She remembers her first bus ride to Massachusetts. She was struck by the similarities in the landscape—the same vigorous green hills, same scoured-looking sky. Same sort of silver flashing river, bending deep at the Oxbow like a genuflecting knee. Northampton was another story: a beautiful little music box of a town. Brick apartments over storefronts, fire escapes zigzagged with batik. White women swooping around in great ethnic capes. There were pianos in the dormitory common areas, fireplaces in the bedrooms. In one, a girl Cel’s age was unpacking. Her shirt rolled up to reveal a complexly impressive midriff; the tiny whelk of a perfect navel. Next to her were two people who must be her parents—two entire parents, summoned from their lives for this occasion. Around them, the dusty-sweet smell of cardboard filling up the air.
“Hi, sweetheart,” said the mother to Cel. “Are you lost?”
Cel remembers her first day of Marxism class, when the girl who turned out to be Elspeth leaned over to her and said, “Hey.” The girl’s hair, in addition to being green, was very dirty. She smelled clean in the way of dirt; the utilitarian, no-nonsense part of a plant.
“Hey,” said the girl again. “Why did Karl Marx’s toilet play music every time he flushed?”
“I don’t know,” said Cel. “Why?”
“Because of the violins inherent in the cistern!”
Cel stared. The girl’s feet were muddy and be-Birkenstocked; her ankles ostentatiously hairy; her teeth, when she smiled, were perfectly, expensively straight. Whatever this girl’s idea was about herself, it was clear that someone, at some point, had had others.
“You know?” The girl was staring at Cel right back. “From The Communist Manifesto?”
“I don’t know,” said Cel, with a depraved panic. “That’s exactly why I’m taking this class.”
But miraculously, the girl was laughing.
“You’re funny,” she said. “You know that?”
Cel said she supposed she did, and Elspeth laughed again. And Cel caught the first glimpse of her next life, and the person who would be living it.
* * *
—
Back at the apartment, Cel is watching Mattie M again, somehow.
This week’s reruns are Best of Mattie M: Forbidden Passions: the five-hundred-pound woman and the dwarf, the eighty-year-old woman and the podiatrist, the pantsuited couples’ therapist who joined her married clients in a polyamorous arrangement. (“She’s good with conflict,” says the man.) The crowd always hates at least one of the lovers on Forbidden Passions—they hated the podiatrist, and they despised the dwarf’s pachydermal lover (who got jeers and exactly the kinds of questions you’d expect). Tonight’s episode is the goat bride—technically a Forbidden Passion, though they’ve also used it for Odd Couple Roommates, My Co-Worker Did What?!, and Believe It or Not!: Freaks Edition. Its versatility is part of what makes it a “Mattie M Classic”—which, according to Luke, means that it will play on a loop at all their funerals.
On the screen, Mattie waves at the crowd over the bouncy closing chords of the intro music. Cel is usually never home during Mattie M’s regular time slot, and something about watching it during the day makes her anxious—as though she should be there right now, seeing this from the studio.
“Thanks, guys!” says Mattie. “Welcome to the show!”
He sits, exposing argyle but—mercifully—no ankle.
“In today’s episode, we’ll be exploring the wacky, wild—and sometimes even woolly!—side of romance.” Mattie’s delivery is deadpan enough to be a little funny, though it’s hard to tell how he means it. Cel finds this ambiguity compounded through the screen; on TV, Mattie M almost feels like two shows at once—like one of those reversible images that some people see as faces and other people see as a vase.
“When we think of star-crossed lovers, we think of Romeo and Juliet, Pyramus and Thisbe—but man and goat?”
Pyramus and Thisbe? Luke must have hated that. The audience doesn’t laugh, of course. Cel can’t imagine who Mattie thinks he’s winking at with that one; intellectuals despise him as much as evangelicals. Cel has read countless leftish articles condemning the show: editorials excoriating its craven pandering to the lowest common denominator; point-counterpoints pondering whether it has created or merely exposed America’s basest cultural instincts; a twenty-thousand-word New Yorker piece casting it as the culmination of a civilizational erosion—under way for at least the twentieth century, and probably the entire millennium. Cel had read that one so many times she wound up memorizing the conclusion: “Having inherited the legacy of Western civilization, we have clung only to its tricks and technologies, and forgotten the animating force which created them. We find ourselves stranded in a socio-cultural tide pool at historic low ebb, with nothing to do but watch the waters retreat across the horizon—and The Mattie M Show, five nights a week in syndication.”
It’s all a little much, but Cel doesn’t really dispute the general thrust. The Mattie M Show is insipid and base, graceless and lewd, a sound and fury signifying nothing; she understands how you can watch it and think: The Renaissance was for this?
The phone rings and she jumps; for a vertiginous moment she has the sense it’s Mattie, somehow calling her through the television—but she answers and it’s only Luke, saying that it’s official: Mattie is booked on Lee and Lisa for Monday morning, congratulations!
“What?” says Cel. “How?”
“Well, Cel, he’ll go in a car to a studio—you remember the one we work in? With all the lights on the ceiling?”
“I mean—already?”
