Part 24 (1/2)
”No, let's talk about my f.u.c.king ex, by all means.” She adopted a singsong tone and started ticking off points on her fingers. ”His name is Toby, he's half-j.a.panese, half-white. He's about your height. Your d.i.c.k is bigger, but he's better in bed. He's a user-experience designer at Lucas-SGI, in Studio City. He never f.u.c.king shuts up about what's wrong with this or that. We dated for two years, lived together for one year, and broke up just before you and I met. I broke it off with him: He was making me G.o.dd.a.m.ned crazy and he wanted me to come back from London and live with him. I wanted to stay out the year in England and go back to my own apartment and possibly a different boyfriend, and he made me choose, so I chose. Is that enough of a briefing for you, Arthur?”
”That was fine,” Art said. Linda's face had gone rabid purple, madly pinched, spittle flecking off of her lips as she spat out the words. ”Thank you.”
She took his hands and kissed the knuckles of his thumbs. ”Look, I don't like to talk about it -- it's painful. I'm sorry he's ruining our holiday. I just won't take his calls anymore, how about that?”
”I don't care, Linda, Honestly, I don't give a rat's a.s.s if you want to chat with your ex. I just saw how upset you were and I thought it might help if you could talk it over with me.”
”I know, baby, I know. But I just need to work some things out all on my own.
Maybe I will take a quick trip out west and talk things over with him. You could come if you want -- there are some wicked bars in West Hollywood.”
”That's OK,” Art said, whipsawed by Linda's incomprehensible mood s.h.i.+fts. ”But if you need to go, go. I've got plenty of old pals to hang out with in Toronto.”
”You're so understanding,” she cooed. ”Tell me about your grandmother again -- you're sure she'll like me?”
”She'll love you. She loves anything that's female, of childbearing years, and in my company. She has great and unrealistic hopes of great-grandchildren.”
”Cluck.”
”Cluck?”
”Just practicing my brood-hen.”
21.
Doc Szandor's a good egg. He's keeping the shrinks at bay, spending more time with me than is strictly necessary. I hope he isn't neglecting his patients, but it's been so long since I had a normal conversation, I just can't bear to give it up. Besides, I get the impression that Szandor's in a similar pit of bad conversation with psychopaths and psychotherapists and is relieved to have a bit of a natter with someone who isn't either having hallucinations or attempting to prevent them in others.
”How the h.e.l.l do you become a user-experience guy?”
”Sheer orneriness,” I say, grinning. ”I was just in the right place at the right time. I had a pal in New York who was working for a biotech company that had made this artificial erectile tissue.”
”Erectile tissue?”
”Yeah. Synthetic turtle p.e.n.i.s. Small and pliable and capable of going large and rigid very quickly.”
”Sounds delightful.”
”Oh, it was actually pretty cool. You know the joke about the circ.u.mcisionist's wallet made from foreskins?”
”Sure, I heard it premed -- he rubs it and it becomes a suitcase, right?”
”That's the one. So these guys were thinking about making drawbridges, temporary shelters, that kind of thing out of it. They even had a cute name for it: 'Ardorite.'”
”Ho ho ho.”
”Yeah. So they weren't s.h.i.+pping a whole lot of product, to put it mildly. Then I spent a couple of weeks in Manhattan housesitting for my friend while he was visiting his folks in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving. He had a ton of this stuff lying around his apartment, and I would come back after walking the soles off my shoes and sit in front of the tube playing with it. I took some of it down to Madison Square Park and played with it there. I liked to hang out there because it was always full of these very cute Icelandic *au pairs* and their tots, and I was a respectable enough young man with about 200 words of Icelandic I'd learned from a friend's mom in high school and they thought I was adorable and I thought they were blond G.o.ddesses. I'd gotten to be friends with one named Marta, oh, Marta. Bookmark Marta, Szandor, and I'll come back to her once we're better acquainted.
”Anyway, Marta was in charge of Machinery and Avarice, the spoiled monsterkinder of a couple of BBD&O senior managers who'd vaulted from art school to VPdom in one year when most of the gray eminences got power-thraxed. Machinery was three and liked to bang things against other things arythmically while hollering atonally. Avarice was five, not toilet trained, and p.r.o.ne to tripping. I'd get Marta novelty coffee from the Stinkbucks on Twenty-third and we'd drink it together while Machinery and Avarice engaged in terrible, life-threatening play with the other kids in the park.
”I showed Marta what I had, though I was tactful enough not to call it *synthetic turtle p.e.n.i.s*, because while Marta was earthy, she wasn't *that*
earthy and, truth be told, it got me kinda hot to watch her long, pale blue fingers fondling the soft tissue, then triggering the circuit that hardened it.