"You smell like celery," she shouted out over the noise. "Like clean rubber bands."
The door closed. He stood against the wall, savoring his sensations. He was positively luminous. He felt. . .
blond,
outside and in.
A red-haired wonder in a dragon-embroidered silk gown was saying, "Well, if I had a body part that changed size, I'd be obsessed with it, too."
"Enough to erect a shrine in your living room?"
"Isn't that Jack Nicholson?"
"So I waltz out in my tiny French maid's outfit with my tiny basket of cleansers and sponges and I have to yell as loud as I can into his left ear, 'No, no, Mr. Bertoni, I'm not here to do the floor, I'm here to do it
on
the floor.' "
The sweet bubble of Perry's mood evaporated in his hands. And before he could escape he was accosted by a short round man with a fake Germanic accent and the bizarre conviction they had already met.
" 'But I can't help myself,' " he whined asthmatically. " 'The terrible force driving me on!' " He paused, confident of a reaction.
"Yeah?" The weak smile on Perry's face hung there like an artificial ornament, precariously balanced.
"
M
," said the man. He waited. "I finally saw it, the movie you recommended."
"Oh sure.
M
." Perry searched the jostling heads in the immediate vicinity for a kindly buoy he could cling to.
" 'Who knows what it's like to be me?' " The man chuckled to himself. "Rather interesting little film, n'est-ce pas? This fascination with knives and little girls, well, it's the story of all us western civers, isn't it? We of the male persuasion. You declared it a masterwork, and now I also concur. Pity so few have seen it."
Perry interrupted, "Excuse me, but I don't know what the hell you are talking about." It was imperative that he reach the sanctuary of the buffet table as soon as possible. He launched himself into the mob.
"But how can you say that about Freya? For someone her age she looks so incredibly beautiful."
"Well, I hear that every night she rubs her crow's-feet with come."
"Oh really? Whose?"
Limping now in Perry's general direction came the ghastly Mr. Cyborg, clad in a silver bodysuit emphasizing the dangerously loose bolt of his hexagonally headed member. Perry pushed his way past a city councilman, an assistant fire chief, two schoolteachers, several other mid-level functionaries in local government who had risen high enough to believe they could do as they pleased but not so high that anyone would care, the sycophantic posturings of Jennifer Jumponher and Wendi Wantit, and into -- at last! -- the breathing space of the ample kitchen, where flushed couples were inspecting the drawers for amusing implements. Perry moved on through and out the back door.
The late western sky dispensed a gentle nonjudgmental flavor, the shade of the blue, the order of the clouds offering a completed look, the varnished surface of something thoroughly achieved. On the tennis court a giggling quartet was enjoying a sloppy game of doubles au naturel.
A required fixture of Freya's weekends was the solitary sobbing woman, her board position altering from week to week, but her presence clearly a necessity, the counterweight of pain against which the world's festivity was hung. Perry found her crouching beneath a mulberry bush at the corner of the house; he approached discreetly, uncertain whether to offer help or retire courteously; then he realized he knew her, not her name or her pleasures, nothing so elemental, but the bathos of her life story (doctored to the moment, he was sure), which had been inflicted on him for untold hours at an earlier party when, looking for a piece of spare rope, he stumbled upon her in the garage, weeping on the soft leather seat of Freya's Mercedes. She was a topless dancer at the Lariat Lounge, the bald fat owner a compulsive thief and degenerate lech, her boyfriend turned tricks and periodically beat her up, there was never enough money for drugs, she felt "funny" much of the time, her best friend stole her clothes -- well, it went on and on, and, true or not, Perry couldn't believe a word, the tale had run out of gas, there was no more air in the tires. If bad storytelling was detrimental to your karmic health, living a bad story was a curse doubled. She'd get no dime in her cup from him.
Perry's objectives each visit to The Rainbow Bridge were three: (1) to share a private moment alone with Freya, (2) to score the vital stomachful of free food, (3) to score. He'd never batted worse than .666, but he'd also never been so behind this late in the game. He was therefore in no mood as he returned to the house, wending his ever-circuitous way toward the elusive yummy board, to be detained by the Jellicoe brothers, those matching male bookends to the Marguerita sisters, dual costars of the notorious and highly profitable
Twins on Twins,
"You'll not only be seeing double," declared
Vid-Eros,
the trade organ, "you'll be screwing double: a four-condom rating." Whatever modest charisma the camera loaned their leporine presence must have had a lien against it in the sallow unlensed flesh; Perry found the brothers arrogant, narcissistic, and plain silly, qualities of course not only abundant in their chosen career but positive benefits. The one with the diamond in his right incisor offered Perry a hit of Piracetem, a smart drug -- it's new! -- guaranteed to give your cerebrum an intelligence rush. Perry declined, believing this transaction the equivalent of buying prescription glasses from a blind man.
