Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Page A

Byron Ponderosa,” Molly said. “For this there is no line. It just came in. Ophelia sent it, and it’s not cataloged yet. Ophelia wants to know your opinion of the art, which I promise you can give her sight unseen.” Fred heard a hesitant note in Molly’s voice: the note she used when she was keeping something from him.
    â€œI might as well tell you, Fred. Ophelia is definitely thinking of going into production with Cover-Hoover.”
    â€œIt figures,” Fred said.
    â€œIt’s why she’s been pestering me to talk with the Doctor. I made her come clean after the meeting I went to. I know Ophelia well enough to see how her mind’s moving.”
    Given the Copley fragment’s absence, Fred had hung a Watteau sketch for Gilles (now called, by the refurbished Louvre, Pierrot )—in which the clown was nude—where he could look at it. Ass’s head coming up from behind a hill following a naked man in pudgy middle age: one of the nicest things Clay had. Clay had the misfortune to let himself believe sometimes that painting was about stories or emotions, rather than about demonstrating or flouting physical laws. The Gilles study concerned the tendency of flesh to defy gravity. Clay could neither see nor understand that.
    â€œOphelia wants to join the powers of light?” Fred prompted.
    â€œShe definitely sees a TV series in it,” Molly said. “Cover-Hoover is more photogenic than Jesus to start with, and she has a compelling presence. She has the backing of the wise and the scared, as well as a ready appeal to what Ophelia calls popular wisdom. Fox Twenty-Five could do great things with Cover-Hoover. Run her around the country with stops in Buffalo, Topeka, Missoula. Ophelia sees it in a tent, like a revival meeting or Chautauqua. Cover-Hoover yells, ‘Approach, all ye possessed,’ and the wretched folk crawl out, weeping and groaning and delivering themselves of prurient witness. It’s a natural, Ophelia says. It’s all sex.”
    â€œSafe sex,” Fred said. “Puritan, backward, smoldering, repressed, bewildered, retroactively fantasized sex. And nobody gets wet.”
    â€œRight,” Molly said. “Sex for the Moral Majority. The hell of it is, I can’t make Ophelia see the damage it can cause. The fallout from the entertainment—Ophelia doesn’t understand we’re not just nailing imaginary villains here; we’re talking real people.
    â€œWhether or not Cover-Hoover’s sincere in the doing-good department, that doesn’t make her any less vicious in her effect. She’s scary, and I’d say she’s evil, if you can judge from the testimony of the wasted families she brags about, which she leaves groveling in her wake.
    â€œSo I’m stalling and looking for a way to keep Ophelia from adding the benefit of her talents and making the Doctor’s crusade into a landslide.”
    *   *   *
    Just after ten o’clock, Fred walked along Charles Street, which was only mildly festive on a Monday night. The shops were closed long since, but revelers worked at gaiety in the bars, and diners in the restaurants lingered over dessert, attended by impatient servers.
    Oona’s was dark and locked. Fred pressed the buzzer next to the door. He looked through his sizable, plain reflection in the window. The temperature was forty degrees or so, but he hadn’t bothered to put a coat on over his jacket for the short walk from Mountjoy Street.
    His reflection fell between a stuffed ostrich and carved wooden screens against which leaned primitive farm implements. His square face under its short bristle of hair surveyed him. The eyes of his reflection were black and said, She’s late.
    He waited half an hour. There was neither life nor light in the shop, nor in the upstairs apartment where she lived. Fred went back to his office and dialed the shop’s number, and listened to it