Stylish choice-making, thought Peter. Some choice! It reminded him of those dumb comparisons you make as a child: If you could pick the way you hadda die, what would you pick?
Peter assessed the man who had engineered his emotional destruction, a man now tossing him a pitch so unhinged that all he could do was hang on and fight to pay attention. How weird could it get, and when would it quit?
Don't sell yourself short, she had told him.
"Mind you, I am not going to shuffle off the coil anytime soon. Past the chore of my biography - I don't wish to die undocumented, you see - how would we resolve the wrinkle of having two men qualified for the same unique and esoteric job?"
"Why don't you be so bold as to tell me?" Peter rolled his eyes, impatient as a tourist at a border-crossing. Was there or was there not a hope of seeing Alea again?
"Delighted to." He paused for effect - he did everything for effect - and dabbed wine from his lips with a corner of the picnic tablecloth. "We give you, as your first assignment, a case I am emotionally incapable of processing objectively. I have been holding in the backlog file a case in which I have a personal interest. That prohibits my involvement. I'll need you to handle it. Eh - finish your cheese. Peter. Don't, tell me you've come this far, reached this high juncture and are still capable of disbelief? Yes? Would you prefer some sleight of hand as reinforcement? Elementary magic? The cup-and-balls trick, or the magic slates?"
Peter shook his head no, and finished his cheese.
"It is my misfortune, and perhaps the world's, that neither I nor my position are genuinely unique, as I've said. You'd think one of me would be enough, as you've said. But, in fact, there's someone else." He tapped off into an almost moonstruck sigh.
The relays in Peter's brain clicked positive even as he gulped to swallow surging hilarity. This was all getting a tad too nineteenth century. "A woman. A woman who does what you do. Your opposite number...?" He let it hang.
"With whom," submitted M. Rogoff, still munching, "do you think I was in love, Peter?"
At first, Peter's laugh was only a strangled noise. "I don't believe it." He murmured this knowing what rotten dialogue it was. It's crazy, but it just might work! Or: We can't stop now for a lot of silly native superstitions! He believed it, all right.
"Would you care to consider the processes that implies?"
M. Rogoff returned the smile, made it encouraging. He urged Peter, with a nod, to continue. "There's a woman ... "said Peter, "the woman and you want me to ... to...?"
"Exactly," said the little man, proud that Peter had read his basic plotlines accurately.
That was all it took to burst the crumbling dam.
Peter laughed out loud. The laughter, freed, ripped from him. He hooted and capered and slapped the bogus tombstone with his name on it. He sucked wind and giggled and choked and blew forth vast salvos of laughter, possessed and scruff-shaken by mirth. Fake fog hightailed it away from his lips. His sounds made monstrous echoes.
"You want -" By now he was gasping. "You want me to bring you two back together?"
"Who knows?" M. Rogoff overdid his shrug. "The woman is bloody near impossible. Intractable! Contentious! But look at your own crystalline reasoning! Look at what you've just told me and deny you are exactly the person I require. Deny that I have chosen correctly!" He recharged his goblet with triumph, smiling too.
"You were in love with her." It was honest incredulity.
M. Rogoff waved his hand. "You were in love with Alea. She began as you are now; her first step was also the fine vintage you are enjoying at this moment. I amplified her astonishing capacity for giving a lover exactly what is needed. By consenting to allow me to amplify you similarly, you shall not only function at the apex of your talent, but you shall become like her ... therefore closer to the essence of what she is. No two works of art are alike."
He raised his full glass in a tentative handshake toast. "So, sir, why don't you and I both get started?"
Consummation time. Time to ink the pact, to get on with it ... or go sniffing for a new deal.
Peter's gaze was magnetized to the little man's free hand. The spotless white glove now held aloft the masque of cyan glass he'd last seen in the possession of the woman now called Michelle. It absorbed the light. M. Rogoff placed it gently, almost reverently, between them in the center of the monument.
