Adventures of the Artificial Woman

by Thomas Berger

  “But Ellery,” said she, “I don’t go to the toilet, and not being altogether waterproof, I can’t take a bath or shower. And knowing you, I doubt you would want us to be seen having sex.”

  “It would be stuff like shopping, eating, talking with friends, going to clubs, none of which you actually ever do, of course.”

  “But I am an actress,” Phyllis said. “It would be playing a part, like any other. After all, everything I’ve ever done has been acting. It’s necessarily all I can do.”

  “We may have something here,” said Pierce. “Your status right now is perfect for reality TV: You’re a has-been but still recognizable to much of the public.”

  15

  Hanging Out with Phyllis was not a success on cable. The public and the critics were unanimous: As herself Phyllis proved boring. She was not grotesque either in appearance or manner, and her professed tastes and opinions were reasonable, as was her language. Pierce in fact now found himself obliged to urge her to use the occasional bleepable obscenity, to juice up her dialogue with the actors who played the trio of sidekicks: the ebony-torsoed former wrestler who served as her personal trainer; her cook, an effervescent Asian; and her “best friend,” a white female interior designer with a wit that great effort was expended in the scripting thereof to make acerbic.

  This cast of characters had been established after much research into what audiences might like but also what no significant segment of it would be offended by. Thus the Asian was not identified specifically as to culture: His eyelids had the epicanthic fold, but he could have hailed from anywhere in the eastern Orient, and he had no discernible accent. The ex-wrestler, a bulky six-foot-five African Native American (his maternal grandmother was a Chickasaw), had an Ivy League honors degree and regularly quoted from Keats. Gwen, the best friend, was a professionally successful single mother, who easily found time to juggle a demanding job with the responsibilities of parenthood, yet seemed always to be in Phyllis’s company, cracking wise about the decor of the restaurants at which they dined (“taste-deprived”) or reflecting waspishly on fictional friends they had in common (botched cosmetic surgery, adulteries, stinginess).

  Phyllis privately observed to Pierce that in her opinion Gwen’s character provided only a reminder of how inferior it was to the female sidekick of the 1940s films, played classically by Eve Arden, and he did not disagree but pointed out that the kind of people who were today’s target audience would not be equipped, or inclined, to make the comparison. And in fact Gwen proved to be the most popular character in the show, more so than Phyllis herself.

  According to the surveys taken frequently throughout the early months of the program, Phyllis was the least liked of the four. Young women viewers found her too passive, especially disappointing in an actress who had been celebrated for kicking male ass in the movie roles for which she became famous. Whereas middle-aged women interpreted her reserve as snobbery.

  When, in response to Pierce’s suggestion that she use saltier language, Phyllis on occasion cried, “Oh sh—!” or “F—that!,” first hundreds, then more than a thousand viewers protested by telephone, fax, e- and snail-mail, and the show was attacked publicly by clerical and lay bluenoses. Nor was support forthcoming from advocates of laissez-faire airwaves, for Phyllis took no vocal position on any progressive cause—abortion, gun control, the environment, or the like—and in fact Gwen more than once rolled her eyes and moued when referring to a male interior decorator whose tastes were, “Gawd, over the top!”

  The Asian chef Lu’s generic stir fries had little appeal, being too exotic for provincial viewers, who could not find the ingredients, and too banal for those in big metropolitan areas where koba noodles, five-spice powder, and garam masala were long passé, and meatloaf, mac’n’cheese, and ’smores were in vogue. As for Ned, the literate giant, he was seen as being either gay, an Uncle Tom, or both, and in any case pompously phony.

  The time came when Pierce was obliged to report, “Phyllis, I’m afraid we’re being cancelled.”

  “What’s your next idea, Ellery?”

  “There’s one of your many advantages over me. This is hitting me hard, given the high hopes I had. I really thought we had a winner, didn’t you?”

  “In fact I did not.”

  “Then why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I saw how enthusiastic you were at the outset,” Phyllis replied. “Then, what do I know?”

  He took her warm face between his hands. After all these years her heating system still functioned perfectly. “Phyl,” he said, “you didn’t want to hurt my feelings. Are you really beginning to care for me?”

  “This is not the first time you’ve asked me that question or some variation on it, Ellery. Why is it so important? The answer cannot change what I am, or for that matter, what you are.”

  Unlike human beings, machines knew their own minds. Or did they? In any event, they were immune to either hope or disappointment.

  “I’m going to let you come up with the next idea,” he told her. “You did pretty well on your own.”

  “All in all, just so-so, Ellery. I got to the top but could not manage to stay there.”

  “Not many have been able to do that, and so far as I know, no other animatron.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Phyllis stated. “I made a thorough study of American movies in their golden era and proceeded accordingly. Greta Garbo left the Industry of her own volition, not because audiences turned against her.”

  “I just don’t know if Garbo was the right model for you, Phyl.”

  She looked keenly at him, immaculate eyebrows knitting, as he had designed them to do. “I am devoid of any musicality, as you well know. I have no sense of rhythm and can’t carry a tune. Nor, though I can run well enough and leap, can I dance for the life of me, else I might have used Betty Grable or Rita Hayworth as models.”

