A Visit From the Goon Squad (21 page)

I ask Kitty how it feels to be a sex goddess.

“It doesn’t feel like anything,” she says, bored and annoyed. “That’s something other people feel.”

“Men, you mean.”

“I guess,” she says, and a new expression flickers over her comely face and alights there, a look that I would have to designate as abrupt weariness.

I feel it too: abruptly weary. In fact, generally weary. “Christ, it’s all such a farce,” I say, in an unguarded moment of self-expression that has no strategic purpose and which, therefore, I’ll doubtless regret within seconds. “Why do we bother to participate?”

Kitty tilts her head at me. I sense that she can detect my general weariness, possibly even guess at some of its causes. She is regarding me, in other words, with pity. I am now perilously close to succumbing to the single greatest hazard of celebrity reporting: permitting my subject to reverse the beam of scrutiny, at which point I will no longer be able to see her. With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just then—ah yes—I feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head. Kitty looks terrified; she shrinks from me while I sort out the mess.

Disaster averted. Or at least forestalled.

“You know,” I say, when finally I’ve managed to swallow my bread and blow my nose at the cost of nearly three minutes, “I’d love to take a walk. What do you say?”

Kitty springs from her chair at the prospect of escaping into the open air. It’s a perfect day, after all, sunlight leaping through the restaurant windows. But her excitement is immediately tempered by an equal and opposite degree of caution. “What about Jake?” she asks, referring to her publicist, who will appear when our forty minutes are up and wave his wand to turn me back into a pumpkin.

“Can’t he just call and meet up with us?” I ask.

“Okay,” she says, doing her best to simulate the first wave of genuine enthusiasm she felt, despite the middle layer of wariness that has intruded. “Sure, let’s go.”

I hastily pay the bill. Now, I’ve orchestrated our debouchment for several reasons: One, I want to filch a few extra minutes off Kitty in an attempt to salvage this assignment and, in a larger sense, my once-promising, now-dwindling literary reputation (“I think she was maybe disappointed that you didn’t try writing another novel after the first one didn’t sell…”—Beatrice Green, over hot tea, after I threw myself sobbing upon her Scarsdale doorstep, pleading for insights into her daughter’s defection). Two, I want to see Kitty Jackson erect and in motion. To this end, I follow behind as she leads the way out of the restaurant, weaving among tables with her head down in the manner of both exceptionally attractive women and also famous people (not to mention those like Kitty, who are both). Here’s a translation of her posture and gait into English:
I know I’m famous and irresistible—a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity—and I know that you in this room are helpless against me. It’s embarrassing for both of us to look at each other and see our mutual knowledge of my radioactivity and your helplessness, so I’ll keep my head down and let you watch me in peace
. While all this is happening, I’m taking in Kitty’s legs, which are long, considering her modest height, as well as brown, and not that orangey brown of tanning salons, but a rich, tawny chestnut that makes me think of—well, of horses.

Central Park is one block away. The time elapsed is forty-one minutes and counting. We enter the park. It is green and splashy with light and shadow, giving the impression that we’ve dived together into a deep, still pond. “I forget when we started,” Kitty says, looking at her watch. “How much more time do we have?”

“Oh, we’re okay,” I mumble. I’m feeling kind of dreamy. I’m looking at Kitty’s legs as we walk (as much as I can without crawling beside her on the ground—a thought that crosses my mind) and discovering that above the knee they are flecked with hairs of finest gold. Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered from the gratuitous cruelty of others, so unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself, merely startled herself and the world with her own premature accomplishments, Kitty’s skin—that smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustion—is perfect. And by “perfect” I mean that nothing hangs or sags or snaps or wrinkles or ripples or bunches—I mean that her skin is like the skin of a leaf, except it’s not green. I can’t imagine such skin having an unpleasant odor or texture or taste—ever being, for example (it is frankly inconceivable), even mildly eczematous.

We sit together on a grassy slope. Kitty has resumed talking dutifully about her new movie, the specter of her returning publicist doubtless having reminded her that the promotion of said movie is the sole reason she is in my company.

“Oh, Kitty,” I say. “Forget the movie. We’re out here in the park, it’s a gorgeous day. Let’s leave those other two people behind us. Let’s talk about…about horses.”

What a look! What a gaze! Every cheesy metaphor you can fathom comes to mind: sun breaking through clouds, flowers yawning into bloom, the sudden and mystical appearance of a rainbow. It’s done. I’ve reached behind or around or within—I’ve touched the real Kitty. And for reasons I cannot understand, reasons that surely must rank among the most mysterious of quantum mechanical mysteries, I experience this contact as revelatory, urgent, as if, in bridging the crevasse between myself and this young actress, I am being lifted above an encroaching darkness.

Kitty opens her small white purse and takes out a picture. A picture of a horse! With a white starburst on its nose. His name is Nixon. “Like the president?” I ask, but Kitty looks disturbingly blank at this reference. “I just liked the sound of that name,” she says, and describes the sensation of feeding Nixon an apple—how he takes it between his horsey jaws and smashes it all at once with a cascade of milky, steaming juice. “I hardly ever get to see him,” she says, with genuine sadness. “I have to hire someone else to ride him because I’m never home.”

“He must be lonely without you,” I say.

Kitty turns to me. I believe she’s forgotten who I am. I have an urge to push her backward onto the grass, and I do.

“Hey!” my subject cries, her voice muffled and startled but not yet frightened, exactly.

“Pretend you’re riding Nixon,” I say.

