Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,128

artist and/or the marriage’s dynamics. Brint Moltke sat hunched or slumped with his toes in and his hands in his lap, a posture reminiscent of a scolded child, but at the same time smiling at Atwater. As in smiling the entire time. It was not an empty professional corporate smile, but the soul effects were similar. Moltke was a thickset man with sideburns and graying hair combed back in what appeared to be a lopsided ducktail. He wore Sansabelt slacks and a dark blue knit shirt with his employer’s name on the breast. You could tell from the dents in his nose that he sometimes wore glasses. A further idiosyncrasy that Atwater noted in Gregg shorthand was the arrangement of the artist’s hands: their thumbs and forefingers formed a perfect lap level circle, which Moltke held or rather somehow directed before him like an aperture or target. He appeared to be unaware of this habit. It was a gesture both unsubtle and somewhat obscure in terms of what it signified. Combined with the rigid smile, it was almost the stuff of nightmares. Atwater’s own hands were controlled and well behaved—his tic with the fist was entirely a private thing. The journalist’s childhood hay fever was back with a vengeance, but even so he could not help detecting the Old Spice scent which Mr. Moltke emitted in great shimmering waves. Old Spice had been Skip’s own father’s scent and, reportedly, his father’s father’s before him.

The pattern of the davenport’s upholstery, Skip Atwater also knew firsthand, was called Forest Floral.

The WITW associate editor’s typing feats were just one example of the various leveling traditions and shticks and reversals of protocol that made Style’s parties and corporate celebrations the envy of publishing interns throughout Manhattan. These fetes took place on the sixteenth floor and were usually open bar; some were even catered. The normally dry and insufferable head of Copyediting did impressions of various US presidents smoking dope that had to be seen to be believed. Given the right kinds of vodka and flame source, a senior receptionist from Haiti could be prevailed upon to breathe fire. A very odd senior paralegal in Permissions, who showed up to the office in foul weather gear nearly every day no matter what the forecast, turned out to have been in the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar, and organized revues that could get kind of risqué. Some of the interns got bizarrely dressed up; nails were occasionally done in White Out. Mrs. Anger’s executive intern had once worn a white leather suit with outrageous fringe and a set of cap pistols in a hiphugger belt and holster accessory. A longtime supervisor of shades used Crystal Light, Everclear, skinned fruit, and an ordinary office paper shredder to produce a libation she called Last Mango in Paris. The interns’ annual ersatz awards show at the climax of Oscars Week often had people on the floor—one year they’d gotten Gene Shalit to appear. And so on and so forth.

Of arresting and demotic party traditions, however, none was so prized as Mrs. Anger’s annual essay at self parody for the combination New Year’s and closing of the Year’s Most Stylish People double issue bash. Bedecked in costume jewelry, mincing and fluttering, affecting a falsetto and lorgnette, holding her head in such a way as to produce a double chin, tottering about with a champagne cocktail like one of those anserine dowagers in Marx Brothers films. It would be difficult to convey this routine’s effect on morale and esprit. The rest of the publishing year, Mrs. Anger was a figure of near testamental awe and dread, serious as a heart attack. A veteran of Fleet Street and two separate R. Murdoch startups, wooed over from Us in 1994 under terms that were industry myth, Mrs. Anger had managed to put Style in the black for the first time in its history, and was said to enjoy influence at the very highest levels of Eckleschafft-Böd, and had worn one of the first Versace pantsuits ever seen in New York, and was nobody’s fool whatsoever.

Mrs. Amber Moltke, the artist’s young spouse, wore a great billowing pastel housedress and flattened espadrilles and was, for better or worse, the sexiest morbidly obese woman Atwater had ever seen. Eastern Indiana was not short on big pretty girls, but this was less a person than a vista, a quarter ton of sheer Midwest pulchritude, and Atwater had already filled several narrow pages of his notebook