5
Ryall Wyndham had never understood how anybody, anywhere, could go about life haphazardly. It wasn’t just a question of money, although money counted. He could name two-dozen people in his class at Brown whose approach to money was a lot like their approach to cheeseburgers: Eat it up fast, before it had a chance to get away. None of them seemed to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that someday they would be old. They lived in a continuous present, and that present was filled with enough in the way of alcohol and drugs to addle God himself on a bad day. They were that way about women too, and that was worse. Ryall could remember a time when men worked very hard not to marry. Now they married all the time, for no reason at all, because it was Tuesday. They married women with money and women without it. They married women with background and women without it. Mostly, they seemed to marry women their parents wouldn’t approve of, as if that, and that alone, was enough to qualify a human female to be the mother of children. Ryall Wyndham did not have a wife, and he did not have children, and he did not expect to acquire either until the time was right. The time would be right when he could get one of these silly debutantes he escorted to all the best places to fall hideously, ridiculously in love with him.
The problem, he decided, checking out his tie in the mirror, was that the women he knew did not seem to go about life as haphazardly as the men he knew. Even the really ugly debutantes realized they were sitting on gold mines, and not just their crotches, either. God, he would love it, one day, to go in to one of those places and use a word like crotch. Or cunt. That was a good one. They really hated that one. They’d use words like crotch every once in a while just to show how down-to-earth and unaffected they were, but they’d never use a word like cunt, because it smelled of real vulgarity. The only people who could get away with real vulgarity were members of the Blood Royal. That was what all these people wanted to be, even though they’d never say so out loud. That was why they sent their children to those schools where the teachers worked overtime to instill true liberal guilt. The rich in America hate the poor everywhere in the world. The people of the Third World want only to rise up and throw off their capitalist oppressors and take on the mantle of vanguard communism for the new millennium. The real problem with this country is the Consumer Mentality. Oh, yes. Groton and St. Paul’s, Exeter and Choate. All those places positively despised the Consumer Mentality. It was just so damned tacky, and bad for you. McDonald’s hardened your arteries and ruined the landscape in pristine wildernesses from Maine to California. Television was a drug, meant to take your mind off Really Serious Things and keep you stupid and happy. Wal-Mart was the worst, because it not only did everything morally wrong, from refusing to carry emergency contraception to resisting the formation of workers’ union s, but it killed the very heart of America, the American small town. America had been a much better place when people had been forced to pay very high prices for bedsheets and electronics on their very own local Main Streets. Ryall was sure these people had seen a Main Street or two, once or twice in their lives. There was one in Stowe where they went to ski. There was another in Bar Harbor.
Tacky, tacky, tacky, Ryall thought. Then he closed his eyes and put his forehead against the mirror’s glass. He was very revved up, and he hadn’t even taken anything yet. He hated to medicate himself before he absolutely needed to. It was getting harder and harder for him to keep his mind on the subject when he went to one of these affairs, and yet everything—his whole life—depended on his remembering what he had seen and not writing it down until he was safely in the car and on the way home. Of course, he could cheat a little. He could find his way into the bathroom a couple of times every night and take out his notebook then, getting the details down before they disappeared forever from his head. It wasn’t as good as having the nearly total recall he’d had when he’d started, but it helped. The problem was that it had its natural limits. If he started hitting the bathroom every hour, rumors would be in full swing by the end of the night. They’d have him half-dead of AIDS or addicted to crack before he’d had a chance to file his column in the morning. That would be the end of everything. Reliability was the key. The women really weren’t as addled as their men. They kept their heads, and they kept their eyes on the main chance, and they weren’t about to jeopardize the only thing that mattered to them to hold on to a pudgy little dork whose only amusement value lay in his ability to get their names in the papers. There was a contradiction for you. The men really did things. They ran banks. They determined the economies of nations. The women did nothing but go to parties, and they were the ones with their names in the papers.