Micro Monthly News—Brink, Moseley, Mays, and Delaney—like so many third parties of the past, might have profited handily by sitting on the sidelines. This was Mays’s personal choice. He sat, each day, on the sidelines in a sort of religious frenzy. But Caroline, perhaps under pressure from hidden executive superiors, perhaps convinced that every major power had to bloody its hands a bit to lend itself credibility, encouraged Micro’s ad staff to draw up its own manifesto. Theirs was a gem of cross-reference. It reproduced reduced versions of the two previous attacks, one on each side of the page. In the middle, sans serif, it asked: “Caught in the cross fire?”
The ad pointed out that magazines intent on pointing out the shortcomings of other magazines often did so at the expense of good coverage. The whole shooting war ended up with the declaration: “While others exhort, we report.” Delaney, realizing that the catchphrase would never reach the rhetorical heights of, say, “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” burlesqued it about the office as “While others bicker, we snicker.” So Mays, knowing how much Delaney enjoyed throwing himself into the competitive fray with a faked Mohammedan zeal, alluded to the cause in an attempt to get Dougo to quit torturing him and resume torturing the coffeepot, Moseley, or some other inanimate object. But this morning Dougo could not be swayed.
—Say, what are you working on that’s so important that you don’t have two minutes to chat with the fellow who taught you everything there is to know about Schmidt Triggers? Deadline got you down? Lonely? Suicidal? Constipated? Perhaps you need . . .
Mays had to intervene at once to keep Delaney from going into his half-hour Madison Avenue free association, which began with an indictment of toilet bowl ring, moved blithely through a docu-drama on killer satellites to arrive at a panel discussion (Doug doing all four voices) on the relevance of the Magna Carta in today’s go-get-’em world. Desperate, Mays uncharacteristically fell back on the ploy of trust.
—How would you go about locating a woman with red hair?
For a dissociative schizophrenic, Delaney struck Peter as being remarkably quick on the uptake.
—Once I saw Gene Kelly trying to locate Vera-Ellen, only he didn’t know she was Vera-Ellen, thinking instead that she was a certain Miss Turnstiles. Ha! I scoff at his naïveté. Anyway, he found her finally, in the fourth reel. Now as finding a blonde in New York must be roughly four times as difficult as finding a redhead in Boston, the tart in question ought to show up in about twenty minutes.
—How about some constructive advice?
—In good time. First, you have to do this nifty soft-shoe routine down in the subway.
—Get serious for a minute, will you?
Delaney instantly went into his Lytton Strachey impersonating Oswald Spengler imitation. It was much more convincing than Mays doing Caroline.
—I tried contacting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles. They’ll release statistics pertaining to hair color, but no names, addresses, or phone numbers. I tried to buy customer lists from the hairdressers down on Newbury, but they thought I was a Fed or deviant or something. Isn’t there a lobby or special-interest group for redheads?
—Have you tried NOW? Really, my friend, this is not Ivanhoe. Contemporary woman is not yours for the hunting down. There’s a new consciousness about, a new . . .
Peter made a rude suggestion involving Delaney and a Susan B. Anthony silver dollar.
—Besides, you’re going about this all wrong.
Mays steeled himself for the “There’s more than one fish in the sea” speech. A favorite of Delaney’s, it ran: “There’s more than one fish in the sea. There’s more than one cow in the slaughterhouse. There’s more than one ‘1’ in ‘constellation.’ ” Instead, Doug said:
—She also plays the clarinet.
With some embarrassment and much discomfort, it occurred to Peter that he had not adequately disguised the obsession that had had hold of him for the last several weeks.
Delaney had never gotten past Hank Williams, while Mays himself was stone tone-deaf. Fa and la, like most monosyllables, made him nervous. When the two asked Moseley how to go about finding a redhead musician who looked about mid-twenty from eight stories up, he threatened lawsuit if not left alone. Mays was already in trouble with Brink over a delinquent column; a lawsuit would mean back to working for a living.
