“I mean it. I go to plays all the time. It’s real, Maggie. You don’t have to wonder what everybody’s thinking, they just say it. I want you to talk to Whitney Hess.”
“Whitney Hess the producer? Do you know him?”
“Yeah, sure I know him.”
“I don’t want to do that, Johnny. I don’t want to get help from somebody just because he’s a friend of yours. That’s not right. I want ‘Blue Sun Rising’ to stand on its own.”
“Are you kidding?” said Johnny. “Whitney Hess wouldn’t buy a bad play from his dying mother. Besides, I want five points of this up front. You’re not going to cut me out of a winner.”
Tony and Carla and Tony’s brothers and his sister and Mama and Papa Velotta dressed up for opening night. Johnny Lucata sent a limo to pick them up, and another to get Jeannie and Sherry and Eva. Tony got out the word, and the truckers found Billy Mace and Henry Black Bear and Quincy Pride. They all had seventh row center seats.
Maggie thought sure she was dreaming. Her name up in lights at the Shubert Theatre. Ladies in furs and jewels dressed up for opening night. Spotlights and TV cameras and people she’d only seen in the movies. She stayed outside for a long time. Standing in the very same spot where she’d thrown up pretzels in the street. Not far from the alley where she’d curled up in a box and nearly died. You just never know, she told herself. You just don’t.
There was no need to wait for the reviews. After the first act, Whitney Hess said they had a smash on their hands. After the third act curtain, even Maggie believed it was true. The audience came to its feet and shouted, “author! author!” and someone told Maggie they meant her.
Johnny hurried her out of the Shubert by the side door. He wouldn’t say where they were going. A black car was by the curb around the corner. There were men in overcoats and shades.
“I want you to meet somebody,” said Johnny, and opened the rear door. “This is Maggie McKenna,” he said. “Maggie, I’d like you to meet my father.”
Maggie caught the proper respect in his voice. She looked inside and saw an old man sitting in the corner. He was lost in a black suit, a man no more substantial than a cut-rate chicken in a sack.
"That was a nice play,” he said. "I like it a lot. I like plays with a story you can’t guess what’s going to happen all the time. There’s nothing on the television but dirt. The Reds got people in the business. They built this place in Chelyabinsk looks just like Twentieth Century Fox. Writers, directors, the works. They teach ’em how to do stuff rots out your head then they send them over here. This is a great country. You keep writing nice plays.”
"Thank you,” said Maggie, "I’m very glad you liked it.”
"Here. A little present from me. Your big night. You remember where you got it.”
"I’m very grateful,” said Maggie. "For everything.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.
"That’s very nice. You’re a nice girl. She’s a nice girl, Johnny.”
Johnny took her back inside, and on the way home after the big party Whitney Hess gave at the Plaza, Maggie opened her present. It was a pendant shaped like an olive. Pale emeralds formed the olive and a ruby sat on top for the pimento.
"It’s just lovely,” said Maggie.
"The old man’s got a lot of class.”
"Why didn’t you tell me that was your father’s house, Johnny?
I kinda guessed later but I didn’t know for sure.”
"Wasn’t the right time.”
"And it’s the right time now?”
"Yeah, I guess it is.”
"Whitney Hess wants to go into rehearsal on ‘Diesel and Roses’ next month. I’m going to ask Billy Mace and Henry Black Bear and Quincy Pride to come on as technical advisors. There’s not a thing for them to do, but I*d like to have them around.”
"That’s nice. It’s a good idea.”
"Whitney says everyone wants the movie rights to ‘Blue Sun Rising.’ Which means we’ll get a picture deal up front for ‘Diesel and Roses.’ Oh Lordy, I can’t believe all this is really happening. Everything in my life’s been either awful or as good as it can be.”
“It’s going to stay good now, Maggie.” He leaned over and kissed her quickly. Maggie stared at the tinted glass.
“You’ve never done that before.”
“Well, I have now.”
