The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [91]
Couch pantomimes biting his nails, mocking the whole idea of taking the matter seriously. Having become well versed in Couchese by now, Ursula knows this could very well mean he actually is nervous about the possibility of Tomorrow Ltd.’s going bankrupt. If so, she wonders why he cares, owning, as he does, an entire lake and all. She herself feels strangely detached from the situation, experiencing the half-queasy, half-giddy fascination of a little girl who sets a snowball rolling down a mountain and watches it grow into something beyond anything she’s anticipated. Maybe she could still stop it somehow, run ahead and throw herself in front of it, but the gathering mass is hypnotic, and for the moment the impending havoc seems every bit as alluring as it does appalling.
For better or worse, this snowball keeps right on rolling.
“Hey, James,” she says. “One last thing I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
Couch lowers his head and opens his hands, indicating his willingness to serve.
“What did you think about all that stuff Chas said about irony?”
He sighs. “Oh, I don’t know. Irony this, irony that—I’ve never understood the first thing about irony.”
He looks up at her, eyes wide and innocent. For a moment the performance strikes her dumb.
Scars
I’m So SCHIZO!” is the title of a photo essay in the fragrant new issue of Mademoiselle. The spastic, jaunty letters of the capitalized word stagger across a two-page spread showing the glamorous, eccentric Ivy Van Urden sprawling against a white padded wall in an eggplant linen straitjacket, her legs bare. Other portraits follow, including a second spread taken in her bedroom, newly redecorated in an appropriately schizophrenic half-past, half-future motif, the left side sporting potted tropical plants, animal-skin rugs, and clay-colored walls hung with reproductions of cave paintings, and the right featuring burnished aluminum walls hung with stills from War of the Worlds, Fahrenheit 451, and 1984, intrusive cameras on adjustable metal stalks, a steel-framed single bed as high as an operating table, and a giant monitor displaying Ivy’s back as she sits at her computer terminal in a backless stretch camisole.
The accompanying article is grudgingly accommodated in two-inch columns along the margins of the pictures. Ursula has diligently set out to read it, but there’s so little friction to the syntax that after a few sentences she can’t slow down and ends up skimming. The reporter’s “angle” is to take a lighthearted tack in discussing Ivy’s delusions. Ursula spots the word kooky and stops, dumbfounded, to check her vision. She knows folks think she’s a little bit kooky, the line goes, but she’s not letting the naysayers get in her way. The savage girl is going high tech, with a new website to get her message out and save the world from the evil Imagineers. For Ivy, being a star is a matter of life and death. “My image is the drain magnet in the glamour continuum! I have to get famous as fast as possible!” she says, checking her reflection in a pocket mirror. “And money. I need money. A lot of money, fast. Take another picture of me,” she tells our photographer, Giambattista. She pushes out her hip, tosses her hair. “Like this!”
Ursula closes the magazine. She can’t stand Ivy. Around her on the subway car a few people look her way, perhaps discovering in her a resemblance, albeit haggard and flawed, to the glamorous, eccentric Ivy Van Urden. She adjusts her oversize sunglasses and disappears behind the magazine again. She can’t help admiring Ivy, of course, for the same reason she can’t stand her. Ivy has become the queen of paradessences, an absolute master at having everything both ways and every way and getting everything she wants. She gets power by being a victim, attention by being elusive, respect by being irresponsible, success by being a basket case.
If