  “I’ll tell you, Phyllis,” Pierce said soberly, “I really don’t have the nerve to try to retool you at this late date. After my ups and downs, I lack the old confidence. What if I messed up and disabled you in some fashion? I’d never forgive myself. I think we’d better forget musical comedy as a vehicle.”

  “What’s left to try?”

  “How about a talk show? I know, there have been all kinds, at all hours of the day, with every type of host, from daytime sobsisters through evening loudmouths to late-night clowns, but you would be the only one ever to know at least as much about the subject in question as the guest, whoever the latter might be.”

  “Could you explain, Ellery? I have watched a lot of television, but have focused on the informational shows on the Learning, Discovery, and History channels, and of course those that show old movies.”

  “Basically, guests are interviewed about their current projects. During the day, these are predominantly folks with personal problems, who are brought together with experts who can pretend to solve such. Political types predominate in the evening, and show-biz celebrities on late night. Given your lack of a sense of humor, I think we can rule out the last-named, where interviews with entertainment personalities alternate with comedy routines.”

  “As you well know, I can laugh,” said Phyllis. “But I don’t do so unless told to. I can also understand why human beings laugh. In my observation, it’s when they perceive that a situation is incomplete but not totally incapable of being completed. Were the latter the case, sadness would be the ruling emotion.”

  “I have to think about that,” said Pierce. “You come up with challenging concepts, Phyl. They would be ideal for a prime-time evening program, with guests who debate about world crises, economic predicaments, unpunished crime, and religious scandal, serious subjects for a thoughtful audience of diametrically opposed zealots. A prior day’s homework in any subject will make you an expert who can hold her own with any authority.”

  “No question about that,” said Phyllis.

  “But I think you could also handle the earlier type of show, with its chara
cteristic display of emotion, real or simulated. True, you can’t produce tears, but even so …”

  “I’m an experienced actress. I can represent any emotion that is called for by the part I play.”

  “Then what do you think, Phyl: personal calamities or international crises?”

  “Let me watch both kinds of show, Ellery, so I am able to make an informed judgment.”

  “Ellery,” Phyllis said eight days later, after a week of intensive application to the television screen, “my conclusion is that I should be better received by the potential audience if I had a daytime show dealing with issues of concern to the immediate lives of lower-middle-class persons individually, rather than those that apply to political entities, societies, nations, and planets, and here are my reasons: First and foremost, I am seen as being female, and women are commonly considered by human beings of both sexes as being more sensitive to emotional matters than are males, as men are thought to tend toward the analytical. Though many exceptions to the norm appear when any phase of human performance is studied closely, it is practical to work with averages when the purpose is to attract the public.”

  “Point well taken,” said Pierce. “And you have more?”

  “Secondly,” Phyllis resumed, “while many women take part with confidence and authority in the evening discussions, great pains have been taken with their physical appearance—hair styles, jewelry, cosmetics, and attire. The same cannot be said about all the males, at least some of whom feel free to be unkempt, presumably because the audiences for these programs, persons of either sex, are relatively indifferent to the appearance of a man who expresses an opinion on an abstract matter, such as economic policy, that has no immediately measurable effect on a given individual.”

  “But you are as attractive as I could imagine,” Pierce pointed out.

  “Which can only distract from an issue at hand,” said Phyllis, “unless, like the typical daytime subjects, it pertains to sex, in which case I should think the presence of a sexually desirable hostess might be an enhancement.”

  “Well thought out, Phyllis.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Shoot.” He chuckled at her frown. “That’s an expression, having nothing to do with a gun.”

  “If you say so.” She nodded briskly. “My third reason is that I would be better received by the TV audience in the role of sympathizer than as know-it-all.”

  16

  Phyllis received some derision from the media, especially the late-night comics, but although her daily afternoon talk show, entitled Phyllis from the Heart, started slowly, by the end of a month and a half it claimed the lioness’s share of the available TV audience for its time slot. There was general agreement among those who make such assessments that she brought a new style to the role. Not that either sentimentality or tough love was unprecedented, but her peculiar combination of the two, intermixed with or perhaps punctuated by a sudden suggestion of violence, kept audiences, at home and in the studio, on the razor’s edge.

  For example, when a big-bellied driver of an interstate eighteen wheeler confessed to his wife that he regularly frequented truck-stop whores, Phyllis turned savagely on the woman.

  “Isn’t that how he first met you? And aren’t you still turning tricks when he’s on the road, you slut?”

  “I’ll be damn,” said the truck driver, in his CAT-cap and plaid shirt. “I oughta kick your ass, you tramp.”

  “You just tell me, honey,” Phyllis said to the wife. “If he touches you, I’ll come and tear off his face.”

  The exclusively female audience sprang to its feet as one, with a cheer like cannonfire.

  If a mother brought on her sullen teenaged son, whose chronic shoplifting supported his drug habit, Phyllis might well show apparent sympathy for the boy, telling the woman, “I’m going to send you home with a tape of this show, so you can study yourself and maybe see why any child of yours would want to stay permanently stoned.”

