Fire in the Firefly (23 page)

Heaven is where you have your cake and eat it too.

The Collected Sayings of Julius Roebuck

“S
orry I didn't come to visit you in the hospital.”

“Don't be silly. Anne tells me you asked every day.”

“I still think you should sue.”

“And the flowers. Lovely.”

“Yarrow, for health.”

“Perfect. Perfectly appropriate.”

“Really. I mean it. The loss of productivity alone …”

“They decided it was probably a virus …”

“Anne said. But it started with that poisoned seafood.”

“Water under the bridge, Yasmin.”

“So you're sure you're in good health?”

Now they've reached the nub. She has been having second thoughts, he is well aware, with regard to his genetic fitness: it's a delicate thing to have to defend. Roebuck has been in business long enough to know when the hard sell is counterproductive. He lets the answer go unspoken because he also knows that Yasmin has already got the goods from Anne.

Anne was worried.

So worried that when the verdict came in that it wasn't cancer, wasn't anything at all in fact beyond a mystery, she raptured like a Baptist climbing back to Jesus.
“We played tennis this afternoon and he beat me four sets out of six! Most games it's the other way around! Oh, Yasmin, he's completely recovered. I can't tell you how relieved I am!”

Anne takes her tennis very seriously

Bottom line, in any case, is if there had been a change of mind, he wouldn't be sitting here on Yasmin's
safari-inspired
couch. Her basal body temperature, recorded just moments ago, is a perfect one degree above its sultry norm.

“I'm fine,” says Roebuck.

The loft is exactly how he'd imaged it: Tiger stripes and leopard spots; ebonies and cherry woods; feral reds with blazes of orange and emerald green; rampant nudes stretching tendons on marble pedestals; goddesses in nooks with snakes around their hips and breasts like perfect pumpkins. And of course a wealth of mirrors. Roebuck has never put his finger on exactly what
kundalinic energy is supposed to be, but he figures this is it.
He permits himself a sip of wine.

“You haven't been drinking, have you? I mean in the last
twenty-four
hours.”

“Are we going to do this?”

Now that he is sitting primly with his back against her sofa, Roebuck finds himself surprisingly relaxed.

If there has been a guiding principle, getting here, it has been his own internal steadiness, Roebuck's
rock-ribbed
fidelity to his own intentions. When Yasmin suggested she come by his office—whatever time he named—his reply was a firm and confident
no
. “Not the right environment,” he returned by Hushmail. “Difficult, in that setting.”

“I thought you said you were recovered?”

“This has nothing to do with that, Yasmin. It's a matter of …” he chose his wording carefully … “ambience. Privacy.”

They'd gone at it back and forth like teenagers passing notes.

“Why can't you do it at home and bring it with you? I'll stop by your office …”

“Even worse. With the kids screaming and Anne yelling at me to get out of the bathroom. Are you kidding? Plus there's the issue of freshness.”

“So how do we do this?”

“Your place.”

“You'll bring it to my place? That works for me.”

“I'll produce it at your place. Safer.”

Nearly an hour of silence before Yasmin's reply. “Julius. I'm not comfortable with that option.”

“
You're
not comfortable?” Roebuck had his script prepared well in advance. “What about me? This is awkward for me wherever it happens. Your place is the least awkward option. Plus it's the most efficient. Plus it guarantees freshness. If you want to do this, this is how it has to be.”

Yasmin, he knows, likes her logic laid out like sausages in links. But in the end he's fairly certain it was the freshness angle that clinched it.

He sips his Barolo. It's a heady wine for the circumstances. She has unexpected depths, sometimes. Tannins pluck at the root of his tongue.

“Well,” he says, standing.

Yasmin stands also.

Eyebrows politely raised, Roebuck glances round the room.

“The bathroom is right this way.”

He has wondered how she would be dressed for this. Like a real estate agent, as it turns out, for an upscale showing; careful though observably unbuttoned. He notes that she's in heels as always. Yasmin leads him to the bathroom and halts there by the open door.

Again he is struck by the image of realty and display. She gestures and steps to one side. The room is massive. It must originally have been a bedroom, converted to its present opulence. He can tell, even through the swirl of all these other currents, that Yasmin is proud of her loo: smoked glass and showerheads like enormous sunflowers; a massive tub more reminiscent of a limestone pool; candles here and there in sconces. He smells incense, but can't locate the source. It's the coffee table, though, that draws his eye: elaborate
wrought-iron
—placed at the foot of a wingback chair. He wonders if this is a permanent feature or arranged just for today.

And there it is: his
orange-lidded
sample jar, bathed in candlelight, perched tactfully beside an assortment of erotic magazines, fanned for ease of reference.

“It's lovely,” he says. “You've thought of everything.”

She blushes. “Make yourself comfortable.”

The hostess with the mostess, he wants to add, regressing, but disciplines himself.

Yasmin shuts the door, and Roebuck is left to his devices.

He hears her heels receding and settles into the comfortable chair. Roebuck looks over his selection of reading material.
He is surprised to see that
Hustler
is still in print. Didn't Larry Flint die eons ago? Or maybe he's thinking of the
Penthouse
guy? Bowing to nostalgia, Roebuck opts for
Playboy.

