Simon was delighted to be fifty-three, lean and aggressive except for his belly which was not lean and aggressive. He was younger than IM Pei, younger than Dizzy Gillespie, younger than the Pope. He had more wisdom packed in his little finger than was to be found in the entire Sweets catalog, with its pages of alluring metal moldings and fire-rated expansion joints. He had kept asbestos and asbestos-containing products out of every job he had ever worked on, sometimes at considerable cost. He had a daughter who would come into the kitchen at breakfast and say, "Whos got the goddamn New York Times?" Sarah did not wake well. He could spell 49,999 words correctly and make a pretty good stab at many of the rest. He had a Bronze Star, courtesy of a clerk-typist in his unit whose gift for writing citations for routinely rotating personnel had been envied even at Corps level. The IRS regarded him as a cash cow, on a small scale, and regularly sent him loving salutations, including, one year, a box of Godiva chocolates. He could speak persuasively in meetings, maintaining a grave and thoughtful countenance and letting all the dumb guys speak first. He had about twice the elan of youth, normal elan plus extra elan derived from raw need and grain spirits. Several of the male members of his family had lived to be fifty-nine or sixty. "Grow or die" was the maxim that most accorded with his experience and when he did not think of himself as a giraffe he thought of himself as a tree, a palm, schematically a skinny curving vertical with a lot of furor at the top. With colored felt pens and a pad of tracing paper he could produce impressive sketches in twenty minutes, which he then had to rec?oncile with reality and sweat over for forty days, cursing himself for his facility. "What about the cornstalk?" A design prof had told the students that there were no right angles in nature, and Simon had raised the ques?tion of the cornstalk. Had he to do it again, thirty years later, he wou ld have raised the question of the tele?phone pole, a deterioration of sensibility, perhaps. He rushed toward things, normally, his present quietude a parenthesis in a life not unmarked by strife and contes?tation. Pipe bombs did not bother him so long as they did not blow his face off. The assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, on the other hand, scarred his brain. He had met Palme once, at a conference on the work of the Greek planner Constantin Doxiodes in Stockholm in 1972, at which Doxiodes had declared himself a criminal because he had put human beings into high-rise buildings. Palme had been a beneficent presence, a short man who wanted everything to go well, wanted the world to succeed in good socialist fash?ion, gay and optimistic. "The deed of a lunatic," the Swedish police said, Simon feeling despair for human?kind. A friend, a Polish architect who had been at Penn with him, visited him in Philadelphia in 1984 on a grant from the Ford Foundation. Carol had made osso bu co and they had talked for hours. "Socialism, finally, doesnt work," Ryszard had said. "You get, you know, too many bad guys at the top." Ryszards father had been a deputy in the Polish parliament, a Communist who sat for some years and had then been jailed follow?ing a change in the leadership. It was the first time that anyone had said to Simon, with the authority of three decades of involvement, that socialism didnt work. "You get, at the summit, not the worst but the next-worst." Simon took Ryszard to the airport, gave him as a going-away present a Tizio lamp, regretted that he saw him so seldom, wished that he lived next door, on Pine Street. Carol, when they were twenty-five and twenty-six, had been a smart-ass, an admirable smart-ass. "I love you but its only temporary," she had said. She was fond of saying to people, "Heres wishing you a happy and successful first marriage." Simon could lift refrigerators other people couldnt lift. He had almost crushed his left hand getting a refrigerator down a set of right-angled stairs for a neighbor. His muscles responded brightly to challenge. Fifty-three, he thought, was not so much worse than twenty-three. All giraffes think this.
"HE used a rolled-up newspaper," Veron?ica says, "what youd use on a dog. Only he put his back into it, when I was twelve and thirteen and four?teen. What can I say? Sadistic son-of-a-bitch. If hed been a drunk I could maybe have forgiven him but he didnt drink. He was a piano salesman, worked for this piano store downtown. He played pretty well himself. Hed wanted to be a doctor. My mother got rid of him, eventually. Not soon enough."
Simon thinks of his own large, calm father, still ac?tive at seventy-five, playing the market and raising hell on behalf of the ADA. Shes wearing patched jeans (patches at the back of the knee, just under a buttock, on the right thigh) and a dead-black sweater. Blond hair done in cornrows this morning, a copy of Interview in her lap, somebody named Kim Basinger on the cover. He wants to hold her tight, rock her, even -- a non-rational impulse, shes almost as tall as he is.
"Well, its a bitch," he says. This sounds feeble even to him.
