Savant

2

Elaine Roach needed to find work in the worst way. But even as badly as she needed this job, and as intriguing as it sounded—when she'd responded to the Help Wanted classified ad in the Saturday Star—the idea of calling on a man in his hotel room was anathema to her. She was terribly nervous. While she was coming up in the elevator, her knees started knocking together and she became so suddenly chilled that she feared she'd get violently ill. She nearly punched the lobby button and rode back down, but having to face another Monday morning without employment was a fear as terrifying as this one. She screwed her courage and marched down the hallway, the scrap of paper with Mr. Norville's room number clutched in one of her gloved hands. Even her knock on the door was prim.

'It's open!' a voice screeched from inside. She saw an immense and flagrantly homosexual man seated on the bed speaking into a telephone. 'Come in. Be seated,' he snapped, the mouthpiece covered so the other party could not hear him, presumably, motioning her toward a chair with a limp-wristed gesture. 'I'll be with you in a moment.' He turned away and spoke into the phone.

'No—it's someone about the position. All right, I'll see you when I get to the Coast. Yes…Um-hmm…I don't have room for those in my warehouse locally. I'll let you know when we move to the new building. All right. See you in Los Angeles Tuesday evening. Au revoir!' He hung up dramatically. He knew approximately how long the desk clerk usually took to get to the phones at this time of the day. He'd mistimed it slightly, by chance, but his huge paw had covered the mouthpiece when he'd turned and blocked her vision.

'So sorry, my dear. I'm having a perfectly hectic day. My name is Tommy Norville,' he announced and swished across the room to greet the woman, who stood up, no longer quite so nervous, but exceedingly puzzled. A 400- plus-pound simpering queen takes a bit of getting used to. They shook hands. He offered a massive hand as if it had no bones in it, and when the woman took it she felt as if she'd grabbed a fat ten-pound perch as he gave her his best impression of a dead-fish handshake.

As usual, he'd sized her up instantly and she was perfect. Utter perfection. The woman was wearing a hat such as nobody had worn in twenty years and white gloves!

'I'm Elaine Roach,' she said. 'I phoned you about the position in the antique gallery,' she told him unnecessarily. An unattractive woman, made more so by a severe hair style—prematurely ugly hair—she was a spinster in her early fifties who could easily pass for Social Security age, due to both her appearance and deportment.

'Yes, Miss Roach, I think your qualifications may do.' He turned in a dainty pirouette like an elephant in a tutu, and swished back across the room, bidding her to sit with a limp paw that gestured as if it held a fairy wand. One fear—her greatest, in fact—that of being raped, was no longer relevant.

Norville was dressed flamboyantly, in what she thought of as 'sissy businessman' clothing, his hair cut very short on the top and streaked, the twenty-dollar drugstore bifocals down on his nose. They were the kind with the cord attached, and they gave his dimpled face a sort of benevolent and oddly feminine look. He wore a silk shirt, a turtleneck sweater under it that accented his hugely fat double chin, with a loud pocket silk flowing from the pocket of his blazer.

'I haven't worked since I lived in Portland,' she said in a quiet voice, her eyes downcast. She was used to being turned down.

'Excellent,' he simpered. 'Your head won't be filled with wrong work concepts.' He was a master at camouflaged doublespeak. After a few minutes in his presence one almost began to make sense out of his utterances, so seemingly connected were the cleverly pseudologic patterns. 'Do you have family here?' he asked pleasantly, crossing his legs and almost suffocating as he did so.

'No. Not anymore. Everyone's passed away. My brother and his wife and their two children are all I have, and that's who I was working for when I lived in Portland. If I may ask, what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?' She was seated so primly it was all he could do not to walk over and touch her, just to see how high she would jump. Her legs were squeezed so tightly together it was absurd. She held a huge purse in front of her private parts, clasped in a death grip by those hands encased in the stupid white gloves. He couldn't have selected someone more ideal. Chaingang thought he might be in love!

