“Are these duplicates?” asked Hussar, thumbing wrong-handedly at the leaves with no pretence of the patience necessary to read them.
“Well—”
“No. They are not—that’s astonishing,” he said with an irrepressible smile and a shake of his head. “Double-sided I suppose,” he said. “They are that as well! Fantastic! How many pages do we think? Don’t look! Do you know?”
“Mr. Degem—”
“You do not. Twenty-three, twenty-four . . . twenty-six pages!”
“Mr. Degem . . .”
“Degen.”
“Sorry. Mr. Degem . . . It’s very common. Commonplace . . . a simple, very standard membership contract,” insisted the consultant.
“People actually sign these?”
“Yes, Mr. Degem, of course they do.”
“Now . . . Roger . . . I have a very important question.”
“Of course, Mr. Degem . . .”
Hussar leaned forward, and carefully situated his palms astride the pages: “Are they shut-ins?”
“Absolutely not—”
“That’s marvelous!” he roared with laughter. “Fools then! Every business must have its model. Yours is simply indentured retards.”
“Mr. Degem!” the consultant protested.
“Organ donation requires less reading, and is, I suspect, less binding than what you have in mind—Roger. But perhaps there’s room for additional obligation.”
“Mr. Degem.”
“What’s one more page in the scheme of things?”
“Mr. Degem.”
“Your pen . . . please?” requested Hussar, who was presented it by the incredulous consultant, and initialed, signed, signed, and initialed.
The consultant collected the pen, turned the pages to face him, and stared dazedly, but briefly, at the signatures. “I’ll be right back with your copy,” he said, but remained seated, and instead considered Hussar’s features as though grappling with the glyphs of an alien language. When he finally made as though to stand, Hussar interrupted.
“Goodbye Roger.”
“Let me just get your copies—”
“Mount them beside your other trophies,” said Hussar, rising and with a gesture toward the bare walls.
“Enjoy your workout, Mr. Degem!” called the consultant, and scrambled out of the office after Hussar as the entry doors turned behind him.
5.
Outdoors it rained the sparse and persistent rain of cool seasons. It clicked like beads against the window glass and gurgled faintly through the progress of the gutters. A woman sat at the edge of his bed in half dress. She’d thrown on his discarded t-shirt and switched on the small desk lamp at the bedside. In this light the black shirt shown with the same Prussian Blue round the curve of her breast, as the underslope of predawn cloud through the window. Hussar knew her name was not Lilith as she’d said, but as he stood in the doorframe with the last of the Champagne ringing in two glasses, and she gazed up at him with large, beautiful, startled eyes; however absurd, he felt it oddly fitting.
The day had opened with rain: a steady mist the wipers stroked at intervals as Hussar crossed Clayton beneath the yoke of thirty-year-old mid-rise office towers. Along the corners mid-age professionals queued for lights in black hems and blue shirtsleeves and bowed beneath lunch-hour umbrellas arrayed against the levitating rain.
He’d begun at a shoe store in Brentwood, stuffed in the crook of a shopping plaza, and lighted with the vehemence of an indoor football pitch: for sixty-five minutes he’d wiled his time, committing the unique tread of men’s shoes to memory, and left with black laces in an oversize bag.
He’d trundled the brief run up 170 into Clayton to the guttural perturbations of the exhaust, and stopped by a wine merchant, where the odor of strong cheese and damp ceiling tile rest as though the opened door were a lifted lid, and checked out at a high counter, where he purchased three boxes of stemware, two foil-capped Champagnes, and a bottled whisky in a pale carton from a man heavily sweating bourbon. He’d stopped at the gym, with its scent of chlorine pool agents; fowled clothing and fresh-dried towels; the consultant, dappled in his brume of post-adolescent sebum; and its grand glass façade: a pious devotional to the commercial power of protestant ethic perseverations.
But at the blush of sunset, Hussar sat balanced between two moods, a table wrapped in lifted red laminate sheet, and a Paulaner drooling overfill from a plastic cup. He was swathed in the dark cavity of a men’s club in East Saint Louis, and to Hussar’s thinking it had the look of the inside of a thrift-store smoking jacket: the threadbare, synthetic interior of something which from the outside—and held to the light just so—looks the convincing counterfeit to a right idea. A soiled carpet in red paisley crawled beneath the tables and disappeared into the corners. A DJ loft at the back was painted galvanized tube and diamond plate. The working bar was a convolution of Formica and corrugated sheet, and where three elevated stages marked the dusk, they shone as oases of light and polished brass. There were two near Hussar: bright and vacant. But about the third and furthest, a small residual of the daytime crowd hung helplessly from their stools, as if ensnared on the barbs of their own yearning, and spinning up thin ropes of tobacco smoke. In spite of this, Hussar found the room to be eerily scentless—still too early perhaps for the fulminate of bathroom colognes, sick, cigarettes, and spilt beer.