"He looked nice in a suit. He had these pretty ex?pensive suits, maybe a dozen suits. He had a lot of shoes, I remember the shoes with shoetrees in them. He gave me a very good camera when I was fifteen, a Mamiyaflex, a twin-lens reflex. I used to take pictures of lizards, lizard-on-branch, lizard-on-brick-wall, lizard looking at camera --"
"And your mother?"
"She was kind of a dishrag, to tell the truth. Then. She pulled her socks up after she got rid of him. Shes still back there, in Denver. Shes a school principal, elementary school. Got a boyfriend, the shop teacher. She thinks shes doing Lady Chatterleys Lover."
She pauses.
"Guess what," she says.
"What?"
"Youre not a father-figure. That surprise you?"
"No."
"Youre more like a guy whos stayed out in the rain too long."
Does this translate into experienced, tried-and-true, well-tempered? Or pulpy, hanging-in-thin-strips? He pulls at an ear.
"I mean worn, but with a certain character."
Rust never sleeps, he thinks.
"Well," he says, "shall we take the children to school?"
"What children?"
"Right."
"Are you going to have any more children?"
"Probably not."
TIM, the professional whistler, is a sad Saab of a man about thirty. He has appeared on a number of local tv shows and plays club dates occasionally. He whistles "Twilight Time," "Tumbling Tumbleweeds," and "My Blue Heaven," the latter taken note-for-note from the famous record by Gene Austin. His whistling is tough, very tough, with many complicated flourishes. Tim says that the most famous whistler of all time was Fred Lowry, who whistled for both Vincent Lopez and Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. The version of the "William Tell Overture" Lowry did with Heidt has never been surpassed, Tim says.
After dinner (roasted squab with chicken-fried po?tato skins) Tim talks additionally about whistling. Dore is moving nervously between the kitchen and the sitting room. Fred Lowrys version of "Indian Love Call" sold more than two million copies, Tim tells them. He him?self has had several careers other than whistling, nota?bly high-tech electronics in California.
"I had this place in Mountain View. I had every?thing, projection television, walk-around no-hands tele?phones, stereo, a Nautilus machine, whirlpool bath, two BMWs, two dogs, PC with printer, shotguns, lots of shotguns, handguns, Alvar Aalto chairs and tables and chaises, art, some very fine art, three Diebenkorns, two Clementes, the house was by Frank Gehry, great trees, wine cellar, great California wines, I used to go around to the vineyards for the tastings, got to know a lot of the growers, thirty suits, this one is by Issey Miyake, he did it especially for me --"
"Any of this true?" Veronica whispers.
"How would I know?" Simon whispers.
Tim is drinking Black Russians. Simon has gone out to obtain Kahlua and brandy.
"What we were basically doing," Tim says, "was voice synthesis. The first application is clearly for peo?ple whove lost their voices because of operations or one thing and another. Then toys, vending machines, voiceprint applications for banking and of course the whole telecommunications thing. Bell Labs is heavily, heavily into this but we were doing some things that would have scared them if theyd known."
Dore looks at Simon. Simon inclines his head to the left, meaning Could be.
"Digital is unbelievable," Tim says. "I can take an ordinary utterance and give it a nasty sneering tone, just by bending some numbers. I can --"
Veronica says, "So what are you doing now?"
"Car wash," Tim says, "over on Tenth Avenue. Washing cars. What most people dont know is that the finish on todays cars, especially the Japanese cars, actually embraces the dirt. I mean if you wanted the dirt to adhere to the finish you couldnt come up with a better. . . There are these tiny pits uniformly distrib?uted over the surface of the car that act like traps for the grime, reach out and suck it up. It becomes like plaque on teeth. Now, you wonder why they cant de?vise a solvent that would dissolve the plaque and not harm the enamel. Im telling you, the formula exists. It is in being. But because the big dentifrice outfits dont want to lose a very, very lucrative market, you and I get zip. Have to go in twice a year and have some dental assistant scrape away with the old hand tool for an hour. Are you familiar with the work of Buckminster Fuller? Have you read what Fuller has to say about copper wire? The earths supply of copper is finite. Our per capita investment in copper, fo r every man, woman and child on earth --"
Simons getting tired. "But of course you can look at it in another way," he says.
"Look at what?"
"The whole thing. The deficit. The government is the biggest consumer in the country, right? And thats going to be true by and large of all governments everywhere. So if every government contract were tied to a proportionate amount which would go to reduction of the deficit, if you couldnt get government work without --"
"Theyd just cost-plus you," says Tim.
"No more cost-plus," Simon says. "Weve done away with it."
"Theyd just bury it somewhere else."
"More auditors."
