Love and Power 8
Bud Hournet's office was part of a suite of several rooms.
In the outer office Germaine sat at a desk of three-quarter inch thick sky-blue glass. It was held up by three cloud-colored marble stanchions. From that post, by her computer, she kept the gate. The room was flooded with natural light and resplendent with a green gathering of white and pink flowering laurels growing in large terra cotta pots festooned with molded garlands encircling them.
The office itself where Hournet worked was large, oval, and stately. Its French windows led onto a small balcony protected by an ornately embroidered wrought iron art nouveau balustrade and railing. The prospect from Hournet's window looked south, beyond the Empire State Building, onto a great open sky.
His desk was a beautifully carved contemporary oak thing. Several leather chairs, several side tables, and a few expensive lamps constituted the furnishings. One lamp was made of slate -- its intricately braided spindle blossoming into a boy riding upon a dolphin, its back a graceful arc -- from which the spindle rose again to the socket -- cresting an imaginary ocean; another lamp was a brass casting of Galatea, in the first ecstatic realization of life's impulse stirring within her, holding, as if it were a sacred offering from the gods to mankind, the electric socket. A highly polished cherry wood floor laid out in chevrons gleamed where it was left bare. Where the antique floor was not bare, it was covered by a luxuriant classically blue and red Persian carpet hand woven in Iran: a special gift from the Shah during the time of his reign.
In addition two sets of double doors in his office opened onto two conference rooms, both done in the subdued mahogany and striped plum velvet of twenties deco.
There was a modest but tastefully appointed bedroom, too, with its own bathroom, located behind a door in the smaller conference room. The door was camouflaged by a bookcase.
The windows in this chamber looked out onto several roof and terrace gardens hidden from the street. They transformed small parcels of tar, dirt, or concrete into oases. On the terrace outside Hournet's windows, a small garden was installed. Germaine tended it several times a week.
I love the texture of your hair, Teddy, Hournet said, caressing it and gazing with delight into his eyes as he gently danced inside him, having led him into that hidden room and worshipfully undressed him and pitched him to peaks of need. I want you to be mine, he growled as they both ignited with growing intensity. Bud teased him to unrelenting need. Bud drew him nearer and nearer to explosion. Ted surrendered unreservedly.
As he woke from the swoon of the afterwards, as he looked at Ted who had not yet awoken, Hournet felt aglow with the satisfaction of a good day's work having been well done. He experienced the healthy vitality of successful, victorious accomplishment.
Wake up, my sleepy head, Hournet whispered. We have work to do.
Ted stirred in his sleep and contented emerged from oceanic depths. He smiled when he saw Hournet as he opened his eyes.
Here we are, Hournet said. I think we can use some coffee. There's a long night ahead of us if we want to get a jump on this thing.
What time is it? Ted asked, confused by sleep.
It's nine.
In the morning?
At night.
I must be a little jet-lagged, Ted said, grinning.
I would not be surprised, Hournet said. You're crossing some big distances.
I better get dressed, Ted said.
Hournet kissed him the way somebody kisses you when he wants you to lose touch with everything else but him.
No need for that, Hournet said.
Let me get dressed, Ted said, teasingly resisting, slipping out of bed, and taking his clothes from the chair he had left them on.
I'm glad you're on board, Hournet said with a hardly detectable trace of anxiety. We've got to work swiftly and effectively.
On board? Ted repeated the words quizzically. I don't understand.
You're working with us.
What gives you that impression? Ted laughed.
I just fucked you, Hournet said as if that explained it.
And very nicely, too, Ted responded. But...
But, Hournet said in the kind of astonishment that precedes anger.
Did you know that this was going to happen? Ted said, tripping over anger of his own. Did you make plans? Did you count on it? Was it a strategy?
Hournet looked at him stunned. It hurt him in his chest that this kind of antipathy could follow that kind of lovemaking.
Was your surrender to me in bed just now a strategy? he shot back.
You'd like it if it was, I bet, Ted answered. That would make you feel good about yourself. Everybody is corrupt, you could say and rid yourself of any personal responsibility for what you do.
Everybody but you! Is that it? You are Miss Purity and no one can corrupt you. What would you say if I told you that I have a tape of our happy encounter...now, alas, so remote?
I'd say it's just the kind of sleaze I'd expect from you.
Don't think I'm not going to use it if I have to. That is still up to you.
Use it for what?
It'll be all over the internet, you with your legs up in the air begging, how you let me nail you. If you want to be stubborn, we have the power to play dirty in public.
By now, the whole world knows that now. All anybody has to do is look what a cesspool you've made the gulf.
We're ready to rumble. Are you with us or against us? You know what's at stake.
You want to blackmail me? Ted said laughing.
It won't be so funny when you feel the effect.
I won't sign a release unless it's pay per view and I get sixty percent.
•
"There is a video that I would love to see.
"And probably never will.
"Nor will you.
"Even if it really exists.
