“Oh, it’s nothing, honey. Come, sit.”
“It’s not like I’m here to break up the party. That’s not why I’m here. It looks like a lovely party, and I’m hoping that I get invited next time, and that I’m not too late to get one of these lovely eye pillows . . .”
Melody Howell Forvath might laugh were it not beginning to dawn on her that Lois is not here to make a complaint about the hostess, nor about the fact that she wasn’t invited. No, there’s something far more terrifying going on, something far more inimical to partygoing merriment. Lois means to make a complaint against Dr. Maevka. Melody can see the recognition dawning in him now, the recognition of Lois. Lois as the accretion of bad luck. Dr. Maevka’s lantern jaw is set in a hard way, as though he’s a tight end who is going to have to fight his way over linebackers.
“Listen up, everyone,” Lois is saying, holding one of the lavender eye pillows in a clenched fist. “I think most of you know me here, and so I think I’m not without credibility. You know it’s me, someone from your own community, who’s about to say what I’m going to say. And what I’m going to say is that the procedure you’re undertaking today —”
Is that a blob of spittle yo-yoing from Lois’s mouth, detaching, heading for the marble floor in fancy filmic slow motion? It certainly looks like a little dollop of some foamy something. Spittle, in all likelihood. Detaching. Catching some California sunlight before striking the tile with a gentle plop. Melody is sure that it is. Melody even whispers, “Is that drool?” to herself and notices Diana Collins nodding. Diana sees it, too. It’s drool, proceeding in a steady trickle from Lois’s mouth, the mouth set in that African mask of a face. And Melody begins to understand. It’s not that Lois is depressed over her husband! It’s not that Lois is hiding out because of the little tart her husband ran off with, though this would be a perfectly good reason to hide out. Instead, Lois has been concealed in her Laguna Beach mansion because of ineffective cosmetic treatments!
“Botulinum is dangerous, you guys, that’s what I’m telling you, and there’s a lot that can go wrong with it. I didn’t want to interrupt the party, I didn’t want to ruin the party, but I thought you should see what can happen before you get seduced by the story someone’s telling you about the miracle.”
It’s unmistakable. Lois is
drooping.
She has the telltale eye droop. It’s the left eye, teardrop shaped and drooping, and the edge of her mouth is drooping, almost as if she’s had a stroke. An entire side of her face has somehow been, well,
smooshed.
She has had some reaction on the left side and she looks like that actor, what’s his name, the one that won’t stop making public appearances even though he can no longer talk. Melody would be the first to admit that Lois has no lines in her paralyzed, drooping face, that’s true. Her paralyzed face is without lines, and if it weren’t for the cascading saliva, she would look pretty good. Melody wonders whether available men in California would have trouble making sweet love to a sexually independent woman who drools.
“I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that I got my injections from the very office that is here today making the house calls. I just thought you should know.”
“Just a moment! Mrs. Maiser, I object!” Dr. Maevka shouts, and now it’s really a carnival. He pulls a surgical glove from one hand, a punctuation mark, and thrusts it to the floor, where he stamps on the glove as though he were challenging Lois to a duel with Russian eighteenth-century pistols. “Mrs. Maiser! I will not stand by while you calumniate my professional practice.”
Lois’s voice is beginning to rise, to ascend to its more shrill register. “I have brought myself here as a cautionary tale, and people are free to make whatever conclusions they want to make!”
In the voluptuousness that is the sun and its reflection and the westward retreat of daylight over the swimming pool, the women begin to sneak out of the house of Melody Howell Forvath, without making even abbreviated good-byes. It’s stealthy at first and then more like a stampede. And Melody, a little light-headed, as if the hornets have got the best of her, doesn’t know what to think. Friends clutch at her hand as they sneak toward the door. Diane Collins clasps Melody’s hand between her own and she says nothing, because Melody has the stuff
in her
now, as if it’s her secret, her postmenopausal fetus, the botulinum toxin, slayer of American mushroom soup eaters. She doesn’t know who to be angry with first, so she puts ire aside, for now, and she goes and stands with the Wife of Bath, who is stooping before a sculpture of a water nymph. The Wife of Bath is cleaning away a dollop of lobster salad that somehow landed there.
“There’s a phone call for you,” the Wife of Bath says. “In the kitchen.”
