Reality Check
A man of lesser fortitude than Ralph Bickersmart might have been charged with presentiment by the ringing phone that echoed, shrill and hard, through the modest chambers of his Minnesota house on that early winter morning. Thus inclined, he might have been further chastened by the brutality of the weather brewing outside. The sun lingered low in the sky, furtively scampering west, its presence belied only by fleeting shafts of amber that punctured the slate gray mantle of clouds. From the kitchen Ralph could hear the fierce arctic wind, whipped and eddied on the currents of a thousand tiny lakes, yet so arid that – had he had the temerity to step outside – it would literally have taken his breath away.
It was a little unusual: such friends as they had usually waited until the evening hours to make contact, the office did not trouble him anymore, and the assorted hustlers, hucksters and scam artists had been thwarted, he remembered smugly, by his prompt filing with the Do Not Call registry. In any event, Miriam typically answered the phone. But on this day proximity and protocol dictated that he pick up the portable receiver (a gift, he fondly remembered, from one of his sons) that lay prostrate beneath him on the kitchen counter top. He watched it bleat and wriggle like an unchanged infant. Declining to pause from loading the dishwasher, he lifted the mewling plastic babe and cradled it under his neck so that it gently see-sawed, tickling his trim white beard.
“Hello?”
He spoke as if taking steps into a darkened room. A rivulet of phlegm dislodged at the back of his throat, imparting, to his irritation, the suggestion of a man just awakened. In fact he had been up, as was his custom, since six.
A brief delay. Long distance.
“Hey, Dad!”
Marci’s disembodied voice, squeaky and game, holed up in a conference room high above Tinseltown – or perhaps feeding a ravenous pay phone in a barrio gas station. He cared not to ask. Pondering the time difference between Minnesota and California, he wondered, unkindly, if she had yet been to bed.
“Well. Hello, Marci, how are you?”
He spoke with the tone of the English émigré; clipped, weighty, only the occasional twang – an out-of-tune guitar string – betraying his deeper loyalties. He straightened from his crouch, stretched his wiry frame and spied, with some small satisfaction, an errant coffee cup decoupled from its saucer and resting askew against the tiled kitchen wall.
“Not too bad, Dad, thanks,” she sounded lucid enough, but she paused, as if preparing herself. “Say, eh, is Mom there?”
He was relieved to be granted so undemanding a passage and readied to pass the phone, baton style, to his wife when he heard further avian chirping.
“Dad! No! Don’t go! It’s you I want to talk to. I just don’t want Mom to know what we’re talking about.”
This last remark, addressed in a hushed tone, seduced him with a frisson of conspiracy. He glanced up and registered the girth of Miriam’s back, her shoulders heaving heedlessly to the rhythm of her chopping and dicing. With a handful of muted steps, he removed himself to the hallway.
“Well, my dearest daughter, what is it?” his feigned nonchalance was betrayed by the hand that shielded the mouthpiece, quite unnecessarily as his wife was now comfortably out of earshot.
“Well, Dad,” she was more at ease now; she had a present to unwrap. “D’you remember that show I told you about – the one I’ve been helping out on – Room Snatchers?”
He calculated. In the time it took for him to come up with a plausible response, it was clear that he did not.
“Dad. Sometimes I don’t think you take me very seriously.” This was not true; he did not ever take her seriously. At least not in this incarnation, the chubby girl gone Hollywood. Nor in her former turns as philosopher, performance artist, novelist and designer. But he protested his innocence and his interest, and she continued, declining to embarrass him again.
“It’s a reality show, Dad. You’d know what that was if you ever woke up to what’s going on in the world. Reality TV has conquered the sitcom. Low production costs plus real human drama. Ferchrisakes, I think you Brits practically invented it!”
Not for the first time he regretted packing her off to that boarding school. The California twang was now unmistakable, although she was still happily undone by the elongated vowels, drama remaining an obstinate draaama. Loathe as he would be to admit it, he had heard of reality TV. The Star-Tribune or the Times would occasionally run a chuckling article on the culture pages. It all seemed aptly fin de siecle to him and certainly of no consequence.
But Marci was rolling now. “Well, anyway, on Room Snatchers they, like, send this team of designers and workmen round to your house, right, and they, like, do a total makeover on one of your rooms while you’re out shopping for groceries or neutering the cat or something stupid and prosaic like that. It’s hilarious, Dad. They only need three hours, and you won’t believe what they can do. D’you remember I told them they should do your house?”