'Of course. Primarily you'd be responsible for keeping our financial records, which are simple in the extreme. You'd open our small amount of business mail that comes in from the periodical auction, cash the checks and so on, and answer the phone. It would not be a demanding job for more than a few days each mouth—the sort of business when things are hectic for a couple of days and then you just sit around idle until the next auction comes up.' Consciously, he was forcing his word patterns to match hers. The question that began 'what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?' was echoed, for instance, in the phrase 'the sort of business when things are hectic.' He had matched the rise and fall of her speech cadences precisely.

He was also matching his voice and its rhythms to the effeminate clothes, the sissified speech affectations, and the woman's obvious expectations, based on her call—and now on her body language—but he was quite careful not to lay it on too thickly. All he wanted was enough to counterbalance her natural fears, offset his massive size a bit, and give her something to remember him by. He was more animated than usual, and he never allowed his rubbery face to sink into the look it normally wore when in repose.

'There is one other thing I wonder about—and it's something I would pay extra for, in fact considerably extra. A telephone. You know, I was going to break my longstanding rule and install a phone in the gallery itself, but I detest doing that. They're so intrusive! And—no more than we'd use it, I wonder…would you consider renting me the use of your phone for one day each month? Say for an additional two hundred a month?'

'Oh, certainly. I have a private line at my apartment, and you could use it one day a month. Would the calls be local?'

'Um. I wouldn't be using it to call out. We'd be receiving calls on it. I could run the number as our auction line.'

'Of course. That would be fine.' She shook her head. 'I wouldn't charge that much, though. Not just for you using it one day a month.'

'I appreciate that, Miss Roach. However I would like to pay it for this reason. Occasionally—I mean, perhaps two or three times a month—I might get a customer inquiring about an item listed in the mail auction. And if you didn't mind, here's what I'd like you to do: You answer the telephone in your normal way, and if they ask if this is the Norville Gallery you tell them yes, but that the director is out, and that I will return their call. Each evening I would give you a call and you'd pass those numbers along to me. You'd seldom get such inquiries, so it wouldn't become a bother. But if you'd be willing to allow the use of your phone in that manner I'd make your salary fourteen hundred a month instead of twelve hundred a month.'

'Certainly,' she said quickly, mentally counting the financial windfall. They spoke some more about the gallery and what the auctions were like. He'd chosen his person well. Elaine Roach was rather at ease now, evidently pleased by the nature of the work and the pay scale.

'It's done then.' He stood up heavily and she got to her feet. 'I'll start you on salary instantly, and I'll call you in the morning with your first day's duties.' He saw something in her face, sensitive to sea changes as ever. 'Monday, rather. I forgot what day it was.' He said this in a hushed, prim voice, and she nodded her understanding, She had nothing against a homosexual employer. Perhaps she would find this a pleasant association after all. She mentally made a note to remember to use the word 'gay' instead of homosexual.

'So, Mr. Norville, I'll be working out of my apartment essentially, and not at the gallery?'

'Yes. Pretty much so, essentially. You'll make a trip to the bank and post office now and again, but for the most part you'll just stay all nice and cozy, in your apartment.' She brightened as he fed her lines back to her. Clearly she was someone who didn't relish being back out in the work force.

The job sounded wonderfully ideal to Elaine Roach, who had not been treated kindly by her fifty-four years on the planet. It was almost too good to be true. She also thought she sensed Mr. Norville's genuine pleasure with her qualifications and it was reassuring that at last she had met someone whose needs she in some way filled.

They said their goodbyes, and he came back inside the hotel room. If she learned at some point that Giles Cunningham was the name on the register as occupant of the room in which she'd met Tommy Norville, it could be explained away in the most understandable terms. Giles and Tommy were roommates. He would wait awhile and Tommy Norville would now cease to be, for a bit, except in print and over the phones.

For the moment, the image that stared back at Tommy Norville in the Hyatt Regency's mirror was one that bore surprisingly little resemblance—size aside—from that of the man who had not long ago occupied Cell 10 in the