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Synopsis.

KELLY CHRISTENSEN:
An Introduction

The sequel to

GINNY GOOD.

Chapter One Little Yellow Thong Thing I mentioned somewhere toward the end of Ginny Good that I might write a whole 'nother book someday, but that was total crap. I had no intention of ever writing another word. Don't hold your breath, I think I said. In case you haven't read it, Ginny Good was mainly about how Elliot Felton and Ginny and Melanie and me all tried living together like one big happy family back in the summer of 1972. Kelly Christensen wasn't even quite born yet. Ha! She's such a kid, so old and wise, so smart and careful, so the total love of my life. Holy Christ, is she ever cool. Her eyes do things I can't explain. They show you who she is, how scared and shy and smart and quick to see you're telling a lie if you're ever stupid enough to try to tell her a lie. I don't try to tell her lies, no, no, no. But once you get past the suspiciousness, you can see in Kelly's eyes how quivery and young and tender and skittish she is, how full of life, like a deer, a fawn, almond-shaped, dewy, doe-like eyes. It feels like I found her a dream, curled up under a lilac bush in a warm, friendly forest in the spring, dappled in sunlight and naked except for that little yellow thong thing she wears. On her driver's license they call the color of her eyes hazel...yellow flecks, green glint, grey...but I think that hazel bullshit just means nobody could ever describe what the hell color her eyes are. Her hair, her driver's license calls brown. Stupid driver's license, what does it know? Her hair's long and fine and shiny and mostly strawberry blond with bangs cut straight across her forehead. She sent me a lock of her hair in the mail before we met. It was two-feet long and silkier than silk. I took it out into the sunlight to see it shine and never saw more colors of hair before in my life, amber and reddish and blond and shades of lighter and darker strawberry-brown. Her hair's as endless as her eyes; everything about her is worse than eternal. I put the strand of her hair into my mouth like she was there in the flesh out in my front yard. She was. She is. I take her by the hand through the bushes by my mother's bedroom window, up the path beside the house and into the back yard to see how her hair shines in the sun up there. We look across the valley. I put my arm around her shoulders. She's always here, not just the lock of her hair—all of her, everywhere all the time, her neat feet with clear, no-nonsense nail-polish, her tiny ankles and tomboy calves and bony knees and skinny thighs. And her ass, sheesh, I can't even think about her cute ass without wanting to hold her in my hands. Fuck. That was how the whole thing started, right there. Kelly and I had gotten to be buddies. I was having girl trouble, she was having husband trouble. I told her I was done with this chick I was messing with and needed to get me a new chick to mess with. "Hey, find me someone else to flirt with. Some little Polish chick, maybe, with a space between her teeth. Or an Asian chick with extra slanty eyes and an overbite like a beaver, a hint of a lisp, no one too commercially gorgeous. Mid to low self-esteem, a nice ass and vestiges of an eating disorder would be perfect." "Shit, the only part of that I fit is the nice ass part. Damn it." In case you didn't read Ginny Good, the four of us all living together turned out to be kind of a dumb idea. I wrote a book about it and stuck it up on the Internet. Kelly read it. She liked it. We got to be buddies in e-mails until I heard about her nice ass and we wound up in a torrid online romance...in e-mails, on the phone...that progressed pretty quickly into getting together for a week in so-called real life. We did it all. We couldn't get enough of each other...well, until we had to cool it after a year and a half or so 'cause of her marriage and the way she had it in mind that she needed to live her life. "I'm glad you told me I could keep you with me however I needed to, because I do need you too much to bury you. Without you I'm completely alone so I pretty much have to keep you as alive and close to me as I can. I'll try to use you well. You gave me so much good stuff I can't even, fuck, I'm crying too much. I should just say good-bye. That's what we're doing with all this, right, saying good-bye? I'm trying to be brave, man, but I'm such a big baby. But, no, I'm ready whenever you are. This can be it. I know you don't care at this point, but I'll love you and keep you always." I thought I'd never hear from her again. I did. Right around the time Ginny Good got published. Hearing from Kelly again made me want to write a whole new book, a sequel, on the off chance someone buys the first one and wants to read more. I guess to do that I'd have to pick up where Ginny Good left off. I'd need to go back to how it really all started, before Kelly mentioned her nice ass, way back, back to Melanie. But all I really want to write about is Kelly, so I'm calling this: Kelly Christensen: An Introduction. It's the only way I can trick myself into doing it. Talk about a long time, holy mackerel, going clear back to Melanie is a really, really long time ago, somewhere around 1984 or so, I guess. Fuck. I'm old. Kelly's young. I have all these things I wrote back then that have been gathering dust in my computer, though. I can dig them out and polish them up and get rid of them once and for all. I can do all kinds of things, kill a bunch of birds with one stone—maybe even sell the sucker and get me a big advance, buff-up some and take Kelly to the Bahamas for a week or two. She's so pretty, so sweet, so seriously cute as fuck in that little yellow thong thing she wears. Wow is she ever adorable. You have no idea. Okay, I'm stoked. Then as soon as I'm done with An Introduction, I can write a whole 'nother book, just about Kelly. She Who Needs No Introduction, I'll maybe call it...but first things first. Hope springs eternal. Ha!

