by John Domini
Two or three more nights had passed since the insanity in the hotel room—impossible, rough-cut dark hours stained with dreams of being born and then going to work at once, still trailing the greasy umbilicus. Impossible nights. So when Grissom did in fact make it home, his young hand was shaking so hard it took him three tries to turn the kitchen doorknob. And—? “Yaaaay, Grissom! He’d stumbled bang into the raised glasses and popping flashbulbs of a surprise party. Syl had been so proud of him for earning the right to go on such a trip, and his birthday fell near enough to make such an excuse. So neighbors, relatives, even slight office acquaintances had been brought over. Syl and he, in those days, were trying to expand their circle.
When his wife rushed out of the crowd and hugged him, fiercely, Grissom had burst into tears and shrieked something hysterical, Godgodgod or something, at which everyone in the room laughed and said: Awww. Look at that, awww, what else can you say? He returned Syl’s hug, tight, tight, burying his face in her neck to avoid seeing these loosened smiles and roving eyes that had come at him out of the darkened rooms of his own home. Syl had finally told him loudly, party-volume, to loosen up his hold, hey come on darling. The crowd found this hilarious. The people who’d laughed too raucously, or who’d made the wrong sort of jokes, Syl and Grissom had never seen again.
And—? His reaction had been nothing short of a miracle. He didn’t call the party off. Yes of course Grissom wanted to avoid a scene; yes too he was hungry and the baklava Syl had baked reeked of sweet honey. Yes, most importantly, he’d been too frightened to go through any more high emotions for a while. So, a miracle, Grissom stayed on his feet. Manfully he circled among the wisecracks about growing old and the fearsome traces of a perfume that would be right for a sophisticated lady in a big-city bar. The night followed the pattern, in capsule version, for that brutal cross-country running around that a man at Grissom’s level of the business was supposed to do: racing from the freezer to Kansas City, then catching a late-night shuttle for Savannah, with a connection for the baby’s bedroom…. Hours had passed. He’d stayed on his feet. Then finally and without knowing how it had happened, he’d discovered himself alone with his wife for the first time all evening. She was sitting in the after-party dark, lying back nearly, on the sofa. She’d brought their son downstairs and, her breast like a softening in the smoke and upholstery, she was nursing him. Grissom watched. The infant’s large eyes were closed; her own were lowered to see him suck. They might both have been asleep, except that she was murmuring to the child in babytalk. And the wife had the second child sitting up in her belly already, that’s how fast you went about such things then. So Grissom had come to believe, as he stood watching the two of them, that he would never again take part in this world of Syl’s, this drowsy continuous talking and touching. The calm fullness of bellies and the tongue living inside the kiss: never for him. Syl had made too fragile a web, a wisp strung between two monsters, for the boom and bust of Grissom’s inner life. When he saw the baby’s saliva start to dribble down his wife’s breast, Grissom had to turn away.
Yet he’d remained faithful. After the second baby was born and Grissom’s numbness in the sack continued nonetheless, Syl had broken down and screamed at him, weeping, to see a headshrinker, see one. Then he’d punched in his hours on the couch. He’d taken also his more conservative medicines, the Church and raising children. In time there had come a night when Syl could go farther than merely laying a hand on the back of his thigh to let him know the choice was still open.
And after more time still, Grissom came to yet another—what could he call it?—another moment of private graduation. This time it happened at the office. A late September day. He was then 52, his night on acid twenty years behind him already. He was standing at the urinal in the executive washroom, looking over his company’s latest annual report. He tried always to bring some work with him into the men’s room, so as not to have his concentration broken. The place, with its aluminum and Muzak and air-freshener, could rub your brains clean in a minute. There Grissom had noticed that his photograph at the front of the report appeared odd, incorrect somehow. Moving to the basin to wash his hands, he thought it over. And then, on an impulse, he’d splashed the water up onto his face and looked into the mirror, bright and humming with Muzak. Like that, the answer came to him. Of course: the boys in Design & Layout had airbrushed his picture, so he wouldn’t look too old.
That morning, that day…again his mysterious failure of speech afflicted Grissom. He couldn’t say with any precision why this retouched photo in his company report, a simple matter of good business, should pick up his spirits as much as it had. But he went back to his desk at a strut. He felt so with-it he invited the other vice-president on his corridor to lunch. And in the restaurant, Grissom had shocked the man by ordering good imported Scotch straight up before the meal.