He is
open-minded
on the subject of pornography—as an advertiser, he has to be—but deep down Roebuck has never really understood the appeal. Watching someone else having sex is only a reminder that you yourself are not. Same again with photographs of naked women: they are there; you are somewhere else. Though it's also true that he remembers, back in adolescence, aching at those pictures slipped out from underneath the mattress—and there it is again: cliché. But the moment he was old enough to access the real thing, facsimiles ceased to be of interest. It's been decades since Roebuck cracked the cover of a girly magazine.

The crotch shots are much as he remembers, though come to think of it perhaps more extensively trimmed. And silicone hadn't yet been standardized, back then, so breasts weren't replicated in such spherical precision. But the pouts haven't changed, though the cartoons—which in his memory were daring and often quite witty (is he right in recalling that Heffner himself did the drawings?)—are now depressingly banal.

It was always said that
Playboy
published
top-notch
writing. Roebuck leafs through pages.

Most of the articles are short and loud. No Norman Mailers, these days; at least not this edition. There's a profile on one of the more recent
boy-band
castratos, now launched into a career in motion pictures. Morgan would be interested in it, though grossed out by the photographs before and after. Roebuck lingers for a time at the
Advisor
page. A reader wants to know if it's possible to have sex with a ghost. The editor's reply, in italics, is cautiously affirmative, quoting Chaucer. A gentleman from Raleigh, North Carolina, asks if it's all right to have sex with his cousin, and a reader from Georgia wonders what percentage of women shave their pubic hair today as compared to ten years ago? The reply cites a survey conducted at Indiana University which found that 21 percent of women age 18 to 24 are typically
hair-free
, 38 percent go bare sometimes, while 29 percent trim. With each subsequent age group—and this factoid comes as no surprise—less hair is removed less often. Women who go bare are more likely to receive cunnilingus, to be in a
long-term
relationship, but not married, and to score higher on measures of genital
self-image
and sexual function … Roebuck slots this information in with other, complementary data. He briefly considers tearing out the page for Lily's entertainment.

Drag and clop … drag and clop … drag and clop
… Back and forth beyond the door, Yasmin is pacing. Shaved, he decides, dollars to doughnuts. He wishes he had topped up his glass while the bottle was still handy.

Halfway in, he finds a short story. Has
Playboy
always published fiction? This too he can't recall. The
lead-in
is unpromising. Some kind of
sci-fi
StarTrek
send-up
, by the look of it, but Roebuck perseveres. The plot is not what he would call original. The yeoman is expecting to die; he's the sixth member of a
six-man
team about to be beamed to the surface of an unexplored planet, and the sixth guy always comes back dead. Wasn't there was a movie on this theme, a few years back with Sigourney Weaver?

Roebuck's glass is now empty.

He gets up, crosses yards of marble to the sink, and refills it from the tap—more a stone lip, really, than tap: water flowing over the edge for the
tranquil-mountain
-
brook-effect
. The crystal makes a tinkling sound against the stone.

“Everything all right in there?”

Yasmin is tapping at the door.

“Um …” he says. And not a word more.

Roebuck returns to his fiction. The dialogue is not bad, crisp even; though the Captain Kirk figure is parodied so heavily that Roebuck almost gives up on this writer. The yeoman has a wife, though, who's had enough of her husband's
dead-end
jobs and threatens to intercede with the chain of command. A nice touch of irony, but he can see where this one's going.

Heels are tracking back and forth again outside.

The away team has beamed down to the planet. The captain immediately goes looking for aliens to have sex with, while the yeoman is sent to explore a dangerous crevice. Roebuck honestly believes that the monologue at the start of the original
Star Trek
captures the true human spirit as accurately as anything he's come across since, though even he would never admit that in public. To boldly go …

“Julius! What's going on in there?”

“Well …” he says. “Um …”

“I beg your pardon? I can't hear you.”

He clears his throat, audibly. “Well, I mean … it just doesn't seem to be … working.”

A pause “Did you find the magazines?”

“I did. Yes. Thank you.”

Roebuck gives himself a little breathing room. He coughs a little pointedly. He has decided he wouldn't mind finishing this story.

Yasmin flounces off. Footsteps go stalking in the direction of the living area. She's upending the rest of the bottle, he decides. But in a minute she is back outside the door.

Silence.

He remembers that he should uncap the sample jar.

Roebuck puts his magazine
face-down
on the armrest so he can free both hands. He untucks his shirt and generally dishevels.

“Any luck?”

“Sorry … no.”

“Oh, for God's sake!”

Now she's really pacing. He imagines her consulting the thermometer again … escalating anxiety, her window closing … the clock ticking down …

Roebuck undoes a little more extensively. He has to look like he's been giving this his all. He stands, loudly buckling, zipping. Sighing, sighing …

A brooding silence from beyond the door.

“I'm sorry, Yasmin. Maybe this was just a bad idea …”

It swings open. Roebuck has of course undone the lock.

“What can I do?”

She has, he sees, kicked off her shoes.