It is difficult to shrug on an elliptical trainer. ‘Good quote unquote.’
‘Then the answer again is that what we’re interested in is human interest, not some abstract aesthetic value.’
‘And yet isn’t the point that they’re not mutually exclusive? How about all Picasso’s affairs, or the thing with van Gogh’s ear?’
‘Yes, but van Gogh didn’t paint with his ear.’
By habit, Ellen Bactrian avoided looking directly at their side by side reflections in the mirrored wall. The executive intern was at least three inches taller than she. The sounds of all the young men’s legs working the StairMasters were at certain points syncopated, then not, then gradually syncopated again. The two editorial interns’ movements on the elliptical trainers, on the other hand, appeared synchronized down to the smallest detail. Each of them had a bottle of water with a sports cap in her elliptical trainer’s special receptacle, although they were not the same brands of bottled water. The fitness center’s sonic environment was basically one large, complex, and rhythmic pneumatic clank.
Between breaths, an ever so slightly peevish or impatient tone entered Ellen Bactrian’s voice: ‘Then, say, the My Left Foot guy who painted with his left foot.’
‘Or the idiot savant who can reproduce Chopin after one hearing,’ the executive intern said. This was an indirect bit of massaging on her part, since there had been a WITW profile of just such an idiot savant in an issue the previous summer—the piece’s UBA was that the retarded man’s mother had battled heroically to keep him out of an institution.
Under the diffused high lumen lights of the cardio fitness area, the executive intern’s quads and delts seemed like something out of an advertisement. Ellen Bactrian was fit and attractive, with a perfectly respectable body fat percentage, but around the executive intern she often felt squat and dumpy. An unhealthy part of her sometimes suspected that the executive intern liked exercising with her because it made her, the executive intern, feel comparatively even more willowy and scintillant and buff. What neither Ellen Bactrian nor anyone else at Style knew was that the executive intern had had a dark period in preparatory school during which she’d made scores of tiny cuts in the tender skin of her upper arms’ insides and then squeezed reconstituted lemon juice into the cuts as penance for a long list of personal shortcomings, a list she had tracked daily in her journal in a special numerical key code that was totally unbreakable unless you knew exactly which page of The Bell Jar the code’s numbers were keyed to. Those days were now behind her, but they were still part of who the executive intern was.
‘Yes,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘although, although I’m no art critic, Skip’s guy’s pieces are also artworks of surpassing quality and value in their own right.’
‘Although of course all the readers will get to see is photos —’
‘Maybe.’ Both interns laughed briefly. The issue of publishable photos had been one they’d all agreed that morning to table—there were, as the WITW associate editor sometimes liked to quip, bigger fish on the front burner.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Although remember that even photos, if Amine’s to be believed, if absolutely properly lit and detailed so that —’
‘Except hold on, answer this—does this person have to actually be familiar with something to represent it the way he does?’
Both women were at a node of their computerized workout and were breathing almost heavily now. Amine Tadic´ was Style magazine’s associate photo editor; her head intern had served as her proxy in the morning’s email confab.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘What do you mean?’
‘According to Laurel, this is a person with maybe like a year or two of community college. How on earth would he know Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, or what Anubis’s head looks like?’
‘Or for that matter which side the Liberty Bell’s crack’s on.’
‘I sure didn’t know it.’
Ellen Bactrian laughed. ‘Laurel did. Or she said she did—obviously she could have looked it up.’ Ellen Bactrian was also, on her own time, trying to learn how to type completely different things with each hand, à la the WHAT IN THE WORLD section’s associate editor, for whom she had certain feelings that she knew perfectly well were SOP transference for an intelligent, ambitious woman her age, since the associate editor was both seductive and a textbook authority figure. Ellen Bactrian liked the associate editor’s wife quite a lot, actually, and so took great pains to keep the whole bimanual thing in perspective.
The executive intern was able to reach down and hydrate without breaking rhythm, which on an elliptical trainer takes a great deal of practice. ‘I’m saying: Does the man have to see or know something in order to represent it? Produce it? Let’s say that if he does and it’s all totally conscious and intentional, then he’s a real artist.’
‘But if he doesn’t —’
‘Which is why the unlikeliness of a Roto Rooter guy from Nowhere Indiana knowing futurism or the Unique Forms is relevant,’ the executive intern said, wiping her forehead with a terry wristband.
‘If he doesn’t, it’s some kind of, what, a miracle? Idiot savantry? Divine intervention?’
‘Or else some kind of extremely sick fraud.’
Fraud was a frightening word to them both, for obvious reasons. One consequence of getting Mrs. Anger’s executive intern in on the miraculous poo story was that Eckleschafft-Böd US’s Legal people were now involved and devoting resources to the piece in a way that Laurel Manderley and Ellen Bactrian could never have caused, even given the WITW associate editor’s own background in Legal. BSG weeklies rarely broke stories or covered anything that other media hadn’t already premasticated. The prospect was both exciting and frightful.
The executive intern said: ‘Or else maybe it’s subconscious. Maybe his colon somehow knows things his conscious mind doesn’t.’
