The Ditto List (20 page)

“I didn't lay a hand on Lucinda, Del. Which is more than you can say, isn't it? There's a long line of people down at that hospital, Delbert, ready and willing to testify to what you did to your wife last night. Now what the hell do you want?”

Barbara sat back on her haunches, pressed her bottom to his thighs. Freed, her other hand removed the object from between her teeth and joined its mate at the jar. It really was a knife. She wouldn't do anything stupid, would she? Even in fun? The knife dipped slowly toward the crucible.

“The thing is, Lucy don't know what she's doing. She don't want no divorce; she's got no need to get one. I give her everything she needs. Hell, I even give her a baby like she wanted. So the best thing for you to do is tell her to forget it. Tell her to come back home.”

“I'm filing the papers on Monday, Finders. You'll be served within a week.”

The knife emerged from the jar, laden with a whitish substance. Barbara gazed on the buttery mound as though to read its powers, inhale its scents, then lowered the teeming blade toward his naked chest.

“You best not serve papers on
me
, Jones, not if you want to stay healthy. I'll give you what you got last night and then some. That car of yours ever hits a tree it'll fold up on you like a paper bag. Take 'em a day to get you out.”

“You're already on probation, Finders. If you mess with Lucinda or me again I go to the D.A. and have your probation revoked. We'll see how tough you are after a few months in the joint.”

“Jail don't scare me none. Cops, neither.”

With a single swipe, Barbara buttered his breastbone, the exact center of his hairless chest, with whatever was on the knife. The broad white stripe traversed his sternum and pointed toward his groin. The knife returned to the jar. He sniffed, then cupped the phone and asked Barbara what it was. Stonily, she ignored him.

“Where is she, Jones? She still there with you? You going to keep her around to service you awhile, like a whore with your initials on her ass?”

“She's not here. I don't know where she is.”

“Crap.”

“It's true.”

He dipped a finger in the sauce and tasted it. Of course. Barbara's physic, her balm, next to sex and sweat her cure for everything that ailed her: yogurt, bran, gorp, coconut, raisins, whatever else anyone had ever thought was healthy. She smeared it on everything from ice cream to mashed potatoes. Now she was smearing it on him.

The knife returned, the wide line lengthened. With another dip it was at his navel, clogging it. With another it was at his groin. His body hair occupied the paste like worms. Barbara paused to inspect her work.

“You talk to her, Jones. Tell her this divorce stuff is for shit. Tell her she'll be just fine if she comes back where she belongs. Tell her if she comes home I won't whip her no more. Tell her that. Tell her from now on I won't drink nothing but beer. No more pills. No coke. Nothing like that. You tell her I won't hurt her no more.”

“I'm not telling her anything.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“Because it would be a lie. Because punks like you beat their women forever, until someone puts you where the only woman is a dream.”

Barbara wielded the knife again, and this time dabbed his cock. Again, and yet again, the applications as precise as pastry, until it was a bright white shaft with a blood red tip, a beacon or a buoy. She tossed the jar off the bed and the knife right after it. Crouching again, she began to lick away the gruel, beginning where she had begun. Her tongue singed him like a brand, moved teasingly toward his sex.

Muscles and tendons twitched untouched. His body arced like a tumbler's. She raised her head and blew on his groin, hot streaks of air that electrified him, caused his foot to jerk. Her head moved lower. Like Pinocchio's nose, as cursed and as untamed, his plastered cock surged toward her parted lips, its tip as red and close to bursting as a thermometer on the door to Hell.

“What's that, Mister Lawyer? You say something?”

“I'm through listening to you, Finders. As of tomorrow there'll be a restraining order in effect, signed by a judge, directing you to stay the hell away from Lucinda. You violate it and you're in contempt of court and the cops come looking. You'll be a two-time loser, Delbert. It'll be bye-bye for a long time.”

“You best not file those papers, you cocksucker. I'll kill your ass if you do. I got nothing going for me anyway, what the hell do I care if I rot in jail?”

“You feel pretty sorry for yourself, Delbert.”

