Woman Who Loved the Moon (10 page)

* * *

Eight
a.m., Friday morning in Chicago, Jordan Granelli sat at his desk, reading the Corpse Roster. High above the street, on the two-hundredth floor of the Daley Tower, he escaped the noise of city sirens and the chatter of voices: here there was only the rustling paper and the click of computers, and a blue, silent sky. He read the print-outs slowly and carefully, making little piles on the desk top. Out on Madison there was an old wino dead; they named him King of the Alkies—he never let a man go without a drink if he had a drop in his flask... the bums are sobering up for his funeral today... On Sheridan Road, in the heart of the Gold Coast, there was a crippled girl whose rich family bankrupted itself to keep her alive; she died this morning, 4
a.m.... On Kedzie the hard-working mother of three just died of DDT poisoning... All good, heart-breaking stories. In Evanston, a widower’s only son just got killed swinging on a monorail pylon, 10
p.m. last night... He frowned and tossed that one aside. They’d done a dead child Tuesday. He flipped back and pulled a sheet out, and buzzed for a messenger.

“Take this to the director’s office,” he told the boy, and swiveled his chair towards the window. He gazed out at the light-filled sky, at the lake, at the morning sun. There was no place in the world he felt more alive, unless it was in front of the camera’s eye. “In the midst of life we are in death,” he said to the sky, rolling the words like honey on the tongue. They loved it, his idiot public, when he poured clichés on their ears. He wrapped the dead round with sweet words, and the money came tumbling in. Power rose in his blood like fever. Noon was his hour. He waited for the earth’s slow turn to noon.

* * *

Noon, on a Friday in Chicago: means it is 1:00 in New York, 11:00 in Denver, 10:00 in Los Angeles. In L. A. the housewives turn off their vacuums and turn on the TVs, and the secretaries in San Francisco and in Denver take their morning half-hour break in a crowded lounge. In New York clerks and tellers and factory workers take a late lunch, and the men in the bars, checking their watches, order one last quick one. And in Chicago the entire city settles into appreciative stillness. On the lunch counters and in the restaurants, up on the beams of rising buildings jutting through dust clouds and smog like Babel, even inside the ghastly painted cheerfulness of hospitals, mental homes, and morgues, TV sets glow.

* * *

Jordan Granelli looked out at them all through the camera. “It’s a sad thing,” he said, his voice graceful and deep, “when the very young are called. Who of us has not, would not, mourn for the death of a child? But it is doubly sad when young and old join in mourning for one they loved, and miss. Today, my friends, we talk with Ms. Emily Maddy, who has lost her only daughter, Jennifer. Jennifer was a woman in her prime, with three young children of her own, and now they and her own mother have lost her.”

The camera swung slowly around a shack-like house, and stopped on the face of a bent, tired woman looking dully up at Jordan Granelli. “The kids don’t understand it yet,” she said. “They think she’s comin’ back. I wish it had been me. It should have been me.”

* * *

A woman in a factory in Atlanta rubs her eyes. “She looks like my mother. I’m voting my money to her.”

“Look at that hole she’s living in!” comments a city planner in San Diego, watching the miniature Japanese set on his secretary’s desk. “Mary and I just bought our voting card last week. I wonder if we’ll get to see the kids?”

A man on a road construction crew in Cleveland says, “I’m voting for her.”

“You said Tuesday you were gonna vote for the guy whose son was killed by the fire engine,” his neighbor reminds him.

“Well, this old lady needs it more; she’s got those kids to look after.”

“I don’t know how you can watch that stuff,” a third man says fiercely. “It makes me puke.” He walks ostentatiously out of earshot of the TV. They stare at him in wonder.

“His wife died in June,” someone volunteers. “Left him with two kids. He hates to be reminded.”

“Jealous?” the first man nods. “He would have liked a little cash himself, I bet. He’s got no feeling for other peoples’ troubles, that guy. I wouldn’t vote a cent to him, not a cent.”

On their big wall screen in Chicago, the network executives watch the woman’s tears with pleasure. “That son-of-a-bitch sure knows how to play it,” says a vice-president. “I’m damned if I know why no one ever thought of it before. It’s a great gimmick, death. He’ll top last week’s ratings.”

