I like it?”
“That I can’t tell you.”
Doug, who was younger and shorter than Chip, so persistently claimed to be in awe of Chip’s intellect and so consistently tested free of any irony or condescension that Chip had finally accepted that Doug really did admire him. This admiration was more grueling than belittlement.
“Eden tells me you finished the script,” Doug said, restacking some gelati that April had upset. “Man, I am psyched. This project sounds phenomenal.”
April was cradling three rimed cartons against her corduroy jumper.
“What kind did you get?” Chip asked her.
April shrugged extremely, a beginner’s shrug.
“Sugar bunny, run those up to Mommy. I’m going to talk to Chip.”
As April ran back up the aisle Chip wondered what it would be like to father a child, to always be needed instead of always needing.
“Something I wanted to ask you,” Doug said. “Do you have a second? Say somebody offered you a new personality: would you take it? Say somebody said to you, I will permanently rewire your mental hardware in whatever way you want. Would you pay to have that done?”
The salmon paper was sweat-bonded to Chip’s skin and tearing open at the bottom. This was not the ideal time to be providing Doug with the intellectual companionship he seemed to crave, but Chip wanted Doug to keep thinking highly of him and encourage Eden to buy his script. He asked why Doug asked.
“A lot of crazy stuff crosses my desk,” Doug said. “Especially now with all the money coming home from overseas. All the dot-com issues, of course. We’re still trying our very hardest to persuade the average American to happily engineer his own financial ruin. But the biotech is fascinating. I’ve been reading whole prospectuses about genetically altered squash. Apparently people in this country are eating a lot more squash than I was aware of, and squashes are prone to more diseases than you’d infer from their robust exterior. Either that or … Southern Cucumtech is seriously overvalued at thirty-five a share. Whatever. But Chip, this brain thing, man, it caught my eye. Bizarre fact number one is that I’m allowed to talk about it. It’s all public knowledge. Is this bizarre?”
Chip was trying to keep his eyes focused on Doug in an interested manner, but his eyes were like children, they wanted to skip up and down the aisles. He was ready, basically, to jump out of his skin. “Yeah. Bizarre.”
“The idea,” Doug said, “is your basic gut cerebral rehab. Leave the shell and roof, replace the walls and plumbing. Design away that useless dining nook. Put a modern circuit breaker in.”
“Uh huh.”
“You get to keep your handsome façade,” Doug said. “You still look serious and intellectual, a little Nordic, on the outside. Sober, bookish. But inside you’re more livable. A big family room with an entertainment console. A kitchen that’s roomier and handier. You’ve got your In-Sink-Erator, your convection oven. An ice-cube dispenser on the refrigerator door.”
“Do I still recognize myself?”
“Do you want to? Everybody else still will—at least, the outside of you.”
The big glowing tally for TODAY’S GROSS RECEIPTS paused for a moment at $444,447.41 and then went higher.
“My furnishings are my personality,” Chip said.
“Say it’s a gradual rehab. Say the workmen are very tidy. The brain’s cleaned up every night when you get home from work, and nobody can bother you on the weekend, per local ordinance and the usual covenantal restrictions. The whole thing happens in stages—you grow into it. Or it grows into you, so to speak. Nobody’s making you buy new furniture.”
“You’re asking hypothetically.”
Doug raised a finger. “The only thing is there might be some metal involved. It’s possible you’d set off alarms at the airport. I’m imagining you might get some unwanted talk radio, too, on certain frequencies. Gatorade and other high-electrolyte drinks might be a problem. But what do you say?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Check out the Web site. I’ll give you the address. ‘The implications are disturbing, but there’s no stopping this powerful new technology.’ That could be the motto for our age, don’t you think?”
That a salmon filet was now spreading down into Chip’s underpants like a wide, warm slug did seem to have everything to do with his brain and with a number of poor decisions that this brain had made. Rationally Chip knew that Doug would let him go soon and that eventually he might even escape the Nightmare of Consumption and find a restaurant bathroom where he could take the filet out and regain his full critical faculties—that there would come a moment when he was no longer standing amid pricey gelati with lukewarm fish in his pants, and that this future moment would be a moment of extraordinary relief—but for now he still inhabited an earlier, much less pleasant moment from the vantage point of which a new brain looked like just the ticket.
“The desserts were a foot tall!” Enid said, her instincts having told her that Denise didn’t care about pyramids of shrimp. “It was elegant elegant. Have you ever seen anything like that?”
“I’m sure it was very nice,” Denise said.
“The Dribletts really do things super-deluxe. I’d never seen a dessert that tall. Have you?”
The subtle signs that Denise was exercising patience—the slightly deeper breaths she took, the soundless way she set her fork down on her plate and took a sip of wine and set the glass back down—were more hurtful to Enid than a violent explosion.
“I’ve seen tall desserts,” Denise said.
“Are they tremendously difficult to make?”
Denise folded her hands in her lap and exhaled slowly. “It sounds like a great party. I’m glad you had fun.”
Enid had, true enough, had fun at Dean and Trish’s party, and she’d wished that Denise had been there to see for herself how elegant it was. At the same time, she was afraid that Denise would not have found the party elegant at all, that Denise would have picked apart its specialness until there was nothing left but ordinariness. Her daughter’s taste was a dark spot in Enid’s vision, a hole in her experience through which her own pleasures were forever threatening to leak and dissipate.
“I guess there’s no accounting for tastes,” she said.
“That’s true,” Denise said. “Although some tastes are better than others.”
Alfred had bent low over his plate to ensure that any salmon or haricots verts that fell from his fork would land on china. But he was listening. He said, “Enough.”
“That’s what everybody thinks,” Enid said. “Everybody thinks their taste is the best.”
“But most people are wrong,” Denise said.
“Everybody’s entitled to their own taste,” Enid said. “Everybody gets one vote in this country.”
“Unfortunately!”
“Enough,” Alfred said to Denise. “You’ll never win.”
“You sound like a snob,” Enid said.
“Mother, you’re always telling me how much you like a good home-cooked meal. Well, that’s what I like, too. I think there’s a kind of Disney vulgarity in a foot-tall dessert. You are a better cook than—”
“Oh, no. No.” Enid shook her head. “I’m a nothing cook.”
“That’s not true at all! Where do you think I—”
“Not from me,” Enid interrupted. “I don’t know where my children got their talents. But not from me. I’m a nothing as a