Maggie wondered what was happening inside. She felt funny all over. She was dizzy from the kiss. She liked Johnny a lot but she’d never liked him quite like this. She wanted him to kiss her again and again, but not now. Not wearing Oral’s protective device, which she’d worn since her very first day in New York. It was something she’d never thought about before. What if you really wanted someone to do something to you? Would the wire and the black stone know that it wasn’t Jimmy Gerder or Marty Wilde? She certainly couldn’t take the chance of finding out.
The phone was ringing when they got to her apartment.
“You’re famous,” said Johnny. “That’ll go on all night.”
“No, it won’t,” said Maggie, “just take it off the hook. I can be famous tomorrow. Tonight I just want to be me.”
Johnny had a funny look in his eyes. She was sure he was going to kiss her right then. “Just wait right there,” she said. “Don’t go away. Get me a Dr Pepper and open yourself a beer.” She hurried into the bedroom and shut the door. Raised up her skirt and slipped the little wire off her waist. Her heart was beating fast. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Maggie McKenna.”
Johnny gave a decidedly angry shout from the other room. Another man yelled. Something fell to the floor.
“Good heavens, what’s that?” said Maggie. She rushed into the room. Johnny had a young man backed against the wall, threatening him with a fist. The man wore a patched cardigan sweater and khaki pants. He was trying to hit Johnny with a sack.
“Who the hell are you” said Johnny, “what are you doing in here!”
“Oh my God,” said Maggie. She stopped in her tracks, then ran past Johnny and threw her arms around the other man’s neck. “Oh Daddy, I knew you wouldn’t leave me! I knew you’d come back!”
“Maggie? Is that you? Why, you’re all grown up! Say, what a looker you are. Where am I? How’s your mother?”
“We’ll talk about that. Just sit down and rest.” She could hardly see through her tears. “I’ll explain,” she told Johnny. “At least I’ll give it a try. Oh, Oral, I hope you’re wherever it is you want to be. Johnny, get Daddy a Dr Pepper.” She gave him the sack. “Put this in the kitchen and you come right back.”
“It’s just catfood and bread,” said Daddy. “I think that fella there took me wrong.”
“Everything’s all right now.”
“Maggie, I feel like I’ve been floating around in yogurt. Forever or maybe an hour and a half. It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I’m greatly confused for the moment. I ought to be more than five years older’n you.”
“It happens. There are documented cases. Just sit down and rest. There’s plenty of time to talk.” Johnny came back with a Dr Pepper. She gave it to her father and led Johnny to the kitchen.
“I don’t get it,” said Johnny.
“You got all that business with the monks, you can learn to handle this. Just hold me a minute, all right? And do what you did in the car.”
Johnny kissed her a very long time. Maggie was sure she was going to faint.
“I’m a real serious guy,” said Johnny. “I’m not just playing around. I got very strong emotions.”
“I like you a lot,” said Maggie. “I’m not sure I could love a man in your line of work.”
“I’m in olives. I got a nice family business.”
“You’ve got a family in overcoats and shades, Johnny Lucata.”
“Okay, so we’ll work something out.”
“I guess maybe we will. I keep forgetting I’m in olive oil too. Maybe you better kiss me again. Johnny there’s so much I want us to do. I want to show you Marble Cree
k. I want to show you green turtles on a log and the Sidewinderettes doing a halftime double-snake whip. I want to see every single shade of blue in that castle and I’ve got a simply great idea for a play. Oh, Johnny, Daddy’s back and you’re here and I’ve got about everything there is. New York is such a knocked-out crazy wonderful town!”
BLUNDERBORE
Esther M. Friesner
“Blunderbore” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the September 1990 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by George Thompson. Friesner"s first sale was to Asimov’s, under George Scithers in 1982, and she’s made several sales here subsequently under Gardner Dozois (we also have several new stories by her in inventory). In the years since 1982, she’s become one of the most prolific of modern fantasists, with thirteen novels in print, and has established herself as one of the funniest writers to enter the field in some while. Her many novels include Mustapha and His Wise Dog, Elf Defense, Druid's Blood, Sphinxes Wild, Here Be Demons, Demon Blues, Hooray for Hellywood. Broadway Banshee, Ragnarok and Roll, and The Water King’s Daughter. She’s reported to be at work on her first hard science fiction novel. She lives with her family in Madison, Connecticut.
