A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [56]
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