'How did you know about that?'
'We're keeping tabs,' Donatti said noncommittally, and hungup.
When they entered the small room, Donatti said, 'Don't look so nervous. No one's going to bite you. Step over here, please.'
Morrison saw an ordinary bathroom scale. 'Listen, I've gained a little weight, but -'
'Yes, seventy-three per cent of our clients do. Step up, please.'
Morrison did, and tipped the scales at one seventy-four.
'Okay, fine. You can step off. How tall are you, Mr Morrison?'
'Five-eleven.'
'Okay, let's see.' He pulled a small card laminated in plastic from his breast pocket. 'Well, that's not too bad. I'm going to write you a prescrip for some highly illegal diet pills. Use them sparingly and according to directions. And I'm going to set your maximum weight at. . . let's see . .
He consulted the card again. 'One eighty-two, how does that sound? And since this is December first, I'll expect you the first of every month for a weigh-in. No problem if you can't make it, as long as you call in advance.'
'And what happens if I go over one-eighty-two?'
Donatti smiled. 'We'll send someone out to your house to cut off your wife's little finger,' he said. 'You can leave through this door, Mr Morrison. Have a nice day.'
Eight months later:
Morrison runs into the crony from the Larkin Studios at Dempsey's bar. Morrison is down to what Cindy proudly calls his fighting weight: one sixty-seven. He works out three times a week and looks as fit as whipcord. The crony from Larkin, by comparison, looks like something the cat dragged in.
Crony: Lord, how'd you ever stop? I'm locked into this damn habit tighter than Tillie. The crony stubs his cigarette out with real revulsion and drains his scotch.
Morrison looks at him speculatively and then takes a small white business card out of his wallet. He puts it on the bar between them. You know, he says, these guys changed my life.
Twelve months later:
Morrison receives a bill in the mail. The bill says:
QUITTERS ,INC.
237 East 46th Street
New York, N.Y. 10017
1 Treatment $2500.00
Counsellor (Victor Donatti) $2500.00
Electricity $ .50
TOTAL (Please pay this amount) $5000.50
Those sons of bitches! he explodes. They charged me for the electricity they used to. . . to
Just pay it, she says, and kisses him.
Twenty months later:
Quite by accident, Morrison and his wife meet the Jimmy McCanns at the Helen Hayes Theatre. Introductions are made all around. Jimmy looks as good, if not better than he did on that day in the airport terminal so long ago. Morrison has never met his wife. She is pretty in the radiant way plain girls sometimes have when they are very, very happy.
She offers her hand and Morrison shakes it. There is something odd about her grip, and halfway through the second act, he realizes what it was. The little finger on her right hand is missing.
I KNOW WHAT YOU NEED
'I know what you need.'
Elizabeth looked up from her sociology text, startled, and saw a rather nondescript young man in a green fatigue jacket. For a moment she thought he looked familiar, as if she had known him before; the feeling was close to deja vu. Then it was gone. He was about her height, skinny, and.
twitchy. That was the word. He wasn't moving, but he seemed to be twitching inside his skin, just out of sight. His hair was black and unkempt. He wore thick horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his dark brown eyes, and the lenses looked dirty. No, she was quite sure she had never seen him before.
'You know,' she said, 'I doubt that.'
'You need a strawberry double-dip cone. Right?'
She blinked at him, frankly startled. Somewhere in the back of her mind she
