Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

A hand reaches out for Tania, clutches her sleeve.

“What type Jell-O? What type Jell-O have you got tonight?” It’s an old man, his eyes rheumy behind the unbelievably thick lenses of his eyeglasses. The words come out of a soft mouth that seems to be lacking many teeth. But his grip is like iron.

“He wants to know,” says a woman at his table, helpfully, “what the kind of Jell-O is that you’ve got here tonight.”

“Pressman’s on the phone even before the noon break: ‘Nixon! I’m sympathetic, the man is down on his luck. He shows initiative and he takes an interest. But then he tells Mrs. Glassman she’d have a better shot at getting a good fit if she went to the rowboat concession in Central Park.’ So Nixon, you know, he feels he’s accomplished something. A balance. Shuttle discourtesy. Plus, you know, it keeps Henry away from the office. He sits in that straight chair on the other side of Nixon’s desk, eyeing Nixon’s Woolworth chicken, kibitzing when Nixon has to take a phone call, erasing things on Nixon’s chalkboard when his back is turned.

“But that’s all finished now. Nixon’s back in San Clemente. Guys in suits out on the lawn, behind the flower beds, talking into their lapels. Neighbors complaining about the noise, the lights, the traffic; it’s their own personal Götterdämmerung. Nixon’s picking up the Trimline phone in the living room to call Pat in the kitchen to ask her to bring him in some sunflower seeds, please. Sure he has things to do: Match Game’s on at ten-thirty. He likes all those game shows where the secrets are concealed under sliding panels, behind rotating sections of a big lit-up board. So much friendlier than the hearings. If it had been Gene Rayburn instead of Peter Rodino doing the questioning, we all would have been out of there in nothing flat, goes his way of thinking.

“All finished. The laws of physics have won; this is a body at rest. But since he wasn’t ever interested in laws, why should now be any different? The tenacity, while it lasted, back from the dead, back again and again, it’s like a picture Roger Corman said the hell with. Because you want to show everybody. Hanging in there, sticking to those rusty old six guns. You want to show everybody. I got rachmones, standing up here, believe it. His what they call political base is gone, man. He may have been the one climbing onto that helicopter waving bye-bye, but the people are the ones who left him. They’re wiping the dust off their ColorTrak TVs with lemon Pledge, prepping the tube so it’s fit to receive its first images of the new top man. President Whatshisface. Well, far as they’re concerned, anybody’s better. Polls show people hate Nixon worse than they hate Hitler, Jack the Ripper, Count Dracula, and Idi Amin, in that order. They’ll all come back, though. He ’ ll come back. After all, it was just a third-rate burglary. For that he gets this ? What about all those old report cards he sweated out? He participated, he got along well, he showed respect, he obeyed rules, he showed self-control, he followed directions, he worked neatly, he had excellent penmanship. He scored a four-hole outhouse for the annual bonfire at Whittier. Only president to visit all fifty states. His own mother said he was the best potato masher, to die for. He’s got one more act coming, and he knows it.”

Someone hollers, “Say something funny!”

“Something funny, he says. OK. How many congregants does it take to change a lightbulb in a synagogue? ‘ Change ? You’re wanting we should change the lightbulb? My grandmother donated that lightbulb!’”

Diffuse laughter.

“For now, though, it’s all over. We’re all going to have to spend some time healing, recuperating from this long national nightmare. I see myself in a hospital bed, being spoon-fed Junket and kneaded with VapoRub by a round-the-clock team of nurses who look like Yvonne DeCarlo, Virginia Mayo, and Jane Greer, though all votes for Gloria Grahame will be counted. Thank God for major medical.”

“Young lady,” says an older man holding a menu, who then, having gotten Tania’s attention, turns to a young woman seated beside him. “You eat what you want. Get whatever pleases you, not a word I’m saying. It’s your stomach. But stop trying to have an influence.” The young woman rolls her eyes.

“Young lady,” he says again. “You got a nice piece of boneless chicken breast? It’s fresh? It’s not just sitting there in the kitchen under lights? All right, bring me a piece of boneless chicken. And make sure it’s all the way cooked.” He turns again to his companion. “You want to eat chazerai, go ahead. Be my guest. Not one word from me. You’re big. It’s your stomach.”

“Chicken. God, Daddy.”

“The whole time, though, I’ll be waiting for him to come back. I’ll be waiting, you’ll be waiting, he himself will be waiting. In the meantime, what? A little notecard to Rose Mary Woods? Rose Mary, she put in her time, God knows. She just wants to do her linoleum cuts of woodland scenes and have a second piece of coffee cake, for Christ’s sake. A little paint by numbers. She’s got nothing but time. She knows she’ll get a call in a couple of years and she’s willing to wait.”

Farber looks slightly distracted as he slowly walks to the lip of the stage. He thrusts his arms stiffly into the air to form the familiar V signs. Then he turns abruptly and walks off. Though a few have applauded automatically, most of the audience is astir with unease. They feel cheated. “Comedy Tonight,” it had said outside, and this guy got up, and just what did he do, exactly? A woman summons Tania. She appears furious. Everything’s our fault.

“What’s wrong with that man?” she says.

FIFTY THOUSAND TIPS. THIS is a measure of something Thomas Polhaus has never encountered in a lifetime of investigative work. He expects the public to take well-known cases to heart, he expects civilians to follow developments as reported in the press and to form commensurately ill-informed opinions concerning the Bureau’s work. He expects an above-average level of interest in the cases that set the screen aglow on the six o’clock news. He expects the people who want to get into the act: search here, dig there, check this out. Fields full of sheep shit in Petaluma, swampy lowlands, eerily lit by will-o’-the-wisp, near Modesto; places so lonely it ached to know that you were there looking for nothing. He expects that, always. He expects the delicately private reaction that the wider social phenomena in which the Bureau has become involved — the civil rights movement, the Left as a whole — can engender in a certain type of person. But this protean case is different. GALTNAP tosses away all the usual assumptions. It isn’t only a question of having an opinion about the case or the Bureau’s handling of it (of course there was more of that than usual). It isn’t simply that people either like the girl and sympathize with her family or despise her and her entire clan and want her shot on sight. There is also a feeling that people are calling, in effect, to ask the Bureau to investigate them, to understand them , to explain them to themselves, that at the kernel of each call, each letter, each message tied to a brick, is a secret, some concealed thing illustrious and profound to the sender but unutterable. This held true for both the patently frivolous leads and the ones Polhaus felt obliged to take seriously. Polhaus feels for them, understands that in every case the Bureau, and he himself, have disappointed, by failing to immediately decipher the secret, to recognize what is concealed.

The fifty thousand tips were the usual mishmash. After sorting through the mention of lost husbands and second wives, through noise complaints involving neighbors and neighbor dogs and neighbor stereos, through references to Madison Avenue and to the Pope; after hearing of the man who’d fucked his mother-in-law’s Thanksgiving turkey, coming in the chestnut and sausage dressing, of the woman who overheard her doctors discussing murdering her; of the man whose mother constantly projected psychic pain waves into his head from the back bedroom in which she sat smoking, pretending to watch her soaps, of my street was ripped up four separate times in the last year — once phone, once gas, once electricity, once water — and this is a known fact, and no one does anything. Sort through all that, and the tips found the missing girl sitting on a bench on Whipple Avenue, reading a paperback Peanuts book. They placed her on El Camino Real, passing out religious tracts. She was at shopping malls and weddings, serving kosher meals at Grossinger’s, and blending in with the crowd at ethnic festivals and Uriah Heep concerts.