  But when the audience ended its clamor—pro and con, derisive hoots, enraged catcalls, gasps of uncertain empathy—Phyllis was likely to address the lad in a much sweeter tone. “Tony, despite all of your mother’s concern for your well-being and the tens of thousands of dollars spent by the taxpayers to give you an education, you seem to be totally worthless. You’ll probably spend most of your life in prison, being sodomized by the larger inmates, and unless you enjoy that sort of thing, you’ll hang yourself in your cell. That’s what is likely in store for you, but your coming here today to be publicly shamed means that at least you have an exhibitionistic vanity, which suggests that your instincts for survival are not quite as dead as the rest of your wretched self. So you still have some hope, however tiny, of making it if you get in one of the programs on the list you will be given backstage. And if your mother wants, we will follow your progress until, as is probable, you foul it up as usual.”

  In some quarters Phyllis was criticized for her approach, but the results were often positive. Tony, for example, was still doing all right, half a year afterward, as were several other adolescent sometime delinquents, members of criminal gangs, juvenile sex predators, arsonists; but after a catfight on Phyllis’s show, a sixteen-year-old named Kellianne tried to poison a rival for a place on the cheerleading squad, and both the victim’s parents and Kellianne’s sued the program. As did the formerly brutal gay-basher who as a result of his appearance on Phyllis’s show underwent a radical transformation and took a homosexual lover, owing to which liaison he allegedly became HIV-positive.

  Then too, Phyllis was the defendant in a lawsuit brought by a man who had stalked her for months before making his move in the studio parking lot, a few yards ahead of the bodyguards entertainment celebrities are obliged to maintain to ward off homicidal cranks, as she walked to the stretch limo inside which Pierce awaited her, cell phone at his ear as usual.

  “How dare you ignore my love letters?” the stalker cried, breaking through the security detail that restrained the crowd of autograph-seekers, brandishing a twelve-inch knife of the type that had been sheathed on the leopard-skin thong worn by Phyllis in her action films.

  Though it had been some time now since she had made such a movie, Phyllis had necessarily remained, without working out, in the same superb condition as when she had performed her own stunts. She caught the descending blade just above its keen edge and snapped it off the hilt while backhanding the attacker with sufficient force to knock out most of his front teeth.

  At Pierce’s direction, the publicity people managed to keep news of this incident out of the media. He believed the time was still not ripe for revealing Phyllis’s true identity, which such a demonstration of superhuman physical prowess might call into question. In the interests of this strategy, the madman’s lawyer was granted a generous settlement, and the nut went free no doubt to menace others, but hey, that was their lookout. Since becoming a show-biz macher, Pierce had acquired a cynicism quite foreign to the lonely applied-scientist he had been in his earlier life, before Phyllis had exceeded his most extravagant dreams.

  They were wealthy now, he and she, and growing richer through the packaging deals, commercial endorsements, website sales of tie-in merchandise, videos, action figures, coffee mugs, T-shirts, and the like, in all of which Pierce was prime mover, amazing himself by his accomplishment in the new métier.

  “Who would have ever suspected I could do well as a businessman?” he asked Phyllis once when they were alone, for he knew well enough never to have asked it of anyone else.

  “You can do anything you wish.”

  “I don’t think it’s wise to confuse our respective capabilities, Phyl. You’re the one with unlimited potential. I’m only human.”

  “By which you mean you will die?”

  “That’s not a real question. But aging, terminating in mortality, is not my only limitation.”

  “Well, there you have one of mine,” Phyllis said. “I cannot understand that statement.”

  For a
ll Phyllis’s remarkable talents, she was like a little child in assuming her begetter was omnipotent. But only with regard to Pierce was she naïve. Her series of self-help books was endorsed by many professionals as being compendia of principles and practices of tough but benevolent good sense. “Self-pity is a denial of self.” “Don’t do good. Always do better.” “If you debate whether giving is preferable to receiving, or vice versa, you are wasting your life.” “Decent manners should be irrelevant to personal tastes.” Such aphorisms came easily to Phyllis, who dictated her books at conversational speed to a voice-generated word processor that Pierce, keeping his hand in the technology arena, did not invent but improved considerably.

  On the commercial success of her first book, Phyllis agreed to furnish a monthly column to Herself, the leading women’s magazine, and these were collected periodically into paperback volumes that were displayed on supermarket checkout racks, near the sensation-mongering tabloids that for years had failed to find anything scandalous to allege about her, though surely they must have tried. Something about Phyllis, some obvious, seemingly congenital purity of character, along with her social reclusiveness, had kept her immune from hostile scrutiny. And thus far no disgruntled ex-employees had surfaced, for she had always insisted that Pierce be generous to those who worked for them, with high salaries, bonuses, and costly gifts—often against his objection—not owing to emotional motives that she could not have, but rather because it was rational to reward people consonant with the income from the business, which in Phyllis’s case was now enormous, so much so in fact that eventually her chief accountant was emboldened to embezzle a million and a half. On discovering this crime Pierce intended to send him to prison, but Phyllis said no, the money could be declared advance payment of his wages, which he would subsequently pay back by faithful service to those who had kept him a free man.