She had appealed to Grissom unusually, that woman. Even now, twenty-five years further on, he wished he could find a way to tell his wife just what the experience with that woman had meant to him. His wife Syl, Grissom believed honestly, had been a part of it. Because when he had first laid eyes on that woman, on that whore all dolled up in the nightclubby fashions of the mid-Fifties, she had appealed to him…unusually. She’d appealed to him as a kind of perverted lens through which he could see both himself and his wife more clearly, more specially. Syl, he wished he could tell his wife now, you were up in that room with us. And surely, after thirty years married to Grissom, Syl would understand a rising young executive’s one-night layover with a pickup in another hotel. But during this month just past, the story had got out of Grissom’s control. It had got out into the Chicago papers before he could find the words to explain it to his wife.
And Grissom knew also he wasn’t your standard executive geek, high-powered and homeless. He’d been through all that crap already. He’d started out in consulting, one of the real ballbuster firms. But shortly after his experience with the whore, he’d switched to a job where it wasn’t the Sharks vs. the Shits all the time. He’d gone to a place near Batavia, in the jet-aircraft line. In those days—Grissom wasn’t then thirty-five—he’d told people in his circle he switched because the cross-country running around a man had to do in consulting took too much time from his wife and kids. And his wife and kids had been, in fact, part of Grissom’s reasoning. Grissom’s father had always said, in his heavy-tongued immigrant accent, work eats the legs but the family feeds the soul. Then surely, after all that and more, Grissom felt comfortable with himself. He was pushing sixty by now.
But the whore and her people, no denying, had thrown him badly. It hadn’t been just the woman herself. The bottom line was, just when Grissom’s career had been getting started, he’d been forced to step down to a position that cost him a minimum of $12,500 in salary and benefits alone over the first two years. The exact figures were important. He’d gone over them carefully with his lawyer.
The woman herself, well. When he had seen her alone in that hotel bar, the young Grissom had felt only the old and simple deepdown tug. He didn’t try to fight it. The woman fit his imaginings. When she lifted the veil they wore in those days, by the flame of his lighter Grissom saw icy, dark features, the fineboned quality he’d always pictured on European women. And that bar where they met was of course nowhere near his brown home in Lake Forest, nor even near Chicago. This had all happened on his very first extended executive-level trek. Even when he and the woman were discussing money, him showing off his pre-credit-card wallet as hefty as the wrought-iron elevator they rode in, even that came out sounding to Grissom like avant-garde poetry fresh in from the Continent—or wherever, in the suddenly very wide world, they got avant-garde poetry from.
Grissom of course drank. A good Scotch firmly in hand could practically launch a career by itself, in those days, and the place he worked for was a world-class ballbuster. Afterwards (no surprise, considering) Grissom went on the wagon.
And she next did something strange. Yes, something as strange by its own lights as anything that followed. The woman actually let him have what he’d gone up there for. Together they got the juices going and took turns leering at each other from top or bottom. She let young Grissom have his satisfaction even though it was she who’d mixed the drinks—even though, in other words, she must have slipped him the stuff right away. She must have slipped him the stuff before he’d so much as got his shoes off. And naturally Grissom had belted down as many shots of courage as an empty stomach would allow. Moreover he did remember, odd detail, that the drink had left a coating of silt on the ice He remembered, because after the last swallow he’d held the glass up to one eye in order to watch her undress. He’d felt very lightheaded already. That nightelubby suit she wore, like Peter Gunn’s girlfriend’s, had seemed to blur with the fineness of her skin, which was sometimes indistinguishable from the ghostly ice. Yet the woman did strip, in silence. Soon enough she stood unusually naked, a glistening silt-creature he’d tuned in from a world of icebergs and runny, elongated stars. And then, still silent, she held out her hands to him.
