Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

But then, midsummer, the calls began. Teko and Yolanda, calling separately, calling together, from public phones. We need you, Susan. Don’t forget us, Susan. She was thrilled. Jeff would conk out after a day painting down in Castro Valley or Hayward, a copy of Grundrisse open across his chest, and she’d be dragging the extension into the bathroom to have the kind of intense, whispered conversation she’d been missing since Angela had gone. They planned for the future, schemed and plotted. She sent money, packets of cash wrapped in dark paper and sealed in manila envelopes addressed to general delivery. She set aside more money to rent the W Street place. They worked the arrangements out, speaking frequently, fervidly; it was intimate and seductive, communication beyond words, she felt. She tried to project soulful desire into every phrase she uttered into the mouthpiece. She missed them. She wanted them.

But it was as a revolutionary that she signed on, even as she formed this emotional bond, and as a revolutionary recruit she expected a more formal sense of belonging, she expected a clear channel to the truth through the many, many shades of gray that she was certain they’d consider, she expected a studious solidarity, the cell hunched over its synoptic texts. It’s beginning to dawn on her that what she has is a small and argumentative group cohering around its mutual discontent, assigning it a name (“fascism”), and using it as a pretext for every kind of dim-witted excess.

Jeff comes into the kitchen, dressed for another day of life-affirming manual labor. She stubs out the cigarette in an ashtray that says GREAT ELECTRIC UNDERGROUND and seizes the soft lapels of her old robe in her hands, draws them together over her breasts. No, this isn’t the time for analysis. She’s always had her doubts. She had them when she found out that Angela was involved with them. She thought it was stupid and fruitless to assassinate Marcus Foster. Viscerally alarming that they invaded the home of Alice Galton and carried her off into the night. Ostentatiously self-seeking when they robbed the Hibernia Bank and shot two depositors. Boneheadedly dense to have risked shoplifting — what was it, socks? — when they were supposed to be laying low in L.A. But she’s caught up in something now, committed, successfully outpacing her boredom, for once. She will be drawn in and implicated, move beyond the everyday, into a kind of history, a legend amid the outlaw annals, larger than ideology.

LYDIA GALTON SAT AT her desk, waiting for Thomas Polhaus to arrive, alternately composing anagrams on a sheet of paper and gazing out the window at the ladies and gentlemen of the press who clustered below, seeking shelter from a cold drizzle beneath the wind-whipped canopy pitched on the lawn. There were more reporters than usual this morning, the reason being the occasion of her daughter’s twenty-first birthday, she supposed.

A good anagram for diazepam was “zap media.”

Though everything seemed to have a reason nowadays. She was always being presented with reasons for appearing before television cameras, for permitting reporters into her home, for providing emotional responses to “the situation” on demand, for traveling to places she had no wish to visit, for speaking, all the time, to policemen with their roving eyes. paid maze

She understood perfectly well that the reasons had been made up. If you were told why you had to do something, there was a greater chance you’d shut up and do it. Damned simple. In the end, of course, if you had any sense, you shut up and did it just to shut up the people intent upon providing you with all those good reasons they cooked up. It was why she’d married Hank, for God’s sake. She’d become so tired of hearing about him that she’d guessed it would be simpler just to live with him. Eighteen years old, and all she knew for certain in this world was that she’d rather hear anyone’s voice every day than her mother’s when she was mounting a campaign. The campaign to turn Lydia Daniels into Mrs. Henry Hubbard Galton, into an entirely different person, had been the last Lydia endured at her hands. And now here it was thirty-seven years later, and Lydia was an old lady, and her mother was dead and buried, and now all the good reasons that were presented to her each day as solid, practical, and virtually self-evident were to explain things, situations, that hadn’t existed even as possibilities back then. She imagined that hers was a shared perception, a fairly common take on the times: Where had the world gone?

Hence the remark that had made it into the papers, that had become notorious, scandalous, that had begun the process of turning her into a dotty joke. She’d suggested to Eric Stump — in passing, so she’d thought, a mere observation — that if Clark Gable had been in the house with Alice, those hoodlums couldn’t have taken her. “Where are all the real men?” she’d asked rhetorically. If Stump were a “real man,” he would have taken it in good part and laughed with her. If he’d been capable of understanding who Clark Gable had been, what he had meant, then the implication of the remark would have been obvious. But to Stump, to all these ignorant young people, Gable was merely something obsolescent, a superseded precursor of some contemporary creature like Jack Nicholson holding food between his legs. If she could begin to explain why a Jack Nicholson, or a Dustin Hoffman clouting wedding guests over the head with a crucifix, was not a patch on Clark Gable’s ass, for all their easy gestures of defiant contempt, she would be a professor of movies (something she was always astonished to note actually existed). It was a nostalgic remark: that’s all. A man who is jealous of movie stars is no man at all; he is a nitwit. If Stump had possessed the good sense to realize that she was not directly comparing him with Gable, that Gable was incomparable and that that was precisely the point, she might have forgiven him everything (though she doubted it). But instead Stump had scuttled off, looking all wounded , straight to the reporters, who naturally distorted the remark. When it appeared, the story had become Can you believe what the silly old bat had to say? Clark Gable, imagine that. Direct from the days of the wind-up Victrola!

Her nostalgia was not only out of place but out of style as well. The young people had their own synthetic nostalgia: a television show, Happy Days ; a Broadway musical, Grease ; and a movie, American Graffiti , all of which concerned a sentimental 1950s past. Men, women, and children alike seemed to accept these spectacles as the truth of the era, its absolute limit. Lydia sometimes watched the television program in the kitchen with the cook (it was Tuesday night, it was eight o’clock, it was Hank hiding from her in his study, so why the hell not sit watching the kitchen portable beside a woman with the last name of Núñez?). The lettered cardigans and pomaded hair, the snickering references to backseat sex that all of the nation, in the year 1975, seemed to find titillating. This was the first time Lydia could remember when there seemed to be a strong communal will to reverse the clock, an attempt beyond nostalgia actually to construct a living imitation of the past from the shinier and more durable pieces of its debris and then to dwell in it. There was of course the inconvenience of people her own age, not to mention the thousands still walking the earth who could vividly recall something as distant as the last century. While the conventional take on the ascendancy of Happy Days etc. was that these diversions provided an “escape” from the “perplexing” “reality” of a “turbulent” era, Lydia had little doubt that around the 1990s there would be a television comedy all about the trigger-happy days of the seventies. All this would be funny in the distant future!