Construction of some sort was going on behind the house, and I had to squeeze Alice around a knot of shirtless Hispanics gathered around a long silver catering truck. I parked beside a powder-blue Bentley. The front door was standing negligently open.
I found him in the living room with a phone shoved into one ear, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe at 9:00 A.M. with the insouciance of a man who plans to wear one all day. The phone cord was about forty feet long, and he paced the length of the room as he walked, talking a stream of mostly numbers into the mouthpiece. A cigar grew like a brown tusk out of the left corner of his mouth. “Sit,” he said to me, pointing at the couch. “Fifteen minutes.” He made a little gesture with his index finger over the dial of his gold Rolex to indicate a quarter of an hour, just in case the words hadn’t found their way home. I sat on a fourteen-foot couch, covered in sky-blue satin ornamented with knotted little gold tufts. Kneeling in homage in front of it was a long veined marble coffee table on fat gilt legs, groaning beneath the weight of extravagant clusters of glass grapes. Marie Antoinette would have felt right at home.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. Then he said, “No, no, no.” He flicked the ash from the cigar into a potted plant. There were big crystal ashtrays everywhere. Talking numbers again, he paced to the other end of the room, dodging furniture with a bullfighter’s expertise, and deposited a fine tube of cigar ash the thickness of a roll of nickels into the center of a crystal bowl filled with potpourri. He had to reach across an ashtray to get to it. The ear that didn’t have the phone clapped to it was the hairiest I’d ever seen; he looked like Bottom in the first moments of his transformation. I watched his broad white back recede and then focused on an oil painting of a blond woman. Its subject gazed at the artist with the remote assurance of the truly beautiful.
He hung up the phone and gave me a mistrustful stare. “So who are you supposed to be?” he rasped.
“I don’t know who I’m supposed to be. Who I am is an acquaintance of your son’s.”
“He’s not my son,” he said. “I’ve done plenty, but I didn’t do that. And what about the cops? What’s the little freak done now?” The heavy lips formed a crescent moon with the cigar protruding from its center. The crescent’s ends curved up, but it wasn’t a smile.
“Is that your wife?” I asked, indicating the portrait.
He made cigar-ash snow over a miniature orange tree, weighing his answer. “Yeah,” he finally said, coming clean despite years of evident conditioning. “That’s the little bride. That’s the expensive little bride.”
“She’s a very beautiful woman,” I said.
“You’d be a very beautiful woman, too, you spent as much time on it as she does,” he said. “Weights, jogging, aquatic aerobics, facials, Retin-A like it’s ice cream, no ice cream, no meat, hairdresser four times a week, manicures, pedicures, cosmetic dentistry, sheep’s placenta injections, every year two weeks in Switzerland for a complete blood change. You want to see her about Junior?” He threw his cigar into the fireplace, where it nestled among others like a convention of supernaturally large slugs.
“Right.”
“Okay, okay. Another couple of minutes.” He looked sourly at the portrait and fished a fresh cigar out of the pocket of his robe. “I figure I got left about ten percent of the woman I married,” he said. He pulled the cigar from his mouth and gobbed a gray oyster of sputum into a Boston fern. “Two years from now, she’ll be completely new. It’s like getting divorced and remarried. Only more expensive.”
“Actually,” I said, just to pass the time, “she’s already completely new. The average molecule of human tissue has a half-life of two to three weeks.”
“Yeah?” He glowered at me over the newly lighted cigar. “What’s a half-life?”
“The amount of time it takes for half of all of any kinds of molecules-say, fat molecules, for example-to wear out and get replaced by other molecules just like them. And ninety-five percent of them have been replaced within a hundred days or so.”
“You’re shitting me.”
The satin couch was comfortable, and I was tired, so I kept talking. “Well, some go faster and some go slower,” I said. “Intestinal protein takes only about fourteen days. Bone, as you’d figure, lasts longer.”
He held up a hand as hairy as a tarantula. “Wait a minute. It takes months for a face-lift to settle. You’re telling me that the face she got nipped and tucked last month is gone by the time the lift is ready to take outdoors?”
“More or less.”
“Fucking hell,” he said. “Alice!”
He headed for the door next to the fireplace, but it opened before he got there, tugged inward by the lady herself. She wore a lavender leotard, yellow ankle-warmers, and a pink headband. Her face was filmed with sweat, but her eyes, the same pale sky blue as the Bentley, could have cooled the room. It was a very large room. “Yes, Eddie?” she said, as though she were talking to a tardy bellboy.
He stopped in midstride, and the phone began to ring. “This boyo’s for you,” he said in an entirely different tone, and picked up the phone gratefully.
“About Wilton,” I said as the cold eyes fell on me.
“No news is good news,” she said. “I suppose you have news.”
“Yes,” I said. “You might say I have news.” I got up. Eddie was spouting numbers into the phone like a verbal ticker tape. He did not seem at all eager to look at his wife. She opened the door wider in invitation and said, “In here.”
I followed her sculpted haunches down a long gray-carpeted hallway. She never glanced back. Despite a dark sweat mark, shaped more or less like sunny California, running down the center of her back, coolness seemed to flow from her. We turned right through a double sliding door into a windowless exercise room. Disco music pumped itself effervescently at us. The lack of windows was more than compensated for by what seemed to be an acre of mirrors that lined three of the walls. Other than the mirrors, all the fin-de-siecle decor had been banished. Maybe, when she was surrounded by mirrors, she was her own decor. She twisted a knob on the wall. The music stopped pushing the air around. “What about the little weirdo?” She still hadn’t faced me.
“He is your son?”
“I’d deny it if I could. What’s he done now?”
“What did he use to do?”
She waved an index finger at me. “That’s not going to make it, sonny,” she said. “I may not look busy to you, but I am. It would take months to tell you all the things Wilton used to do. And, to be frank, they’re not months I would care to spend, even in your company. How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven,” I said, surprised at the question.
“A good age,” she said. “I remember it fondly.”
“You don’t look it now.”
“If you’re going to flatter me, you might as well sit. Wait,” she said, holding up a hand. “Am I going to hate this?”
“Yes,” I said. She held her gaze steady. “You sure as hell are.”
“Then I need a shower,” she said. “Look at yourself in the mirror for a few minutes. You’re worth it. Get yourself a chair.”
She pressed one of the mirrored panels, and it popped open and then closed behind her. I pulled up a chair and looked at myself. Nothing I saw particularly surprised me, except that I seemed to be bleeding to death through the eyeballs.
After a few minutes, my reflection slid away from me. “So what about Wilton?” she asked, coming through the mirrored panel in a fuchsia bathrobe.
“When was the last time you saw him?” I began.
“Honey,” she said, sitting in a chair that was a twin to mine, “give and get. If you haven’t figured out that’s how it works, you’re a late bloomer. What about Wilton?”
This was the moment I hadn’t rehearsed. Up until now, I’d figured that I could put her off with generalities while I skillfully extracted precious information. Of course, I was exhausted, and that was before I’d met her.
“He’s burning people,” I said.
Nothing happened to her face. Nothing happened to her eyes. What she did do was look down at her lap and readjust the knot in her bathrobe. “I knew it,” she said to the knot. “It’s Wilton.”
“You knew it.”
