Bigfoot Dreams (6 page)

Yet now, as Vera goes for another bite of eggplant and finds she’s already finished, it seems just as unlikely that you could stop loving someone for being unable to go to the grocery. Vera can hardly believe it, but she knows
This Week
readers could:
SHOOTS SPOUSE FOR SHOPPING SLIPUP
. Shopping slipup. Vera tries saying it aloud a few times, then notices that the people around her have looked up from their sausage heroes and are staring at her strangely. How fitting that she should be taken for a screamer! How many screamers clutch grease-stained, crumpled letters just like hers! Vera stands and slides her tray into the stack with such excessive precision that anyone watching would think she
was
certifiable, or at the very least blind drunk.

Leaving, she pretends not to see Vinnie; if she smiled, it would come out one of those rictus screamer grins. Engrossed in her
Afternoon Serial
magazine, Hazel ignores Vera, who’s wondering why a woman who works all week bothers to read summaries of the soap-opera plots. Perhaps all her friends watch, and poor Hazel has to keep up. Vera’s heart warms to Hazel, then cools again when the elevator stops with her floor at knee level.

When Vera walks in, Carmen holds up a tear sheet still smelling of printer’s ink:
REMARKABLE RADISH DIET FIGHTS FAT. DES MOINES DOC PROMISES RADISHING NEW FIGURE IN 30 DAYS.

“What do you think?” says Carmen.

“Thirty days of radishes? Carmen, please.” Among Vera’s reasons for distrusting the Lizard is that he’s always telling Carmen how much he likes skinny girls. Consequently, Carmen has been on every fad diet known to man and permitted by the Seventh-Day Adventists. She loves talking about her diets, conversations that are theoretically about willpower and actually about food: I was doing fine till Cousin Lupe brought over her three-layer devil’s-food cake. Nothing but grapefruit for two weeks till Uncle Manuel had his barbeque—chicken, ribs, rice with squid, buttered pigeon peas, coco flan.

Now she says, “No, I mean
this
.” She points to two postage-stamp-sized pictures at the top of the story. Like all before-and-afters, they look like no one you’d ever run across in real life. But these are both Carmen: Carmen bulging prettily out of a modest one-piece bathing suit beside Carmen with so much weight airbrushed off she looks positively anorexic.

“Did Solomon take these?” Vera asks.

“I volunteered,” says Carmen, saluting. “Now listen, here’s my diet. I send the ‘after’ shot to Frankie in Fort Benning. I say, ‘Look how skinny I’ve got!’ Then I’ll
have
to lose it before he comes home Thanksgiving.”

“Don’t do it,” says Vera.

“Relax,” says Carmen. “If it doesn’t work, I’ll just tell him I gained it back again.”

“Forget it,” Vera says. “Just forget it. Are Shaefer and Esposito back yet?”

“Jury’s still out,” Carmen says. “Go to your office, put your feet up, take it easy. I’ll buzz you when they come in.”

Obediently, Vera trots off and actually puts her feet on her desk. She thinks of one of Solomon’s pre-
This Week
photos—the furrowed soles of an old Mexican who’d just completed a barefoot fifty-mile walk to some shrine. Leaning back, she studies her bookcase, filled mostly with books she’d gotten in the office mail and hadn’t thought worth taking home, including—she sees now—a load of material from Ray Bramlett and the cryptobiologists. She picks out
Bigfoot: Fact or Fantasy?
and, opening at random, reads:

It is nearly impossible for most city dwellers to imagine a terrain wild and vast enough for a creature of Bigfoot’s size to live there undetected. In many ways, Bigfoot is a creature of the last frontier.

When she catches herself reaching for Lowell’s letter again, she decides that working will make the time pass faster.

Another game she plays, a little like Where-Did-This-Story-Come-From? only more productive, is to shut her eyes and put her finger on the nearest printed matter and make a story out of whatever word she’s touched. In this case it’s the salutation on Lowell’s letter: Howdy! She switches on the typewriter and without thinking slugs in the head:
HOWDY DOODY VICTIM OF BIZARRE KIDDIE CULT. SHOCKED MOM SUES.

When six-year-old Teddy Fedders’s friends asked him to bring his Howdy Doody doll out to play, little did the Michigan tot suspect that his beloved puppet would become the latest victim in a wave of violence aimed against America’s best-loved dummy.

In a schoolyard not far from his posh Bloomfield Hills home, little Teddy watched in anguish as the marionette—a legacy from his Dad, killed in a car crash three years before—was tied to a stake and doused with gasoline and burned.

