David Wallace - Oblivion

Indiana storms surprise no one. You can see them coming from half a state away, like a train on a very straight track, even as you stand in the sun and try to breathe. Atwater had what his mother’d always called a weather eye.

Seated together in the standard Midwest attitude of besotted amiability, the three of them had passed the midday hours in the Moltkes’ sitting room with the curtains drawn and two rotating fans that picked Atwater’s hair up and laid it down and made the little racks’ magazines riffle. Laurel Manderley, who was something of a whiz at the cold call, had set this initial meeting up by phone the previous evening. The home was half a rented duplex, and you could hear its aluminum siding tick and pop in the assembling heat. A window AC chugged gamely in one of the interior rooms. The off white Roto Rooter van in the driveway had signified the Moltkes’ side of the ranch style twin; Laurel’s Internet directions to the address had been flawless as usual. The cul de sac was a newer development with abrasive cement and engineering specs still spraypainted on the curbs. Only the very western horizon showed piling clouds when Atwater pulled up in the rented Cavalier. Some of the homes’ yards had not yet been fully sodded. There were almost no porches as such. The Moltkes’ side’s front door had had a US flag in an angled holder and an anodized cameo of perhaps a huge black ladybug or some kind of beetle attached to the storm door’s frame, which one had to back slightly off the concrete slab in order to open. The slab’s mat bid literal welcome.

The sitting room was narrow and airless and done mostly in green and a tawny type of maple syrup brown. It was thickly carpeted throughout. The davenport, chairs, and end tables had plainly been acquired as a set. A bird emerged at intervals from a catalogue clock; a knit sampler over the mantel expressed conventional wishes for the home and its occupants. The iced tea was kneebucklingly sweet. An odd stain or watermark marred the room’s east wall, which Atwater educed was the load bearing wall that the Moltkes shared with the duplex’s other side.

‘I think I speak for a lot of folks when I want to know how it works. Just how you do it.’ Atwater was in a padded rocker next to the television console and thus faced the artist and his wife, who were seated together on the davenport. The reporter had his legs crossed comfortably but was not actually rocking. He had spent a great deal of preliminary time chatting about the area and his memories of regional features and establishing a rapport and putting the Moltkes at ease. The recorder was out and on, but he was also going with a stenographer’s notebook because it made him look a little more like the popular stereotype of someone from the press.

You could tell almost immediately that something was off about the artist and/or the marriage’s dynamics. Brint Moltke sat hunched or slumped with his toes in and his hands in his lap, a posture reminiscent of a scolded child, but at the same time smiling at Atwater. As in smiling the entire time. It was not an empty professional corporate smile, but the soul effects were similar. Moltke was a thickset man with sideburns and graying hair combed back in what appeared to be a lopsided ducktail. He wore Sansabelt slacks and a dark blue knit shirt with his employer’s name on the breast. You could tell from the dents in his nose that he sometimes wore glasses. A further idiosyncrasy that Atwater noted in Gregg shorthand was the arrangement of the artist’s hands: their thumbs and forefingers formed a perfect lap level circle, which Moltke held or rather somehow directed before him like an aperture or target. He appeared to be unaware of this habit. It was a gesture both unsubtle and somewhat obscure in terms of what it signified. Combined with the rigid smile, it was almost the stuff of nightmares. Atwater’s own hands were controlled and well behaved — his tic with the fist was entirely a private thing. The journalist’s childhood hay fever was back with a vengeance, but even so he could not help detecting the Old Spice scent which Mr. Moltke emitted in great shimmering waves. Old Spice had been Skip’s own father’s scent and, reportedly, his father’s father’s before him.

The pattern of the davenport’s upholstery, Skip Atwater also knew firsthand, was called Forest Floral.

The WITW associate editor’s typing feats were just one example of the various leveling traditions and shticks and reversals of protocol that made Style’ s parties and corporate celebrations the envy of publishing interns throughout Manhattan. These fetes took place on the sixteenth floor and were usually open bar; some were even catered. The normally dry and insufferable head of Copyediting did impressions of various US presidents smoking dope that had to be seen to be believed. Given the right kinds of vodka and flame source, a senior receptionist from Haiti could be prevailed upon to breathe fire. A very odd senior paralegal in Permissions, who showed up to the office in foul weather gear nearly every day no matter what the forecast, turned out to have been in the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, and organized revues that could get kind of risqué. Some of the interns got bizarrely dressed up; nails were occasionally done in White Out. Mrs. Anger’s executive intern had once worn a white leather suit with outrageous fringe and a set of cap pistols in a hiphugger belt and holster accessory. A longtime supervisor of shades used Crystal Light, Everclear, skinned fruit, and an ordinary office paper shredder to produce a libation she called Last Mango in Paris. The interns’ annual ersatz awards show at the climax of Oscars Week often had people on the floor — one year they’d gotten Gene Shalit to appear. And so on and so forth.

Of arresting and demotic party traditions, however, none was so prized as Mrs. Anger’s annual essay at self parody for the combination New Year’s and closing of the Year’s Most Stylish People double issue bash. Bedecked in costume jewelry, mincing and fluttering, affecting a falsetto and lorgnette, holding her head in such a way as to produce a double chin, tottering about with a champagne cocktail like one of those anserine dowagers in Marx Brothers films. It would be difficult to convey this routine’s effect on morale and esprit. The rest of the publishing year, Mrs. Anger was a figure of near testamental awe and dread, serious as a heart attack. A veteran of Fleet Street and two separate R. Murdoch startups, wooed over from Us in 1994 under terms that were industry myth, Mrs. Anger had managed to put Style in the black for the first time in its history, and was said to enjoy influence at the very highest levels of Eckleschafft-Böd, and had worn one of the first Versace pantsuits ever seen in New York, and was nobody’s fool whatsoever.

Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook with descriptions and analogies and abstract encomia to Mrs. Moltke, none of which could be used in the compressed piece he was even then conceiving how to pitch and submit. Some of the allure was atavistic, he acknowledged. Some was simply contrast, a relief from the sucking cheeks and starved eyes of Manhattan’s women. He had personally seen Style interns weighing their food on small pharmaceutical scales before they consumed it. In one of the more abstract notebook entries, Atwater had theorized that Mrs. Moltke’s was perhaps a sort of negative beauty that consisted mainly in her failure to be repellent. In another, he had compared her face and throat to whatever canids see in the full moon that makes them howl. The associate editor would never see one jot of material like this, obviously. Some BSG salarymen built their pieces gradually from the ground up. Atwater, trained originally as a background man for news dailies, constructed his own WITW pieces by pouring into his notebooks and word processor an enormous waterfall of prose which was then filtered more and more closely down to 400 words of commercial sediment. It was labor intensive, but it was his way. Atwater had colleagues who were unable even to start without a Roman numeral outline. Style’ s daytime television specialist could compose his pieces only on public transport. So long as salarymen’s personal quotas were filled and deadlines met, the BSG weeklies tended to be respectful of people’s processes.