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Tepper Isn't Going Out: A Novel

Page 8

by Calvin Trillin


  “Just sit down there,” Teresa repeated, pointing to an odd-looking chair. “Put your little computer over here by my desk, just in case whatever that thing’s got in it turns computer programs into raspberry Jell-O, and sit down.”

  The chair was made of a dark gray material that appeared to be some sort of composite of ash or soot. It looked rather forbidding—hard material, straight edges. Extending from one side was an adjustable attachment that looked as if it swung in to provide a sort of chin rest for whoever was sitting in the chair. The chair had dials.

  “I actually heard about this, and I thought it was a joke,” Shanahan said.

  “It’s no joke,” Teresa said, picking up a four-color brochure. “It is, in fact, a Body Orifice Security Scanner, also known as a BOSS.” She started reading from the brochure: “The low-intensity magnetic fields pose no danger to people with heart pacemakers or pregnant women. No X rays are used, so staff and inmates are never subjected to . . .” She stopped. The light on her desk was flashing. “The mayor will see you now,” she said to Shanahan.

  Shanahan started to walk toward the mayor’s office, but Teresa put her hand on his arm. “As soon as you sit in the chair—the Body Orifice Security Scanner,” she said. He put his laptop computer next to Teresa’s desk, walked over to the BOSS, and sat down, lowering himself with some delicacy, like a fraternity pledge who had just undergone some brutal paddling. There was no sound. “You did fine,” Teresa said, as she signaled him to stand up. “I can’t guarantee that there’s nothing in your body orifices, but if there is something it’s not dangerous to others.”

  The mayor was actually sitting behind his desk, going through some papers. “Carmody’s getting ready,” he said, when he saw Shanahan. “I hear from somebody at the Players club that Maxie Allen never shows up there for lunch anymore. He’s too busy working on songs with that clown Carmody.”

  “I hear the same thing,” Shanahan said. “The word is that Carmody’s going to run.”

  “I’ll be going to Phoenix for this mayors’ conference in about a week,” Ducavelli said. “I figure by the time I get back from there we’ll be seeing our friend Mr. Carmody around town a little more.”

  “Sounds about right,” Shanahan said. “Unless he can’t get the lyrics memorized by then.”

  “What’s the latest we’ve got on a head-to-head?” Ducavelli said.

  Shanahan put his laptop on the mayor’s conference table, tapped a few keys, and said, “The latest is a five-hundred-voter phone survey we did a month ago. You win fifty-six to forty-four in a straight head-to-head. If the Reverend Alonzo Butler runs, as he threatens to do now and then when the police mistake an ice-cream cone or key ring in the hand of a black man as a gun and start firing away, he would pull about equally from you and Carmody.”

  “Alonzo Butler is a hypocrite and false leader,” the mayor said. “Anybody who preaches in Harlem and lives in Yonkers is a coward who is obviously trying to get out of the range of my authority so he won’t find a methadone treatment center next door to his house, which is what he deserves to find, and what he will find if I can ever persuade that wimp mayor of Yonkers that granting a lawful request from a fellow mayor is a matter of common courtesy. Yes, Alonzo Butler is an obviously and irredeemably corrupt and degraded human being. That’s the long and short of it.”

  “Be that as it may,” Shanahan said, “he pulls about equally from you and the Wacko, so you still lead the Wacko by roughly twelve points.”

  “The man’s a clown,” Ducavelli said, almost to himself. “A disgrace.” The mayor sat staring into the middle distance for a while, occasionally muttering a word like “fool” or “degenerate,” like a motor that is basically about out of fuel but is still coughing a bit irregularly. Then, after a while, he looked at Mike Shanahan as if Shanahan had just come into the office. “You were going to give me some survey results on parking, Mike,” he said. “Parking’s the thing. Bedrock!”

