Carlos Martinez would be a fine choice, she thought. I’m glad he was the first man. Yes, a fine choice, if she could not have Quinn.
PAW TUCKET RHODE ISLAND-LATE 1970s
The personal greening of Thornton Tomtree began with spring’s warm breezes hushing up the immaculate lawn of Dwight Grassley’s yachting club, a somewhat tattered royalty that once had defended the America’s Cup. With T3’s name gaining coin about the country, Dwight sponsored Tomtree into the elite world of Newport.
Scion of the old Grassley family, Dwight had the duty of seeing that his female siblings made suitable marriages. He had three sisters: one barely coherent, in a Tribeca loft, one who did everything right, and one who was a problem. Penny, the barefoot, skinny-dipping conte ssa was not a bad artist, but she loved the many men who passed her way. Three of them had left her bearing three quite different children. It bothered Dwight that she was the happiest of them all, give or take a suicidal incident or two.
Nini, on the other hand, did everything right. A Newport Yacht Club wedding to be forgotten as soon as the ice sculpture melted. The couple were both homely but produced beautiful children.
Pucky was the problem. She was a long streaker, a tall, thin girl of
five foot eleven. She had a pleasant face, though her teeth were a
mite large. Pucky knew from her first boarding school what her route would be in the airless, closed Newport society.
She’d leave the race car drivers to Penny.
Looking closely at Pucky, one would see a personality bubbling like a newly opened bottle of Perrier. Her body was thin but made the right slow turns at the right places, giving her a tall flow which she knew how to use.
What seemed to be a shallow inlet was very deep, filled with disarming knowledge of a wide range of subjects. Somewhere along the line Pucky became very comfortable with herself, and she stopped the bull-moose monetary charges of a number of the yacht club’s finest who tried to court or seduce her.
Thornton Tomtree’s appearance immediately drew her interest. He seemed even taller than he was because of his growing stature in the national community.
T3, as he came to be known, didn’t like the yacht club scene, but neither did she. Those qualities, deep down, unspoken, got to her. She saw him as a great big Newfoundland puppy, not quite coordinated, but a lonely man needing a compassionate woman, wife, lover.
Pucky, whose short list usually ran to actors, writers, and artists in Providence, suddenly found herself taken by an industrialist!
She was far from invisible. She sailed splendidly, was a charming hostess, a charity workaholic, and mainly—a force in the cultural life of the state, including the great jazz festival.
Providence had become a strong satellite community for the artists who couldn’t quite cut it in New York. Pucky’s long suit was her quiet but very serious help for the creative. “Tis told” she was very romantic.
When all was said and done, Pucky wanted Thornton Tomtree’s magnificent mind, or enough of it to take her to places where she might get a chance look into his ethereal world.
Penny set Thornton up by sending him to the family’s beach cabana to get Pucky a towel, and he entered to find her naked.
Totally unexpected, she appeared as a tall, beautifully proportioned Greek statue, particularly her breasts, from which he could not remove his eyes.
T3 Industries netted a billion dollars the day they were married. He purchased Nanatuck Island, built a twenty-thousand square-foot home among the climbing rocks and flat level plateaus, and he helicoptered to and from Pawtucket.
The early years were palatable enough. Pucky gave birth to the required son and daughter a few years later.
His premarital introversion which she had found so charming did not hold up. The bloom fell off the rose. Clunk.
The ensuing twenty years was a catalogue of Thornton’s indifference to her and the good things she did.
Pucky Tomtree never did travel very far into her husband’s mind. He had a built-in walled city of a brain, connected mostly to speak the new language of the computer.
The fork in their road ran in opposite directions, and that was the way they evolved, away from one another. He showed up at a few baroque string quartets played at the Newport mansions for high-scaled charity events. Pucky was more at home with the jazz trumpets at the people’s festival.
Their children, CiCi and Thomas Carmichael Tomtree, grew up flatly within the required Grassley-Newport framework. They were flat in ambition, flat in achievement, great sailors and peacefully took their places in line on the inheritance ladder and went on to live flat wealthy lives with flat wealthy mates. But before taking that flat voyage as permanence in life, both drifted into the flower-child, hippie scene and had to be retrieved from Haight-Asbury on two occasions.