When Teddy’s Mom, Ariella Fedders, 29, pressed charges, she learned that this apparently isolated incident was actually the latest in a Howdy Doody crime wave culminating in last spring’s raid on a Cleveland DJ’s collection of Howdy memorabilia. Nationwide, collectors are fearing for the safety of their Howdy Doody holdings. There is some concern that news of this bizarre violence may be spreading via the same kiddie rumor underground responsible for last year’s whisper campaign alleging the presence of rat hairs in Burger King products.

Where did
this
story come from? Vera watched Howdy Doody as a kid, but was never much of a fan. Nor does she associate him, as some do, with all the sweetness of childhood, with those last precious moments of afternoon TV before Mom called you for dinner.

Rather than pursue this, Vera drifts off till she catches herself staring into the trash basket at the letter from the ultrasound victim in West Myra, Illinois. Then she rolls in more paper and types:
HOUSEWIFE CHARGES ASTRAL RAPE.

In a ground-breaking criminal suit, an Illinois housewife has charged a neighborhood man with assaulting her via astral projection.

Anything would be better than knowing where this story came from. Vera’s considering another trip to the coffee room when the red light on her telephone blinks on.

“Okay,” says Carmen. “They’re here.”

T
HE TABLEAU IN SHAEFER’S
office reminds Vera of moments at parties when conversation dies and you look around and see nothing but other groups who’ve just run out of things to say. All four men—Dan Esposito at Frank Shaefer’s desk, Shaefer standing in the far corner, the two lawyers seated at opposite ends of the chapped Naugahyde couch—look slightly stunned, motionless except for the younger lawyer, whose knees pump as he dandles his briefcase in his lap.

Vera aims her thin little “Hi” at Dan Esposito, whose tan, handsome, slightly hangdog face is the easiest to look at. Tilted back in his chair, he seems at once weary and wholly at ease; if he were driving a truck, one elbow would be out the window.

“Vera,” he says. “Come in.”

Once at an office Christmas party, Vera drank too much punch and found herself standing very close to Dan Esposito, who had himself drunk enough to want to tell her about the camping trips he takes with his wife every fall, out into what he called the heartland to see if
This Week
was keeping in touch. As he spoke, Vera pictured a misty campground beside some Idaho lake. Gazing into the water, Mrs. Esposito is shredding a cigarette filter and wishing they’d gone to Europe like the Shaefers, while Dan sits in a lawn chair with his sleeves rolled up, his fine hands over his eyes, straining to hear what the folks in the camper next door are saying about UFO sightings and life after death.

“Vera, you know Mr. Goldblum,” says Dan, and though Vera has no memory of the bald, gnomish man who rises to greet her, she nods and attempts a smile.

“And this is Mr. Goldblum’s partner. Leonard Villanova, Vera Perl.” The younger lawyer unfolds himself from the couch and walks towards Vera with steps that seem rather too small for his age and height. His hand is soft and damp, and Vera can hardly mumble hello for trying not to laugh at the thought that this is the kind of guy who makes you think the Victorians were right about excessive masturbation showing up in your face. “Pleased to meet you,” says Leonard, a good ten seconds after it’s appropriate, then backs up and sits down.

Vera would like to sit, too, but short of wedging herself between the lawyers, there’s no way. Furnished in dentist’s-waiting-room chic, Shaefer’s office makes no concession to comfort or beauty, not unless you count the prodigious collection of monkeys covering their eyes, ears, mouths, and nearly every inch of shelf space. At their first interview, when Vera complimented him on it—and really, you had to say something—he’d spoken with great reverence of how Gandhi received thousands of similar statues from admirers all over the world. Surely there’s some hidden meaning beyond the obvious irony in the editor of
This Week
amassing these symbols of perfect discretion and tact, but for the life of her, Vera can’t think what it is.

Now Frank spins toward her with a folding chair, which he snaps out like a matador flicking a cape. Above the rumpled shirt, the straining buttons, Frank Shaefer’s face is round as the moon and his blue eyes peer out of it with a baby’s astonishment. In a forties movie or a better world, Frank would live forever in some newsroom, Mr. City Desk chomping stogies and clacking out datelines on an old-fashioned Royal. Instead he’s the eighties version, forced by an early coronary to give up cigars. Vera’s always thought the heart attack had less to do with nicotine than with Frank’s conversational style—firing off questions, then answering them for you. Now she wishes he’d ask her where Solomon is so maybe she could find out.

