The Recipe for Revolution. Carolyn Chute
“It was a long time ago,” the guy says with a chuckle. “Neither of us was infamous then.”
Gordon squints, blinks. He thinks the guy does seem familiar, but not from any of Janet and Morse’s dinner parties. It’s the name, Bruce Hummer.
The guy offers no more priming of Gordon’s memory, just says, “Fog’s going to keep a lot of people stranded for the day. I’m thinking of renting a car and driving down to beautiful fog-free New York.”
Not just his accent but the disciplined march of his phrases is mesmerizing.
Gordon is starting to really feel the weight of the airport’s overheatedness.
For a couple of minutes they discuss the fog. And they agree that airport architecture does not fall into any category of art. Bruce snickers, “Even a pipe organ booming away on Bach, lighted candles in crystal chandeliers, lovely gals in rustling skirts, gents in capes bowing or clip-clopping by on white stallions couldn’t beef up the ambience in one of these vinyl caverns.” They both chortle grimly.
Bruce Hummer asks Gordon questions. Gordon, not likely to ask a stranger questions, just dutifully answers the questions asked of him. “Family coming back from Texas,” and “I saw her earlier this month.” Then a wink, “She looks great in blue.” He swallows. “But Morse. Not great. Not good.”
Bruce presses his hands to the plate glass, palms flat, fingers spread, a heaviness creeping into his soft drawl. “Morse is mortal, it turns out.”
Gordon runs some fingers preeningly down one side of his own mustache, thinking he needs to be drunk.
The stranger smiles as he also seems to have come three steps closer. “Janet said your kids are all sharp as tacks.”
Gordon groans with the Dumond House memory fluttering and flickering panoramically.
Bruce is now telling of a piece of property he owns up on the coast, near Bar Harbor, oceanfront. His eyes flick down over Gordon’s red-and-black plaid wool vest then back to his face, that kind of peacocky dark and gray beard with the intense, uncertain pale eyes in dark lashes. Not Hollywood handsome nor would Manhattan give the time of day to such a visage. But in a mountain hollow, Bruce doesn’t doubt, this Guillaume St. Onge is the sun, the moon, and the stars to those many and several hearts that rumor has it, and media has it, are all his.
Bruce confides, “Lina and I had a small place built there but we never used it. I mean never. Not together. I just came from there now. It’s my self-inflicted solitary confinement. Just me and the chipmunks. And acorns coming down.” His closed-mouth smile is a long-lasting scribbled line of sorrow. He squeezes his eyes shut. “Lotta acorns.” Opens his eyes in a goggly way. “Why so many?”
Gordon says, “Well, it’s—”
Bruce interrupts, “I am proud to be in the midst of a divorce that lacks vengeance. Rare, mind you. Divorces in my world are not usually so.” He is close enough now that he grasps Gordon’s upper arm. “My world, sir . . . is . . . afire with opportunities.” Pause for effect. “And vengeance. Even between dearly beloveds. Your world, my sources tell me, is in an enviable limbo. An enviable failure. Opportunities for you all are just . . . what? . . . bales of hay and buckets of milk?”
Gordon’s Tourette’s-like eye-flinch is getting up some velocity.
“I can tell, Gordon, that you don’t stay abreast of certain kinds of minutiae . . . for instance, the Wall Street Journal, with its little sketched cameo portraits . . . or even television, yes . . . the sound bytes, the artful press conferences starring individuals who . . . have . . . well . . . hey! Hear this. One of my dreams a few nights ago was about you.” In a silky one-piece motion the guy draws a pen from his chest pocket, a ballpoint, slim, silver. He smiles yet again. His smile, like his motions, like his voice, like the costly pen, is his suit of armor, hushy and recondite, made differently than for horseback jousting, made for this grand epoch where killers and the killed seldom meet.
He says to Gordon, “You were on a bridge but it was also inside a room. That’s all. The rest is fuzzy. But hey . . . what a coincidence.” Now a business card materializes. He writes on the back, presses it into Gordon’s hand. The print of the card informs Gordon that Bruce Hummer is Chief Executive Officer of Duotron Lindsey International. What Bruce handwrote on the other side is: Janet’s and Morse’s friend.
Gordon seizes in the dead center of his mind’s eye the word friend exactly written in that silky black ink. He is mulling over how much hope Morse Weymouth had placed in shareholder activism. Morse called it democracy, sickeningly true since pencils and US election ballots are as fairy dust in a four-year-old’s storybook. Gordon holds his breath. The new knowledge that Morse has been chummy with the CEO of Duotron Lindsey, the war weapons manufacturing giant, who no doubt has received those personal phone calls of Janet’s, her hushy wrist-grasping voice calling “Bruce” by name and this man’s velvet-throated devilishly seductive accent answering, sickens Gordon. He has known the Weymouths forever. His mother Marian approves of them, of course, in her lifetime endeavor to wear status like a warm coat against ice and snow. But Gordon has . . . yes . . . has loved the Weymouths . . . as human beings . . . as very special human persons. And now what? Is it that all those in the upper classes just suffer too much from politeness? Or do they see each other across a crowded room and fly to each other’s arms . . . figuratively speaking . . . in order to eat well, drink well, and at times satiate themselves in meaningful pretend combat? For they are all winners in the big picture . . . like lions dining on the bleeding spoils, they cuff one another, but their only true enemy is the great mass of human antelopes that is alive only to lie still while being chewed on. In reality this balance of humanity is kept alive only to serve.
He thinks of Morse’s legislative battles. Tinkering at the edges of the edifice but never raising his voice to the ideology of masters over slaves, never sounding off with too much of the belly and the balls. Okay, not always well-mannered, okay, but not one word ever about even a fleeting wish to end slavery. Oh, they say slavery ended. Horseshit. The world writhes in slavery. And of course it’s the nature of the human species . . . it will always be so. In one shape or another it will go on and on and on.
If only Morse had wept for the slave, keened wetly, held the slave in daily awe, even just spoken aloud of the slave.
Maybe Morse never gave a fuck about slaves. Only the “environment” mattered.
And Janet? Does she privately grieve for those chained to debt, cursed by meekness, swept from their homelands, flash-frozen (figuratively speaking), and packed into computer work cubicles, phone marketing cubicles, fellerbunchers, assembly lines, and cell blocks?
He shivers to see the Weymouths in this new dark light. He swallows hard, hotter and hotter in his wool.
Bruce is right there. His expression is odd, like that of someone who sees a ghost or maybe a flying saucer but knows better than to let on. He, Bruce, holds up a hand, a traffic cop’s Stop! and says, “So, no TV or Internet at your compound?”
Gordon stands soldier-straight and grunts, “If I found a TV on the property, I’d order it to go before the firing squad.”
Bruce laughs, withdrawing his hand, looks down the rows of plastic chairs to the X-ray-equipped entrance of this bright waiting area. He turns to Gordon again. He sucks in his breath, tightens his stomach, a fit-looking man, like Rex, but, yes, different from Rex. “I know you, Gordon . . . your politics, your . . . habits. I’ve been following you in the papers . . . and the Internet has more on you than on George Washington. Oh, these sources screw up but certain essences remain. You’ve moved the masses.” He stares straight as the path of light into Gordon’s eyes. “That’s a dangerous gift.”
Gordon’s eyes don’t flinch Tourette’s-ishly but his dark mustache flickers. He hears the airport announcements, which are staticky. He sees discouraged faces of those fogged-in passengers, sitting, standing, milling. He believes somebody has turned the heat up in the demon furnaces under this temple of sacrifice where people are ferried to and from the skies,