She was going to do it. At long last. As soon as the paste was licked away she would take him in her mouth, do what he had silently willed her to do for months, reward his rectitude. A few licks more. A swallow. Now. In a way he owed it all to Del.

“I'm going to give you something to feel sorry for, asshole. If Lucy isn't back here by tomorrow I'll make last night look like a love tap. I'll mash her up so bad you won't know her from your dog. And if something happens to that little baby she's got in there, well, the blame's right on you, Lawyer-Man. So you just tell Lucy to get her sweet ass back here. Now. Or I find her and make her wish she had. And then I come looking for
you
.”

The line clicked dead. He dropped the receiver and twisted to his side, dislodging Barbara from her perch, then curled fetally and closed his eyes.

“D.T.? What's wrong?” Barbara's voice mixed hurt and fear.

“I'm sorry. I …”

“Who was on the phone?”

“The guy who beat up his wife.”

“Oh.”

Barbara curled against his back and began to stroke his shoulder. “Did he threaten you?”

“I guess.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Me, too.”

“Try to forget about it.”

Barbara stroked him for long dead minutes. He lay there, smelling a hint of peach, feeling the stiff stickiness of yogurt and saliva, still afraid. It seemed an age before she spoke again.

“D.T.?” She mumbled his name and nuzzled his neck.

“Hmm?”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Promise you'll tell the truth?”

“Sure. Maybe.”

“Swear to God?”

“Swear to Joe Montana.”

“What's the D.T. stand for?”

“De Tumescent,” he said, and proved it.

DISCOVERY

NINE

He was an hour more than fashionably late. As he climbed the flagstone steps to the tall oak door he again regretted accepting the invitation, and again concluded he had had no choice. The party was Joyce Tuttle's, and she was the only friend acquired during his marriage to Michele who continued to acknowledge his existence.

Joyce had been a helpful confidante to both of them during the long process of their unraveling. She had spent one particularly morose evening alone with D.T., in a bar no one had ever heard of in a place he could never find again, listening to what Joyce called “his side of it”—legitimizing his mistreatment, validating his excuses, accepting his allocation of fault, enduring his wild wallow in self-pity. It had been the one truly rending evening of the whole experience for him, and so he owed her one and Joyce had decided this was it. She had supplemented the printed invitation with a telephone call urging him to come, and he had promised he would, even after learning that Michele would be there, too.

When he reached the door he saw that a document was nailed to it, at eye level, in the tradition of Martin Luther, impossible to miss. When he recognized it he smiled. Joyce Tuttle had just been divorced herself, after a decade of marriage to a marble statue. This was her first postmarital bash, her announcement of a ringless finger, and the document on the door was the official confirmation of her status, signed by the circuit judge, certified by the county clerk. D.T. pressed the ivory bell button. Wriggling inside his best wool suit, shrugging his topcoat higher on his neck to keep the November wind from inching down his back like a stranger's hand, he fought back an urge to flee.

The door was opened by a uniformed maid, who welcomed him and took his coat and directed him to the living room, all without uttering a word of English. He regarded the foyer as a gauntlet, his destination as a cell. He walked toward the white noise of congeniality knowing that most of the people he would soon encounter had advised Michele that she was mad to marry him.

The house was mammoth and contemporary. Christmas decorations abounded, though it was three days to Thanksgiving. The air was scented artificially of pine, and frequently rent by giggles. The gleaming hardwood floors were warmed here and there by rugs from sheep or Persia. Above the enamel walls a fabric made the ceiling look just tilled. Indirect lights cast a glow no less romantic than the slowly setting sun.

Beneath the textured ceiling the furniture was arranged like groups of grazing mammals. Amidst the mammals were their keepers, elegantly garbed and theatrically posed, extravagantly charmed and breathlessly thrilled by whatever they saw and heard and ate and drank, partying till the cows came home. D.T. eyed them bravely from the doorway, planning a tactless evening, knowing the arena he was about to enter demanded skills he had always lacked.

In the far corner a six-piece band played the “Theme from E.T.” Beside the band was a bar on which was collected every form of liquor in the hemisphere. D.T. slipped cautiously into the room and sidled along its edge until he could pluck a highball from the bar and seek out a place where he would seem to be a part of something while not being a part of anything at all. As he was avoiding ensnarement by a swag light his hostess found him and offered him her cheek to kiss.