“And then a man in a suit will ask him some softball questions—‘softball’ being an idiomatic term, in this case—”
“Jesus, that was fast.”
“These are fast times we’re living in. Also? They had a cancellation. And also? Kliegerman wants you to prep Mattie.”
“What?”
“No one is more surprised than I am. Apparently the Kliegs thinks Mattie has gotten a little too hip to my tricks.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“You do what Mattie does,” says Luke. “You do what the fucking Muppets do. You read the cue cards.”
So this is what she gets for competence: yesterday’s outline, Cel sees, contains the seeds of her undoing. They’d made bulleted lists of talking points and preferred euphemisms; they’d drafted plausible rebuttals to anticipated accusations, as well as snappy rejoinders to anticipated rephrasings of same. They’d noted lines of argument that are discouraged, and those expressly forbidden—blaming guns, parenting, other media (accepts the premise). They’d collated notes, compiled over the course of Mattie’s previous non-Mattie appearances, on the stylistic tics and rhetorical maneuvers they’d prefer he not repeat. They’d collected reams of background research on Suzanne Bryanson. Cel was personally party to all this thoroughness, and now it has ensnared her. It is becoming increasingly clear to her that professionalism is a self-reinforcing trap, like pyramid schemes and drug addiction.
“I mean—you can read, can’t you, Cel?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ve functioned admirably well in that case.”
“Luke, I’ve barely ever talked to the guy. And aren’t you always telling me how this is all so hard?”
It certainly doesn’t look easy, trying to wrangle Mattie M ahead of a public appearance. Each category of instruction requires a slightly different mode of delivery. On the big points, they can usually be fairly straightforward; it’s the areas of medium importance where he’s likely to act out—disputing, or simply ignoring, their suggestions. Whether this is out of a desire to feel he’s participating in the process, or a childishly low tolerance for accepting advice, no one knows. The trick with this category is to impress instructions upon Mattie without ever articulating them directly. Then there are the “wish list” det
ails—specific phrasings that are preferred, but not crucial enough to warrant squandering any of Mattie’s finite cooperation; these must be imparted nearly subliminally, through frequent repetition. Cel knows all this because she’s watched Luke do it several times, and heard him explain it many more.
“Look, Cel,” says Luke. “Even you understand the overarching triage. The really essential points are just a matter of basic human communication—and literacy aside, we have satisfactorily established that you are at least minimally verbal.”
Oh yeah? thinks Cel, and says nothing.
“And who knows, you know? Maybe you’ll scramble his radar.”
“Scramble his radar? I’ll be lucky if he doesn’t call security. He doesn’t even know who I am.”
“Of course he does. He made me hire you, remember?”
Luke says this all the time. Cel has no idea whether it is true, though she knows better than to let Luke know she doesn’t know.
“I’ve been trying ever since to figure out why, and all I can come up with is that you struck him as some kind of idiot savant. We’re all still waiting for the savant part to kick in—but in the meantime, it’s just possible the idiot part can be useful.”
“This is inspiring stuff, Luke, truly. Have you considered motivational speaking?”
“Because Mattie’s resistant to messages in code. But the medium is the message, and if you’re the medium, maybe he thinks there is no message. Because incompetence seems guileless, right?”
So now her incompetence is the reason she must do more work. This is something like karma, or maybe video games? Cel’s knowledge of both is limited.
“So who knows?” says Luke. He exhales sharply. “And also, at this point? What the hell.”
EIGHT
semi
1971
The Hearings came in January.
I arrived at the courthouse early. I’d told myself I’d have to hunt for Matthew—though in fact I always spotted him right away, no matter where we were. Today he was standing in the westernmost doorway of the courthouse, wearing an ill-advised beige suit, talking to a man I’d never seen before. This man had blond hair and a princely demeanor; he turned out later to be the dauphin of some great packaging fortune. I hated him immediately.
Brookie was at the courthouse, too, with the GLF. He was standing right outside the doorway, dressed as Little Orphan Annie.
“Well, how lovely to see you again,” he said to Matthew, and curtsied. I was aware of wishing to hurry Matthew past this; equally aware of being unable to publicly direct, or acknowledge, him at all. My understanding of this feeling was settling from quiet thrill into quiet misery; the shock of it was gone, and I’d be left forever with whatever came next.
I could barely hear what Matthew Miller said during the testimony, though I do believe—and the public record attests—that it was, more or less, what we’d drafted.
Afterward, he found me in the hallway.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“Congratulations to you!” I said, giving an awkward little salute. I expected him to turn away again—he was usually emphatically Irish in his exits—but instead he stayed there, looking at me, even as the clerks and reporters and secretaries and witnesses swept in and out of doors.
“We should celebrate,” he said, or maybe I only thought he said. I could hear the squeak of snowy shoes, the steam of overly aggressive radiators. Why couldn’t I hear anything else? On the window high above us, frost pressed into the glass like the palm of a hand.
“What?” I said.
“I’m saying we should celebrate.” This time, I heard him, even though he seemed to have lowered his voice. “I’m saying: come over for a drink?”
