“I don’t know,” says Cel. It’s strange she’s never wondered.
“He must have oodles of money,” says Nikki contemplatively. “Just piles.”
“I know he gives some of it away.” Cel should have said this part up front, probably.
“Oh yeah?” says Scott. “FCC bribes or—?”
“Charity, believe it or not. He gives a lot to AIDS.” Cel gnaws at her lip. “He’s kind of a progressive, actually. Or he was, anyway.”
“And I thought Clinton was damaging the party’s image,” says Scott. “I mean, Troopergate, The Mattie M Show—who knew the apocalypse would be such a circus?”
He taps Cel’s glass and raises an eyebrow.
“Better not,” says Cel.
“Mattie’s on Lee and Lisa tomorrow,” says Nikki. “Cel has to chaperone.”
“Yikes.” Scott leans forward again, and Cel smells something dimly oceanic—she pictures a vast, empty apartment, with a cold glittering skyline outside a picture window, though she doesn’t know whether this is a genuine thought or something imported from cologne advertising. “I guess they’ll probably run with this whole fan-shooter thing, huh?”
“I guess they’ll probably try,” says Cel.
“It’s a pretty cheap shot, if you ask me.” Although she hadn’t. “But I see why people are making the connection.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“I just mean, it sort of seems of a piece with the fighting, the wife-beating—”
“The wives—the women—they don’t fight,” says Cel. “They don’t get hit, I mean.”
Scott is giving her exactly the look she deserves for this.
“Okay, so.” Scott pauses, then adopts an avuncular, Brokawesque voice. “How do you respond to concerns that The Mattie M Show is contributing to a coarsening of the culture? What do you say to parents who are concerned about its influence on their children?”
Cel takes a sip of her melted ice. “First of all, Scott, let me just say that The Mattie M Show is pure entertainment.” She has put on her own fake voice—her Job Voice, Elspeth calls it, though Cel thinks of it as Please Let Me Explain. Its tone is one of confidence tinged with diffuse exasperation; it conveys a sense of: I know this, and you know this, but certain exigencies demand we pretend we don’t know this, and so we both must try to be patient—though it is true that we are, all of us, very busy people.
“And The Mattie M Show is entertaining, which is why millions of Americans tune in each day to watch.” Cel knows this wording so well that her inflection becomes a little singsongy, like a child reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “It isn’t a PBS documentary, but not everyone wants to watch one—and if you do, you can certainly change the channel. By the same token, The Mattie M Show is not for children, as its Viewer Discretion warning indicates. I would remind concerned parents that, the last time I checked, all televisions come with an off switch.”
Nikki golf-claps, as per usual.
Cel leans her head to the side, squeezing the rest of her lime into her empty glass. “Do I sound convincing?”
“Were you trying to?” says Scott.
“I don’t know!” Cel laughs, which surprises her. “Imagine Mattie saying it.”
Scott looks, for a moment, as though he is actually trying to do this. “You know what’s weird?” he says. “The guy’s all over, but I can barely remember what his voice sounds like.”
“Yeah,” says Cel. “He sort of has one of those voices. What do you think, anyhow?”
Scott blinks. “You mean—in general?”
“Do you think the show is totally reprehensible, or what? Seriously. You can be honest.” This happens sometimes—these hapless opinion polls of alarmed strangers. You could call it rogue market research—which is what Cel will call it, if anyone asks why she’s asking, though luckily no one ever does.
“I just mean—” Cel takes a breath and wishes for the trillionth time she knew a way to show when she was actually serious. Sincerity should be something you could externally indicate, like a turn signal. “The show—it’s exploitive, right? But so are most things. So do you think it’s, like—like, unconscionably exploitive? Is it unforgivable, is what I’m saying. No, scratch that, of course it’s unforgivable—what I mean is: is it beyond the pale of other unforgivable things?”
Scott looks amazed.
“You’ll have to excuse her,” says Nikki. “She was an only child.”
“Well,” says Cel. “Sort of.”
Nikki gives Scott a look like: Case in point.
“What does that mean?” says Scott. “You sort of had siblings?”
“Technically, I mean, no,” says Cel, now peevish. Sort of is perhaps not the best answer to give to a yes-or-no question, but it’s not the worst answer, either; worse would have been to try to explain what she actually meant.
“So what’s the verdict?” Cel can feel Nikki’s disapproval boring into her back. “Are Mattie M’s sins mortal or venial?”
Scott opens his mouth, then closes it again. “I guess I’m wondering why you’re asking. You realize I’m not exactly a regular viewer?”
“I gathered, yeah, but that’s not the point. I’m interested in what people think, in general. And you seem like you’d have an opinion.”
“I’ve got plenty.” Without asking, Scott pours half of his remaining drink into Cel’s empty glass. “On this, I guess what I think is that this whole thing has been going on for a really, really long time.”
“When you say ‘thing,’ you mean—?”
“I mean all of it. Exploitation, sure, and callousness, yes. But also the sense that something uniquely apocalyptic is occurring. I mean, that’s never not going on.”
Cel likes that he’s willing to assert something without assuming she agrees with him: with most people, it’s one or the other.