  Shanahan tapped again at his computer. “The parking situation is pretty simple, Mayor,” he said. “When you try to crack down on United Nations diplomats, your numbers go up; when you try to crack down on ordinary citizens for, say, double parking, your numbers go down.” A few months before, the mayor had decided, rather abruptly, that double-parking your car while waiting behind the wheel, maybe even with the motor running, was essentially the same as double-parking your car, locking it, and leaving. He had ordered a crackdown.

  “Double parkers are criminals,” the mayor said.

  “Well, I won’t argue the legalities, Mayor, but what they consider themselves, which turns out to be what’s important in their view of your crackdown on double parking, is maybe miscreants at worst and maybe even people waiting for their wives to get out of a store so they can drive home to Queens.”

  “A double-parked car is a call to lawlessness,” the mayor said. “It’s like a sign inviting in the forces of disorder.”

  “Your campaign against the Ukrainians was one of the most popular things you’ve ever done,” Shanahan continued, deciding that there was no point in continuing a discussion of double parking with Mayor Ducavelli. “Although I say that as one who is opposed to an actual declaration of war. According to our data, the phrase ‘scofflaws in striped pants’ was the phrase you used that voters liked best of any phrase associated with you all year. I should say that there aren’t many Ukrainian voters. Those Ukrainians who used to live in what they’re now calling the East Village seem to have been replaced by boutiques, and the immigrants from around Kiev who live in Brooklyn are actually Jews who have good reason not to leap to their feet when the Ukrainian national anthem is played. So, even though our survey shows that sticking it to the diplomats is generally good politics, it also shows that it depends on which diplomats you stick it to. If the main scofflaws among diplomats were the Israelis or the Irish or the Italians, you might come out ahead by letting bygones be bygones.”

  Toward the end of that report, the mayor had seemed to tune out. He was again staring out at nothing particular, muttering. “Buffoon,” he said after a while. And then, “Fool.” And then, “Poltroon.”

  13. A Mittgin Morning

  TEPPER THOUGHT OF IT AS HIS BARNEY MITTGIN morning. He’d have time to do some other business, of course. In fact, he had a consultation scheduled with the circulation people planning the charter subscription drive for one of those new magazines aimed at women over fifty—a magazine that was tentatively called Laughlines, although its circulation people, all of them male, generally referred to it among themselves as Cellulite. He was also meeting with some people from the campaign committee of a young man who was running for Congress in Westchester County as a pro-choice free-market anti-tax gun-control pro-NATO Republican reformer. The committee, frustrated in its attempts to encompass the candidate’s natural constituency through the lists available from conventional political sources, thought that Tepper might be able to come up with something. Tepper also had some other odds and ends to do. He was planning to pick some doctors’ lists to test for a sort of real estate mutual fund—for reasons he couldn’t explain, he had the strong feeling that allergists were going to be a strong market—and if he had time he might do a little research on lettuce dryers, just to have something to report to Arnie Sarnow when the subject of the magic list came up. But he still thought of the morning as the morning Barney Mittgin was coming by Worldwide Lists to demonstrate once again what a schmuck he was.

  Mittgin showed up at nine-thirty. He was a man who had put on weight in a way that called to mind a sausage that had been filled at a rate that was a bit too much for its casing—particularly for some weak sections that bulged out grotesquely from the whole. He often got out of breath and red in the face. Tepper noticed that Mittgin vaguely resembled the fat man on West Fifty-seventh Street who had kept shouting, “Ya jerky bastard, ya.”

  “Well, it’s the famous Murray Tepper,” Mittgin said, when he walked into the office and took the seat next to Tep
per’s desk. The chair had been vacated ten or fifteen minutes before by Arnie Sarnow, who had dropped in just long enough to report that Mittgin, in a foul state about the failure of Worldwide Lists to come up with a satisfactorily imaginative approach to selling his device for sleeping on airplanes and finding your way around airports, had insisted on spending some time with Murray Tepper himself.

  Tepper shrugged. “Not overwhelmingly famous,” he said.

  “Hope this isn’t pushing you, Touch, me coming in without much warning,” Mittgin said, as he settled in.