A woman with a blue face wandered past, holding a fishbowl of prophylactics and wearing a sign PRACTICE GLOVE LOVE
.
Someone said: "And I was like, whoa, excuse me, but I don't want to be raped by orchids."
Suddenly Perry was seized by a girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen and delivered a full kiss, naughty tongue included, because he looked so much like that Hollywood actor, you know, and now she knew the thrill of kissing the original because all the similar features were located in roughly the same places, or something like that.
A startled woman with glittery strings of tinsel adorning her big salon-constructed hair rushed at Perry, threatening cassette-corder in hand.
"Senator Wilcox," she began breathlessly, "what are your views on unorthodox sexual practices?"
Gently, as if the machine might detonate, Perry pushed the cassette-corder away from his mouth. "I'm not John Wilcox," he explained. "I haven't been elected yet, and I don't believe there exists such a thing as unorthodox sex."
"Thank you, senator," she replied briskly, punching the rewind button to check at once that this devastating sound bite had been duly captured.
"Never leave you alone, do they?" The old man had sidled up to Perry as if he'd be welcomed. He spoke in rasping confidential tones and he was wearing white silk evening gloves and an impressively authentic grass skirt. His large red-rimmed eyes appeared to have been too hastily inserted, the wrong size for their sockets.
"Didn't you hear what I just said? I'm not Senator Wilcox. I'm not candidate Wilcox."
"I understand. Listen, you can be who you want to be. Who am I to complain?"
"And after I divorced him," a passing voice explained, "he had a gelatin mold made in the shape of his cock and Lindsey asked him how many did it serve?"
"I'm not supposed to be here. This is not the party I was invited to."
"If you can imagine it, someone's done it."
"No, I don't want to see what lurks under the grass. I'm sure it's a very nice snake. Excuse me, I've got to take a leak."
Perry escaped down the busy corridor to the bathroom, where from behind a bolted door issued the squeaks and giggles of suppressed laughter but no response to his energetic knock. Frisky merrymakers danced deliriously by, the percentage of exposed skin increasing by the hour, designer people on designer drugs.
"So I asked him, did you ever hear of the sadhu in India who as young boys begin hanging weights on their penises until eventually the damn things get so elongated they have to carry them around in little baskets? Utterly useless for copulation, of course, but they walk around in a state of constant sexual stimulation. And so Todd says, 'Ah, the ideal American consumer.' "
"So Freya said, 'To hell with psychoanalysis, I've turned Freud on his head and given him a good blow job.' "
"So Hilary said, 'Now that I've got my clit pierced, I can't go to the grocery store without having an orgasm.' "
"So I said if he didn't have his ringer up your ass, he couldn't possibly be a real Italian."
The Hula Man rounded the corner, skirt aflutter, bearing down on Perry with crazed determination. The rhythm of his hammering grew in urgency: "C'mon in there, open up!"
A young man in a bikini with a whistle around his neck cried, "Hey, Senator Wilcox, how's it hanging, bud?"
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
The door was cracked an inch, two inches, enough to reveal a pair of bloodred lips and one bold blue eye. "Can you operate a video camera?"
"Hell, yes."
The Hula Man was, incredibly, sashaying across the hall carpet, the grotesque spectacle of his creakily undulating hips clearing its own wide path.
The bathroom door yawned open and Perry was hauled inside. He found himself -- holy adolescent fantasy! -- packed into a close space with half a dozen frolicsome babes in various states of carefree deshabille, and though nudity was certainly no novelty to him, it was also no antique, his eyes couldn't seem to quit jumping around in his head, everything was breasts, butts, and porcelain. A bottle-blond Freya wannabe (legion was her number), nipples colored to resemble eyes, passed him an expensive video camera, saying, "We're making a scat tape, get in the tub."
He noted the perfectly ordinary bath, the trim Amazon with a ring in her nose holding the lid-sized sheet of Plexiglas, the circle of hushed expectancy, his own emotions on a muddled spin, impossible to disentangle the slightest guide to the truth of the moment. Is this how you're regarded in the final minutes before the previously friendly natives toss you into the pot?
"C'mon," he was urged from behind, poked in the ass by what he presumed was one sharp finger. "This is gonna be great, you're just the guy we've been waiting for."
"A gag for my boyfriend," explained the one with the ogling breasts. "Next week's his birthday."
"And he already has everything," added the amicable doorkeeper. "It's so difficult to be original anymore."
