“Neither did I,” Mary said, “until the third and last time I bugged his boogie-woogie. Brandi it was, and you know how much it takes to make her complain about somebody. The job itself went okay, as those things go…but then afterward the goniff started hinting around. Hinting about how much he hated his wife, and how wonderful it would be if she happened to sustain fatal injuries in a manner accidental enough to satisfy his insurance company, and how grateful he’d be to anybody who knew anybody who could bring that day closer.”
Lady Sally scowled ferociously, Mike frowned, and the Professor was looking alertly interested.
“Well, naturally Brandi told him to walk north ’til his hat floated. He got nasty and tried to hurt her to make her keep her mouth shut. You know Brandi: she charges top dollar just to pretend to get hurt, and he hadn’t tipped her for the last one. So she mangled his marbles for him and got the cuffs on him before she hit the panic button. Priscilla happened to be busy downstairs, so I had somebody spell me in the Snoop Room and went down and threw him out myself. Big blubbery windbag with a weasel eye, full of squawk and bluster and ‘I have powerful friends in this town.’ I’ll be surprised if he’s got a friend in the world; he must have inherited his job.”
“Sounds like an ideal pigeon to me,” Mike said.
The Professor sat up straight on my bed. “Excuse me,” he said, perhaps to us. His eyes rolled up into his head, and his breathing slowed.
Mike looked at me.
“He’s creating,” I explained.
“Thought so,” he nodded. He finished his tea and poured the dregs from the pot, watching the Professor with some interest. How often does one get to observe genius in action? Much less genius in garter belt and panties?
I was pleased myself. The Professor did not by any means go into such trances every time he planned a caper; not even most of the time. But when he did it was a virtual guarantee that the sting would succeed. It had been a long time since I’d last seen him thus. Too long, perhaps…
Besides, I have this peculiar character trait. Watching a man work gets me horny. Even a man I can’t live with.
“Can I get a drink without disturbing him?” Mary asked.
“You can fire a cannon, or masturbate, or set his hair on fire,” I told her. “He’s away. Brandy for me.”
Brandy suited the other two as well. (Lady Sally, of course, stuck with the tea.) By the time Mary had passed out the fourth glass, the Professor had come back from the Infinite. His eyes unrolled, his shoulders slumped slightly, and he acquired a wistful smile, as of one leaving Paradise to attend a sales convention in Columbus, Ohio.
“Eureka,” he said softly, almost sadly.
Mike nodded and passed his own brandy to the Professor. “Funny feeling, isn’t it, when you bust a tough one? Triumph, sure. Maybe a little secret relief that you pulled it off. But there’s a fine sweet sadness in there, too, because now the golden moment is behind you. For a moment in there you were God…and now you’re just a guy who used to be God for a minute, and will be again some day.”
The Professor regarded him thoughtfully. “You show hidden depths, friend Michael. You are a creative man yourself?”
“In a small way, kinda in my spare time.”
“Might one inquire as to your specific field of endeavor?”
“Puns.”
The Professor regarded him with new respect. “Capital, my boy, capital!”
Mike looked pleased. “You don’t believe, then, that puns are a lower case of humor?”
The Professor winced approvingly. “Not if you put a bold face on it, dear boy.”
Mary made a wordless sound of protest and disgust; Lady Sally, perhaps most fittingly for the spouse of a paronomasiac, displayed no reaction at all. Myself, I made a polite grimace—and changed the subject. “Professor, am I right in guessing that you have a plan?”
He smiled at me. “Sherry, dear, you know me so well.”
“Is there a part for me?”
Now he beamed. “Darling, an artist of your calibre is a welcome addition to any enterprise.” He leered gallantly. “No matter which art is involved. And yet I confess that when I took the liberty of tentatively pencilling you into my new libretto, as indeed I have done, it was as much for the sweet sharp pleasure of your company as for your professional competence. It has always been a pleasure to work with you. Thank you: I am delighted to accept your sword beneath my banner.”
My turn to beam.
“Your Ladyship?”
“Yes, Professor,” Lady Sally answered.
“May I call upon you for some small assistance?”