He’d been looking for an adventure, sure. That much Syl could have understood. She could have appreciated her husband’s yen for a night’s adventure maybe twenty-five minutes after the fact, let alone twenty-five years. Sure. But also young Grissom had wanted…so many times, especially during this month just past, he’d tried to put this idea into words…he’d wanted to come by means of this experience to a more complete, more substantial idea of himself as an individual. Grissom alone, he’d wanted to see. Grissom as a separately defined person, as an intensely, separately defined person, something as unique and identifiable as a planet in a pale sky. That too was what he’d wanted from this woman. And given all the facts about what had happened, certainly in time he could have put the idea into words. He could have gentled the lonesome wanderer he was trying to define, and so in time he could have shared the whole experience with Syl.
Unfortunately however young Grissom had not merely been led into a whore’s hotel room. The room and the lady had been a trap. Worse luck, it had taken all these two and a half decades to get at the truth of the matter.
Finally, now when he was pushing sixty, the story broke. Grissom had first seen the news on TV. It seemed that a couple of those hush-hush, top-level intelligence agencies in this country occasionally used to slip unsuspecting victims a drug, an hallucinogen. CIA, Army, whatever. They would drive somebody clear out of his mind for a few hours, as an experiment.
While “the project was in operation,” Grissom had learned, these agencies had sometimes hired prostitutes to “administer the substance.” Thereafter, an agency man would sit behind a two-way mirror and “monitor the session.” Oh, Grissom had come to know their bald lingo well, this past month. The agency records had been subpoenaed, and he’d seen his own name in them. He’d seen the faraway date and verified it against his old business records. He’d seen, he’d seen.
And so Grissom and his lawyer arrived at the troublesome business of the whore’s actually going through with her original job. Why had she let Grissom have her? The two men had discussed the question one afternoon a couple weeks ago, in the lawyer’s office. The woman’s motives might prove important if the suit came to court. The office was bright, with buttons flashing red and yellow on the enormous desk phone. The lawyer raised the question in a friendly way, but Grissom at first kept quiet. Since he still couldn’t find the words to explain it to his wife, Grissom figured, no way he could talk it out with a lawyer. In silence he watched the phone buttons flash. Eventually, calmly, the lawyer tried out an idea of his own. He hypothesized that the agency had wanted a subject who would truly feel guilty, in order for the experiment to be more, more—the lawyer frowned, searching for the expression—more emotionally impactive.
Now Grissom frowned. Emotionally what?
So, the lawyer finished with a grin, the girl had let Grissom zap her as part of their research.
Grissom found he couldn’t sit still. That kind of talk, he’d said loudly, shaking his head and striding round the office, that kind of talk—. His lawyer was looking at the wrong side of the picture entirely. The drug’s effects, Grissom said, were way more complex than that. Instead his lawyer should look at the other end of the picture, the human element. One way or the other, Grissom suddenly started shouting, you have to join the human race. One way or the other!
Bad idea, getting so fired up. The next day the Sun-Times carried a photograph of him throwing a fit in the public corridor outside his lawyer’s office. As he’d jumped round screaming about the human race, a camera-flash had caught him. The picture showed a heavy-bodied man in late middle age, with one knee raised in mid-stomp. The other foot, in its elegant European boot, was actually off the ground. This leaping person had an intelligent forehead, broad and pronounced, but at that moment it was cracked into so many wrinkles it looked like intestines caught in a vise. That morning (only a couple of weeks ago, now), Grissom had come into work and found the paper on his desk, folded open to the page with the picture.
He’d jumped back into his car, that morning, and driven the thirty miles to his home at well past the speed limit. He thought somehow he could pick up the house copy before Syl saw it. No dice. He found his wife at the kitchen table, with the paper open to his photograph in front of her, murmuring wearily over the phone to someone in her family. Her body sagged in its chair. After the first startled glance, she wouldn’t look at Grissom.
Revenge, Grissom thought. The whore had let him have her as a means of revenge. The drug after all was too freaky, too mysterious for anyone to go predicting its effects. Therefore you had to look at the person, not the apparatus around the person. So this woman, Grissom explained later to his lawyer, had wanted a hooker’s revenge: her own special way of showing her ass to the men who gave her their grubby orders and then sat, smug and above-it-all, behind the mirror.