Perry commiserated. "I'll do my best." He climbed into the tub like the first brave man to go down in a submarine, assumed a relatively comfortable supine position, camcorder resting momentarily on his chest, a compulsive-obsessive vampire at peace in his sanitary, enameled coffin. The Plexiglas was laid over the top of the bathtub; the naked girlfriend clambered up. She squatted there above Perry's head as if magically suspended in pure space. He sighted up through the viewfinder and into the origin of the universe. "Ready?" she asked, glancing down into his anxious eye; he knew about the occasional lethal accident when this trick had been performed on a glass cocktail table. "When you are," he replied. What an indescribably peculiar sensation to find yourself flat on your back in a ceramic crib, bulging nipple eyes smiling benignly down, when abruptly, from the bearded mouth of the great torso face overhead, gushed a torrent of warm urine, exploding against the glass in a sparkling dance of the drops, bouncing like loose BBs over tile and tub and squealing onlookers, the noise terrific from Perry's position, the smell rich and strangely tender, Perry not knowing what to think, what to feel, this experience, like so many in recent months, unfolding in a realm beyond any moral categories he was capable of reckoning, he rode the vertigo ride and he was not unhappy, wavering neither hand nor eye, the year of professional camera work serving him in good stead here, down to the last clear droplet of this seemingly inexhaustible flow, when, as abruptly as it began, his willowy star leaped from her perch, lifted away the Plexiglas shield, streams and rivulets rolling off onto his clothes, "Thanks, dude," and grabbing the camcorder, she and her manic tribe were gone.
As Perry struggled to extricate himself from the tub, The Hula Man materialized in the open doorway, cast one long look upon the scene, and proclaimed loudly, "How can the man even begin to consider running for the presidency?"
Perry cleaned his shirt and pants as best he could with a wet washcloth. Who would notice the stains amongst this bedlam?
A pale mushroom-shaped man with a prodigious growth of body hair announced, "I haven't worn clothes in four days."
"Sylvia Plath once described the male genitalia as resembling a turkey neck with gizzards, but of course she was a poet."
"If you can imagine it, someone has done it."
"He said my love canal was polluted, so I told him his pole of muscle had termites."
Perry pushed his way through the promiscuous throng like a crazed commuter; he would be denied no longer.
Yes. Rising into view beyond the mountainous shoulder range of rude gluttons, the grand buffet spread, at last. He spied a hole in the defensive line and broke for daylight. He was in, toe to toe with the delicacies, his starving eye scanning the table fore to aft and back again, and failing to recognize a single edible tidbit. He started over, a slow pan, noting sizes, shapes, hues, registering each available odor. Fleshy tones seemed to predominate, dead sea creatures on ice, skinned, but not cooked. If fire, as Freya had once informed him, marked a crucial interaction between the human and the divine -- of which cooked food was the symbol and celebration -- then this raw medley indicated that tonight he and his fellow guests were on their own among the bare facts of one another.
He was preparing to sample the mound of pink goo he had concluded was probably salmon dip when, wheat cracker poised for the plunge, he noticed the pale curve of a discarded fingernail garnishing the peak of the rosy heap. Behind the punch bowl, a pool of iced blood he wished was doctored lingonberry juice but smelled instead of cold beets, he spied a neglected platter of thumb-sized sausages of Odin-knew-what ingredients that actually looked to have been at least walked past a warm oven. He resolved to risk a taste, had the speared brown thing halfway to his lips when the small unnoticed woman on his right spoke up. "You're not going to put that in your mouth, are you?"
"Well," he looked her over, dark hair, dark eyes, tight body beneath an I USED TO BE WHITE
T-shirt, "as a matter of fact, yes, I am."
"But it's meat."
"Yeah?" Suspicions already mottling the pure plane of possibility.
"It's got meat
in
it."
"I put meat into my mouth all the time," he replied, popping the morsel between chomping teeth, and I bet you do, too, he wanted to add.
"I am Ula," she announced in a change of voice, apparently conceding the lost nutritional point.
"Yeah?" He wiped greasy fingers on his damp pant leg. "Pleased to meet you." Or had they already met? After a couple of visits you came to believe you knew, on some level, everyone in the room. "I am" -- significant processing pause as he awaited a suitably august equivalent to emerge onto the screen -- "Solander."
"Whenever I nibble on a piece of fruit or vegetable," she went on, "I can literally feel my organs being cleansed. A gentle flushing action that leaves me vibrant and refreshed. And not only the body but my soul, too, washed shiny and new. You are aware, I suppose, that you also ingest the soul of whatever creature you eat?"