She and Solomon should have come in together. Waiting for him again recalls a bad party kept going by the hope that some new arrival may yet change everything. Finally they hear his cameras clanking out in the hall and turn toward the sound. Solomon lurches in and bounces around shaking hands. Then Shaefer shakes open a copy of
This Week
with much the same motion he’d used on the folding chair and says, “Okay, what’s the story on
this
?”

FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH FLOWS IN BROOKLYN BACK YARD
. Vera remembers the headline from three or four weeks back. But when Solomon passes it on to her, she rereads every word, partly for the details and partly because she knows no one will bother her till she’s finished:

Soon after a Brooklyn brother and sis started their sidewalk lemonade biz, neighbors began claiming that the youngsters’ brand was having some surprising side effects.

Business boomed for 8-year-old Joshua Green and his sister Megan, 6, when word spread that their 5-cents-a-glass wonder drink was curing satisfied customers of chronic ills and restoring youth and vitality throughout their Flatbush neighborhood. In an exclusive
This Week
interview, the children’s mom, Stephanie Green, 37, admitted that the beverage was concocted from generic lemonade mix and water.

Dr. Martin Green, a well-known Manhattan cardiologist, lost no time in putting his kids “out of business.” But though the Greens refuse to sell samples, requests remain numerous. Daily crowds have all but ruined the front lawn and forced the unfortunate family to invest over $5,000 in additional fencing.

As the shell-shocked Mrs. Green told
This Week
, “I don’t know how this happened to us. I feel like it’s all my fault.”

Vera knows where this story came from. Sometimes Solomon gives her photos and she makes up stories to go with them. It’s a game they play, a reverse of their usual working method. The sad truth is that their collaboration has become a parody of their own dreams. For during that time they’d imagined themselves in love, they’d spoken often of working together on the perfect marriage of picture and text and all-expense-paid vacations: articles for
Geo
magazine on deserted Balinese beaches, lush coffee-table books on Indians of the Amazon and carnival in Venice.

Studying the grainy reprint, Vera’s looking for what’s left of that gorgeous eight-by-ten glossy that Solomon dropped on her desk. She can still see the plastic pitcher, the miniature table and chairs, the two children in front of their Flatbush Gothic monstrosity home, and above it, the dark sky and clouds that look borrowed from Kansas. But what’s missing in reproduction are the hopeful, wide-open-for-business looks on the children’s faces; without them, Vera finds she can’t recapture the peculiar feeling that the little girl in the photo was herself as a child.

She’d set out to write about people who
weren’t
like her, people who name their kids Megan and Joshua and restore the kind of house she grew up in but which in the meantime have declined into what are euphemistically called “multi-family dwellings.” And she’d wound up writing about the fountain of youth, the only thing that could change her back into that child who’d imagined great fortunes and begun selling lemonade.

When she looks up, everyone’s watching her and Frank Shaefer’s saying, “Dr. and Mrs. Green are suing.”

“What Dr. and Mrs. Green?” says Vera.

“Why don’t you tell us about it?” says Dan, the good cop on the interrogation team.

Vera looks at Solomon. For some reason she’d had the impression he’d just been driving by and had got out and snapped the picture. But maybe not, maybe he knew these people, had told her about them, lodged their names in her brain without her remembering. Solomon’s shrugging, palms upturned; he’s bugging his eyes at her. So her impression was right. For once she’s glad Shaefer’s answering for her:

“The Dr. and Mrs. Green who live in this house.” He pokes at the paper. “Megan and Joshua’s Mom and Dad. The well-known Manhattan cardiologist and his shell-shocked wife.”

“That’s not possible,” says Vera. “I made them up.”

The silence that greets this makes Vera want to climb Shaefer’s bookcase and lean out the window toward the soothing traffic noise of Herald Square. Old Mr. Goldblum keeps bobbing his head and smiling. Perhaps he’s surprised or embarrassed; perhaps he thinks Vera’s joking. Solomon shifts his weight from one foot to the other, a process so awkward and noisy that Goldblum beckons to him and pats the couch beside him. Crossing the room, Solomon just misses Shaefer. They dodge each other like dancers in some awful modern ballet. Meanwhile Leonard Villanova has scooted forward and opened his mouth. When Shaefer stands behind him and starts talking, the moment loses its balletic aspect and takes on the aura of an equally rotten ventriloquist act.