The Future We Wish We Had

She scribbled something on a sheet of Tweed ’s note-paper, folded it, and tucked it into Roger’s shirt pocket. The touch of her fingertips through the thin material made his neck muscles go tight. “Meet me at the Pneum-A-Pod on forty-eight,” she said, as she walked past him. “Twenty minutes.” She paused at the door. “Bring your sense of humor. You do have one, don’t you?”

“Of course I have one,” he said heatedly.

“I was starting to wonder. Dust it off once in a while.”

“We’re in a deadly serious business, uplifting the public.”

“Deadly, right.” She waved over her shoulder on her way out.

He waited almost a minute before he opened the note.

You don’t have a choice, it read.

Roger and Doreen lay side by side in the Pneum-A-Pod as it hurtled on a cushion of air through the Eighth Avenue tunnel. Through the clear walls of the tunnel, Roger might have seen the lights of the city rushing beneath them, if he hadn’t been staring into Doreen’s eyes.

“What I believe is that ratings reflect our mission,” he was saying. “According to the May sweeps, the UN has more viewers than Fox and CBS combined. And if the World Chess Championship hadn’t gone to fourteen games, A &E wouldn’t even have come close to us.”

“The only reason so many people watch us is that there isn’t anything on TV that’s more fun,” Doreen responded. “Uncle Ralph makes sure of that.”

“Uncle Ralph? Are you talking about Ralph Nader?”

“Right-the Secretary of Television,” she confirmed. “The man who knows what’s good for you-or else.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that the Pan Am Broadway Showcase isn’t fun? Don’t we run Shakespeare and Aristophanes every week? Didn’t we just have a Moliere Festival?”

She made a lemon face. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

She had never quoted Shakespeare to him before. Roger tried not to let her see that he was impressed. “But where are we going?”

“You’ve been cooped up in the Tower for too long, Bookboy,” she said with a smile he didn’t quite understand. “Wake up and smell the gutter.”

“I’ve never been in this part of town before.” Roger glanced uneasily at the garish lights that blinked and throbbed around dim doorways and dark windows. “Where are we going?”

“What difference does it make?” asked Doreen. “You’re out on the town with a sexy girl on your arm. Stop thinking and enjoy.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“Why not?” she said. “This is the real world, Bookboy. You know,” she added confidentially, “‘even Harvard professors leave the ivy-covered halls and blow off a little steam from time to time.”

“It’s the buildings that are ivy-covered, not the halls,” he corrected her.

“Roger, come down off the sixty-fourth floor. The air is too thin up there for life.”

“Why do you keep belittling our work?” he asked, “Television is the greatest invention of the century, maybe the greatest since the invention of fire.”

“You never heard of penicillin, I take it,” she said sardonically. “Or Botox.”

“Antibiotics are certainly wonderful breakthroughs, but they save sick people. Television saves everyone. Surely you’ve seen movies from the pre-television era: Abbott and Costello talking nonsense about who was on first base, private detectives walking into a hail of bullets and never getting hurt, Hoot Gibson and James Cagney being held up as examples of American manhood.”

“There were good movies too, you know,” said Doreen.

“But nobody watched them, so they stopped making them. Nobody wanted to know that Frankenstein’s monster spoke perfect English and had a soul; they just wanted to be scared into mindlessness. Or James Bond. Here’s a secret agent, a covert agent, and he can walk into any bar in the world and someone is sure to say ‘Shaken, not stirred’-and no one objects or guffaws. Movies dumb the public down; it’s up to television to pull people back up.” Roger could feel his adrenaline flowing as he warmed to his subject. “Same thing with popular literature. Before people like Tweed came along, junk like sci-fi and thrillers and romance dominated the bestseller lists. Now thoughtful essays and avant-garde poetry get the readerships they deserve.”

“Just because books are bought doesn’t mean they’re read,” said Doreen. “I think Stephen Hawking proved that years ago.” She paused in front of a double door painted a lascivious shade of red. The humming neon sign above it read All Night Long Lounge. “What if people just want to escape?”

“From what?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.

“From the culture Tweed and acolytes like you are forcing on them.”

“Ridiculous!” he snapped.