“Ssh!” says his boss. “I want to hear what he says.”

* * *

The woman’s sobs were at last quieting. She bent her head away from the bright lights, and they touched the white streaks in her hair with silver. One shaky hand shaded her eyes. Jordan Granelli took hold of the other with tender insistence. The camera moved in closer; the button mike on Granelli’s collar caught each meticulous word, and resonated it out to eighty million people.

“Let your grief happen,” he said softly. It was one of his favorite remarks. “Ms. Maddy, you told us that your daughter was a good person.”

“Yes,” said her mother, “oh yes, she was. Good with the kids and always laughing and sunny—”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in tears for youth and grace and goodness. In all your pain, remember—” he paused histrionically, and she looked up at him as if he might, indeed, comfort her with his precisely rounded sentences, “remember, my friends, that we are all in debt, and we pay it with our sorrow. Ms. Maddy, there are millions of people feeling for you at this very moment. We live by chance, and Dame Fortune, who smiles on us today, cuts the thread of our lives tomorrow. Mourn for those you love—for you may not mourn for yourself—and think kindly of those that death has left behind. In life we are in death. And we all have to go.”

Poetic, smooth, slimy bastard, Christy thought. She moved even closer in, catching his craggy expressive hand holding the woman’s worn one, the dirty dark furniture, the crinkled photograph of the dead daughter on the table, the stains on the floor—push that poverty, girl, it brings in the money every time—and, as the light booms drew back, the play of moving shadows across white hair. That ought to do it. The sound had cut out at Granelli’s final echoing syllable. She cut out and stepped back; simultaneously, Leo, the set director, standing to her left, sliced his long fingers through the air. The crew relaxed.

Granelli stood up briskly, dropping the old woman’s hand. He brushed some dirt off his trousers and walked towards the door. As he passed Christy he inclined his head: “Thank you, Ms. Holland.”

She ignored his thanks. She would have turned her back, except that would have been too pointedly rude, and even she, his chief camerawoman, could not be rude with impunity to Jordan Granelli. One word from him and the network would break her back down to children’s shows. She simply concentrated on taking her camera from its tripod and storing it in its case. Her arms ached. Ms. Maddy, she saw, was looking after Granelli as if he had left a hole in the air. Christy hated it, that look of beaten bewilderment. Did you think that sympathy was real, lady? He fooled you, too. He’s a ghoul. We’re all ghouls.

Zenan, the second cameraman, strolled over to her, from his leaning place behind her on the wall. She could smell the alcohol on his breath. He stayed drunk most of the time, now. “You okay?” she asked him.

“Another day, another death, right, Chris?” he said.

“Shut up, Zen,” she said.

“Tell me, Christy, how much do you think the great-hearted American public will pay the lady for her sterling performance? Friday’s death has an edge, they say, on the ones at the beginning of the week. If ten million people vote a dollar a week, take away the network cut, and Mr. Granelli’s handsome salary, and what you and I need to pay our bills—hell, I was never very good at arithmetic in school. But it’s a lot of money. Weep your heart out for Mr. Death, and win a million!” he proclaimed. “Does
she
know it’s a lot of money?” he asked, jerking his thumb at Ms. Maddy.

“Zen, for pity’s sake!” She could see Jake leaning towards them from his place near the door, listening, with a concentrated, big cat stare. Is there danger? those eyes asked. She caught that directed gaze and shrugged. After six years working for “We All Have To Go,” I’ll be a drunk too.

“For pity’s sake?” he repeated. He looked down at her from his greater height. “Here am I, a sodden voice crying in the wilderness, crying that when Jordan Granelli walks, in the dark nights when the moon is full, the deathlight shines around him!”

And Jake was there, one big hand holding Zenan’s arm. “Come on, Zen, come outside.”

Leo came striding in. “What the hell happened?”

She smiled. “He called Granelli ‘Mister Death.’”

“You think it’s funny? Some day Granelli’s going to hear it and frown, and his guards are going to take Zenan to an empty lot and smash his windpipe in.”

She was jolted. “Jake wouldn’t do that!”

“You like Jake? Well, Cary or Stew. That’s what he pays them for—that’s what the network pays them for,” he amended. “Ah, Christ. He’s got seniority. They can’t fire him. He’s our reality check.” He scowled. “I’ve been here too long myself.”