She holds up the offending lobster salad clotting a lavender cocktail napkin. Nearby, Lois and Maevka are referring each other to their lawyers in apoplectic whispers.
Melody leaves her own party behind as though it never happened. There’s no other conclusion but that it was a disaster as a party, a blot on the escutcheon of Melody Forvath. She has no intention of lingering. Maybe she, too, should sue Maevka, that quack, who claims to have a license to practice in California and who probably has no such thing. Melody leaves it all behind, for the kitchen, where the portable phone is handed to her as if it were a baton. Her office is beyond, and she hasn’t visited her office in days, but now she takes a long slow stroll in its direction. Vic Freese’s voice reverberates in her poisoned head. He has a weak voice, a loser’s voice, as if he was never taught to breathe properly. He’s the television agent, or at least she thinks he’s the television agent, and television agents share most of their genetic material with cockroaches, that Ceylonese subspecies that hisses loud enough to scare dogs. Melody much prefers her American literary agent, though sometimes her British literary agent is nice, and also his Italian co-agent, who is very sexy, and then there’s also the French agent with that beautiful accent. They all send her gifts at Christmas.
“Melody, didn’t you once write a big fat novel called
The Diviners
?” Vic Freese asks.
“Do you remember what it’s about?”
The two detectives, according to reports filed later, spend the first hour of the stakeout arguing about doughnuts. They introduce various facts into the discussion; for example, that Krispy Kreme sells a billion doughnuts per year and thus cannot be considered inferior to the more popular brands, that Krispy Kreme can produce, in situ, up to twelve thousand doughnuts an hour. Imagine if twelve thousand original glazed doughnuts were to become suddenly available at a particular Krispy Kreme franchise, for example, the World Trade Center location. What a boon to New York City policing. The detectives feel that the more complex doughnut varieties, such as the chocolate ice cream filled or the glazed lemon filled, are tasty, but these are not really the doughnuts that the detectives consider the essential business line of the Krispy Kreme corporation. The essential business line is the original glazed doughnut. The detectives speak of the cultural penetration of the original glazed, how it has acquired an almost fetishistic reputation among consumers. Consider, for example, tiered doughnut wedding cakes. Concentric rings of original glazed doughnuts, in a fractal design, with lightweight bride and groom ornaments at the summit. This wedding cake design is taking off now, and it proves that the only way to go, with a business line like the original glazed, is up. Original glazed no more than five hundred feet from every American household. Original glazed on every block in every major city. Original glazed available at other fast-food addresses. Original glazed in public schools. Original glazed when you register to vote.
The detectives are considering investing in the Krispy Kreme corporation, a common stock listed on the NYSE, one that has been doing quite well, a fact noted with pleasure by the detectives, who are currently getting their asses kicked on some of their other securities, for example, QualComm. Krispy Kreme has the Krispy Kreme “mythodology,” which is based on the work of the critic Joseph Campbell. Krispy Kreme has strong brand recognition, a proven growth record, as well as the Doughnut Theater Concept, which is more than you can say about QualComm. The Doughnut Theater Concept is the on-site Krispy Kreme production event made visible to the consumer. Better even than the Ford production line. The Doughnut Theater Concept begins when the red light comes on, the red light indicating the presence of the core line of business, the original glazed doughnut. The Doughnut Theater Concept is the detectives watching as the original glazed doughnuts begin to come off the production line, twelve thousand strong, toppling onto cooling trays as if they were lemmings free-falling into a ravine. Yes, with the Doughnut Theater Concept, the detectives can know the business in which they are investing and they can conduct surveillance on the core line of business, which conforms to the style and habits of the metropolitan detective, who does not have time to figure out which parts of his cellular phone use QualComm technology.
The stakeout continues in this way until one of the detectives, the one
not
reading the tabloids, announces that the sister of the suspect is now on the move. He uses the code agreed upon earlier, “The worm has turned.” The sister of the suspect is now leaving her East Village address, she is slamming the front door of the walk-up behind her, proceeding west, and so the detectives stir like ravens in a dead tree. That is, the detectives abandon their vehicle, and each brings a doughnut. It is Sunday, and the detectives would normally have the day off, but they are concerned that the suspect, the older brother of the young woman currently under surveillance, may have fled the metropolitan area to points unknown. The sister may be the only credible link to the suspect.
