was out to lunch and the Army recruiter next door, recognizing a good thing when he saw one, offered to pay for his college education. So Bobby Jay ended up shooting at Vietnamese instead, which was almost as good as college students except that they shot back. Still, he enjoyed his two tours in Southeast Asia and would have signed up for a third, only the tail-rotor of a helicopter blade got the better of his left arm up to the elbow during a hasty evacuation of a red-hot LZ. He was one of the few Vietnam-era soldiers to receive a welcoming parade on his return home, though the parade, attended by all the residents of Loober, could not truthfully be called a huge one. Still, parades being rare in those troubled times, it made the papers and caught the attention of Stockton Drum, the legendary head of SAFETY. Drum had taken a run-down gun-owners' organization and turned it into the equivalent of the world's largest standing army, thirty million strong and nothing if not vocal, as any senator and congressman could tell you. With his colorful Southerner's way and steely left hook, Bobby Jay was a natural spokesman for the cause of gun ownership in America, and he prospered, rising to become SAFETY'S chief spokesman. Along the way he repented of his sinful ways and became a born-again Christian, and not at an easy time, either, what with all the television evangelists going to jail for unevangelical behavior. He carpooled in from suburban Virginia with a group of fellow SAFETY born-agains, and on his way home to his wife and four children, they would stop at a firing range and discharge the tensions accumulated during the day by blasting away at paper-target silhouettes of vaguely ethnic attackers.
The Moderation Council, formerly the National Association for Alcoholic Beverages, represented the nation's distilled spirits, wine, and beer industries, and it had made a smart choice when it promoted Polly Bailey as its chief spokesperson. Faced with a rising tide of neo-puritanism, neo-prohibitionism, and disastrous volumetric decline, they resolved that a new approach was needed. So as beer commercials switched from bikini blondes and bibulous dogs to oil-coated baby seals being heroically rescued, as wine promotions began to emphasize its cholesterol- reducing qualities, and as liquor ads turned from ice-cold, dry martinis to earnest pleas for responsible driving, their trade association turned not to the traditional tough-talking, middle-aged white guy in a business suit, but to a talking head that could turn heads. Pretty, dark, a petite size-six, with lively, challenging blue eyes and (naturally) long eyelashes, Polly would not have looked out of place in a soap commercial; so when you saw her on the TV screen challenging the latest government report on alcohol-related car crashes or fetal alcohol syndrome, instead of talking about how she only used Ivory soap, the effect was downright arresting. It was her genius, Nick had noted, to wear her hair long, well down over her shoulders, suggesting youth and vitality, instead of the usual dutifully professional style that women feel they must adopt in order to show that they are willing to suppress natural beauty for the sake of gender assimilation, if that's what it takes to make partner, senior VP, or cabinet secretary.
Polly smoked — chain-smoked, in fact — which gave her voice a nice husky rasp, so that her flawless equivocations on the subject of blood alcohol content, phenolics, and excise taxes sounded downright sexy, as if she were sharing them with you in bed, with the sheets rumpled, jazz on the stereo, the candle flickering, smoke curling toward the ceiling. She was a stylish dresser too — unusual in Washington, where stylishness in women is suspect — favoring Donna Karan black and white suits, especially the ones with the oversized collars that manage to impart a touch of the schoolgirl while also announcing that it would be very foolish to take this woman lightly. All in all, an effective voice in Washington for ethanol.
The liquor industry had been using women to sell its stuff since time began, rubbing them up against phallic bottles, displaying their gams while they cooed about how the new boyfriend drank their brand of scotch; why, Nick wondered, had it only recently occurred to them to use a good-looking lady while pitching public policy? Weren't congressmen and senators who decided on health warning labels and excise taxes as susceptible as anyone else to sex? Indeed, Nick himself was now in the midst of justifying his own traditional white-male self to his own boss, who seemed increasingly eager to replace him with the telegenic Jeannette.
Polly had come from southern California and gone to Georgetown University with thoughts of entering the foreign service, flunked the foreign service exam, gone to work on Capitol Hill, where she spent a good deal of time running from congressmen who had more than cloture on their minds.