The lawyer had looked sincerely surprised to hear Grissom come up with such a subtle theory. The lawyer took off his glasses and touched a stem to his lower lip. Grissom, in turn, could only give a disgusted half-smile. He would never get used to these narrow preconceptions people outside of business had about those on the inside. A man could work as an executive and nonetheless perceive the soul. Grissom had imagination enough to appreciate what must happen to a whore’s spirit while her body rang up trick after trick. For a moment he felt like jumping up and shouting again.
This conversation however took place the day after his photograph had appeared in the papers. Grissom therefore calmed himself. He watched the silent mechanical flash of the phone buttons. At last he shrugged. Look, he told the lawyer, the possible explanations for the prostitute’s behavior were endless. This much only was certain: she didn’t have to. By the time the hotel sheets had been heaped up round them like thunderclouds, the backs of Grissom’s knees had been going crazy, trembling with more than sexual fever. He’d bristled everywhere with his first rush.
After that, memory became spotty. What isolated moments he did recall were vivid, indeed far worse than vivid. But now Grissom had entered the mystery, a vastness complicated by a million wiry connections, and there not even his most enraged recent efforts to recall could fill in the blanks.
He could say, at least, that when TV or the movies handled this kind of experience they were way off base. The hallucinogen had never once caused Grissom to see things that weren’t “there” in some sense or another. The cow did not jump over the moon. Rather, every far-out vision had long psychic trailers rooted finally in some humble taste, some homely touch. Yes TV was way off base. TV started out to protect their viewers and wound up shoving everybody who watched into the garbage. TV went for the bright lights and never got at the truth, which was this essential combination of the homely and the psychedelic. It was because of that combination a person on acid knew the experience was real. And because it was real, it made you crazy. Madness therefore was a kind of ground pepper scattered over the experience, and though the bursts of memory could shatter Grissom like a sneeze, the grainy heaps of black to either side were just as large.
For example he could remember a time when the whore’s icy features had reddened and shriveled into those of the Devil himself, risen from his dark home. Her legs had run together into a ropelike tail holding him tight. Okay. Surely that guilty hallucination was only to be expected. Syl was, as he longed to tell her nowadays, in that hotel room with him. But then how, and when, had the prostitute become the Moon Maiden? How had her hair turned the consistency of cream cheese, and how had those tentacles sprung from her ribs to circle round him and tickle his spine so excruciatingly? All was doubtful, rough and tumble, transferences felt only in separated bits around the dark passage of asteroid chunks. Or never mind this woman and the million dreams that rode her skin. How in the world had Grissom come to spend so much time standing facing that hotel room’s mirror?
Yes that floor-to-ceiling vanity mirror, ow, ow. No sooner had Grissom put his fingers to the glass than he’d received a shock as if he’d been hauled upside-down off his feet and spanked. He snatched his hand back. On the spot he realized that he could have taken hold of any item from his young life—his first child’s first spoon, his wife’s jars of lotion, the ungainly watch his father had given him—any item, and not one would have devastated him so much as this deep stretch of reflecting glass. The rows of bulbs shining to either side pained his eyes. Of course, during this month just past Grissom had found out that his shock, too, had been part of the setup. The agency records explained how the surface of the mirror had been lightly electrified as a precaution. But knowing these things now didn’t change at all the cataclysmic feel of what he could recall from then. For instance he could remember also that at one point he’d thought of lowering his head and smashing on through. And this past month, he’d learned the agency types had been prepared for that move as well: he would have knocked himself cold against their protective steel supports. But knowing so now didn’t lessen the pervading weakness, like a steam leaking outward from his marrow, which had kept him from crashing through and which softened his bones all over again every time he remembered the moment.