There will be observation of the movements of the sister of the suspect, in the event that the sister makes known the whereabouts of the suspect.
The sister of the suspect, according to reports, is, it should be noted, “very attractive,” and is wearing “leather pants” on the day in question. It’s another day of steady drizzle. Nonetheless, the detectives hasten westward, following the sister of the suspect at some remove. What they know: The sister is an employee of a boutique film production company, which boutique has made a number of films that the detectives have not seen. The boutique film production company hires out work to the very messenger company at which the suspect in the assault case previously worked. A connection has therefore been established, between suspect and sister, first in the identical surnames of these two persons. Second, this connection was verified in a quick data search of credit and medical records, confirming that the suspect has been both a failed graduate student and a client of a variety of mental health professionals. He is, in fact, “bipolar,” or manic-depressive, whatever the current terminology is. According to the detectives, it is established that the suspect has a history of mental illness, and this is likely to be material to a jury trial, especially in view of the fact that the assault incident is being prosecuted as an attack without motive.
The detectives have leaked this information to the press.
They know, and the knowledge is bittersweet, that both the suspect and his sister, the woman currently under surveillance, are adoptees. They know that the children were adopted, some years apart, by white parents, though both the suspect and his sister are African American, and to the detectives this is a sorrowful part of the investigation because one of the detectives, while educated in the city college system, is himself from the projects. The projects speak through him, and the projects are with him, and there is no shaking off the projects, which are an engine of African American identity in this city. He knows: When you take a black kid out of the neighborhoods and you put this black kid in the white neighborhoods, this kid will be like a duck raised by geese. And in this instance, the adoptive parents are church folk. The father is a minister of some kind, and the mother is a psychologist. The suspect and his sister were adopted and they were raised up in New England. The detectives also happen to know the names of the natural parents of the two children, and they know that one of these children was born in Chicago and one in Las Vegas. They surmise that the two siblings are as close as natural siblings because they are two supererogatory kids. Later there was a natural sibling, a white baby, born to the formerly barren mother. This is why they think the suspect will contact his sister. He can’t do otherwise. They want to be there when it happens.
The sister of the suspect proceeds up Avenue A at a brisk clip past a Mexican joint. Mexican food in NYC is almost always a disappointment. Nevertheless, the detectives duck inside this establishment briefly and throw away their tabloids, inhale cilantro and tomatillos, wait for a suitable interval, and then they exit and continue the surveillance. The detectives continue west on Eighth Street, passing examples of a genus that doesn’t seem to exist in any other neighborhood, the men and women wearing black leather jackets, all of them with dyed black hair, all of them with various piercings, all come to the region around St. Mark’s Place. The sister of the suspect, picking up the pace further, makes a right-hand turn at the cube sculpture, a known squatter and runaway hangout, past the still unpalatable Kmart franchise, first of its type in the city. To what destination would the “very attractive” sister of the suspect be bound? Might she be making for the cheap hairstylists of Fourteenth Street? For the extremely large music and media store nearby? Is she going to kill time in the park, reading some tome? Or perhaps she is bent upon the farmers’ market? Not possible. No farmers’ market on Sunday.
It is the best of all outcomes for the detectives. They have eaten little but doughnuts since the stakeout began. They could not have hoped for
this,
for how the sister of the suspect passes through the threshold of a restaurant in the Union Square neighborhood, a restaurant beloved by the detectives, a restaurant that is, yes, “model owned and operated.” Indeed, the restaurant, which was once a run-down Greek American coffee shop, is painted a nauseating teal on the outside and is notorious for attracting only the most delectable of feminine examples, each of them over six feet and with legs of limitless majesty. The detectives do not seek out such places. They are made of sterner stuff. They will stake out the Fulton Fish Market if required, they will stake out mortuaries in the outer boroughs. But if their work brings them to the former coffee shop, they will allow themselves a moment of bedazzlement as the hostess takes them to their table, a table where their concealed audio recorder can pick up some of the conversation at the next booth, the booth that currently contains the sister of the suspect and a certain coworker from the film company known as Means of Production, namely Jeanine Stampfel. Born: Scottsdale, Arizona, July
15, 1976
. Educated: University of Arizona, BA, in English. Moved to New York City: 1998. Lives: Upper West Side.