Because of some sort of hassle between Style and its imaging tech vendor over the terms of the service agreement, the fax machine that Skip Atwater shared with one other full time salaryman had had both a defunct ringer and a missing tray for over a month. Laurel Manderley was in stocking feet at Atwater’s console formatting additional background on The Suffering Channel when the fax machine’s red incoming light began blinking behind her. The Kinko’s franchise in Scipio IN had no scanner, but it did have a digital faxing option that was vastly better than an ordinary low pixel fax. The images Atwater was forwarding to Laurel Manderley began to emerge from the unit’s feeder, coiled slightly, detached, and floated in a back and forth fashion to the antistatic carpet. It would be almost 6:00 before she broke for a raisin and even saw them.
The first great grape sized drops were striking the windshield as the severely canted car left Scipio’s commercial district, made two left turns in rapid succession, and proceeded out of town on a numbered county road whose gravel was so fresh it fairly gleamed in the gathering stormlight. Mrs. Moltke was navigating. Atwater now wore a mushroom colored Robert Talbott raincoat over his blazer. As was SOP for Indiana storms, there were several minutes of high winds and tentative spatters, followed by a brief eerie stillness that had the quality of an immense inhalation as gravel clattered beneath their chassis. Then fields and trees and cornrows’ furrows all vanished in a sheet of sideways rain that sent vague tumbling things across the road ahead and behind. It was like nothing anyone east of Cleveland has ever seen. Atwater, whose father had been a Civil Defense volunteer during the F4 tornado that struck parts of Anderson in 1977, enjoined Amber to try to find something on the AM band that wasn’t just concussive static. With the car’s front seat unit moved all the way back to accommodate her, Atwater had to strain way out to reach the pedals, which made it difficult to lean forward anxiously and scan upward for assembling funnels. The odd hailstone made a musical sound against the rental’s hood. The great myth is that the bad ones don’t last long.
Amber Moltke directed Atwater through a murine succession of rural roads and even smaller roads off those roads until they were on little more than the ghost of a two track lane that cut through great whipping tracts of Rorschach shrubbery. Her instructions came primarily in the form of slight motions of her head and left hand, which were all she could move within the confines of her safety belt and harness, against which latter her body strained in several different places with resultant depressions and folds. Atwater’s face was the same color as his raincoat by the time they reached their destination, some gap or terminus in the foliage which Amber explained was actually a kind of crude mesa whose vantage overlooked a large nitrogen fixative factory, whose complex and emberous lights at night were an attraction countywide. All that was visible at present was the storm working against the Cavalier’s windshield like some sort of berserk car wash, but Atwater told Mrs. Moltke that he certainly appreciated her taking time out to let him absorb some of the local flavor. He watched her begin trying to disengage her seat’s restraint system. The ambient noise was roughly equivalent to midcabin on a jetliner. There was, he could detect, a slight ammonial tang to the area’s air.
Atwater had, by this point, helped Amber Moltke into the vehicle three separate times and out of it twice. Though technically fat, she presented more as simply huge, extrudent in all three dimensions. At least a half foot taller than the journalist, she managed to seem both towering and squat. Her release of the seat belt produced an effect not unlike an impact’s airbag. Atwater’s notebook already contained a description of Mrs. Moltke’s fatness as being the smooth solid kind as opposed to the soft plumpness or billowing aspect or loose flapping fat of some obese people. There was no cellulite, no quivery or pendent or freehanging parts—she was enormous and firm, and fair the same way babies are. A head the size of a motorcycle tire was topped by a massive blond pageboy whose bangs were thick and not wholly even, receding into a complexly textured bale of curls in the rear areas. In the light of the storm she seemed to glow; the umbrella she carried was not for rain. ‘I so much as get downwind of the sun and I burn,’ had been Amber’s explanation to Skip as the artist/husband held the great flowered thing out at arms’ length to spread it in the driveway and then angle it up over the car’s rear door just so.
Many of Style’s upper echelon interns convened for a working lunch at Chambers Street’s Tutti Mangia restaurant twice a week, to discuss issues of concern and transact any editorial or other business that was pending, after which each returned to her respective mentor and relayed whatever was germane. It was an efficient practice that saved the magazine’s paid staffers a great deal of time and emotional energy. Many of the interns at Monday’s lunches traditionally had the Niçoise salad, which was outrageously good here.