Abruptly, Peter knew the graveyard as pure facade - saw the baby spots and lighting rigs bolted to the overhead ironwork. Saw the wall padding and seams. To the peripheral left he saw refrigeration vents and the squat, oily smoke generators. They had a hydraulic stink about them. Real dust swam in beams of ersatz twilight. He saw the machines and gears that made it all so atmospheric on film, and hesitated.
Not real. This graveyard was a Bastille of illusion. He lifted the blue glass masque and saw the ghost of his old face flowing over its smooth contour. The image hit one of the eyeholes and dropped in; cloudy water down a drain, one swirl and gone.
Then came the ticklish feeling that the teleplay for Sinner, probably in its eleventh revision by now, was going to stay tented on his dining room table, destined for coaster service. The hair on his forearms raised as though charged.
In Peter's head, the voice of the little man, always two steps ahead, always so goddamned sure. Now your eyes are supposed to flare, and in a spasm of rage you smash the glass masque. Ready? Action.
"We should get started?" It was not a question; not really a repetition. "Since I already know this story by heart, we should get started, huh?"
Almost casually, he spun the masque back toward the middle of the checkered tablecloth. They were playing chess, for godsake. It clattered - the sound of real glass being threatened - but did not break.
With an irritated puff of breath, M. Rogoff bent forward - the height of the monument stone was a nuisance - and slapped the masque with the flat of his hand. It made a death sound like fracturing a mirror tile with an elbow inside the rolled-up sleeve of a flannel shirt. When the little man lifted his hand, Peter saw the masque had gone to sand the color of Bimini diving water and a thousand sharp tongues and slivers. The eyes were gone.
M. Rogoff picked points of blue glass out of the palm of his hand. Some were seated deeply. There was no blood. It looked to Peter like film of the fragments being meticulously inserted, like pins, into the cushion of M. Rogoff's hand, projected in reverse. Little punctures. No blood.
"Are we happy now?" said the little man.
What in hell did he have left? Peter reached for his own goblet and stopped short. The sound of the masque breaking had startled him; this sound of glass disintegrating against the stone bearing his name. It was hewn of actual mineral; it had to weigh a ton, minimum, no bullshit. Why wasn't this a foam rubber fake? Papier-mâché?
"Mr. Deutsch?"
Staring at the broken, eyeless face of the ideal lover, Peter swallowed his goblet's last sip of yellow wine and broke it, experimentally, against the stone. Crash. Rock beats glass.
"Oh, good," said M. Rogoff. His tone did not mock. It was appreciative.
He thought of all the deals that had been near enough to soil him. The lies, the ass-covering, the grabs and misses and fervent wish that nothing stinks too much beneath the teak paneling when the first weekend box office grosses roll in. Everybody gets what they want except for the ones behind the scenes, where someone always got trodden, where one more ethic wound up dead and rotting. The way they sucked you in was with the felicity, the seductiveness of their offers. The way you kept control was by calling the setups. The essence of survival in such an arena was to insure that the fall guy was never you, and as a director, Peter had only understood that power one way. Until now.
Inside him, the scalpel excavated; uncaring.
The little man needed an apprentice. A biographer. A matchmaker. And beyond. Peter knew what he needed, or rather, knew with sky-blue clarity who he needed. A perfect deal, and a perfect excuse to break all those old pacts, with escalator
s and incentives.
Even for the perfect deal, Peter did not think he could sign his name in that sort of blood.
The little man cocked his head, as though reading his thoughts. "Peter? I don't personally believe in gods or devils or deities vain enough to capitalize their own pronouns. I believe in people. I certainly believe in myself, and I love doing what I'm good at - arrangements. I had felt sure I'd come to the right place and chosen the correct candidate for my very special offer. This matter is no trifle to me. But now it occurs to me that even I, with my spotless record, might have erred. If so, I heartily apologize. You are, naturally, under absolutely no obligation to accept my offer."
The phrase was so clichéd it reminded Peter of the junk mail come-ons his eye automatically dismissed. YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY WON $50,000! He experienced brief phosphene flash pops of being able to engineer love, processes; to multiply a million fold the pain he had been convinced he'd felt.
"Peter, if you did not know the story by heart, you would not be standing across from me now. Don't you think that I know my job?"
