most loving kindness, which at least was genuine, and so she could tolerate his addiction to whores when pursued discreetly. For a time she even considered marrying him but decided against it when she realized that running off on assignment to Cairo or Kuala Lumpur would be unfair to their offspring and the picket fence and dog would have no point unless children went with them.

  After a while, having at last broken the ice, she replaced Jerry with, one at a time, a series of other lovers. From there on, Mabel always had someone on hand, somebody who was male, no more than a decade older than she, and not noticeably overweight. She really had no further wishes.

  The Methuselah Factor

  IT IS NEVER EASY to date these things. The popular assumption is that the prevalence of old men began with the victory of seventy-five-year-old Barney Beckett in the heavyweight title bout against the then champion Roscoe Johnson, twenty-six years of age. But to get to that point Beckett had to work his way up through a host of contenders, every one of them under thirty, and he defeated them all by knockout. Even so, Johnson’s promoters would never have made the match had it not been for public demand. The people really liked the old guy, though probably only the more naive of them actually took him seriously as a legitimate prize fighter. That is to say, he was mostly thought to be a fraud, but amusing in a way that old folks could hardly ever be said to be in those all but humorless times and in a lackluster season so far as authentic boxers went. Johnson’s challengers for the past two years had been bums.

  It went without saying that the sports reporters in all media were ecstatic about the upcoming fight. Not in years had they enjoyed so worthy a subject for their unique kind of enthusiasm. Having been married, as a stripling, Beckett was a great-grandfather, three generations beyond Roscoe Johnson. His crown was utterly bald, and what was left of his hair around the temples was pure white. In boxing trunks he made a pathetic appearance: narrow, sagging shoulders, a puffy waist, toothpick calves. His eyes were rheumy, his teeth were false, and in idle moments his mouth tended to sag at the left corner and looked as if it might drool. He was not all that miserable a figure for a man of seventy-five; he might even have been seen as rather more fit than most men his age. But to enter a ring against Roscoe Johnson, a prime-of-life, 220-pound colossus of muscle on whom no opponent had laid a damaging glove in years, was obviously a piece of buffoonery in which all parties were collaborating.

  When Beckett knocked Johnson out in the second round with what, in repeated video replays from several angles, would seem to have been a genuine right cross, the sense of fun was replaced by outraged scepticism. The sports writers vied with one another in making strong suggestions that Roscoe had taken a dive, and in bars and taverns across the land violently negative sentiments could be heard.

  When the appropriate boxing commission had completed its investigation and given the fight and both Johnson and Beckett a clean bill of moral health, it was simply assumed that these gentlemen had been bought off by the Mob, who proved thereby that its control of professional prize fighting remained absolute.

  But in no time at all there was a new feat to be explained. A seventy-year-old California man swam 100 meters, freestyle, four seconds faster than the current world record! Lou Terhune, the well-known, sometimes loved, more often reviled television personality, in a characteristic coup, got the first exclusive interview with the old swimmer, whose name was Alex Boyle.

  “I’m no overnight success,” said Boyle, beating the disappointed Terhune to the obvious. “I’ve been after this for fifty years.” He was a man who looked every day of his age. His sunken chest was webbed with white hairs; he had a turkey neck and a spotted pate. When not in the water he wore a hearing aid.

  “Now, Alex,” Terhune asked in his famous tenor whine, “fess up, my friend! Is this a hoax, in other words a snare and a delusion, a deliberate deception practiced on the American public, or is it not?”

  “If it is, Mr. Terhune,” Boyle answered, “it wouldn’t be mine, would it? I was in the water. I didn’t operate the timing devices.”

  “Well, you’ve got me there, Alex,” Terhune mock-ruefully admitted. He stared into the camera. “And may I assure the public that the aforementioned timers—there are several, should any of them fail or for any reason be suspect—the timing devices, no longer the old-fashioned hand-held stopwatch, but electronic, computerized chronometers corrected to the millisecond, these delicate timing mechanisms have been thoroughly checked by impartial authorities appointed by the governor of this great state, and found to be in perfect order. Which therefore means that if deception there was, it could only have been carried out by a collusion or illicit collaboration between or among the officials who timed the race, men of certified integrity and probity. Unthinkable that they would do anything of this sort.”

  Terhune went on to wonder vocally whether there might be a connection between this triumph and the old man’s victory in the championship prize fight, but quickly decided there could not be, for the reason that the boxing bout had been a manifest hoax. Next day he found himself a defendant in slander suits brought by Roscoe Johnson and the persons who had served as judges and referee, but not by Barney Beckett, the septuagenarian heavyweight champ.

  When queried by the newspeople Beckett laughed and said, “I’m too old to get in them kinda beefs.”

  “But you aren’t too old to fight men less than half your age, huh Barney?” cried the man from NBC.

  “That’s right,” said Beckett. “I got to save my strength for the important things.” He also refused for some months to try to explain his prowess, but when, six months later, he fought again and again knocked out Roscoe Johnson, this time in two minutes of the first round, old Barney attributed his success to the sagacity that comes with age.

  “But every fighter gets old, Barney,” said ABC ring commentator Joe Montefiore. “The rest of them just quit the game when they get past a certain age. They begin to go downhill pretty soon once they hit their thirties, for gosh sake. You’re seventy-five! How do you carry out what your experience tells you?”
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br />   Beckett smiled. “I guess it’s easier done than said.” He had not even worked up a visible sweat in this latest contest. As to Roscoe Johnson, when he had come to just after the ref reached the count of ten, he rose laboriously, trudged across the ring to touch glove with his ancient opponent, and say wonderingly, “Old man, you somepin else!” Into Montefiore’s mike he confessed he had never been hit harder. After this rematch Lou Terhune made a public admission that he had been wrong to doubt the authenticity of the first fight, and offered verbose apologies to all concerned. Johnson and the others subsequently withdrew their lawsuits on the advice of their attorneys, who assured them that Terhune’s gesture, on the coast-to-coast network, was worth far more than any sum of money.

  By now not only had old Alex Boyle set the new 100-meter freestyle swimming record, but Jim Melton, seventy-three years of age, had pole-vaulted to a new height; John Pomerantz, seventy-six, had put the shot four inches beyond the previous record; and perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of all, a seventy-eight-year-old named Dwight Burmeister ran the mile in the unprecedented time of 3:42:10.

  It was now clear that these phenomena were not coincidences. Obviously, something was happening to, or in any event with, the old men of our nation—for as yet, it (whatever it might be) was confined to males who lived in the United States. No aged female athletes had appeared, nor in any foreign country had an older man distinguished himself in a sports event. Indeed, the rest of the world had thus far proved reluctant to give wholehearted credence to this purely American state of affairs.