Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (12 page)

16

Scarlett

NAOMI HAD WARNED ME THAT
the process of ridding oneself of tapeworms is not pleasant. She had killed hers off in Paris, and there was, she said, a lot of writhing around and some bloating and blasting and other sorts of abdominal turmoil while she sat on the porcelain throne and then gradually, grudgingly, they came out, still twitching, great long lengths of them, slimy, blue-green, swimming around in the toilet bowl, and thank goodness Johnny was there to clean up the mess. (She didn’t say who Johnny was, and that’s good because I didn’t want to know.)

I had set up camp in my new apartment and steeled myself to the task ahead and took my position on the throne, with bicarbonate of soda at hand and also a ballpeen hammer in case the creatures needed pacification, and I held the yellow pill in my hand and was about to swallow it when the phone rang, and like a fool I answered. It was Naomi, calling from New York.

“Hi. How are you doing?” she said. No “Darling I miss you”
or “I count the hours until I see you”
—
just the “Hi. How are you doing?” A sign that something was amiss. She was sitting in a café on West 67th Street, waiting to go into ABC-TV and tape an interview with Phil Ragbin, the aging co-host of the
Chloris & Phil
show, to promote her brand-new book—“New book??” said I. “Why? How?”

“I have a brilliant writer named Billy Williams. I’m way too busy promoting books to keep writing them, and he
loves
to sit in a dim cubicle all day and flesh out my ideas, so what the hey. The book is called
The Blessing of Less,
and it basically says that weight loss is an act of religious devotion, and it’s forty-four pages long, and my publicist says it’s shooting straight to number one on the
Times
best-seller list. Anyway—I called because I need you to take care of something. Remember Larry B. Larry?”

“He’s been threatening me with bodily harm for the past month. Yeah. I’m well aware of the guy.”

“Well, Mr. Larry has gone and sold an option on Elongate to Pfizer. Pfizer, the pharmaceuticals giant. They gave him a half million to deliver the DNA of our tapeworms. And Pfizer has a mole in the Food and Drug Administration named Cliff Kress, who is about to usher their version of Elongate through the licensing process. We’re in an ambush by giants, Guy. I’ve got my lawyer Birch on the case, but I need you to scout the opposition. This Kress is based in Minneapolis, a mild-mannered bow-tie sort of guy who adores French pastry and Marcel Proust and hopes to retire to an apartment in Provence in a few months, and he’s in Pfizer’s pocket. I’d like you to drop some cash in his small white palm and see if he might cut us some slack. We can afford the dough.”

Elongate had done six million in sales in one week, she told me. The big sales bulge was among women forty-eight to sixty-four, the gals with the harem pants and the voluminous shirts, and after that, men eighteen to thirty-five, the nerds who sit at computers day and night and snack on Cheez-Its and apple fritters and develop a ring of blubber over their belt. And then there are the grossly obese who live in darkened apartments with no mirrors, in buildings with freight elevators, who feed on ginormous pepperoni pizzas, two at a sitting, and earn their living as telemarketers. Elongate had made a big splash in the fattycake world. Naomi told me this in a dispassionate way, as if she were telling about something she’d read in the paper. She was no longer het up about tapeworms. She had moved off in pursuit of Lessness.

It dawned on me then that the big checks might stop coming. A gift horse that falls into your lap can just as easily fall out of your lap. And my lap was not as large as it had been.

“Are you coming back to Minnesota?” I asked, and as the words came out of my mouth, I knew the answer. When you are conquering the world, why would you turn around and come home?

“Oh darling, I miss the Mississippi, but a girl has to cut hay while the sun shines, and I don’t know anybody back there anymore except you and some lady professors, and they all hate me because I got too successful. If you’re a feminist academic, you’re supposed to be unappreciated and bitter, and here I am with a Paris apartment and I just bought the most darling little cottage in Southampton. It
feels
little but it’s eight thousand square feet, and I would love to show it to
you
, darling, but if I had lunch with those ladies, they’d sit and loathe me unless I made up a story about having pancreatic cancer, and that would give them such pleasure, they’d almost forgive me for being rich and beautiful.”

She sighed, and I waited for her to suggest a specific time when she might show me the cottage in Southampton, but she swept on. “
The Blessing of Less
is going to be huge, darling. It’s gathering slowly, like a tidal wave, and it’s going to start a revolution in this country.
Less
is the new
More.
It’s not only about weight loss, it’s about the power of diminishment. Concentration. The beauty of the minimal. Politics, the arts, religion—it is relevant across the board. Walmart ordered a hundred thousand copies. Oprah is making it her Book Club selection. The Dalai Lama is sending it to everyone on his Christmas card list.”

