Strange Wine (8 page)

She pretended not to know what I was talking about. I tried to be polite referring to what had happened between us. I didn’t want to use the wrong words, but there were
no words
she responded to. It was as if that bed, and the two of us on it, had never existed. I couldn’t believe she could be that brutal. I left the office early that day.

And the next day she hung me out to dry. It was even more brutal than the day before. The day before, it had only been obvious dislike, go on about your business, Duncaster. But the next day we were mortal enemies. Like ancient antagonists from some primordial swamp, she was after me, and I knew it. I can’t explain
how
I knew, I simply understood somewhere deep in the blood and bones that this woman was determined to rip out my throat.

Or perhaps I
can
explain it.

Take the film they made of
Jaws
. That is a terrifying film. It collapses entire audiences, and not merely because of the cinematic tricks. People in the middle of Kansas, people who’ve never even
seen
an ocean or a shark, go into cardiac arrest. Why should that be? There are terrors much closer to us–muggers on the streets, a positive biopsy report, being smashed to pudding in a freeway accident–terrors that
can
reach us; why should we be so petrified by that shark? I reject abstractions: the
vagina dentatus
, that paranoid hobgoblin of Freudian shadow-myth; the simplicity of our recoiling from something filled with teeth, an eating machine. I have another theory.

The shark is one of the few life forms that has come down to the present virtually unchanged from the Devonian. So few: the cockroach, the horseshoe crab, the nautilus, the coelecanth–probably older than the dinosaurs. The shark.

When we were still aquatic creatures…there was the shark. And even today, in the blood that boils through us, the blood whose constituency is the same as sea water, in the blood and somewhere deep in our racial memory, there is still the remembrance of the shark. Of swimming away from that inexorable eating machine, of crawling up onto the land to be safe from it, of vowing never to return to the warm seas where the teeth can reach us.

When we see the shark, we understand that
that
is one of the dreadful furies that drove us to become human beings. Natural enemy from beyond the curtain of time, from beneath the killing darkness. Natural enemies.

Perhaps I
can
explain how I knew, that next day, that Netta Bernstein and I were blood enemies.

The moment I walked into the conference room and saw her sitting next to Sloan–a clipboard fat with charts lying on the table in front of her–I knew she was lying in wait for me. The teeth, the warm seas, the eating machines that had followed us onto the land. And in that instant, I now realize, I first decided to kill her.

You have to understand how it is with a major toy company, how it works in the corporate way; otherwise it doesn’t make sense…the killing of Netta Bernstein.

Fighting my way to the top at the MyToy Corporation had been the commitment of ten years of my life. It wouldn’t have been any different at Mattel or Marx or Fisher-Price or Ideal or Hasbro or Kenner or Mego or Playskool or even Creative Playthings. The race is always to make The Big Breakthrough, to come up with the new toy that sweeps the field before the competition can work up a knockoff imitation. Barbie, G.I. Joe, Hot Wheels, they made millions for one man and one company because they were The Big Breakthroughs. In an industry where sixty percent of each year’s product is brand-new,
has to be
brand-new because the kids have a saturation/boredom threshold that is not to be believed, it is the guy with The Big Breakthrough who gets to be Vice President of Product Planning, at $50,000 a year.

I was Director of Marketing Research. Gumball, Destruction Derby, Change-A-Face, those had been my weapons in the fight toward the $50,000 plateau. MyToy was one of the big five and I’d been on the rise for ten years.

But the last four ideas I’d hawked to top management had either been rejected or been put into production and bombed. The fashion-doll line had been too sophisticated–and the recession had hit; there was backlash against opulence, conspicuous consumption; and the feminist movement had come out strong against what they called “training little girls to be empty-headed clotheshorses.” Dinosaur had been too impractical to produce at a reasonable per-unit cost. Pretesting had shown that kids rejected Peggy Puffin as being “ugly,” even though parents found the packaging attractive; they’d buy it, but the kids wouldn’t play with it. And the lousy sales reports on Mother’s Helper had verified a negative transference; old learning habits had generally inhibited learning new techniques. It was what the president of MyToy, Sloan, had called “disastrously counterproductive.” And I’d begun to smell the ambivalence about me. Then the doubts. Then the veiled antagonisms. The dismissals, the offhand rejections of trial balloons I’d floated. And now there was even open hostility. I was at the crunch point.

