that again. Cities burned. Insurance rates shooting sky high.”
“He cooks, too. He’s cooking dinner today.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“Plenty of fellows do that these days. Cook, babysit.”
“How’s your son doing?”
“He’s still in the seminary. I got a card from him. It was covered with strange-looking stamps.”
“Yeah, what did he have to say?”
“He said he was having some kind of dispute with his superiors. He said they were too devoted to orthodoxy and ritual. He claims that he’s a part of a new church. A church devoted to social and political issues. His position was the source of his troubles.”
“That’s a mouthful. My nephew always did have a head on his shoulders.”
“There’s something that worries me, though, George.”
“What’s that, Herman?”
“When he came home for the holidays he brought this strange man with him called Brother Andrew. This Andrew kept addressing my kid as Bishop. He kept referring to him as the Bishop this and the Bishop that. He wouldn’t call my kid by his right name. My son ain’t no Bishop. I’m wondering what the hell is going on.” A float passes by carrying Dean Clift, the top male model of the United States. He is modeling some snug-fitting jeans. Men and women struggle with the police. They want to touch him, to feel him. There are a few anxious moments as they almost turn the float over.
Look at them. They’d cut out my heart if I’d let them. Take parts of it home as souvenirs. I have dreams of their fanglike eyes staring at me. My public. My audience. My life. When I’m in bed at night I see hands reaching through the walls, trying to get me. Will they always crave this body? This body which has never shown an inch of flab. It’s becoming more difficult to keep this body in shape. Maybe I should think of a new career. Sometimes I can’t distinguish between the real me and the billboard me. My life’s story seems to be a series of billboards, television commercials, beer ads, cigarette ads, shirt ads. I live between the covers of magazines like the commercial Buster Brown who lived in a shoe.
The crowd surges once again to get their grips on Mr. Dean Clift. The whole country wanted to cling to him, to become treacly over him. It had been a pretty easy life except for the tragedy occurring a few years before, and now there were muscle spasms, and palpitations, backaches, and sometimes on cold mornings he couldn’t move his index finger.
Soon I will look like Santa Claus, and what then? If Elizabeth hadn’t made those wise investments there would be no future for me at all. She manages the house on the Hudson and the apartment in New York. But what good is it? The city is overflowing with bag people, trash people, beggars of all kinds, refugees. Maybe I should accept those politicians’ offers. Run for Congress from the silk stocking district. Looks easy being a congressman. “You don’t even have to show up for work half the time. You meet interesting people and get to travel a lot. Something to think about.
They have to speed up Dean Clift’s float. Some of the crowd has pushed through the barricade and have to be clubbed by the police.
“Handsome fellow, huh, George? He looks like Steve Canyon. That set square jaw and those comic-book blue eyes.”
“He isn’t queer, is he?” asked Herman.
“Naw. He’s married and he’s got two kids. Well, one kid now. A girl. The oldest kid was killed in a bizarre accident at Harvard. He was trying to hoist a Confederate flag over his fraternity house and this other kid, a campus radical, started wrestling with him and the kid fell. He was impaled on a spike and was carried off wriggling on that spike. They had to cut off part of the fence to take him away to the hospital. He was dead on arrival. The kid that did it got away. He dropped out of sight.”
“How awful. Did you hear the news?”
“No, what news?”
“They’re thinking about running Clift for Congress from the silk stocking district.”
“What?”
“But he doesn’t know anything about anything. I’ve never heard him express a thought. At the parties, he’s always smiling at you, flashbulbs popping, beautiful women on each arm, the hostesses outdoing themselves to see that he gets what he wants.”
“Yeah, but he’s not just a jock. He does more than lift weights. He’s the highest-paid model in the United States. His face is everywhere. He gets as much as twenty thousand an hour. If a man like that had a brain he’d be dangerous. He’s got his wife managing his investments, according to an interview I read in Women’s Wear Daily. Calls her Mommy. Mommy this, Mommy that. Totally dependent on her. She packs his clothes and draws his bath water. A shrewd woman, though. Besides, who knows, they may become so cautious they won’t even want an actor fronting for them. He may pull a Mr. Smith on them.”
“What do you mean?”
“That movie. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In this one scene, Mr. Smith gets up and makes a speech in Congress in which he exposes all of the corruption in the land, and this one Senator, played by Claude Rains, becomes so agitated he leaps to his feet and confesses it all. I have a cousin who puts it this way: a dancer’s greatest fear is losing his legs, a painter’s his vision; an actor sometimes forgets where the real him ends and the character takes over. Writers too. You know, this guy Simenon, he said he quit writing because his characters began to dominate him, tell him what to do. So just like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the actor may tear up the script, ignore the teleprompter, and really say what’s on his mind. They might decide to replace him with a robot.”
“Aw, George, things will never get that bad.”
“Don’t count on it. A university in Santa Monica is working on a doll that will be so real it will be macabre. They plan to have it on the market by Christmas ’eighty-four.”
The men chuckle. “What do you say we go over to the club for a drink? I’m tired of the parade.”
“I can only stay for one martini. I have to fly to Texas tomorrow. Are they going to be sore when they see the bad sales figures.”
“Yeah, it must be tough on you, Herman. Arguing before those Texans. These slumps occur, but business ought to pick up. You’d think they’d give us more time.”
“What do they know about time? All they know is money and filthy bathroom humor.”
“We should have never sold Rehab Oil those shares. They know absolutely nothing about the department store business. Our grandfather comes over here from Germany. Builds the store from a pushcart peddling pots and pans. And then we modernize it and bring it into the twentieth century with high class merchandise, but how could we compete with these big merchandise chains and their discounts and their computers and space-age marketing techniques?”
“Maybe we’re done for, George. Maybe they’ll get rid of us and bring in some younger blood, some anonymous clean-shaven face who’ll do their bidding. The East is dying. We’re dying. Everything is shifting to the West. The sunbelt, and the gold coast of California. The Japs have bought up about three states in the West.”
“The East will never die. The East