So memory grew spottier, grainier still after that. Hours, young Grissom must have remained there, silently weeping. He had an odd recollection of pulling the hairs away from his navel and thrusting his reflected belly up towards itself, God knows why. He could be positive only that he’d been standing before the mirror when he’d seen his worst.
He had no idea just how far along it was. The woman had brought him a dripping facecloth. He hadn’t noticed her coming. But after that agony of wet and cold hit his forehead, instinctively he brought up his palm to cover the blazing damp spot and hold it there. The liquid streaming down meantime had forced him to blink repeatedly, lengthily, till under the pressure of light and dark the surface of his thinking had exploded and Grissom could see clearly at last that this “water” striping his skin was itself composed entirely of mirrors. He stopped blinking and watched. Tiny mirrors, these were, each no larger than the fragment of a tear. Like the row of black reflections he’d sometimes seen clinging to his windshield after a storm: tiny mirrors, all wriggling their tails. Yes and in this case they weren’t merely wriggling, either, but moving, actually moving with a purpose. Down from his enlarged eyes, down his cheeks and down, the mirrors traveled in linked chains, with a jerky sinuousness like something out of a cartoon. Grissom’s heart was going so hard he couldn’t move his eyes. He could just make out infinitesimal pairs of dirty bare feet. He could see finally the hemp ropes holding the mirrors in place. One wobbled for a moment; a black hand rose to steady it, the pressure of the fingers—minute as the hairs on a fly—making a small depression in the bulbous reflecting surface. Mirrors, lugging away on their backs what the larger mirror showed! Why, then, these germlike native bearers, these shimmery work gangs Grissom had wrung from the washcloth himself, why they were going to carry away his face. Even now his face was going, running down, in trapped particles of eyelash and eyebrow, bits of sideburn and lip beard stubble….
Grissom had got tough with himself. He whispered into his reflection that this was only another hooker’s trick, another slut way of getting him to spend the entire night and so pay more (why, if she succeeded in driving him insane for the rest of his life, just think what he’d pay). But he couldn’t remove his hand from the facecloth, nor his eyes from the glass. Desperately then he looked to the woman with him—in the mirror. He was startled to discover she stood beside him. She stood in an old-fashioned robe, fixing her face. And as she smeared on some ointment, businesslike but in no rush, he could see she was rubbing away not just the bags under her eyes but her eyes themselves, not just the lines round her nose but her entire fineboned nose itself.
Yet though she met his gaze, with the blank indentations where her eyes had been, she never offered more than a bored smile. Even when her mouth too was wiped away, he could tell she remained unperturbed. She didn’t see the damage done. So Grissom had understood, and thereafter the night was lost to memory. He had wanted to see what he was alone, what he was as an individual away from Syl or anyone else. And now he knew.
Afterwards, well. It was hardly anything you could confide in the wife. Grissom went on the wagon. No surprise, considering.
Also, more or less secretly, he went on the couch for a couple-three years. Syl knew, but no one else. It was Syl in fact who’d suggested Grissom start seeing a psychiatrist. She’d told him, at the end of one unending, weepy night, that some time with a headshrinker seemed to be the only solution to his problems. Syl was also terrific when it came to keeping the analysis a secret from Grissom’s father. The old man was from the old country; he’d never have understood. The two kids, as for them, weren’t even talking yet during those years. And the psychiatrist’s office was in the same crowded steel high-rise as Grissom’s dentist’s, so he always had a ready excuse. Yet a psychiatrist, too…Grissom could never see his way clear to telling a psychiatrist either. How could he? The doctor would stand over him and say: for a businessman in America, there is the work and there is the family, two very strong drives which often conflict. Then how could Grissom start to talk about microscopic native bearers carrying away his face?
Nonetheless he was grateful for the time. Grissom progressed soon enough to a point where he was able to ask for the less demanding job, in the jet-aircraft line, without shame. Once there, also, he found himself prospering. After he reached middle age, after his father had died, Grissom didn’t bother keeping his work with the doctor a secret any longer. Indeed he became a regular advocate of analysis for management-level employees. Couple years on the couch, Grissom took to saying, and you’ll die a rich man.
