Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Though to Lydia the fifties didn’t really seem all that distant. Just yesterday, really. Certainly nothing much had changed in Hillsborough. And what else? Walter Winchell was gone, but Herb Caen was still writing. Gunsmoke was still on the air. Mutual funds were very popular now. Willie Mays had joined the Country Club. Paperback books were respectable. So were California wines. Ann Landers suggested divorce occasionally now. The United States lost Vietnam, but who’d really wanted it? People drove little toy cars from Japan and had machines that answered their telephones. The people who called to talk to them talked to these machines instead. They still stocked Mallomars in cooler weather only. Israel was still there, and people seemed just as angry about it as they ever had.

Well, the anger. That was the difference. She couldn’t remember the anger, from back then. She was certain that it had been out there , somewhere, but it hadn’t been right here . There had been boredom and fear, there had been some terrible photographs in Life , there had been plenty of boorish people, most of whom seemed to end up in the United States Congress, who arrived with their wives for dinner or cocktails and who’d had strong notions about Negroes, Communists, taxes, labor unions, and young men who played the guitar. And then they left and you didn’t think anymore about Negroes or guitars or what have you. But now you couldn’t buy a house big enough or build it on a hill high enough to get away from the anger. It was an angry age. Restraint had been swept out of fashion. People working in the grocery store and the filling station were angry. The man skimming the pool. They were angry about their jobs, or about not having jobs, or about having jobs when other people didn’t seem to need to have jobs. They were angry about preservatives in food, about air pollution, about miniskirts, about college tuition, about property taxes, about there not being enough left-handed scissors in the world. They were angry about things people never even used to talk about. Had they always been angry?

The people who’d taken her daughter were angry with her, and she had no bloody idea even who they were. She could imagine perhaps kidnapping the daughter of someone who had, say, run over one’s dog. That she could imagine. A dog was, in many ways, more valuable and satisfying than a daughter. But to kidnap your daughter simply because you lived in a nice house and belonged to a prominent family? It was difficult to understand. There were certainly plenty of people in the neighborhood with more money than they had. Yet their daughters were dressing nicely and keeping up with their studies and preparing to become leading citizens. If these revolutionaries were such marvelous democrats, they damned well should have driven to Woodside and Atherton and Portola Valley and Los Altos Hills and kidnapped everyone’s daughters. Let everyone open the Chronicle in the morning and have to read about himself, “Mrs. Galton briefly appeared in the luxuriant front garden before her impressive home. She waved to reporters but declined to answer their polite questions. At ten in the morning, she sported a costly-looking string of pearls around her neck and a large diamond glittered from one finger.” In the end it came down to anger. They were angry with her. Take a number. Certainly Hank was angry with her, and she was beginning to think she had no idea who he was either. Alice was angry with her, and she’d never quite known what to make of her. Lydia was pretty convinced that the reporters below were angry with her.

Id zap me

iz mad ape

iz mad

mad

The other thing about reasons was that when she failed to provide a reason for something she had done, even when it was something she’d done without a thought, without, as it were, having had any reason at all, there was trouble. If she dressed in black, they wondered if she was mourning prematurely. If she dressed in a colorful print, they wondered if she’d put her daughter out of her mind. Why are you crying? Why aren’t you crying? Are you on tranquilizers? Pep pills? Have you been drinking? She was obliged to fabricate reasons for the way she dressed, for the jewelry she wore, for the hairstyle she preferred. No wonder that in the midst of this flurry of improvisational rationalizing she had to perform she sometimes got it wrong. There were the professional explainers, like Henry Kissinger, and then there were private citizens. And of course the newspapers, those mandarins of cause and effect, were all over her. Rainstorms and scarce parking spaces and the profusion of sex in today’s motion pictures, they had an explanation for everything. Nobody wanted only news; they wanted reasons as well. If you didn’t give them a good reason, they just made up a bad one for you. Here was a good example: Dutch Reagan had offered her, simply as a formality, her own seat on the Board of Regents of the University of California, a seat she’d occupied since 1956, those happy days. Of course she accepted the reappointment. It was a responsibility, it was a privilege, it was an honor. What it had never before been was news. But were those good enough reasons? Why, no. The reason, Lydia was startled to read, was that she was arrogant. It was arrogant not to allow herself to be pushed around by the gangsters demanding that she leave the board. It was arrogant to have done so without wringing her hands over it in front of the TV cameras.

Outside, a young man from KRON dashed out from under the canopy and began to sing a few lyrics from “Singin’ in the Rain.” There were a few laughs, a general murmur of appreciation. A little something to break up the routine of another boring day spent standing outside the Galton house. It was a practical form insanity could take. Or anger. Probably anger. Lydia remembered going to pay someone a call at the Huntington Hotel once upon a time and spending a perfectly awful afternoon, drinking tea and dodging catty remarks. It had been one of those visits. Afterward, stepping off the automatic elevator on the lobby floor, she’d paused on the threshold and then ducked back inside to press each of the buttons, from B all the way up to PH. She had no idea why other than that she’d been angry. “Singin’ in the Rain” was about the least angry song she could think of; it made “Happy Birthday to You” sound like “Ride of the Valkyries,” but why wouldn’t they be angry, standing under a canopy in the rain all day like a bunch of damned fools?

The doorbell rang, and there she was getting up, rising from her perfectly comfortable seat. She could greet Agent Polhaus or she could take cover in the bathroom. Probably she would go downstairs and meet her visitor. Hear him out. And then see him out. She had begun to suspect that Polhaus’s motivation for calling on them to deliver his status reports derived more from his interest in the twelve-year-old Laphroaig they kept behind the bar than from any sense of decorum or professional courtesy. She felt as if she ought to say, No daughter, no scotch. But then she’d be in hot water again. Well, whatever his “reasons,” there he was, and if Hank wasn’t going to hide from him, she was damned if she would.

TRAINING AND PLANNING. Tania scouts the area, working from Yolanda’s painstakingly detailed notes, typed up on the Royal portable (§VI.A.2., knowledge of main access routes, natural barriers, defiles, parks, schools, dead-end streets, stop signs, stoplights, shopping centers, parking lots).

Teko picks Jeff to lead the Bakery Operation, but Jeff greets the suggestion with naked panic. Teko persists; they conduct drills under the assumption that Jeff will be in command. Quickly it becomes clear that Jeff can’t even rehearse the job without fucking up; so huge is his nervousness that the hand in which he holds his unloaded pistol shakes disconcertingly; he stammers and falters when demanding money from Susan or Tania. Teko agrees to take over. Jeff will cover the bank with a shotgun and keep time. Three minutes in and out.