White noise

28

Wilder sat on a tall stool in front of the stove, watching water boil in a small enamel pot. He seemed fascinated by the process. I wondered if he'd uncovered some splendid connection between things he'd always thought of as separate. The kitchen is routinely rich in such moments, perhaps for me as much as for him.

Steffie walked in saying, "I'm the only person I know who likes Wednesdays." Wilder's absorption seemed to interest her. She went and stood next to him, trying to figure out what attracted him to the agitated water. She leaned over the pot, looking for an egg.

A jingle for a product called Ray-Ban Wayfarer began running through my head.

"How did the evacuation go?"

"A lot of people never showed up. We waited around, moaning."

"They show up for the real ones," I said.

"Then it's too late."

The light was bright and cool, making objects glow. Steffie was dressed for the outdoors, a schoolday morning, but remained at the stove, looking from Wilder to the pot and back, trying to intersect the lines of his curiosity and wonder.

"Baba says you got a letter."

"My mother wants me to visit at Easter."

"Good. Do you want to go? Of course you do. You like your mother. She's in Mexico City now, isn't she?"

"Who'll take me?"

"I'll take you to the airport. Your mother will pick you up at the other end. It's easy. Bee does it all the time. You like Bee."

The enormity of the mission, of flying to a foreign country at nearly supersonic speed, at thirty thousand feet, alone, in a humped container of titanium and steel, caused her to grow momentarily silent. We watched the water boil.

"I signed up to be a victim again. It's just before Easter. So I think I have to stay here."

"Another evacuation? What's the occasion this time?"

"A funny smell."

"You mean some chemical from a plant across the river?"

"I guess so."

"What do you do as the victim of a smell?"

"They have to tell us yet."

"I'm sure they won't mind excusing you just this once. I'll write a note," I said.

My first and fourth marriages were to Dana Breedlove, who is Steffie's mother. The first marriage worked well enough to encourage us to try again as soon as it became mutually convenient. When we did, after the melancholy epochs of Janet Savory and Tweedy Browner, things proceeded to fall apart. But not before Stephanie Rose was conceived, a star-hung night in Barbados. Dana was there to bribe an official.

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail.

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice.

Some of my adoration of Babette must have been sheer relief. She was not a keeper of secrets, at least not until her death fears drove her into a frenzy of clandestine research and erotic deception. I thought of Mr. Gray and his pendulous member. The image was hazy, unfinished. The man was literally gray, giving off a visual buzz.

The water progressed to a rolling boil. Steffie helped the boy down from his perch. I ran into 6abette on my way to the front door. We exchanged the simple but deeply sincere question we'd been asking each other two or three times a day since the night of the Dylar revelations. "How do you feel?" Asking the question, hearing it asked, made us both feel better. I bounded upstairs to find my glasses.

The National Cancer Quiz was on TV.

In the lunchroom in Centenary Hall, I watched Murray sniff his utensils. There was a special pallor in the faces of the New York émigrés. Lasher and Grappa in particular. They had the wanness of obsession, of powerful appetites confined to small spaces. Murray said that Elliot Lasher had a film noir face. His features were sharply defined, his hair perfumed with some oily extract. I had the curious thought that these men were nostalgic for black-and-white, their longings dominated by achromatic values, personal extremes of postwar urban gray.

Alfonse Stompanato sat down, radiating aggression and threat. He seemed to be watching me, one department head measuring the aura of another. There was a Brooklyn Dodger emblem sewed to the front of his gown.

Lasher wadded up a paper napkin and tossed it at someone two tables away. Then he stared at Grappa.

"Who was the greatest influence on your life?" he said in a hostile tone.

"Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. When Richard Widmark pushed that old lady in that wheelchair down that flight of stairs, it was like a personal breakthrough for me. It resolved a number of conflicts. I copied Richard Widmark's sadistic laugh and used it for ten years. It got me through some tough emotional periods. Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death. Remember that creepy laugh? Hyena-faced. A ghoulish titter. It clarified a number of things in my life. Helped me become a person."

"Did you ever spit in your soda bottle so you wouldn't have to share your drink with the other kids?"

"It was an automatic thing. Some guys even spit in their sandwiches. After we pitched pennies to the wall, we'd buy stuff to eat and drink. There was always a flurry of spitting. Guys spit on their fudge pops, their charlotte russes."

"How old were you when you first realized your father was a jerk?"

"Twelve and a half," Grappa said. "I was sitting in the balcony at the Loew's Fairmont watching Fritz Lang's Clash by Night with Barbara Stanwyck as Mae Doyle, Paul Douglas as Jerry d'Amato and the great Robert Ryan as Earl Pfeiffer. Featuring J. Carroll Naish, Keith Andes and the early Marilyn Monroe. Shot in thirty-two days. Black and white."

"Did you ever get an erection from a dental hygienist rubbing against your arm while she cleaned your teeth?"

"More times than I can count."

"When you bite dead skin off your thumb, do you eat it or spit it out?"

"Chew it briefly, then propel it swiftly from the end of the tongue."

