The Spectators

by Jennifer Dubois

  “The Mattie M Show is callous and corrosive,” she is saying. “It’s demeaning to women—”

  “Co-opting the enemy’s catchphrase!” says Luke. “Smart.”

  “—the chair-throwing, and the hair-pulling, and the fights, as I’ve mentioned—”

  “But the fights aren’t real,” says Pete, perking up. “Are they?”

  “You know, I don’t know, Pete.” Another thing you don’t see every day: on-air admissions of agnosticism. “But I do know this. If we can’t tell whether the fights are real, then the kids watching can’t, either. And that’s the point.”

  Cel had been ready to disdain whatever expression of simple-person horse sense Suzanne Bryanson was about to say here—I may not know much, Pete, but I do know this one thing that renders all other knowledge moot!—but instead, she finds herself agreeing. Are the fights real? One might point out that the chairs are light as coat hangers, that nobody is ever really hurt. But this isn’t just the wrong rebuttal, it’s also the wrong critique: the real point is sneaking around in the background, unnoticed.

  “I think some people would say that fighting—violence—is a part of life,” says Pete. “So you can’t really blame movies or TV for depicting it.”

  “Violence exists in the world, of course,” says Suzanne Bryanson. “I would never accuse Mattie M of inventing that—”

  “Unless there’s a lot we don’t know about him!” says Pete punchily.

  “Has he forgotten what show he’s on right now?” says Cel.

  “I think he’s forgotten he’s on TV right now.”

  “—but we do get to decide how to regard that violence,” says Suzanne Bryanson. “And every time we watch Mattie M, we are choosing to regard it as entertainment.”

  “But Mattie M didn’t invent that either, did he? I mean, take boxing, take pro wrestling. Look at monster truck rallies. Look at the NFL! Isn’t a fascination with this stuff just a part of human nature? Why single out Mattie M?”

  “To some extent, yes, it must be a part of human nature,” says Suzanne Bryanson: Cel cannot believe Pete keeps letting her pick between the questions. “Though it certainly isn’t my idea of a good time.”

  Pete raises his eyebrows like he’s about to ask her what is.

  “Could he be flirting with her?” says Cel.

  “They can’t be running that short.”

  “But you’re right, Pete, that violence as spectacle has probably been with us as long as violence itself. The Romans who fed the Christians to the lions didn’t invent it, and neither did the people who went to watch, and neither did Mattie M. This is something atavistic.”

  Atavistic. Cel shivers, unreasonably. But this is something she has felt while watching Mattie M herself: a sense of witnessing something that—though constrained by legal documents, obscured by Mature Audience warnings, complicated by self-ironizing, and beamed out to an audience larger than the total population of ancient Europe—is, in fact, very old. Or maybe beyond time entirely: some echo of the first thing, some presentiment of the last. She feels this even though yes, of course, the fights are staged. That seems a part of it, somehow.

  “So yes, there is brutality in our nature,” Suzanne Bryanson is saying. “But this is why we have civilization. To restrain those impulses. To animate our positive potential.”

  There’s no way she isn’t losing people with this stuff. Cel is fairly sure viewers register lamentations about the modern age as a sort of cultural white noise. And it’s possible this conversation has veered so far into the weeds that people at home won’t notice they are, in fact, hearing something new—that Suzanne Bryanson is linking Mattie to something far darker than usual, something that isn’t about modernity at all.

  “You know, Pete, pundits like to talk a lot about the ‘culture wars,’ ” says Suzanne Bryanson. “But we rarely step back and ask: What is culture? Is it some unstoppable force outside of us? Or is it something we all create, bit by bit, together?”

  “Is she a fucking sociologist?” says Luke. “Did the electric fences go out up at Columbia?”

  “She’s pretentious enough,” says Cel. Although this would be too good to be true. Academics are not relevant, which is why they are never on TV, which is why this woman probably is not one, QED.

  “Well, you’d know,” says Luke.

  “Oh, not this.”

  “As a high WASP princess of the Seven Sisters.”

  “Luke, I have told you repeatedly I am French.”

  “You and Marie Antoinette! Don’t you know there’s a whole army of hoi polloi out there, armed to the teeth with pitchforks? The country at this point is mostly just mole people and Mattie M guests and immigrants. Landed elites like you and Suzie Q here need to stick together!”

  “Oh, Christ, Luke. Tell me again about inventing written language by candlelight?”

  Whatever: Cel doesn’t care. Maybe Luke will do them both a favor and actually fire her for once. She closes her eyes.

  “Shh.”

  Instead of firing her, Luke is going to—shush her? Cel opens her eyes.

  “Some people’s parents shell out twenty thousand dollars a year to hear this kind of bullshit, and here we’re getting it for free.” Luke is leaned in toward the television. So this, then, is what is called for: okay. She blinks. “These are the kinds of opportunities you’ve got to take, Cel, if you ever hope to achieve model minority status.”

  “—and anyway,” Suzanne Bryanson is saying. “Everyone loves to speculate about whether the fights are ‘real,’ without asking ourselves what this ambiguity means. Whether or not the fights are real, the show goes to some lengths to present them as such—and everyone understands that’s because we want them to be.”

