"Who knows?" George said cheerfully, yanking off his coat and flopping down full length on a long Danish chaise longue. The whole spotless apartment was full of extremely modem Danish furniture. The chairs all had lots of chrome on them. Coffee would have loved the place.
"How about some Irish coffee?" George said, kicking off his shoes. "And see if there's any of those doughnuts left. Some cheese wouldn't be amiss either, and a couple of pears. I hate dinner parties where I don't get fed."
To my surprise all three women trooped off to the kitchen, leaving George to the delights of his chaise, which he rolled on like a baby in a baby bed. He had a fat little body, under his tweeds.
He popped up briefly, ran into another room, came back with a brocade pillow, lay back down on the chaise, and put the pillow under his head.
"I wish those women would hurry up," he said. "Not one of them would make an adequate housewife, you know. Too selfish. It's hard to find an unselfish woman in this town. Lord knows I've looked."
Just as he said it the three women trailed back in, bringing an array of goodies. These included cookies, doughnuts, apples, and pears. Also several cheeses. Lilah had one tray and Cindy another. Khaki brought up the rear, bringing the Irish coffee.
George was not terribly appreciative. He grabbed a doughnut, ate one bite, and dropped it back on the tray, glaring at Khaki as he did.
'Those doughnuts are stale," he said. "What happened to the crullers?"
"I guess you ate them," Khaki said. "I didn't see any."
"Shit," George said. "I want a cruller. Go look again. They must be there."
"They aren't there," Khaki said. "You ate them."
George threw a doughnut at her but missed. Then he picked up four or five doughnuts and threw them all at her. His face had suddenly gotten red.
"Don't talk back to me, woman," he said. "Get your ass in the kitchen and find those crullers."
All three women stared at him with hostility. Khaki's eyes were like little ingots of hate. Though all of them had trotted off obediently at first and done a quick turn as harem girls, the role had suddenly worn thin. The sight of George flinging doughnuts at Khaki from his reclining position had evidently reminded them that they were liberated women.
"Don't order me around," Khaki said. "I'm not your slave, you know."
George ran his fingers through his hair. "Oh boy," he said. "This is what I get. I might have known this would be what I got. This is really what I get."
"Hey, change the record," Cindy said, snapping out of her detachment suddenly. "What do you mean it's what you get?"
"In plain English it's what I get!" George yelled. "I work my ass off year after year trying to be the conscience of this country and this is what I get."
"Come again, honey?" Lilah asked, in surprise. "What is it you been doin'?"
"Working my ass off!" George yelled. "Living down here in the ghetto, trying to practice a little social justice, hoping in a small way to be a voice for the oppressed, hammering away at the need for economic sanity and better relations with the Third World, and now I end up with a woman who can't even find a cruller in her own kitchen."
"It isn't the ghetto and it isn't my kitchen," Khaki said. "It's your kitchen. Go find your own crullers."
"I won't!" George said, stretching out on the chaise like a defiant child. "This is a partnership we have. You have to do your part, and your part is getting me crullers when I want crullers."^
"Fuck your crullers," Khaki said, with a certain vehemence.
Then the women exchanged looks. It was as if the instinct for mischief had awakened at the same instant in the three of them. Without another word they marched out of the room, in the direction of the kitchen.
George exhibited no surprise.
"That's impressive," I said. "It looks like you're going to get your way."
"I always get my way," George said. "All you have to remember about women is that they have weak egos. People with weak egos love to take orders from people with strong egos. I have a strong ego. It's that simple. All this liberation bullshit makes me giggle. I could boss Gloria around, if I wanted to. I could even boss Bella around, if I wanted to."
At that he stopped, evidently startled by what he had just said.
"Though I doubt that Bella would bring me a cruller," he added, wrinkling his freckled brow.
Just as he said it the three women came rushing back into the room empty-handed. Before George could open his mouth to berate them for their empty-handedness all three flung themselves on top of him.