There was some more stammering, but this time she was in no mood to be diverted. “Well, they’re swinging through the Midwest next month, and they wanna do it. They said yes, Dad! I only had to show them a photo of that godawful living room you guys hang out in, Mom looking all Little House on the Prairie in her housecoat, and they were hooked. They love that heartland stuff out here – well, y’know, in small doses.”
“Gee, eh, Marci” he was, perhaps for the first time with his youngest child, genuinely flustered. Plus he rather liked the living room. “It, erm, seems to me that it would be a lot of fuss and mess, and I, urmm, I hardly think your mother is going to be thrilled with the prospect of a lot of strange people, eh, Hollywood people, trampling through her shag-pile.”
Marci was triumphant. “That’s just it, Dad, Mom won’t know! She can’t know! The whole point, y’know, the money shot, is the look of surprise on her face when she comes back and sees what they’ve done. She’s gonna sh- I mean she’s gonna freak out. Can’t you just see it? It’ll be priceless.”
Another pause. “And think, Dad, you get a brand new room and a whole lot of free stuff in the bargain.”
He had to admit, giving his moustache an exploratory stroke, she had marshaled her arguments to great effect. As insulted as he was by her dangling ‘free stuff’ in front of him, he did rather like the idea of putting one over on Miriam.
But she had waited to deliver the clincher. “C’mon, Dad. It would really help me to have put this together for these guys. I think things are starting to move for me out here.”
No father can resist the urge to protect his daughter, least of all one as convinced of his child’s fecklessness and vulnerability as Ralph Bickersmart. The poor girl: corpulent bait swimming with the Armani sharks.
Another pause. Deep breath.
“No mess?”
“No mess.”
“No fuss?”
“No fuss.”
“Mother is not to know?”
“Mother is not to know.”
Ralph had met Miriam in the early seventies, on his third day working at the St. Paul insurance company where he had sought refuge after refusing corporate evacuation back to London. Perhaps ‘met’ was not the right word. In truth he coveted from afar her trim, upright body, the shapely bosom that bobbed gently with the clickety-clack of her typing as she sat, erect and proud, the tallest and prettiest girl in the pool. Ensconced in his crepuscular office, hemmed in left and right by burgeoning file cabinets, he twisted his black shoestring tie between fingers sweaty with lust and trembling with sexual frustration. He winced at the lustrous black hair, tumbling in waves behind the back of her ergonomic chair. Her nose, thin and delicate, was curved just enough to be exotic. When she wrinkled it – perhaps stumped for a second by a dictated word piped into her earpiece – he would draw his breath and clench his fists, fused with her fleeting discomfort. He had not had relations with a woman since arriving in the US two years ago. They seemed interplanetary, these American girls – their implacably unblemished skin, the coruscating rows of flawless teeth – out of his orbit.
With a heart resigned to failure, Ralph took notes on the lunchtimes of the pool girls, measuring as methodically as if he were scouting guards for a prison break. It was just for the want of trying that he tip-toed over to the pool’s Formica perimeter, taking due care that Betty had indeed left for lunch and that Delores had not yet returned. It was just for the bloody hell of it that he clutched in his quivering hand the poorly contrived memo draft – some awful nonsense about staffing rosters – that he had spent the better part of the morning scratching out. It was only because he was so desperately, desperately lonely and that he would try anything, no matter how unlikely, to meet and – God and all the saints willing – have intercourse with a woman, that he greeted the glowing Miriam, bedecked in a lime green headband, her matching skirt daringly hemmed, and croaked, with all the insouciance his wretched soul could muster, a faintly whispered, “Hello.”
“So, eh, Miriam I was thinking. Your sixtieth is coming up soon. Why don’t we drive down to the Mall of America this afternoon, perhaps you can pick out your present?”
They were lingering at the breakfast table, she savoring the last of her buttered toast. He punched open his Star-Tribune with a flourish, the better, he hoped, to imply the humdrum nature of his considerate suggestion. Normally he had her choose her present from the Sears catalog so this was, he knew, a bit of a gamble.
“Mmm, what’s that you said dear?” he had caught her mid-bite. Not an auspicious beginning. Patience.
“I said – Miriam – how would you like me to drive you down to the Mall of America this afternoon, so you can pick out your birthday present?”
