When she said “warm moist place,” I felt all warm and moist and trembly all of a sudden. I tried to say “No way,” but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
“Ishimoto will put the eggs into little soft shells, and you swallow them like pills. They’re harmless. They stay in your tummy until it’s time to retrieve them, and then you take a mild laxative and out they come, warm and moist and ready to be put in pills.”
She was breathing into the phone, and it was such tender breathing. Purring. A sensuous sighing, or susurration, like the wind in the silvery cottonwoods by a burbling brook flowing through the whispering prairie grasses by a long two-track dirt road somewhere in Nebraska, not that I’ve been there myself but I read Willa Cather once when I was dating an English major named Leslye who was, in fact, from Lincoln, Nebraska, and I believe “susurration” was the word Willa used.
“Are you sure the eggs won’t hatch and I’ll be eaten up by ravenous worms like that emperor in the Bible?” I murmured.
“No, no, no, no, no,” she said. “No chance of that.”
“My tapeworms won’t kill them?”
“No, no, no.” And then she said she would do anything for me—I believe a trip to Tuscany was mentioned, and an oceangoing yacht, lunch at the White House, VIP tickets to concerts, health benefits, retiling a bathroom, a pony named Muffin—“Stand tall, darling Guy, and guard the bulwarks and I will make you so happy your heart will turn cartwheels. When you and I are sunbathing on the deck of our yacht anchored in the Aegean off the island of Patmos, sharing a wineskin of retsina and figs wrapped in grape leaves, and we dive off the stern deep into the clear water and embrace in the depths of the ancient sea where Helen of Troy, who was fathered by Zeus in the form of a swan, was abducted by Paris and therewith launched the Trojan war, and O my Guy, you will be glad you did faithful service for our company,” she murmured. My lips were twitching, my forehead was warm and moist. I said yes. How could you say no to a long, lingering underwater embrace in memory of Helen of Troy? Sometimes life is like that. You’re looking for dimes, and it tosses you diamonds.
MR. ISHIMOTO SHOVELED EGGS INTO the walnuts and sealed them with a soldering iron and handed them to me. Six of them.
“I’m not sure I can swallow these,” I said. “These are not what the average person would consider small. They are objects of some size. A person could choke to death.”
“They compress, Mistah Cholly. They are swallowable.”
I was about to argue the point, and he popped one pod into my mouth and shoved it past the point of no return, and down it went. “See? No problem.”
He kept popping them in, one after the other, and poking them in past my tonsils. It felt like I was swallowing golf balls. I could feel them all the way down the gullet and into my gut.
“Excellent job, Mistah Boss!” he cried. Hard as it was to swallow them, it was worse to imagine them coming back up. Or what it would feel like when they shot out the other end. I hyperventilated a little and put a paper bag over my head and thought of the Aegean and Naomi naked with bubbles streaming from her mouth as she kissed me in the azure depths.
THAT EVENING THE BOGUS BOYS attacked Ishimoto’s laboratory in Robbinsdale and rampaged around, busting down doors, while Mr. Ishimoto lay trembling among the ductwork in the crawl space overhead. They threw petri dishes and fish tanks and mold specimens to the floor, ripped up hoses and wiring, and pulverized his notes, and when they found no worms or eggs, they flew into a towering rage and jumped up and down and screamed like banshees, and eventually the cops arrived, three squad cars and a chopper, and chased the boys over the bushes and down a median strip and across a church parking lot and through a child-infested mall, where the Boguses gave them the slip, and meanwhile I drove out to comfort him. He was sweeping up the debris and grinned when he saw me and patted my stomach. “Treasure chest,” he said. “You take good care, Cholly.” He had spoken to Naomi. He held up five fingers. She had offered him 5 percent of the net for his efforts. I slapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, that’s great. You deserve it,” I said, insincerely.