Yet between them, Delaney and Peter managed to work up a few leads that would occupy Mays at least enough so that he did not have to rerehearse the conversation he would have with the mirage-woman when he finally caught up with her. He had a script written for each of many possible meeting places: Supermarket, Public Library, Hospital, Casbah, Combat Zone, Côte d’Azur. She would say, “It took you long enough.” He, with a flash of Sherlock or Oliver Wendell Holmesian deadpan, would say, “I hadn’t much to go on.” With a provocative orange-juicy look about the eyes, she’d say, “You didn’t want it to be easy, did you?” And then he’d say and then she’d say.
The imagined dialogues always seemed to flow more freely than his overdue “Accumulator” column. Half the world suffered from esprit de l’escalier, staircase witticism, in which, on the way to bed, the victim recalls the chances for funny sayings missed during the evening. But Mays belonged to the camp suffering from esprit d’entrée, in which the victim must endlessly prepare all wit in advance. Those not suffering repeatedly under the delusion that they’ve forgotten to lock the door on leaving always subscribe to a mania that won’t let them hang up the phone until they’ve gotten directions three times.
Delaney suggested that Peter get hold of a parade manifest. City Hall, he explained, held for six months a roster of all participants registered for public events. This protected the city from potential lawsuits. America in the ‘80s produced ten lawyers for every engineer, and Micro was printed proof to how much trouble the engineer could make. Lawyers could create ten times the havoc, so the city barricaded itself behind a wall of protective paper. Japan, on the other hand, produced ten engineers to each lawyer, and it was little wonder that they were cleaning up in what Micro styled the “Technowar,” a conflict in which Delaney saw himself as a sort of Ed Teller.
City Hall, it seemed, made documents such as the parade manifest available to the public. Mays wondered how a lug like Delaney knew such a timely piece of obscuranta, but thought it wise not to inquire too closely into the matter.
Between the two of them, they also scraped together a meager roster of the area’s musical institutions: the Symphony, the Conservatory. Neither mentioned the suspicion that the redhead was more than likely a high school twink who marched in the school band to be close to her beau, or a career woman who dusted off the Selmer on weekends and holidays because it beat standing on the curb picking cotton candy off the kids’ clothes. Mays harbored and Delaney encouraged the notion that this was the daughter of two survivors of Belsen who’d dropped out of a surgical residency at Mass. General to pursue the diminished seventh.
As each new tangible avenue of attack joined the list, Peter grew more morose. Did the hunters for Pluto, the coelacanth, or the Andrea Doria feel sullen at closing in on the quarry? If not for this morning’s chance conversation, not being able to put Delaney off, he would have gone perhaps another six weeks searching for a head of red hair, using all the method of the famous drunk searching for a way away from the lamppost. In the end, as always, he would arrive at a cheery oblivion, lulled into a forgetfulness appropriate to the matter’s inconsequentiality. What had made the figure, swimming upstream against the crowd’s current, so compelling was her aura of otherworldliness: her clothes, her carriage, her bearing all contributed to making her seem a vision glimpsed through a closing shutter. And visions were not meant to be approached up close.
Brink pounced on the conspiracy from out of nowhere. Breaking in mid-sentence, Delaney tried to cover up their activity:
—And so, you simple-minded clot, your shallow ideas about the feasibility of a gigabyte address decode
r fail to show even cursory familiarity with the state-of-the-art. Consider the alpha particle . . .
—Who wants to know what about musical groups?
Mays, too exhausted to keep up his guard any longer, confessed. Brink mentioned that her boyfriend belonged to the Cologne Chamber Music Society. Delaney asked how the fabled twosome were getting along of late. The Managing Editor reminded him that times were very tough and that overpaid copy boys were luxuries. He counterthreatened, saying he knew of two books that would jump at a person of his qualifications. She said “jump at” would just about describe the encounter. And he said and she said.
