Americana

nerve. Strobe seemed to admire the physical imperfections of people, their lisps, scar tissue, chipped teeth; in his view these added up to character, to a certain seedy magnetism. His world was not mine. I admired Humphrey Bogart but he made me nervous. His forehead bothered me; it was the forehead of a man who owes money. My own instincts led me to Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. These were the American pyramids and they needed no underground to spread their fame. They were monumental. Their faces slashed across the screen. When they laughed or cried it was without restraint. Their chromium smiles were never ambiguous. And they rarely had time to sit down and trade cynical quips with some classy society dame or dumb flatfoot. They were men of action, running, leaping, loving with abandon. When I was a teenager I saw Burt in From Here to Eternity. He stood above Deborah Kerr on that Hawaiian beach and for the first time in my life I felt the true power of the image. Burt was like a city in which we are all living. He was that big. Within the conflux of shadow and time, there was room for all of us and I knew I must extend myself until the molecules parted and I was spliced into the image. Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it. Burt lives! I carry that image to this day, and so, I believe, do millions of others, men and women, for their separate reasons. Burt in the moonlight. It was a concept; it was the icon of a new religion. That night, after the movie, driving my father's car along the country roads, I began to wonder how real the landscape truly was, and how much of a dream is a dream.

Strobe died in the middle of a meeting. He had a heart attack at his desk. He is conventionally dead. But he would have been happy to know that his reaction to my physical traits was shared by others at the network. Hidden energies filled the air, small secret currents, as happens in every business which thrives in the heat of the image. There was a cult of the unattractive and the clever. There were points scored for ruthlessness. There were vendettas against the good-looking. One sought to avoid categories and therefore confound the formulators. For to be neither handsome nor unattractive, neither ruthless nor clever, was to be considered a hero by the bland, a nice fellow by the brilliant and the handsome, a nonentity by the clever, a homosexual by the lunatic fringe of the unattractive, a bright young man by the ruthless, a threat by the dangerously neurotic, an intimate and loyal friend by the alienated and the doomed. I did my best to keep low. I moved quietly close to walls and up and down the stairwells. A small incident confirmed the value of these tactics. It happened one day, after lunch, when I found myself crossing Madison Avenue stride for stride with Tom Maples, a young man who had joined the network at roughly the same time I had. We exchanged the usual cautious pleasantries. When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. 'I don't know who you are,' she said, 'but I'm sure you must be somebody.'

Her smile was rather winning, and blithely I signed her fold-out map of the subway system, thinking Maples might be amused. He avoided me for the next six months. After that I did my best to be exceedingly humble and withdrawing. I felt it was essential to the well-being of others.

It's time now to run the film again. I mean that quite literally, for I still have in my possession a movie made in those years, and many tapes as well. There isn't much to do on an island this remote and I can kill (or rather redistribute) a fair amount of time by listening to the soundtrack and taking yet another look at some of the footage.

I went down the corridor to my office. My secretary was at her desk eating a jelly donut and writing a letter. Her name was Binky Lister. She was a cheerful girl, a few pounds overweight in a pleasant way. She was having an affair with my immediate superior, Weede Denney, but continued to be a trustworthy secretary, which means she lied on my behalf and defended me on all counts against charges made by the secretaries of men who feared and hated me. She followed me into the office.

'Mr. Denney wants you for a ten o'clock meeting.' 'What's it all about?'

'He doesn't tell me everything for chrissake.' 'Don't get mad, Binky. It was just an idle question.' Standing there she crossed her ankles awkwardly, a sort of non-facial pout. I sat behind my enormous desk and at once imagined myself naked. Then I pushed the chair back slightly and began to revolve in a magisterial 180-degree arc, surveying my land. The walls were covered with blow-ups of still photographs from programs I had written and coordinated. My bookcase was full of bound scripts. There were plants in two corners of the room and a dozen media periodicals arranged neatly on the end table. The ashtrays were all from Jensen. I had a black leather sofa and a yellow door. Weede Denney's sofa was bright red and he had a black door.