"And I am not sure if it really does.
"But the possibility of this tape's existence has been dangled in front of me as a threat in order to prevent me from doing just the sort of thing I am doing now: telling you that there is one major oil company that has not just now begun to do the earth and its people harm because of how it destroyed the Gulf of Mexico. Its cavalier disregard for human life, nature, and even the principles of engineering have governed it for more than half a century.
"It has been a principal villain in misshaping history and spreading false information for over half a century.
"Its villainy began when the company submitted a request for the CIA to overthrow Mohamed Mosedeq in Iran in 1953 in order to protect what they considered to be their oil, when Mosadeq, in the pursuit of Iranian nationalism, offered them compensation at market value as he exercised the Iranian people's right to eminent domain and nationalized the oil fields.
"Now, after the explosion of a well offshore in the gulf and the consequent unrelenting up-gush of raw petroleum into ocean waters, that company has adapted. It now constructs islands in the midst of open sea, off the coast of Alaska, for example, so that it can drill even when OFF-shore drilling is legally forbidden because the company can, thanks to the fake islands it built, now be called ON-shore drilling.
"That Bud Hournet, the company chief and chief spokesman for the company has inaugurated a campaign to ignore the catastrophe and to release a series of ecologically-friendly infomercials picturing the company as being at the vanguard of ecological saintliness is what this story is about and what you ought to know."
That is how Ted began the article he wrote afterwards and that was published in Rolling Stone under the headline, Fucking Us Over: How They Make the Earth Move under Our Feet but Keep Us from Feeling It.
When Ozzie Kelly read the piece, he was fascinated by the fact of a sexual encounter and the blackmail that Ted described as well as pumped up by his frontal exposure of the oil industry and by his rebellion against endemic reliance on petroleum. Kelly took the ferry to Manhattan and was banging unannounced at Ted Blum's door.
When no one answered, he installed himself on the mat, his back against the door and began to read from a dog-eared copy of the Theban plays by Sophocles.
•
I read your piece in Rolling Stone, and I think there is hope for you. That was not the kind of thing a defeated person does, Ozzie Kelly said as they sat at the table, the four of them, Ilia, Ted, Philip and himself, and, dinner finished, were tasting several after dinner liqueurs, digestifs, Philp said, as he brought several glimmering bottles to the table.
No, Ted answered. But what do you expect me to do now? You can expose them and expose them and expose them and they just keep doing what they did, redesigning something here, repackaging something there, using a re-branded logo somewhere else. They subvert and destroy nature, but they are like vampires. They get their very strength by sucking up earth's blood.
I could not have said it better, Ozzie Kelly said.
So what! Teddy Blum answered in irritation.
•
Again it was a call from Max Cantor from Maxson's, as he identified himself with his signature Yiddish lilt, who came to the rescue.
I saw, he told Ilia, Ted's piece. Very moving. A brave piece of journalism. It gave me an idea for another coffee table calendar.
I want you and Ted to spend some time in Louisiana, on the beaches and inside the towns there, getting to know the people.
I think if you can put together a dozen drawings accompanied by good prose sketches that catch the reality of the situation in all its grimness and also show how heroically `small people' cope despite everything, I can put together an important and heartbreaking book.
The Water Gazers was published a little more than five months later, two weeks before Christmas.
It was a book of a dozen drawings of the Louisina coast, the Gulf of Mexico, the people, the boats, the birds, the wetland and marshes. Accompanying each month's drawing were several pages of commentary that Ted fashioned to fit Ilia's pictures.
When Ozzie Kelly heard about the book they were going to do, he begged to go to the Gulf with them but they said that it was better for their work if they could be alone.
Ozzie Kelly smiled; perhaps he slightly leered, as he took it that they wanted to be together and he would get in their way, keeping them from...
Ted saw what he was thinking from the shadows thinking cast upon his features.
You think just like a straight guy, Ted said.
Ozzie Kelly should have been nonplussed, but he was not. He should not have understood what Ted was saying, but he did. Ted lived in another world, but it was not hidden to Ozzie. It was a world Kelly envied and was ashamed to recognize.
He told Philip -- of the three Philip was the one easiest to talk to, the least frightening -- he told Philip that he felt what he called a sick curiosity about homosexuality, but that he did not have any actual gay impulses or feelings himself.
Philip said that that was too bad because ever since he had first seen him, he hoped he could at least make out with him, despite his homophobic bluster.
Ozzie Kelly looked at him and melted.
I don't know if I can go there, Ozzie Kelly said.
Well, if you do manage to, I'm already there waiting for you when you arrive.
Is that a proposal? Ozzie said, grinning.
You are incurably, terminally straight, Ted said ruffling the hair on his shaggy, pretty head.
•
The really depressing thing was that when the book, The Water Gazers, came out, the problem had not yet been solved and scores of thousands of barrels of raw petroleum were still rushing from their bed deep near earth's burning core spreading out in plumes and surface slicks for thousands of square miles from the center into the gulf, ravaging sea and land and destroying the people who lived by them.