‘Is it the colon that determines the whole shape and configuration and everything of the . . . you know?’
The executive intern made a face. ‘I don’t know. I don’t really want to think about it.’
‘What is the colon, anyhow? Is it part of the intestines or is it technically its own organ?’
Ellen Bactrian’s and the executive intern’s fathers were both MDs in Westchester County NY, though the two men practiced different medical specialties and had never met. The executive intern periodically reversed the direction of her elliptical trainer’s pedals, working her quadriceps and calves instead of the hamstrings and lower gluteals. Her facial expression throughout these periods of reversal was both intent and abstracted.
‘Either way,’ Ellen Bactrian said, ‘it’s obviously human interest right out the wazoo.’ She then related the anecdote that Laurel Manderley had shared with her in the elevators on the way back down from the 82nd floor early that morning, about the DKNY clad circulation intern at lunch telling everybody that she sometimes pretended her waste was a baby and then expecting them to relate or to think her candor was somehow hip or brave.
For a moment there was nothing but the sound of two syncopated elliptical trainers. Then the executive intern said: ‘There’s a way to do this.’ She blotted momentarily at her upper lip with the inside of her wristband. ‘Joan would say we’ve been thinking about this all wrong. We’ve been thinking about the subject of the piece instead of the angle for the piece.’ Joan referred to Mrs. Anger, the Executive Editor of Style.
‘The UBA’s been a problem from the start,’ Ellen Bactrian said. ‘What I told —’
The executive intern interrupted: ‘There doesn’t have to be a strict UBA, though, because we can take the piece out of WHAT IN THE WORLD and do it in SOCIETY PAGES. Is the miraculous poo phenomenon art, or miracle, or just disgusting.’ She seemed not to be aware that her limbs’ forward speed had increased; she was now forcing her workout’s program instead of following it. SOCIETY PAGES was the section of Style devoted to soft coverage of social issues such as postnatal depression and t
he rain forest. According to the magazine’s editorial template, SP items ran up to 600 words as opposed to WITW’s 400.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning we include some bites from credible sources who think it is disgusting. We have Skip create controversy in the piece itself.’ It was true that her use of Atwater’s name in the remark was somewhat strategic—there were complex turf issues involved in altering a piece’s venue within the magazine, and Ellen Bactrian could well imagine the WITW associate editor’s facial expression and some of the cynical jokes he might make in order to mask his hurt at being shut out of the story altogether.
‘No,’ the executive intern responded. ‘Not quite. We don’t create the controversy, we cover it.’ She was checking her sports watch even though there were digital clocks right there on the machines’ consoles. Both women had met or exceeded their target heartrate for over half an hour.
A short time later, they were in the little tiled area where people toweled off after a shower. At this time of day, the locker room was steamy and extremely crowded. The executive intern looked like something out of Norse mythology. The hundreds of tiny parallel scars on the insides of her upper arms were all but invisible. It is a fact of life that certain people are corrosive to others’ self esteem simply as a function of who and what they are. The executive intern was saying: ‘The real angle is about coverage. Style is not foisting a gross or potentially offensive story on its readers. Rather, Style is doing soft coverage on a controversial story that already exists.’
Ellen Bactrian had two towels, one of which she had wrapped around her head in an immense lavender turban. ‘So Atwater will just rotate over and do it for SOCIETY PAGES, you’re saying? Or will Genevieve want to send in her own salaryman?’ Genevieve was the given name of the new associate editor in charge of SOCIETY PAGES, with whom Ellen Bactrian’s overman had already locked horns several times in editorial meetings.
The executive intern had inclined her head over to the side and was combing out a shower related tangle with her fingers. As was something of an unconscious habit, she bit gently at her lower lip in concentration. ‘I’m like ninety percent sure this is the way to go,’ she said. ‘Style is covering the human element of a controversy that’s already raging.’ At this point, they were at their rented lockers, which, in contradistinction to those on the men’s side, were full length in order to facilitate hanging. Painstakingly modified with portable inset shelving and adhesive hooks, both the women’s locker units were small marvels of organization.
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘Meaning it will need to be done somewhere else first. SOCIETY PAGES covers the coverage and the controversy.’ She favored Gaultier pinstripe slacks and sleeveless cashmere tops that could be worn either solo or under a jacket. So long as the slacks and top were in the same color family, sleeveless could still be all business—Mrs. Anger had taught them all that.
In what appeared to be another unconscious habit, the executive intern sometimes actually pressed the heel of her hand into her forehead when she was thinking especially hard. In a way, it was her version of Skip Atwater’s capital flush. The opinion of nearly all the magazine’s other interns was that the executive intern was operating on a level where she didn’t have to be concerned about things like color families or maintaining a cool professional demeanor.
‘But it can’t be too big,’ she said.
‘The piece, or the venue?’ Ellen Bactrian always had to pat the ear with all the studs in it dry with a disposable little antibiotic cloth.
‘We don’t want Style readers to already know the story. This is the tricky part. We want them to feel as if Style is their first exposure to a story whose existence still precedes their seeing it.’
‘In a media sense, you mean.’
