Lionel Shriver - The New Republic

“Why not?” said Nicola. “Gauging o vento insano is a local preoccupation. There’s an unstable high-to-low-pressure interface between the Med and the Atlantic that creates a near-permanent sirocco across the Barban peninsula. And no, it’s not always this bad, Edgar; it’s generally much worse. Some days advisories are issued not to leave your house. Most natives learn to protect themselves, but others give over. There’s a certain stupefied idiocy you’ll find around here that results from gross exposure to the atmosphere. Vento -heads extend their arms to let the gale keep them aloft. Their eyes glaze and dry out. Sometimes they fall asleep, since the wind props them up. O vento insano can get into your head. Like tinnitus.”

“Or like Creamie propaganda,” said Pyre. “It’s incessant, it never varies except in decibel level, and subjection to enough of it turns you into a moron.”

“Sweetheart?” Nicola looked about rapidly, her long hair flailing, before she located her husband. It wasn’t such a large room that she should worry about losing him, physically at least. “Would you like another Diamond White?”

Henry ignored her, and collapsed indolently into an armchair. Surprisingly, on close examination Nicola’s husband was probably about thirty-five. Slight and gangly with a cowlick and freckles, in charitable light Henry might have passed for a kid, except for a telltale hardening of his adolescent features, as if a seventeen-year-old had been sculpted in wax. If he looked a little careworn, his Happy Days face appeared frozen in perpetual distress that he didn’t have a prom date. By contrast, ever since the Celery Wars Edgar’s brow had been plowed with mature furrows, the grooves from his nose to the corners of his mouth scored with the gravity of a stock-market crash.

One aspect of the Madame Tussauds teenager was intriguing. Money has an eye for money, and Edgar not long ago had a lot of it. That watch on Henry’s wrist was gold, and not plate. Clean lines, sweet dial: classy, and three thousand bucks if it was ten cents. Someone had taste, and Edgar bet it wasn’t Henry. Yet the clasp was fastened carelessly loose, and the face dropped around his hand. Likewise that salmon raw-silk shirt was Yves Saint Laurent, the blond suede vest Gucci, but the sleeves were crudely bunched above his elbows, and the suede was filthy. Whoever had spent a lot of dough on that gear, it now roused only Henry’s indifference.

“Henry? Sweetie? Let me get you a cold one.” Nicola scurried to the kitchen.

Pyre tsked at her back. “Poor Nick and Henry. They used to be so repulsively happy. Now they just seem that way, like everyone else.”

“What happened?” asked Edgar.

“With couples, it’s more often who .”

“Let me guess,” said Edgar.

“You’re quick,” Pyre conceded. “You’ll need to be. Those aren’t easy boots to fill.”

“Another devoted fan?” asked Edgar dryly.

“I deplore the man,” said Pyre, and for the first time Edgar warmed to the veteran hack. “He’s everything that gives journalists a bad name: arrogant, irresponsible, inaccurate. He thinks he’s bigger than his story. Barba, well, he thinks he owns Barba, as if he made the place up. He’s unserious. Saddler’s seen a lot of the world, and at its worst. But I have, too—Lebanon, Somalia—and it’s the dickens not to simply turn nasty. But Saddler, Saddler’s reaction has been hysterical. I mean he finds everything funny. Me, I’m not amused. Saddler covers terrorist incidents as if they’re practical jokes. But I’ve had one pulled on me.” Pyre patted his bad leg. “In eighty-three, I was conducting an interview near that Marine barracks car bomb in Beirut. Though I got off light, I’ll never play tennis again. Saddler thinks that’s a hah-hah. But I liked playing tennis.”

“You still talk about him in the present tense.”

“Barrington Saddler would never submit to anything melodramatic without an audience. I doubt he takes a dump without someone watching.”

“Even flamboyant fatheads get run over by buses,” Edgar countered.

“Saddler would more likely run over the bus himself.”

“He’s that much of a load?”

“He’s that determined that nothing get in his way. Now, can I introduce you to a few of your colleagues? Though don’t expect overnight fast friends.”

“How did I manage to step on toes from twenty feet?”

“By not being Merry Barry. Since Saddler jumped ship, the pulse of this town has slowed to hibernation levels. Truth is, I kinda miss hating the guy.”

“Are we still playing, or not?” asked the blonde, whose face had that clear-eyed, clear-skinned symmetry used to sell moisturizing cream, but that for the life of him Edgar could never find sexy.

Win Pyre thumped his cane on the carpet and made introductions.

“Am I interrupting something?” asked Edgar.

“Yes, thank God. Party games.” The reporter for the London Guardian , Roland Ordway, spewed a thin stream of smoke. His spiky black hair sprayed at the cleverly balanced Katzenjammer angles of a pricey designer cut. Young and sleazily good-looking, Ordway kept the arms of his sports jacket jammed above his elbows, and his jeans were ironed with a crease. As for the cowboy boots, Ordway was the sort of Brit who thought Americana was hip so long as Americans didn’t come with it.

“What’s the game?” Edgar bounced onto the balls of his feet, literally on his toes.

“To name the game is to lose it.” Sucking his ciggie, Ordway pinched the butt from underneath.

“Let Trudy explain, then,” said the frump on the loveseat, a correspondent for the Washington Post whose name was Martha Hulbert. “She adores losing.”

Martha was one of those women who look terrible on purpose. Her shapeless dress was scalloped with chintzy gold-painted plastic chain at the waist, its fabric the corrupted green of aged broccoli florets; imagining any woman walking into a store and choosing this spoilage-colored sack boggled the mind. Martha might have looked presentable if she lost twenty pounds, but Edgar knew the sort: all her life she’d hug those twenty pounds like a kid with a stuffed bunny.

“We’re timing ourselves,” said Ordway. “To see how long we can go without mentioning He Who Is No Longer With Us. There. A black mark for me.”

“It’s a stupid game,” said Trudy Sisson, the cover-girl blonde whom Pyre had introduced with a curdled lip as a “freelance photographer.” In this case “freelance” appeared to mean “bankrolled by Daddy,” and in Pyre’s mind Trudy Sisson’s bowling-pin calves and syrupy Southern accent must have dropped her IQ thirty points. Edgar had ridiculed his share of secretarial bimbos at the firm, but like the smell of your own armpits prejudice is less obnoxious when it’s yours, and for the moment he felt sorry for her. He’d get over it.

“Leastways when Barrington comes up it’s a little like he’s still here,” Trudy went on. “For a few seconds we have some energy. And I wanted to hear about the twins.”

“I gather they’re still not speaking,” said Martha.

“Lucky us,” said Ordway. “Remember what they said ?”

“Sorry.” Martha glanced dutifully at Edgar. “Bear had an affair—”

Ordway began to singsong, “Bear had an affair with two twins—”

“A team, once upon a time,” Martha persevered.

“And shimmied all four shapely shins—”

“Roland, if you don’t mind, I’m trying to be polite!” said Martha sharply. “They wrote and photographed for Esquire . Very successful duo—”