John Domini - Bedlam and Other Stories

She’d reached out and taken hold of his chin. She’d thrust her face at him: Look at me, Grissom! Finally he’d had to rise from the sofa shouting you’ve got it backwards Syl, you’re looking at the wrong side of the question. The whole reason I’m going through this is so people will respect my family, this is business Syl. And with an open-handed downward gesture at the waist, Grissom had started striding round the living room.

Perhaps that was Syl he glimpsed now, a dark cone-shaped figure back somewhere near the telephone.

“Starbaby!” the grip kept shouting. “Let’s go be alone. Forget your mama, forget your daddy—”

“All right !” But that wasn’t the blonde girl’s voice. The blonde girl was pouting and had crossed both bulky arms of her jacket low on her body, covering her belly. Grissom looked elsewhere. He saw that the beautiful woman in the green suit had both narrow arms angled upwards sharply.

“All right,” the woman repeated. “They gave us a thirty spot, fifteen back on either side.”

The activity around Grissom picked up again. There was a general murmur that sounded, near as he could tell, happy. He heard also a lot of emphatic clicking.

Then the Oriental reporter was standing beside him. She’d changed her mirror somehow into a cylindrical silver appliance, about the size of a penlight, which she was pressing into Grissom’s hand. It was heavier than he’d expected.

“Mr. Grissom, I’m sorry to be so rushed about all this.” She spoke to him in a different, much quieter voice. “And I do hope you understand about the people in the crew kidding each other. We have a girl today who’s new, I mean she’s just breaking into the business, and so I guess we kid around with her to, ah, in order to get her legs under her. You do see what I mean, Mr. Grissom?”

“I understand how she feels,” the man found himself saying. “I was young once myself.”

The reporter may have smiled. But he couldn’t get a clear view; she’d turned away quickly and squatted over the grip’s black box. All at once she was masculine as a baseball catcher.

“Yes thank you Mr. Grissom. Now you choose yourself: do you wish to stand or sit?”

At which the two bulbs inside the reflecting aluminum bowl exploded, and for several moments Grissom was suspended in a bright blindness through which the Oriental woman moved authoritatively, shouting in her other voice: “Yeah now, yeah now…all right so cut it…you can count it up or you can count it down but you better get it on either way….” Grissom smelled spearmint gum, then an oppressive lime breath freshener, then spearmint gum again. When his sight at last returned, the blonde girl was holding her compass-thing under his eyes, blurry against the bridge of his nose, and the grip was tucking a wire around his — Grissom’s — lelt thigh.

“It is three,” the girl called, sounding firm again.

“When they’re old like that,” someone else shouted, “the face just goes .”

“Mr. Grissom, please relax,” the reporter said when he jerked his leg away from the muscular grip. “Please, let us do our setup here, just stand still, you see what I mean.” She was out of sight, behind him possibly. “Time’s running short, and besides, you should understand before we begin, Mr. Grissom, you should understand that we are on your side. We are, ah, think of us as a company or an agency that works for you. Yes you do know that, don’t you. We work for you.”

“Give it some back light.” The Camera/Face loomed up once more. “There’s no time to tweak the chromo-levels and I’m telling you, his face will just go .”

The sectioned jade suit came in view again. Before Grissom could find the woman’s eyes, however, the grip was back on him, this time sprinkling Grissom’s cheeks and forehead with a kind of powder. It felt gluey, clingy.

“And Mr. Grissom? Another thing, please. Our viewers would be interested in knowing if you’re related to the astronaut, the American astronaut, you see who I mean.”

Already he was shaking his head. But could this be him, actually? Hey Grissom — the same person? Now that his eyes were shut the reflector lights had turned the inside of his lids a strange burnt orange, a color he couldn’t recall ever seeing before. His face prickled under its new coating in a way that made him think of a match just dipped in sulphur. Worst of all, he was responding sensibly to something he knew was the fakest friendliness he’d heard in his life. Yet Grissom kept shaking his head. This question, he thought with the same heightened reasonableness he’d used earlier, is a question I have been asked many times before.

“The astronaut,” he said when the grip moved away, “was no relation. My father came from Greece.”

“I see,” the reporter said.

Grissom’s eyes seemed slower adjusting, this second time around. The figures were no more than darker folds in a shattering orange sun.

“And oh yes, Mr. Grissom? That reminds me. Do you have any family you want with you now?”

“No.” His knees too, he noticed, were trembling badly.

“You wife perhaps, Mr. Grissom? Children or, ah, other?”

“No.”

“Your typical executive,” the grip said. He’d hardly bothered to lower his voice. “Like the song says, Starbaby: ‘It’s just me, me, me, me.’“

“Now that song,” the blonde girl said, “ is a new song.” She sounded as if she were smiling. She appeared to have moved over beside the grip.

“I see,” the reporter said, “I see.”

“Counting two sixties to fifteen in front!” the grip shouted.

Beyond the aluminum reflector, beyond the crew’s sudden zombie stiffness, in the back of the house by the basement doors, Syl sat at the kitchen table talking on the telephone.

“Hello Susan?” she said. “Yes it’s your sister again, your sister who married a caveman. He’s going ahead with it. Louie is going on TV.”

“Now,” the reporter was saying to Grissom meantime, “there’s one last thing, very important.” She stood beside him, speaking now at high speed, but she still had her face averted. It seemed she’d frozen, looking up at the ceiling. “Very important, Mr. Grissom. Don’t be afraid to let your feelings show. In this business, Mr. Grissom, we work with what people can see. We have a saying, ‘You can show them what you can’t tell them.’“

“Hey,” Syl said over the phone, “Susan, hey, it’s like this. The whole world knows before his family knows. His own family has to find out on the TV. Hey, who does he think he is ?”

“Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said quickly, “tonight for example we have only thirty seconds to get the job done. We have a thirty-second spot, plus a thirty-second shadow. Ah, fifteen seconds’ leeway, that is, before and after. Anyway Mr. Grissom, the point is, you can be a superstar with whatever time you get, or you can put millions of viewers to sleep. The choice is yours.”

“I can’t live with the man,” Syl told her sister. “Here Louie’s always saying, ‘respect the family,’ ‘protect the family.’ And then he shoves me into the garbage! Hey, thirty years we’ve been married, is that nothing? I loved him, is that nothing?”

“So Mr. Grissom,” the reporter said, “we want you to show them somebody who’s all one feeling, you see what I mean. We don’t have time for any gray areas. And I think you want the same thing. You want to show them.” Grissom nodded, fast, with her. “Yes you’re all business now. So then let’s start working it up, Mr. Grissom. Watch yourself on the TV, yes watch yourself, I know it helps to jack those feelings up . And oh. Oh I nearly forgot. You will have to watch your language of course, Mr. Grissom. But otherwise go for it. Go .”