“How long will you be in New York?” I said.

“Only two days, then I’m off to Mexico with Rush Limbaugh and that big fatso governor of New Jersey, Mr. Chris Misty. Rush is on the pill. He lost forty pounds in the first month, and it’s making him sensitive and wistful, and he wants to quit his attack-dog radio show and become a children’s author. He’s working on a book called
Lillian the Llama,
and we’re going to his llama ranch in Michoacán and just lie in a steam bath and cleanse.”

She was so happy I didn’t have the heart to tell her about all the women who were after me. Even as she talked about Lessness, Sharon was texting me:
The smell of espresso makes me horny since you were in here yesterday. I just want to rip your clothes off. Just saying. Oh, by the way, good morning.

I checked my phone, and the blue ball was in Minneapolis, moving slowly west on Wayzata Boulevard, so I dropped in at the Brew Ha Ha to tell Sharon I’d moved, in case (hint hint) she wanted to come over and check out the bedspreads. The place was jammed with art students, and she was in excellent form, snarffling a pitcher of milk to a fine froth, and asking an old guy if he wanted any sprinkles, hinkles, or dinkles on his latte—he shook his head—and I strolled over. She whispered behind her hand: “What’s going on with you? I heard you moved to a fancy-schmancy place on the river.”

“Who told you that?”

“A guy named Mr. Larry. He was in here looking for you.”

“Why would he look here if he knew I was over there?”

And the old guy turned and said that if this was the same Larry B. Larry as the one he knew, then I’d be well advised to hightail it to Chicago and keep going. He took his latte, and Sharon leaned over and said, “You and I going to spend some time together?”

“Let’s do that. We’ve known each other a long time. It’s time we should get to know each other.”

She reached down under the counter and hauled out a box the size of a hatbox, wrapped in brown paper and tied up in string. “Mr. Larry left this for you,” she said.

I lifted it. It was very light. Nothing ticked or hissed inside. I shook it, and nothing was loose.
Anthrax,
I thought.
A batch of botulism.
But of course the guy wouldn’t want to kill me quite yet, not until I handed over the queens.

“He didn’t head upstairs, by any chance, did he?”

She shook her head. “Left here and got into a black Lincoln Town Car and was on his cell phone the whole time. So how are you?”

I wanted to tell her that I had become a sex symbol, but it isn’t the sort of thing you should have to explain to people.

I shook the box again and thumped it, and then I stripped off the paper and string and slowly opened the top flaps and looked in, and there, glued to the bottom, was the cigar box from my desk. The box I’d stored the worms in. Empty.

Out the door I ran and buzzed the elevator and rode up to the twelfth floor and around the corner, and my office door was ajar. Inside, a maelstrom of paper. Mounds of it. Files strewn hither and yon, and the queen worms gone without a trace.

I called Mr. Ishimoto. He was not perturbed.

“The good queens I have shipped to China,” he said. “The ones I gave you are bad queens. Very bad, Mistah Cholly.” I heard an insidious chuckle. “Whoever takes the eggs of those queens will get a big surprise. No babies. No sex.” He burst into high-pitched giggles.

I CAME BACK TO THE
Brew Ha Ha and took my espresso to an empty table next to the window looking out at the park where the bums reclined on the benches around the granite fountain. The bum life had appealed to me at one time, the thought of napping in parks and arranging one’s social life around the soup kitchen at the Dorothy Day Center and planning the fall migration to warmer climes. There is intelligent life among the unemployed. You learn about that if you hoof it around town and meet people rather than ride around locked up in a car—there are learned philosophers in Palmer’s and the 400 Bar near Seven Corners, and if you appreciate the art of the storyteller, you will find better practitioners in bars and on city buses than in any creative writing program. Storytelling and panhandling are allied crafts: a writer in no need of ready cash is only going through the motions, like a hockey player without a puck or a horseman on a sawhorse. I had lost the precious tapeworm queens only to discover that they were worse than worthless, they were poison.

And should I now call Mr. Larry and warn him? Or let him find out that his pencil will soon have no more lead?