The idea of Caroline having relations with men struck Mays as incongruous. She was attractive, in a professional way. Her near-corpulence went against his late-twentieth-century taste for the anorectic. But she was entirely too congenial to be mixed up in the sordid affair of sex. Mays had met Lenny Bullock, Brink’s boyfriend, for want of a better term, at office parties when both men had been duly oiled. Even the haze of alcohol could not lessen Mays’s suspicion of what the cad must certainly be doing to the unsuspecting and frowsty Caroline.
—He’s unbelievable. You can sing a tune once and Len has it by heart. He’s studied with professionals, you know. He walks around the house singing, you name it, Brahms’s Fifth, the way you or I might sing “Wedding Bells Are Ringing.”
—Are you in the habit of singing about wedding bells?
With that, Delaney made a timely and Continental exit to the coffeepot. Brink went on at uncharacteristic length about how Bullock could provide Mays with an entrée to the Boston musical scene. He had never heard her speak of anyone outside of De Forest or Edison with such reverence. The more she spoke, the more Mays stood by his first impressions: Bullock could only charitably be called unbalanced. A transient when transcience was fashionable, he played the American extended adolescence for all it was worth. Finding himself at last in adulthood and totally unqualified to do any meaningful work, he’d sashayed into stockbroking—“Got registered,” as the jargon had it (handguns, historic houses, and stockbrokers). Society had tamed the erratic fellow by co-opting him into the mainstream. For its largest threats, society reserves success.
Despite this success, despite the fact that he frequently took home to the place he shared with Caro over seven thousand dollars in one week’s commissions, Bullock was heavily in hock. Unlike most other heavy borrowers, he adored talking about his debt. The first thing he ever said to Peter, by way of opening line, was that a man’s worth could be gauged by how much he owed. The same evening, he told Mays that he had an investment that could net him 8K for 2, “K” being jargon the two professionals shared. Lenny had probably gotten the lead the same place he’d found out about the new Brahms symphony.
Mays thanked his boss as deferentially as his personality allowed, and said he’d get in touch with Leonard, who would certainly be a help. Secretly, Mays filed all thought of the fellow under “Insect” for safekeeping.
—Say, what are you so hot on music for all of a sudden? You’re usually so serious and aloof from that sort of stuff.
Mays observed silence, considering a three-part series on public television titled “Young Mays: His Seriousness, His Aloofness.” He wondered if “seriousness” were a word. Serity. Seriosity.
—It’s next March’s special report on music synthesis chips, isn’t it? Damn it, Peter. That’s fine, first class. We’re not even out with the Christmas issue, and you’re planning ahead for spring. You’re going to be a first-rate editor after all. A damn fine editor.
“Damn” was going to need a lot more time in Caro’s mouth before her body stopped rejecting it as foreign tissue. Nor did Peter like the sound of that “after all.” But at least she was back to the magazine and off the topic of humans and the relations thereamong.
Moseley suggestively rustled several manila envelopes, and Caroline, shocked into sense by the rare sound of office supplies at work, grew circumspect and slunk off to her cell. In the jungle of indifference Mays had cultivated toward the older man, he planted a twenty-four-hour flowering gratitude. Moseley, in peace at last, resumed his red-penning.
The remaining day, already reneged, had to be gotten through on the installment plan. Delaney buzzed by Mays twice more, once forcing him into the degradation of discussing professional sports. Caro, compensatory, remained shut up in her module. Mays wrote two words and lapsed, wrote two more and lapsed. He tried to force his memory—which he imagined to be an inch deep and just left of his crown—to reproduce the aerial view of that Veterans’ Day. But the more he strained, the more distant and ubiquitous that antique, upstream figure became.
