“What was that?”
“I try to use local ingredients,” she confessed.
“Not hairy pears?”
“Torta de uvas peludas: hairy-grape pie. Same fruit, immature—small and hard. Less gooshy, but more bitter. It’s an acquired taste.”
“So far, baby, this whole shtick is an acquired taste.” Edgar drained his bourbon. “The wind, the beer, the peevish politics, and your friend Saddler.”
“How can you be so envious of someone you’ve never met?” She poured Edgar another finger of Noah’s Mill. “And despite that, obviously don’t like?”
“I never said I was envious. Here.” He handed Nicola the poker. “Do something. It’s dark.”
“But socially—you’d like to take Barrington’s place?”
Edgar flopped onto the ottoman to assume his favorite slouch: feet-up, chin-on-chest, view-of-the-girl. His back ached from demonstrating that he didn’t always assume the defensive stance of a besieged middleweight. “Only so long as I didn’t have to become a total asshole. From what I’ve scoped so far, that’s the price. To be everybody’s favorite uncle you’ve apparently gotta be a complete jerk-off.”
Flames once again shot passionately up the flue. Her profile lined in pumpkin, the black turtleneck warmed to brown, Nicola knelt on the hearth like an undiscovered Rembrandt. Most of the attractive women Edgar had dated all strode with the same look-at-me languor, high heels indolently clopping the pavement like drays on cobblestone. They posed statuesquely in chairs and cast frequent glances at their own legs, typically projecting a disconcerting blend of insecurity and contempt. It had taken him years to digest that at any given moment, even while Edgar discussed nuclear proliferation across the table, uppermost on the mind of your average fox was her own appearance. Ironically, it wasn’t pretty. As a self-confessed aesthete, Nicola would have noticed her looks, but maybe only in passing. To inhabit beauty that entirely she had to be thinking about something else.
“Why are you poised at-the-ready?” Nicola wondered. “Dukes up? What you said about the press corps when I drove you here—I know they’ve their flaws. But you were scathing! Trudy was a ‘bimbette’; Martha was a ‘cow.’ Win was a ‘crusty know-it-all’; Reinhold, a ‘sanctimonious killjoy.’ And Roland? A ‘jive-talking greaseball.’ You were so tired you could barely talk, and you could still muster the energy for character assassination. What makes you so wary of people, so unsparing?”
Three thousand miles from home, Edgar had never been presented with a more sublime opportunity to repudiate his past; he could make up anything.
Chapter 11
The Celery Wars
“I WAS FAT,” said Edgar.
“How fat?” asked Nicola.
“I think the medical term is ‘morbidly obese.’ Until I was sixteen. I lost the weight, but kept the attitude—since most people are about to slug you, given the chance.”
“Do you,” she hazarded, “really believe you’re thin?”
Edgar half-smiled. He wasn’t about to admit that, now that she mentioned it, a subtle bulge at the top of his thighs would never, no matter how he stinted on fried foods, melt away; nor would he confide that in an odd way he didn’t want the bulges to retreat completely. Those residual swells were mementos of an era as instructive as it was painful, useful reminders that he should never get too trusting.
“Maybe not,” said Edgar. “At least I always think that with one extra cheese twist it’s back to taking up two seats on the bus. As a blimp, you learn stuff about people. Not some people. Everybody. Stuff you don’t want to know.”
“What made you decide to slim down?” Nicola asked, head cocked as if regarding him in a somewhat different light. “Anything in particular?”
Having inadvertently triggered a memory that Edgar conventionally kept from himself, Nicola looked up, all innocence. Helplessly, he suffered the old flecked footage as it came blazing at him, triple-X, wide-screen. July, back in Wilmington. Even blubber balls pass puberty, and Edgar routinely shut himself in the john when no one was home. Beforehand (so to speak), he always vowed privately that he’d merely unzip and be clinically efficient about meeting what even Yardley’s Health Sciences teacher asserted was a perfectly normal need. And the procedure would save his sheets—though Edgar jerked off often enough, sometimes three or four times on the Saturdays his mother played golf, that nocturnal emissions were a theoretical complaint.
