Daniel Price - Slick

“So aren’t you going to ask about her?”

That was Miranda, sitting next to me in the Tiki Bar at the Honolulu Airport. We were both waiting for flights to Los Angeles. Once there, she would hop her connecting plane to New York, and I would go home and go to bed. I looked forward to that.

I gazed up at the mounted TV, waiting for the five o’clock news. I loved being out in public when my stories hit the air. Here I could listen to the reactions of everyone around me. I didn’t give a crap what they thought about the nudity or the monk seal. I just wanted to hear them say the word “Fairmont.” That would mean I got them. It was a wonderful thing to see my mojo at work. Sometime within the next thirty-five minutes I’d be hawking my product to everyone in this bar without saying a word.

“Scott?”

“I’m sorry. What?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how Gracie’s doing?”

“Oh,” I replied innocently. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if she’s good, I might feel bad. And if she’s bad, I might feel bad about feeling good. That’s the thing about being raised by German Jews. I feel guilt at my own schadenfreude.”

Miranda laughed. “Fine. But she asked me to get the dirt on you. To see how you’re doing.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know. If you had more than one mood or facial expression, I might be able to get a better reading.”

“Well, you’re a reporter. Ask me questions.”

“Sorry. No. I’ve had enough disinformation for one day.”

“Fair enough.”

It was 4:50. The Channel 9 news team had yet to plug my story once between the slices of Judge Judy . That wasn’t encouraging.

“For the record,” Miranda added, “she’s good.”

I knew that. And I was glad for Gracie. There was really no reason for me to stay angry. We had what we had. From the beginning we’d agreed to be the Anti-Couple. We weren’t going to meld into one freakish entity or follow any preconceived notions of how to exist. No Franklin Covey tenets. No magazine quizzes. No chicken soup for our souls. And most important, no theatrics. We knew that melodrama was the leading cause of death in all relationships. We were two individuals whose lives would not imitate art.

That was the real pity. That she broke her oath. The tale of how she met and fell in love with her husband could have come straight from a beginner screenwriting class: a smarmy, syrupy pastiche of every Meg Ryan vehicle. Fortunately I was off-screen for most of it. The plot was eventually relayed to me by Miranda, who played the heroine’s blunt but supportive friend. She didn’t tell me what climactic stunt he had used to win Gracie’s heart. Rode a balloon to her office building. Dressed up in a bunny suit. Who knows? He got her. I got over it.

“So is there someone else in your life?” Miranda asked.

I checked my watch, then the TV. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because nobody likes me.”

“That’s bullshit. You’re tall. You’re smart. You’re funny. And you’ve got that whole sexy ‘evil’ thing going on.”

“Oh, is that back in vogue?”

The young bartender refreshed my Diet Pepsi. I dropped a lemon wedge in the glass, then stirred it with a straw.

“Whatever,” said Miranda. “Maybe I’ll fix you up with someone. I don’t know many eligible women. But apparently my husband does.”

“Jim’s a prick.”

“No kidding.”

She took a long sip of her Mai Tai. “What’s wrong with me, Scott?”

“Your taste in men.”

“It’s that simple, huh?”

“He’s beneath you and he knows it. I mean, he’s not that smart. Or interesting. And he chuckles at his own jokes. Nervously.”

She laughed. “I know, I know. He just got me at a good young age, when I was still wet cement. Now I feel like I’m stuck with him. Even if we split up, I’ll always be carrying him around.”

The credits were running on Judge Judy . Still no teaser.

“I’m just tired of all the bullshit,” she continued. “And I don’t just mean his kind. Or even your kind. My job is just…fuck. I don’t know, Scott. I’m sick of the whole business.”

Short of faking a seizure, there was nothing I could say or do to prevent her from elaborating.

“There was this woman who died last week. Pika Kumari. She was eighty-four and blind as a bat, but she died just hours after finishing her three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eighth clay sculpture. They were all of Ganesha, the Indian god of fortune. She’d been working on them day in and day out for seventeen years. She was blinded in that 1984 Union Carbide accident in Bhopal. You know, the poison leak. You know how many people died in that thing?”

“Three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight,” I guessed.

“Exactly. She stayed alive just long enough to finish her tribute to those victims. I cried when I found that out. I wrote this thousand-word piece on her. It wasn’t just an obituary, it was my tribute to her. Do you know how many newspapers ended up running it?”

“Zero.”

“Four. But they all whittled it down to a little nub before sticking it in the back, right below the pet obituaries.” She pushed away her drink. “Assholes. Too bad there weren’t any naked women involved.”

I checked the TV yet again. Why weren’t they plugging my story, goddamn it? I gave them plenty of lead time.

Miranda went on. “Human interest. What a bullshit term. Have people gotten so dumb that they need mass slaughter or full-frontal nudity to get their attention?”

“There’s a book by Bruno Bettelheim. The Uses of Enchantment . Ever read it?”

“No.”

“It’s basically a hyper-Freudian analysis of all the classic fairy tales. Screwed-up stuff. He has a whole chapter on ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ how it’s basically an unconscious allegory about sexual awakening.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“No. For example, Jack’s mother makes him sell the cow because she doesn’t provide milk anymore. Are we talking about the cow or the mother? Aha. Then he buys some magic testicular beans, plants them in the fertile ground, and then overnight…” I rose a hand from my groin to the sky.

She laughed. “That is such crap.”

“That was my first reaction, too. But Bettelheim goes on to make a good point. There have been thousands of fairy tales written over the course of history, but only a handful have survived to become classics. How did that happen? It wasn’t good marketing. There was never a GrimmCo pushing these things. They were simply the stories that stuck in the minds of kids. They grew up and passed them on to their own kids. Lather, rinse, repeat. Why do you think that happens?”

Miranda rolled her eyes. “Because on a deeper human level, sex and violence sell.”

“We didn’t create the need. We’re just filling it.”

“Whatever happened to a need for the truth?”

“Yeah, right. Out of the millions of people who love Big Macs, how many would want a list of all the industrial-strength chemicals that go into one? How many of them would jump at the chance to see their favorite burger get put together by some hygienically challenged teenager who probably fondled himself in the restroom without—”

“All right. All right!” She held up her hands, repulsed. “Bastard.”

“See, that’s the problem. You’re like a media fry cook. You can’t enjoy your own product because you see all the shit that goes into it.”

“Well, you’re the one who puts it there!”

“And you’re the one who serves it.”

“Tell me, Scott. Was any of this conversation designed to cheer me up?”