you have children?” he went on. “Because this is the résumé of someone who has spent the last ten or fifteen years raising a family—”
“One child,” Helen said. “Yes.”
Harvey beamed at her, as if she would want to share in his professional pride at having guessed these embarrassing facts about her. “Then you already know what we do,” he said, tilting his chair backwards. “We tell stories. We tell stories to the public, because stories are what people pay attention to, what they remember. Why? Because when they were little, they had devoted, beautiful mothers like you, who told them stories, and stories are how they first learned to make sense out of the whole big, confusing world.”
“Stories,” Helen said indulgently, though the truth was that his mere invocation of Sara, whom he did not know, whose existence wasno more than generic to him, had caused a little tightness in her throat that kept her from wanting to risk saying anything more. That kind of thing had happened to her a lot these last few weeks.
“Now, because our services cost money, the protagonists of these stories tend to be people who are rich, or famous, or better yet rich and famous. But the stories themselves are everyman stories, familiar. Archetypal. Am I pronouncing that right? We put these figures in stories whose outcomes we’re already familiar with from childhood, so that way we know how the audience will judge them when we finish telling them. The stories lead the people to the judgment we want. Is all this making sense?”
“Don’t they ever object?” Helen asked.
“Who?”
“The celebrities, the rich people. Do they ever resist being put into these everyman stories?”
Harvey smiled, a little condescendingly, Helen thought. “They’re used to it. They live in publicity, it’s like their atmosphere, so they already know they’ll get judged, and it’s just a question of influencing how. Unlike the rest of us, they don’t really have the option of assuming there’s no one watching. Anyway, it’s what they pay us for. We don’t go to them, you understand; they come to us. Do you know any celebrities yourself?”
Helen was, naturally, thinking of her husband, who had not long ago been on the front page of the New York Post , and whose name a man like Harvey would surely recognize in an instant. In Harvey’s world this association with the public realm might even have advanced Helen’s case; still, she just didn’t feel like getting into it with him. She shook her head.
“Not at present,” she said.
“Not at present?” He laughed. “I like you. What about at past, then?”
Helen smiled shyly. “Well, if you want to go back a ways, I actually went to junior high with Hamilton Barth.”
She was worried he would laugh at her, at the pathetic tenuousness of this connection, but he did not. Any point of contact with someoneas famous as Hamilton Barth was worth cultivating, and respecting. His eyes grew wide. “No kidding,” he said. “Where was this?”
“In a little town in northern New York,” said Helen, “where we both grew up.” “Little town” didn’t begin to describe it. They sat in the same Catholic school classroom every year from kindergarten through the eighth grade; Helen’s family moved from Malloy to Watertown the following year, but Hamilton made it through only two and a half years of high school anyway before dropping out and heading south to the city, and then west to L.A., to become an actor. Was there any hint, back then, of the deep, tortured, mercurially tempered, disarmingly handsome movie star he would later become? No, there was not, unless you counted the fact that he was short, as the great male movie stars tended to be for some reason, distilled and without excess, like bonsai trees. They weren’t close friends back then, but they knew a lot about each other, because you knew a lot about everybody your age in a town that small; and if you wanted to get