This was a surprising thing to observe, and it surprised George at least as much as it surprised me. In a second he lay pinned to his Danish chaise by three bodies, two of which were fairly hefty bodies. Cindy, who lay across his chest, glanced over at me.
"You keep out of this," she said. "We're getting our revenge."
George said nothing, perhaps because one of Cindy's strong Santa Barbara forearms was pressed against his Adam's apple.
"Hurry up," Lilah said. "Unzip his pants."
This job fell to Khaki, who was lying across George's midsection. When she started to unzip them George started to wiggle, and wiggled violently for perhaps thirty seconds, before he wore himself out. He was not in very good shape and grew extremely red in the face, a fact none of the women took the slightest notice of.
Watching, I had a strong sense of deja vu. I seemed to be seeing a scene the like of which I had not witnessed since my pre-teen days in the Texas Valley, when gangs of giggling girls were always ganging up on some hapless boy and unzipping his pants.
In fact all three women were giggling, much like girls. The object of their attack seemed to be to fish George's penis out of his underwear and stick it through a doughnut. Khaki, as his lover of the moment, was required to do the fishing.
To a detached bystander like myself, the results were anticlimactic, just like most of the unzippings I had witnessed in high school. About all that happened was that George got a lot of powdered sugar in his pubic hair.
The women regarded the attack as highly successful, though. They laughed like banshees and continued to hold George down, perhaps hoping that he would get a hard-on and impale the doughnut in a more colorful manner. It didn't happen.
The minute the women let him up George marched out of the room without a word to any of us, and was never seen again, at least by me. Khaki made the prudent decision to spend the night with Lilah. The doughnut they had tried to stick George's penis through lay on the floor.
"He never admits defeat," Khaki said, speaking of George's silent exit. "It's one of his facets."
"He'll claim he was high and didn't notice," she added. "We better not let him catch one of us alone for a while, though."
"I'm not scared of George," Cindy said, calmly. "I could always handle him and I still can."
"Ah well, he broke my heart," Lilah said, unexpectedly, as if she had just remembered it. Neither Khaki nor Cindy responded to the remark, but they responded to the taxi driver, who had just taken a turn they didn't like. The man looked like he had just left Pakistan a few days before. His turban was dirty, and I doubt he was used to being bossed around by women, because he looked pretty surly when they all started yelling at him.
Then he started muttering. I think his pride was hurt. He was not in his own country, and three women were giving him a hard time.
"He'll break yours, too," Lilah said to Khaki, referring to George's penchant for breaking hearts.
"That's all right," she added. "Then we can be best friends again. I can't be best friends with anybody who's sleeping with George."
Cindy was looking out the window of the cab. The conversation seemed to hold little interest for her.
It held none for the Pakistani taxi driver, either.
"Be quiet!" he said, turning suddenly to glare at Khaki and Lilah. While he was turned the taxi narrowly missed a head-on collision with a city bus. When the driver saw the bus he honked and shook
his fist at it, although he was on the side of the street that rightfully belonged to the bus.
"I kill it!" he said menacingly, looking at the women again.
Unfortunately his ferocity did not impress them. He was a little fat man, not unlike George.
"Listen, just watch where you're going," Khaki said. "And you know what? You ought to wash that turban sometime."
"One took me to the Iwo Jima monument," Lilah whispered. "Just last week. I wanted to go to the F Street Club and he took me to the Iwo Jima monument. I don't think they should let them immigrate if they can't learn their way around any better than that.
"Why would I want to go to the Iwo Jima monument anyway?" she asked, after a moment.
"Maybe he wanted to hang you from it," Khaki suggested, as the driver let them out.
Chapter V
"Did George ever break your heart?" I asked Cindy, the minute we were inside her door. Unfortunately, I was developing a curiosity about her past.
Cindy looked at me as if I were only slightly less dumb than the Pakistani taxi driver.