Indeed, that last graduation had picked him up too high, too fast. Every one of Grissom’s shot glasses, these past five years, had dropped like a small bomb behind his ribcage. He’d gone back to hard stuff, after all, at an age when he should have been switching to milk.
In this business, too, Syl had impressed him. Any time he reached for a third highball, she would start reminding him of the two or three men in their circle who’d already had their first heart attack. She would lay her broad hand (she had a fisherman’s hands, he’d always thought) over his whenever he began to pour an unnecessary J&B. She’d ask: you forgetting who you are, Grissom? Yes with that mock-businesslike way she had of using his last name as if it was something serious enough to joke about. Hey Grissom, she’d say. You trying to catch up with somebody out there? Grissom, settle down a little, don’t just stand there talking to yourself. Hey, look at me. Hey Grissom, talk to me.
It might have worked, her familiar needling gab. Those fisherman hands might have hooked the right words in the darkness beneath Grissom’s thoughts. She could have made him tell her how he’d wanted to define himself as one way or another, in that hotel bar a generation earlier, how he wanted to see himself without any gray areas showing. But no dice. After his first heart attack, a man gets everything from a new perspective.
Less than a year ago, now. The attack had come in the form of a gum-slow pain, as if he were giving birth to a creature that needed first to burrow from his breastbone through to his spine. Afterwards, as he’d floated through the white and steel of the hospital, with the color TV going all the time, seeming a million starstruck miles from his brown home in Lake Forest, then Grissom had drifted mentally too. He lay there reconstructing. A damaged chest and a rattled mind, both reconstructing. Yes both, because at his heart’s first vicious twist inward—in the very moment—uncountable tough lumps of memory had erupted farther up the spine.
Somebody will pay for doing this to me, he’d told himself at the time.
My whole life passed before my eyes, he’d told his visitors at the hospital.
Thus, there, plugged into the heart-support machinery, he saw the stories of what the intelligence agencies had done. His first day back on his feet Grissom called his lawyer. It wasn’t till this month just past that they at last received verification.
Now arrived the TV people. They came into Grissom’s home tonight and caught him by surprise. Though of course he had arranged the visit himself. Hours earlier, he’d telephoned the Chicago station. Plus before that he’d arranged every step of the procedure with Syl: the room they would use, the time of arrival. Yet then Grissom’s wife had unsettled his nerves. Simply by asking a few hard questions, Syl had got him striding back and forth across the living-room rug, so intently that when he’d touched a lightswitch—it was near sundown—the static electricity gave him a bad shock. Syl had sat on the sofa watching. She was waiting for something it seemed. Finally, her voice growing quiet with determination, the lines of her face deepening, she’d refused absolutely to take any part in Grissom’s bit on the TV news.
So he was caught by surprise. A man near sixty,
in a bright silver suit he’d cleaned especially, he lumbered around gesturing to himself. He hadn’t even noticed Syl when she’d crossed the entryway to answer the door.
Only, one moment Grissom looked up, and in came the TV people.
A tall Oriental woman went first, angular at the jawline and hip, unmistakeably a beauty even though from Grissom’s distance her face was vague. In her angles alone he could tell she was gorgeous. Her hair was tied back flat against her skull, her long body cinched up tight in a three-piece suit of that flecked, metallic green which was popular just now. To see her stalk in, trailing wires—so bright, so pinched and sectioned, trailing wires—Grissom thought of a hornet prowling the air. Round her long neck there tottered a steel mirror on a hinged apparatus that allowed her to look at herself as she walked. The reflected sunset coming through the open door behind her colored her small face oddly.
Grissom stared, in wary shock. He went on standing in the center of his living room.