At any rate, the efficiency pledge never lasted, particularly if it was the first of the day, and Mom would be gone for hours. In fact, it took about sixty seconds for Edgar to turn that forbidden corner, beyond which he became—not quite himself. Keeping his right hand firmly and furiously on his dick, he worked with the left to tug his jeans down his thighs. The denim would puddle around his ankles. To Edgar’s frustration, he could never get all his clothes off and hold on at the same time. Forcing himself to let go, he’d tear off his clinging shirt, kick off his splayed sneakers, disentangle the forty-two-inch-waist Levis from around his feet, and return to business—this time swiveling from the toilet to face the full-length mirror, hung like child abuse on the inside of the bathroom door.
Ordinarily, sitting on the can or dripping from the shower, Edgar averted his eyes from the obscenity of his own reflection, but on these Saturday afternoons that staggering expanse of fat was just what excited his fist to pummel faster. Standing close to the glass, he marveled at his own extent, punctuated midway by a little red finger pointing at the enormity of his accomplishment: 238 pounds by the age of fifteen. Both exhilarated and repulsed—the emotions mingled—Edgar would knead his pale, bloated flesh with his free hand, smearing the sweat beading between the rolls of his abdomen up over his full, effeminate breasts. At his peak, he’d press against the mirror and make love to his own mass, spraying the glass and rubbing his belly into the spatter to form a sticky emulsion.
Of course, like the promise to be “efficient,” Edgar always made a pact with himself that he wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t actually come onto the mirror, even if in a shadowy part of his mind lurked the awful knowledge that he would. But the jizz made a god-awful mess, and the glass was murderous to clean, though he stashed a secret bottle of Windex under the sink for this purpose. Too often a haze remained behind even after this desperate squirting and wiping. The washcloth, still sharp with window cleaner and hung to dry, seemed telltale. Once his mother had commented on the film, feigning incomprehension or so he feared, and Edgar, heart whomping, had sneered sourly at the ineptitude of their black housekeeper.
The memory that Nicola had triggered was a generic Saturday afternoon porn flick, up to a point. If anything his performance before the mirror was more athletic than ever, and for inspiration his weight that summer was maxing out. Oh, his mother was golfing all right, but he’d forgotten that his older brother Jeff was due back from winch-grinding in the Caribbean. Mistaking the house as his for hours, Edgar hadn’t locked the bathroom door. Just as he was about to shoot, the door flew open.
Stark-naked, left hand clutching his flushed right nipple, right hand shanking away, abruptly Edgar found himself staring not into his own friendly flab but the flabbergasted face of his evenly tanned, leanly muscled older brother. Edgar’s hand sprang from his cock, but too late. A white dollop arced onto Jeff’s freshly washed Izod shirt.
“Oh, gross!” Jeff screeched, gaping with horror from his shirt to Edgar’s cock, which still poked ridiculously forward and bobbled against a shelf of gut. “I’m gonna hurl! Fat spurting spunk!”
As Jeff pushed past his stricken younger brother to get at a towel and wipe his shirt, Edgar vowed right then and there not to be “efficient” next time or to restrain himself from coming on the mirror, but to (A) lose one hundred pounds by Christmas, or (B) kill himself. For the next thudding minute, as he stuffed his pink sausage legs into their denim casing, Plan B was unquestionably the more appealing.
“I decided to swap disgust with myself for disgust with everybo
dy else,” Edgar telescoped to Nicola. Something about the long version wouldn’t tell well.
“Now I understand that posture of yours. Bearing a grudge that size—it’s surprising you don’t lurch around like Quasimodo.”
“Some things don’t bear forgiving,” said Edgar gruffly. “Not from other folks. Not from yourself.”
“If you can commend self-reproach, you’ve never done anything all that dreadful.”
Edgar parried, “In my neck of the woods, that’s an insult.”
Sitting on the floor, Nicola clasped Edgar’s sock-covered toes. “Do you really think I don’t love my husband?”
She must have already wearied of talk about Edgar, since the connection between his adolescent weight problem and Nicola’s marriage eluded him. “How should I know?”
“I was a bit disingenuous, before.” Nicola twisted a stray thread on his argyle while Edgar prayed his socks didn’t stink. “About how happy we were. Oh, we were happy, I think. But Henry isn’t, and hasn’t been for years. I blame the lottery.”