  They must be running over by now, but Pete makes no move to wrap up: Cel has the sense that he’s become so absorbed in the speech that he’s lost track of the segment. So they’re up against an orator with the power to stop time on live TV: fantastic.

  “So what is undeniably real is the moral damage they inflict on our children, and on us, every single day. Regardless of what is happening in Mattie M’s studio, this is what is happening in the world. Does that answer your question, Pete?”

  Luke moves his hand in a short little air-punch that seems nearly celebratory. His overall mood seems to have returned to status quo ante. Cel should have been a diplomat! She turns off the TV.

  “Well.” Cel feels a little stunned, as though she’s just witnessed an abrupt medical event—birth in a taxicab, heart attack on an airplane, emergency tracheotomy at a Denny’s. Luke takes off his glasses and pulls a handkerchief from his pocket. He rubs his eyes, then his glasses, then his eyes again, and Cel begins to worry he means this as a kind of drumroll.

  “I don’t understand those,” says Cel, waving at the handkerchief. She doesn’t know what she’s saying: Luke does not tolerate inanities from anyone. From Cel, he barely tolerates nonessential communication.

  “The cloth thing, I mean.” She feels skittish and non-sequiturish. “I get the glasses.”

  Luke manages an expression that is somehow unsurprised and also murderous; he holds it for a moment without looking at her. Then he puts his glasses back on.

  “You know what this means, right?” He is using only about 60 percent of his capacity for tonal contempt.

  Cel says nothing.

  Luke says nothing.

  The suspense is hideous; she folds.

  “What does it mean?” she says. “Does it mean you’re going to tell me what it means?”

  “Well—and I’m really very sorry to say this—” He almost does sound sorry: Cel didn’t know he had that one up his sleeve. He sighs, pretending to steady himself. “What it means, Cel, is that, unfortunately? You are going to have to start doing your job.”

  FOUR

  s
emi

  1969–1970

  The second time I met Matthew Miller, I was alone.

  The comic Dougie Clay was making a triumphant return to the Village after his imprisonment on obscenity charges. I tried to get the boys to go with me.

  “I don’t even know who that is,” said Paulie.

  “Yes, you do,” said Brookie. “He’s that comic? The one who’s always sweating?”

  “That could be any comic.”

  “He’s got that filthy joke that goes—wait, how does it go? It’s got LBJ and Jackie and the second shooter—”

  “Come along and find out,” I said.

  “I don’t like the guy,” said Brookie. “For one thing, he dresses too loud.”

  He fluffed his marabou boa at us.

  “Anyway, it’s freezing out,” said Paulie.

  Brookie looked contemplative. “I’m pretty sure the punch line is ‘grassy hole.’ ”

  Stephen was still gone, his bike hanging forlornly from the ceiling. And so I found myself walking to the club alone. Around me, mist bloomed through the sodium lamps; red stoplights turned the snowflakes into rose petals. Abandoned Christmas trees slumped against the stoops like drunks. I dodged a mountain of trash—Chock Full o’Nuts cups and Sabrett wrappers and discarded copies of the Daily News, a single slick condom glinting atop it all like a diadem. It seemed there was more garbage around these days, that it was beginning to amass worrisomely. But then I thought of the piles of trash beneath Pompeii: nothing new under the sun.

  “You know who said that first?” my grandmother asked me once.

  “The Bible,” I replied automatically.

  “The Vedas,” she said. “But then the Bible said it, too, of course.”

  By the time I got to the club, an experimental poet was on; I’d missed the performance artist with the pigeon and guitar. I maneuvered my way inside, trying to find an acceptable equidistance between the stage and freezing-cold doorway. Jerry-rigged lights cast polychrome lozenges on the floor; I smelled cigarette smoke and Canoe aftershave and the jubilantly human odor of the politically underwashed. And then, somehow, Matthew Miller was beside me.

  He was already unmistakable—black hair, mild face, witchily green eyes. He had skin so pale it’d make you worry for the health of a national candidate; he was made to appear tanner somehow later, for the cameras. I could not understand, as a physical matter, how he’d gotten so close. It was impossible that he’d been standing there all along; equally impossible that he’d purposefully approached. I was pondering these dueling impossibilities when he looked at me, and caught me looking.

  “Excuse me.” I looked away, and back, and found him still staring. His expression was tired, and not discernibly appraising.

  I said apologetically, “It’s just—we’ve met before.”

  His tongue bulged below the line of his lip—this, I later learned, was his single tell: for skepticism. His jaw, I noticed, was a little crooked.

  “I don’t think so,” he said finally.

  “Okay,” I said. I could tell he thought I was going to insist. “My mistake, then.”

  There was a flash of tension just above his left eye: an effort not to raise a brow.

  “Hey,” I said, waving my hands in an airy, expansive little motion. I was dimly aware of having gone off a script I hadn’t even known existed. “You say we didn’t meet. Fine, okay. I make a point not to tell anyone their own story.”

