Under the Night Read online

  ‘But—’

  ‘Our future as a democracy is contingent upon our ability to spend, to keep consumption in line with output, and we have to work harder at that, because there’s no reversing this thing. The industrial output of goods and services is never going to stop, regardless of what we might need today and regardless of the fact that ten, twenty, fifty years from now, we’ll inevitably have reached some outer limit of what it’s even possible to consume. Plus, we’ll have made ourselves sick in the process, actually poisoned ourselves, poisoned the planet, or blown ourselves up.’

  ‘So how—’

  ‘Look around. Everyone’s stalking the supermarket aisles, they’re haunting the car dealerships, they’re flicking through the Sears catalog, all in this hypnoidal trance. And who are the snake charmers?’ Sweeney takes a mock bow. ‘The ad agencies up and down Madison Avenue, that’s who. They’re all – we’re all – using new psychiatric probing techniques to chart the very fabric of the human mind. And we’re not doing it to find out what people want, that’s a dead end, we’re doing it to find out how to make people want stuff.’

  ‘That’s quite an extraordinary thesis you’ve got there, Mr … uh?’

  ‘Sweeney. Ned Sweeney. I’m with RRB, on Madison Avenue. What about you?’ Extending his hand, he throws a surreptitious glance out over the room. However he’s ended up here, he reckons the place is an upscale watering hole for midtown executive types.

  The guy shakes his hand. ‘Vance Packard,’ he says. ‘I work for American Magazine, over on Fifth, in the Crowell-Collier Building.’

  At the mention of this, a Technicolor blizzard of magazine covers flits across Sweeney’s brain.

  ‘You’re a journalist?’

  ‘Yes. I do features mainly.’ Packard then looks at his watch. ‘You know what, Ned, I’d love to continue this conversation, because I have a ton of questions I want to put to you, but I have to meet someone at the Waldorf. It won’t take more than ten minutes. I don’t suppose you’d like to tag along?’

  *

  At the entrance to the Waldorf, Packard engages briefly in some banter with the doormen, after which he and Sweeney skip up the short flight of stairs to the main foyer. As a New Yorker, Sweeney has passed the Waldorf many times, but he’s never actually been inside it. Despite this, he seems to have accumulated a considerable knowledge of the place – mostly, he supposes, from magazine articles and movies. As they walk across the foyer, he notices everything in detail, the Rockwood-stone walls and columns, the travertine floors, the Louis Rigal frieze (an elaborate, thirteen-panel allegory about hunting, eating, drinking and dancing), and that bizarre rug, with its central, six-part circular tapestry depicting the drama of human existence, the Wheel of Life, all of it stretching out before him now, oscillating, threatening to come alive and engulf him.

  But he keeps walking, and follows Packard over to what is known as Peacock Alley. This wide, corridor-like affair leads through to the hotel’s central lobby, but it is also a busy lounge area lined on either side with tables and chairs. Most of these are occupied, and more people are standing around in little groups, with the occasional staff member gliding past in one direction or another, carrying a tray of drinks or holding up a telegram.

  A few feet ahead of him, Packard slows down, half turns, and indicates to Sweeney that he won’t be long. He then approaches someone at a nearby table and joins him. Sweeney slows down too, and makes a gentle turn, feeling slightly dizzy as he takes in the opulence of his surroundings – the French walnut paneling inlaid with ebony, the glass display cabinets showcasing expensive jewelry, the marble pilasters and nickel-bronze cornices. He starts to drift back toward the foyer, but in the next moment, and before he knows it, he’s standing among a small group of men, everyone smoking, everyone having a drink, everyone listening … to him. ‘Consider it like this, gentlemen. A new highway opens, or a new expressway, or a new bridge, and a month later, however modest the projections might have been, it’s already operating at full capacity, so simply building more of them is not the answer. It might actually be the problem. If we continue to churn out cars at this rate, followed by road networks to accommodate them, what do you think the city’s going to look like in 1963? Or in 1973? By all means build roads, but you’ve got to expand the masstransit system, too.’

  ‘Well, shoot,’ one of the men standing next to him, a fat guy in a silk suit, whispers loudly. ‘Don’t let RM hear you say that.’

  The others laugh.

  RM?

  Glancing around, Sweeney quickly scans the room. Further back, Vance Packard is still sitting at that table talking to – or, rather, listening to – another man. Sweeney squints. The man is probably in his sixties. He’s distinguished-looking and radiates a certain authority. It takes a couple of seconds, but of course … this is Robert Moses, the powerful city parks commissioner, and these guys here have to be his entourage.

  Sweeney turns back to look at them again. He shakes his head. ‘RM isn’t going to stop, is he? It’s not in his nature. He’s just going to keep doing the same thing over and over again, wave after wave of it, each phase bigger than the last, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Horace Harding, this Lower Manhattan thing, whatever … He’s chasing that elusive solution, the big fix – forty-five to sixty billion dollars over the next eight to twelve years, isn’t that the figure I read somewhere recently?’

  ‘Hey—’

  ‘And no one’ll say boo to him. That’s the problem.’

  The men seem taken aback by this. One of them, a slim, nervous type in a bow tie, raises his eyebrows. ‘Do you want to give it a try?’

  Sweeney shrugs. ‘Look, I don’t have—’

  But then the fat guy flinches and says, ‘Oh, shitsky.’ They all turn to see Moses striding toward them from the far end of the lounge area.

  Is it possible to smell fear? With a fine spray of it in the air now, Sweeney certainly can.

  ‘Time to ship out, fellas,’ Moses barks as he approaches.

  There’s a rush to extinguish cigarettes. Drinks are abandoned on any available surface. As this is going on, Moses comes to a stop directly in front of Sweeney and just stands there.

  ‘Who are you?’ he says gruffly.

  ‘Oh, I’m nobody, Mr Moses,’ Sweeney answers, ‘just a regular schmoe who comes into the city every day on the train, on the noisy, dirty Toonerville Trolley. You see, I live in the suburbs, but I don’t own an automobile, so I guess I’m … what would you call me, a relic?’

  Moses stares at him for a second, puzzled, processing what he’s heard, or thinks he’s heard. He moves his head slightly to the side. ‘Charlie? Charlie? Who is this clown?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Moses,’ the fat guy says, rushing over, ‘I don’t actually—’

  ‘Traffic will run smoothly?’ Sweeney says, ignoring Charlie. ‘That’s the prediction you keep making, year after year, like a … a mantra, but don’t you see, it’s never going to happen.’

  Moses’s nostrils flare and a reddish, almost purple flush colors his cheeks. This isn’t how people talk to him. He continues staring at Sweeney in disbelief but seems curiously unable to respond.

  ‘It’s the numbers,’ Sweeney goes on quietly, ‘they just don’t stack up. They can’t. They only go one way, and in terms of car ownership and daily commutes, the progression isn’t even arithmetical, it’s geometrical. It’s like with everything else’ – he takes a quick, deep breath here – ‘in our society, in the economy, in the culture, all around us, it’s just one big, ever-expanding, self-replicating, fractal pattern.’

  ‘Fractal?’ Moses whispers. ‘Mantra? What the hell does that mean? What are you talking about?’ Then, as though snapping awake from a trance, he turns to Fat Charlie and shakes his head. ‘What kind of liquor are they serving here?’

  ‘Beats me, sir.’

  When Moses starts to move away, Sweeney leans in. ‘Uh, just one thing, Mr Moses.’

  ‘What, goddammit? I’m busy.’r />
  ‘Talk to Walter O’Malley, would you? Please.’

  Moses pulls back, as though to get a clearer look at Sweeney’s face. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me. If you don’t let the O’Malley build his stadium on Atlantic Avenue, he’ll move the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. Don’t think he won’t do it.’

  Fat Charlie makes a snorting sound. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You think?’ Sweeney says. ‘The Boston Braves have just moved to Milwaukee.’

  ‘But that’s—’

  ‘Look, it’d be a business decision. Ebbets Field is crumbling, no one can get to it, and if they can, there’s nowhere to park. The site O’Malley wants is right over by the Flatbush Terminal. People like me would come pouring in on the LIRR.’

  ‘All right,’ Moses barks, half lunging at him. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Fat Charlie and Skinny Bow Tie intervene. As they cajole a furious Moses away toward the Park Avenue foyer, Sweeney just stands there and watches. Then he glances back and sees that Packard, still at the table, is consulting his notepad. Was he interviewing Moses? It seemed a bit short and informal for that, and anyway, Sweeney is pretty sure Moses doesn’t actually give interviews. He’s too important, or considers himself so, to endure the inconvenience. Nevertheless, Packard here is no hack. Didn’t he spend a whole week the previous January with the Eisenhowers as they settled into the White House? Didn’t he write about it for American Magazine?

  Whichever it was, Sweeney is quickly losing interest. Robert Moses, for all his power and standing, strikes him as a fairly one-dimensional and transparent figure. Nor is Sweeney interested, for that matter, in answering any more of Vance Packard’s questions about advertising. He’s really said all he wants to say on the subject. So before the journalist happens to look up and spot him, he slips away. He doesn’t go in the direction Moses went, but the other way, toward the hotel’s bigger, busier central lobby. Here, as he moves about, voices slide in and out of his hearing, colors shift subtly, surfaces shimmer. Passing the registration desk, then a newsstand, then a cigar counter, he feels the strongest urge to stop and talk to someone, anyone. He needs to engage. But he also knows it can’t be inconsequential, it can’t just be small talk.

  He keeps moving, and over the next couple of minutes wanders deeper into the hotel’s maze of hallways and corridors, connecting galleries and side lobbies. But it may be longer than a couple of minutes, because once again he has the impression that time is skipping, jumping forward in barely perceptible increments, the missing beats like frames cut from a strip of film. He ends up at a bank of elevators near the Lexington Avenue exit and is staring at the elaborate bas-relief Art Deco design on one of the blue-steel doors when he becomes aware of people behind him, approaching – voices, one low and husky, mumbling, the other higher and sweeter, giggling.

  ‘Going up?’

  To his left, a tuxedo-sleeved arm reaches for the button, presses it, and withdraws.

  He detects something – or, rather, many things, and all in an instant – cadence, pitch, inflection. Also, a scent, a fragrance. Without turning, he says, ‘Rose Geranium?’

  There is a brief pause, and then, ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Floris,’ he says, turning slightly, but not making eye contact. ‘Rose Geranium by Floris? Your perfume?’

  ‘Why, yes.’ Another brief pause, and a giggle. ‘Bet you couldn’t do that, Mar.’

  The elevator door pings open. The attendant looks out and smiles. ‘Good evening.’ He steps aside to let them all in. ‘Please.’

  The ride in the elevator passes in a flash. Whatever happens in those few moments, and in the few after that, whatever is said – and it’s probably plenty – Sweeney is hardly conscious of any of it. The space is too enclosed, the rush of sensory impressions too intense. In fact, the next time he feels any degree of control he is sitting in an armchair in a luxurious room, and Marilyn – in her black, pleated chiffon dress – is handing him a drink.

  ‘I never heard it put that way before,’ she is saying.

  He takes the drink. ‘Well, it serves our purposes to portray the Soviet system as evil, to portray communism as a form of cancer, but to be honest, Joe Stalin was no communist, and neither is this new fellow, Nikita Khrushchev, not really, not by any strict definition of the term. What these guys are, however, is autocrats, and to the bone. I mean, it’s just how they roll over there. Look at the tsars, it was no different back then, either …’ As Sweeney is speaking, he glances around the room. This is a residential suite in the Waldorf Towers. He didn’t register where they were heading in the elevator, but glancing out the window now, and seeing a corner of what he takes to be 49th Street, he reckons they are probably on the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth floor. ‘… so what this is really about is control. They use the iron fist and the jackboot – we use soap powder and paranoia.’

  Marilyn is curled up on the couch opposite him now, listening intently. Brando, tie loosened, is pacing back and forth between them.

  ‘But sooner or later,’ Sweeney continues, ‘if we’re not careful, if we don’t stand up to people like the senator from Wisconsin, that distinction will become blurred and will ultimately lose its meaning.’

  ‘Jesus, Ned,’ Brando says, ‘you’re killing me with this stuff.’ He stops and turns toward Marilyn. ‘I mean … I see Gadge all the time now, every day, I gotta look him in the eye, and I … I …

  ‘Oh, Mar …’

  It’s a nice room, warm, clearly lived in. A bulletin board on the wall next to the door has some photos and cuttings pinned to it. There are books (Invisible Man, Sister Carrie) and magazines (Popular Science, Modern Screen) lying around. There is also a pile of typed pages bound with brass fasteners.

  ‘Listen,’ Sweeney says, ‘I’m not just talking about the hearings, or about one guy giving names. It’s bigger than that, it’s about all of us … all of us capitulating at the most basic level, all of us being complicit in our own moral and aesthetic suffocation.’

  ‘All right, all right …’ Brando says, turning around slowly, his fists clenched, a pained expression on his face. ‘Just who the hell are you, man?’

  A bit later – ten minutes, twenty, an hour, it’s hard to tell – Sweeney finds himself sitting on the other sofa, in quiet conclave with Marilyn. Brando is in another room, on a bed presumably, or maybe on the floor, snoring audibly.

  ‘I don’t mind being famous,’ Marilyn is whispering. ‘It’s kind of fun, most of the time anyway, but then people can surprise you. They can be awfully cruel, you know. They can say things that just make you want to give it all up.’ She traces the line of a pleat on her dress with her finger. ‘But I think I’m probably going to do that anyway, sooner or later, you know? Give all this up, and retire.’ She pauses. ‘Into private life.’

  ‘Listen, Marilyn,’ Sweeney says, staring at her arm, her shoulder, her neck, tracing an imaginary line of his own. ‘That’s not going to happen. There is no private life, not any more, not for you, not for him in there either. You two are already so … so imprinted on the collective consciousness that I don’t see … I don’t …’

  He feels a sudden ripple of exhaustion, of weakness almost.

  ‘Don’t see what, Ned?’

  There is a hint of alarm in her voice.

  ‘You’re how old, Marilyn? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?’ Sweeney glances in the direction of the other room. ‘He’s twenty-nine?’

  She nods.

  ‘Okay, well, this level of fame you have now? It’s not going away. Not ever.’ A pain starts throbbing behind his eyes. ‘Your career may peak at some point, then subside, and that could happen soon, next year, or the year after, or in 1960 – or it may have happened already, who knows – but your actual fame? That will never see a peak, and therefore never subside. It can only ever expand, and widen, and fragment …’

  Which is what Marilyn is doing now, fragmenting right there in front of him … multiple Marilyn
s in a grid, rapidly self-replicating, all bright colors at first, but then dimming, draining to a pallid gray …

  At that point there is a shift, another jump cut. To the street.

  Did he vomit in the elevator on the way down? He’s not sure, but he has a really sour taste in his mouth as he walks up Lexington Avenue.

  As he limps, actually.

  He looks at his watch. It’s late, after one, and much colder than before – so cold that his mind feels sort of numb. Approaching 57th Street, he slows down. Then he comes to a stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk. Where was he just now? At the Waldorf Astoria? Inches from Marilyn Monroe? Gazing at her bare shoulders? Inhaling her perfume, her whispers?

  Really?

  And before that?

  There were other people, other conversations, but he can’t piece any of it together. He’s confused, and tired. He hasn’t eaten.

  Will his dinner still be in the oven when he gets home? For that matter, will his home still be there when he gets off the train? Suddenly, more than anything else in the world, he needs to get to Greenlake Avenue. He starts walking again, in the opposite direction, moving fast, then faster. After a while, he throws his arm out and hails a passing yellow cab.

  He piles into the back seat and tells the driver Penn Station. The driver flicks his flag down and hits the gas. Probably in the middle of his shift, the guy is fidgety, anxious to talk. Sweeney tunes in and out. ‘… that’s where I saw it,’ the driver is saying at one point, ‘in that new magazine they’re putting out, the TV Guide, it’s called, real neat little thing, fits right in your pocket. You ever see that, ever read it yourself, the TV Guide?’