FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I don't care if NYNEX and Bell Atlantic want to merge, but at least they ought to have the decency to keep it to themselves. Even if I did care, of course, I wouldn't challenge the God-given right of American corporations to expend most of their energy breaking up and coming back together. This is, after all, the fabulous free-market dynamic that generates so much wealth for the executives involved, a process that must be taught in leading graduate schools of business as the Amoeba Principle.

And I'm not worried about the possibility that because of the Amoeba Principle, all the companies that came into being after the breakup of AT&T in 1984 may remerge, coagulating into some gigantic snarl of cables and wires. If that happens, I assume, the television commercials that were designed to make those diverse companies distinctive will simply meld together for a while, so that Candice Bergen will discuss the Yellow Pages with James Earl Jones in the voice of Dick Cavett.

Then, sooner or later, the new corporation, called something like AT&T II, will break up again, creating a new group of executives rich enough to buy John-John's potty. None of this would trouble me if it could be done with no thought at all of where the consumer fits in, the way it's done in other American industries.

But every time the telecommunications industry shifts itself around, we are bombarded with news and analysis and advertisements on how the shift could affect vital decisions on our own individual telephone service. Here's how I feel about decisions on my own individual telephone service: I don't want to make any.

I have never wanted to make any. I am not opposed to competition. I am perfectly aware that, compared with the days when I thought of my telephone as being operated by a single entity known as "the phone company," a three-minute call to my cranky and overbearing Aunt Rosie in Kansas City costs 73' less, even at peak hours. I appreciate that, even though I sometimes think I would appreciate it even more if I were talking to someone other than Aunt Rosie.

From the start, though, I believed that making a decision about telephone service was simply one more decision than I was prepared to make--even though I'm sure that, at least compared with an executive in the telecommunications industry, I wasn't making many decisions in the first place.

So for 12 years, I made no decision at all about my telephone. None. Then, during a flurry of debate on health care just a few months ago, I read a sad letter in the New York Times from a woman who, in trying to demonstrate how rapidly her aged parents had deteriorated, said that within a few years they had gone from vital and productive members of the community to people so incapable of handling their own affairs that they were renting a rotary telephone from AT&T.

I told my wife that maybe we ought to get rid of the rotary telephone we were renting from AT&T. Having a definition of senility hanging on the wall of your kitchen seems to me unwise under any circumstances.

But that's as far as I'm willing to go. I'm not interested in deciding whether to go with Friends & Family or Enemies & In-Laws. I don't want to factor in free access to the Internet. I don't want to know how the merging of two Baby Bells in the West into one Adolescent Bell is going to affect me. I wish they would just keep all that to themselves.