  “No problem, Barney,” Tepper said. “I’ve got a meeting with some political campaign people in a while, but I think we’ve got enough time.”

  Mittgin smiled. “Ah, the political people want to talk to the man with the magic touch—the man who found the car-cleaner list.”

  “Barney, I didn’t have anything to do with the car-cleaner list. You’ve got that mixed up.” Tepper felt constrained to make the denial even though he didn’t have any illusions that it would do much good. Once Mittgin got an idea in his head, it couldn’t be dislodged by constant bombardment of contradictory facts. Tepper had not, in fact, had anything to do with finding the car-cleaner list, although he had always been fascinated by its effectiveness. In the sixties, a list broker working for the Republican National Committee must have been testing what amounted to wild-card lists, among them a list of people who had sent away for a chemically treated cloth that was effective for “washing” a car without the use of water. As a list for Republican fund-raising it turned out to be second in effectiveness only to a list of people who had sent away for copies of Six Crises by Richard M. Nixon. The Democrats in the trade explained the success of the car-cleaner list with no trouble at all: they said that the average Republican donor was not only abnormally interested in maintaining his property but too stiff to get wet while doing it. But Tepper had heard that the car-cleaner list also worked for the Democratic National Committee. He had pondered for years what exterior car maintenance and willingness to donate money to politicians could possibly have in common. The connection never came.

  “You’ve got the touch, Murray,” Mittgin said, and then sat smiling at him as if he expected Tepper to demonstrate his magic touch right there. “You’re a modest man, but you’ve got the touch. Don’t forget the No list.”

  Tepper nodded. The No list. The No was one of his all right, although he didn’t consider it anything more than the sort of connection he made dozens of times a week. The No list was the list of people who had sent back sweepstakes offers marked “No”—exercising the option to have their name remain in the running for a prize but declining the subscription or set of books or travel offer the sweepstakes was designed to sell. The No option had to be included by law, but the people who ran sweepstakes would have included it anyway. They had found that offering the option to say no increased the percentage of people who said yes—presumably because the extra split second people kept the mailing in their hand to think about the decision led to a tiny but significant number of them deciding to take out the subscription after all.

  For years nobody had found a use for the No list, beyond some relatively minor mailings for puzzle and game magazines. It just sat there, tantalizing people in the trade who considered any unused list of names arable land lying fallow. The people on the No list had demonstrated that they were willing to deal through the mails. They had demonstrated that they were willing to risk a first-class stamp for a fantastically long shot at winning a new cabin cruiser or $25,000 for ten years. The solution that Tepper thought of was so simple that it almost didn’t qualify as a connection. A number of states were then looking for ways to broaden their state lotteries, and a couple of them were actually considering mailings—a play-by-mail lottery. They had the state motor vehicles registration lists at their disposal, but those were too broad. By taking the No list and slicing it into states on a computer, Tepper provided the state lotteries with lists of hard-core long-shot something-for-nothing people. He was known in the business for a while as the man who found a use for the No list, but Tepper himself considered it a flash in the pan.

  Not Barney Mittgin. He was one of those people who insisted on covering people with praise for accomplishments they either hadn’t had anything to do with or knew to be of no particular consequence. At least that’s the way he treated Tepper. Since Tepper avoided Mittgin outside the absolute necessities of their business dealings, he had no way of knowing whether everyone else got the same treatment. Sometimes, though, he could imagine Mittgin arriving home every evening and gushing over something his wife had, for good reason, considered routine at best. “No wonder everyone describes you as a gourmet cook,” he’d say at dinner. “This turkey is magnificent. A triumph.”

  “It’s one of those frozen dinners, Barney,” Mittgin’s unfortunate wife would say. “I just thawed it out. Gourmets don’t thaw.”

  “When I think of the blessing I’ve been given to have such a wife—a genuine gourmet cook . .”

  The other side of Mittgin’s misplaced admiration was the belief that people he had not admitted into his pantheon of heroes were absolutely incompetent—which is what he had decided about Arnie Sarnow. “He’s a nice boy, Murray, but he doesn’t have the touch,” Mittgin said.

