Service Dress Blues (14 page)

Chapter 17

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

“She's gone,” Carlsen told Rep just after eleven the next morning in a voice so listless it seemed to shrug.

“Oh.”

“All of her photography stuff is gone. Cameras, everything. Wiped everything off of her computer. No answer on either of the phone numbers I have for her. She's history.”

“Got it,” Rep said.

He paced a bit, trying to glance around the interior of Future³ without being obvious about it. The place seemed to be cruising along in laid back normality. A handful of people went about engaging tasks in unhurried calm. A mop-headed kid who couldn't have been much out of high school, wearing a large pair of padded earphones, tapped at a desktop computer keyboard. A young man and young woman with matching pink and blue hair bent over a table-sized layout, flourishing grease-pencils. Rep spotted Laurel Fox across the room, headed for the door and fitting what looked like an antique telephone-answering machine into a powder blue backpack. The thing was at least a foot square, and Rep counted four black levers across its face. Except for Carlsen himself, it didn't look like Laurel Wolf's disappearance had caused much of a ripple yet at the company.

“I have no idea what happened,” Carlsen said. “I thought we were going along great. Then this.”

“Any clue about where she went?”

“There are several thousand square miles of Native American reservation land in Wisconsin and Minnesota. She could be anywhere in there. For that matter, she has a portable skill and a salable ride. She could be halfway to a dozen big cities by now. If she's emotionally upset about something, though, I'd bet on the rez.”

“Tracks are done, tiger,” Fox called from the door. “See ya.” The door closed behind her before Carlsen could have responded even if he'd wanted to.

“This has to be tough on you,” Rep said quietly. “I know how much you liked her, and she thought the world of you.”

“She is someone very special,” Carlsen said, shaking his head. “Not sure how I'm going to handle it. I'm having a tough time processing all this.”

“Well, I'd be surprised if she doesn't get back in touch with you at some point. For whatever that's worth.”

“Thanks. But between us, right this minute it ain't worth much.”

Rep waited until he reached his car before he called Kuchinski.

“How's Lena doing?” he asked.

“Bail hearing tomorrow morning. We'll spring her. Her buddy, Flanagan, has some friends and neighbors doing what they can to clean up the fire and water damage. Where are you, by the way? It's not like you to take the morning off, even after a rough night.”

“I just left Future Cubed. Laurel Wolf has disappeared. It has all the earmarks of a hasty but carefully planned exit.”

“Whoa,” Kuchinski said. “That does make the cheesehead more binding, as my sainted mother would have said if she'd thought of it. Why do you suppose she flew the coop?”

“Because she's the one who set the fire, and she's afraid I recognized her voice.”

“How sure are you about that?”

“Last night it was a coin-flip. Right now I'm about eighty percent certain.”

“Sure enough to tell the police, in other words.”

“Yeah,” Rep said, “but I thought I'd tell you first. If they're still grilling me next week when Melissa is scheduled for Gephardt's conference, I'm hoping you'll drop by UWM and explain where I am.”

“You kidding? You just dropped a twenty-four carat alternative suspect in my lap. For that I'd get to the conference early and help them with their Power Points. And don't worry about the cops overdoing it. I still know how to spell ‘
habeas
.' I'm not sure about ‘
corpus
,' but I can look it up.”

Chapter 18

Thursday, February 5, 2009

“So Melissa's panel is next?” Kuchinski asked Rep a little after four as he swirled pink punch in a stubby plastic cup with sloping sides.

“Right after this break, according to the program.”

Rep fingered a glossy, four-color, saddle-stitched brochure with
SILENT CRISIS/ PUBLIC CONSCIENCE: A SYMPOSIUM ON DOMESTIC BATTERY
splashed in satin black over vivid yellow across its cover. As the cover design suggested, the program brochure wasn't exactly a model of academic understatement. Color pictures illustrated more than half of its forty-two slick pages—in which, by Rep's count, Veronica Gephardt's name appeared thirty-seven times.

“I bet you could recite Melissa's presentation yourself by now,” Kuchinski said.

“Close. She's done several run-throughs with me. I'll listen to her diligently, though. If I blow this off she might slap me around when we get home.”

“Careful, boy. Earnest true-believers are immune to irony. If one of these tightly wound activists overhears a crack like that, you'll find yourself brought up on heresy charges.”

Rep felt a squeeze on his right elbow. He looked over his shoulder to see Melissa.

“This is a surprise,” he said. “I thought you'd be busy making final edits or something.”

“I probably should be, and I need to talk to Professor Ibish about some stage business he has in mind to start his presentation. But I want you to do something for me.”

“As long as it doesn't involve fire hoses or tomahawks, I'm game.”

She handed him a folded sheet of pale blue loose-leaf paper.

“If I nod at you during the question-and-answer period, ask me the questions on this page.”

Rep looked skeptically at his wife's green-flecked brown eyes. He saw a mischievous glint that he knew very well.

“What are you up to, minx?”

“Just follow directions, darling.” She pecked him on the cheek. “Try to sound sincerely indignant.”

“And I thought she just wanted me here for moral support,” Rep said to Kuchinski as Melissa strode away.