When the five bells sounded, Mays dredged up, instead of the memory he was after, a spontaneous tune from out of his old church hymnal: “Now Thank We All Our God.” He did not know that it had been the German national hymn, sung spontaneously by Berlin crowds on August 1, 1914, the day of mobilization. Nor could he imagine how it sounded on the clarinet. It was merely his way of giving thanks for the end of another thankless day.
Chapter Seven
Portraits in Gum Arabic
The world that used to be and the ideas that shaped it disappeared . . . down the corridors of August and the months that followed.
—Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August
And so after only a very short time in Boston, I had lost both the mystical impression and the physical sense of that Detroit photo. I had come across those faces by accident, but it was also the gradual accumulation of daily accidents that blurred and overexposed those faces in my mind. For the three figures on the muddy road had no names to anchor them in a more solid bed of association. Stories stick in the mind longer than near-religious sensations.
And to admit it, the forgetting made my life less anxious, more comfortable. We’re lucky that our memories are so much less physically persistent than they might be. Being able to forget a broken arm usually makes up for the annoyance of bad memory. But this time, the trade-off was a bad one. If the weakness of memory protects from repeated regashing, it also postpones the cut of necessary surgery.
I could no longer voluntarily call to mind the subject of the black-and-white image that had moved me so profoundly. Yet I had moments, admittedly more and more isolated, seemingly spontaneous or brought on by slight associations, when the urgency and clarity of those three farmers, looking out over their right shoulders, came back to me with all their old force. I felt very much the old widower who, fifteen years after the death of his wife, wonders what could be keeping her so long this fine morning.
But I could no more sustain those clear slices of quarter hour when the farmers once again came down the road than the widower could preserve his confusion. When I was able to make out the shapes of those black suits and canes, my feeling revived so strongly as to seem the one instant of lucidity out of weeks of wasted time. At my office, on hearing a proper Bostonian say “Revere,” I mistakenly heard the surname Rivera, and was at once back inside the assembly-line murals in Detroit. My sense of returning sanity was so strong that I instantly got on the phone before the conviction could escape and made reservations for the next flight to Michigan. I had very nearly completed the deal when the clerk put me on hold. The piped music, technomorphia, was quite definitely not “There’s a Long, Long Night of Waiting.” I felt rather foolish and broke the connection.
Convinced that my memory was deteriorating, I began to keep a notebook. I would stay up late, and under the influence of black coffee I would fill pages with forced recollections and exercises in concentration. I would wake in the mornings, eager to see the revelations waiting in longhand on the pages. I would reach for the still-open book and read over what I had written down the evening before. The small part that was legible I found romantically incoherent.
Most of my time I spent in calm disinterest. While I could not remember the urgency of the picture, I had forgotten also to worry much about forgetting. My work was technical enou
gh to lose myself in, but not so difficult as to require any real concentration. In the evenings, I continued research on those leads I could remember from my Detroit hiatus, but I had lost sight of the end. No conspiracy developed. On weekends, I stuck to my Baedecker, doing walking tours of Boston. The Freedom Trail was my happy monotony.
The interruptions of memory, however few, were fierce enough to force notice. Three men walk down a muddy road at late afternoon, two obviously young, one an indeterminate age. When that mechanical reproduction came back to me, I felt the shame of neglect that I always feel in those dreams in which my father, who gave in to cancer when I was twenty-one, comes and sits on the end of my bed, saying, “You’ve forgotten me? What do you think I am, dead?” The farmers, looking out over their right shoulders, accused me of the same crime. Their look at the lens, when clear, seemed a call to experience something I knew nothing of.
Stronger than their accusation was my fear that any sudden moves on my part might dissolve the image once more. But the fear generally did the chasing off by itself. I seemed headed for a time when the anxiety of memory would soon be present without any sense of its constituting image.
I did not know it then, but I had no cause for worry. What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route. I would have to follow a strange, indirect circuit to arrive back at that day in 1914, but I would get there in time. To identify those would-be dancers, I had first to submerge myself in their dance.
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance Page 8