But he suffered, nevertheless, some lower-grade infections left from his night before the prostitute’s vanity mirror. These remained hard to put into words. Really, the slack hell of the last twenty-five years was rendered best, in capsule version, on the night of his return from that first executive-level trek. Oh, he could say he’d done some other things in the interim. He’d remained faithful to Syl. He’d gone back to the Church, finding his place among those crowds whispering to themselves with eyes closed. He’d raised two sons during the 1960’s, he shouldn’t forget that. Yet really, it had all been in the return.
Two or three more nights had passed since the insanity in the hotel room—impossible, rough-cut dark hours stained with dreams of being born and then going to work at once, still trailing the greasy umbilicus. Impossible nights. So when Grissom did in fact make it home, his young hand was shaking so hard it took him three tries to turn the kitchen doorknob. And—? “Yaaaay, Grissom! He’d stumbled bang into the raised glasses and popping flashbulbs of a surprise party. Syl had been so proud of him for earning the right to go on such a trip, and his birthday fell near enough to make such an excuse. So neighbors, relatives, even slight office acquaintances had been brought over. Syl and he, in those days, were trying to expand their circle.
When his wife rushed out of the crowd and hugged him, fiercely, Grissom had burst into tears and shrieked something hysterical, Godgodgod or something, at which everyone in the room laughed and said: Awww. Look at that, awww, what else can you say? He returned Syl’s hug, tight, tight, burying his face in her neck to avoid seeing these loosened smiles and roving eyes that had come at him out of the darkened rooms of his own home. Syl had finally told him loudly, party-volume, to loosen up his hold, hey come on darling. The crowd found this hilarious. The people who’d laughed too raucously, or who’d made the wrong sort of jokes, Syl and Grissom had never seen again.
And—? His reaction had been nothing short of a miracle. He didn’t call the party off. Yes of course Grissom wanted to avoid a scene; yes too he was hungry and the baklava Syl had baked reeked of sweet honey. Yes, most importantly, he’d been too frightened to go through any more high emotions for a while. So, a miracle, Grissom stayed on his feet. Manfully he circled among the wisecracks about growing old and the fearsome traces of a perfume that would be right for a sophisticated lady in a big-city bar. The night followed the pattern, in capsule version, for that brutal cross-country running around that a man at Grissom’s level of the business was supposed to do: racing from the freezer to Kansas City, then catching a late-night shuttle for Savannah, with a connection for the baby’s bedroom…. Hours had passed. He’d stayed on his feet. Then finally and without knowing how it had happened, he’d discovered himself alone with his wife for the first time all evening. She was sitting in the after-party dark, lying back nearly, on the sofa. She’d brought their son downstairs and, her breast like a softening in the smoke and upholstery, she was nursing him. Grissom watched. The infant’s large eyes were closed; her own were lowered to see him suck. They might both have been asleep, except that she was murmuring to the child in babytalk. And the wife had the second child sitting up in her belly already, that’s how fast you went about such things then. So Grissom had come to believe, as he stood watching the two of them, that he would never again take part in this world of Syl’s, this drowsy continuous talking and touching. The calm fullness of bellies and the tongue living inside the kiss: never for him. Syl had made too fragile a web, a wisp strung between two monsters, for the boom and bust of Grissom’s inner life. When he saw the baby’s saliva start to dribble down his wife’s breast, Grissom had to turn away.
Yet he’d remained faithful. After the second baby was born and Grissom’s numbness in the sack continued nonetheless, Syl had broken down and screamed at him, weeping, to see a headshrinker, see one. Then he’d punched in his hours on the couch. He’d taken also his more conservative medicines, the Church and raising children. In time there had come a night when Syl could go farther than merely laying a hand on the back of his thigh to let him know the choice was still open.