He surveyed her over the crest of his paper. Hard to see now the sprightly young girl in the mini-skirt hidden within the munching jowls, the graying hair fossilized in spray, the shoulders hunched forward as she gathered stray crumbs into her mouth. She quit the pool on the day he proposed, pausing only to dazzle the girls with the ring he had nonchalantly slipped onto her cafeteria tray. Meanwhile, he climbed the corporate ladder, reaching at last the executive floor and the title of Corporate Secretary, a position of glittering obsequiousness from which he had just been retired.
There was a look of confusion for a second, then mild alarm, and then, her brown eyes opening wide, she looked as thrilled as if he had slapped down the Hope diamond, right there between the orange juice and the butter dish.
“Oooh, Ralph, that sounds like a lovely idea. Now, let me think. Just after lunch would suit me grand.”
“Excellent! Shall we say twelve-thirty?”
“Yes, Ralph, just after lunch.”
“Yes, Miriam, twelve-thirty.”
He was pushing it now, but it was all in the timing, and he had been warming to the ruse, making friends with some of the production crew and even going so far as to compare alternative decoys with Rodney, the muscle-bound Australian sound engineer.
He got her out on time, thanks to a show of foot-tapping, tut-tutting and impatient pacing that commenced, as planned, at noon. They arrived at the Mall a half-hour later, having negotiated a choleric I-494. He turned the old Buick’s recalcitrant steering over and over, the tires squeaking their protest, as they ascended the cavernous parking lot, eventually finding a space, he noted with a smile, in the California zone. This was an alien world to him but his few visits to the Mall, tugged by Miriam to appease out of town visitors, had convinced him that here was the place to waste away the precious hours required to let those magicians do their work. He had not counted on Miriam making a beeline for Sears.
“I think these will suit me just fine, Ralphie.” She was holding one half of a pair of brown flats, giving the dull leather an exploratory flex between her strong hands. It was now one-twenty.
“Well, eh, it seems to me you might be a little hasty there, Miriam. We’ve all afternoon you know, and you don’t want to pick the first thing you see, now do you?” This was thin ice. Ralph Bickersmart did not choose to linger in shopping malls. Nevertheless, he motioned towards the marbleized walkway and a veritable pun alley of specialty stores: The Great Frame Up, You Know It Makes Scents, and, he noted with a slightly scandalized eye, The Sweet Smell of Sex-cess.
She looked as hurt as the first time he had broken a date. “Don’t you like them, Ralphie?” she looked at the unobjectionable shoe as if it were an abandoned puppy whose death warrant Ralph had just cheerfully signed. He knew at that moment he was sunk.
Now Ralph Bickersmart drove his wife back to a home changed he knew not how. They had warned him that he would be filmed as they made their suspenseful return, and he saw it now in his rear-view mirror: a dark grey Explorer flashing its lights, outstretched arms waving him into the left lane. The bloody impertinence! Risking their lives for a better camera angle! It wasn’t enough that the limp-wristed little prick with the Carnaby Street shirt and the clipboard pressed against his scrawny chest had asked, well ordered him, really, to be back by three-thirty “sharp, s’il vous plait!” so they could catch the reaction shots in the fading sunlight. Now they wanted to run him off the road, too! He held up his hand to shield his eyes and drove obstinately, unswervingly on. Left lane be damned. All the while, Miriam, who he was sure by now must suspect something, rode an impassive shotgun, wool coat buttoned, eyes fixed ahead, patent leather handbag clutched like a rosary.
They took their exit off 494, the gray Explorer trailing in their wake. It was now three twenty-five, and they were two miles from home. A good thing, too, for Ralph’s thoughts were not on his imminent television debut but on the cumulative mass of two full meals and an oversized mug of flat beer pressing urgently on his tumescent bladder. And he had forgotten to take his Zantac! He had salvaged the day, desperate now, by announcing that they should celebrate Miriam’s surprisingly efficient shopping expedition with a “spot of dinner” over at Pasta Best, a chain restaurant in Minnetonka that boasted a life-size gondola fresco, a fiber-glass Trevi fountain and its own set of Spanish Steps, leading not to the Piazza de Spagna but to the spotless basement restrooms. He had calculated that the lunch crowd would have dissipated, that the unusual hour would at least provide for a rapid seating. With luck they could be on their way home by three.