“HEY!” she yells, and I cover her mouth with my hand. Kitty is writhing beneath me, but her writhing is stymied by my height—six foot three—and my weight, two hundred sixty pounds, approximately one-third of which is concentrated in my “spare tire of a” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) gut, which pinions her like a sandbag. I hold her mouth with one hand and worm the other hand between our two flailing bodies until finally—yes!—I manage to seize hold of my zipper. How is all this affecting me? Well, we’re lying on a hill in Central Park, a somewhat secluded spot that is still, technically speaking, in plain sight. So I feel anxious, dully aware that I’m placing my career and reputation at some risk with this caper. But more than that, I feel this crazy—what?—rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her. I want to rub it onto my raw, “scrofulous” (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her (“fuck her to death” and “fuck her brains out” being acceptable variations on this basic goal). What I have no interest in doing is killing her and
then
fucking her, because it’s her life—the inner life of Kitty Jackson—that I so desperately long to reach.

As it turns out, I do neither.

Let us return to the moment: one hand covering Kitty’s mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which I’m having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me. What I have no control over, unfortunately, are Kitty’s hands, one of which has found its way into her white purse, where a number of items are sequestered: a picture of a horse, a potato chip–sized cell phone, which has been ringing nonstop for the past several minutes, and a canister of something that I’d have to surmise is Mace, or perhaps some form of tear gas, judging by its impact when sprayed directly into my face: a hot, blinding sensation in my eye area accompanied by gushing tears, a strangling sensation in my throat, spastic choking and severe nausea, all of which prompt me to leap to my feet and double over in a swoon of agony (still pinning Kitty to the ground with one foot), at which point she avails herself of yet another item in said purse: a set of keys with a small Swiss Army knife attached, whose diminutive and rather dull blade she nevertheless manages to sink through my khakis and into my calf.

By now I’m bellowing and honking like a besieged buffalo, and Kitty is running away, her tawny limbs no doubt dappled with light falling through the trees, though I’m too distressed even to look.

I think I’d have to call that the end of our lunch. I got twenty extra minutes, easy.

The end of lunch, yes, but the beginning of so much else: a presentation before the grand jury followed by my indictment for attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault; my present incarceration (despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Levi to raise my $500,000 bail) and impending trial, which is to begin this month—on the very day, as luck would have it, that Kitty’s new movie,
Whip-poor-will Falls
, opens nationally.

Kitty sent me a letter in jail. “I apologize for whatever part I played in your emotional breakdown,” she wrote, “and also for stabing [sic] you.” There was a circle over each
i
and a smiley face at the end.

What did I tell you?
Nice
.

Of course, our little contretemps has been enormously helpful to Kitty. Front-page headlines, followed by a flurry of hand-wringing follow-up articles, editorials and op-ed pieces addressing an array of related topics: the “increasing vulnerability of celebrities” (The
New York Times);
the “violent inability of some men to cope with feelings of rejection”
(USA Today);
the imperative that magazine editors vet their freelance writers more thoroughly (The
New Republic)
, and the lack of adequate daytime security in Central Park.
⁴
Kitty, the martyrish figurehead of this juggernaut, is already being touted as the Marilyn Monroe of her generation, and she isn’t even dead.

Her new movie looks to be a hit, whatever it’s about.

1.
I’ve engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained. Entangled particles are subatomic “twins”: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles.
    How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle possibly “know” what is happening to the other? How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously?
    Theoretical explanations:
    (1) The particles are communicating.
    Impossible, because they would have to do so at a speed faster than the speed of light, thus violating relativity theory. In other words, in order for an awareness of Kitty’s presence to sweep the restaurant simultaneously, the diners at tables nearest to her would have to convey, through words or gestures, the fact of her presence to diners farther away who cannot see her—all at a speed faster than the speed of light. And that is impossible.
    (2) The two photons are responding to “local” factors engendered by their former status as a single photon. (This was Einstein’s explanation for the phenomenon of entangled particles, which he termed “spooky action at a distance.”)
    Nope. Because we’ve already established that they’re
not
responding to each other; they’re all responding simultaneously to Kitty Jackson, whom only a small fraction of them can actually see!
    (3) It’s one of those quantum mechanical mysteries.
    Apparently so. All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entangled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are
not
Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions between us—our tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of insects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a child—in the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other non–Kitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react.

2.
Occasionally, life affords you the time, the repose, the
dolce far niente
to ask the sorts of questions that go largely unexamined in the brisk course of ordinary life: How well do you recall the mechanics of photosynthesis? Have you ever managed to use the word “ontology” in a conversational sentence? At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereabouts—in my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility?
    After several months of subjecting each filament and nanosecond of my lunch with Kitty Jackson to a level of analysis that would make Talmudic scholars look hasty in their appraisal of the Sabbath, I have concluded that my own subtle yet decisive realignment occurred at precisely the moment when Kitty Jackson dipped her finger into the bowl of salad dressing “on the side” and sucked the dressing off.
    Here, carefully teased apart and restored to chronological order, is a reconstruction of the brew of thoughts and impulses that I now believe coursed through my mind at that time:
    Thought 1 (at the sight of Kitty dipping her finger and sucking it): Can it possibly be that this ravishing young girl is
coming on to me?
    Thought 2: No, that’s out of the question.
    Thought 3: But
why
is it out of the question?
    Thought 4: Because she’s a famous nineteen-year-old movie star and you’re “heavier all of a sudden—or am I just noticing it more?” (—Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) and have a skin problem and no worldly clout.
    Thought 5: But she just dipped her finger into a bowl of salad dressing and sucked it off in my presence! What else can that possibly mean?
    Thought 6: It means you’re so far outside the field of Kitty’s sexual consideration that her internal sensors, which normally stifle behavior that might be construed as overly encouraging, or possibly incendiary, such as dipping a finger into salad dressing and sucking it off in the company of a man who might interpret it as a sign of sexual interest, are not operative.
    Thought 7: Why not?
    Thought 8: Because you do not register as a “man” to Kitty Jackson, and so being around you makes her no more self-conscious than would the presence of a dachshund.