I tried not to feel bitter. When the total is up in the millions, a guy ought to be happy with 2 percent, especially when he’s been scraping bottom for years, but I couldn’t help but be a little resentful. I was the one carrying the eggs, not the Jap. I was the one Larry B. Larry was threatening. I made a mental note to myself: Talk to Naomi and negotiate a contract, and don’t just accept the first offer like a spineless jellyfish. You’re a New Yorker, not a Minnesotan, so say what you want in clear English. Be bold. Don’t underbid yourself. But first, maybe it’d be good to face up to the Boguses as a proof of your loyalty. Tussle with them and get Naomi’s attention, and maybe then she’ll raise your share to 5 percent or even 7 or 8. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Danny at the deli had told me an interesting fact about the Boys. Their names were Tony, Tiny, and Ronnie, and they were former pro rasslers, under the ring names Devastation, Destruction, and Death, and were terrified of spiders, snakes, and bats. “All you got to do is put something on them that crawls up them and they turn to jelly.” A big, hairy spider would do the trick. I had plenty of those in the office. So what’s to worry about?
9
The Bogus Brothers attack
AS I GOT SKINNIER, I got great pleasure out of swanning through a crowded room and leaning against a pillar or abutment and striking an elegant pose and watching women fling themselves at me like moths on a lightbulb. On May Day, a child of twenty-one named Moxie hit on me in the Brew Ha Ha. She was plump, like a popover, and wore daisies in her hair and a smock that said Color Me Happy, and she said, “I’m sitting over there and I’m going, like, Who is that totally hot guy? And I’m, like, Do I dare walk over and talk to him? And I’m going, No way. And then I’m going, like, Why not. You look hot. Like, how old are you?”
“Darling child, if you and I were to talk and my shoulder brushed your shoulder, we’d be caught in a rushing torrent of ravenous passion and down the white-frothed spillway and over the roaring cataract of romance and into a whirling vortex of desire—kissing, caressing, clutching, grabbing, thrusting, crying out with hunger and delight—and, beautiful as our intentions might be, it simply wouldn’t work and here’s why—I live in many different verb tenses, such as the imperfect indicative, the past imperfect, and the subjunctive, and you, sweetheart, only in the present indicative. I mean, you’re going, like, Who is that guy? but I have gone or might have gone or will have gone, but you just pretty much keep going, and someday you may look back and wonder where I went. And I’ll be, like, not there.”
She gave me a triumphal smile. “I had been hoping you could come to my apartment and we might have come to know each other better,” she said, a predicate that almost stole my heart away.
I might have kissed her then and there, but a scrawny kid with black horn-rims walked up. Black T-shirt, black pants, black tennies, hair dyed black and sitting lopsided on his head. “Where you going with this old dude?” he said to her.
“He’s chill, Tony.”
“Chill? You mean like, cold. Like in, laid out on a marble slab. Don’t mess with him unless you know about resuscitation, Mox.” And he lunged at me and took a swing and missed and fell down and banged his noggin on the table and knocked himself silly. His nose was bleeding all over the black shirt. He drew himself up tall and glared at me and dabbed at the blood with napkins and finally came up with a good exit line. “Watch yourself,” he said to me. And exited.
“How about it? Want to come with?” she said to me.
“I’m going, like, I don’t think so. But thanks for the offer.” She was very nice, as they say, but too young. I don’t get into bed with a woman who might, casually, in the post-coital glow, ask what the sixties were like. Not my sixties or the other one.
ODDLY, NOW THAT I DIDN’T need to work a lick, I got a str
eam of job offers. The phone jingled like a Salvation Army Santa Claus.
1. Lost dachshund, tan with tattoo of rosebud on left ear, answers to name “Rigatoni,” belonging to Desdemona and Jonah the Shoshone duo-trombonists from Sedona, Arizona, who perform pro bono with their palomino Corona and Rigatoni in a kimono.
2. Woman needed to know if a couple she’d invited for dinner that night were Republicans so she should seat them away from her husband, who is still livid about George W. Bush and gets all flushed and talks about war crimes and saliva flies out of his mouth.
3. Woman wanted me to drive to Decorah, Iowa, to spy on her daughter at Luther College to ascertain if she was getting enough sleep and who is the man she hears clearing his throat in the background when she calls Lori in the morning.
