Case and the Dreamer (44 page)

“So he strips naked and says, in that voice, ‘Now?’ And she murmurs, ‘Now …’ And he tiptoes across the room with this enormous erection ahead of him like a bowsprit, and he says, ‘Prue? Li’l Prue?’ And she flings back the covers, and then he does his trick.”

There was the kind of this disoriented silence that happens for the first three seconds after a videotape breaks.

“What trick?!” Michaelmas asked.

“I told you. O’Toole has a trick he does. He did his trick, and then they got dressed, and he took her home, and that’s all.”

“Dammit, woman!” Michaelmas roared in his old skinflint, miser, robber baron manner, “What the hell happened?”

“Mr. Mike, dear, I love you altogether, but I wouldn’t spoil what comes next for anything in the world. Even you.”

There was a moment’s tense silence. Then a cultivated female voice spoke from a corporate walnut speaker grille: “Mr. Michaelmas, there’s a Mr. O’Toole here to see you.”

Apricot held up five fingers. “Give me five minutes,” Michaelmas called.

“Only five?” The voice clicked off.

Apricot laughed. “Oh, that O’Toole.…” She bounded out of bed and began to skin into a very formfitting silver jumpsuit. A little less gracefully and slightly irritated, Michaelmas fumbled into slacks and a T-shirt and scuffs. Apricot led the way—danced the way—into the adjoining office. Her eyes sparkled. She waved toward the desk
intercom. Michaelmas threw the key and said, “I’ll see Mr. O’Toole now.”

“Will you ever,” Apricot murmured.

The tall doors swung open, and O’Toole strode in wearing a thin chamois jacket and matched wool turtleneck, dark-brown slacks and huaraches. He looked very refreshed. “Morning, Apricot … Mr. Michaelmas,” he rumbled.

“O’Toole,” said Apricot gaily, “we can talk about coffee and the weather and how you are later, if you don’t mind. But I’ve just told Mr. Michaelmas everything that happened with you and Prue Adams, up to but not including the moment you did your trick. And he can’t wait to know the rest of it, and I can’t wait either.”

“Oh—okay.” Quite unselfconsciously, he unzipped the dark-brown slacks.

“Wait!” Apricot cried. She whirled to the cabinet behind the desk and took out a Styrofoam cup. “Would you mind?”

“Not at all.” O’Toole hooked one iron thumb into the intricate back of a heavy, straight chair and slung it out to the middle of the room. He straddled it in such a way that the corner of the seat was centered under his crotch. From his open fly he produced the kind of dong that makes a fair percentage of other men feel that what they have is ding. On a small triangular platform formed by the corner of the chair, Apricot carefully placed the Styrofoam cup and stood back.

Michaelmas seemed about to speak, when Apricot said, “Sh-h-h. Watch.”

With no observable effort on O’Toole’s part, his dangling organ snapped erect with such speed and force that the cup was belted halfway across the room, whizzing past Michaelmas’s ear.

“Now that,” breathed Michaelmas in an awestruck voice, “that is really a trick. So … what did you do Wednesday night—bombard that poor lady with plastic cups?”

Apricot was still applauding. “O’Toole, thank you. Mr. Mike, that was
not
his trick … his
other
trick. O’Toole, I told everything up to your using the trick. Now I’d like to show Mr. Michaelmas exactly how it all happened.

“I’ll be Prue Adams. I’m naked. I’m lying in the bed—” She hopped up on the huge desk and lay down.

“I’m covered with a blanket. You call out from the bathroom, ‘Ready?’ And I say, ‘Ready.’ You’re naked with that nice hard-on. You come across the room, stop by the bed and call my name. I open my eyes and see that wonderful tool reaching out for me. I throw the blanket off—you’ll have to imagine there’s a blanket—and you do your trick. Got it?”

“Got it,” said O’Toole. He extricated himself from the chair. Even from where he sat, Michael could see the coral tip of that weapon of O’Toole’s pulsing; and it couldn’t have been more stiff if it had been splinted with a rat-tail file.

Apricot lay still on the desk with her eyes open.

O’Toole called out softly, a sound like a low B-flat on the French horn: “Ready?”

“Ready,” she half whispered totally, and closed her eyes.

O’Toole tiptoed across to her, preceded by the bowsprit. “Ape—I mean, Prue. Little Prue …”

Apricot opened her eyes, which fixed on the looming torpedo. Her eyes grew even larger, and she made a wide gesture with her arm, sweeping away the imaginary blanket.