And after more time still, Grissom came to yet another—what could he call it?—another moment of private graduation. This time it happened at the office. A late September day. He was then 52, his night on acid twenty years behind him already. He was standing at the urinal in the executive washroom, looking over his company’s latest annual report. He tried always to bring some work with him into the men’s room, so as not to have his concentration broken. The place, with its aluminum and Muzak and air-freshener, could rub your brains clean in a minute. There Grissom had noticed that his photograph at the front of the report appeared odd, incorrect somehow. Moving to the basin to wash his hands, he thought it over. And then, on an impulse, he’d splashed the water up onto his face and looked into the mirror, bright and humming with Muzak. Like that, the answer came to him. Of course: the boys in Design & Layout had airbrushed his picture, so he wouldn’t look too old.
That morning, that day…again his mysterious failure of speech afflicted Grissom. He couldn’t say with any precision why this retouched photo in his company report, a simple matter of good business, should pick up his spirits as much as it had. But he went back to his desk at a strut. He felt so with-it he invited the other vice-president on his corridor to lunch. And in the restaurant, Grissom had shocked the man by ordering good imported Scotch straight up before the meal.
Indeed, that last graduation had picked him up too high, too fast. Every one of Grissom’s shot glasses, these past five years, had dropped like a small bomb behind his ribcage. He’d gone back to hard stuff, after all, at an age when he should have been switching to milk.
In this business, too, Syl had impressed him. Any time he reached for a third highball, she would start reminding him of the two or three men in their circle who’d already had their first heart attack. She would lay her broad hand (she had a fisherman’s hands, he’d always thought) over his whenever he began to pour an unnecessary J&B. She’d ask: you forgetting who you are, Grissom? Yes with that mock-businesslike way she had of using his last name as if it was something serious enough to joke about. Hey Grissom, she’d say. You trying to catch up with somebody out there? Grissom, settle down a little, don’t just stand there talking to yourself. Hey, look at me. Hey Grissom, talk to me.
It might have worked, her familiar needling gab. Those fisherman hands might have hooked the right words in the darkness beneath Grissom’s thoughts. She could have made him tell her how he’d wanted to define himself as one way or another, in that hotel bar a generation earlier, how he wanted to see himself without any gray areas showing. But no dice. After his first heart attack, a man gets everything from a new perspective.
Less than a year ago, now. The attack had come in the form of a gum-slow pain, as if he were giving birth to a creature that needed first to burrow from his breastbone through to his spine. Afterwards, as he’d floated through the white and steel of the hospital, with the color TV going all the time, seeming a million starstruck miles from his brown home in Lake Forest, then Grissom had drifted mentally too. He lay there reconstructing. A damaged chest and a rattled mind, both reconstructing. Yes both, because at his heart’s first vicious twist inward—in the very moment—uncountable tough lumps of memory had erupted farther up the spine.
Somebody will pay for doing this to me, he’d told himself at the time.
My whole life passed before my eyes, he’d told his visitors at the hospital.
Thus, there, plugged into the heart-support machinery, he saw the stories of what the intelligence agencies had done. His first day back on his feet Grissom called his lawyer. It wasn’t till this month just past that they at last received verification.
Now arrived the TV people. They came into Grissom’s home tonight and caught him by surprise. Though of course he had arranged the visit himself. Hours earlier, he’d telephoned the Chicago station. Plus before that he’d arranged every step of the procedure with Syl: the room they would use, the time of arrival. Yet then Grissom’s wife had unsettled his nerves. Simply by asking a few hard questions, Syl had got him striding back and forth across the living-room rug, so intently that when he’d touched a lightswitch—it was near sundown—the static electricity gave him a bad shock. Syl had sat on the sofa watching. She was waiting for something it seemed. Finally, her voice growing quiet with determination, the lines of her face deepening, she’d refused absolutely to take any part in Grissom’s bit on the TV news.