  “I thought Arnie did pretty well testing subscription lists from computer-repair magazines,” Tepper said.

  Mittgin shook his head. “He doesn’t have the touch, Murray. Remember when you found the accountants list for the discount designer jeans? Other people might have put together accountants and discount, but accountants and designer jeans—that’s you, Murray. That’s the magic touch.”

  “I think Arnie must have handled that one, Barney. I didn’t do any designer jeans account.”

  “It took someone who knew what makes this country tick to make that connection, Murray,” Mittgin went on, as if Tepper hadn’t spoken. “It took someone with the magic touch.”

  “Maybe it’s the product, Barney,” Tepper said, even though he knew it would do no good. “Maybe not that many people feel the need for a sleep doughnut with airport maps on it.”

  “It’s not the product, Murray. I’ve got a hundred and fifty gross of the product to move. It can’t be the product.”

  14. Dinner

  MURRAY TEPPER COULD TELL THAT RUTH WAS ABOUT TO introduce an important subject by the way she said his name before she began. They were sitting at the dinner table in their apartment on the West Side, in the same dining room they had eaten in for twenty-five years. They were having roast chicken. Ruth often started sentences with his name—she had, in fact, just said, “Murray, could you pass the salt, please?”—but this was a different tone from the one she used for getting the salt or for asking some routine question, like “Murray, do you want this shirt to go to the laundry or what?” This was a more considered tone. The first syllable of his name was emphasized, and the two syllables were separated more firmly.

  “Murray,” she said. “What do you think about going back to England sometime this summer?”

  Tepper was working on a chicken leg. His mouth was full of dark meat.

  “Or maybe in September,” Ruth said, before he could reply. “When the airline fares go down.”

  “England’s a nice little country,” he said.

  Ruth considered that answer for a moment. It was probably not a description of the United Kingdom that the British ambassador would go for, but, coming from Murray, it seemed enthusiastic enough to warrant pursuit of the subject. Murray had, in fact, always seemed to enjoy England. From time to time, they had even talked about retiring there one day, in one of those pretty, peaceful villages in the West, just a few fields in from the sea. Calling England “a nice little country” wasn’t necessarily meant in a condescending way. It wasn’t unusual for Murray to describe a country in terms of its geographic size. She had heard him refer to France once as “a nice middle-sized country.” When the subject of Canada came up, he
was likely to say, “Very big. Very, very big.”

  “We could go to the seashore in the West of England,” Ruth said. “I’d love to do some watercolors there—Devon, Cornwall. You told me once that my seascapes were your favorites.”

  “It’s true,” Tepper said. “That’s partly because I particularly like your pictures when they have a lot of blue in them. Your blue is spectacular, Ruth. Truly spectacular. Nobody’s blue is like your blue.”

  When Tepper met the woman who was to be his wife, just after the war, she was studying art full-time. She had come to New York hoping to be a painter. Until Linda was born, Ruth had worked as an illustrator. She’d also done some graphic design. Her true love, though, was working in watercolors. Ruth’s style hadn’t really changed much in all of those years. She still used mainly watercolors, and her subjects were still mostly landscapes and seascapes. Tepper preferred the seascapes, because of the blue, but he found all of Ruth’s work soothing. When he read in the paper about an artist who was drawing attention for some avant-garde departure, he sometimes wondered how he would respond if he arrived home one evening to find Ruth intently pasting turkey feathers and bits of alfalfa on a canvas that had been painted four shades of black. But when he returned from the office each evening and peeked into the room Ruth used as her studio—what had formerly been Linda’s bedroom—he always saw, to his relief, that Ruth’s style was unchanged. She painted what she had always painted—the rocks, the tumbledown fishing shacks, the blue water, the blue sky, sometimes a blue pickup truck.

  “You don’t have anything that would keep you here, do you?” Ruth asked.

  “Keep me here?” Tepper said. “I can’t think of anything that would keep me here. Like what?”

 

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