David Wallace - Oblivion

‘I’ll overnight photos.’

‘You will not.’

As mentioned, Atwater was rarely aware of the up and down fist thing, which as far as he could recall had first started in the pressure cooker environs of the Indianapolis Star. When he became aware he was doing it, he sometimes looked down at the moving fist without recognition, as if it were somebody else’s. It was one of several lacunae or blind spots in Atwater’s self concept, which in turn were part of why he inspired both affection and mild contempt around the offices of Style. Those he worked closely with, such as Laurel Manderley, saw him as without much protective edge or shell, and there were clearly some maternal elements in Laurel’s regard for him. His interns’ tendency to fierce devotion, in further turn, caused some at Style to see him as a manipulator, someone who complicitly leaned on people instead of developing his own inner resources. The former associate editor in charge of the magazine’s SOCIETY PAGES feature had once referred to Skip Atwater as an emotional tampon, though there were plenty of people who could verify that she had been a person with all kinds of personal baggage of her own. As with institutional politics everywhere, the whole thing got very involved.

Also as mentioned, the editorial exchange on the telephone was in fact very rapid and compressed, with the exception of one sustained pause while the associate editor conferred with someone from Design about the shape of a pull quote, which Atwater could overhear clearly. The several beats of silence after that, however, could have meant almost anything.

‘See if you get this,’ the associate editor said finally. ‘How about if I say to you what Mrs. Anger would say to me were I hypothetically as enthused as you are, and gave you the OK, and went up to the ed meeting and pitched it for let’s say 10 September. Are you out of your mind. People are not interested in shit. People are disgusted and repelled by shit. That’s why they call it shit. Not even to mention the high percentage of fall ad pages that are food or beauty based. Are you insane. Unquote.’ Mrs. Anger was the Executive Editor of Style and the magazine’s point man with respect to its parent company, which was the US division of Eckleschafft-Böd Medien.

‘Although the inverse of that reasoning is that it’s also wholly common and universal,’ Atwater had said. ‘Everyone has personal experience with shit.’

‘But personal private experience.’ Though technically included in the same toll call, this last rejoinder was part of a separate, subsequent conversation with Laurel Manderley, the intern who currently manned Atwater’s phone and fax when he was on the road, and winnowed and vetted research items forwarded by the shades in Research for WHAT IN THE WORLD, and interfaced for him with the editorial interns. ‘It’s done in private, in a special private place, and flushed. People flush so it will go away. It’s one of the things people don’t want to be reminded of. That’s why nobody talks about it.’

Laurel Manderley, who like most of the magazine’s high level interns wore exquisitely chosen and coordinated professional attire, permitted herself a small diamond stud in one nostril that Atwater found slightly distracting in face to face exchanges, but she was extremely shrewd and pragmatic — she had actually been voted Most Rational by the Class of ’96 at Miss Porter’s School. She was also all but incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence and thus could not, by any dark stretch of the imagination, ever be any kind of rival for Atwater’s salaryman position at Style. As he had with perhaps only one or two previous interns, Atwater relied on Laurel Manderley, and sounded her out, and welcomed her input so long as it was requested, and often spent large blocks of time on the phone with her, and had shared with her certain elements of his personal history, including pictures of the four year old schipperke mixes who were his pride and joy. Laurel Manderley, whose father controlled a large number of Blockbuster Video franchises throughout western Connecticut, and whose mother was in the final push toward certification as a Master Gardener, was herself destined to survive, through either coincidence or premonition, the tragedy by which Style would enter history two months hence.

Atwater rubbed his nose vertically with two fingers. ‘Well, some people talk about it. You should hear little boys. Or men, in a locker room setting: “Boy, you wouldn’t believe the dump I took last night.” That sort of thing.’

‘I don’t want to hear that. I don’t want to imagine that’s what men talk to each other about.’

‘It’s not as if it comes up all that often,’ Atwater conceded. He did feel a little uneasy talking about this with a female. ‘My point is that the whole embarrassment and distaste of the issue is the point, if it’s done right. The transfiguration of disgust. This is the UBA.’ UBA was their industry’s shorthand for upbeat angle, what hard news organs would call a story’s hook. ‘The let’s say unexpected reversal of embarrassment and distaste. The triumph of creative achievement in even the unlikeliest places.’

Laurel Manderley sat with her feet up on an open file drawer of Atwater’s desk, holding her phone’s headset instead of wearing it. Slender almost to the point of clinical intervention, she had a prominent forehead and surprised eyebrows and a tortoiseshell barrette and was, like Atwater, extremely earnest and serious at all times. She had interned at Style for almost a year, and knew that Skip’s only real weakness as a BSG journalist was a tendency to grand abstraction that was usually not hard to bring him back to earth on and get him to tone down. She knew further that this tendency was a form of compensation for what Skip himself believed was his chief flaw, an insufficient sense of the tragic which an editor at the Indiana Star had accused him of at an age when that sort of thing sank deep out of sight in the psyche and became part of your core understanding of who you are. One of Laurel Manderley’s profs at Wellesley had once criticized her freshman essays for what he’d called their tin ear and cozening tone of unearned confidence, which had immediately become dark parts of her own self concept.

‘So go write a Ph.D. thesis on the guy,’ she had responded. ‘But do not ask me to go to Miss Flick and make a case for making Style readers hear about somebody pooping little pieces of sculpture out of their butt. Because it’s not going to happen.’ Laurel Manderley now nearly always spoke her mind; her cozening days were behind her. ‘I’d be spending credibility and asking Ellen to spend hers on something that’s a lost cause.

‘You have to be careful what you ask people to do,’ she had said. Sometimes privately a.k.a. Miss Flick, Ellen Bactrian was the WHAT IN THE WORLD section’s head intern, a personage who was not only the associate editor’s right hand but who was known to have the ear of someone high on Mrs. Anger’s own staff on the 82nd floor, because Ellen Bactrian and this executive intern often biked down to work together from the Flatiron district on the extraordinary bicycle paths that ran all the way along the Hudson to almost Battery Park. It was said that they even had matching helmets.

For complicated personal and political reasons, Skip Atwater was uncomfortable around Ellen Bactrian and tried to avoid her whenever possible.

There were a couple moments of nothing but background clatter on his end of the phone.

‘Who is this guy, anyhow?’ Laurel Manderley had asked. ‘What sort of person goes around displaying his own poo?’

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