Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (10 page)

My head spun. A whole Russian novel’s worth of complications in a hundred words or less. “But how did Beatrice find out about me and Naomi?”

“Beatrice’s hairdresser is Naomi’s treacherous half-sister Missy. Who happens to be dating Lieutenant McCafferty’s son Sean, who plays shortstop on Sugar’s masseur, Sheldon’s, softball team the Shoreview Sharks along with Beatrice’s trash man, Trent. St. Paul is just one big small town, Guy. Everybody knows someone who is a friend of a person who knows you. It’s not like Minneapolis. There are secrets in Minneapolis. For example, the fact that you jumped in between the sheets with Sugar—it happened in Minneapolis, and so nobody knows it.”

“How do you know it?”

“I didn’t. I was just guessing, and now you’ve confirmed it.”

Birch turned away, and I saw a tiny iridescent tear form in her eye. “I hate to admit this, but—I’m jealous, Guy. I always thought that you and I would make a wonderful couple. I’ve been flirting outrageously with you ever since I don’t know when. Been batting my eyelashes until the lids are sore. Wearing blouses with necklines down to my sternum. What do I have to do? Pull my skirt up over my head?”

I bought her a drier, more complicated wine, and she liked that more, and I tried to explain that the night with Sugar was a one-shot deal, a trip down Memory Lane, but women have a built-in lie detector when it comes to Other Women, and Birch wasn’t buying it, and who could blame her? “I’m glad that you go to the trouble of lying to me,” she said. “I take that as a compliment. It means I’m important in your life.” She swigged the rest of her wine. “I see you and me in a cabin in the woods with a big woodstove in the middle and a bed hanging from the rafters on chains, and I imagine us making that bed swing from side to side, night after night. But first I want you to get Mr. Kress off our backs. Otherwise, I’ll be talking to you through two inches of Plexiglas, baby.” And she stood up, and out the door she went.

I loved the sight of her rear end sashaying out of the bar. It spoke a language all its own. It said, “I am yours soon as you do the work, and the sooner the better.” On the jukebox, Amy Miami was singing,

Why do I keep trying when I know the score?

You will leave me as you have before.

But I love you, my beautiful one.

Oh there is nothing new, nothing under the sun.

14

Making my move

I DON’T EVER ATTEND CHURCH.
If you saw me in church, sorry, but that was someone else, not me. I don’t go. For one thing, organ music reminds me of creepy movies about deformed people. And for another, the sermons just get dumber and dumber. Priests used to address the subject of sin, and now, for fear of offending the sensitive, they mostly talk goodness and mercy, and if they talk about sin, they come at it from the wrong direction—”Alas, alas that man is capable of such despicable things!”
—
whereas the private eye accepts that the despicable thing
was
done and asks, “Why was this done and by whom?”
Big difference. Bad people are capable of inexplicable nobility and good people can be meaner than skunks. Man is capable of larceny, rape, incest, murder, and all sorts of dark deeds that would horrify your average coyote, and that’s a fact, so don’t pretend that the Golden Rule is who we are. Mr. Larry was out to slit my throat, and I had to stop him by whatever means.
Simple as that.
Why waste time on moral indignation?

Sugar had loaded an app onto my cell phone so I could keep track of the blue ball that represented the Bogus Boy’s scrotum, and it was sticking close to downtown St. Paul and spending plenty of time in and around the Acme Building. So it was time for me to decamp from the Shropshire Arms nearby and head across the river to Minneapolis. Sugar begged me to move in with her, but I am not a good roommate. I like to be able to put a Mose Allison record on the turntable and not be asked, “Who is he and why does he sing that way? Why the big vinyl disc? Why not a CD?” I also need to be able to go out the door and not be asked where I am going. Sometimes I don’t know, myself. When I got a check for $158,000 on July 1, I made my move and called a real-estate agent. (“Darling,” Naomi wrote, “Elongate is now sold in China, and it is such a sensation, there being no laws against worm medicinals there, and so I’ve opened a production plant in Chang-dao, and may be able to close down Mr. Ishimoto’s operation in the near future. The Chinese plant has unlimited capacity, the sky’s the limit. We can now open sales offices in Beijing, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul. I’m in Paris, btw. I bought the sweetest little apartment near the Trocadero Gardens with a view of the Eiffel Tower through the French doors of my bedroom, and from my breakfast room, the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I do my exercises on parquet floors and out onto the balcony and down the grand staircase into the courtyard and around the fountain and out the gate and along the Seine, which is a stone’s throw from my door. What a city!

“But I’m hoping to get home when the new book is done. Did I tell you about the new book? No? Well, all in good time.”)

Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, the cash flow was strong, and my love life was picking up speed. One more reason to leave the dank and dismal Shropshire Arms and my eagle-eyed landlady, Doris, taking note of my movements large and small, the contents of wastebaskets, the extent of my puzzling (“Can’t do the Saturday crossword anymore, huh? My 12-year-old nephew does it in less than a half-hour.”). The real estate agent was a dazzling beauty from Beige, Walz & Flors named Peyton Peterson, milky skin, golden hair, teeth aglow—I had to put on dark glasses to dim her luster.