Now, there is a sound that can only be written
ecch
, but which is pronounced in the back of the throat—like the sound some people make immediately before they spit, but softer.

Pretend-naked O’Toole looked down on pretend-naked pretend-Prue, his absolutely no-pretense-about-it erection hanging over her, and made that strange sound
—ecch.…

And the bone-stiff, pulsing kidney-wiper collapsed, a good deal faster than a tire goes flat (but quieter). At the same time O’Toole’s expressive face acquired an expression of terminal boredom, as he turned his aristocratic profile aside, his eyes upward and away from the supine form before him. In a voice suddenly cold, suddenly harsh, he said, “Get your clothes on. I’ll take you home.”

Apricot rolled up to sit on the edge of the desk, beaming. “How about that? That’s his trick.”

Michaelmas had not quite finished getting his breath back.
“O’Toole,” he said finally, “how do you do that?”

“I dunno, Mr. Michaelmas. It’s just something I do. Always could. Hormones or something. I just don’t know,” O’Toole said, putting his equipment away.

Michaelmas went round the desk for his checkbook and wrote. He tore off a check and handed it to O’Toole. “That’s what we agreed on?”

“No,” said O’Toole. “It’s twice as much.”

“Worth it,” Michaelmas said.

As O’Toole started away, Apricot said, “Go talk to Sue Benson. I bet she’s holding her breath waiting for you to go through those doors.”

O’Toole paused. “You want me to—”

“Beat it.” Michaelmas smiled. “That one’s on you.” When O’Toole had gone, he turned to Apricot, who was swinging her feet, all but purring. “Ape, did you write that script?”

She nodded. “Mm-hm.”

“Sometimes,” Michaelmas said, “you scare me.”

Later, alone in his office, Michaelmas sent for Square Adam. The young executive bounded in. His eyes sparkled, he crackled with energy, and when he walked up and down, which he did almost every time he said anything, Michaelmas thought he was going to skip. “Well! You’re looking chipper today.”

“I finished typing in the notes,” Adams said, putting them on the desk.

“Fine. How’re things, Adam?”

“Oh, good. Wonderful. I mean, great!” He moved close and put his hands on the desk. “Mr. Michaelmas—do you understand women?”

“No.”

“Well, the most unbelievable thing happened last night, Thursday night, you know. That’s when we … gee, I feel kind of funny talking about it—it’s kind of private, you know.”

Michaelmas rose from his chair and came around to put a fatherly hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You don’t think I’d misuse
anything you told me behind closed doors, do you?” Which is the kind of thing you learned if you were ever a skinflint. The other guy always thinks you’ve made a promise.

“Oh, gosh, no!” Adam said. “After we talked the other day and all.” And he actually blushed. “What happened last night, I was coming to bed—
her
bed, you know—and the first thing she did was tell me not to put out the light. That never happened before. And all of a sudden she threw back the bedclothes and lay there on the sheet. And she, well, she didn’t even have her nightgown on! She was half crying and said, ‘Adam, am I ugly? Am I awful? Do I turn you off?’

“And I said, ‘Prue, this—you—you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ And she cried out and put up her arms … and we, well, you know, and it was just wonderful. And, and … that isn’t all. Afterward she wouldn’t let me go. Not even to, you know, wash. I stayed in her bed all night long. I never did that before! And it was wonderful. I really do not understand women.” He made a little laugh, started out, stopped, turned. “Mr. Michaelmas?”

“Yes, Adam.”

“Do you suppose I could order some of those, uh, educational movies?”

“All you want, son. And better.” Michaelmas smiled.

Sometimes you look at ’em once and you just don’t believe your eyes and you have to turn your head away and think it over for a split second before you look again to check out why you are kidding yourself; nobody can look as beautiful as that, not in real life. And when you look again, you find out she really does.

I think if you had to find a single word for her, it might be ‘supple,’ but, you see, one word wouldn’t do. The way she carried herself, that shining hair, that half smile, sort of a ‘come on, it’s all right’ sort of smile, directed and announced to the whole world. The sun was on her as she came down the steps of the Women’s Medical Clinic on Balboa Avenue. I’d been climbing up, but the sight of her stopped me stupid, standing there goggling with my mouth open. And her smile widened a little, as if she liked what she saw and she said “Hi.”