The Oriental reporter stopped to check something in her mirror, parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth. As she paused, there strode past her a creature that seemed to have three heads, each with a different size and a different degree of mobility. Grissom squinted and blinked several times. Finally he managed to distinguish between the plastic half-moon of the microphone, the iron angles of the camera, and the emaciated young cameraman’s half-visible, red-bearded face. Meantime closer to Grissom something else went rushing by low to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at it: some kind of large black box, an uncertain shape. It made the air stir around his ankles. The man hauling the box however was impossible to miss, a tough working stiff in his prime, twice Grissom’s size, his body under its golden T-shirt as blunt and efficient as a dead-bolt lock. Gold, it seemed, was this guy’s thing. Along one side of his face dangled an earring a good two inches across, bright gold. His belt buckle also was gold, and worn up on his right hip to catch the eye. Then next, coming in the door next, now—a wide aluminum bowl, freestanding, with consoles of switches and toothed snap-latches bolted on both at top and bottom. There were nasty-looking yellow bulbs at the bowl’s center. Crossing the slate entryway, its wheels shrieked. How did it move? But the girl who entered next certainly wasn’t pushing anything. A frowning blonde who looked like she wasn’t yet out of her teens, she came through the door tilted sideways, groaning, uneasy on cheap-looking high heels. Under this girl’s chin swung a legal pad clipped to a board; up on one shoulder she barely managed to balance a steel briefcase with sharp, studded corners; cradled against her other side was a bone-white gallon jug crookedly labeled HOT STUFF. All was positive, hard-surface, solid evidence thrusting forth dynamically into uncut sunlight. Even this overloaded teenage girl had an upper body that mushroomed out into a high-school jacket with bulging shoulders.
The jacket’s elastic hem was hiked up, revealing her midriff. It was the only ordinary, untucked flesh anywhere among these people. To Grissom it seemed the girl’s belly was rising towards him, rising…the hairless teenage skin blending with her unbelted jeans….
“Say three, three and a half right now,” the girl said, or rather grunted loudly. She’d come quite close. “And with these curtains—minute—” she bent, set down her burden. Her midriff disappeared. “With these curtains, better make it two.”
“Starbaby, I told you, I got the meter right here.” This was the grip in gold, answering over his shoulder and through his earring. Grissom couldn’t be sure, but the man appeared to have a hand between his legs. “They got rooms upstairs. Starbaby! Let’s go be alone and shut the door.”
“Knock it off and give me six hundred.” The Camera/Face, who closed in on Grissom and then backed away. “And make it a wide six hundred. I want to go override and we’ll color-down right here.”
He pressed in close again, his black lens twitching.
“Starbaby,” the grip went on shouting, “I told you, you want to travel with us you got to decide. What’s it going to be girl? Them or me, girl?”
Oh I understand, Grissom thought, sounding the words against his inner ear with forced sensibleness. I understand. He’s trying to put the make on the blonde girl.
“That’s an old song,” the girl shouted back without looking at him. She waved around something that looked like a compass. “I mean I heard my grandfather singing that song.”
“Oh you just don’t know, girl.” The man was working expertly, hopping up and down like a gymnast, making swift settings on the aluminum reflecting bowl. “Starbaby it ain’t that I’m old, it’s that you’re new. Girl you ain’t even been born yet.”
“Go, just—just stay on the other side of the world from me.” She sounded uncertain. “Just, get us the count.”
Grissom stood watching them all come into his house. The girl’s midriff like a piece of his own flesh orbiting now behind him to his right. The topheavy cameraman, the jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip’s shouting. Grissom thought he’d never seen these rooms so crammed with humanity. Although—he thought again—that was an odd way to feel with Syl out of sight. But ow, those few hard questions she’d asked him earlier. They seemed still with him, here like seastones under the carpet. Why, Syl had asked him, did Grissom leave it to her during this past month to reconstruct the whole twenty-five-year-long chain of events on her own? Why didn’t he come tell her straight out: first there was that original executive-level trek, and, and next, Grissom…He tried to answer, saying there were things he could tell his lawyer and the people in the media that, ah, naturally Syl, ah, well like my fat her used to say, Syl, there are a lot of bastards out there….
She’d reached out and taken hold of his chin. She’d thrust her face at him: Look at me, Grissom! Finally he’d had to rise from the sofa shouting you’ve got it backwards Syl, you’re looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I’m going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.
Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.
“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let’s go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”
“All right!” But that wasn’t the blonde girl’s voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.
“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”
The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.
Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She’d changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom’s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected.
“Mr. Grissom, I’m sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who’s new, I mean she’s just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”
“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”
The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn’t get a clear view; she’d turned away quickly and squatted over the grip’s black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.
“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”
At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blind
ness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it on either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his—Grissom’s—lelt thigh.
“It is three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.
“When they’re old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just goes.”
“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time’s running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don’t you. We work for you.”
“Give it some back light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There’s no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I’m telling you, his face will just go.”
The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman’s eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom’s cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.
“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you’re related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”