A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [68]
Sixteen minutes have passed.
“Rumor has it,” I say, my mouth full of half-masticated hamburger in a calculated effort to disgust my subject, thus puncturing her prophylactic shield of niceness and commencing the painstaking attrition of her self-control, “that you’ve become involved with your costar.”
That gets her attention. I’ve rather sprung this on her, having learned the hard way that sidling up to the personal questions gives difficult subjects too much time to get their hackles up, and nice ones too much time to gently and blushingly sidestep.
“That’s absolutely not true!” Kitty cries. “Tom and I have a wonderful friendship. I love Nicole. She’s been a role model for me. I’ve even babysat their children.”
I unsheathe my Big Fat Grin, a meaningless tactic intended purely to unnerve and fluster my subject. If my methods seem unnecessarily harsh, I invite you to recall that I have been allotted forty minutes, nearly twenty of which have now elapsed, and let me add, on a personal note, that if the piece stinks—i.e., if it fails to unveil some aspect of Kitty that you haven’t seen before (as have, I’m told, my pieces on hunting elk with Leonardo DiCaprio, reading Homer with Sharon Stone and digging for clams with Jeremy Irons)—it might very well be killed, thus further reducing my stock in New York and Los Angeles and prolonging the “bizarre string of failures you’ve been having, buddy” (—Atticus Levi, my friend and editor, over lunch last month).
“Why are you smiling like that?” Kitty asks, with hostility.
See? No more nice.
“Was I smiling?”
She turns her attention to her Cobb salad. And so do I. Because I have so little to go on, so few ports of entry to the inner sanctum of Kitty Jackson, that I’m reduced to observing and now relaying the fact that over the course of lunch, she eats all of her lettuce, approximately 2½ bites of chicken and several tomato wedges. She ignores: olives, blue cheese, boiled eggs, bacon and avocado—in other words, all of the parts of the Cobb salad that, technically speaking, make it a Cobb salad. As for the dressing, which she has requested “on the side,” she doesn’t touch it except to dip in the end of her index finger, once, and suck the dressing off. 2
“I’ll tell you what I’m thinking,” I finally say, relieving the vibrato of tension that has been building at our table. “I’m thinking, nineteen years old. Mega-grossing movie behind her, half the world doing a rain dance at her window, and where can she possibly go next? What can she possibly do?”
In Kitty’s face I see a number of things: relief that I haven’t said something worse, something about Tom Cruise, and mingled with that relief (and partly because of it) a fleeting desire to see me as more than yet another crank with a tape recorder—to see me as someone who understands the incredible strangeness of her world. How I wish it were true! I would like nothing more than to understand the strangeness of Kitty’s world—to burrow inside that strangeness never to emerge. But the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald impossibility of any real communion between us, and the fact that I’ve managed to do so for twenty-one minutes is a triumph.
Why do I keep mentioning—“inserting,” as it may seem—myself into this story?