Fat chance. He was crestfallen to see an improbable gaggle of prospective diners milling around the trickling fountain, some of the children even trying an exploratory paddle. Bedraggled fathers rocked baby carriages with one hand and clutched giant plastic hockey pucks in the other, glancing down at the alien disks every few seconds so as not to miss the clamorous siren that would indicate the availability of their table. It was fully two-thirty before they were seated in a wood-paneled booth, Ralph drumming his fingers on the vinyl menu as the oblivious Miriam cooed over the cocktail list.
He ran a clammy palm across face, grazing the grains of ossified spittle that nestled in the corners of his mouth. The beer had parched his throat. With a spasm of panic he wondered if any of the spaghetti Bolognese, wolfed down in ten minutes flat, had strayed onto his chin. Too late to be sure now, he told himself, as he yanked the parking brake and unbuckled his belt, the unseen cameras tracking his every gesture. He glanced over at Miriam: she was clean. Time to go. He climbed out of the car and gallantly jogged around to collect his wife. They walked the handful of steps to the front door as if they were in a three-legged race, arms showily entwined, their heads bowed into the glacial wind. Soon enough, Ralph had unlocked the front door, and they were inside. Miriam slid out of her coat and, as if drawn, headed straight for the living room door.
Suppose that, in lieu of hanging their overcoats on the hallway’s wooden rack and returning his keys to their bowl on the occasional table, he had instead seized the ornamental letter opener that rested next to the bowl and, with a manic howl, plunged the opener’s serrated blade into his neck, ripping his carotid artery as if it were an unopened RedBook. Suppose that his knees had buckled, and he had lurched forward like a dislodged chimney stack, landing with a soft thud on the hallway carpet, his legs twitching like a hooked fish, a swelling semi-circle of his blood staining the beige rattan. And suppose that, after a few moments of flapping and flailing, he had begun the consoling process of disembodiment, floating up and through the hallway ceiling into the bedroom, past their marital bed with its kaleidoscopic mountain range of pillows, past the regiments of socks and underwear bivouacked in their wooden drawers and up and up, through the roof and out of the house, turning over at last and facing, with an unimaginable sensation of grace, the purest, the whitest light of the promised kingdom of heaven. It would, he thought at that moment, have been no more pure, no more white, no more dazzling than the sight that greeted him as he dutifully followed Miriam into the metamorphosed living room.
His familiar tartans and plaids, the crimson striped wallpaper with its nascent peeling, the floral drapes that fluttered and danced with the currents of the air vents; they were all gone. Dissolved in a flood of unrelenting, uncompromising, fascistic white. There were dozens of spotlights, angled like tiny cameras high up on the ceiling, their sadistic beams ricocheting off the glossy paint that covered the freshly fitted sheet-rock. He steadied himself against one of the walls; it felt strangely hollow. A rug the color of baby puke obscured the old hardwood floors and the furniture, the assorted over-stuffed armchairs and aquiline couches, looked to be adorned with some kind of science fiction bleached vinyl. In the far corner, where the old General Electric TV used to sit, there now loomed a fearsome chrome clad screen. He recognized it as one of those new flat screen models. It nestled smugly atop a glass and wood buttress, as wide as the span of his arms.
“Don’t look into the light!”
“Huh?”
“Ralph, mate, don’t look into the light!”
It seemed ethereal for a moment, the whispered counsel that emanated from his right, and he was relieved finally to identify Rodney’s antipodean tones. He was kneeling on a leather barstool, hoisting a boom mike that wavered like a wind-buffeted crane above Ralph’s head. His black T-shirt said something funny about rugby balls. In any event, it did not matter; the lights were almost hypnotic, and it was all Ralph could do to shield his face with an outstretched hand.
He stole a furtive glance at Miriam. Her shoulders were thrust back so that Ralph was forced to shimmy beside her, lest he be pushed back into the hallway. He could see her hands moving up to her face, cupping her mouth and then, with a flourish, falling back down to her sides. She did this one, two, three times, her smile broadening, her breathing deep and rhythmic, her scarlet cheeks taut as she tilted her head up towards the whirring cameras. He looked around the room at the thin figures silhouetted against the bleached walls. He could see eyes fixed on Miriam, fists clenched in anticipation, grins slowly forming until they at last turned to him and saw -
“Cut!”