They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade. Which management was happy to do—conjoin the tables. It was an interesting station to serve or sit near. The Style interns all still possessed the lilting inflections and vaguely outraged facial expressions of adolescence, which were in sharp contrast to their extraordinary table manners and to the brisk clipped manner of their gestures and speech, as well as to the fact that their outfits’ elements were nearly always members of the same color family, a very adult type of coordination that worked to convey a formal and businesslike tone to each ensemble. For reasons with origins much farther back in history than anyone at the table could have speculated about, a majority of the editorial interns at Style traditionally come from Seven Sisters colleges. Also at the table was one very plain but self possessed intern who worked with the design director up in Style’s executive offices on the 82nd floor. The two least conservatively dressed interns were senior shades from Research and also always wore, unless the day was really overcast, dark glasses to cover the red rings their jobs’ goggles left around their eyes, which were slow to fade. It was also true that no fewer than five of the interns at the working lunch on 2 July were named either Laurel or Tara, although it’s not as if people can help what their names are.
Laurel Manderley, who tended to favor very soft simple lines in business attire, wore a black Armani skirt and jacket ensemble with sheer hose and an objectively stunning pair of Miu Miu pumps that she’d picked up for next to nothing at a flea market in Milan the previous summer. Her hair was up and had a lacquer chopstick through the chignon. Ellen Bactrian often took a noon dance class on Mondays and was not at today’s working lunch, though four of the other associate editors’ head interns were there, one sporting a square cut engagement ring so large and garish that she made an ironic display of having to support her wrist with the other hand in order to show it around the table, which occasioned some snarky little internal emails back at Style over the course of the rest of the day.
Skip Atwater’s bizarre and quixotic pitch for a WITW piece on some sort of handyman who purportedly excreted pieces of fine art out of his bottom in Indiana, while not the most pressing issue on this closing day for what was known as SE2, was certainly the most arresting and controversial. The interns ended up hashing out what came to be called the miraculous poo story in some detail, and the discussion was lively and far ranging, with passions aroused and a good deal of personal background information laid on the table, some of which would alter various power constellations in subtle ways that would not even emerge until preliminary work on the 10 September issue commenced later in the month.
At one point during the lunch, an editorial intern in a charcoal gray Yamamoto pantsuit related an anecdote of her fiancé’s, with whom she had apparently exchanged every detail of their sexual histories as a condition for maximal openness and trust in their upcoming marriage. The anecdote, which the intern amused everyone by trying at first to phrase very delicately, involved her fiancé, as an undergraduate, performing cunnilingus on what was at that time one of Swa
rthmore’s most beautiful and widely desired girls, with zero percent body fat and those great pillowy lips that were just then coming into vogue, when evidently she had, suddenly and without any warning . . . well, farted—the girl being gone down on had—and not at all in the sort of way you could minimize or blow off, according to the fiancé later, but rather ‘one of those strange horrible hot ones that are so totally awful and rank.’ The anecdote appeared to strike some kind of common chord or nerve: most of the interns at the table were laughing so hard they had to put their forks down, and some held their napkins to their mouths as if to bite them or hold down digestive matter. After the laughter tailed off, there was a brief inbent communal silence while the interns—most of whom were quite intelligent and had had exceptionally high board scores, particularly on the analytical component—tried to suss out just why they had all laughed and what was so funny about the conjunction of oral sex and flatus. There was also something just perfect about the editorial intern’s jacket’s asymmetrical cut, both incongruous and yet somehow inevitable, which was why Yamamoto was generally felt to be worth every penny. At the same time, it was common knowledge that there was something in the process or chemicals used in commercial dry cleaning that was unfriendly to Yamamotos’ particular fabrics, and that they never lay or hung or felt quite so perfect after they’d been dry cleaned a couple times; so there was always a kernel of tragedy to the pleasure of wearing Yamamoto, which may have been a deeper part of its value. A more recent tradition was that the more senior of the interns usually enjoyed a glass of pinot grigio. The intern said that her fiancé tended to date his sexual adulthood as commencing with that incident, and liked to say that he had ‘lost literally about twenty pounds of illusions in that one second,’ and was now exceptionally, almost unnaturally comfortable with his body and bodies in general and their private functions, rarely even closing the bathroom door now when he went in there for what the intern referred to as big potty.
A fellow WITW staff intern, who also roomed with Laurel Manderley and three other Wellesleyites in a basement sublet near the Williamsburg Bridge, related a vignette that her therapist had once shared with her about dating his wife, whom the therapist had originally met when both of them were going through horrible divorces, and of their going out to dinner on one of their early dates and coming back and sitting with glasses of wine on her sofa, and of she all of a sudden saying, ‘You have to leave,’ and he not understanding, not knowing whether she was kicking him out or whether he’d said something inappropriate or what, and she finally explaining, ‘I have to take a dump and I can’t do it with you here, it’s too stressful,’ using the actual word dump, and of so how the therapist had gone down and stood on the corner smoking a cigarette and looking up at her apartment, watching the light in the bathroom’s frosted window go on, and simultaneously, one, feeling like a bit of an idiot for standing out there waiting for her to finish so he could go back up, and, two, realizing that he loved and respected this woman for baring to him so nakedly the insecurity she had been feeling. He had told the intern that standing on that corner was the first time in quite a long time he had not felt deeply and painfully alone, he had realized.
