The White Album (23 page)

“8:30
AM
.
to
9:30
A
.
M
.
: LIVE
on
WFSB TV/THIS
MORNING
.

“10
A
.
M
.
to
10:30
A
.
M
.
:
LIVE on WINFAM/THE WORLD
TODAY
.

“10:45
A
.
M
.
to
11:45
A
.
M
.
: PRESS INTERVIEW with
HARTFORD COURANT
.

“12
noon to
1:30
P
.
M
.
: AUTOGRAPHING at BARNES
AND NOBLE
.

“2
P
.
M
.
to
2:30
P
.
M
.
:
TAPE at WDRCAM/FM
.

“3
P
.
M
.
to
3:30
P
.
M
.
: PRESS INTERVIEW with THE HILL
INK
.

“7:30
P
.
M
.
to
9
P
.
M
.
: TAPE at WHNB TV/WHAT ABOUT
WOMEN”

From 12 noon to 1:30
p
.
m
.
,
that first day in Hartford, I talked to a man who had cut a picture of me from a magazine in 1970 and had come round to Barnes and Noble to see what I looked like in 1977
.
From 2
p
.
m
.
to 2:30
p
.
m
.
,
that first day in Hartford, I listened to the receptionists at WDRC AM/FM talk about the new records and I watched snow drop from the pine boughs in the cemetery across the street
.
The name of the cemetery was Mt
.
St
.
Benedict and my husband
’s
father had been buried there
.
“Any Steely Dan come in?” the receptionists kept asking
.
From 8:30
a
.
m
.
until 9
p
.
m
.
,
that first day in Hartford, I neglected to mention the name of the book I was supposed to be promoting
.
It was my fourth book but I had never before done what is called in the trade a book tour
.
I was not sure what I was doing or why I was doing it
.
I had left California equipped with two “good” suits, a box of unanswered mail, Elizabeth
Hardwick
’s
Seduction and Betrayal
,
Edmund Wilsons
To the Finland Station,
six
Judy Blume
books and my eleven-year-old daughter
.
The Judy Blume books were along to divert my daughter
.
My daughter was along to divert me
.
Three days into the tour I sent home the box of unanswered mail to make room for a packet of Simon and Schuster press releases describing me in favorable terms
.
Four days into the tour I sent home
Seduction and Betrayal
and
To the Finland Station
to make room for a thousand-watt hair blower
.
By the time I reached Boston, ten days into the tour, I knew that I had never before heard and would possibly never again hear America singing at precisely this pitch: ethereal, speedy, an angel choir on Dexamyl
.

Where were we heading
.
The set for this discussion was always the same: a cozy oasis of wic
ker and ferns in the wilderness
of cables and cameras and Styrofoam coffee cups that was the actual studio
.
On wicker settees across the nation I expressed my conviction that we were heading “into an era” of whatever the clock seemed to demand
.
In green rooms across the nation I listened to other people talk about where we were heading, and also about their vocations, avocations, and secret interests
.
I discussed L-dopa and biorhythm with a woman whose father invented prayer breakfasts
.
I exchanged makeup tips with a former Mouseketeer
.
I stopped reading newspapers and started relying on bulletins from limo drivers, from Mouseketeers, from the callers-in on call-in shows and from the closed-circuit screens in airports that flashed random stories off the wire
(“carter urges barbiturate ban”
is one that got my attention at La Guardia) between advertisements for
Shenandoah
.
I gravitated to the random
.
I swung with the nonsequential
.

I began to see America as my own, a child’s map over which my child and I could skim and light at will
.
We spoke not of cities but of airports
.
If rain fell at Logan we could find sun at Dulles
.
Bags lost at O’Hare could be found at Dallas/Fort Worth
.
In the first-class cabins of the planes on which we traveled we were often, my child and I, the only female passengers, and I apprehended for the first time those particular illusions of mobility which power American business
.
Time was money
.
Motion was progress
.
Decisions were snap and the ministrations of other people were constant
.
Room service, for example, assumed paramount importance
.
We needed, my eleven-year-old and I, instant but erratically timed infusions of
consommé
, oatmeal, crab salad and asparagus vinaigrette
.
We needed Perrier water and tea to drink when we were working
.
We needed bourbon on the rocks and Shirley Temples to drink when we were not
.
A kind of irritable panic came over us when room service went off, and also when no one answered in the housekeeping department
.
In short we had fallen into the peculiar hormonal momentum of business travel, and I had begun to understand the habituation many men and a few women have to planes and telephones and schedules
.
I had begun to regard my own schedule—a sheaf of thick cream-colored pages printed with the words
“simon
schuster/a division of gulf
western corporation”
—with a reverence approaching the mystical
.
We wanted 24-hour room service
.

