A Visit From the Goon Squad (17 page)

“We are not happy,” said Arc.

“Me either,” Dolly said. “You didn’t cut off the—”

“The general is not happy.”

“Arc, listen to me. You need to cut off the—”

“The general is not happy, Miss Peale.”

“Listen to me, Arc.”

“He is not happy.”

“That’s because—look, take a scissors—”

“He is not happy, Miss Peale.”

Dolly went quiet. There were times, listening to Arc’s silken monotone, when she’d been sure she’d heard a curl of irony around the words he’d been ordered to say, like he was speaking to her in code. Now there was a prolonged pause. Dolly spoke very softly. “Arc, take a scissors and cut the ties off the hat. There shouldn’t be a goddamned bow under the general’s chin.”

“He will no longer wear this hat.”

“He
has
to wear the hat.”

“He will not wear it. He refuses.”

“Cut off the ties, Arc.”

“Rumors have reached us, Miss Peale.”

Her stomach lurched. “Rumors?”

“That you are not ‘on top’ as you once were. And now the hat is unsuccessful.”

Dolly felt the negative forces pulling in around her. Standing there with the traffic of Eighth Avenue grinding past beneath her window, fingering her frizzy hair that she’d stopped coloring and allowed to grow in long and gray, she felt a jab of some deep urgency.

“I have enemies, Arc,” she said. “Just like the general.”

He was silent.

“If you listen to my enemies, I can’t do my job. Now take out that fancy pen I can see in your pocket every time you get your picture in the paper and write this down:
Cut the strings off the hat. Lose the bow. Push the hat farther back on the general’s head so some of his hair fluffs out in front
. Do that, Arc, and let’s see what happens.”

Lulu had come into the room and was rubbing her eyes in her pink pajamas. Dolly looked at her watch, saw that her daughter had lost a half hour of sleep, and experienced a small inner collapse at the thought of Lulu feeling tired at school. She put her arms around her daughter’s shoulders. Lulu received this embrace with the regal bearing that was her trademark.

Dolly had forgotten Arc, but now he spoke from the phone at her neck: “I will do this, Miss Peale.”

·   ·   ·

It was several weeks before the general’s picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read:

EXTENT OF B’S WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED,
NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

La Doll had met with ruin on New Year’s Eve two years ago, at a wildly anticipated party that was projected, by the cultural history-minded pundits she’d considered worth inviting, to rival Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball. The Party, it was called, or the List. As in:
Is he on the list?
A party to celebrate—what? In retrospect, Dolly wasn’t sure; the fact that Americans had never been richer, despite the turmoil roiling the world? The Party had nominal hosts, all famous, but the real hostess, as everyone knew, was La Doll, who had more connections and access and juju than all of these people combined. And La Doll had made a very human mistake—or so she tried to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker, causing her to writhe in her sofa bed and swill brandy from the bottle—she’d thought that because she could do something very, very well (namely, get the best people into one room at one time), she could do other things well, too. Like design. And La Doll had had a vision: broad, translucent trays of oil and water suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights whose heat would make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl. She’d imagined people craning their necks to look up, spellbound by the shifting liquid shapes. And they did look up. They marveled at the lit trays; La Doll saw them do it from a small booth she’d had constructed high up and to one side so she could view the panorama of her achievement. From there, she was the first to notice, as midnight approached, that something was awry with the translucent trays that held the water and oil: they were sagging a little—were they? They were slumping like sacks from their chains and
melting
, in other words. And then they began to collapse, flop and drape and fall away, sending scalding oil onto the heads of every glamorous person in the country and some other countries, too. They were burned, scarred, maimed in the sense that tear-shaped droplets of scar tissue on the fore head of a movie star or small bald patches on the head of an art dealer or a model or generally fabulous person constitute maiming. But something shut down in La Doll as she stood there, away from the burning oil: she didn’t call 911. She gaped in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell.

The accusations later—that she’d done it on purpose, was a sadist who’d stood there delighting as people suffered—were actually more terrible, for La Doll, than watching the oil pour mercilessly onto the heads of her five hundred guests. Then she’d been protected by a cocoon of shock. But what followed she had to witness in a lucid state: They hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she weren’t human, but a rat or a bug. And they succeeded. Even before she’d served her six months for criminal negligence, before the class-action suit that resulted in her entire net worth (never nearly as large as it had seemed) being distributed in small parcels to her victims, La Doll was gone. Wiped out. She emerged from jail thirty pounds heavier and fifty years older, with wild gray hair. No one recognized her, and the world where she’d thrived had shortly proceeded to vaporize—now even the rich believed they were poor. After a few gleeful headlines and photos of her new, ruined state, they forgot about her.

Dolly was left alone to ponder her miscalculations—and not just the obvious ones involving the melting temperature of plastic and the proper distribution of weight-bearing chains. Her deeper error had preceded all that: she’d overlooked a seismic shift—had conceived of an event crystallizing an era that had already passed. For a publicist, there could be no greater failure. She deserved her oblivion. Now and then, Dolly found herself wondering what sort of event or convergence
would
define the new world in which she found herself, as Capote’s party had, or Woodstock, or Malcolm Forbes’s seventieth birthday, or the party for
Talk
magazine. She had no idea. She had lost her power to judge; it would be up to Lulu and her generation to decide.

When the headlines relating to General B. had definitively softened, when several witnesses against him were shown to have received money from the opposition, Arc called again. “The general pays you each month a sum,” he said. “That is not for one idea only.”

“It was a good idea, Arc. You have to admit.”

“The general is impatient, Miss Peale,” he said, and Dolly imagined him smiling. “The hat is no longer new.”