Pucky simply had too much vitality. Unable to plumb her husband’s mind or excite him physically, she endured for a time as indentured chattel. For Thornton, sleep meant working out a problem in his dreams.
Lovemaking meant working out a manufacturing glitch.
New York? Theater? A waste of time. Those puffy-cheeked clarinetists blowing out “Saints”? Good Lord, Pucky, what next? Conversation? To what avail if not to advance your business?
After two decades and out from under child rearing, Pucky threw in the towel. Her confidant was—who else but Darnell Jefferson?
“T3 is more a piece of technology than a human being,” she had told Darnell over and over again.
Even knowing the two were too far separated ever to have a fruitful and peaceful relationship, Darnell sideslipped the discussion until he saw a woman coming on fifty nearly totally melancholy.
“You knew what you were getting into, Pucky.”
“I knew and I never complained.”
“You went into the marriage with Thornton thinking you could change him, fuck him into compliance. Too many wives fling open the refrigerator on their wedding night and say, you don’t need those hot dogs, but you should have more yogurt. Nobody in the world can change Thornton Tomtree. He’s an original.”
“You can,” she challenged.
“Pucky, I can’t produce his testosterone for him.”
So, on she went with her good works in the arts, traveling to and from Washington on national committees, patronizing the theater in her region, supporting young artists. It was all very Grassley. And Pucky was to be congratulated for stabilizing her son and daughter so ultimately they were neither hippies nor druggies.
The master bedroom at Nanatuck faced the sea, complete with a hot tub and a play area. Thornton slept in the dark-dark because too much light hurt his eyes.
About five in the morning, most mornings, Pucky was awakened by the sound of Thornton in his bathroom, urinating and brushing his teeth.
She quickly went to her own bathroom, and he knew exactly how long it took her to prepare and get back under the covers.
A very low-key ritual dance began with a peck of a kiss followed by certain wigglings and allah-kazam, they were in the missionary posture. Give or take, the entire drill lasted around fifteen minutes. It was impossible for Pucky to confront him with his sexual inadequacy. He simply didn’t get it, require it, or see that there should be more to it.
The woman kept it to herself, had herself tied off after the daughter was born, and lived with a low tide of sadness always near.
Darnell always had business in New York and Washington, where T3 maintained offices. It was a wild time of happenings from the Challenger explosion to the Chernobyl disaster to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and his present wife often accompanied Pucky to Broadway theater, Lincoln Center, or the wild bright spots in the Village.
At the end of the night she often did not go back to the T3 apartment on Park Avenue but drifted down to the Village alone to her sister Penny’s loft. Darnell did not know that anything was amiss but suspected it.
He did not want such a tight relationship with Thornton’s wife. It
put him on the middle of a fault.
A time back, Darnell had convinced Thornton that he should establish a charitable foundation. The monster bill was tens of millions; its guiding philosophy was a support system for engineering, medical, and scientific research.
“Over my dead body,” warned Thornton when Darnell proposed a five-million-dollar research grant for AIDS. T3 was alive and well when the gift was made. It grabbed national attention, and suddenly over a hundred gay employees of T3 Industries came out of the closet.
Darnell worked the boss like he was playing a fine violin, so Thornton got credit for putting Pucky on the foundation board. It was a brilliant move, one that put a light into her eyes again.
Dr. Hans Neucamp, president of the Tomtree Foundation, was tired and sported squinting red eyes. “Grant number one hundred twenty-two,” he said, “thirty thousand dollars to Utah State for finishing ponds for the rest of the freshwater fish experiments.”
No objections.
“And one more. The Peterson brothers in Toledo. Their battery will drive a Jeep three hundred miles without a charge. They’re onto the right system for a breakthrough,” Dr. Neucamp said.
Thornton nodded his head.
“Well, that’s it,” Neucamp said.