So he was caught by surprise. A man near sixty, in a bright silver suit he’d cleaned especially, he lumbered around gesturing to himself. He hadn’t even noticed Syl when she’d crossed the entryway to answer the door.
Only, one moment Grissom looked up, and in came the TV people.
A tall Oriental woman went first, angular at the jawline and hip, unmistakeably a beauty even though from Grissom’s distance her face was vague. In her angles alone he could tell she was gorgeous. Her hair was tied back flat against her skull, her long body cinched up tight in a three-piece suit of that flecked, metallic green which was popular just now. To see her stalk in, trailing wires—so bright, so pinched and sectioned, trailing wires—Grissom thought of a hornet prowling the air. Round her long neck there tottered a steel mirror on a hinged apparatus that allowed her to look at herself as she walked. The reflected sunset coming through the open door behind her colored her small face oddly.
Grissom stared, in wary shock. He went on standing in the center of his living room.
The Oriental reporter stopped to check something in her mirror, parting her lips roughly with two blood-colored fingernails and revealing her teeth. As she paused, there strode past her a creature that seemed to have three heads, each with a different size and a different degree of mobility. Grissom squinted and blinked several times. Finally he managed to distinguish between the plastic half-moon of the microphone, the iron angles of the camera, and the emaciated young cameraman’s half-visible, red-bearded face. Meantime closer to Grissom something else went rushing by low to the ground. He didn’t get a good look at it: some kind of large black box, an uncertain shape. It made the air stir around his ankles. The man hauling the box however was impossible to miss, a tough working stiff in his prime, twice Grissom’s size, his body under its golden T-shirt as blunt and efficient as a dead-bolt lock. Gold, it seemed, was this guy’s thing. Along one side of his face dangled an earring a good two inches across, bright gold. His belt buckle also was gold, and worn up on his right hip to catch the eye. Then next, coming in the door next, now—a wide aluminum bowl, freestanding, with consoles of switches and toothed snap-latches bolted on both at top and bottom. There were nasty-looking yellow bulbs at the bowl’s center. Crossing the slate entryway, its wheels shrieked. How did it move? But the girl who entered next certainly wasn’t pushing anything. A frowning blonde who looked like she wasn’t yet out of her teens, she came through the door tilted sideways, groaning, uneasy on cheap-looking high heels. Under this girl’s chin swung a legal pad clipped to a board; up on one shoulder she barely managed to balance a steel briefcase with sharp, studded corners; cradled against her other side was a bone-white gallon jug crookedly labeled HOT STUFF. All was positive, hard-surface, solid evidence thrusting forth dynamically into uncut sunlight. Even this overloaded teenage girl had an upper body that mushroomed out into a high-school jacket with bulging shoulders.
The jacket’s elastic hem was hiked up, revealing her midriff. It was the only ordinary, untucked flesh anywhere among these people. To Grissom it seemed the girl’s belly was rising towards him, rising…the hairless teenage skin blending with her unbelted jeans….
“Say three, three and a half right now,” the girl said, or rather grunted loudly. She’d come quite close. “And with these curtains—minute—” she bent, set down her burden. Her midriff disappeared. “With these curtains, better make it two.”
“Starbaby, I told you, I got the meter right here.” This was the grip in gold, answering over his shoulder and through his earring. Grissom couldn’t be sure, but the man appeared to have a hand between his legs. “They got rooms upstairs. Starbaby! Let’s go be alone and shut the door.”
“Knock it off and give me six hundred.” The Camera/Face, who closed in on Grissom and then backed away. “And make it a wide six hundred. I want to go override and we’ll color-down right here.”
He pressed in close again, his black lens twitching.
“Starbaby,” the grip went on shouting, “I told you, you want to travel with us you got to decide. What’s it going to be girl? Them or me, girl?”
Oh I understand, Grissom thought, sounding the words against his inner ear with forced sensibleness. I understand. He’s trying to put the make on the blonde girl.