“Location is everything, Guy,” she said, putting her pale lilac-nailed hand on my shoulder, “and figures show that the hottest properties are close to water. I’m going to show you Pillsbury Mill condominiums overlooking St. Anthony Falls and downtown Minneapolis.” Peyton could see I was moving up in the world, and she encouraged me to take a
big
leap and not inch my way up the slope. “Luxury properties hold their value better. Everyone knows that. You want to stay out of the midrange. It’s taken some big hits.” She took my elbow in her hand and fondled it. “I’m only guessing at what your financials are like, but I think you should aim for the $1.5 to $2.5 million range.” This was heady stuff for a guy with a thousand-dollar-a-month studio apartment, and when a tall blonde says it and her hand is roaming up your back and coming to rest on the back of your neck, it sounds very reasonable.

It was July and the temperature hit 102 one day. Where, six months before, we’d been looking at an icy grave, now we were on the verge of combustion. Minnesota, the Theater of Seasons, and whether it’s tragedy or comedy, we’re never sure. The Shropshire Arms sat baking in the sun, and my little window air-conditioner was weeping softly to itself. I sat perspiring in my skivvies and felt like Willy Loman, and Peyton made me feel like I might become Henry IV. I made an appointment for Tuesday at noon.

MY WAISTLINE WAS DOWN TO 30,
lean as when I was twenty-one, and oddly, my hormones were kicking in big time thanks to a brisk thirty-minute walk every day and all those crunches and push-ups and squats, and women were all over me. They couldn’t keep their hands off me. I was used to flirting with women and getting a sisterly pat on the shoulder and “Thanks but no thanks, Pops.”
My last pretapeworm romantic escapade was through Mercy Dating-dot-com, a walk around the block with a sixty-five-year-old twice-divorced woman looking for a short-term relationship while the swelling went down from her plastic surgery. But now I was hot merch. In the Brew Ha Ha, young women, art students, twenty-one, twenty-two years old, would walk right up and grab my shirt and say how much they loved the nubbliness of the material, the color, the drape, the indescribable
feel
of it, and all the time their fingers were walking over my pecs, making my epidermis tingle and my heart go boom. A slight girl with flaming red hair approached and asked where did you get those cargo pants and she grabbed a handful of inner leg and said, “I really love this”—that never happened to me pretapeworm.

It’s a man’s daydream to be accosted and jostled and fingered and poked by beautiful women. I sat working the
Times
crossword, and a young beauty brushed her breasts against my earlobe and whispered, “I don’t mean to interrupt but I think that twenty-one across, where you wrote
INTOTHEFORESTQUICKLY
—actually that should be
INTELLIGENCEQUOTIENT
.” And she put her finger on it—“Right there, twenty-one across”—which also brought her pelvic mound up tight to my right shoulder. Caramba! Lord, have mercy!

“I see you here in the coffee shop a lot,” she said.

“I see you just as much,” I said.

“Are you a writer?”

I shook my head. “Wouldn’t even consider it. Writers are snoops and sneaks and betrayers of friends and family. No, I’m a security consultant. I protect people. Do you need protection?”

She gave me a look. “I think I can handle that,” she said. “But here’s my number if you want to talk some more.”

The excitement of that dewy-eyed, fresh-faced physical presence—the unforgettableness of her—pretty much destroyed the rest of my day. She wrote her phone number down on a slip of paper, and I stared at it and asked myself,
Does a twenty-two-year-old really need to have an aging PI in her life, and do I want to be a father figure to a naked person?
The correct answers are
no
and
no.
I tried to argue myself out of the correct answers (
Life is meant to be enjoyed, and what harm can come of a little romantic fling?
Correct answer:
A whole lot.)
without success.

But Sugar was crazy about me. Birch Bergquist, too, I was pretty sure. Sharon at the Brew Ha Ha hit on me. Twice. Told me she was “dying of loneliness.” Asked what I was “up to tonight” and did I want to “hang out” at her apartment? She thought we had “a lot in common”—this from a woman of twenty-seven to a man in what I think of as my extremely late fifties. I looked at her raven tresses falling onto her bare shoulders like dark chocolate on vanilla, and suddenly I had a craving for sweets. I told her I was busy tonight but to keep me in mind. “Oh, I’ve got you in mind,” she murmured, and she grabbed my butt and squeezed. Took the whole right cheek in her hand like she was checking out a melon and said, “I’ve got plans for you, sweetie.”

What a pleasure. A mangy mutt becomes a show dog and—
bow wow wow—
what a difference a little glamour makes! My world was golden. A woman named Nell sought my professional help. She taught eleventh-grade English—though, looking at her, it was hard to see how boys in her class could stay focused on Shakespeare—and she’d created a computer program that could read and grade student term papers on
Huckleberry Finn, Macbeth, Beloved, The Scarlet Letter, Death of a Salesman,
and
The Great Gatsby,
and write cogent comments in the margins, a fabulous time saver, and she was looking for a way to market it.

“You came to the wrong guy,” I said. “I’ve got no head for business.”

