While establishing my headquarters, hiring actors for the recordings, taking on yet more staff to handle orders and ensure that the portly doll with the hard hat that demanded, “Where’s my grub?” went to Lansing, Michigan, and not to Idaho, it had been tricky to remain attentive to Fletcher, Tanner, and Cody, or even to fit in phone calls to family farther afield. Although one call three years back had sounded fractionally off-key. My product had just begun to capture the popular imagination, and I was still excited; why, my pull-string dolls were apparently all the rage among the upper crust in my brother’s own city, having just been the subject of New York magazine’s lead story, “Monotonous Manhattan”—with inset scripts of Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg dolls. But the tone with which Edison congratulated me on my appearance on that cover had disinclined me to dial again soon. All the words were in the right place, and the slight sneering or testiness might have been in my head; you could never quite trust the phone.
Since then, for me Monotonous had become too successful—meaning, all that remained was for the enterprise to become less so. Only a tipping point awaited, beyond which orders would decline. It wasn’t a “problem” with which I expected others to sympathize, but recently I’d been suffering from an insidious lassitude that derived from having everything—more than, really—I had ever wanted. On the personal side, I had found Fletcher Feuerbach, to others tightly wound, but warmer and funnier behind closed doors than most suspected. (Stripped, he was a surprisingly handsome man, and he had once said the same of me: we were “stealth attractive.”) I’d had none of my own children, but my adoptive ones were still speaking to me, which was more than could be said of the average teenager one had borne; I’d skipped the bawling-baby stage of childrearing, and gotten in on the best part. On the career side, I had never been ambitious, and suddenly I headed a thriving business of the most improbable sort: one with a sense of humor. I’d made just enough money that the prospect of making a little more left me cold.
Wise high-flyers kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves. Picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated, disappointed, and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy. Be that as it may, it really isn’t a very nice sensation to not want anything. Thwarted hopes are no picnic, but desire itself is energizing. I had always been a hard worker, and this damnable repleteness was enervating. Without a doubt, there was only one solution to my growing torpidity, my Thanksgiving-dinner stupor writ large:
I needed a new project.
Brown with elegiac hints of yellow, cornfields drying for the October harvest slipped past my window. Overland electrical cables scalloped rhythmically by on creosoted poles, while globular water tanks on narrow stems glowed in autumnal sun like giant incandescent lightbulbs. The pastoral effect was blighted by big-box stores and strip malls—Kum & Go, Dollar General, Home Depot, and the recent explosion of Mexican restaurants, while as ever the Super 8 bannered in garish black-and-gold plastic: GO HAWKEYES, SUPPORT OUR TEAM! Yet on pristine stretches the countryside expressed the timeless groundedness and solidity that had captivated me as a child on visits to my paternal grandparents: white clapboard, potato crops, the odd horse. Whatever foofaraw was roiling the rest of the country always seemed far away.
Since then, Iowa had changed. A wave of illegal immigrants had arrived to work in the pork-processing plants. State politics had grown a febrile right-wing fringe. Most family farms of the sort my grandparents tilled had long ago been sold or rented to agribusiness, so that numerous farmhouses, barns, and outbuildings along this route had collapsed. The crop already subsidized to the hilt, more than half of that corn would be converted to ethanol—netting still more lucrative federal subsidies and so slathering a whole second layer of corruption on a grain once a byword for wholesomeness and a hokey sense of humor. The subdued isolation that was soothing to me was soporific to modern young people, for whom the anonymity in which I wallowed was swallowing. Just like my father in his youth, my stepson was frantic to get out.
By contrast, Fletcher was born in Muscatine, and his never having moved from his home state didn’t signal a lack of imagination; rather, a contented acceptance and even a certain profundity. “Iowa is somewhere,” he said once, “and that’s as much as anywhere can claim.” The modesty of the Midwest, its secure, unpretentious self-knowledge, its useful growth of crops that people ate as opposed to the provision of elusive “services,” appealed to us both.
Nearing the airport, I looked forward to having Edison around again—finally, company with appetite. My brother had been imbued with all the verve, the flair, the savoir faire that I lacked. Tall, fit, and flamboyant, he’d inherited our father’s Jeff Bridges good looks without also assuming the oiliness that had always contaminated Travis. Edison’s younger features were fine, almost delicate, and last I’d seen him the somewhat broader lines of his face at forty still hadn’t buried the high cheekbones. He kept his dirty-blond hair just long enough to flare into an unruly corona around his crown. The manic keyboard of a smile glinted with a hint of wickedness, the predatory voracity of a big cat. In my early teens, my misfit friends were always smitten with my brother. He had an energy, an eagerness, a rapacity; even into adulthood, he never hugged me without lifting me off the floor. Edison was bound to breathe some life into that vast blank house on Solomon Drive, a residence that, since the advent of Fletcher’s mad cycling and cheerless diet, had erred on the grim side.
For I was a homebody. I hated travel, and gladly let my brother act as my alter ego, catching red-eyes while I slept. I recoiled from attention; from childhood, Edison could never get enough of it. Aside from the obvious competition with our father, I was mystified why my brother wanted so badly for other people to know who he was. I could see coveting recognition for his talent, but that wasn’t what made him tick. Ever since I could remember, he’d wanted to be famous.
Why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you, when they didn’t? I adored the fortification of proper strangers, whose blithe disinterest constituted a form of protection, a soft, oblivious aspic of apathy in which I could hide, like a square of fruit cocktail in strawberry Jell-O. How raw and exposing instead to be surrounded by strangers who want something from you, who believe they not only know but own you. I couldn’t imagine why you’d want droves of nitpickers to comment on your change of hairstyle, to regard everything from your peculiar furniture to the cellulite in your thighs as their business. For me, nothing was more precious than the ability to walk down the street unrecognized, or to take a seat in a restaurant and be left in peace.
But then, the joys of obscurity were my own discovery. Like everyone else in L.A., I was raised to regard being a nobody as a death. It may have been easier for me to reject that proposition because from the age of eight I grew up with celebrity at ready hand—or celebrity by association, the worst kind: unearned, cheap.
I found being admired myself unpleasant, and far preferred looking up to someone else. While I’d looked up to numerous teachers as a child, that comfortable hierarchy—in which the weaker party isn’t humiliated by the submission—is decreasingly on offer in adulthood. Grown-ups are more likely to despise than adulate their bosses, and in my own self-employment I could only despise or adulate myself. Long gone were the days American electorates looked up to a president like JFK; we were more apt to look askance at politicians. Celebrities splashed across magazines excited less adoration than envy; in an era of the famous-for-being-famous, the assumption ran that with the right PR rep this talentless no-account with all the goodies could be you. I used to look up to my father, and the fact that I did no longer pained me more than I admitted. I loved Fletcher’s graceful, sinuous furniture, but I didn’t look up to him. In fact, maybe if you look up to your spouse there’s something wrong.
I looked up to Edison. I knew little about jazz, but anyone who tripped out that many complicated notes without creating sheer cacophony was accomplished. I was never sure the level of recognition Edison had achieved in his rarified circles, but he had played with musicians whom folks in the know seemed to recognize, and I’d memorized their names in order to rattle off