4. A young guy with long, backswept hair swept into my office, black cape swirling around him and clouds of cologne—a tenor from Minnesota Opera. “They try to kill me! The director. Direttore. He wants acting, not just singing! Realismo. Wrestle the soprano to the floor and roll around. Some sopranos roll better than others. Okay, I do this. Now I’m Rodolfo in La Bohème. Artist in the garret. Snow falling. He makes the stage so cold I can’t sing Che gelida manina. I am too gelido. Like gelato. Terribile! Non è possibile. Idioto! Stupido! And Mimi is skinny. String bean. Fagiolo verde. Nothing to grab hold of.” He wanted me to follow the opera director home after rehearsal and hold a knife to his throat and yell, “Questa è la fine. Morte à te, un traditore.“ (This is the end. Death to you, treacherous one.)
5. A woman wanted me to locate a lesbian couple she saw two minutes before on West Seventh Street walking into Cossetta’s who she was sure she used to know but she’d forgotten their names—one woman was wearing a yellow nylon jacket that said GACK! on it, and the other was in black tights and a tanktop—and what if she ran into them again?
6. A man called and asked for a huckleberry pie. “This is Guy Noir, P.I., not Guy Noir Pies,” I said, having gotten calls of this nature in the past. “Then how about banana cream?” he said. “I’m a private investigator, sir.” “Great. How about you go track down a pie for me, then?”
7. A man wanted me to go to Gary’s House of Hair on West Larpenteur and pick up a toupee for him—he was too embarrassed to do it himself. Black, not too long on the sides.
8. A woman called who had finally finished reading Moby-Dick after ten years and had forgotten what the book was about, and could I help?
9. Plus the usual lost car keys and misplaced glasses. The umbrella forgotten in a bar called Michael’s or Mitchell’s that used to be on Ford Parkway, then went somewhere else, maybe shelling.
Marvin had told me, “Get it in writing,” and I left a message on Naomi’s voice mail, asking when we might discuss some sort of formal agreement—that I was happy with a handshake blah blah blah but I had some big cases in the works, Microsoft, Google, Bloomberg, Apple—lie lie lie—and my staff was pushing me to regularize the arrangement—and just then I heard big steel-toed boots in the hall and the growl of industrial-strength testosterone and my name shouted and a big fist banged on the door. “Open up, or we’ll bust your thumbs!” somebody yelled. Somebody who sounded quite capable of thumb-busting. And he had colleagues. I heard them muttering, Gumbagumbagumbagumba.
“Put a hanky over your face—we’re fumigating with cyanide!” I yelled, and made a hissy sound through the keyhole. That stopped them for a moment. Gave me time to open up the Q-T drawer and take the bag of queens and deposit it into a White Owl cigar box and set it out on the desk, in the open. Sometimes Obvious is your best strategy. And I grabbed the spider out of Emily Dickinson and held it up as the gentlemen in the hall hit the door with their shoulders—once, twice—and krrrrrrackkkk busted it off the hinges and ker-whammo it smacked flat on the floor, and three big bruisers in black leather landed hard chins-first, and the concussion dazed them long enough for me to jump over the line of scrimmage and hustle out and down the stairs to the tenth floor and dart into the fern-infested offices of Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark, past a stunning young receptionist who whinnied as I dashed through, knocking over a big yellow vase that I neatly caught one-handed and carried through a door marked PRIVATE and through a room with a shiny mahogany table as long as a canoe and floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with red leather-bound legal tomes and into Birch Bergquist’s office—she sat with her back to me, talking on the phone—and crawled under her desk. “Excuse me,” she said into the phone. She poked me with the toe of her sling-back pump. “What is going on here?” I was panting like a bull moose in heat. “Mr. Noir! Stop looking up my skirt!” she said.
She was right. I was looking up her skirt. Pure reflex. Pale peach undies, if you must know.
“I’m trying to prevent a homicide,” I said. “My own.”
There was male bellowing out in the hall, a sort of rar-rar-rar-rar, like a chainsaw idling. Large men blinded by rage, hyperventilating, stamping their big hooves, all hot to find something to pummel.