This disaster was a boom for Maxson. Ilia's work was praised for the same erotic intensity that critics hailed in his other work, despite the absence of the overtly erotic subject that was familiarly his. The piece in Rolling Stone had made Ted not only a celebrity but established for him a reputation as a penetrating analyst. He had a run of television interviews and was still running, as he said, while the oil was still flowing.
He told Philip one night, laughing as Philip was carrying him to heights of ecstatic abandonment, that he was getting tired of hearing the sound of his own voice.
But he bowed to the necessity and, in fact, through study, made himself expert in areas where expertise had been assigned to him only through presumption.
His text was praised for his ability to establish contexts for facts, for the way he could quickly and engagingly explain the facts, how he was fluent on political, environmental, and economic issues, and still was able to bring the issues to life because of the way he could write vibrantly about his melancholy encounters with the people of the region, who were struggling to survive in the eye of the disaster.
Reviewers coupled his name with Studs Terkel's.
Ilia and Ted were paid for their work, but the entire profits from the book, after Maxon's recuperated its investment, would go in perpetuity to a fund to keep the coast of Louisiana and the people who lived on that coast alive and hopeful in the possibility of getting the poison grime out of their lives.
At the benefit for the Fund, Ilia and Ted were presented with tributary plaques. They made a joint appeal for environmental sanity. Ted said that included forbidding war. He appealed to the audience to stop even thinking about war as a possible weapon of conflict resolution and to think a lot more about how to go about conflict prevention -- through international justice and international humanity.
The oil that is drilled out of the depths of the earth becomes the fuel that propels the airplanes that bomb the surface of the earth. This cannot go on. Besides being a moral imperative, it is an ecological fact, Ilia said to the gathering assembled to honor them.
After the dinner, as the event was breaking up, a voice from behind caught Ted momentarily by surprise.
It's a long time, Ted heard the voice saying. He turned around and was caught in the grip of Giovanni's gaze, and was tongue-tied.
I have been waiting for this, Giovanni said with a smile, ever since I saw the Opera Calendar. Tell your friend, you're ok and you're leaving with me.
I am ok. I will.
Ilia! Ted caught his attention as soon as he sought it. I'm going with
-- Giovanni. He mouthed the name so as to frame it in significance -- and pointed to him.
Giovanni took it all into account measuring and parceling out just what he had to do to take full control.
You never tried to get in touch with me, he said with a threatening trace of reproach as they walked westerly through Central Park.
I never wanted to.
Giovanni was astonished.
What? he said.
My obedience was perfect, Ted explained. Thank you.
For what? Giovanni objected with a dismissive laugh.
I am serious, Ted responded.
Giovanni began to say something.
Let me speak, please, Ted prevented him. My obedience was perfect. To have sought you, even only secretly in my own heart, he continued, would have betrayed you. You ordered me to surrender my desire for you. I no more even had the right to think about you. You had ordered me to live without you. I obeyed. The trouble was that when I did not exist for you, it felt like I did not exist at all. I existed for no one until I began to re-exist as a new person, retrieving bits of self from wherever I could gather them. That's what I'm doing now.
You are double-talking now.
Maybe it's just that you don't understand me.
Giovanni slapped him hard across his face.
Don't ever do that again, Ted said quietly but with absolute authority.
Giovanni was so amazed that he had begun to shake and could not calm himself.
What is it that you want? he said finally.
It was you who invited me on this walk.
Do you want to know how I got here tonight? Do you want to know how Hournet got your name?
If you think it will interest me. Ted shrugged.
It's gonna interest you plenty, Giovanni said without any trace of Southern accent.
Bud Hournet hired me.
Hired you?
To entrap you.
To entrap me?
Right.
Into what? They have a tape of Hournet fucking me and me adoring it. What more could they have?
You.
Ted looked over the rims of his eye sockets at him.
Giovanni avoided it by continuing with a rigidly nervous flow of words.
You. Entirely in my control.
Why are you telling me this?
I don't know. I shouldn't. I recommended you to Bud when he consulted me.
You knew each other?
I owed him. Things got sticky after I let you go. So when he asked me to help, I thought of you. I know how good your work is, and I know how susceptible you can be to...influence.
Ted remained silent and his physiognomy remained blank.
When you betrayed him, Giovanni said.
I betrayed him!
You led him to believe you had agreed to work for him.
Tricking with a handsome, sexy guy and becoming a corporate shill for a criminal industry are two separate things.
I was dishonored, Giovanni said with rebuke.
You were dishonored!
You did not live up to my promise.
Your promise?
That you could be made compliant.
You're living in the past.
And if, Giovanni said in a whisper, if I succeed now, despite having put myself at a disadvantage, if I succeed now in getting you back despite your resistance, that won't be something to spit on.
[When you write, please put story name in subject slot. Thanks]