Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,166
ways Ellen Bactrian kept her edge. Were she to learn that she, too, was virtually assured of a salaried offer from Style at her internship’s end, she would literally be unable to process the information—it might well send her over the edge, the executive intern knew. The way the girl now pressed at her forehead in unconscious imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core insecurity the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling Ellen Bactrian how the miraculous poo story should be structured so that everyone made out. The executive intern was one of the greatest, most intuitive nurturers of talent Mrs. Anger had ever seen—and she herself had interned under Katharine Graham, back in the day.
‘So it can’t be too big,’ Ellen Bactrian was saying, first one hand against the locker and then the other as she adjusted her Blahniks’ straps. She now spoke in the half dreamy way of classic brainstorming. ‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out in the shape of Anubis’s head.’ Her hair had almost completely air dried already.
The executive intern’s belt for the skirt was two feet of good double hemp nautical rope. Her sandals were Laurent, open toe heels that went with nearly anything. She tied the ankles’ straps with half hitches and began to apply just the tiniest bit of clear gloss. Ellen Bactrian had now turned and was looking at her:
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
Their eyes met in the compact’s little mirror, and the executive intern smiled coolly. ‘Your salaryman’s already out there. You said he’s shuttling between the two pieces already, no?’
Ellen Bactrian said: ‘But is there actual suffering involved?’ She was already constructing a mental flow chart of calls to be made and arrangements undertaken and then dividing the overall list between herself and Laurel Manderley, whom she now considered a bit of a pistol.
‘Well, listen—can he take orders?’
‘Skip? Skip’s a consummate pro.’
The executive intern was adjusting the balloon sleeves of her blouse. ‘And according to him, the miraculous poo man is skittish on the story?’
‘The word Laurel says Skip used was excruciated.’
‘Is that even a word?’
‘It’s apparently totally the wife’s show, in terms of publicity. The artist guy is scared of his own shadow—according to Laurel, he’s sitting there flashing Skip secret signs like No, please God, no.’
‘So how hard could it be to represent this to Atwater’s All Ads person as comprising bona fide suffering?’
Ellen Bactrian’s mental flow charts often contained actual boxes, Roman numerals, and multiarrow graphics—that’s how gifted an administrator she was. ‘You’re talking about something live, then.’
‘With the proviso that of course it’s all academic until this afternoon’s tests check out.’
‘But do we know for sure he’ll even go for it?’
The executive intern never brushed her hair after a shower. She just gave her head two or three shakes and let it fall gloriously where it might and turned, slightly, to give Ellen Bactrian the full effect:
‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.
6.
In what everyone at the next day’s working lunch would agree was a masterstroke, the special limousine that arrived at 5:00 AM Wednesday to convey the artist and his wife to Chicago was like something out of a Style reader’s dream. Half a city block long, white the way cruise ships and bridal gowns are white, it had a television and wet bar, opposing seats of cordovan leather, noiseless AC, and a thick glass shield between passenger compartment and driver that could be raised and lowered at the touch of a button on the woodgrain panel, for privacy. To Skip Atwater, it looked like the hearse of the kind of star for whom the whole world stops dead in its tracks to mourn. Inside, the Moltkes faced each other, their knees almost touching, the artist’s hands obscured from view by the panels of his new beige sportcoat.
The salaryman’s Kia trailing at a respectful distance, the limousine proceeded at dawn through the stolid caucasian poverty of Mount Carmel. There were only faint suggestions of faces behind its windows’ darkened glass, but whoever was awake to see the limousine glide by could tell that whoever was in there looking out saw everything afresh, like coming out of a long coma.