I have my own personal cargo of shy, and this isn’t my style at all, but I heard myself saying, “You want coffee, right?”

“Tea,” she said. You watch someone playing cello, if they bow right up near the bridge in the middle-low register, it makes a sound like her voice.

I said a little tiny ‘oh’ and then a real sharp “Oh!” and I could feel my eyes open so wide they bulged. “Well,” I said, and, “Well, then.” And, “There’s a place over on mumble mumble.”

“Oh good.”

So there we were in this coffee shop, where she settled into a booth like thistle-down when the wind dies. Her name, she said, was Griselda—“Grizzly.” I’d said, wittily, “I can’t bear it,” and then she’d said, “A lot of people say that, sooner or later,” and coming from anyone else, that would be puncture, but not the way she did it, so pleasant. And from the time the coffee (and tea) were ordered until
the time they arrived, I didn’t try to say a word, I just looked. She took it gracefully, with another kind of smile which said openly, “Go ahead—it’s all right.” “Graceful”—that’s another one-word description, but it doesn’t cover the shining teeth peeping out from under their pink-silk coverlet, not that soft shadowed cave between the fall of her hair and her neck when she tipped her head to one side. Then she said, “Do you have herpes?”

I said “h-h-h- …” and then had to stop and swallow. I told myself for a lot of years that I was unshockable, but guess what. When I got my breath back I said, “No I don’t, and I don’t have Down syndrome or neurodermatitis or—or Twonk’s Disease or even AIDS.”

“That’s too bad,” she said—she said regretfully!—and then reached quickly to touch the back of my hand (it was the first touch between us, and it raced through my entire endocrine system) and she made a small laugh. “I don’t really mean herpes; that’s at a standstill right now, although there might be a real breakthrough soon, what with oral acyclovir and that detergent cell they’re looking at now. No—AIDS is what I’m after at the moment. Of course,” she added, and touched my wrist again, only enough to make my nostrils flare, “I’d want to get it from someone I liked. What’s Twonk’s Disease?”

I tried to come out of shock into anger—I really tried, but dammit, I had to look at her while I did that, and I couldn’t look at that face, that hair, and feel anything but wonder. “You’ve got a funny way,” I said oafishly, “of being funny.” And then the anger poked its little head up again. “Is that a cute way of finding out if I’m gay?”

She made a half shake of her head. Impatience. “Don’t fall for that Moral Majority ploy, that you have to make it with a homosexual Haitian drug addict to get AIDS. The first researchers found it there, sure, and it was a godsend to Sister Schlafly, who could then imply that God sent it to punish the sins of gays for they did with each other, for snowbirds for what they did to themselves, for Haitians for being black and for anyone who might be an undocumented alien. Once the doctors got into some real research, they found out that most anybody can get acquired immunodeficiency syndrome from anyone who has it. Ask the doctors at Montefiore Medical if you don’t believe me.”

I’d’ve believed anything she told me, but I was afraid to say so yet. I hadn’t been ready for that cascade of information and opinion either. I said, “Why are you so interested in AIDS, anyway?”

“I think I told you. I want to catch it.”

My coffee was getting cold. I wasn’t. “You?
You?
” It came out like a holy word. “That would be terrible! Just, well,
terrible!
Why on earth would you want to do a thing like that?”

“Because I’d make an ideal research subject. And they could research me for months—years, on that one.”

I felt a great warm rush of something which completely bypassed the ductless glands. It was admiration. “You are a wonderful, wonderful person.” I think I had tears in my eyes. “You care that much about other people, people you don’t even know, that you’d risk your life to help find a cure.” I wanted to belly across the table and hug her but real reverence tied me down. “You are a saint.”

“I wish I could pin that medal on,” she said, and took both my hands. “Just to have you looking at me like that. Nobody ever looked at me like that before.” Her eyes were extraordinarily bright. We sat that way for a half minute or a week, I forgot which, and then she took her hands away, and said: “Do I have to tell you how hard it is to get a job these days—any job, let alone a good clean one where you know where the next meal and the next change of linen is coming from? And people around you who really care?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“I know a man who has diffuse interstitial pneumonitis. It’s slowly turning those little spongy cells and his lungs into fibroid tissue. Nobody knows what causes it. There’s a team of doctors at UCSD Medical Center who want to find out. He’s lost thirty-five percent of his lung capacity already. It will surely kill him.”