"Naw," she said.
She was looking intensely beautiful. She had looked great at the party, but now she looked subtly better. Something had happened to elevate her a notch or two, beauty-wise.
I knew enough about beautiful women to know that when that happens their prospects have changed. A new and better future suggests itself, causing their already excellent cells to radiate at an even higher level.
That must have happened to Cindy. Deep down inside her, some prospect was throbbing. Even as I watched it was being weighed on the scales of her instincts. That was why she looked so detached. I remembered that she had been seated by Spud Breyfogle at Oblivia's.
She went upstairs without another word. Her new mood left me out to such an extent that I felt a little hesitant about even following her up to the bedroom. I was no stranger to such occasions. Often I had temporarily ceased to have an existence in the consciousness of a particular woman. One minute they're talking to you, the next minute you could just as well be in Tibet, where they're concerned. Sometimes you fade back in in a few minutes, other times it might take months.
Once I had followed Coffee into the bedroom, when she was in such a mood, and when she looked around and saw me sitting on the bed taking my boots off she was as shocked as if I had tried to rape her.
The only way to determine Cindy's attitude, in such a situation, was to go on upstairs, so I did. She had already washed her face, and she came out of the bathroom with her nightgown in her hand. She was neither hostile nor welcoming. She behaved as if she were alone, yet she never registered the slightest objection to my presence.
"Do you want me to leave?" I asked, just to be sure.
Cindy looked at me curiously. She had put on her nightgown.
"Why would I want you to leave?" she asked.
"I have no idea," I said.
"You're really goofy," she said, turning down the covers.
I sat down on the bed and took off" my boots.
"Brush your teeth," Cindy said.
When I came to bed, Cindy took my hand. She liked to hold hands at night. It allowed her to be sure that somebody was there. We lay side by side, holding hands. There was just enough light from the streetlight that I could see her profile. Her eyes were wide open. While she was holding my hand she was thinking about whatever it was that had happened at the party—the thing that had detached her, and elevated her, beauty-wise.
"I think Spud wants to go out with me," she said.
I felt touched. She had actually spoken her mind to me. It seemed a considerable act of trust, all things considered.
“I think so, too," I said. It had been obvious to me at the Embassy party that Spud was interested in Cindy. I had noticed him feeding her a shrimp. Men seldom feed shrimp to women they aren't interested in taking out.
Cindy sat up in bed and looked at me.
"How would you know about it?" she asked.
"I saw him coming on to you at the Embassy party," I said. "He fed you a shrimp."
"Yeah," she said, startled that I had noticed something she had registered only subliminally.
"You must have a good memory," she said, rubbing my stomach. "I didn't even remember that.
"So what, though?" she said. "It was just a shrimp,"
"Feeding people is sexy," I pointed out. "It's a form of coming on. If I had a shrimp I'd feed it to you right now."
Cindy looked at me silently. That shrimp eating could be a form of sex play had evidently not occurred to her. I decided to see what could be accomplished without the shrimp, which proved to be an excellent decision.
"It's getting better,” she said, in a surprised voice, when we were resting and holding hands again. The surprise in her voice was extremely appealing.
"Do you want to go out with Spud?" I asked, pleasantly.
"Don't browbeat me," she said meekly, sounding like a little girl who was about to be sent to bed without her supper.
"I'm not browbeating you," I said.
She pursed her lips, as if irritated by the complexities life springs on one.
"I like Jennie," she said.
"Who's Jennie?"
"Spud's daughter," she said. "Jennie's my friend. I don't know about Betsy."
"Is Betsy another daughter?"
"Betsy's his wife," she said. "He's from an old family, you know.
"Actually, his family is better than Harris'," she said, again with a touch of surprise in her voice. The thought that a man from a family better than Harris' might want to take her out had never occured to her.