“What do you have a head for?” she said in a seductive tone. She put her small, pale hand on my shoulder.

“Eyes to behold you, ears to hear you, a tongue to speak.”

She recognized the quote from something, I forget what, and she asked me what I wanted to say.

I thought about that for a moment. “I want to be with you and make you happy in a way you’ve never been happy before,” I said.

She said, “I told my husband I was going canoeing.”

“With him?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t do outdoor things. He’s allergic to bug bites. One little mosquito bite, and he swells up like a puff pastry.”

I nodded.

“So let’s go canoeing,” she murmured.

I tried to say no, but what came out was “Of course.”

Love was in the air, and the sweet scent of apples and old leather, horses, smoke, dry leaves. The waves softly lapping on the shore of Lake Como, as she paddled the rental canoe into a secluded inlet in the shade of a weeping willow, my head in her lap, feeling her thighs twist as she pushed the canoe along. She leaned down and kissed me on the lips and inserted her tongue. She squeezed my arm and said I was exactly her type, whatever that means. I told her that her grading software would be a godsend to teachers and free them from the grind of paperwork so they could look at the bigger picture, my own eyes at the moment focused upward on her low-cut black blouse that gave new meaning to the words
va va va voom
. Her delicate fingers unbuttoned the top three buttons of my shirt and clearly we were headed for a collision in one bed or another. But which one? Her husband was at home, my apartment was a horror show. So I called up the Hotel Bel Rive and got onto a complicated touch-tone menu—pressed one for Reservations and then four for Today’s Reservations and three for No, I Am Not a Member of the Concierge Club. I was on hold for a minute, listening to a woman sing about a romantic weekend for two with complimentary champagne and in-room massage and floral bouquet, and then a live woman came on and asked if I would mind being put on hold for a minute, so I went back to the singer and the champagne weekend. A recorded voice thanked me for my patience and said someone would be with me shortly. It was a little aggravating, knowing that my inability to order up a room must be raising questions in the mind of the potential lover sitting patiently in the bow of the canoe, waving away the gnats and horseflies, so when finally the live woman came on and said, “Yes, we have a room with king-size bed for $149.50. May I have your credit card number?” I rose to my feet to pull out my billfold and, of course, capsized the canoe, and not in a grand or heroic way—I simply toppled over like a stooge in a movie—and Nell screamed and fell into the water too, which was about four feet deep there. We stood up, soaking wet, and looked at each other. She wasn’t laughing. I had dropped my billfold in the lake and also her cell phone. We felt around in the mucky bottom with our feet and didn’t locate them. This took twenty minutes or so. She asked me if I had ever been canoeing before. Her tone of voice stung me to the quick. And then she looked at her watch and announced that she had to be home in fifteen minutes, which clearly was a lie. Another insult. So that was that. Farewell, Nell.

JIMMY THE BARTENDER ALWAYS ASKS
me how my love life is, and I told him about Nell and Sugar and Sharon and all the twentyish ladies who took a shine to me, and he says, “See? I told you a dozen times. Get rid of the grunge look and rejoin the human race.” He was putting crushed ice in the martini shaker, and I told him not to put so much in, which he ignored. “You thought it was hip to look like a homeless person, and that may be true when you’re young, but past thirty-five it doesn’t work anymore, and that’s why you used to come in here all sad and rejected and feeling morbid and morose and needing a jolt of gin to pull you out of the nosedive, but would you listen to me? No.” He poured in too much vermouth, as he always does, but I said nothing. “Now you’ve lost forty pounds and your abs are no longer like a big pillow, and you got your teeth cleaned and found a good cologne instead of the sheep disinfectant you used to use, and no wonder the women are sniffing around you.”

And then a woman walked up as I drank the martini and whispered that I made her think bad thoughts. Her name was Kendra. She looked to be in her late sixties but in fact she was thirty-seven—she’d taught eighth-grade English for ten years, and it had aged her. “I live not far from here,” she said. “Forgive me for being direct, but—do you want to do stuff?” she said.

“Do stuff?”

“Do stuff with me.” And she clicked her tongue. Jimmy stood rearranging bottles on the back bar, listening intently.

I told her I had to get home to the wife and kiddos.

She sneered. “You ain’t married, mister. I know Married, and you’re not in that particular league.”

“How do you know that?”

“You look all cheery and shiny, that’s how. You look like nobody’s yelled at you in months.”

“Four or five guys are out to shoot me in the head, but never mind that. Small detail.” I put down a ten for the drink and she and I strolled over to her apartment in the Angus Hotel on Selby Avenue. Books were strewn everywhere, and a brown shag carpet looked like buffalo had slept on it. The smell of burnt incense. A public radio station was in the throes of Pledge Week, and a weepy woman was on the air, crying, “Please, please call the eight hundred number now—if I don’t hear from ten of you right now, I am going to have my cat put to sleep! I’m not kidding. I don’t want my Mittens to live in a world where people don’t care about quality broadcasting!” And she broke down, sobbing, and Kendra turned the radio off and started unbuttoning her blouse as she asked me if I had read much Flannery O’Connor.