Chapter Two Melanie, Wendy and Blue From the time Melanie and I got back together after the four years she spent shooting up heroin in Sacramento in 1978 until I fell in love with Cecelia in 1988, not much happened. Well, Elliot shot himself in the head and Ginny accidently killed herself the same day. That was something. Melanie and Wendy had a dog with them when I got there in the U-Haul. A big dog. Blue. He followed Wendy home one day and that was that. I looked him up in an Encyclopedia of Dogs. He wasn't there. He was a strong, handsome breed unto himself, with thick coppery blond fur tufted white inside his hind legs, a massive white-tipped tail that curled over his back and eyes you could read his mind in. His mind wasn't all that inscrutable. When you opened his dog food he drooled. When you looked at his leash he barked and pranced and jumped on the couch and back to the floor again and bit the handle of the La-Z-Boy. At night he howled along with far away fire trucks in his sleep and dreamed of sheep. Blue went nuts at the mere thought of a sheep, and when he actually saw a few stray lambs at the side of the road, oh boy. He tore the car apart. He bit the glass, chewed the seat belt. It had to be genetic. There weren't many sheep in Sacramento, however, so poor Blue had to make do mainly with rabbits and squirrels. Wendy took advantage of his instincts. She called everything a sheep. She'd see a rabbit and say, "Go get the sheep." And Blue would take off rocking like a rocking horse with his tail bounding above the dry oats by the Sacramento River...or she'd see a squirrel and tell him, "Get the sheep! Get the sheep!" And poor, innocent, ever-trusting Blue would tear off through flocks of flapping ducks on the lawn at Sutter's Fort chasing the squirrel up the side of a tree. That always baffled him as if he also knew instinctively that sheep could not climb trees. When Melanie, Wendy and Blue came back to San Francisco with me, there weren't even any rabbits or squirrels. Wendy had Blue chasing imaginary mice and the neighbor's big white cat. Taking advantage of Blue's instincts was the least of Wendy's troubles. She skipped school and stole cars and did way too many drugs for a thirteen-year-old kid and finally ended up in the Youth Authority facility down in Camarillo for a year or so. That was a relief. She would have been dead the way she was going. We couldn't stop her, Melanie and I. We tried, Lord knows. In 1983, Wendy moved to Sacramento with some boyfriend or other, and took Blue with her. Melanie and I had each other all to ourselves again. We were living on Larkin Street, Tenderloin Heights we used to call it. We'd been through a lot for a long, long time—twenty years, more or less, on and off, give or take. We weren't expecting much more than for one of us to die in the other's arms. On Saturday mornings we went around the corner and up the hill to Brother Juniper's Breadbox on Bush Street for breakfast. Melanie just had coffee while I ate scrambled eggs, wheat toast and dark crispy clumps of hashbrowns. The deal was that if you got coffee with breakfast it only cost a dime. Otherwise, separately, a cup of coffee cost seventy-five cents, and since Melanie had already eaten her usual yeasty concoction of apples, wheatgerm, Tiger's Milk and blackstrap molasses before the sun had come up, she drank the coffee that came with my breakfast and the whole thing cost less than two bucks. Oh, you could get refills, too, so we both had coffee. Melanie drank hers black. When she'd had enough, I gobbed mine up with honey and half-and-half. We were frugal. We didn't have to be, we just were. After Brother Juniper's, we stocked up on groceries at Bob's U-Save Supermarket down on Geary. Pigeons nested in the big sheetmetal U in the U-Save sign. We always got in Mei's line. I called her the Chinese Checker. Mei ran the middle register, wore tight jeans and leg warmers and had a different tint of Easter Egg Lavender or Cotton Candy Pink in her hair every time you went there. She was a sweetheart. She took her time with the old people—the deaf, crotchety old retired fry cooks and the fuss-budget little women in Empress Eugenie hats with veils. Nobody didn't like Mei. She knew how a person felt. No matter who you were or what you looked like or how much of a bare beer belly spilled out from under your yellowing thermal undershirt, Mei always called you her darling or her dear or "Precious" or "Sugar" or "Honey" or just plain, unequivocal "Love." Mei had a whole raft of ways to cheer a person up. Some of the regulars did their shopping one or two items at a time, three or four times a day, just to hear what Mei was going to come up with to say to them the next