“Maybe that can be a new ad campaign,” says Nikki. “ ‘Watching Mattie M: It’s Not the End of the World.’ ”
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” says Scott. “But if I had to talk about it on television—which, thank God, I don’t—”
“Are you kidding?” says Cel. “Can we hire you? I’ll have them fax over the contract tomorrow!”
“But if I did, you know—that’s what I’d say. This new thing is the death of us? That is a very old complaint. It’s probably the first complaint. Other things have changed, of course. The gadgetry’s changed.” Cel knows where this is going; she feels senselessly deflated. “Teenagers with semiautomatic weapons, that’s new. God, what a face! I know, I know—you can’t talk about that on television.”
“Forty-one percent of our viewers own firearms,” Cel says sadly.
“How is that possible?” says Nikki. “I don’t think I know anyone who’s ever even touched a gun.”
She does, in fact: Hal had one that lived year-round in the shed. Cel had mentioned this once at a party at Smith and learned it was not a thing to discuss at college. It was certainly not a thing to discuss in a bar in lower Manhattan. And yet for a teetering moment, she feels this disclosure on the very tip of her tongue.
Instead, she says, “Are you sure?”
A shadow crosses Nikki’s face before she laughs. “Woman of mystery,” she says. “Like I said.”
“Cheers to that,” says Scott to Cel, and clinks his glass against her own.
* * *
—
Because Cel absolutely must sleep, of course she cannot.
She’d had the most outrageous insomnia her first week in New York. Her second week, she began going to the Comedy Cellar—always alone, a fact that still feels like a secret even though she doesn’t know who she’s keeping it from. Sometimes Nikki thinks she’s with men, and sometimes Cel allows this. Lately she’s been going more often. But tonight it’s too late for the Comedy Cellar,
and Cel is on her own.
She lies awake, thinking of all the ill-advised things she’s said to Mattie, the many more she almost said to Scott. “You sort of had siblings?” he’d asked—and for a moment, she’d nearly told him how she and Ruth had torn through the hills, through the woods, through the stream. How she cannot remember ever being lonely.
“What on earth are you two doing?” said Hal when he’d come upon them once, casting his shadow over their stream.
We’re smelling the water, they told him.
“I see.” His voice full of its characteristic weariness. Hal never seemed to finish working in the summers, only taking breaks to drink cans of root beer, to flip through his books on World War II (“Why?” went Cel’s standard comment later. “He already knows how it ends.”).
“Does water even have a smell?” Hal had sawdust in his hair, as per usual, and he smelled sharply sweaty.
“Yes!” they shrieked, and he looked at them like they were both crazy—which maybe (Cel thought giddily, frantically) they both were. Because she could smell the water: it was complicated and loamy and much more assertive than you’d think.
Afterward they’d run inside, giggling, to play something on their ruined old piano. Once, a million years ago, Ruth had taken lessons. The piano as Cel knew it produced notes only tenuously tethered to their moorings; each key contained an echoey, multidimensional sound—a hint of a chord within a pitch, like a voice gone hoarse. Even Hal agreed there was no point in trying to sell it. Ruth taught Cel to play “Elfin Dance,” their piano conjuring elves that were strange and wise and unpredictable in ways that were not always benign: figures worthy of respect, as well as caution.
Cel had almost wanted to explain that to Scott, too.
The last time she’d tried explaining anything to anyone was at the Smith College Counseling Center. Her therapist nodded, sweet-faced, while Cel tried to describe the moments of pure magic: Ruth sitting on the white-and-yellow checkered dresser, next to the curtains with the parrots, telling sagas of their tragic heroism. The airy, gray morning when the wind made Cel feel somehow close to the sea, and she crept downstairs to find Ruth staring at their Christmas cactus.
“It’s been growing since 1930,” she said, blinking at Cel through her tortoiseshell glasses. “Isn’t that astonishing?”
And wasn’t it?
Or the treasures Cel was forever finding in the stream—a paperclip bent into a heart; a little ceramic fish, bright indigo against the mud; an unfathomably shiny penny, glowing like a tiny copper moon, that never looked the same once Cel pulled it from the water. For many years Cel took these as coincidence: Ruth’s denials were disarmingly convincing. And perhaps this was because they were true—perhaps it was not Ruth who put things in the stream, or anyway not quite.
“It must be terribly hard to think of her as a bad mother,” the counselor had said. “So maybe it’s easier not to think of her as your mother at all.”
You don’t have to believe me, Cel had wanted to say, but nevertheless it is true: it was a supernatural childhood, but not all of its sorcery was dark. Ruth was like the elves made by that teetering piano: wild and singular and nothing like what you saw in the storybooks—an analysis the therapist might have encouraged if Cel had ever gone back for a second appointment.
Because she hadn’t, Cel had never told the therapist about the time she’d finally heard “Elfin Dance” played correctly—by a chubby child in a yellow-brick community theater building in Northampton. She’d never told the therapist, or anyone, how disoriented she’d been by the elves’ cutesiness, how (momentarily!) tempted she had been to pinch the chubby child playing it. And yet she’d almost said all this to Scott, at the bar, for no reason. It seemed only a kind of luck that she had not: Nikki should count her blessings.