“Henry won the lottery?” Edgar asked absently, shutting his eyes. If he didn’t seem to notice that she was fiddling with his feet, maybe she’d keep doing it.
“My euphemism of choice. But yes, he did win a morbid sort of lottery. Poor Henry is so sick of this story, and pained by it, that I’d not even tell you, except that anyone else around here is bound to. You remember British Airways’ Flight 321?”
“Who could forget? Even read the book.”
“Oh, that gruesome WHSmith-type thing. Henry hated it. He refused to cooperate with the authors.”
“Cooperate—?”
“Both of Henry’s parents, his older sister Ravenna, and his brother-in-law Aaron were all on that plane.”
“Yikes,” said Edgar, hastily knocking the pathos of juvenile overindulgence in frozen Mars Bars down a peg. “No survivors.”
“Only one thing survived,” said Nicola dolorously. “Money.”
“There was a mass of lawsuits brought over that flight,” Edgar recalled. “Security at Kennedy was lax. They allowed a bag to be checked without a passenger flying with it, right? The jury awards for relatives were gigantic.”
“You’re telling me,” Nicola groaned. “And Henry cashed in—a phrase he’s none too fond of—on three bereavements. He’d only the one sister, so he was the sole next-of-kin to collect compensation. Then medical records revealed that Ravenna was pregnant. The jury loved that. All told, Henry walked away with four million pounds.”
“Holy shit!” For a former corporate lawyer, numbers still had the power to shock. Forgetting to leave Nicola his socks to play with, Edgar wheeled his feet to the floor.
“Please skip the standard, ‘Well, knock me down with a feather!’ I’m so tired of it. Besides,” she added with dread, “there’s more.”
“More story, or more money?”
“More of both. You may have noticed from his accent: Henry’s from Southampton. His roots aren’t quite working-class, but close. Still, his father was enterprising, and on a visit to a cousin in New Jersey he took a shine to American bagels. You couldn’t get bagels in England at the time. He researched the process, took out a small loan, started a shop . . . Bagels became the rage in Southampton, and soon he was able to open outlets from Portsmouth to Cornwall. My father-in-law made a packet. As his parents got better-heeled, a silver spoon left a bad taste in Henry’s mouth. I guess the family was happier in the old days, when they were skint. Shortly before Flight 321, Henry’s father sold The British Bagel for several million quid. And after Flight 321—”
“Henry inherited several million quid.” Edgar whistled.
Massaging her temples in circles, Nicola spoke quickly, as if wanting to get the story over with. “It was like a macabre pyramid scheme. Next, Henry’s brother-in-law, Aaron? His parents were bazillionaires. After the Second World War, Aaron’s father bought up carpet-bombed property for spare change—then cleared the rubble, paved over the plots, and made a fortune from automated car parks. Three months before BA-321, Aaron’s parents had been killed in a smash-up on the M-20 as they headed for the ferry to Calais. Aaron was an only child, and came into the lot. In fact, Henry’s parents had invited Ravenna and her husband along to holiday in San Francisco partly to cheer Aaron up. It was on the last leg back to Heathrow that the plane exploded over Long Island. Aaron himself owned a computer-importing business. The couple didn’t have any children, yet . . . You get the picture. It all went to Henry.”
“I’m losing track of the arithmetic.”
“I lost track some time ago. Fortunately, taxes helped prune the inheritance back. But you know dosh: in quantity, it grows like hogweed.”
“Let me guess: Henry’s loaded, thanks to calamity. Though he’d swap all his do-re-mi for his relatives’ being alive and well, he’s plagued by a guilty sense of having swapped his family for the high life. Only, some high life. If Henry’s flush, what’s he doing in Barba?”
Nicola shrugged. “Stringing for the Independent. Oh, there’s a thin logic to it. The SOB blew up the plane, and even Henry got interested in the issues—if conceiving a personal hatred qualifies as interest. I’m sure there’s an element of working off that guilt you picked up on. And Henry had toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist for a while; he’d already done a bit of subbing for the Evening Standard. So we thought, why not head here? The Independent was keen. Henry was in the news, he’s so wealthy that he didn’t ask for a retainer, and handing him the string gave the paper super publicity.”