We wanted direct-dial telephones
.
We wanted to stay on the road forever
.

We saw air as our element
.
In Houston the air was warm and rich and suggestive of fossil fuel and we pretended we owned a house in River Oaks
.
In Chicago the air was brilliant and thin and we pretended we owned the 27th floor of the Ritz
.
In New York the air was charged and crackling and shorting out with opinions, and we pretended we had some
.
Everyone in New York had opinions
.
Opinions were demanded in return
.
The absence of opinion was construed as opinion
.
Even my daughter was developing opinions
.
“Had an interesting talk with Carl Bernstein,” she noted in the log she had been assigned to keep for her fifth-grade teacher in Malibu, California
.
Many of these New York opinions seemed intended as tonic revisions, bold corrections to opinions in vogue during the previous week, but since I had just dropped from the sky it was difficult for me to distinguish those opinions which were “bold” and “revisionist” from those which were merely “weary” and “rote
.
”
At the time I left New York many people were expressing a bold belief in “joy”—joy in children, joy in wedlock, joy in the dailiness of life—but joy was trickling down fast to show-business personalities
.
Mike Nichols, for example, was expressing his joy in the pages
of Newsweek,
and also his weariness with “lapidary bleakness
.
”
Lapidary bleakness was definitely rote
.

We were rethinking the Sixties that week, or Morris Dickstein was
.

We were taking another look at the Fifties that week, or Hilton Kramer was
.

I agreed passionately
.
I disagreed passionately
.
I called room service on one phone and listened attentively on the other to people who seemed convinced that the “texture” of their lives had been agreeably or adversely affected by conversion to the politics of joy, by regression to lapidary bleakness, by the Sixties, by the Fifties, by the recent change in administrations and by the sale of
The Thorn Birds
to paper for one-million-nine
.

I lost track of information
.

I was blitzed by opinion
.

I began to see opinions arcing in the air, intersecting flight patterns
.
The Eastern shutde was cleared for landing and so was lapidary bleakness
.
John Leonard and joy were on converging vectors
.
I began to see the country itself as a projection on air, a kind of hologram, an invisible grid of image and opinion and electronic impulse
.
There were opinions in the air and there were planes in the air and there were even people in the air: one afternoon in New York my husband saw a man jump from a window and fall to the sidewalk outside the Yale Club
.
I mentioned this to a
Daily News
photographer who was taking my picture
.
“You have to catch a jumper in the act to make the paper,” he advised me
.
He had caught two in the act but only the first had made the paper
.
The second was a better picture but coincided with the crash of a DC-io at Orly
.
“They’re all over town,” the photographer said
.
“Jumpers
.
A lot of them aren’t even jumpers
.
They’re window washers
.
Who fall
.
”

What does that say about us as a nation,
I was asked the next day when I mentioned the jumpers and window washers on the air
.
Where are we headed
.
On the 27th floor of the Ritz in Chicago my daughter and I sat frozen at the breakfast table until the window washers glided safely out of sight
.
At a call-in station in Los Angeles I was told by the guard that there would be a delay because they had a jumper on the line
.
“I say let him jump,” the guard said to me
.
I imagined a sky dense with jumpers and fallers and DC-ios
.
I held my daughter’s hand at takeoff and landing and watched for antennae on the drive into town
.
The big antennae with the pulsing red lights had been for a month our landmarks
.
The big antennae with the pulsing red lights had in fact been for a month our destinations
.
“Out I-10 to the antenna” was the kind of direction we had come to understand, for we were on the road, on the grid, on the air and also in it
.
Where were we heading
.
I don’t know where you’re heading, I said in the studio attached to the last of these antennae, my eyes fixed on still another of the neon
Fleetwood mac
signs that flickered that spring in radio stations from coast to coast, but I’m heading home
.

1977