Everything was tied up in the two new projects I’d worked out with R&D. The Can-Do Chipper and the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll. Research & Development had gotten the approval to put them into preliminary design, both aimed at preschool development markets, and Netta Bernstein had tested them in the MyToy play therapy facilities.

MyToy was the only major toy company in America to maintain a full-time staff of child and research psychologists. Netta headed the team. The prototypes had been sent to her for live evaluation with test kids. The reports filled that clipboard. Fifty thou filled that clipboard. And I knew she was out to get me.

Sloan wouldn’t look at me. I went down the length of the conference table, took an empty seat between Dixon and Schwann; I was bracketed by cost accountants, a pair of minor sales potential vassals. The seat on the right hand of Brian Sloan, God of MyToy, the seat I’d held for almost ten years, was occupied by Ostlander, the hungry little turncoat from Ideal who’d come over, bringing with him design secrets worth a fortune. Not The Big Breakthrough, but enough knockoff data to pay his way to the other side.

And on the left hand of God sat Netta Bernstein.

My future lay before her fastened tight in the clipboard. Her tests with the kids would make or break me. And the night before last she had said she loved me. And the day before she had told me to go away. And today I smelled the killing darkness of the Devonian seas.

The first hour was marking time. Sales reports, prospectus for third-quarter production, a presentation about the proposed Lexington, Kentucky, plant site, odds and ends. Then Sloan said we’d hear Netta’s test results on the new designs. She never looked at me.

“I’ll begin with the big dolls for preschoolers,” she said, releasing the clip and removing the first batch of reports. “They all reach or exceed the expectations projected by prelim. They have the ‘kid appeal’ Mr. Sloan discussed last Thursday, with one small modification on the shopper doll. The mother model. I found, in giving the dolls to six selected groups of test children–eight in each group–that the pocket on the apron was ignored completely. The children had no use for it, and I think it can be eliminated to the advantage of the item.”

Sloan looked at me. “Jimmy,” he said, “what would that mean in terms of lowering the per-unit cost of the mother shopper?”

I already had my calculator out and was running the figures. “Uh, that would be…three cents per unit on a projected run of–” I looked at Schwann; he scribbled
3 mil
on his pad. “A run of three million units: ninety thousand dollars.” It had been a most ordinary question, and an ordinary answer.

Netta Bernstein, without looking at me, said to Sloan, “I believe that figure is incorrect. The per-unit saving would be closer to 4.6 cents, for a total of one hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars.”

Sloan didn’t answer. He just looked at Schwann and Dixon. They both nodded rapidly, like a pair of those Woolworth’s cork birds that dip their beaks into a glass of water and then sit upright again. It would have been pointless to say the three-cents-per-unit figure had been given to me by prelim the week before and that Netta had obviously gotten more up-to-date stats on the project. It would have been pointless, not only because Sloan didn’t like to hear excuses, but because Netta had clearly set out to mousetrap me. Cost stats were not her area, never had been, never should be; yet she had them. Chance? I doubted it. Either way, I looked like a doughnut.

There was a hefty chunk of silence, and then Netta went on to the test results of three other proposals, none of them mine. On one of them the changes would have been impractical, on the second the kids simply didn’t like the toy, and on the third the changes would have been too expensive.

Then she was down to the last two sheafs of notes, and I smelled the warm Devonian seas again.

How I killed her was slovenly, sloppily, untidily, random, and rumpled.

As she reached into the clothes closet for her bathrobe I pushed her inside and tried to strangle her. She fought me off and started to come out and I pushed her back. The clothes rack bar fell out of its brackets and we were lying in a heap on the floor. I hit her a couple of times and she hit me back, even harder than I’d hit her. Finally, I grabbed the plastic clothing bag from a dress fresh from the dry cleaners, and suffocated her with it. Then I went into her bathroom and vomited up the prime rib and spinach.

