American Beauty Busted: Necromedia and Domestic Discipline

The older, traditional ideas of private, isolated thoughts and actions . . . are very seriously threatened by new methods of instantaneous electronic information retrieval, by the electrically computerized dossier bank—that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes.”

Since 1880, there has been a storage medium for each kind of betrayal.

A short while ago a former colleague of mine disclosed a somewhat embarrassing tale about how he discovered his wife was cheating on him. They had just crossed the country and moved into a new apartment. Very few people had any knowledge of their new address or phone number. During the first week in the apartment they received a phone call, which my colleague’s wife quickly answered. Expecting the call to be from his mother-in-law, he began to leave the room. He was puzzled however by his wife’s silence and her unfamiliar facial expression. A death in the family? A violent, prank phone call? Who was the ghost at the other end of the line? As my colleague explains it, the true nature of the call came to him in a paralyzing flash. Without the passing of a word, he recognized in his wife’s face the terror of disclosed adultery; the phone call had been placed by her lover’s wife who, irate and vengeful, had made handy use of 4-1-1. As my colleague describes it, at that very moment, the previous year of his life rewound in high speed in his mind, generating a psychic snowball of paranoiac suspicions and innuendos—most of which he would never be able to prove or disprove—involving his wife and a faceless lover. My colleague claims that his wife, having been “busted,” burst into uncontrollable tears, and he, in a state of information overload perhaps, lay paralyzed on the bathroom floor for nearly an hour. Needless to say, this telephonic interruption seriously disrupted their domestic scene. To this day my colleague recalls this incident as one might recall a sudden death in the family. [End Page 34]