clubbed by the police.
“Handsome fellow, huh, George? He looks like Steve Canyon. That set square jaw and those comic-book blue eyes.”
“He isn’t queer, is he?” asked Herman.
“Naw. He’s married and he’s got two kids. Well, one kid now. A girl. The oldest kid was killed in a bizarre accident at Harvard. He was trying to hoist a Confederate flag over his fraternity house and this other kid, a campus radical, started wrestling with him and the kid fell. He was impaled on a spike and was carried off wriggling on that spike. They had to cut off part of the fence to take him away to the hospital. He was dead on arrival. The kid that did it got away. He dropped out of sight.”
“How awful. Did you hear the news?”
“No, what news?”
“They’re thinking about running Clift for Congress from the silk stocking district.”
“What?”
“But he doesn’t know anything about anything. I’ve never heard him express a thought. At the parties, he’s always smiling at you, flashbulbs popping, beautiful women on each arm, the hostesses outdoing themselves to see that he gets what he wants.”
“Yeah, but he’s not just a jock. He does more than lift weights. He’s the highest-paid model in the United States. His face is everywhere. He gets as much as twenty thousand an hour. If a man like that had a brain he’d be dangerous. He’s got his wife managing his investments, according to an interview I read in Women’s Wear Daily. Calls her Mommy. Mommy this, Mommy that. Totally dependent on her. She packs his clothes and draws his bath water. A shrewd woman, though. Besides, who knows, they may become so cautious they won’t even want an actor fronting for them. He may pull a Mr. Smith on them.”
“What do you mean?”
“That movie. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. In this one scene, Mr. Smith gets up and makes a speech in Congress in which he exposes all of the corruption in the land, and this one Senator, played by Claude Rains, becomes so agitated he leaps to his feet and confesses it all. I have a cousin who puts it this way: a dancer’s greatest fear is losing his legs, a painter’s his vision; an actor sometimes forgets where the real him ends and the character takes over. Writers too. You know, this guy Simenon, he said he quit writing because his characters began to dominate him, tell him what to do. So just like in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the actor may tear up the script, ignore the teleprompter, and really say what’s on his mind. They might decide to replace him with a robot.”
“Aw, George, things will never get that bad.”
“Don’t count on it. A university in Santa Monica is working on a doll that will be so real it will be macabre. They plan to have it on the market by Christmas ’eighty-four.”
The men chuckle. “What do you say we go over to the club for a drink? I’m tired of the parade.”
“I can only stay for one martini. I have to fly to Texas tomorrow. Are they going to be sore when they see the bad sales figures.”
“Yeah, it must be tough on you, Herman. Arguing before those Texans. These slumps occur, but business ought to pick up. You’d think they’d give us more time.”
“What do they know about time? All they know is money and filthy bathroom humor.”
“We should have never sold Rehab Oil those shares. They know absolutely nothing about the department store business. Our grandfather comes over here from Germany. Builds the store from a pushcart peddling pots and pans. And then we modernize it and bring it into the twentieth century with high class merchandise, but how could we compete with these big merchandise chains and their discounts and their computers and space-age marketing techniques?”
“Maybe we’re done for, George. Maybe they’ll get rid of us and bring in some younger blood, some anonymous clean-shaven face who’ll do their bidding. The East is dying. We’re dying. Everything is shifting to the West. The sunbelt, and the gold coast of California. The Japs have bought up about three states in the West.”
“The East will never die. The East will suffer some setbacks, but it won’t die. Too much sun out there. Genius thrives in bad weather.”
The first boss signaled the driver. The huge fossil-fuels monster turned from the parade barricades and slowly headed towards the East Side. As it moved away, Sister Sledge rode by on a float shaped like a huge turkey.
Vixen, standing near the curb, knew about Sister Sledge. She remembered their song, “We Are Family,” the theme song of the Pittsburgh Pirates. “We Are Family.” It never occurred to her that it was sung in march time. She wished she and her husband, Sam, were a family. They were drifting apart. During the holidays, she began to yearn for the old values. Of home and hearth. Maybe it was her New England background. The white steeples, the cemeteries, and the fir trees of New Hampshire and the white birch of Vermont. She’d cooked a Thanksgiving feast for herself and Sam. Turkey, corn, pumpkin pie. That’s how much the holidays got to her. She would always get the blues during the holidays. But Sam hadn’t come home. He had said he was going down to one of the East Side piers to hear a jazz concert, but he hadn’t returned. Maybe there was another woman. She caught him once with another woman and he said that he had to do it because the creative drive is connected to the libido and that he had a painter’s block. She wondered was he fucking that dark-haired slinky-looking waitress down on Prince Street. She wondered if he knew she was fucking Romeo, his best friend. Unlike Sam, who sometimes made her feel like a human doughnut, Romeo took his time. He looked like Julius LaRosa and did it elegant like Marcello Mastroianni.
This marriage was the pits. She was tired of the painters coming over to her house, smoking pot and drinking beer and referring to painters who weren’t present as prostitutes and faggots. She wanted to have Sam’s baby but he’d smoked so much dope that his sperm, instead of containing the population of a small town, held that of a bus stop in Oakland. Plus, he had a chronic cough now. She’d read that marijuana contained some kind of fungus similar to that one finds in the damp dark corners of a house. She was tired of working as a busgirl and ticket taker while he painted. She was better educated than his friends were and if they’d listen to her she could tell them why nobody would give them a show. The stuff they were heralding as new was done thirty years ago in Belgium. She was tired of New York. She didn’t have any girlfriends she could relate to. New York was grimy and the sky always had the color of an embalmed oyster. In her elevator, they’d found a woman who had been brutally raped and murdered; she had been stabbed thirty-two times. Drunks urinated at the entrance to their loft. They were three months behind in their rent because Sam had quit his shipping-clerk job in order to, as he put it, devote full time to his “art.” He was in bad shape. He wouldn’t even clean underneath his nails. He was always scratching his scalp. He gave her the crabs, and his belly was beginning to drop over his belt, and all he did was lie around or talk a lot of feverish incoherent meaningless jargon full of “O Wow.” He used to say “heavy” a lot but he met a French painter at a party and now he was saying formidable a lot. She was having fun today watching the Macy’s parade.
The parade looked like an illustration by a well-known American illustrator who smoked a pipe and owned a prominent Adam’s apple. Melba Moore sang atop a float sponsored by the Daily News. It was made of a miniature skyline of New York dominated by a huge apple. Melba sat on the apple singing “I Love New York.”
Sam’s friends would ridicule Vixen for taking delight in this Thanksgiving Day Parade. She was wearing the same black bear coat she’d worn in college. She had blown hair. Her hands were shoved into her pockets. She had a feeling of well-being because she was close to a decision. She always had this feeling when her mind was being made up and she was about to take another step. She’d been dreaming of her father recently. He’d died of a heart attack a few years ago. Her mother was smart and glamorous and didn’t have much time to be a mother. She’d run away to New Mexico and, when last heard, she was drinking herself to death.
Her friend Jennifer had moved to Alaska. Jennifer had written that there were lots of jobs and men available