The executive intern’s skirt was made of several dozen men’s neckties all stitched together lengthwise in a complicated way. She and a Mauritanian exchange student in THE THUMB who wore hallucinatorily colored tribal garb were the only two interns at Style who could get away with this sort of thing. It was actually the executive intern, at a working lunch two summers past, who had originally compared Skip Atwater to a jockey who’d broken training, though she had said it in a light and almost affectionate way—coming from her, it had not sounded cruel. Over Memorial Day weekend, she had actually been a guest of Mrs. Anger at her summer home in Quogue, where she had reportedly played mahjongg with none other than Mrs. Hans G. Böd. Her future seemed literally without limit.
‘Yes, though again, it’s delicate,’ the executive intern said. ‘Think of it as not unlike the Bush daughters, or that thing last Christmas on Dodi’s driver.’ These were rough analogies, but they did convey to Ellen Bactrian the executive intern’s basic thrust. In a broad sense, the cover the extant story angle was one of the standard ways BSGs distinguished themselves from both hard news glossies and the tabloids. On another level, Ellen Bactrian was also being informed that the overall piece was still her and the WHAT IN THE WORLD associate editor’s baby; and the executive intern’s repeated use of terms like tricky and delicate was designed both to flatter Ellen Bactrian and to apprise her that her editorial skill set would be amply tested by the challenges ahead.
Gaultier slacks held their crease a great deal better if your hanger had clips and they could hang from the cuffs. The voluptuous humidity of the locker room was actually good for the tiny wrinkles that always accumulated through the morning. Unbeknownst to Ellen Bactrian, lower level interns often referred to her and the executive intern in the same hushed and venerative tones. A constant sense that she was insufficient and ever at risk of exposing her incompetence was one of the ways Ellen Bactrian kept her edge. Were she to learn that she, too, was virtually assured of a salaried offer from Style at her internship’s end, she would literally be unable to process the information—it might well send her over the edge, the executive intern knew. The way the girl now pressed at her forehead in unconscious imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core insecurity the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling Ellen Bactrian how the miraculous poo story should be structured so that everyone made out. The executive intern was one of the greatest, most intuitive nurturers of talent Mrs. Anger had ever seen—and she herself had interned under Katharine Graham, back in the day.
‘So it can’t be too big,’ Ellen Bactrian was saying, first one hand against the locker and then the other as she adjusted her Blahniks’ straps. She now spoke in the half dreamy way of classic brainstorming. ‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out in the shape of Anubis’s head.’ Her hair had almost completely air dried already.
The executive intern’s belt for the skirt was two feet of good double hemp nautical rope. Her sandals were Laurent, open toe heels that went with nearly anything. She tied the ankles’ straps with half hitches and began to apply just the tiniest bit of clear gloss. Ellen Bactrian had now turned and was looking at her:
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
Their eyes met in the compact’s little mirror, and the executive intern smiled coolly. ‘Your salaryman’s already out there. You said he’s shuttling between the two pieces already, no?’
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But is there actual suffering involved?’ She was already constructing a mental flow chart of calls to be made and arrangements undertaken and then dividing the overall list between herself and Laurel Manderley, whom she now considered a bit of a pistol.
‘Well, listen—can he take orders?’
‘Skip? Skip’s a consummate pro.’
The executive intern was adjusting the balloon sleeves of her blouse. ‘And according to him, the miraculous poo man is skittish on the story?’
‘The word Laurel says S
kip used was excruciated.’
‘Is that even a word?’
‘It’s apparently totally the wife’s show, in terms of publicity. The artist guy is scared of his own shadow—according to Laurel, he’s sitting there flashing Skip secret signs like No, please God, no.’
‘So how hard could it be to represent this to Atwater’s All Ads person as comprising bona fide suffering?’
Ellen Bactrian’s mental flow charts often contained actual boxes, Roman numerals, and multiarrow graphics—that’s how gifted an administrator she was. ‘You’re talking about something live, then.’
‘With the proviso that of course it’s all academic until this afternoon’s tests check out.’
‘But do we know for sure he’ll even go for it?’
The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect:
‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.
6.
In what everyone at the next day’s working lunch would agree was a masterstroke, the special limousine that arrived at 5:00 AM Wednesday to convey the artist and his wife to Chicago was like something out of a Style reader’s dream. Half a city block long, white the way cruise ships and bridal gowns are white, it had a television and wet bar, opposing seats of cordovan leather, noiseless AC, and a thick glass shield between passenger compartment and driver that could be raised and lowered at the touch of a button on the woodgrain panel, for privacy. To Skip Atwater, it looked like the hearse of the kind of star for whom the whole world stops dead in its tracks to mourn. Inside, the Moltkes faced each other, their knees almost touching, the artist’s hands obscured from view by the panels of his new beige sportcoat.
The salaryman’s Kia trailing at a respectful distance, the limousine proceeded at dawn through the stolid caucasian poverty of Mount Carmel. There were only faint suggestions of faces behind its windows’ darkened glass, but whoever was awake to see the limousine glide by could tell that whoever was in there looking out saw everything afresh, like coming out of a long coma.