The bathroom stinks and the floor is gritty with slivers of ice that won’t melt, and when Albert helps Madam to her feet, her white dress wet with yellow stains, Madam swings the broken bottle at the host, slips in the perfume and broken glass, and lands on her palms.
She’s crying and bleeding, curled against the toilet. Oh, and it stings, she says. “Oh, Walter, it stings. It’s stinging,” Madam says.
The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
The host pulls Madam to her feet against him, Madam holding her hands up as if she were praying but with her hands an inch apart and blood running down the palms, down the wrists, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbows where it drips.
And the host, he says, “It will be alright, Nina.”
“My hands, Walter,” Madam says.
“It will be alright.”
Madam says, “Who would do this to me? Who could hate me this much?”
The host says, to Albert, “Would you call an ambulance?”
That was Tyler’s first mission as a service industry terrorist. Guerrilla waiter. Minimum-wage despoiler. Tyler’s been doing this for years, but he says everything is more fun as a shared activity.
At the end of Albert’s story, Tyler smiles and says, “Cool.”
Back in the hotel, right now, in the elevator stopped between the kitchen and the banquet floors, I tell Tyler how I sneezed on the trout in aspic for the dermatologist convention and three people told me it was too salty and one person said it was delicious.
Tyler shakes himself off over the soup tureen and says he’s run dry.
This is easier with cold soup, vichyssoise, or when the chefs make a really fresh gazpacho. This is impossible with that onion soup that has a crust of melted cheese on it in ramekins. If I ever ate here, that’s what I’d order.
We were running out of ideas, Tyler and me. Doing stuff to the food got to be boring, almost part of the job description. Then I hear one of the doctors, lawyers, whatever, say how a hepatitis bug can live on stainless steel for six months. You have to wonder how long this bug can live on Rum Custard Charlotte Russe.
Or Salmon Timbale.
I asked the doctor where could we get our hands on some of these hepatitis bugs, and he’s drunk enough to laugh.
Everything goes to the medical waste dump, he says.
And he laughs.
Everything.
The medical waste dump sounds like hitting bottom.
One hand on the elevator control, I ask Tyler if he’s ready. The scar on the back of my hand is swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips in the exact shape of Tyler’s kiss.
“One second,” Tyler says.
The tomato soup must still be hot because the crooked thing Tyler tucks back in his pants is boiled pink as a jumbo prawn.
Chapter 8
In South America, Land of Enchantment, we could be wading in a river where tiny fish will swim up Tyler’s urethra. The fish have barbed spines that flare out and back so once they’re up Tyler, the fish set up housekeeping and get ready to lay their eggs. In so many ways, how we spent Saturday night could be worse.
“It could’ve been worse,” Tyler says, “what we did with Marla’s mother.”
I say, shut up.
Tyler says, the French government could’ve taken us to an underground complex outside of Paris where not even surgeons but semiskilled technicians would razor our eyelids off as part of toxicity testing an aerosol tanning spray.
“This stuff happens,” Tyler says. “Read the newspaper.”
What’s worse is I knew what Tyler had been up to with Marla’s mother, but for the first time since I’ve known him, Tyler had some oval play money. Tyler was making real bucks. Nordstrom’s called and left an order for two hundred bars of Tyler’s brown sugar facial soap before Christmas. At twenty bucks a bar, suggested retail price, we had money to go out on Saturday night. Money to fix the leak in the gas line. Go dancing. Without money to worry about, maybe I could quit my job.
Tyler calls himself the Paper Street Soap Company. People are saying it’s the best soap ever.
“What would’ve been worse,” Tyler says, “is if you had accidentally eaten Marla’s mother.”
Through a mouthful of Kung Pao Chicken, I say to just shut the hell up.
Where we are this Saturday night is the front seat of a 1968 Impala sitting on two flats in the front row of a used-car lot. Tyler and me, we’re talking, drinking beer out of cans, and the front seat of this Impala is bigger than most people’s sofas. The car lots up and down this part of the boulevard, in the industry they call these lots the Pot Lots where the cars all cost around two hundred dollars and during the day, the gypsy guys who run these lots stand around in their plywood offices smoking long, thin cigars.
The cars are the beater first cars kids drive in high school: Gremlins and Pacers, Mavericks and Hornets, Pintos, International Harvester pickup trucks, lowered Camaros and Dusters and Impalas. Cars that people loved and then dumped. Animals at the pound. Bridesmaid dresses at the Goodwill. With dents and gray or red or black primer quarter panels and rocker panels and lumps of body putty that nobody ever got around to sanding. Plastic wood and plastic leather and plastic chrome interiors. At night, the gypsy guys don’t even lock the car doors.
The headlights on the boulevard go by behind the price painted on the Impala-big wraparound Cinemascope windshield. See the U.S.A. The price is ninety-eight dollars. From the inside, this looks like eightynine cents. Zero, zero, decimal point, eight, nine. America is asking you to call.
Most of the cars here are about a hundred dollars, and all the cars have an “AS IS” sales agreement hanging in the driver’s window.
We chose the Impala because if we have to sleep in a car on Saturday night, this car has the biggest seats.
We’re eating Chinese because we can’t go home. It was either sleep here, or stay up all night at an after- hours dance club. We don’t go to dance clubs. Tyler says the music is so loud, especially the base tracks, that it screws with his biorhythm. The last time we went out, Tyler said the loud music made him constipated. This, and the club is too loud to talk, so after a couple of drinks, everyone feels like the center of attention but completely cutoff from participating with anyone else.
You’re the corpse in an English murder mystery.
We’re sleeping in a car tonight because Marla came to the house and threatened to call the police and have me arrested for cooking her mother, and then Marla slammed around the house, screaming that I was a ghoul and a cannibal and she went kicking through the piles of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, and then I left her there. In a nutshell.
After her accidental on-purpose suicide with Xanax at the Regent Hotel, I can’t imagine Marla calling the police, but Tyler thought it would be good to sleep out, tonight. Just in case.
Just in case Marla burns the house down.
Just in case Marla goes out and finds a gun.
Just in case Marla is still in the house.
Just in case.
I try to get centered:
Watching white moon face The stars never feel anger Blah, blah, blah, the end
Here, with the cars going by on the boulevard and a beer in my hand in the Impala with its cold, hard Bakelite steering wheel maybe three feet in diameter and the cracked vinyl seat pinching my ass through my jeans, Tyler says, “One more time. Tell me exactly what happened.”