“If I hear no objections, I propose we vote to pass the grants unanimously.”
“I object,” Pucky said. Emerge from your long darkness now, Darnell had pleaded with her. She caught a glimpse of Darnell on the right side of T3.
Come on, baby, Darnell thought, kick ass.
“Mrs. Tomtree?” Dr. Neucamp asked with a crooked smile and a voice that leapt just a few notes higher.
“What the hell is this all about?” Thornton snapped, looking at his watch. He leaned closer to Darnell, and Darnell nodded. “This being the case, we’ve had a very long day. Why don’t we adjourn till tomorrow? I’ll see what’s on Mrs. T’s mind, and it will only take a few minutes to wrap it up. See you here at ten.”
Dr. Neucamp wanted to hear what transpired, badly, but Darnell took his elbow and guided him through the leather door. The other board members, a cross section of intimidated silence, slunk out.
Darnell phoned the press office and told them to hold up the fund announcements.
“My goodness,” Pucky said, ‘”I object’ were the first two words I’ve spoken in ten board meetings. I object, I object, I object.”
Darnell started to leave.
“Come back here. You’re not leaving me alone with this crazy woman.”
“MIT, Cal Tech, Carnegie-Mellon, are going to be drenched in joy tomorrow,” she said.
“I know what my bride is up to,” Thornton said.
“When I came on the board, you agreed that a portion, not specified, would go to the arts. A portion of zero is zero.”
“Correct! Nothing of nothing is nothing. And nothing is where the arts are going in the next century. Playwrights have abandoned the stage, and novels will become relics. They prefer to spread crap thinner and thinner on a hundred and fifty TV channels.”
“Hold on, Thornton,” Pucky commanded. “We woke up from a war singing, “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” It was the nation’s song of hope. Brilliant and talented people carried this through the middle of the century with golden plays, golden novels, and golden theater. They were as good as any in American history. Richard Rogers, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck .. . Lord!”
“The people have made their choice, Pucky. I’m only following their orders,” Thornton answered.
“Their orders! To conceal corporate greed?”
“Oh, Jesus, Pucky. People have gladly traded their freedom for a web site. Everything, everything is going to be packaged and merchandized so they won’t ever have to get up off the couch again. You’ve heard the rappers .. .
“Oh, woe is me, Cop on the beat, mean mother, I’m in pain without gain,
So, listen up, brother, And listen up, dykes I’ll slash you for yo Hikes!
“You want me to support this noise?” he continued. “You want me to support so-called artists floating livers in bottles of urine and calling it art? Where are the men and women who write for the stage? A single American play a year might get through to Broadway. Not a single goddamned play in twenty five years. Jesus Christ, Superstar .. . that’s a musical?
“Listen up, Pucky, they are going to do up Broadway soon. Down with the hookers! Down with the pimps! Down with dealers! Down with the storefronts going out of business every week! Down with all the freaks! We are going to have us a sanitized, packaged, merchandized Broadway. When they run the faggots out of Forty-Second Street, we’re gonna have Walt Disney’s itchy-clean Broadway ... a place where a man can take his wife and kids into itchy-clean T-shirt shops.”
For the first time Darnell had heard his boss passionate about something other than his computers. Thornton knew he was on the leading edge of a revolution for the minds of the people, one where instant gratification and not knowledge dug from deep places was going to be the rule. Thornton was dedicated to some kind of sterilization of society.
“I heard a golden-voiced man sing at Juilliard last night,” Pucky said as if in a trance. “He’s no chance without a scholarship because the tuition doesn’t cover a crippled wife and two children, and unless we provide it, we may have lost a new Pavarotti.”
“We’ve already got one. Who needs another one?”
“Thornton. Musicians and writers and most artists are the least greedy people in the world. Because they cannot function without support, what do we do? Every culture since man began has supported its creative heritage.”