* * *
—
His apartment was dim, dark, tragic-bachelor—oh, who knows: it was very hard to pay attention. Across the street, the glowing eyes of some sort of creature stared out from a neon bar sign.
“I think it’s supposed to be a cat,” he said when he saw me looking.
I do remember books: The Other America, The Death and Life of Great American Cities—along with some Jefferson, Debs, Trotsky, Fromm. I asked him where was Freud, and he said he despised Freud, and I said what would Freud say about that? And unbelievably, he laughed.
I was aware that there was no visible bed—he turned out to have a Murphy folded up into the wall. In the corner, a telex crouched precariously on a file cabinet.
“Nice escritoire,” I said, though luckily Matthew did not hear me; he’d retreated to the kitchen. I followed him. On the counter, a desiccated meat loaf was escaping from its foil.
“Don’t touch that,” he said, emerging from the refrigerator and handing me a beer. “It came out of a vending machine.”
“Well, now I’ve seen it all.” My mouth was dry.
“Are you shocked?” His eyes were full of laughter. “I thought there was nothing new under the sun.”
I wasn’t sure if he was making fun of me or not.
“Maybe only this,” I said.
“What would the formidable Lady Sinclair have to say about that?”
He meant my grandmother. He remembered everything about everybody, I reminded myself.
“I’m sure she’d be speechless,” I said.
“To her,” he said, clinking my glass.
“To her.”
We drank.
“Do you think you’ll ever see her again?” said Matthew after a moment. I was sure I’d never told him I hadn’t.
“I don’t know,” I said, which was the truth. I did not long for some loving, tearful reunion. Still, there was a formal grace in the acknowledgment of a family: something like the record of your birth in the town register, the correct spelling of the name on your gravestone. I’d tried explaining this to Brookie once, and he’d stared at me, agog.
“You know what happens to fags whose names get written down?” he said.
And another time: “So an old lady doesn’t like her homo grandkid? This is the oldest story in the book! I’ve heard this one a million times!”
“Not from me,” I told him.
“You writers never understand that just because you’re telling something for the first time doesn’t mean we’re hearing it for the first time.”
A sentiment my grandmother would have surely appreciated.
Matthew Miller seemed to be listening very intently, even though I was not speaking. I blushed and shook myself.
“Maybe I’d go back.” I took a sip of beer, though I hated beer and came to learn that Matthew did, as well: he kept it around for when politicos stopped by. “For a long time I thought I would go back, if I could ever know what I was retrieving.”
“Whether it’d be worth it, you mean.”
“Or what ‘it’ even is.” For a long time, I’d wanted to know what my return would mean—I wanted to understand its shape, shift its slight weight in my hands. Over the years, I’d watched its hypothetical mass grow smaller, until I was almost sure I had my answer—if I didn’t know the precise dimensions, I knew what they rounded down to. “I was waiting to understand that, I think, for a while.”
“And now?” said Matthew.
“I think now I’m just waiting not to be waiting anymore.” But then there was always that desire to know something permanently: orthogonal rays of curiosity angling to a vanishing point. Because when could we say with certainty that what had not yet happened never would? “Obviously, I should not care.”
“But of course you do,” said Matthew. “Because nothing is ever that simple.”
Out the window, a girl in a green plaid skirt stepped daintily over a pile of trash.
“My grandmother had this friend,” I found myself saying abruptly. “Confirmed bachelor, you know. He’d come over wearing Patek Philippe ties and
make enormous vats of martinis and show us slides of his travels in Europe. I was riveted. Well, you can imagine.”
Could he?
“In retrospect, I’m almost sure she knew about him.” I once saw them talking intently in the kitchen, her hand pressed sisterishly to his wrist. Surely she had known, and surely he had not told her—and surely this was why she’d loved him, in her way. This went without saying. It all—always—went without saying. “On some level, I think she was a pretty hard woman to faze.”
“Yet you managed it.”
It seemed Matthew had gotten a little closer, somehow. I shook my head.
“Her objection to me wasn’t moral so much as aesthetic,” I said. “What she really couldn’t bear was histrionics. Theater people.” As she’d said meaningfully and more than once. “There was a whole lot of Brideshead-type stuff at St. Paul’s—much clutching of hands, reciting of poetry in the woods. You know.”
Did he? He was undeniably much closer. I could see the silver hairs in his beard, the fingerprint-sized birthmark on his neck. The tiny scar slicing out from the edge of his left eye. It deepened, which is how I knew he was smiling: I could not bring myself to look at his mouth.
“She admired people who revealed nothing,” I said. “She would have liked you, probably.”
“Why is that?”
His eyes had a nervy alertness that made me feel like I’d been shocked every time I met them. Now, my courage failed me. My hands were trembling; I squeezed them into fists.
“Res ipsa loquitur, was another thing she often said.”
His hand was on my hand; my hand was somehow unfurling. I stared at the divot in his wrist, the gap between bone and everything else.
“Why do you care, anyway?” Now my voice was trembling, too. “She isn’t even registered in New York.”
We were turning to each other, somehow, finally.
“I care,” he said. And in that moment, for a moment, it seemed certain that he did.
* * *
The Spectators Page 11