It was Carnaby Street, resplendent today in a dark blue paisley shirt and black drainpipe jeans. The clipboard was tucked under his arm. He glided forward, putting Ralph in mind of the final moments of Close Encounters, except that the extra-terrestrials did not have tight curly hair that flopped effeminately forward. Nor did they have wispy, ineffectual goatees. He clasped Miriam’s outstretched hands, fixing her with the gaze of a cult leader.
“Miriam! I am so glad to finally meet you! You are just a sweetheart! Now you’ll see we’ve done just a teensy, weensy bit of remodeling here, and I do hope you like it, and we do have some just lovely footage of your big, big surprise just now, which I have to say was just darling, really made me feel like you’re a natural ’cuz I can see the camera loves you, but unfortunately – ”
He shot Ralph a petulant glance. “Unfortunately your husband has ever so slightly messed things up by sticking his hand in the air. So, my dear, what we’d like you to do is this: if you could both step back outside for just a sec and, when I give the word, please come back in and try just one more time, and then we’ll be all set, and we’ll leave you to enjoy this yummy new room. All right, sweetheart?”
Miriam nodded her head. They turned around to leave.
“And Mr. Bickersmart. Ralph.”
He paused and turned.
“A little less of the dramatics, s’il vous plait.”
Back in the hallway, Ralph took off his blazer and hung it on the banister. It reeked of his sweat. He longed to turn to Miriam, enjoy with her a moment’s solidarity, balance himself on her shoulder but she had already swiveled around, standing ramrod at attention in front of the door.
This time when they entered, Ralph’s eyes had adjusted a little to the spectral brightness, and he was able to pick out some of the familiar faces of the crew as he surveyed the room. There was a woman in the corner; he was sure he had not seen her before. He would have remembered such a shapely, athletic little thing. Her back was turned to him as she rummaged with well-toned arms through an equipment box. She had rich red brown hair that draped over a translucent white T-shirt. Her bra strap stretched tantalizingly as she crouched down. He could see that a pleasingly pert bottom hid beneath her light blue jeans. He was a man after all, not dead yet, so he raised himself just ever so slightly on his toes and – well there’s no harm in looking is there? – yes, yes, a tiny borderline of her white cotton panties, delicately laced, came into view as she reached down into the box.
“Cut! What in heaven’s name is that?”
The sound of Carnaby Street’s reedy voice snapped him back to attention. He looked as if he had been caught by the parish priest with a porn movie in one hand and a dime bag in the other. A scan of the room confirmed his fears: all eyes were on him. Even Rodney was shaking his head in silent admonition. Then he turned finally to face his accuser, Carnaby Street’s righteous finger pointing straight at his chest.
“I will repeat, Mr. Bickersmart. What in heaven’s name is that?”
He looked down. Oh, shit.
“I, I, eh, I think it’s a spaghetti sauce stain.”
He might as well have been shot, such was the impact of the deep crimson patch now in full view. It oozed from his white shirt. Reflexively he tried to brush away the indelible mark, succeeding only in dislodging a tiny piece of congealed pasta that pirouetted to the floor.
“Are you OK, Ralph? You don’t look too clever, mate.”
It was odd this: Rodney was speaking to him, but it was Carnaby Street’s lips that were moving. He must be confused. A sit down and a cup of tea; that would be nice. Now where was his old armchair, the one with the loose stuffing? He would ask the athletic woman who was straightening up and turning to face him, triumphantly brandishing a translucent plastic disk. Maybe she was waiting for a table, too. Strange, she bore a remarkable resemblance to his daughter. Except that the puppy fat was hollowed out, rendering some remarkable cheek bones. Except that she wore dark red lipstick, like a grown woman and a T-shirt with F*C*U*K emblazoned across her breasts. Stupid boarding school – what was he paying that tuition for anyway? He should really talk to her about her spelling. Perhaps some extra tutoring would help. Goodness knows she needs to –
But he was falling now, twirling and tumbling, too late to catch him as his lumpen frame ruptured the flimsy sheet rock, tiny white splinters dusting his face. And as he fell, dislodging Rodney from his perch, the boom mike crashing on top of his prostrate form, he looked up at his wife of thirty-four years and became aware – suffused with a dreadful clarity – that her coos and her oohs and her ahhs, that her burgeoning smile and her thrice cupped hands, indeed, that her every utterance and her every gesture had been a faithful replica of what had come before.
Originally published in Duck and Herring