Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,157
had already been hashed out in the enmired Cavalier two days prior. ‘It’s not a matter of whether the magazine trusts you or not. It’s that some readers are obviously going to be skeptical. Style cannot afford to look overcredulous or like a dupe to even a fraction of its readers.’ He did not, in the kitchen, refer to the BSGs’ concern with distinguishing themselves from tabloids, though he did say: ‘They can’t afford to let this look like a tabloid story.’
Both Amber Moltke and the photographer had been eating pieces of a national brand coffee cake that could evidently be heated in the microwave without becoming runny or damp. Her forkwork was deft and delicate and her face as broad across as two of Skip’s own placed somehow side by side.
‘Maybe we should just go on and let some tabloid do it, then,’ she had replied coolly.
Atwater said: ‘Well, should you decide to do that, then yes, credibility ceases to be an issue. The story gets inserted between Delta Burke’s all fruit diet and reports of Elvis’s profile in a photo of Neptune. But no other outlet picks up the story or follows it up. Tabloid pieces don’t enter the mainstream.’ He said: ‘It’s a delicate balance of privacy and exposure for you and Brint, I’m aware. You’ll obviously have to make your own decision.’
Later, waiting in the narrow and redolent hallway, Atwater noted in Gregg that at some point he and Amber had ceased even pretending to include the artist in the kitchen’s whole back and forth charade. And that the way his damaged knee really felt was this: ignominious.
‘Or here’s one,’ Laurel Manderley said. She was standing next to the trayless fax machine, and the editorial intern who had regaled the previous day’s working lunch with the intracunnilingual flatus vignette was seated at the other WITW salaryman’s console a few feet away. Today the editorial intern—whose first name also happened to be Laurel, and who was a particularly close friend and protégé of Ellen Bactrian—wore a Gaultier skirt and a sleeveless turtleneck of very soft looking ash gray cashmere.
‘Your own saliva,’ said Laurel Manderley. ‘You’re swallowing it all the time. Is it disgusting to you? No. But now imagine gradually filling up a juice glass or something with your own saliva, and then drinking it all down.’
‘That really is disgusting,’ the editorial intern admitted.
‘But why? When it’s in your mouth it’s not gross, but the minute it’s outside of your mouth and you consider putting it back in, it becomes gross.’
‘Are you suggesting it’s somehow the same thing with poo?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think with poo, it’s more like as long as it’s inside us we don’t think about it. In a way, poo only becomes poo when it’s excreted. Until then, it’s more like a part of you, like your inner organs.’
‘It’s maybe the same way we don’t think about our organs, our livers and intestines. They’re inside all of us —’
‘They are us. Who can live without intestines?’
‘But we still don’t want to see them. If we see them, they’re automatically disgusting.’
Laurel Manderley kept touching at the side of her nose, which felt naked and somewhat creepily smooth. She also had the kind of sick headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even woozier. She said: ‘But partly we don’t like seeing them because if they’re visible, that means there’s something wrong, there’s a hole or some kind of damage.’
‘But we also don’t even want to think about them,’ the other Laurel said. ‘Who sits there and goes, Now the salad I ate an hour ago is entering my intestines, now my intestines are pulsing and squeezing and moving the material along?’
‘Our hearts pulse and squeeze, and we don’t mind thinking about our heart.’
‘But we don’t want to see it. We don’t even want to see our blood. We faint dead away.’
‘Not menstrual blood, though.’
‘True. I was thinking more of like a blood test, seeing the blood in the tube. Or getting a cut and seeing the blood come out.’
‘Menstrual blood is disgusting, but it doesn’t make you lightheaded,’ Laurel Manderley said almost to herself, her large forehead crinkled with thought. Her hands felt as though they were shaking even though she knew no one else could see it.