“Can’t you see, woman, we’ve been shedding this past year by year. It’s
a new scheme of things. So what is it, Pucky? Have we abandoned the writers or have the writers abandoned us? Revivals are going clear back to the Student Prince—a la mode. Or would you prefer a British tete-a-tete? The writers are all making more money filling up time desperately on a hundred and fifty channels. Money is good! Writers never had money. So, my dear, give unto Disney what is Disney’s and sweep Times Square clean and have little fairy princesses passing out gumdrops on Forty-Second Street.”
Pucky was ashen. He had too much truth in his words, but damned if she would stand by quietly watching during a cultural collapse.
Now Darnell Jefferson jumped in. “Wait! Wait!” he cried. “I’m getting a vision. Pawtucket has just opened a ten-plex movie house. I go to the movies. What picture? Eight of them are buddy-uddy cop bang-bang films that must gross twenty million on the first weekend or die. Ah, at last a picture I want to see, badly. Passenger plane, a 747, off course, transatlantic flight. Somehow a half dozen terrorists get aboard with breakdown plastic guns. There is a case of deadly virus stored in the luggage compartment. If, oh God, the canister is found and opened by the vile terrorists .. . good-bye East Coast of America. The president of the United States is informed in his bad left ear while dozing in a reception line. Call a scramble to sitcomm.comm.comm.org, orders the president over the head of his chief of staff, Field Marshal Stoopnagel. Scramble the fighter planes of the famous Asshole Squadron. Shoot the motherfucker down if it gets closer than fifty miles off the coast. A sweet, innocent little girl in row twenty-two brushes the hair of her Barbie doll. Tm going to see my daddy in Sing Sing.””
Pucky and Thornton caught their breath and waited for Darnell to quit
ranting. He didn’t. “Wait a minute, is this the movie where the
poison was going to destroy the East Coast, or where it was carrying a
load of kudzu seeds to strangle every tree in the South? Well, we know
one thing, don’t we? Only one man can save the situation, Sylvester
Ford Harrison, who has played in sixty films without smiling. He is lowered into the 747 toilet by a jet helicopter. You know, brother and sister, I left the ten-plex rather disappointed, so when I got home I turned on the TV to get a breath of quality. They had an uptown audience of
fourteen- and sixteen-year-olds and on the stage in front of the camera a lot of fat people. Jenny Degenerate, the hostess, asked Hydrangea Flapjacks if she’d had incest with her brothers and father. The audience squealed! Yes, ma’am, till I married my uncle.””
“All right, enough, Darnell. We have been patient. What are you trying to say?” Thornton demanded.
Darnell leaned over the table, and tears welled and perspiration dripped. “Thornton! For God’s sake! These pissy-ass movies and that pissy-ass television eat up more material in one day than was written by all the English authors during the entire Victorian era. Pucky is only trying to hold back an avalanche of ignorance.”
“All right,” Thornton said softly. “I want you to listen to something, and you tell me.”
He put a disk into the Bulldog’s CD-ROM and punched the required keys. In a few seconds music came over the speakers. It was sweet, melodic, dancy and teasy. It was pure Mozart.
Thornton changed the setting to what was obviously Beethoven. Pucky was caught up in trying to identify the symphony. It occurred to her that somehow, some unplayed and unpublished Mozart and Beethoven had been discovered. My God, it was world-shattering. “That’s the future of music,” Thornton said. “It is already the future of writing, as you have just documented so well, Darnell. The Bulldog was programmed to log fifty hours of each composer, then compose something new using the composer’s structure.”
“The computer composed that!” Darnell cried.
“That’s the future. Want to see some non-paintings by Rembrandt or
some non-statues by Michelangelo or maybe read a little non-Hemingway? Alas, the Bulldog is a little weak on Hemingway.”
Pucky looked around the office until she spotted the Ming vase she had bought at auction, snatched it from its stand, marched to his desk, lifted it over her head, and flung it into the monitor of the Bulldog.
MARINE CORPS AIR BASE, EL TORO,
CALIFORNIA—LATE 1970s
Throughout the history of the republic, military mavericks have popped up, some with innovations that changed the nature of war. After World War I, an Army Air Force general, Billy Mitchell, demonstrated the impossible, that airplanes could sink a battleship.