At the bar a heavy doorman with a headset rest his chin against his knuckles and occasionally issued drinks to the girls working tables. Hussar watched him steer his gaze about the room, over the patrons, and occasionally toward the door, with the deliberating weight of a dim searchlight. From the loft, the DJ served up expired pop singles as the rhythm of an autoerotic soundtrack, and at volume palpable as a fluid. Spangled and low-cut, the girls stopped into the narrow loft to visit him with drinks and requests, and the doorman’s gaze watched this too: clients seduced occasionally down the hall toward private rooms; and from time to time it lighted downrange upon the two women on stage, their small breasts flushed and abraded, holding the stage with a nipple-bothering pantomime of wrestling and ecstasy.
Bruised peaches, thought Hussar.
A long figure in a tufted hunting jacket emerged from the threshold of the hall then, bearing an ample forelock swept back by the flat of his hand, and a nervous preoccupation with the flare of his nostrils. He crossed from the hall to an empty table in the middle of the room, where he stretched his length out over the chairback as he sat. A woman followed him shortly from the hall. She approached him with a touch to his shoulder and leant closely into his ear. He made no motion toward her except when she’d gone, when he turned to watch her at the bar. She returned with a drink, which she left with him together with a brief lingering of her fingers in his hair.
The man’s silhouette jutted from the terrain of low-back chairs and tables, and from time to time, his head lolled indifferently into the upturned pitch of his collar, until at last the twosome had exhausted their vaudeville of lesbian affections; and following a short interval, the same woman who had accompanied him from the hall, appeared on stage to replace them. From the look of her, Hussar guessed her for a prime-shift talent picking up an early double: a composition almost entirely in legs, breasts, heels, and a small demure of clothing held in suspense. And when, at last, she’d thrown off these fetters, it was plain to Hussar why the man had admired her for company.
Her routine was lazy and disinterested: but if her sincerity were ever a matter for doubt, her audience seemed unaware; they were breathless with appetite. They fed her dollar bills all the while and brayed like children at a petting zoo. Even the doorman’s gaze bore rare temperature. But Hussar put it to a conceit of biology: hope is an eternally suspended disbelief.
The man in the hunting jacket watched restively. Occasionally he lurched to cloy at his nose, or bat at his forelock with an unaccountabl
e suddenness—as though it might be water in his eyes—and then rebounded to stillness. When she’d finished, and left the stage—to what passed there for reflective quiet—the tall man dispatched his drink in four prompt even measures, ratcheted himself up from the chair and onto his legs, swept by the bar for the tab, and made his path to the door. Now he was gone. But it wasn’t until he’d been gone some time that the woman appeared at Hussar’s shoulder.
She’d now an over-small jacket for an addition of clothes, and as she stood before him, Hussar marveled that by a similar abstract of impulse, all enterprises of men are sustained: the merest glimpse of an unlikely flesh is the fuel vapor of unrequited aspiration, he thought.
“Look at you all alone,” she shouted into the space between them. It was a space she quickly narrowed.
“It’s not my fault,” he said.
“No?” she said, her warm breath now in his ear.
“I was born this way.”
“Alone?”
“Very much. So I can hardly be blamed for looking the part,” he said, but her eyes wouldn’t tell whether she’d heard.
“You’re clever. Where’re your friends?
“I didn’t invite them. I was afraid I might find something I liked,” he said, and smiled broadly to the notion of playing a game which can’t be lost.
“And then what?” she said and sidled onto his knee.
“And then I’d hate to share,” he said.
“You’re quite charming.”
“I know,” he said, and thought of the Paulaner on his breath, and then suddenly wished he’d had much more to drink.
“And how do those charms play on the ladies?” she asked.
“Really, it’s my modesty that most impresses—”
“Most impresses . . . ?” she repeated.
“Impresses most,” he said and flicked his wrist dismissively. “You’re missing my best material for the noise.”
“How-bout a dance, clever boy?—I give the best dances.”
“Is there a ratings agency for such things?”
“Yes. And they rated me best, the very, very, best,” she said, and squirmed uncomfortably on his lap.
“Was that Fitch, Moody’s, or Standard and Poor’s? Though, considering your features, I’m sure it was a unanimous decision.”
“It was. I’m Triple A rated.”
“A college girl!” he said, and suddenly had the image to mind of turning through a textbook and finding pornography. “What would I do with my hands—they generally like to be involved.”
“You’d do what clever boys do, and just keep them to yourself.”
“That seems an odd protocol. I crave intimacy . . . you see.”
“Just what the private rooms are for—come along and I’ll show you,” she said, straightening as if they were poised to leave.
“What happens in there?” he asked, causing her to bring her ear close again.
“I dance . . . for you . . . in private.”
“What’s more private?”
“It’s not on the menu.”
“It sounds more work than play,” he said.
“It’s no work for you—I’ll take care of everything.”
“I have a poor imagination: feeble,” he said. “Who’s friendly here? Are you friendly?”
“We’re all friendly, clever boy,” she said, and touched his neck.
