Danny proves to be one rare monster, stout as a hog but nimble as a lemur yet something else as an itty-bitty kitten flung down a basement staircase by its tail. Three minutes into his leaping, bucking, slithering, A-to-Z, pansexual imitation of everyone from Stalin to Shirley Temple—and he can do them simultaneously, too, sitting on a park bench licking sugar cones or with their heads stuck through adjacent guillotines—I’ve so horrifically received my money’s worth that I’m about to pee my pants with glee. And indeed I feel a tiny trickle, which I suck back up or at least prevent from soaking me. I ask Alex if she’ll excuse me for a moment. She won’t, though. She refuses to excuse me. She grabs my hand and crushes ligament as Danny dipsy-doodles through the Louvre as both the Mona Lisa and Picasso, and after about thirty seconds of tense resistance I decide that there’s another, better way: I’ll just go limp and take whatever’s coming and hope some skilled clinician can save me later.
“Stop that,” she whispers. “Don’t squirm. It’s almost over.”
I resolved to go limp, but I didn’t manage it. This time I will. I imagine soft old rope rotting on a Lake Superior dock.
For the show’s last ten minutes I picture various deaths at Alex’s slender hands. Yet I don’t feel her anger. This troubles me even more. I was going to run into one of them, eventually, but I figured it would be a swift, short blow. I’m sick of waiting for it. I want it now.
Driver is in position when we’re reborn from Danny’s seething necropolis and straggle out into the light of late-night Vegas. Move toward the light, it’s all a soul must know, even if it comes streaming from the red eyes of a mammoth re-created sphinx with two front paws the size of supertankers.
“Well, I guess it’s all out in the open now,” says Alex, reclining against the molded leatherette of our American-made black mass on wheels. Driver is taking us somewhere he thinks we’ll like but he wants it to be a surprise. He’s being Driver.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say. But just so-so. Why bother with guilt when she’s about to hang me? It’ll be her turn to feel guilty soon.
“Slide over here and make it up to me. Kiss my legs or something. Right on up.”
I obey her, both in letter and in spirit. The alcohol in her perfume stings my tongue. She must have bathed in it.
“Came early, stayed late,” she says. “Worked weekends. Holidays. I had a sick kid brother with no health plan, a mom who shared a dad with someone else and liked the nice girly things he couldn’t give her. Mostly, it was for me, though. I drove Miatas. One-year leases so I could try new colors. You know who I represented once? Barbara Bush. Pretty fabulous. I got some hand-me-downs. When she’d built up to five copies of one necklace that she couldn’t risk wearing the original of, guess who got the sixth, with a sweet card? That’s how they became the Texas Kennedys: cards for everyone, wrote them day and night.” She leans back further. “You’re doing good. Go, Fido.”
“Ma’am?” The voice of Driver.
“I’m still a miss. A junior miss.”
“We’re there.”
“Just circle, please.”
I cast up my eyes at the giantess. She pats me. If this is the sum of my obligations to her, I’ll gladly go till dawn. Till dawn of spring. Or could it be that I payed my spiritual debt by watching Danny mutate for an hour and now I’m into the extra-credit zone.
“I slept with the boss man. I didn’t feel exploited. I felt like he was offering me insurance. He wouldn’t just hump any of the young things, and the ones that he did hump had major blackmail power, all seventeen of us. God, I loved PR. The privilege of it. Showing the world that Texaco and Exxon only drilled and brokered and refined as a way to support their truer passions: saving the porpoise and promoting opera in the inner city, which they’ll rebuild someday and not even take the write-off—it’s a gift. Being entrusted with tall tales that vast just swoops you up onto your silver princess throne. More, give me more. Give me harder ones, you shout. Let me position private penitentiaries as walled Montessoris for late-blooming unfortunates. Your appetite for deception spreads and grows, and just when you think it can’t gape any wider, someone hands you a folder tabbed ‘Pesticide Spill: Monsanto.’ It’s like bliss. You don’t have to chew so hard, Ryan. Focus. Focus.”
“I apologize, miss, but my left rear tire feels flat. There’s broken glass all over the road tonight. I’ll need to stop up ahead and use the jack.”
“Can you just lock us in?”
“Of course I can.”
“Then it’s not a problem.”
“Yes, miss. Thank you.”
I hear a door slam muffled by so much skin.
“But then we lost some big clients,” Alex says, “and one of our rainmakers died and . . . dominoes. I truly think they drew lots to choose who went. You still don’t remember me? Those suits I wore? I’m up to our first meeting.”
The harder she bangs on this lid, the tighter it seals. A moment ago I felt it opening—a vision of Dallas office- tower blue glass, an artsy reception area with seats resembling children’s wood alphabet blocks, extreme-angle views of parking garages with painted helipad markings on the roofs—but now it’s all black again, and shut; Chernobyl entombed in its smooth concrete sarcophagus. The barricades are up on memory lane.
My seat seems to tilt. Is this the jack at work?
“You don’t remember the exercise?” she says. “That workshop hour where you were some big headhunter and I was supposed to sell you on my skills without using words like ‘need’ or ‘want’ or ‘hope’? You cracked pistachios to show uninterest, which you said I’d have to be prepared for, and I unbuttoned my cashmere cardigan, the top two buttons, and you said, ‘That looks desperate; you want a new job, not a sugar daddy.’ Nothing?” She lifts my chin with two hands and makes me see her.
I apologize and apologize. The seats tilt. I’m afraid if I move I’ll shift the limo’s balance point and crush Driver under an axle.