In the hilarious story that follows, she takes us along on a very modern woman’s very modern date in modern Manhattan with a very old-style bachelor. . .
* * *
“Jack? That pipsqueak? What do you think I did with the spunkless little blowhard?” Another dart flew from the huge hand, landed with surprising accuracy dead center on the distant target. A long gob of spittle, no less precisely aimed, whizzed from between massive teeth gappy and yellow enough to pass for a jaundiced Stonehenge.
The lady shuddered as the giant’s expectoration splatted perfecto right between her well-shined shoes. Not a driblet landed on their newly Vaselined black patent leather, but sometimes the thought is more than enough.
“I can’t for the life of me imagine,” she managed to reply. As a feeble jest she suggested, “Ground his bones to make your bread?”
The giant roared, a sound that might have been laughter or a bout with sinusitis. His nose was humped and sickled. red with many draughts of Guinness and lousy with pock-marks. Black hairs bristled angrily from the nostrils, hinting at hibernating porcupines.
“Grind his bones to make my bread? There's a good ’un!” He reached for another dart. The barkeep made haste to assure his client of a constant supply. “How’d the weensy manling live to juggle all them cowpats about killing me if I’d done that, eh?” The giant’s lips pursed, the lower resembling a saddle of mutton, the upper two hams. “Oversight, that. I never thought he’d want it noised ’round how I used him. Writing it all up, though, telling it twisty, making out as he’d done for me—Well, I learned much of men from that, I did. Grind his bones.. ..” He grinned. “Not his bones. ’Tis nut bread I fancy.”
The barkeep refilled the giant’s mug and leaned across the counter to inquire softly, deferentially of the lady whether she would like another Bombay gin? She shook her head. Her lips were dry, her throat drier. The proper business suit that was her chrysalis of choice remained pressed, immaculate, entire, unsplit, though this was Saturday night and by rights she should be swinging by nyloned knees from the ceiling fixtures along about this hour.
The giant drained his measure and launched his dart. It split the first, just like Robin Hood’s arrow always splintered those arrogant shafts of his unworthy rivals if they dared hog the bullseye before he shot. The legendary arrows were wood; the actual darts were steel. The metal let out a high, terrified shriek as it was so cavalierly violated from feathered wazoo to razored tip.
“But enough about me,” said the giant. He shifted his weight on the bar. No stool would hold him, and he wasn’t about to stand after a hard day’s labor. The wood complained much, but only buckled a little. Bare feet with toes like hairy pattypan squashes swung back and forth, drumming the mahogany. “How’d a nice girl like you come to run a personal ad, then?”
The lady took a deep breath. Her left hand began to wrench at the rings on her right. “It was my roommate’s idea,” she began. The rush of red murder she sent bubbling over a vision of her roommate’s face left her giddy. How could she speak coherently when every second sentence to come to mind was the bitch dies?
Carthago delenda esse.
Two hours ago she had been afflicted merely with the usual crawful of first-meeting jitters, the nausea and palpitations often prequel to lucky at love. Then the giant walked in. He knew her at once (his telephone voice gave no warning, its quaint accent, seductive pitch and timbre conspiring only to make her silly with lust, inspiring her to heights of self-descriptive facility that left her thoroughly, instantly identifiable among thousands). She could not evade him by pretending to be someone else, or via the more practical shrieks of the bar’s other patrons as they fled wildly out of the place beneath the fuzzy arbors of his armpits.
She had tried, though. He caught her.
Trapped, she had spent the time since in imagining all the most agonizing, crippling, humiliating ways one might dispose of a roommate who gave bad advice and did not clean the kitchen sufficiently well to make up for it. She supposed she might turn her over to the giant. There was that. First, however, present survival.
“You see,” she went on, “I’ve been involved with someone for a very long time. His name’s Ian. We had a—an understanding. A completely open twoness based on mutual respect and noninterference. But he needed personal space, room for growth, emotional evolution.”
“Oh, ar?” the giant commented politely.
She sighed. “Well, he’s gone now, you see. To find himself.
And I have to get on with maximizing my own life experience. That’s why the ad. It’s rather hard to go back to ordinary dating when a long-term relationship ends, don’t you agree?”