I could feel Sloan’s eyes on me as she launched into the recitation of the problems inherent in producing the Can-Do Chipper. The toy was a preschool game that flipped a group of colored chips into the air when the child stomped on a foot pedal. The chips came in four distinct shapes and colors, four of each, with decals on them of bees, birds, fishes, and flowers. The object was for the child to grab as many of his designated decal chips as possible. Some of the squares were yellow with bees, some of the circles were red with flowers, some of the triangles were blue with birds, some of the stars were green with fishes. But some stars had bees on them, some circles had birds on them…and so forth. So a child had to identify in that instant the chips were in the air not only its proper decal, but its shape and its color as well.

Netta had given the game to ten groups of four kids each, for “can-do” testing. She had left them alone in the big playroom on the third floor of the Research & Development wing. One needed a yellow color-coded badge to get
onto
the third floor, and a top-clearance red dot in the center of the yellow badge to get into that
wing
.

The children had not responded to the game as I’d indicated they would. They ignored the decals entirely, set up the rules the way
they
wanted to play it, and simply caught shapes or colors. The cost analysis people said we’d save twenty-five thousand dollars by omitting the decals, and I thought I was home free; but Netta added what I thought was a gratuitous observation: “I think the sales potential of this item is drastically reduced by the loss of the decals. There won’t be any ready-to-hand advertising lures. In fact, when we gave each child a list of toys they could have for participating in the tests, and this was when we first brought them in, the Can-Do Chipper was in the lowest percentile of choice. And after we observed them through the one-way mirrors playing with the game, and after we showed them the cartoons and the commercials and then told them we’d made an error on the forms and they should
now
pick their prizes, it was the least wanted item on the list.”

They scrubbed the project. I was two down for the day.

She went on to the Little Miss Goodie Two-Shoes doll, my Big Breakthrough. It was the last sheaf of test notes, and I harbored the foolish hope that Netta had been playing some kind of deadly stupid lovers’ game with me, that she had saved my hottest project for last, so she could recommend it highly. She hung me out to dry.

“This is one of the most dangerous toys I’ve ever tested,” she began. “To refresh your memory, it is a baby doll that contains a voice-activated tape loop. When you say to the doll, ‘Good dolly, you’re a good dolly,’ or similar affectionate phrase, the doll goes
mmmmmm
. When you say, ‘Bad dolly, you’ve been a bad dolly,’ or similar hostile phrase, the dolly whimpers. Unfortunately, my tests with a large group of children–” and she looked directly at me, “–which I’ve cross-checked through our independent testing group at Harvard, clearly show that not only the tape loop is activated by hostile phrases. This toy activates aggression in children, triggering the worst in them and
feeding
it. They were brutal with the dolls, tormenting them, savaging them, tearing them apart when merely spanking them and throwing them against the walls failed to satisfy their need to hear the whimpering.”

I was, on the spot, in an instant, a pariah.

I was the despoiler of the children’s crusade.

I was the lurking child molester.

I was the lizard piper of Hamelin.

I was, with the good offices of Netta Bernstein, at the end of an auspicious career with the MyToy Corporation.

And the next day she kissed me, surreptitiously, in the elevator; and asked me if I was free to have dinner at her apartment that night.

I left the body in the clothes closet, shoved back in a fetal position under the mound of wrinkled dresses and pants suits. I went out and wandered around the marina till morning, playing the messy murder of Netta Bernstein over and over again. Then I went to work.

I walked past Sloan’s office, toward my own, expecting the door to burst open and Sloan to be standing there with a couple of cops. “That’s him, officers. The one who wanted us to sell a demon doll. And he killed our research psychologist, a beautiful woman named Netta Bernstein. Take his yellow color-coded badge with the red dot in the center, and get him the hell out of here.”

But nothing of the kind happened. Sloan’s door stayed closed, I walked past and headed for my office. As I came abreast of Netta’s glass-walled office, I glanced in as casually as I had every day and saw Netta poring over a large graph on her desk.