A slim young thing walked over to me, wearing one of those light summer dresses that you just know women who wear them know what they do to men. I mean, ventilation is not all that’s going on here. She had wild kinky black hair and heavy eyebrows and a sullen mouth that I wanted to kiss. “Mind if I sit down?” she said. The bodice of her dress was cut in an interesting way—it was simply two long vertical straps that revealed the sides and undersides of her breasts. Which were perfection, the Monet
Water Lilies
of breasts.

She sat down opposite me and flashed a flicker of a smile. “You Noir? Guy Noir?”

“If you want me to be someone else, just say.”

“I’m here to meet a friend.”

“You just did. Me. Where have you been all my life, gorgeous?”

“Well, for the first half of your life, I wasn’t born yet.”

Her voice was slightly hoarse. A wisp of smoke twisted out of her mouth as she said my name, and then I saw the cigarette. She tapped the ash into her palm and brushed back a mass of black curls. “My name is Scarlett. Scarlett Anderson. I like noirish stuff. Especially the movies. The ones where the hero is seriously screwed up and the romantic lead is a bad woman and people tend to have dark secrets, especially the cops.” She stubbed the smoke out on the floor. “By the way,” she said, “I’m packing a heater. A Glock. Just so you know. I do it for the thrill. That scare you? Woman with a roscoe?” She grinned. “Or maybe it excites you.”

I was looking her in the eye, trying not to stare at her breasts, and then I simply had to look. They were proud things, well defined, sculpted, the nipples erect under the cloth. The gun, by the looks of things, was in her tote bag. It certainly wasn’t under her dress.

“You come here often, Mr. Noir? You look very comfortable.”

“I do. I like the context. Young people and their creative aspirations.”

She smiled. “Do you have creative aspirations?”

“None, whatsoever. I’m strictly a voyeur.”

“I can see that, the way you’re looking me over.” She pulled a cigarette out of somewhere, I didn’t see where, I was looking elsewhere. “I like to be looked at. And there’s a lot more of me to look at than what you’re seeing right now. If you were a painter, I’d offer to model for you.”

“If you were my model, I’d for sure try to be a painter.”

“Whatever you did would be just wonderful, I’m sure. So long as it came from pure feeling.” The way she said “pure feeling”
made my skin follicles take a deep breath.

She lit the cigarette. Minnesota has been a No Smoking state for so long, people around us were staring at her as if she had stepped out of a history book. She blew a great cloud of smoke into the air, and they shuddered and crouched down to avoid it as it drifted across the room, as if it were radioactive. They were too young to remember when people used to do this.

“I’ve always been drawn to older men with aspirations,” she whispered. “I’m twenty-three years old, and so I have a lot of older men to choose from. I like to
experience
men who are experienced. Men who bear the burden of age and disappointment and loss but their hearts still can leap. And frankly, I like the looks of you. Some men are put off by a woman who is frank about what she wants. Well, Mr. Noir”—she put her hand on mine—“when I see what I want, I take it, and there’s not much anybody can do about it.” She leaned forward and slid her chair around toward mine. I could feel my blood pressure rising. And something else. “I think I can make your heart leap, Mr. Noir. I am fairly certain of that.”

Suddenly I had a picture in my mind of her naked, standing in an open window, sunlight around her like an aura, the pale skin of her long legs, her radiant thighs, her womanhood, and my heart did sort of leap. Not as high as once it did long ago when Beatrice Olsen wrapped her legs around me, but high enough. And it could learn to leap higher.

“By the way, I’m from Pfizer,” she said, putting a hand on my leg. “You know. The drug company. I’ve been talking to a Mr. Ishimoto, who I believe you know. The name ring a bell?”

“Ding.”

“And what about Naomi Fallopian?”

“Ding. Ding. Ding.”

She smiled. “Good. Then you know what brings me here.” She had the advantage of surprise, and also she had her hand on my leg. “America is a great country, Mr. Noir, and every so often some enterprising entrepreneur gets lucky with an invention such as your little pill, Elongate, and they have visions of wealth and success, and they try to go it alone, and the outcome is not good. No, it is not. They’re like a rowboat in a busy harbor where big ships are steaming to and fro, and they wind up getting smashed and sinking to the bottom and—guess what?—nobody even knows they existed. I happen to know exactly how much you’ve been paid by Miss Fallopian.” She pulled out a paper and pencil from her tote bag—I glanced down and saw the butt of the Glock wrapped in a red silk hanky—and wrote down a six-figure sum that looked pretty accurate to me.