“I'd get moving if I was you, boy. The break is over in two minutes, and you're gonna want a seat near the middle, on the aisle.”

This sounded like good advice and Rep took it. Seven minutes later (symposium schedules are notoriously approximate), when Gephardt appeared at the podium and began half-apologetically urging everyone to “please find a seat, so we can get our final panel under way,” Rep was sitting on the center aisle, twelve rows from the front, less than four feet away from the nearest audience mike.

Like every panel on the program, this one—“He-hits/she-hits: The Comedic Banalization of Inter-Gender Aggression in Popular Culture”—consisted of three people. As with every other panel, one of those people was Veronica Gephardt. On this one, the other two were Melissa and the genial-looking, thirty-something chap whom Melissa had just identified as Professor Ibish. He wore a three-piece set of green-tone Harris tweeds set off by what Rep could tell was a clip-on bow-tie. The program said his first name was Harold and that he taught American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He wore a game, bring-it-on smile. Rep thought he'd probably like the guy if he'd just learn to tie his own bow-ties.

“Do you notice a pattern in the make-up of these panels?” Kuchinski whispered to Rep as he thumbed through the pages.

“I haven't really studied it.”

“On each one you have a certified lefty, a right-winger from central casting, and Gephardt right in the middle as the voice of reason between the two extremes. I don't know how this dog-and-pony show measures up as a scholarly conference, but as political theater it's a masterpiece.”

“If she's typecasting Melissa in the role of lock-step ideologue, she's in for a surprise.”

Gephardt began to introduce Ibish. She started in a deliberately low voice, which stopped the lingering chatter and caused people to lean forward and strain to hear. That was a pro move, and Rep admired it.

Ibish rose to the podium, thanked Gephardt for the introduction, and then turned toward Melissa.

“Professor Pennyworth?”

Still seated, Melissa raised what looked like a thick, narrow board about two feet long in her right hand, drew it back over her left shoulder, and whacked Ibish back-handed on his right bicep. A startlingly loud and very emphatic
SMACK!
echoed through the room. At least half the audience jumped and a healthy minority reflexively laughed. Unfazed by the seeming assault, Ibish reached out his hand and Melissa gave the club to him.

“Thank you, Professor Pennyworth,” he said, raising the instrument. “The technical term for this little prop is ‘slapstick.' As you can see if you look closely, it consists of two very thin pieces of wood sandwiched over a thicker piece of rubber. The wood is attached to the rubber at the handle end but not at the business end. When you hit someone with it, the rubber at the unattached end smacks against the wood on one side, and the wood on the other side smacks against the rubber. The result is a dramatic noise but no real harm to the target.”

Rep glanced around. The prop and the stage business had done their job. Ibish had the crowd's attention.

“This simple device and its immense popularity on stage since at least the sixteenth century,” Ibish continued, “is the reason that we call almost all physical comedy today ‘slapstick.' Long before Punch and Judy, for at least five-hundred years and probably a lot more than that, women hitting men and men hitting women has been making people laugh in every country in the western world—as it did just now, in this room.”

“He's pretty good,” Kuchinski whispered to Rep.

Ibish then ran through twenty crisp minutes of Power Points drawn from movie and television comedies and a few over-the-top print advertisements, interspersed with polysyllabic commentary. The clips showed decades of inter-gender battery in American and English comedy, with women the victims and the aggressors in roughly equal proportions. The audience reacted at first with occasional gasps, embarrassed chuckles, and a kind of low, indeterminate hum that might have been puzzled or angry. From roughly the halfway point, though, once the shock had worn off, the listeners responded mostly with silence. Ibish's last clip showed Anne Hathaway slapping Steve Carrel in the movie version of
Get Smart!
, with Carrel asking in exasperated bafflement, “What was that?”

“Some insist that popular culture is an engine,” Ibish concluded, “shaping who we are and what we do. Some claim that it is just a mirror, reflecting us as we have always been. Whichever side is closer to the truth, it would appear that, at least in the world of laughter, spousal battery is an equal opportunity vice and a gender-neutral phenomenon.”

“Right,” Rep whispered to Kuchinski under cover of the polite applause and scattered hisses that followed. “And after they smacked their wives for serving stale coffee at breakfast like that guy in the Chase and Sanborn ad he showed, American men in the 'fifties shot guns out of bad guys' hands on their way to work.”

“Is that line from you or Melissa?”

“Me. Melissa liked it, though. She said she'd try to squeeze it in.”

“Thank you, Professor Ibish,” Gephardt said, in a tone of studied neutrality. “The next time I see
I Love Lucy
or the Marx Brothers, I'll look at it with different eyes. And now, as our final presentation for the day, I'd like to ask Professor Melissa Pennyworth, who teaches in the English Department here at UWM, to provide us with her take on what Professor Ibish just dubbed ‘the he-hits-she-hits issue.' Professor Pennyworth received her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and her master's and doctoral degrees from Stratton University. Her most recent publication is, ‘Vladimir Lenin and Jane Austen's Snuff Box: The Problem with Facts in Deconstructionist Literary Theory,' which appeared this past fall in
GRAIL: The Graduate Review of Academic and Interdisciplinary Literature
. Professor Pennyworth?”

