David Wallace - Oblivion

The following was actually part of a lengthy telephone conversation on the afternoon of 3 July between Laurel Manderley and Skip Atwater, the latter having literally limped back to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn after negotiating an exhaustive and nerve wracking series of in situ authenticity tests at the artist’s home.

‘And what’s with that address, by the way?’

‘Willkie’s an Indiana politician. The name is ubiquitous here. I think he may have run against Truman. Remember the photo of Truman holding up the headline?’

‘No, I mean the half. What, fourteen and a half Willkie?’

‘It’s a duplex,’ Atwater said.

‘Oh.’

There had been a brief silence, one whose strangeness might have been only in retrospect.

‘Who lives on the other side?’

There had been another pause. It was true that both salaryman and intern were extremely tired and discombobulated by this point.

The journalist said: ‘I don’t know yet. Why?’

To which Laurel Manderley had no good answer.

In the listing Cavalier, at or about the height of the thunderstorm, Atwater shook his head. ‘It’s more than that,’ he said. He was, to all appearances, sincere. He appeared genuinely concerned that the artist’s wife not think his motives exploitative or sleazy. Amber’s finger was still right near his mouth. He told her it was not yet entirely clear to him how she viewed her husband’s pieces or understood the extraordinary power they exerted. Rain and debris notwithstanding, the windshield was too steamed over for Atwater to see that the view of SR 252 and the fixative works was now tilted 30 or more degrees, like a faulty altimeter. Still facing forward with his eyes rotated way over to the right, Atwater told the artist’s wife that his journalistic motives had been mixed at first, maybe, but that verily he did now believe. When they’d taken him through Mrs. Moltke’s sewing room and out back and pulled open the angled green door and led him down the raw pine steps into the storm cellar and he’d seen the pieces all lined up in graduated tiers that way, something had happened. The truth was he’d been moved, and he said he’d understood then for the first time, despite some prior exposure to the world of art through a course or two in college, how people of discernment could say they felt moved and redeemed by serious art. And he believed this was serious, real, bona fide art, he told her. At the same time, it was also true that Skip Atwater had not been in a sexually charged situation since the previous New Year’s annual YMSP2 party’s bout of drunken fanny photocopying, when he’d gotten a glimpse of one of the circulation interns’ pudenda as she settled on the Canon’s plexiglass sheet, which afterward was unnaturally warm.

Registered motto of Chicago IL’s O Verily Productions, which for complicated business reasons appeared on its colophon in Portuguese:

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NATURE’S NIGHTMARE

Amber Moltke, however, pointed out that if conventionally produced, the pieces would really be just small reproductions that showed a great deal of expression and technical detail, that what made them special in the first place was what they were and how they came out fully formed from her husband’s behind, and she again asked rhetorically why on earth she would want these essential facts highlighted and talked about, that they were his shit — pronouncing the word shit in a very flat and matter of fact way — and Atwater admitted that he did wonder about this, and that the whole question of the pieces’ production and how this rendered them somehow simultaneously both more and less natural than conventional artworks seemed dizzyingly abstract and complex, and that but in any event there would almost inevitably be some elements that some Style readers would find distasteful or invasive in an ad hominem way, and confessed that he did wonder, both personally and professionally, whether it wasn’t possible that Mr. or at least Mrs. Moltke wasn’t perhaps more ambivalent about the terms of public exposure than she was allowing herself to realize.

And Amber inclined even closer to Skip Atwater and said to him that she was not. That she’d thought on the whole business long and hard at the first soybean festival, long before Style even knew that Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Moltke of Mount Carmel even existed. She turned slightly to push at her mass of occipital curls, which had tightened shinily in the storm’s moist air. Her voice was a dulcet alto with something almost hypnotic in the timbre. There were tiny random fragments of spindrift rain through the window’s opened crack, and a planar flow of air that felt blessed, and the front seat’s starboard list became more severe, which as he rose so very slowly gave Atwater the sensation that either he was physically enlarging or Mrs. Moltke was diminishing somewhat in relative size, or at any rate that the physical disparity between them was becoming less marked. It occurred to Atwater that he could not recall when he had eaten last. He could not feel his right leg anymore, and his ear’s outer flange felt nearly aflame.

Mrs. Moltke said how she’d thought about it and realized that most people didn’t even get such a chance, and that this here was hers, and Brint’s. To somehow stand out. To distinguish themselves from the great huge faceless mass of folks that watched the folks that did stand out. On the TV and in venues like Style. In retrospect, none of this turned out to be true. To be known, to matter, she said. To have church or Ye Olde Buffet or the new Bennigan’s at the Whitcomb Outlet Mall get quiet when her and Brint came in, and to feel people’s eyes, the weight of their gaze. That it made a difference someplace when they came in. To pick up a copy of People or Style at the beautician’s and see herself and Brint looking back out at her. To be on TV. That this was it. That surely Skip could understand. That yes, despite the overall dimness of Brint Moltke’s bulb and a lack of personal verve that almost approached death in life, when she’d met the drain technician at a church dance in 1997 she’d somehow known that he was her chance. His hair had been slicked down with aftershave and he’d worn white socks with his good suit, and had missed a belt loop, and yet she’d known. Call it a gift, this power — she was different and marked to someday stand out and she’d known it. Atwater himself had worn white socks with dress slacks until college, when his fraternity brothers had finally addressed the issue in Mock Court. His right hand still gripping the steering wheel, Atwater’s head was now rotated just as far as it would go in order to look more or less directly into Amber’s great right eye, whose lashes ruffled his hair when she fluttered them. No more than a quarter moon of tire now showed above the mud on each of the right side’s wheels.

What Amber appeared now to be confiding to him in the rented Cavalier struck Atwater as extremely open and ingenuous and naked. The sheer preterite ugliness of it made its admission almost beautiful, Atwater felt. Bizarrely, it did not occur to him that Amber might be speaking to him as a reporter instead of a fellow person. He knew that there was an artlessness about him that helped people open up, and that he possessed a measure of true empathy. It’s why he considered himself fortunate to be tasked to WHAT IN THE WORLD rather than entertainment or beauty/fashion, budgets and prestige notwithstanding. The truth is that what Amber Moltke was confiding seemed to Atwater very close to the core of the American experience he wanted to capture in his journalism. It was also the tragic conflict at the heart of Style and all soft organs like it. The paradoxical intercourse of audience and celebrity. The suppressed awareness that the whole reason ordinary people found celebrity fascinating was that they were not, themselves, celebrities. That wasn’t quite it. An odd thing was that his fist often stopped altogether when he thought abstractly. It was more the deeper, more tragic and universal conflict of which the celebrity paradox was a part. The conflict between the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance. Atwater knew — as did everyone at Style, though by some strange unspoken consensus it was never said aloud — that this was the single great informing conflict of the American psyche. The management of insignificance. It was the great syncretic bond of US monoculture. It was everywhere, at the root of everything — of impatience in long lines, of cheating on taxes, of movements in fashion and music and art, of marketing. In particular, he thought it was alive in the paradoxes of audience. It was the feeling that celebrities were your intimate friends, coupled with the inchoate awareness that untold millions of people felt the same way — and that the celebrities themselves did not. Atwater had had contact with a certain number of celebrities (there was no way to avoid it at a BSG), and they were not, in his experience, very friendly or considerate people. Which made sense when one considered that celebrities were not actually functioning as real people at all, but as something more like symbols of themselves.