“Is any cash outlay required? I ask purely for purposes of information.”
“I think not. Spending cash is never a problem for a resourceful man. Use of your phone, perhaps. Uh…would you have a briefcase I could borrow, suitable in size and aspect for the housing of fifty large in sawbucks?”
“Simplest thing in the world. People are always leaving the damned things here; I keep them in the Lost and Found for a year and then sell them. And sometimes the contents, if non-narcotic.” Sally does not permit in her House the use or possession of any drug that goes into the nostrils or the veins. “I can even supply some matched pairs, if that’s any help to you.”
“Excellent. And do you suppose Phillip could be persuaded to act as a phone shill? I’d be happy to compensate him handsomely…in a month’s time.”
“I’m sure that will present no problem,” she assured him.
“Splendid! I am Chinaman to your abacus, Your Ladyship—I can always count on you.” Mary kicked the side of the bed sharply, and Mike rolled his eyes. The Professor began gathering up his purse and discarded clothing. “Nothing further can be done until the sun shines again on this corner of Brooklyn, which it will do all too soon. Banner headlines in the Post: PROF NODS! Sherry, dear, if I could trouble you for the loan of a housecoat and slippers, perhaps Lady Sally will show me to some cubicle where I can doss for the night with minimal—”
“Professor,” I interrupted, “would my apartment suit you?”
He set down his belongings, rose from the bed, and bowed low. “Sweet Sherry,” he said, using my House name, “this is good hearing. You are not a sherry but a tawny port in a storm. Any time you offer your honor, I will gladly honor your offer.”
“‘—and all night long it was on ’er and off ’er,’” Mary said.
The Professor kicked the side of the bed experimentally. “Have I got it right?” he asked her. “It seems a curious sort of applause. Though oddly satisfying now that I’ve tried it. Well, thank you all very much for your company, as the actress said to the college of bishops, but I fear I’m keeping myself awake. Lovely Mary, friend Michael, it has been a pleasure meeting you, and doubtless will continue to be so. Your Ladyship—”
The three finished their drinks and rose. Goodnight hugs were exchanged. I noted that Mike seemed quite comfortable hugging a new male friend dressed like a female artist with bills due. I am of the school of thought which holds that a hug ought to resemble a number 1 rather than a letter A; so were both of them. Lady Sally, of course, is the one who taught me about hugs—and she was fond of the Professor. When it was Mary’s turn, she grabbed him by both ears and pulled his face close enough to hers to cross his eyes.
“Prof,” she said, “you’re going to pop this Willoughby blister, aren’t you?”
“The thing is a boat race,” he assured her.
She kissed him so thoroughly that when she stepped back, his appreciation was apparent. (Which looked a little strange given the way he was dressed.)
And then we were alone, and I was hugging him.
“Maureen, you cuddly little armful,” he said in my ear, and in his natural persona, “it’s gonna be a pleasure to work with you again.”
“Yes, it is,” I murmured. His embrace was familiar and pleasant.
“It’s only fair to warn you, I plan to make you pregnant.”
&nb
sp; “Eh?”
“But not until the day after tomorrow.”
“Oh.” There’s no use questioning the Professor when he’s feeling mysterious. And I had more urgent priorities. “Uh, Prof?”
“Yes, Maureen?”
“Look, I didn’t see any reason to bring this up with the others here, but…when I offered you my apartment to sleep in—”
“—all you were offering was your apartment to sleep in?”
“Oh, dammit—”
“Maureen, it’s all right. I understand.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
“It’s probably for the best. Well, anyway, ‘the better.’ Thanks for your tact; that was sweet of you.”
“Will it bother you to sleep in the same bed with me?” Necessary if we were going to keep up appearances.
“Not at all, Mo. Not tonight, at any rate; I’m pooped. Besides, I was your friend before I was your lover.”
Damn, damn, damn.
It was going to bother me. And I’d had more than a dozen men that day, most of them quite satisfactory lovers…
The noon-to-five shift had already started by the time we got down to breakfast in the staff-only basement restaurant. Lady Sally came by as I was finishing my first cup of coffee, and told me that I was out of shift rotation for the duration. The Professor offered to compensate for the lost commissions—and me for my lost income—and we both declined indignantly. But we were both pleased that he offered.