“Speaking of ridiculous, we’re here.” She gestured at the door. “I want you to see this show.”

“What is it?”

“Something very funny.”

“Well, the network can always use more humorists. Mort Sahl is getting a little long in the tooth, and Lord Buckley and Severn Darden both died a few years ago.”

“Well, Woody Allen did apply for a job with us. So did Nichols and May.”

He sniffed contemptuously. “Too lowbrow.”

“But people understand them,” she said. “How many people do you think understood Lord Buckley, or Ken Nordeen’s Word Jazz?”

“Our job is to make them understand.”

Her eyebrows arched and for a moment he thought she might laugh at him.

“Let me amend that,” he said hastily. “Our job is to expose them to such things, and give them the cultural tools to comprehend and appreciate what they’re seeing and hearing.”

“I was wondering what our job was,” she said, and as happened so often when they spoke, he had no idea how to answer her.

A well-dressed couple walked past them and entered the club, and Doreen turned to Roger. “So, we can stand here arguing all night, or we can go in.”

“Wait,” said Roger. “How much is this going to cost?”

“Nothing,” she said. “They know I’ve been scouting the talent here, and I told them I’d be bringing along a consultant tonight.”

Roger didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. If this was just business, then he’d have to lower his expectations. But if it was just business, why did she keep flirting with him? He opened the door and held it for her.

They passed through and were immediately greeted by the doormanbot, who was wearing a gorilla suit. He greeted Doreen warmly and allowed them to pass through. A skimpily clad hostess (which, decided Roger, was just one tiny step more acceptable than a scantily clad hostess) escorted them to a table very near the small stage.

Soon a scantily clad waitress approached them and asked for their orders.

“I’ll have a Manhattan,” said Doreen.

“And the gentleman?”

“Just coffee,” he said. When both women stared at him, he fidgeted uneasily and added, “I have to have my senses about me if I’m evaluating talent. One drink and I’ll probably miss half of the subtleties and nuances.”

“He’ll have a martini,” announced Doreen. As the waitress walked off, she said to Roger, “Not to worry. These people check their nuances at the door.”

“Then why are we here?” he asked earnestly.

“Just relax and we’ll discuss it later.”

The drinks arrived, and Roger took a sip of his martini. He tried not to make a face as it went down. It was the drink of the masses, and he found himself wishing for a ’48 Chardonnay, or possibly a ’51 Dom made entirely from grapes raised on the north slope. (In truth, his tastebuds couldn’t tell the difference between Dom Perignon and Two Buck Chuck, but that, he knew, was merely because they weren’t yet properly educated. He watched all three of UN’s wine shows religiously, and he by God knew good from bad, even if his mouth didn’t-another gift of television to the drab, empty lives of its audience.)

Suddenly the lights dimmed, and a fat man in a sad sack suit sidled nervously onto the stage. He had a receding hairline and bulging eyes almost as big as ping- pong balls. He goggled at the audience, as if he expected that they might start throwing things at him. For a long moment, he said nothing. The room went quiet as well. He shuffled from foot to foot in the spotlight in front of a microphone. Roger thought maybe he had wandered onto the stage by accident. Then he crooked a finger between the collar of his shirt and his neck, loosening his tie.

“I get no respect,” he said. “I took my wife to a fancy restaurant on her birthday and I made a toast. ‘To the best woman a man ever had.’ The waiter joined me.”

The room exploded into laughter.

“My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”

A man at the next table doubled over and banged his head against the tabletop.

There followed another ten minutes of one-liners, none of them new, and none, in Roger’s opinion, the least bit funny. The alleged comedian complained about his wife, his kids, his doctor and his dog, a sad litany of abuse and misunderstanding.

“They actually pay this man to stand up there and spout this drivel?” whispered Roger.

“They not only pay Rodney Dangerfield to perform,” replied Doreen, “but you’ll notice that every table in the house is full.”

“But he belongs in a saloon a century ago!” said Roger. “This whole act is about how stupid he is.”

“Everyone laughed,” she said. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“It means we’ve got our work cut out for us,” said Roger grimly.

“Nothing else?” she persisted.

“Should it?” he asked, confused.

She looked pityingly at him and sighed. “No, I suppose not.”