Laurel Manderley’s caloric regimen included very precise rules on what parts of her Niçoise salad she was allowed to eat and what she had to do to earn them. At today’s lunch she was somewhat preoccupied. She had as yet told no one about any photos, to say nothing of any unannounced overnight package; and Atwater, who had spent the morning commuting to Chicago, made it a principle never to take cellular calls while he drove.
The longtime girl Friday for the associate editor of SURFACES, which was the section of Style that focused on health and beauty, had also been among the first of the magazine’s interns not to bother changing into pumps on arrival but instead to wear, normally with a high end Chanel or DKBL suit, the same crosstrainers she had commuted in, which somehow for some strange reason worked, and had for a time split the editorial interns into two opposed camps regarding office footwear. She had also at some point spent a trimester at Cambridge, and still spoke with a slight British accent, and asked generally now whether anyone else who traveled abroad much had noticed that in German toilets the hole into which the poop is supposed to disappear when you flush is positioned way in front, so that the poop just sort of lies there in full view and there’s almost no way you can avoid looking at it when you get up and turn around to flush. Which she observed was so almost stereotypically German, almost as if you were supposed to study and analyze your poop and make sure it passed muster before you flushed it down. Here a senior shade who seemed always to make it a point to wear something garishly retro on Mondays inserted a reminiscence about first seeing the word FAHRT in great block letters on signs all over Swiss and German rail stations, on childhood trips, and how she and her stepsisters had spent whole long Eurail rides cracking one another up by making childish jokes about travelers’ various FAHRTs. Whereas, the SURFACES head intern continued with a slight cold smile at the shade’s interruption, whereas in French toilets, though, the hole tended to be way in the back so that the poop vanished ASAP, meaning the whole thing was set up to be as elegant and tasteful as possible . . . although in France there was also the whole bidet issue, which many of the interns agreed always struck them as weird and kind of unhygienic. There was then a quick anecdote about someone’s once having asked a French concierge about the really low drinking fountain in the salle de bains, which also struck a nerve of risibility at the table.
At different intervals, two or three of the interns who smoked would excuse themselves briefly and step out to smoke and then return—Tutti Mangia’s management had made it clear that they didn’t really want like eight people at a time out there under the awning.
‘So then what about the US toilets here, with the hole in the middle and all this water so it all floats and goes around and around in a little dance before it goes down—what’s up with that?’
The design director’s intern wore a very simple severe Prada jacket over a black silk tee. ‘They don’t always go around and around. Some toilets are really fast and powerful and it’s gone right away.’
‘Maybe up on eighty-two it is!’ Two of the newer staff interns leaned slightly toward each other as they laughed.
Laurel Manderley’s roommate, who at Wellesley had played both field hockey and basketball and was a national finalist for a Marshall, asked how many of those at the table had had to read those ghastly pieces of Swift’s in Post Liz Lit where he went on and on about women taking a crap and how supposedly traumatic it was for the swain when he found out that his beloved went to the bathroom like a normal human being instead of whatever sick mommy figure Swift liked to make women into, quoting the actual lines, ‘“Send up an excremental Smell/To taint the Parts from whence they fell/the Pettycoats and Gown perfume/And waft a Stink round every Room,”’ which a few people hazarded to say that it was maybe a little bit disturbing that Siobhan had seemingly memorized this . . . and thereupon the latter part of the discussion turned more toward intergender bathroom habits and the various small traumas of cohabitation with a male partner, or even just when you reached the stage where one or the other of you were staying over a lot, and the table conversation broke up into a certain number of overlapping smaller exchanges while some people ordered different kinds of coffee and Laurel Manderley sucked abstractedly on an olive pit.
‘If you ask me, there’s something sketchy about a guy whose bathroom is all full of those little deodorizers and scented candles. I always tend to think, here’s somebody who kind of denies his own humanity.’
‘It’s bad news if it’s a big deal either way. It’s never a good sign.’
‘But you don’t want him totally uninhibited, don’t get me wrong.’
‘Because if he’s going around farting in front of you or something, it means on some level he’s thinking you’re just one of the guys, and that’s always bad news.’
‘Be
cause then how long before he’s sitting there on the couch all day farting and telling you to go get him a beer?’
‘If I’m out in the kitchen and Pankaj wants a beer or something, he knows he better say please.’
The shade who wore Pucci and two other research interns were evidently going with three guys from Forbes to some kind of infamous annual Forbes house party on Fire Island over the holiday weekend, which, since the Fourth was on Wednesday this year, meant the following weekend.