"Do you ever close your eyes," Lasher said, "while you're driving on a highway?"

"I closed my eyes on 95 North for eight full seconds. Eight seconds is my personal best. I've closed my eyes for up to six seconds on winding country roads but that's only doing thirty or thirty-five. On multilane highways I usually hover at seventy before I close my eyes. You do this on straightaways. I've closed my eyes for up to five seconds on straightaways driving with other people in the car. You wait till they're drowsy is how you do it."

Grappa had a round moist worried face. There was something in it of a sweet boy betrayed. I watched him light up a cigarette, shake out the match and toss it into Murray's salad.

"How much pleasure did you take as a kid," Lasher said, "in imagining yourself dead?"

"Never mind as a kid," Grappa said. "I still do it all the time. Whenever I'm upset over something, I imagine all my friends, relatives and colleagues gathered at my bier. They are very, very sorry they weren't nicer to me while I lived. Self-pity is something I've worked very hard to maintain. Why abandon it just because you grow up? Self-pity is something that children are very good at, which must mean it is natural and important. Imagining yourself dead is the cheapest, sleaziest, most satisfying form of childish self-pity. How sad and remorseful and guilty all those people are, standing by your great bronze coffin. They can't even look each other in the eye because they know that the death of this decent and compassionate man is the result of a conspiracy they all took part in. The coffin is banked with flowers and lined with a napped fabric in salmon or peach. What wonderful cross-currents of self-pity and self-esteem you are able to wallow in, seeing yourself laid out in a dark suit and tie, looking tanned, fit and rested, as they say of presidents after vacations. But there is something even more childish and satisfying than self-pity, something that explains why I try to see myself dead on a regular basis, a great fellow surrounded by sniveling mourners. It is my way of punishing people for thinking their own lives are more important than mine."

Lasher said to Murray, "We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans."

"We do. It's called Super Bowl Week."

I didn't want to listen to this. I had my own dying to dwell upon, independent of fantasies. Not that I thought Grappa's remarks were ill-founded. His sense of conspiracy aroused in me a particular ripple of response. This is what we forgive on our deathbeds, not lovelessness or greed. We forgive them for their ability to put themselves at a distance, to scheme in silence against us, do us, effectively, in.

I watched Alfonse reassert his bearish presence with a shoulder-rolling gesture. I took this as a sign that he was wanning up to speak. I wanted to bolt, make off suddenly, run.

"In New York," he said, looking directly at me, "people ask if you have a good internist. This is where true power lies. The inner organs. Liver, kidneys, stomach, intestines, pancreas. Internal medicine is the magic brew. You acquire strength and charisma from a good internist totally aside from the treatment he provides. People ask about tax lawyers, estate planners, dope dealers. But it's the internist who really matters. 'Who's your internist?' someone will say in a challenging tone. The question implies that if your internist's name is unfamiliar, you are certain to die of a mushroom-shaped tumor on your pancreas. You are meant to feel inferior and doomed not just because your inner organs may be trickling blood but because you don't know who to see about it, how to make contacts, how to make your way in the world. Never mind the military-industrial complex. The real power is wielded every day, in these little challenges and intimidations, by people just like us."

I gulped down my dessert and slipped away from the table. Outside I waited for Murray. When he emerged I held his arm just-above the elbow and we walked across campus like a pair of European senior citizens, heads bowed in conversation.

"How do you listen to that?" I said. "Death and disease. Do they talk like that all the time?"

"When I covered sports, I used to get together with the other writers on the road. Hotel rooms, planes, taxis, restaurants. There was only one topic of conversation. Sex and death."

"That's two topics."

"You're right, Jack."

"I would hate to believe they are inextricably linked."

"It's just that on the road everything is linked. Everything and nothing, to be precise."

We walked past small mounds of melting snow.

"How is your car crash seminar progressing?"

"We've looked at hundreds of crash sequences. Cars with cars. Cars with trucks. Trucks with buses. Motorcycles with cars. Cars with helicopters. Trucks with trucks. My students think these movies are prophetic. They mark the suicide wish of technology.

The drive to suicide, the hurtling rush to suicide."

"What do you say to them?"

"These are mainly B-movies, TV movies, rural drive-in movies. I tell my students not to look for apocalypse in such places. I see these car crashes as part of a long tradition of American optimism. They are positive events, full of the old 'can-do' spirit. Each car crash is meant to be better than the last. There is a constant upgrading of tools and skills, a meeting of challenges. A director says, 'I need this flatbed truck to do a midair double somersault that produces an orange ball of fire with a thirty-six-foot diameter, which the cinematographer will use to light the scene.' I tell my students if they want to bring technology into it, they have to take this into account, this tendency toward grandiose deeds, toward pursuing a dream."

"A dream? How do your students reply?"

"Just the way you did. 'A dream?' All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?"

"What about it?" I said.

"I tell them it's not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It's a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naïveté. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, 'Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'"

"What do you say to that?"

"I tell them they can't think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It's a celebration. A reaffïrmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don't mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach."

"Look past the violence."

"Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun."