White Noise

"Different in what way, Eric?"

"You won't take offense?" he said, the grin turning lascivious, rich with secret meaning.

"Of course not. Why would I?"

"Promise you won't take offense."

"I won't take offense."

"You look so harmless, Jack. A big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy."

"Why would I take offense?" I said, paying for my rope and hurrying out the door.

The encounter put me in the mood to shop. I found the others and we walked across two parking lots to the main structure in the Mid-Village Mall, a ten-story building arranged around a center court of waterfalls, promenades and gardens. Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirt" they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, ru

We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms, wishing to be alone. A little later I watched Steffie in front of the TV set. She moved her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken.

18

It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.

But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don't feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We're not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, it would have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires. Certainly little or no resentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence. The school occupies an ever serene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm. Not a place designed to aggravate suspicions.

In light snow I drove to the airport outside Iron City, a large town sunk in confusion, a center of abandonment and broken glass rather than a place of fully realized urban decay. Bee, my twelve-year-old, was due in on a flight from Washington, with two stops and one change of planes along the way. But it was her mother, Tweedy Browner, who showed up in the arrivals area, a small dusty third-world place in a state of halted renovation. For a moment I thought Bee was dead and Tweedy had come to tell me in person.

"Where is Bee?"

"She's flying in later today. That's why I'm here. To spend some time with her. I have to go to Boston tomorrow. Family business."

"But where is she?"

"With her father."

"I'm her father, Tweedy."

"Malcolm Hunt, stupid. My husband."

"He's your husband, he's not her father."

"Do you still love me, Tuck?" she said.

She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.

She wore a Shetland sweater, tweed skirt, knee socks and pe

"For the third time. Where is she?"

" Indonesia, more or less. Malcolm's working in deep cover, sponsoring a Communist revival. It's part of an elegant scheme designed to topple Castro. Let's get out of here, Tuck, before children come swarming around to beg."

"Is she coming alone?"

"Why wouldn't she be?"

"From the Far East to Iron City can't be that simple."

"Bee can cope when she has to. She wants to be a travel writer as a matter of actual fact. Sits a horse well."

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in rapid expert streams from nose and mouth, a routine she used when she wanted to express impatience with her immediate surroundings. There were no bars or restaurants at the airport-just a stand with prepackaged sandwiches, presided over by a man with sect marks on his face. We got Tweedy's luggage, went out to the car and drove through Iron City, past deserted factories, on mainly deserted avenues, a city of hills, occasional cobbled streets, fine old homes here and there, holiday wreaths in the windows.

"Tuck, I'm not happy."