time. She didn't have any favorites. They were all her favorites. Even people you could barely look at, she treated like belles of the ball, like cocks of the walk—like the woman with pins in her jaw who, once she got her mouth open, couldn't get it shut again without using the back of her wrist. Or the Breugel guy with a touch of cerebral palsy who always wore what looked like a sturdy replica of a World War I aviator's cap. You couldn't look at him for long. Nor did you want to get in his way. The whole store was like a giant pinball machine the guy had been shot into. People cringed whenever they saw him making one of his great sweeping swoops over toward the plate glass window or caroming off to the left like he was about to crash his tattered biplane into a stack of egg cartons. He always seemed to catch himself just in the nick of time. There was never any harm done. And when he finally managed to limp and shuffle his way up to purchase his jar of generic peanut butter, Mei treated him like he was her friend. She treated everyone like they were her friends. They were. They counted out whatever handful of nickels and dimes it was going to take to purchase the two flawless bananas they'd finally decided upon, and Mei lavished them with words of affection and respect and they went waltzing happily out the automatic doors like they were on their way to the opera in a top hats and pearls. The trouble was that with such a devoted following, Mei's line was always the longest, but she made up for it by working her stubby, cut up, bandaged, newsprint blackened fingers faster than you could see without a strobe light—and the best thing of all was that sometimes she brought her baby daughter to work with her. The kid couldn't quite walk yet, but she could sure fidget. Her father had most likely been a black guy and, all in all, given the crossbreeding left over from slavery days, the kid looked like a reasonable mix of all the races on the planet. Mei dressed her up in frilly dresses and tied her hair into bunches like broccoli with pastel ribbons and painted her fingernails and toenails to match the ribbons. She was going to grow up to be another Coming of Christ—this time as a chick for a change. Already she was a carpenter, for God's sake. She sat in the cul-de-sac at the end of her mother's chute and built walls around herself with everyone else's groceries. The kid was particularly fond of potato chips. Whenever a bag of Laura Scudder's came skittering her way, the kid clapped it on both sides with a big, crunchy bang and lifted it aloft for all to see, smiling and gasping in long, shrill hiccups of laughter, as if she and she alone had found what everyone else had been endlessly searching for up and down the gum-stuck aisles. Then her mother gathered all the groceries together, tore down the kid's walls, stuffed each of the items expertly into brown paper bags and gave the bags to someone neither of them even knew, bam, just like that. It was cruel. Surprise and wonder and amazement puddled up in the kid's eyes but never quite got a chance to turn into the torrents of tears they wanted to turn into before her mother rolled a can of Star-Kist Tuna her way again, a box of Premium Saltines, a four-roll pack of Charmin—and the little doll built them into walls around herself. A loaf of bread might have been a few cents cheaper at Safeway, but Melanie and I had long since concluded that there wasn't anywhere better to do our shopping than at Bob's and we trudged happily home every Saturday with at least two big bags of groceries apiece. Sometimes we hugged each other in the kitchen and maybe went to the movies afterwards and sometimes made love after the movies and sometimes made love before the movies and often times didn't make love at all, but, either way, we never slept the whole night in the same bed because, according to Melanie, I snored like a motherfucking locomotive. I thought that might have been an exaggeration, but kind of liked sleeping downstairs anyway. I roll around a lot. I clump up the pillows and curl up on one side and roll over and curl up on the other side and kick my feet out from under the covers. Melanie and I accommodated one another. We had deals, all sorts of deals, little deals and big deals, deals we'd hammered out over the decades. One of our deals was that I stayed in bed until Melanie left for work in the morning. From the time her alarm went off at five-thirty until the front gate slammed at seven forty-five, with the single special dispensation that I could come up to take a leak if I had to, the upstairs was hers alone in which to do all the things she had to do to get ready for another day. All the things she had to do had to go in a