That night, the general came to Dolly in a dream. The hat was gone, and he was meeting a pretty blonde outside a revolving door. The blonde took his arm, and they spun back inside, pressed together. Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching the general and his lover, thinking what a good job they were doing playing their roles. She jolted awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it, pressed it to her chest. She understood: the general should be linked to a movie star.

Dolly scrambled off the sofa bed, waxy legs flashing in the street light that leaked in through a broken blind. A movie star. Someone recognizable, appealing—what better way to humanize a man who seemed inhuman?
If he’s good enough for her
…that was one line of thinking. And also:
The general and I have similar tastes: her
. Or else:
She must find that triangular head of his sexy
. Or even:
I wonder how the general dances?
And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the general’s image problems would be solved. It didn’t matter how many thousands he’d slaughtered—if the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.

There were scores of washed-up female stars who might work, but Dolly had a particular one in mind: Kitty Jackson, who ten years ago had debuted as a scrappy, gymnastic crime stopper in
Oh, Baby, Oh
. Kitty’s real fame had come a year later, when Jules Jones, the older brother of one of Dolly’s protégés, had attacked her during an interview for
Details
magazine. The assault and trial had enshrined Kitty in a glowing mist of martyrdom. So people were all the more spooked, when the mist burned off, to find the actress sharply altered: gone was the guileless ingénue she had been, and in her place was one of those people who “couldn’t take the bullshit.” Kitty’s ensuing bad behavior and fall from grace were relentlessly cataloged in the tabloids: on set for a Western, she’d emptied a bag of horseshit onto an iconic actor’s head; she’d set free several thousand lemurs on a Disney film. When an überpowerful producer tried to maneuver her into bed, she’d called his wife. No one would hire Kitty anymore, but the public would remember her—that was what mattered to Dolly. And she was still only twenty-eight.

Kitty wasn’t hard to find; no one was putting much energy into hiding her. By noon, Dolly had reached her: sleepy sounding, smoking audibly. Kitty heard Dolly out, asked her to repeat the generous fee she’d quoted, then paused. In that pause, Dolly detected a mix of desperation and squeamishness that she recognized too well. She felt a queasy jab of pity for the actress, whose choices had boiled down to this one. Then Kitty said yes.

Singing to herself, wired on espresso made on her old Krups machine, Dolly called Arc and laid out her plan.

“The general does not enjoy American movies,” came Arc’s response.

“Who cares?
Americans
know who she is.”

“The general has very particular tastes,” Arc said. “He is not flexible.”

“He doesn’t have to touch her, Arc. He doesn’t have to speak to her. All he has to do is stand near her and get his picture taken. And he has to smile.”

“…Smile?”

“He has to look happy.”

“The general rarely smiles, Miss Peale.”

“He wore the hat, didn’t he?”

There was a long pause. Finally Arc said, “You must accompany this actress. Then we will see.”

“Accompany her where?”

“Here. To us.”

“Oh, Arc.”

“It is required,” he said.

Entering Lulu’s bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in color. A pink shade encircled the overhead lamp. Pink gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. Pink winged princesses were stenciled onto the walls: Dolly had learned how to make the stencils in a jailhouse art class and had spent days decorating the room while Lulu was at school. Long strings of pink beads hung from the ceiling. When she was home, Lulu emerged from her room only to eat.

She was part of a weave of girls at Miss Rutgers’s School, a mesh so fine and scarily intimate that even her mother’s flameout and jail sentence (during which Lulu’s grandmother had come from Minnesota to care for her) couldn’t dissolve it. It wasn’t thread holding these girls together; it was steel wire. And Lulu was the rod around which the wires were wrapped. Overhearing her daughter on the phone with her friends, Dolly was awed by her authority: she was stern when she needed to be, but also soft. Kind. Lulu was nine.

She sat in a pink beanbag chair, doing homework on her laptop and IMing her friends (since the general, Dolly had been paying for wireless). “Hi Dolly,” Lulu said, having stopped calling Dolly “Mom” when she got out of jail. She narrowed her eyes at her mother as if she had difficulty making her out. And Dolly did feel like a black-and-white incursion into this bower of color, a refugee from the dinginess surrounding it.

“I have to take a business trip,” she told Lulu. “To visit a client. I thought you might want to stay with one of your friends so you won’t miss school.”

School was where Lulu’s life took place. She’d been adamant about not allowing her mother, who once had been a fixture at Miss Rutgers’s, to jeopardize Lulu’s status with her new disgrace. Nowadays, Dolly dropped Lulu off around the corner, peering past dank Upper East Side stone to make sure she got safely in the door. At pickup time, Dolly waited in the same spot while Lulu dawdled with her friends outside school, toeing the manicured bushes and (in spring) tulip beds, completing whatever transactions were required to affirm and sustain her power. When Lulu had a play date, Dolly came no farther than the lobby to retrieve her. Lulu would emerge from an elevator flushed, smelling of perfume or freshly baked brownies, take her mother’s hand, and walk with her past the doorman into the night. Not in apology—Lulu had nothing to apologize for—but in sympathy that things had to be so hard for both of them.

Lulu cocked her head, curious. “A business trip. That’s good, right?”

“It is good, absolutely,” Dolly said a little nervously. She’d kept the general a secret from Lulu.

“How long will you be gone?”

“A few days. Four, maybe.”

There was a long pause. Finally Lulu said, “Can I come?”

“With me?” Dolly was taken aback. “But you’d have to miss school.”

Another pause. Lulu was performing some mental calculation that might have involved measuring the peer impact of missing school versus being a guest in someone’s home, or the question of whether you could manage an extended stay at someone’s home without that someone’s parents having contact with your mother. Dolly couldn’t tell. Maybe Lulu didn’t know herself.

“Where?” Lulu asked.

Dolly was flustered; she’d never been much good at saying no to Lulu. But the thought of her daughter and the general in one location made her throat clamp. “I—I can’t tell you that.”