“That’s an old song,” the girl shouted back without looking at him. She waved around something that looked like a compass. “I mean I heard my grandfather singing that song.”
“Oh you just don’t know, girl.” The man was working expertly, hopping up and down like a gymnast, making swift settings on the aluminum reflecting bowl. “Starbaby it ain’t that I’m old, it’s that you’re new. Girl you ain’t even been born yet.”
“Go, just—just stay on the other side of the world from me.” She sounded uncertain. “Just, get us the count.”
Grissom stood watching them all come into his house. The girl’s midriff like a piece of his own flesh orbiting now behind him to his right. The topheavy cameraman, the jade-green reporter like a blade of metal grass thrust upright between the harsh lines of the grip’s shouting. Grissom thought he’d never seen these rooms so crammed with humanity. Although—he thought again—that was an odd way to feel with Syl out of sight. But ow, those few hard questions she’d asked him earlier. They seemed still with him, here like seastones under the carpet. Why, Syl had asked him, did Grissom leave it to her during this past month to reconstruct the whole twenty-five-year-long chain of events on her own? Why didn’t he come tell her straight out: first there was that original executive-level trek, and, and next, Grissom…He tried to answer, saying there were things he could tell his lawyer and the people in the media that, ah, naturally Syl, ah, well like my fat her used to say, Syl, there are a lot of bastards out there….
She’d reached out and taken hold of his chin. She’d thrust her face at him: Look at me, Grissom! Finally he’d had to rise from the sofa shouting you’ve got it backwards Syl, you’re looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I’m going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.
Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.
“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let’s go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”
“All right!” But that wasn’t the blonde girl’s voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.
“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”
The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.
Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She’d changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom’s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected.
“Mr. Grissom, I’m sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who’s new, I mean she’s just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”
“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”
The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn’t get a clear view; she’d turned away quickly and squatted over the grip’s black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.
“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”
At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blindness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it on either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his—Grissom’s—lelt thigh.
“It is three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.
“When they’re old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just goes.”
“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time’s running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don’t you. We work for you.”
“Give it some back light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There’s no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I’m telling you, his face will just go.”
The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman’s eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom’s cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.
“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you’re related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”
Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom—the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he’d heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he’d used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.
“The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”
“I see,” the reporter said.
Grissom’s eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.
“And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”
“No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.
“You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”
“No.”
“Your typical executive,” the grip said. He’d hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It’s just me, me, me, me.’“
“Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “is a new song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.
“I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”
“Counting two sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.
Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew’s sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.
“Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it’s your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He’s going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”
“Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there’s one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she’d frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don’t be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can’t tell them.’“
“Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it’s like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he is?”
“Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds’ leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”
“I can’t live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie’s always saying, ‘respect the family,’ ‘protect the family.’ And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we’ve been married, is that nothing? I loved him, is that nothing?”
“So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who’s all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don’t have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you’re all business now. So then let’s start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings up. And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it. Go.”
“Counting one sixty to fifteen in front!” the grip yelled.
“Oh Godgodgod,” Syl said, “there he goes.” With her free hand she touched the phone receiver. She ran her finger round and round in the tears on the plastic, as if fondling a rosary. “Susan, how can I forgive him? I can’t.”
“Watch my language?” Grissom said.
He felt his tears gluey with the face powder. He heard his voice breaking. And in that moment of his question, finally, he got one good look at the reporter’s face. She came up so close and unexpectedly that the businessman could see nothing but makeup. He saw pancake, the gloss that crusted over the cheekbones. Painted eyebrows, eye-shadow, eye-liner, the thick and artificial moisture of the mouth. Just one good look at her face and then he knew she had no face. He thought: Yes. Those cunts behind the mirror, those cock sucking buttfucking cunts of sharks behind the mirror—yes they showed me the truth.
“I can’t live with the man,” Syl repeated, off by herself.
“Watch my language?” Grissom repeated. “All right, how’s this. Don’t you blankety-blank-blanks think it’s time to join the human race?”