Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,144

in an intimate shush. Atwater could not help wondering whether it was the same finger that had just been in his ear. Its tip was almost the width of both of his nostrils together.

‘He will because he’ll do it for me, Skip. Because I say.’

‘Mn srtny gld t—’

‘But go on and ask it.’ Mrs. Moltke backed the finger off a bit. ‘We should get it out here up front between us. Why I’d want my husband known for his shit.’

‘Though of course the pieces are so much more than that,’ Atwater said, his eyes appearing to cross slightly as he gazed at the finger. Another compact shiver, a whisking sound of fabric and his forehead running with sweat. The cinnamon heat and force of her exhalations like one of the heating grates along Columbus Circle where coteries of homeless sat in the winter in fingerless gloves and balaklava hoods, their eyes flat and pitiless as Atwater hurried past. He had to engage the car’s battery in order to crack his window, and a burst of noise from the radio made him jump.

Amber Moltke appeared very still and intent. ‘Still and all, though,’ she said. ‘To have your TV reporters or Dave Letterman or that skinny one real late at night making their jokes about it, and folks reading in Style and thinking about Brint’s bowel, about him sitting there in the privy moving his bowel in some kind of special way to make something like that come out. Because that’s his whole hook, Skip, isn’t it. Why you’re here in the first place. That it’s his shit.’

It turned out that a certain Richmond IN firm did a type of specialty shipping where they poured liquid styrene around fragile items, producing a very light form fitting insulation. The Federal Express outlet named on the box’s receipt, however, was in Scipio IN, which was also featured in the address on the Kinko’s cover sheet that had accompanied Sunday’s faxed photos, which faxes the next morning’s Fed Ex rendered more or less moot or superfluous, so that Laurel Manderley couldn’t quite see why Atwater’d gone to the trouble.

At Monday’s working lunch, Laurel Manderley’s deceptively simple idea with respect to the package’s contents had been to hurry back and place them out on Ellen Bactrian’s desk before she returned from her dance class, so that they would be sitting there waiting for her, and not to say a word or try to prevail on Ellen in any way, but simply to let the pieces speak for themselves. This was, after all, what her own salaryman appeared to have done, giving Laurel no warning whatsoever that art was on the way.

The following was actually part of a lengthy telephone conversation on the afternoon of 3 July between Laurel Manderley and Skip Atwater, the latter having literally limped back to the Mount Carmel Holiday Inn after negotiating an exhaustive and nerve wracking series of in situ authenticity tests at the artist’s home.

‘And what’s with that address, by the way?’

‘Willkie’s an Indiana politician. The name is ubiquitous here. I think he may have run against Truman. Remember the photo of Truman holding up the headline?’

‘No, I mean the half. What, fourteen and a half Willkie?’

‘It’s a duplex,’ Atwater said.

‘Oh.’

There had been a brief silence, one whose strangeness might have been only in retrospect.

‘Who lives on the other side?’

There had been another pause. It was true that both salaryman and intern were extremely tired and discombobulated by this point.

The journalist said: ‘I don’t know yet. Why?’

To which Laurel Manderley had no good answer.

In the listing Cavalier, at or about the height of the thunderstorm, Atwater shook his head. ‘It’s more than that,’ he said. He was, to all appearances, sincere. He appeared genuinely concerned that the artist’s wife not think his motives exploitative or sleazy. Amber’s finger was still right near his mouth. He told her it was not yet entirely clear to him how she viewed her husband’s pieces or understood the extraordinary power they exerted. Rain and debris notwithstanding, the windshield was too steamed over for Atwater to see that the view of SR 252 and the fixative works was now tilted 30 or more degrees, like a faulty altimeter. Still facing forward with his eyes rotated way over to the right, Atwater told the artist’s wife that his journalistic motives had been mixed at first, maybe, but that verily he did now believe. When they’d taken him through Mrs. Moltke’s sewing room and out back