He ate enough for three men. All his appetites are on the same scale. I cursed the scruples which had caused me to spend the previous night sleeping.
At his request I went upstairs after breakfast and dressed in my best drop-dead business outfit, put my hair up in a tight bun, took care with makeup. Back downstairs, I spent some time with Rhonda the phone lady, arranging for the rescheduling of standing appointments. Rhonda looks like Gary Cooper with hennaed hair, and over the phone she sounds like Shirley Temple in heat. She has great tact and an encyclopedic memory, and is a godsend to us artists; I knew I could leave the shuffling to her. I found the Professor in the Parlor picking out Hoagy Carmichael tunes on the piano. He was dressed male today, in a very snappy looking double-breasted from Wardrobe. (He’s one of those maddening people who can wear clothes right off the rack…and somehow make them look as if a bespoke tailor created them around his personal mannequin.) We praised each other’s outfits and left together.
I like to get out of the House once in a while, just to keep my appreciation of it keen. But the world always seems a grey and out of focus place when I first walk out the door. To be fair, it’s not one of Brooklyn’s better neighborhoods. Warehouses and factories, mostly, at least on the south side of the building. After we’d walked a couple of blocks in companionable silence, the Professor spotted a cab. He seemed to brush a hand across his face and age twenty years. “Play up,” he murmured, and stepped out into the street in front of it, raising both hands. One he held palm out, imperiously; the other displayed an open wallet in which something gleamed. The cab shrieked to a halt. He sprinted round and flung open the back door. “Deputy Chief Monahan,” he rapped, helping me in. “I’m commandeering yer hack; police emergency!”
“Sure ting, Mac.” I didn’t know this cabbie.
“Head for the bridge and don’t spare the horses! Saints pickle us, what a day. All right, now, daughter, calm down and let’s go over this again. Was His Eminence at all purple when you left him?”
I hated to sting a cabbie; they’re good for business. But we were too far from the House to be connected with it—and I couldn’t very well leave the Professor hanging. “Only in the usual places, Father,” I said. “I mean, Daddy. But he was really stiff. In the other places, I mean.”
“Park Avenue, you say.”
I gave the address of a swanky hotel a few blocks from the Professor’s apartment, and he relayed that to the driver. We riffed together all the way over the bridge and across midtown, entertaining the cabbie and—I was mildly dismayed to discover—me. As we pulled up in front of the hotel, the Professor leaned forward and fixed him with a stern glare. “Are you a good Catholic, mister?”
“Lemme put it dis way, chief. I usher at de six forty-five Mass every week.”
“I can rely on your discretion then.” He lowered his voice. “I want you to drive round to the laundry entrance and wait for me. I may be down shortly with a large rug to go to the Rectory. You take my meaning, laddy?”
The cabbie winked. “I got a big trunk,” he assured him.
“Good man. From this day on you can’t get a ticket in New York.”
We waited in the lobby until the cab was around the corner and then strolled leisurely to the Professor’s place. At my request, he showed me the badge in his wallet. A genuine Junior Birdman badge.
“It’s a small calculated risk coming here,” he told me on the way up in the elevator. “When Donuts sells you something he means you can have it until he wants it back, and when he says you’ve got forty-eight hours that means you have until he feels a vagrant impulse to kill you. And this dump is where he’d start looking if the urge struck him. But there’s stuff here I need.”
“Some dump.” The Professor lives well. Frequently; sometimes for months at a time.
“It keeps the rain off.”
The elevator came to an imperceptible halt. We stepped out into a sumptuously carpeted hallway. “Yeah, it’s handy little lean-to,” I said. “When are you going to break down and tell me how we’re going to sting Willoughby?”
“Aw, you’re no fun.”
“Come on, I want my script so I can study my lines. I’m damned if I’m going to go after fifty grand with an improv. I want to know why I have to be pregnant.”