  He looked at me again—without judgment, or even obvious interest, but with, just possibly, a bit more intensity—and flicked his eyes to the stage. “You’re a performer?”

  “Why? You scouting for talent?” I struck a pose, then dropped it, and his expression withdrew. I could feel the exertion of a psychic talus within him: not like a drawbridge pulling up or a helmet slamming shut—more like whatever force of physics sends you sliding backwards before you even realize you’re moving.

  “Well, you’re outta luck,” I muttered miserably. “I’m not a performer.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said.

  “You’re a performer,” I told him. “You’re a lawyer.”

  “Yes, right,” he said. “Clowns and circus animals, all of us.”

  I was pleased to have offered some concrete evidence that we had met before, but he seemed to have somehow already conceded that point.

  “You misunderstand me.” I sounded like an aristocrat impertinently addressed by a subordinate—a tone I was almost certainly copying from Grandmother. From her I’d inherited all manner of detritus: an abhorrence of solecisms (“It’s ‘octopodes,’ ” she’d say severely. “ ‘Octopi’ is pedantic”); a love of metaphorically inflected facts (of early Israeli Zionists: “They wanted to cultivate the original strain of wild wheat from biblical times—they thought it could sustain two nations. And that, exactly that, is where idealism will get you.”). But then, I’d also inherited her cheekbones, and her Dunhill cigarette holder, and—at the price of much mutual misery—her manners, when I wanted them.

  “I don’t mean performers in the sense of pratfalls and trapdoors and such.” I took a long, regal puff of my cigarette. “I suppose I mean performers as in performance artists.”

  “I’m not sure I appreciate the distinction.”

  “Performance art is an interrogation of the act of performance.” I shrugged, exhaling over my shoulder. “Convincing you is beside the point.”

  “How is that different from bad acting?”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

  “You sound like you’ve studied the field some.”

  I turned my head to the side. “I was a theater major.”

  “Ah. Bryn Mawr?”

  “Oh. So you’re a wit.” On the stage, an elderly man was drumming on the side of a saw.

  “So what are you, then?” he said. “If you’re not a performer.”

  “I’m a playwright.” A lie I’d been telling for years that now, finally, was true.

  “I keep hearing the theater is dead.”

  “People always say everything is dead,” I said. “But they usually aren’t. I have a show up at the Roundhouse right now, actually.”

  Six weekend nights so far before a dozen restless audience members, each dozen more restless than the last. I was avoiding it tonight, in fact, along with the rest of New York City.

  “Congratulations,” said Matthew. “I’ll have to come see it.”

  “Oh, I doubt it can compare to this,” I said. “I hear the opening act abuses the audience.”

  “I think he’s already started.” Matthew Miller looked at his watch. “Did you know that in Roman times they actually killed the gladiators along with the shows?”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’ll be any of that tonight,” I said. “The avant-garde isn’t quite that avant, even in the Village. I hope that isn’t why you came all the way from, what—Ossining?”

  I didn’t know yet that he lived around the corner.

  He smiled a little. “It isn’t.”

  “Well, it’s brave of you, all the same,” I said. “One hears scandalous rumors about MacDougal Street. The most lurid characters lurking there, apparently. Mothers afraid to take their children to the park, and all that.”

  “Terrible.”

  “Though in a way, isn’t the whole world their park?”

  I could tell he thought this was funny, even though he didn’t laugh.

  “So why are you here?” I said, though I knew already. I hoped I didn’t sound too interested.

  “I’m here in a professional capacity, believe it or not.” Matthew Miller eyed the stage, where a woman with a balalaika was reading passages from the DSM. She’d taken off her shirt at some point; neither of us, it seemed, had noticed. “I represent Dougie Clay.”

  “That c
omic?” I said. “I thought he was in jail.”

  “He’s out on furlough.”

  “Isn’t he the one who made that awful joke about Jackie?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But that isn’t really what they’re after.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “No?”

  He raised his eyebrows right back at me. “You think things are ever actually about litigating prudishness?” he said. “Now I know you’re too young.”

  “Well, what are they after, then?” I said. Which was better than asking, Too young for what, for what, for what?

  “Pick up a paper, maybe.” Matthew Miller rolled his eyes, then lowered them. “You’re too gorgeous to be uninformed.”

  I felt a bolt then—a rheostatic fluttering so intense it seemed it had to have been audible—and some part of me, I am sure, fell right over. Yet out beyond the electrical storm, another version of me was staying upright, and placing a haughty hand on hip, and leaning against a stanchion, and saying, “Well, it sounds like a thankless job.”

  I needed a cigarette. As if sensing this, Matthew Miller tapped two out of his pack.

  “It isn’t thankless, exactly,” he said. “But I hope I’m not going to be doing it for much longer.”

  “Retirement already? Now I know you’re too old.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not ready to give up the ghost quite yet.”

  “You just have other ambitions.”

  I leaned in toward him for a light.

  He cocked his head. “You might say that.”

  “What comes after lawyer?” The cigarette was making me feel flushed and a little manic; I had to force myself to pause between sentences. “Judge in powdered wig?”

  “No.”

  “Jumping straight to executioner, then?”