Enthusiastic applause greeted Melissa as she stood up, for the audience understood that her role was to refute Ibish and had therefore decided she was right before hearing the first word out of her mouth.

“Apropos of engines and mirrors,” she began, “it may be well to recall Lord Palmerston's admonition: ‘Half the wrong conclusions at which mankind arrive are reached by the abuse of metaphors.' Neither Hollywood nor Madison Avenue is in the documentary business.” She followed with Rep's crack about shooting guns out of bad guys' hands.

This produced raptures. Rep figured she could coast from there if she chose.

She didn't choose. She told the audience in twelve minutes what she had told Gephardt in less than two several weeks ago. She didn't try to dress it up as searing insight, presenting her comments instead simply as common sense with footnotes. The audience didn't care. A few would clearly have preferred a ranting jeremiad against Ibish and all of patriarchy, but even they seemed happy enough. In the collective view of most attendees, Melissa was on the side of the angels and they would have offered her their contented approval if she'd read the UWM staff directory to them.

“In short,” she said with a nod at Gephardt, who had already heard the comment she was about to make, “once you get past the slap and down to the stick, he-hits and she-hits aren't quite so equal after all. We can say with only a slight risk of oversimplification that men get hit in comedies for behaving like children, whereas women get hit for behaving like adults.”

“Thank you, Professor Pennyworth,” Gephardt said, once she could be heard over the applause. “Are there any questions for our panelists before I offer my concluding remarks?”

Rep saw nothing ambiguous in Melissa's nod. He leaped up and bounded to the microphone.

“This question is for Professor Pennyworth,” Rep said, getting a Vulcan death-grip on the mike. “After Agent Ninety-nine slapped Maxwell Smart in Professor Ibish's clip from
Get Smart!
, Smart asks, ‘What was
that
?' In terms of your theory, what was it?”

“The same thing it was when Shakespeare used the same trick in
The Taming of the Shrew
and Cole Porter imitated it in
Kiss Me Kate!
,” Melissa said. “Sex. The slap is a clichéd suggestion of the sexual tension that's supposedly crackling between these two characters already, even though they think they loathe each other. It wasn't particularly fresh when Shakespeare had Katherine and Petruchio trading punches and it's pretty shopworn by now, but apparently it still works.”

Rep glanced at the loose-leaf paper for the next question he was supposed to ask.

“And so that's why we think domestic battery is funny?” he demanded. “Sex?”

“Exactly,” Melissa said as dead silence replaced the murmur. “Comedy is darker and much more serious than drama. The point of drama is to help us purge the tension created by powerful emotions like love, hate, and terror. The point of comedy is to let us experience the thrill of satisfying desires so depraved and forbidden that we can't even admit to ourselves that we have them.”

“
Like beating up your spouse?
” Rep asked, virtually frothing now in over-the-top indignation.

“Like beating up your spouse,” Melissa confirmed with an emphatic nod. “If you've been married to someone for five years without ever wanting to slug him—or her—then you might have a companionable relationship, you might have a successful relationship, you might have a joyful relationship. But you don't have a passionate relationship. Wherever you find real sexual passion, violence isn't very far below the surface.”

“Thank you,” Gephardt said then, rather quickly and in a voice that was oddly distracted. “That's all the time we have for questions.”

Thank heaven for that
, Rep thought.

He sat down as Gephardt launched a bit hastily into her concluding remarks. Their explicit point was that domestic abuse wasn't just aberrant, lower-class behavior but a society-wide phenomenon deeply rooted in social attitudes and constantly reinforced by everything from rap music to clothing ads, making it important to “invest resources”—that is, spend money—not just on “remediation” but also on education and “pre-event intervention.” The subtext, unstated in Gephardt's remarks but quite clear, was that if you wanted someone to do something about this, Veronica Gephardt was your girl—er,
woman
.

Contrasting with the skill and verve she had shown earlier, her delivery seemed a bit flat and anti-climactic. Even so, she got a standing ovation. Rep saw people throughout the room drop legal pads and programs on the floor and clinch Bic pens between their teeth so that they could raise their hands over their heads and clap 'til their palms throbbed.

Never mind attorney general
, Rep thought.
In this room she could run for messiah
.

He and Kuchinski let the crowd file out ahead of them while they waited for Melissa. It took her a couple of minutes to gather her things and shake hands with Gephardt and Ibish, so most of the crowd was near the exit when she finally came up to them.

“Nice work, lover,” she said. “I'd slap your fanny like football players do, but under the circumstances that might be misconstrued.”

“Thanks, but I'm still not sure what you were up to. What was the point?”

“Ask Walt.”

“What was the point?” Rep asked, turning to find Kuchinski gaping at him.

“Weren't you looking at Gephardt when Melissa did her little riff on passion and punch-outs?” he asked.

“Certainly not. I was giving Melissa my undivided attention.”

“Gephardt turned beet red and at first she squirmed like a third-grader who's been sent to the principal's office. She got it back under control, but she had to work at it.”