Koko. Peter Straub
Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.
This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed – the mattress – whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.
Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.
The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.
The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. ‘Oh, sure,’ Tina grumped, ‘I spend all day in bed reading poetry.’ But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr Fenwick Throng.
‘Fenwick Throng?’ Pumo asked. ‘Is that a real name?’
The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the Village Voice at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria, a cafe where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.
He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing in the center of the page: Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East with the others, taking Type A with. Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.
He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole, pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled for the check, paid and left.
Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the agent’s line was always busy.
At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and let him in.
If it hadn’t been for that New York article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.
This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie. They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.
Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.
All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line, my life stopped making sense.
Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers. For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she had left behind.
Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks. Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious yellow-tinged ‘vodka’ Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air Cav.
‘That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,’ said a low voice beside him.
Pumo turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white sidewalls.
Fifteen minutes later the girl was squeezing herself up against him in the back of a taxi. ‘Bite my ear,’ she said.
‘Here?’
She tilted her head toward him. Pumo put one arm around her shoulder and took her earlobe between his teeth. Fine black stubble covered the side of her head.
‘Harder.’
She squirmed when he bit down on the gristly lobe.
‘You didn’t tell me your name,’ he said.
She slid her hand over his crotch. Her breasts nuzzled his upper arm. He felt pleasantly engulfed. ‘My friends call me Dracula,’ she said. ‘But not because I suck blood.’
She wouldn’t let him turn on the lights in his loft, and he groped his way to the bedroom in the dark. Giggling, she pushed him down on the bed. ‘Just lie there,’ she said, and undid his belt, got rid of his boots, and pulled down his trousers. He got out of the chain-mail jacket and wrenched off his tie. ‘Pretty Tina,’ Dracula said. She bent over and licked his erect cock. ‘I always feel like I’m in church when I do this.’
‘Wow,’ Tina said. ‘Where have you been all my life?’
‘You don’t want to know where I’ve been.’ She lightly scratched his scrotum with a long fingernail. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t have any nasty diseases. I practically live at the doctor’s office.’
‘Why?’
‘I guess I just enjoy being a girl.’
Exhausted, dulled by alcohol, Pumo let her proceed. When she sat up, straddling him, she looked like an Apache warrior with plucked eyebrows. ‘Do you like Dracula?’
‘I think I’ll marry Dracula,’ he said.
She unbuttoned the camouflage shirt and tore it off, exposing firm conical breasts. ‘Bite me,’ she said, pushing them into his face. ‘Hard. Until I tell you to stop.’
He gently bit one of her nipples, and she ground her knuckles into the side of his head. ‘Harder.’ She dug her nails into his cock. Pumo