She ended up as assistant staff director for the House Agricultural Committee, her member being the ranking majority member. He was from northern California, whose vineyards at the time were being virtually wiped out by the phylloxera parasite; it was Polly who brilliantly maneuvered an alliance of convenience between her member and the member from the citrus region, screwing the members from the avocado and artichoke regions out of their subsidies in the process, but all's fair in love and appropriations. Her member rewarded her hard work and diligence by passing her over and appointing someone else staff director, so when the genuinely grateful head of Wines at the Moderation Council called to congratulate her on her brilliant victory and mention in passing how he wished he had someone like her on his staff, she leapt.
While still in her twenties, Polly had married a fellow Hill rat named Hector, a smart, attractive, and ambitious young man who seemed destined for some kind of big role eventually in someone's presidential administration; but after attending a lecture by Paul Ehrlich, the overpopulation guru, he became a devotee to the cause, and quit his job on the Hill and went to work for a non-profit organization that distributed birth control — condoms, mainly: three hundred million a year — free throughout the Third World. He spent four-fifths of his time in the Third World. The remaining fifth he spent back home in Washington looking for cures for various exotic tropical and infectious diseases, some of which made it unpleasant to be around him. Hector was passionate about overpopulation, Nick gathered from Polly's accounts, to the point where it was pretty much all he talked about.
Returning from a long trip to West Africa, however, he announced to Polly, in rather an unromantic, businesslike way, that he wanted to start having children, lots of them, and right away. This took Polly by surprise. Whether it was guilt over all those billions and billions of thwarted Third World sperm, or simply the desire to populate his own little corner of the world, Polly could not say; at this point all she did know was that she had, in a moment of weakness brought on by being chased around desks by too many congressmen, married a total loser.
Hector, meanwhile, became more and more adamant. By this time his skin had turned greenish from some suspect malaria pills dispensed by the local apothecary in Brazzaville. This, combined with his monomaniacal procreative fervor, had a calamitous effect on Polly's libido. He presented her with an ultimatum, and when she refused, he announced that it was all over and he was taking his fertility stick elsewhere. The divorce would become final in the fall. He was now living in Lagos, Nigeria, organizing a massive airdrop of condoms on the crowds expected to attend the pope's mass on his upcoming visit.
Discreet as the Mod Squad was, from time to time they invited other spokespeople to lunch to promote camaraderie among the despised. Their guests had come from such groups as the Society for the Humane Treatment of Calves, representing the veal industry, the Friends of Dolphins, formerly the Pacific Tuna Fishermen's Association, the American Highway Safety Association, representing the triple-trailer truckers, the Land Enrichment Foundation, formerly the Coalition for the Responsible Disposal of Radioactive Waste; others. Sometimes they had foreign guests. The chief spokesman for the Brazilian Cattlemen's Association had come by recently to share with them his views on rainforest management, and had entertained them with his imitation of a flock of cockatiels fleeing from bulldozers.
Their regular table was in the smoking section of Bert's, next to a fireplace with a fake electric fire that gave off a cozy, if ersatz, glow. Nick ordered his usual Cobb salad, which at Bert's came with about a quart of gloppy blue cheese dressing on top of enough bacon and chopped egg to clog an artery the size of the Holland Tunnel, and iced black coffee to wash it down and zap the thalamus for an afternoon of jousting with the media.
Bobby Jay ordered his usual: batter-fried shrimp with tasso mayonnaise. Polly, after briefly contemplating calamari, went for a trimming tossed green salad, French dressing on the side, and a glass of the house chenin blanc, crisp with a nice finish and not overpriced at $3.75 a glass.
Polly noticed that Nick was staring morosely into his iced coffee.
'So,' she said, 'how're we doing?' This was the traditional Mod Squad gambit. The answer was always
'How did your Lungs thing go?' Polly said, dragging deeply on a long low-tar cigarette. Nick had told her not to bother with the low-tars, since research showed you only smoked more of them to get the same amount of nicotine, a point nowhere to be found in the voluminous literature of the Academy of Tobacco Studies.
'Oh,' Nick said, 'it was all right. She called for a total advertising ban.