“Everyone’s friendly: some are more friendly than others. I think all this business has given me an appetite,” he said, with a short glance about the room. “Who offers take home?”
She looked at him carefully now and then broke off to survey the room herself, and, Hussar thought, to buy herself a moment for consideration. “Everyone’s got their rhythm. What’d you have in mind?”
“Some carry out.”
“To-go orders,” she said, and drew his jaw toward the deep of her smile, “can be rare . . . and costly. And strictly speaking, they’re not served from this kitchen.”
Hussar laughed. “So much the better: keeps out the riffraff.”
“You don’t mind?” she asked; and Hussar thought then that despite her practiced manner, she proposed to tread rarely covered ground.
“The righteous dine alone,” he said, closely into her ear, “and I happen to be a man of reasonable means.”
She folded her arms round his neck, her chest to his chin.
“Comfortable means . . . ?” she said.
“Oh yes.”
6.
They sat in the orange glow of instruments and cockpit switchgear. She touched the leather on the dashboard with admiration—“It’s like a jet,” she said. A heavy mist blew about the stands of lights which sprung from the long and vacant slope of the parking lot, and cast fine shadows from where it collected on the windshield. Her car set a few spaces away: a burgundy Dodge, miniature, round, and dirty as a schoolyard toy; fine threads of exhaust turned in the cool damp air from its expiring warmth.
“Wherever you like,” she said, “the car’s fine. But maybe not under the lights.” She looked at him and something like a coy smile came over her features.
“It’s hard on the stitching,” he said, but where she waited for a change in his expression, it never came. He knocked the shifter side to side with his palm. “I had a room in mind,” he said, and she noticed the way even the gear pattern shown orange from the crown of the shifter.
“What did you call it,” she asked, “when you gave me the money?”
“An honorarium,” he said, and set the car to motion circling round and swinging toward an exit. She was quiet until he had put the car out briskly before approaching traffic.
“It’s strong,” she said.
“It is strong.”
“It’s awfully trusting, don’t you think—paying in advance? How could you be sure that I would come?”
He offered her a quick and furrowed glance: “It was the only way I could be sure that you would,” he said.
She was quiet again, and watched him move swiftly and smoothly through what traffic there was. “You like to drive,” she said.
“It’s my religion,” he said, and she laughed.
“I bet this has a nice stereo,” she said, and retrieved a lip balm from the bag between her knees. “You have any music?” she asked, and drew the figure of her lips with it, practiced them against one another, then again; replaced the wand, and turned toward him.
“Of course,” he said, and reached for the knobs on the dash. “What do you like?”
“Where are you from?” she asked suddenly. “I didn’t notice it before—you have an accent. You have an accent, don’t you?” She appeared excited at the prospect.
“Diction,” he said. “Any language sounds exotic when you use all the letters.”
She laughed again. “No. Come on!”
“What do you like?” he repeated.
“I don’t know . . . all kinds of stuff : . . . rock . . .”
“Like that trash at the club?”
“That’s not rock,” she said.
“I’m aware.”
“. . . jazz,” she said.
He looked at her now, and then again. “What’s your name?”
“I told you before,” she said. “I see somebody wasn’t paying attention.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did,” she insisted.
“I promise. If you don’t tell me, I won’t have anything to call you.”
“I told you.”
“It never happened.”
“Lilith,” she said. Now her gaze was exasperated and settled keenly upon him.
“It’s a pleasure,” he said.
“And yours?”
“Your stage name?” he asked into a prolonged silence. He looked at her again, chan
ged lanes, and turned off down a side street, coming to rest along the curb.
“Jazz?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, and her features shown pale in the dash light.
“Is that a put-on?” When he looked at her now, his look was long, and his features fixed and immutable. “You’re serious?”
“You want to test me?”
“No,” he said. He looked through the windshield at the pool of concrete beneath the headlamps, and then returned to her. But, she thought, with a searching, distant gaze.
“Marek,” he said.
“I suppose that’s your stage n—”
“I have a different idea,” he interrupted.
“What is it?”
“A surprise.”
7.
The woman sat on the sofa at the heel of the long area rug and watched Hussar cross-legged on the floor, and before the enormous stereo. He sipped Champagne from a wide flute, and from a box of spares, carefully arranged the stemware beneath thick runs of cable which joined the amplifiers and speakers. The cables were sufficiently rigid that they ran flat and level along these supports, and crouching concentratedly as he was, installing these ad hoc piers, he looked to her like a boy fashioning a model trestle from the materials to hand.
“What is it for?” she asked as he shuffled across the floor and fitted glasses beneath the cable on the opposite side.
“It reduces the noise floor. The background haze,” he offered over his shoulder, suspending the substantial cable along the lip of a final glass. “The effect is more pronounced with carpet, but it’s discernable just the same.” When he was satisfied with the arrangement he rose, considered his work, collected the unused glasses, and took them to the kitchen.
“Is it warming up?” she asked.
“Yes,” he called out from the kitchen, “it’s a bit brittle on startup.”
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