The giant’s brows slipped down into the trenches of his forehead. “Bashed his skull in, did they?” he asked.
“?” she answered. It was really the best she could do, and not too paltry, under the circumstances.
“Trolls. Else renegado knights. One tump of the mace upside your goodman’s temple-bone, and you’re left to dance the widow’s bransle. Too bad, too bad. Likely they raped you after, it’s only their way, but still—” His eyebrows now slumped back like eels amorously exhausted. “Did hope as you’d be a virgin. I likes virgins.”
“Will you excuse me?” she said, slipping gracefully from the barstool. “I have to go powder my nose.” As an out it was retro, and sexist, and shameful in the extreme, but all she asked was that it save her skin long enough for her to get some use out of her thirty-five session contract at the Tropitan Salon.
In the ladies’ room was a stall, and in the stall was a toilet, and over the toilet was a window, and out the window she did go, as fast as ever she could slink. There were runs in her Dior pantyhose and wrinkles in her Anne Klein linen suit, raw scrapes striping the sides of her Maud Frizon patent heels (one of which landed in the toilet) and four scales gouged out of her genuine alligator belt, but she emerged alive enough to pitch headfirst into the alley outside. In the alley was a dumpster, and in the dumpster were a lot of empty liquor cartons and dud lottery tickets and some really ripe muddled fruit-leavings. This she added to her roommate’s account of payments due as she huddled in the taxi, plucked lemon rinds from her hair, and cursed all the way home.
And cursed louder, with renewed gusto, when her roommate told her that she didn’t have to sit there and listen to this crap. She hadn’t told her to stick the fateful ad in the New York Review. She thought the Village Voice was quite good enough, thank you, and just see where pretensions can leave you, stuck in some downtown bar with a creature out of myth and Jungian archetype whose toenails want cleaning.
The roommate quit. She packed. She left and moved in with her boyfriend who played the saxophone and really understood the ausgleibnicht Kunstfertseichnet of Michael J. Fox movies.
> The lady was left with vengeance placed on Hold eternal, and a full month’s New York rent to pay in heart’s blood.
There was also a message on her answering machine. It was from him. Why not?
She changed her telephone number. She changed the locks on her doors. She acquired a new roommate by means of utmost discretion. She made a serious commitment to oat bran and never, never more used the weather or the time of the month as excuses for neglecting her morning jog. She became a whole person, relentless mistress of a whole mind in a whole body. Giants never happened to holistic people. Could be it was attributable to all that fiber. Her wholeness was astonishingly complete, given the strain a middle-management position could put on one’s full immersion in the universe. Nothing daunted, she immersed.
He was waiting for her one Friday evening as she came out of her office building on Third Avenue. The air smelled of April and perambulating hot dog wagons. He brought flowers and a dead sheep.
“Sorry I was I got too personal with asking you things,” he said, tendering her the bouquet. She took it gingerly, only because if you counted the attache case clutched tightly in her other hand, it left her no possibility of accepting the sheep.
Apparently he saw it that way, too, for he disposed of the beastie casually, in three bites, head first, fleece and all, just as if it were an afterthought instead of over a hundred pounds of mutton. Wiping lanolin from his chin, he said, “Find it in your heart, could you, to let me buy you a drink, and no hard feelings?”
What could she do? See if he’d take “Just Say No’ for an answer? A poor gamble. Run away? Not with the lights and rush hour traffic against her. Scream for help? Her supervisor might be watching. He was everywhere, paranoia justified, like a February flu. He was always looking for excuses to shunt her career into corporate sandpits.
She smiled at the giant. “Why not?” she said. If only to discover how he’d found her. Magic? Sorcery? God’s vengeance on her (so Mama would maintain) for the Pill?
No magic was at work, beyond the ordinary levels present in the city, nor any intervention even marginally divine. He reminded her that she herself had told him where she worked when first they’d spoken over the phone. It was a beginner’s mistake. Give nothing away. She sipped her drink (this bar, too, had turned into a wasteland when they entered) and asked him to pass the bran-nuts.
Isaac Asimov's SF-Lite Page 7