“Let’s step into the conference room,” she said. So we did. It was ten steps away, a long room painted a soft beige that reminded me of the lower back of a woman I used to know. And there, at the head of the table, sat the very woman herself, Sugar O’Toole, my ex-lover, like a Celtic goddess, her hair dyed a rather convincing shade of auburn, her eyes cerulean blue—and that’s from a guy who doesn’t even know what cerulean means. She wore a long black skirt and a green V-neck T-shirt that, when I looked down the V, my mind was flooded with beautiful memories.
“Oh, Guy!” she sighed. “I am so glad to see you! I’ve been dreaming about you.”
“Sugar! What are you doing here?” She leaped to her feet and got me in a clinch and breathed on my neck and cried real tears. Six years I hadn’t heard from the woman—she didn’t write, she didn’t call, she didn’t text—and now she clung to me like I was a flotation device. Six years ago I was roadkill. Carrion. And now I was Cary Grant.
“I came here to work out a separation from Wally,” she said.
“What’s wrong? I thought you two were happy as could be.”
“He’s a very nice person, Guy. He makes a lovely four-cheese omelet, and he does laundry and even folds the clothes, and he cleans bathrooms with a passion. But two weeks ago he came home and announced that he’s decided he’s a woman. He’s wearing green plaid skirts and knee-high stockings, and the hormone treatments have given him bigger breasts than mine. He’s Wanda now and apparently content with his lot in life, thanks to a caring therapist and powerful drugs, so I’m working out the separation, and Birch tells me I’m walking away with a cool million, and that’s not so bad except I’m lonely as a hoot owl. Wally left my bed a year ago, back when he started getting really, really interested in window treatments. The only emotional support he needs is from his shih tzu Poo-Poo. I’m desperate to find a partner. Or whatever you call someone you sleep with. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I hold the banister when I descend stairs. I read the obituaries with real interest. I attended three memorial services last month alone. I no longer know the names of famous celebrities. My chin is starting to jiggle when I walk.”
“Your chin was never your best feature where I was concerned,” I said. “I much preferred your br—your brain.”
“My brain is wobbling too,” she said. “I keep forgetting where I put the car keys.” Her voice got quiet. “I miss you, babes. I can’t tell you how good you look to me right now.” She gave me a full frontal squeeze, and I remembered all over again how much I prefer the small-breasted woman. An enormous prow may be attractive to a nursing infant, but to me it’s only a barrier. You want to nestle up to a woman, but those enormous buttresses are hard to get around.
I stroked her slender freckled arm. “I miss you too, but at the moment I’m on the run from three guys who want to rip out my entire reproductive system.”
The three gentlemen had gotten quiet out in the hall. Birch had gone out there and (I assumed) spoken to them and threatened them with a restraining order or something. Sugar kissed me full on the lips and inserted her tongue. Tentatively, but still. She wanted to meet me for a drink. “Please,” she said. “What do you have to lose?”
“My life, for one thing. These guys are on the rampage, Sugar. I’m in mortal danger. I have something they’re willing to kill for.”
“Let’s slip out the back way, darling. My car is parked just down the alley. I’ll take you over to Minneapolis. My apartment on Washington Avenue. They’ll never know. Wally’s gone to a Home & Garden show. It’ll be just you and me and the dog. Oh, darling—” And she put her tongue in my mouth again and caressed my wisdom teeth, which has always been a turn-on for me, in case you’re interested. Also my earlobes and my left nipple. The right one, not so much, but if you so much as brush against the left one, I will leap into your arms and beg for mercy.
I pushed her away, but gently. “Sugar, you and I have broken up so many times, my heart jingles when I walk. I have no capacity to love. Especially not now, when I am about to have the stuffing knocked out of me. Fear of imminent death pretty much stifles a man’s sex drive, it’s been shown over and over. Men facing a firing squad do not produce erections to the same extent as men in a luxury hotel room with a king-size bed.”
Birch came back in the room and grabbed my arm: “I told the goons you went up to the roof to jump, and they went off howling for you. Let’s get out of here.”
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 7