"Banks wouldnt give you your capitalization."
"Nationalize em."
"You want an across-the-board standardization of profit? Where do you get your incentive?"
"Say three tiers of incentive tied to productivity. So thered be a meaningful variation but not flat-out rape, if you know what I mean."
Tim sighs and strips off his jacket. "I once heard Fuller speak for seven straight hours. I only understood a tenth of what he was saying. By the end of the eve?ning there were only five people left in the audience. Hed started with three hundred. I went home and began to make tetrahedrons with Play-Doh and tooth?picks at two oclock in the morning. What would the three tiers be?"
"Say the prime rate is six, one, two and three times the prime rate. To get eighteen youd have to do aw?fully good work."
"Who decides?"
"Be the reverse of cost-plus. The multiplier would be how much ahead of time and how much under bud?get."
"Underneath the paint, God knows what."
"Our inspectors would take sections."
Tim says, "Thats terribly rational, Simon. The idea of progress is philosophically dubious, you know that."
"Not talking about progress. Talking about move?ment. Were not necessarily married to the present situ?ation."
Tim looks at the three women.
"Too bad. Engineering is key. We havent even floated the subject of smoking. Every day, fifteen to twenty Americans are injured by their ashtrays."
SIMON enjoyed life as a ghost, one of the re?wards of living in the great city. So many units rushing to and fro that nobody noticed anything much or had time to remark on strangers in the house, in the neigh?borhood. Sublets were everywhere, two men and a grand piano might pop up in your building any Wednesday. Maybe old blockwatchers of thirty years standing were keeping running censuses of the popula?tion, but Simon did not know the old blockwatchers and so felt comfortably anonymous. For amusement, he cooked, or went to a neighborhood movie. He saw The Benny Goodman Story and Silverado, the first with Anne and the second with Dore and Veronica. Dore and Veronica had not heard of Benny Goodman and thus werent interested; Anne didnt like Westerns. "How can you not like Westerns?" Simon asked her, truly amazed, and she had said that when she was a child she had seen one in which Indians had tied a man to two bent-down saplings and then cut a rope and the saplings had rent the man into two distinct pieces and that she had never seen a Western since. Simon told her that not all Westerns had that kind of thing in them but she remained unpersuaded. Simon read, much of the time, and consulted with them on their plans.
The first plan was to return to Denver, and nobody liked it. "Be damned if I will," Veronica had said, and Anne had said the same thing. The second plan was to go to Paris and affiliate themselves with one of the cou?ture houses there, Saint-Laurent or Karl Lagerfeld. Al?though the best stuff was coming from Milan, they said. They talked knowledgeably about Memphis, at least the fabrics. The third plan was to join the Army and acquire training in a number of sophisticated elec?tronic and computer skills. The fourth plan was Burger King.
"A lot of Americans work at Burger King. On a con?tingency basis."
"Americans of every creed and stripe."
"Id rather go to Harvard?"
"Transferring one-and-a-half ragged years at Fort Lupton Community?"
"Yeah, yeah, I know."
"I want to write music."
"What kind of music?"
"Serious music. Big music. Entire string sections bending to the work."
"You could study that."
"I could. Where is this Juilliard place?"
"I think you have to play something before you can get in."
"Tambourine? Naw thats a joke I know tambourine is no good."
"Do you think we started too late?"
"Its never too late. In principle."
"Chase has a plan for bank tellers."
"I dont want to be a bank teller."
"Well its a start."
"Toward what?"
"I dont want to think were fucked. I really dont want to think that."
"We could go out and marry some more people."
"The last thing I have in mind."
"Yeah it does sound a little retrograde."
Anne is in a retrospective mood.
"I won the Colorado Miss Breck," she says. "I didnt win the National, though."
"Cant win em all," Simon says.
"It was very exciting. This stuff is very exciting when youre a kid, people making a fuss over you. It becomes less exciting. I wanted to be a doctor."
"Everybody wants to be a doctor. Veronicas old man the child-beater wanted to be a doctor."
"I know," she says. "Helping people. Your existence is justified."
Simon looks at his khakis; theyre a bit on the filthy side. Buy another pair. "You could still do that," he says. "Medical school."
"Do you want to get married again?"
"Hadnt thought about it."
"Probably somebodyd marry you."
"Like who?"
"Some dumb woman. A commodity with which the world is amply supplied. Me, for example."
"That would be pretty dumb. You need a young sol?dier."
"You telling me what I need?"
"Trying to."
"I feel affectionate toward you, Simon."
"I feel the same thing. Not a good idea."
"Who says?"
"Aetna Life and Casualty."