Have I really only been here two years? She lugged her case and tripod over to Willy, manager of Stores. “See you Monday,” he said cheerily. He’d been there eight years, longer than anybody. But nothing seemed to touch him.

She ducked out of the tiny house to get a breath of air. Granelli’s big limousine, pearl-white with its black crest on the side, sat parked at the curb. Around the house, in a big semicircle kept back by the police, a crowd had gathered to watch. She heard the whispers start. What are they waiting for? Granelli? But they could all see him, he was there in the car, and besides, they all knew his face. They saw him five afternoons a week on their TV screens, much closer than they would ever get to him in reality. They’re waiting for death, she thought morbidly. The Grim Reaper himself, striding out of the house with jangling fingers, hoisting his scythe on his clavicle.

Jake came round the corner. “What’d you do with Zenan?” she asked him.

“Locked him in the crew trailer,” Jake said. “It doesn’t matter who he talks to, in there.” He looked worried. “Christy, you a friend of Zenan’s? Tell him to shut up about Mr. Granelli. If he starts upsetting people, Mr. Granelli won’t like it, and the network won’t either.”

“I don’t know what he has to complain about—Zenan, I mean,” Christy said. “Any TV show that gets eighty million people watching it every day, can’t be wrong.”

He started to answer, and then the car motor rumbled and he ran for his seat, riding shotgun next to Cary, who drove. Stew sat in the back next to Jordan Granelli. Does he ever talk to them? Christy wondered. Does he know that Jake used to be a skyhook and Cary paints old houses for fun? Or are they merely pieces of furniture for him, parts of the landscape, conveniences bought for him by the grateful network, like the cameras and the car?

Leo came walking out of the house as the long white car pulled away. “Another week gone,” he said.

“Jake stuck Zenan in the crew trailer,” Christy said.

Leo wiped a big hand across his eyes, and shrugged. “I don’t want to deal with it,” he said. “I think I’ll just go home. It’s Friday. Want to walk to the subway?”

“I’d love to!”

“Good. Let me tell Gus to go without us.” He strolled down the uneven sidewalk to where the crew trailer was parked, and leaned his head in to talk to the driver. The engine was idling softly, like a patted drum, as Gus played with it. Gus was nineteen, born thirty years too late, he said. His Golden Age was the world of the sixties and early seventies, before the banning of private cars from cities all over the world, when the motor was king, and all you needed was three dollars for a license to drive a car. His childhood memories were an improbable nostalgia of freeways and shiny beetle-like cars with names like Pinto and Jaguar and Matador. He even owned a monster old car (“We were born the same year”) and raced it, for pleasure, along the old Lake Shore Drive. The club he belonged to paid terrific sums to keep the unused roadway in repair. Right now its current project was to convince a skeptical city government to let them use Wrigley Field for something called a Demolition Derby. In it you smashed cars against each other until they all broke down.

“All right,” said Leo. “Come on.”

They walked down Kedzie Street to Lake and turned east. The sun was hot; Chris felt her shirt starting to stick to her back. She hummed. The show was behind her now, and with all her will she would forget it; today was Friday, and she was going home, home to two days with Paul. Leo’s head was down, as if he were counting the cracks in the broken concrete. She could just see his face. He looked tired and bothered. I wouldn’t want his job, she thought, not for all the world. Maybe he was worried about Zenan. We’ve been friends for a long time. Maybe he’ll talk to me.

He surprised her. “Do you ever think about Dacca?”

I never forget it, she thought.

Once, she had tried to tell Paul about it, what it had been like for her, for them all, that summer in Bangladesh. For him it was barely remembered history; he had been fourteen. He stopped her, after five minutes, because of what it did to her eyes and mouth and hands. But Leo remembers it just the way I do. Scenes unreeled at the back of her mind. Babies, crawling over one another on slimy floors, dying as they crawled, and bodies like skeletons with grotesque distended bellies, piled along dirt roads, the skitter of rats in the gutters like the drift of falling leaves, and flies numerous as grains of rice—and no rice. No food. The Famine Year: it had killed fifty million people in Bangladesh. And she and Leo had met there, on the network news team in Dacca. “I remember it. I dream about it sometimes.”