Cel begins to drift off twenty minutes before her wake-up call. As she does it occurs to her that Scott already knows where she was on the day of the shooting, so she’ll never be able to tell him she was somewhere else.
TWELVE
semi
1977–1978
When did Matthew’s talk become campaigning? That assumes it ever was not. But sometime in the winter of ’76, it seems, there was a shift to broader, more ambitious themes. He began to speak of a revamped liberalism—rhetorically syncretic, ideologically modern, merging the humane instincts of the Old Left with the idealism of the new. All this interested me about as much as Brookie’s Marxism.
But alongside the abstractions, unnerving specifics were emerging. Matthew seemed abruptly alert to the political frailties of Ed Koch. He respected Koch’s background as a tenant lawyer—he always made a point of saying so, even before his opinions had calcified into stump speech. But Koch didn’t understand real poverty, he said, and his policy on integration was “magical thinking.” Accordingly, Matthew believed him vulnerable on race. Matthew, it turned out, had his own ideas about how best to negotiate the rivalry between the Harlem and Brooklyn black leadership—this is the revelation that made me roll over, one night in the spring of ’77, and say, “Don’t tell me you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking.”
Beneath the sheets our legs were interdigitated, our pulses were still racing.
He said: “There’s no law against thinking.”
“There are laws against a few things I know you don’t just think about.”
“Not in the state of New York,” he said.
“Oh, you should be all set then. Just tell voters your sexual perversions do not run afoul of current law, and that you know because not only are you a homo, you are also a lawyer.”
“What voters?”
“Exactly.”
I could not believe he was serious. There were whispers about him already—I knew because he’d told me—and during his run for State Assembly, someone had distributed a smattering of fliers with the phrase “Vote for Barry, Not the Fairy.” The Barry campaign denied involvement, and at any rate, they’d lost. But it was obvious that, in this regard, Matthew had already been extremely lucky; the idea of him trying to get away with anything more than he already had seemed out of the question—and running for mayor, even only in the primary, would involve getting away with a whole lot more than that. He was too much of a realist not to understand this.
“The conventional political logic of anarchic times—” he was saying.
“Oh, Christ.”
“—prophesies conservatism among the populace.”
“Are you—is that Edmund fucking Burke?”
“Never mind.”
“No, I was seriously wondering.”
He was silent.
“I’m listening,” I said, after a moment.
“I’m thinking that that thinking is wrong.” He’d turned his back to me by then, disentangled his leg from my own. “Revolutions begin with tearing things down, right? And historically, most never get farther than that.”
“Due to the mass beheadings, and all.”
“Right. The beheadings, and the crucifixions, and the people being made to wear red-hot iron crowns, as in the Slovenian Peasant Revolt.”
I didn’t know where he got this stuff.
“Throughout history, people have taken the most outrageous risks just for the chance of tearing things down,” he was saying. “And here we are.” He gestured vaguely toward the city. “Already sitting in the ruins.”
“Well, lucky us.”
“People are walking around just—dazed—by the crumbling bridges, the water main breaks, the gas explosions—”
“The blackouts.”
“Yes, and—”
“The crime.”
“Right.”
“You get mugged and it’s not even worth reporting. It’s gonna take the police an age to get there and they’ll probably lose a tire on the way. It’ll take forever to schedule
your court date, then it’ll take forever to get there, and if you even survive the trip without getting mugged again, you’ll find that the courtroom is filthy and the hearing’s postponed and no one thought to tell you.”
I was parroting Matthew precisely; we must have both been surprised by how carefully I’d been listening, all along, to this ludicrous catalogue of all the things he thought he’d fix.
“On the way back, you’ll be grievously injured in a mass transit mishap,” I said. “By then you won’t even have the wherewithal to litigate!”
We were quiet; I expect he was allowing me to listen to myself.
“You’re right,” he said after a moment—which meant, essentially, I’m right. “The question is, what do we do?”
“What do we do?” I said: echolalia more than inquiry.
“I’m saying maybe caution isn’t inevitable. I’m saying maybe chaos can produce other appetites.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Are you saving that for your concession speech? Because I’m probably not going to be writing that one.”
He rolled over and gave me a hard, multivalent look.
“I resign,” I said. “Effective noon tomorrow.”
“You make a terrible Nixon.”
“Well, so did Nixon.”
“The thing about right now is that it’s a time of conclusions not yet foregone,” he said. This line sounded both awkward and rehearsed. Was it then that I first felt him talking beyond me—to an audience that I could not see, that I hadn’t even known existed?
“Do you know how rare an opportunity that is?”
No: it was there—in that “you,” which wasn’t really me, but a direct address to some demographic amalgamation. Not only were we not having the same conversation, he seemed to be having his with someone else entirely.
“I’m sure it’s not entirely without precedent,” I said. I turned over so that we were finally back-to-back.
“If you’re not careful, that thought is going to start to seem like a slogan.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we’ll just call it a talking point.”
The Spectators Page 14