“D.T. I was afraid you wouldn't.”

“Accept it as a personal tribute, Joyce,” D.T. told her. “You're the only creature on earth who could get me to abandon
Cagney and Lacey
for an evening with these creeps.”

Joyce smiled maternally. Her gown winked at him from several silver eyes. Her hair sported a new coat of platinum, her cheeks a double dose of blush. She was as striking as money could make her, which was pretty damned. D.T. wondered if she was on the make already and if so for whom. He also realized he didn't quite forgive her for not letting him handle her divorce.

Joyce leaned her orange lips his way. As was the fashion, they appeared to be encrusted with dried milk. “Michele's over by the piano,” she said, as though it were a secret sought by foreign powers.

“Good. Maybe she'll do ‘Jeepers, Creepers.' It's my favorite.”

Joyce only frowned. “She wants to talk to you.”

“It's no use. I forgot the lyrics.”

“Michele and I had a heart-to-heart the other night, D.T.” Joyce was bending toward him. Her body gave off more smells than a greenhouse; her breasts seemed outraged by their cups. “I think she wants to get married again.”

“I know she does. His name is George. He's a swell guy and I'm giving her away.”

Joyce put a hand on his arm. “Not to George.”

“Oh? Who?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“You.”

“You must be kidding. Or hallucinating.”

“No. She went on and on about you. She thinks you two could make it work this time. ‘Now that we finally like each other' was how she put it.”

D.T. sighed and emptied his drink. “A woman who spends two hundred a month on underwear has no business being married to a divorce lawyer who can't keep his bar dues current. All I can say is she must have been having her period. Michele gets nuts when she has her period.”

Joyce Tuttle made a face. “Don't be gross, D.T. Just think about it, that's all I'm saying. Keep an open mind.”

“Sure, Joyce. An open mind. I guess it's something like an open wound.”

Joyce slugged his shoulder. “She's a wonderful woman, D.T.”

“I'm drowning in wonderful women, Joyce. What I need is a class A bitch.” He rushed to change the subject. “So how about you? You got Harvey's replacement picked out yet?”

Joyce grinned and shimmied, prompting her gown to bat its eyes. “I do have a couple of candidates in mind, as a matter of fact. One of them's right behind you.”

D.T. turned and saw an immaculate man of fifty who looked to have just been unwrapped. He had a white head and blue eyes and delicate ears which were listening intently to a woman who had bored D.T. at every single cocktail party he'd attended during his marriage, a woman whose only source of sustenance was a mix of rum and the pain of others. “Good barber,” D.T. said.

“Not half as good as his portfolio,” Joyce Tuttle said with mischief. “It's too bad I've gotten such a taste for money, D.T. Otherwise you'd definitely be on my list.”

D.T. made a silent vow of poverty.

Joyce took his hand and pressed it to her cleavage. “I'd better circulate. If you and Michele get nostalgic, the third bedroom on the right upstairs is ready. But knock first, to make sure Loren and I aren't already
in flagrante
. Loren thinks I'm just the sexiest thing.”

Joyce puckered and D.T. tasted her lip-sauce and watched her move through the room with the skill of a quarter horse. A billion cells of pure libido. You didn't see many of them around any more.

D.T. circulated himself, though with a different purpose: that of remaining disengaged. A few eyes met his, and his
outré
image stimulated smiles which died prematurely when the smilers remembered D.T. was no longer among those who had married civility. He passed the bar twice and patronized it likewise. He passed a waitress once and plucked from her tray a crust of something muddied with caviar. After he swallowed it, he coughed.

Moving only tangentially, he drifted toward the band and watched them plod through “Blue Moon” and “The Way We Were.” It had been one of his youthful dreams, to be a jazz musician, to live like Miles or Getz or Brubeck, to make new music in a new town on every new night of his life. But he had no gift for improvisation and no discipline to learn the chords well enough to fake it, so he had sold his horn and bought some records and joined the throngs who lived their dreams vicariously.