The scalpel ceased prodding and gave Peter a gallows tickle. He found himself helpless to resist one more yank of the chain.
"You mean you wouldn't be just a tiny bit disappointed if I told you to get stuffed?"
Blood evacuated from the little man's face in a rush. His own goblet slipped between slack fingers to break apart on the monument stone. Wine flowed into the checkerboard weave, darkening it as a good, robust Red might have. Lees spattered the fragments of cyan glass on which her special smell still faintly lingered.
"Thought so," said Peter, realizing that the little man would know the breaking of glasses to be a very traditional way of sealing a bargain. He did not need to be told. Peter was getting the hang of this sort of thought. "Never mind. Just kidding. So when do we start?"
As artificial twilight yielded them to genuine night, the two men walked together from the graveyard, discussing, with much expressive waving of hands, how - precisely - they might begin.
A buck impelled into death by a speeding car has no concept of why its concert of musculature feebles into painful unreliability, or for what reason it finally crumples to earth, husking autumn air. While the planet whirls in its orbit, the buck dies with no sense of event, not even feeling chosen, just as the automobile lacks, a sense of having been selected by the creature into which it is destined to crash. On freeways with no mouth and no terminus, it rushes headlong until it stops or flies free of the path. Animal and machine, primitive to modern, hurtling together in shared ignorance, cognizant only of motion and impact and pain.
And so in the lost card of the Tarot, The Falling Man falls forever - unaware of how he was precipitated, or whether his plummet will end in a soft, corporeal cloudbank or in the fatally unyielding flatness of a round Earth. His role is to guide superstitious mortals in their affairs by continuing his fall for eternity. The card cues a Path of Life not trodden in symbolic soil, but inscribed upon the wind itself, as transient as skywriting, as fundamental as oxygen, as mutagenic as love.
MONSTER MOVIES
The green ones were Martians. The orange ones were Indians by deferral, since they'd stopped making the red ones. Light brown ones were Mexicans; darker brown, Negroes. Yellow - Chinese. That left green. Martians.
Jason popped the M&Ms before they could smear a rainbow across the warm palm of his hand. Commercials were so full of owl shit.
Oblivious to the classroom natter he sat, letting the excitement build, as it always did on Fridays. The first thrilling temblor struck early in the week, whenever the new TV Guide hit the racks. It oscillated until Friday night at 11:30, when his pent-up anticipation went bang.
Plain M&MS were the prime taste (Peanut M&Ms were for perverts), followed by Lipton's iced tea and Lay's potato chips. Texture was embodied in a fortress of musty cushions and Jason's ammo stack of magazines, the elder issues furry or lop-eared with handling. The unforgettable aroma was that of the tubes inside the Motorola console firing, scorching off dust.
Nothing good seemed to last; good stuff was forever being stolen, and to Jason the red ones classified. He had always liked them best. Their candy shells seemed hardest, therefore the most fun to chip artfully away with your teeth. They stayed crunchy the longest. And now they were supposed to be bad for you and had been outlawed. Nobody had warned him, so that he might hoard up a stockpile. His father had mentioned something vague about red meaning Russian and Russian meaning Communist, and thus the true reason for doing dumb things like meddling with the colors of candy and disrupting the universe of children.
Jason was not a child. He was nearly twelve, and he owned his own bike and radio. And his personally cultivated Friday-night ritual was about to commence.
Fairchild tossed back his second Tanqueray martini of happy hour and scoped the catch of the day.
Diffused to soft focus by the neon haze and cigarette smoke of the lounge, all of the women in attendance looked tasty and desirable. He knew from experience that up close, the ratio of physically attractive eligibles would nosedive fifty percent: about half were actually as good as they looked.
Once they opened their mouths, the odds crashed another thirty percent.
Benjy, faithful bar ramrod that he was, had stocked the snack dishes with smokehouse almonds today. Fairchild's fingers dallied in a silver clamshell. Best just to nurture a comfy buzz and cab home. Cable was all titties and gore; the late show, all TV reruns, and most assuredly not what it used to be. Fairchild felt betrayed. Home, then, to an early bed and perhaps a fat, sleep-inducing novel. After one more jolt from Benjy. Weekends sucked.