“Good angle,” Edgar agreed.
“Yes, at first. But his editor’s not into it any longer. They’ve made as much capital out of hiring Henry as they’re going to, and with this drought of SOB operations he’s getting bugger-all in the paper. Oh, and don’t imagine his mission to ‘expose the moral poverty of his family’s killers’—that’s the Daily Mail—has earned any points with the characters you met the other night. You know how the Sunday-school brigade is always promoting these wonderful things that money can’t buy? High on the list is professional respect.”
“Henry’s story may be a tearjerker, but your pals here don’t seem sentimental.”
“Journalists pride themselves on being anything but,” said Nicola. “And most aren’t that well paid. Unlike Henry, they’d never use their expenses checks for coffee coasters. So they can be awfully condescending, which makes Henry mad. When we first met, he was just larking about. But between Flight 321 and this unwholesome windfall, my husband’s been determined to get serious.”
“Sounds tragic,” said Edgar, regretting having withdrawn his feet.
“It is,” Nicola concurred dolefully. “Henry used to be so laddish, so happy-go-lucky. When we moved to Barba, he started plunging himself in thought, and he’s not cut out for it. Then we met Barrington. At last we started having a good time again. Henry sometimes reverted to his old self: whimsical, cheeky, spontaneous. I was relieved. But we grew dependent. You know how when you’re in love, and your sweetie walks in the door, and suddenly the air is richer, food tastes better, colors flush, and you keep wanting to laugh for no reason? One day I noticed that’s how we felt when Barrington walked in. When he walked out, Henry and I went flat. Food went to ash.”
“Obviously the BA thing was a drag,” said Edgar, conscious of gross understatement. “But couldn’t the money be some compensation, as that jury intended? Instead of making things easier, a fortune seems like one more burden for you guys. Sure, there’d have been nicer ways to come by the cash. But it beats me why a mountain of payola would turn a cheerful wiseass into an earnest nerd.”
“Then you’ve never thought very hard about winning lotteries, even the traditional kind. Most people haven’t, which is why they buy tickets. But best you talk to Henry about all this.” She stood up. “In fact, we hoped you might come round to dinner next week.”
“Sure. Besides, I wanted to interview you both, for an article on what you thin
k happened to Saddler. Wallasek is convinced that all his readers are busting to know.”
“Keep me out of it. I suggest you kill a flock of gossipy birds with one stone and spend an evening at the Rat.”
“Come again?”
“O Rato que Late—The Barking Rat. The bar where all your colleagues are wont to congregate. Rumor has it that’s where the SOB recruits, though I’ve never seen any hooded thugs with AKs there myself. And Edgar?” She buttoned her cape. “Thanks for telling me. About having once been heavy.”
“Fat,” Edgar corrected.
“I can’t explain it, but somehow that’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Go figure. “Anyway, sorry I’m a little sour about Saddler,” Edgar grunted grudgingly in return. “I guess you miss him. It’s just I’m kinda tired of constantly coming up against another bozo who ‘takes up a lot of room.’ Even after I lost that weight, some apple of everybody’s eye has always made me look like a hairy pear in comparison. I’m trying to carve out a second career for myself here. It doesn’t help to be told straight off the plane that I can’t hope to measure up to the last guy. Someday I could stand to see other people trying to measure up to me.”
“What is it you want, to be famous?” she asked gently.
Edgar answered only with a shrug. The truth was too embarrassing. Standard celebrity had in fact never attracted him. He couldn’t see what Robert Redford got out of it if total strangers tacked posters of The Sting over their bedsteads. Edgar craved a more immediate renown, the kind that filled his incoming message tape, tiddled its nails on his door, and exploded in a squeal of delight that he’d decided to come for drinks after all. Edgar didn’t want to be famous. He wanted to be popular.
Chapter 12
Edgar Meets Baby Serious and Debuts at the Barking Rat
AS BARRINGTON HAD obligingly left the keys to his black Saab 900 Turbo in his kitchen, Edgar forced himself to stay awake during daylight hours for a foray into Cinziero. Abrab Manor, as Edgar had affectionately nicknamed Saddler’s villa, lay a few miles out of town, so he could scope out the local countryside on the way into the provincial capital.