Now that it had, the complexities of life were gathering fast. One of them obviously was that Spud had magnetism, while Harris only had a good family. Spud could walk through doors and feed ladies shrimp at Embassy parties.
"Harris is sweet, though," she said, as if answering a question I had asked. "He takes me to every single Marx brothers movie that comes to town."
"If you like the Marx brothers that's got to be a factor," I said.
"I got too much to think about," Cindy said. "I hate having too much to think about. I can't even sleep when that happens."
"You don't really have to think about it," I said. "Spud hasn't done much yet. Maybe he's just flirting."
"He better not be," she said, indignantly. "He could get me in a lot of trouble, you know." Her brow wrinkled at the thought of the havoc an affair with Spud Breyfogle could wreak.
"I hope you stick around/* she said.
"Why do you hope so?" I asked, though I was touched that she hoped so, whatever the reason.
"I like you," she said simply. "If you stick around maybe nothing will happen."
Chapter VI
In the morning I felt peculiar, unlike Cindy, who bounced out of bed, all worries forgotten, and went off to swim three miles. I hate to swim, and the fact that I was sleeping with a woman who swam three miles every other day made me feel even more peculiar.
I dressed and drove up to the Millers’, hoping Boog would be gone so I could sit around in peace with Boss for a while. Naturally, Boog was still there, sitting at the breakfast table in a vivid yellow suit, a quart full of red liquid in front of him. Boss, as usual, was engrossed in The Wall Street Journal and hardly looked up when I came in.
"You’re just in time for a red draw,” Boog said, hefting the big glass at me.
A red draw was a mixture of beer and tomato juice—a popular drink in West Texas.
"Fm disserpointed in you. Jack,” he said. "You never bring me no worthwhile antiques no more. All you do is hang around hopin’ to fuck my wife."
Boss got up and took some biscuits out of the oven. She hadn't said a word to me. I mixed myself a red draw, just to be companionable.
"Sell me that icon,” Boog said. "Or ain’t you give it to the woman you wanted to fuck yet?*'
"She wouldn't take it,” I said.
"Anyway, sell me somethang,” Boog said. "I ain’t b
ought nothin’ in days. That makes me restless as all get out.”
"What do you want. Jack?” Boss asked.
"He wants to fuck you, like the rest of mankind,” Boog said.
"I’m gonna sock you, Boog," Boss said. "I wasn't asking you."
"If he's so nice he ought to sell me somethang," Boog countered. "What's the use of a scout if he don't bring you nothing?"
He had a point. I had not exactly been piling up treasures, during the last few days. The icon and Jean's dower chest were my only purchases. I had begun to drift, slightly. Partly it was Cindy's fault, since she didn't recognize my profession and didn't care whether I was drifting or not. I hadn't hit a flea market in a week, which was most unusual for me.
While I ate some biscuits. Boss watched me closely. I didn't meet her eye, but I knew she was watching me. The fact that I interested her that much was faintly reassuring.
Then I remembered that I had an appointment to meet Mr. Cawdrey, the man who was presumably selling the Smithsonian baskets. Buying 190,000 baskets would certainly pull me out of my slump.
"I'm looking at the baskets today," I said to Boog.
He looked blank.
"The Smithsonian baskets," I said.
"Oh, them," Boog said. "I thank them's already sold. That's what I hear."
"I just talked to the man yesterday," I said. "How can they have been sold?"
Of course I knew my question was stupid. The first law of life is that anything can be sold at any time.
I suddenly felt very unconfident. A scout's confidence is like an athlete's confidence, essentially irrational. The old, beautiful conviction, which was that I could persuade anyone to sell me anything, was slipping away.
"You sat on your ass where them baskets was concerned," Boog said. "There was probably a lot of them baskets that I could have used. What's the matter with you?"
"Cindy is the matter with him," Boss said.
"I wisht she was the matter with me," Boog said, "But I never was lucky."
He belched a deep belch and stood up. "Gotter go," he said. "Gotter see a man."