Lacquered nails tapped the shoulder of his Verri Uomo suit. "Psst, hey meester. Buy a drink for a real lady?"
"Why, Ms. Masterson. Thank whatever gods are left."
She moved in close so he could hear; the din was amping up. "I think it's safe for you to call me Kris; we've been off the company clock since five. Come on, I've secured a booth. You can sit and tell me what in hell you're doing, cruising this meat rack. Unless you've got to go?"
From Fairchild's barstool vantage his own apartment was no longer succoring, a shield against the world. It had become a dank trap.
She hailed Benjy, then slid in opposite Fairchild, the swish of her smoky hose lost in the cocktail din. He imagined the sound - silky, sinuous, calculated. What was up?
"Well," she said. "This is the biggest victory of my business day so far."
He raised his eyebrows. Let her call it. Automatically his hands sought the martini glass, the almond dish.
"You didn't say no."
His smile was genuine, and he was pleased. "Are you kidding?" He opened his hands toward her, shrugging, as if her virtues were obvious to any fool. Not beauty; his brain amended. More like magnetism. Her hair looked fulsome, tactile. The lines framing her mouth were pleasantly human; the mouth itself tempting, beneath frosty gloss. Her nose made her face impress too aggressively. She was aware of this and turned it to her advantage when she chose. Her eyes were the best - the irises clear as Zeiss lenses, bordered with green-flecked black rings, so stark and powerful that she kept them damped behind wide executive glasses with spidery white frames. Turn her down, was she kidding? Her posture was charm-school perfect, her legs distracting, her voice commandingly husky. She looked about two inches shorter than him. He imagined the way a serious kiss would tilt her.
"I was just scrutinizing the male element in this joint. Half of them are tuned to Age-Wave, half to metal rape music ... and most, to dead air." She was drinking Long Island iced teas.
"Not much room left for anything with a melody?"
She saluted his observation with her glass, ruefully.
"So clearly, the fields are fallow. I have decided to take bull in hand - or something - and declare that the time has come for you, Mr. Fairchild, and I to have a talk about us?"
"Us?" Thus far he was being a moron in the banter department.
; "Mm-hm. You heard right. You. Me. Us. And the first misconception we need to chuck off the sill is the excuse about how you don't dare approach me because of bow it might look, me being above you, corporately speaking. I have been dying for you to say more than hello ever since the Fullerton conference. Do you remember when that was?"
He could not forget. In his mind it reran, overexposed, her image searing hot-white as she strode into the boardroom: attaché case, flunky in tow, power suit, girded shoulders, legs to die for; god, every man in the room must want her. That had been ... a couple of weeks ago?
"Four months." She pointed, for emphasis. Simple high-gloss nail polish, no silk-wrapped bullshit. She'd done it herself. "You sure know how to hurt a lady. Four months, during which I haven't invited you anywhere, either. I could plead prior commitments. Truth be told, I think we might be equally chicken. Care to grab a stab at Excuse #2?"
"Sure. It's too soon after the divorce," He mimed a tiny violin.
"Yours? Or mine?"
"Yes?" That brought on their first shared laughter of the evening. A foundation, in case they cared to build something.
"I guess that makes it time to impose a testing criterion. Always good company procedure. You have to list your faults. I'll go first." She sipped her drink and worked up a mischievous expression. "I don't just wear these glasses to read. I wear flats when I'm not trying to thrill strangers. I don't sleep in the nude. I despise cats. If I drink too much I think I'm too gorgeous and that my jokes are all hysterical. They aren't. I'm a workaholic. I don't plan on being anybody's mommy. I listen to my answer phone to see who's calling before I pick up. That's not everything, but now you can start."
He duplicated her ritual with the glass. "I wear tinted contacts. I eat too much Italian. I punch elevator and crosswalk buttons more than once. I'm drinking more and enjoying it less. I talk about getting 'back in shape' someday. Except for coffee I always skip breakfast. I think clothes do make the man. I terminally adore old monster movies."
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