Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,131
that he had to head on up to Chicago for a day or two but then would be back to start in on deep background if the Moltkes decided to give their consent. He had explained that the type of personality driven article that Style was interested in running would be impossible without the artist’s cooperation, and that there would be no point in his taking up any more of their time after today if Mr. and Mrs. Moltke weren’t totally on board and as excited about the piece as everyone over at Style was. He had addressed this statement to the artist, but it had been Amber Moltke’s reaction he noted.
On the same coffee table between them, beside the magazines and tape recorder and a small vase of synthetic marigolds, were three artworks allegedly produced through ordinary elimination by Mr. Brint F. Moltke. The pieces varied slightly in size, but all were arresting in their extraordinary realism and the detail of their craftsmanship—although one of Atwater’s notes was a reminder to himself to consider whether a word like craftsmanship really applied in such a case. The sample pieces were the very earliest examples that Mrs. Moltke said she’d been able to lay hands on; they had been out on the table when Atwater arrived. There were literally scores more of the artworks arranged in vaguely familiar looking glass cases in the unattached storm cellar out back, an environment that seemed strangely perfect, though Atwater had seen immediately how difficult the storm cellar would be for any of Style’s photographers to light and shoot properly. By 11:00 AM, he was mouthbreathing due to hay fever.
Mrs. Moltke periodically fanned at herself in a delicate way and said she did believe it might rain.
When Atwater and his brother had been in the eighth grade, the father of a family just up the road in Anderson had run a length of garden hose from his vehicle’s exhaust pipe to the interior and killed himself in the home’s garage, after which the son in their class and everyone else in the family had gone around with a strange fixed smile that had seemed both creepy and courageous; and something in the hydraulics of Brint Moltke’s smile on the davenport reminded Skip Atwater of the Haas family’s smile.
Omitted through oversight above: Nearly every Indiana community has some street, lane, drive, or easement named for Wendell L. Willkie, b. 1892, GOP, favorite son.
The recorder’s tiny tape’s first side had been almost entirely filled by Skip Atwater answering Mrs. Moltke’s initial questions. It had become evident pretty quickly whose show this was, in terms of any sort of piece, on their end. Chewing a piece of gum with tiny motions of her front teeth in the distinctive Indiana style, Mrs. Moltke had requested information on how any potential article would be positioned and when it was likely to run. She had asked about word counts, column inches, boxes, leader quotes, and shared templates. Hers was the type of infantly milky skin on which even the lightest contact would leave some type of blotch. She had used terms like conferral, serial rights, and sic vos non vobis, which latter Skip did not even know. She had high quality photographs of some of the more spectacular artworks in a leatherette portfolio with the Moltkes’ name and address embossed on the cover, and Atwater was asked to provide a receipt for the portfolio’s loan.
The tape’s second side, however, contained Mr. Brint Moltke’s own first person account of how his strange and ambivalent gift had first come to light, which emerged—the account did—after Atwater had phrased his query several different ways and Amber Moltke had finally asked the journalist to excuse them and removed her husband into one of the home’s rear rooms, where they took inaudible counsel together while Atwater circumspectly chewed the remainder of his ice. The result was what Atwater later, in his second floor room at the Holiday Inn, after showering, applying crude first aid to his left knee, and struggling unsuccessfully to move or reverse the room’s excruciating painting, had copied into his steno as certainly usable in some part or form for deep background/UBA, particularly if Mr. Moltke, who had appeared to warm to the task or at least to come somewhat alive, could be induced to repeat its substance on record in a sanitized way:
‘It was on a field exercise in basic [training in the US Army, in which Moltke later saw action in