'What else?' I said.

'A woman called. She didn't leave her name but she said to tell you the frogs' legs weren't as tasty as usual.'

'My life,' I said, 'is a series of telephone messages which nobody understands but me. Every woman I meet thinks she's some kind of Delphic phrasemaker. My phone rings at three in the morning and it's somebody stranded at some airport calling to tell me that the animal crackers have left the zoo. The other day I got a telegram-a schizogram-from a girl on the Coast and all it said was: my tonsils went to a funeral. Do you ever send messages like that, Bink? My life is a telex from Interpol.'

'If it's all so annoying, why did you smile when I told you about the frogs' legs?'

'It was good news,' I said.

I went around to Weede's office. He was sitting in his restyled barber chair. For a desk he used a low round coffee table made of teak. Across the room was his three-screen color TV console. The barber chair, being an eccentricity permitted someone in Weede's position, hadn't bothered me much, but the coffee table was a bit frightening, seeming to imply that my titanic desk was all but superfluous. Weede was a master of the office arts, specializing in the tactic of reaction. Some time after I had joined the network, a subordinate of Weede's named Rob Claven decided to decorate his office with exactly fourteen of his wife's paintings. It was a fairly horrifying sight. Weede didn't say a word. But a week later a few of us, including Rob Claven, went to a meeting in Weede's office. What we saw startled us. All the paintings and old schooner prints had vanished and in their place was hung a single eight-by-twelve-inch reproduction of a detail from the Sistine Chapel. The almost bare walls were Rob Claven's death sentence. The Michelangelo was the dropping of the blade.

Finally Weede nodded me out of the doorway and directed me to the blue chair. He did this with a movement of hand or eye so close to imperceptibility that even as I sat down I could not determine how I knew that I was supposed to sit in the blue chair. Reeves Chubb was already there, smoking one of his mentholated cigars. Weede told us an anecdote that concerned golf and adultery. Within a few minutes five more people entered, one a woman, Isabel Mayer, and the meeting began.

I looked out the window. Men in yellow helmets were working on a building that was going up across the street. They weaved in and out of its hollow bones, shooting acetylene, and catwalked over shaky planks. Strangely they did not seem to move with any special caution. Perhaps they had come to terms with the fear of falling. They had probably seen others fall and despised those deaths for the relief that followed the shock, a relief that must have risen with the wind, floor to floor, up the raw spindling shanks of the building. What could you do but go quickly to a dark bar and drink three burning whiskies? At one level two men squatted, riveting, and another, a level above, jumped from plank to plank, his arms held out slightly, hands at hip length. In mid-jump, at a certain angle against the open side of the building, he had the sky behind him, a rich and early blue, and they were framed in girders, man and sky, for what seemed an impossible second. I could see the riveters and the man jumping but they could not see each other. I watched for a long time, simultaneously trying to map the office voices and make them mean something. Then another man appeared from behind a girder, a tall man whose pants did not quite reach the top of his workboots. He stood motionless for a moment, hand canted against the rim of his helmet, shielding his eyes from the sun. He seemed to be looking at us. Then he lifted his hand above his head and began to wave. He was looking right at me, waving. I didn't know what to do. The cool voices clicked, measuring, compromising, destroying, pressuring. I felt he had to be acknowledged. I didn't know why but I felt it had to be done. It was absolutely imperative; a sign had to be given.

'Look,' I said. 'Look at that man over there. He's waving at us.'

'Look,' Isabel said. 'He's waving. That construction worker. Do you see him, Weede?'

Then we were all on our feet, all eight of us, crowding before the window, waving back to him. It was exhilarating. We were all waving and laughing. Weede began to shout: 'We see you! We see you!' We shoved each other to get more room. Isabel was trying to climb onto the wide radiator shelf that edged out from the bottom of the window. I helped her up and she knelt there, waving with both hands now. The sky was cloudless. We were laughing uncontrollably.