“Oh, all right.” We reached his door and he put his key into the lock. “But honest, there’s nothing to it. You could do it in your sleep, really. It’s kind of similar to the job we did together on that diamond merchant back in—oh, hello.”
Something large loomed inside the darkened apartment.
“I’m sorry,” the Professor said graciously, “Have you two met? Tony, allow me to introduce my cousin Alice. Alice, this is my good friend Tony Donuts.”
I gave him my very best smile. “Hello, Tony.”
“Nice boobs,” he said. “Close de daw.”
The Professor was smiling beatifically as he turned back from the door. “Good to see you, Tony.” He snapped on a small pole lamp, good for little more than mood lighting. The living room was a wreck. “Thanks for looking after things while I was away; you’ve done wonders with the place. I always say, what’s the good of using first-rate sofa stuffing if nobody can see it? To what do I owe the pleasure—wasn’t our appointment for tomorrow?”
I had no contribution to make to the dialogue. I was busy trying to restart my heart.
Trust a whore: there are all kinds of virility. Perhaps as many as there are men. The Professor, for instance, is (in his natural person) extremely slender and slightly built, and generally falls asleep on you after an hour or two. But those two hours are more fun than a whole night with a randy teenager or a muscled performance freak. (And I still regretted denying them to myself the previous night.) There’s a little woman in the Professor, enough that he could carry off drag in Sally’s Parlor, enough that I can empathize with him. I believe that femaleness and maleness are halves of a spectrum, a curve on which you can graph humanity and get a hell of a lot of overlap in the middle. Some disparage these so-called “in-betweeners,” but I believe the true freaks are the few stuck way out at either end of the curve, their sexuality unalloyed by any of its complementary ingredient. Those poor perverts often carve wide paths through the world, driven as they are by untempered engines, inspiring the awe due mighty forces out of control. (I’m not talking here about Colt. His appetites are huge, granted. But they’re under control since he came to work at the House. One of the happier men I know. )
The actor Robert Mitchum is about
as male as a man can get without losing control. That’s his appeal. To each man he meets his face says, “I’m so much more man than you that I have no need to prove it, or even rub it in. We’re going to get along just fine.” To each woman, it says, “We both know I can have you any time I’m ready. So I’ll let you say when.” Brute confidence, resulting in an easy-going disposition. So much strength there can be gentleness.
Graph Robert Mitchum on the female-male curve in your imagination. Now plot a point as far from him in one direction as Liberace is in the other. Label this genetic freak: “Tony Donuts.”
The most visibly male thing about him, in that poorly lit apartment, was his instinctively aggressive stance. Then came his size and stature and fitness. He was built like Atlas’s gym teacher, yet looked as springy on his feet as a bantamweight boxer. I believed he could run around the world in a week, packing three oxen for snacks. The next most visibly male thing was what my colleague Tim would call the size of his basket. The lore of my profession to the contrary, there has never been a single medically authenticated case of a man so large that a receptive woman of average dimensions cannot accommodate him. But authentication, it suddenly dawned on me, requires that the woman survive to testify…
But the most exaggeratedly male thing about him was the most subtle, and the one I noticed first, even in the dimness. His eyes were as eloquent as Mitchum’s, and what they said to the Professor (or any male) was, “I wish you were more man; it would be more fun when I kill you.” And what they said to me (or any female) was, “I’m already screwing you; you just don’t know it yet. I hope you hate it…but you probably won’t.” I’m very used to men looking at me and wondering what I’ll be like in bed, knowing they’re going to find out. Tony Donuts already knew, in detail, and he wasn’t impressed. What he wondered was how high he could make me scream.
Maybe it wasn’t his eyes; the light was bad with the curtains drawn. Maybe it was his smell. It pervaded the torn-up apartment. A girl in my line of work gets a finely calibrated nose for man-smell, and Tony’s smell set off alarm bells in my head. I wanted to be back at Lady Sally’s, where all I had to do was say the panic word and survive until reinforcements arrived. Failing that, I wanted a large-caliber gun, so that I could shoot myself in the head before he did something worse than that to me. I was like a minnow in the presence of a shark; I could only pray that he had dined recently.
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