certain order. She had a system. If she didn't stick to it nothing went right again until she started the whole process all over again the next morning. Wednesdays were the worst. "Let me know when you leave, okay?" I called up to her. Melanie didn't answer. That wasn't unusual either. "Okay," she called back down about five minutes later. "Are you leaving?" "No," she hollered through a mouthful of toothpaste. I knew I exasperated her sometimes but sometimes I made her laugh, too. That was important. "Yeah, well, let me know when you do." She didn't answer. "I'm leaving now," she called awhile later. "Don't forget to lock the door." When we'd been living out in the Mission someone had come into the house and had gone through Melanie's dresser drawers and had cut the crotches out of several pairs of her prettiest panties. That was all whoever did it did but she couldn't think of anything worse a person could have done. It was chilling. And in the years it had been since then, Melanie never left the house without reminding me to lock the door. And the way she reminded me was in a sort of hypnotic chant, like if I didn't remember to lock the door, maybe some more responsible person living inside me would remember to lock the door and she wouldn't have to come home to a house full of open drawers and find all her pretty underpants in pieces. "Yes, my dear." I answered as I always did. "Don't forget to turn off the stove." Similarly, on another occasion, I'd gone out without turning off the burner under the coffee pot. The heat melted the handle and it had taken a week to get the smell of burning plastic out of the place. Melanie couldn't sleep nights. All she could think about was what all the hydrocarbons and poison gasses in the air must have been doing to the delicate membranes of her lungs and liver. I didn't remind her what being strung out on heroin for four years might have done to all her god damn delicate membranes, but instead just tried my best to remember to turn off the stove before I left the house. "Yes, my dear," I sort of sang back to her, while I heard both bolts slip into both locks as she turned each key. Then I heard the gate creak open and slam shut and Melanie was on her way once more—with her Fast Pass in her hand and her purse slung over her shoulder and a scarf trailing out from under her hair shining all red and gold and coppery in the sun. She was alert, well dressed, nice looking; another pretty woman on the way to work with her head down. Melanie didn't rush. She took her time walking toward the bus stop by the Four-Hour Cleaners. If she missed one bus there would always be another. She waited for lights to turn green, for the signs to say WALK. She didn't take chances. They hadn't been worth it. She worked with seven different insurance agents, all men. They liked her. She kept things on an even keel. The bus dropped her in front of the building in the morning and picked her up there at night. That was important. Her performance reports glowed. That was important. Or, hell, maybe it was all just my imagination. Maybe she didn't give a shit where she worked or where the bus dropped her or whether they liked her or not or whether I made her laugh or any of it. Maybe all she wanted was the door locked and the stove turned off. Maybe that was enough. I'd been making good money selling computers for three or four years and in 1984 I thought I knew enough about everything in general to start a business of my own. It was a big disaster. I had the hots for this little secretary I hired. Felice. She was a cutie-pie. My business went out of business. I was bummed. In 1985, I started writing stuff again. I hadn't written anything in twenty years. Well, except for a little here and there. I vaguely remember trying to console myself by writing stuff about Melanie falling in love with her heroin dealer while I was up in Oregon dying a thousand deaths. It started out as a novel, some kind of glitzy blockbuster, I'm sure, but it got boiled down to this: Men stand on street corners from Singapore to Baltimore with their pants around their knees asking questions without answers. The magnolia bush has spilled brown petals onto the ground and the branches of the willow tree sweep magnolia petals into piles day and night and day and night I absolutely hate your fucking guts and always have and always will you darling sweet angel for whom my purest love will never end. Some dark morning when the moon is in Brazil and Uranus is uninhabited, unbeknownst to either of us, I'm going to climb down your throat and eat your adenoids. Creepy crawly across Chianti teeth, small as a spider spore, I'll play me a tune with a spoon on the silver fillings in your teeth, prop myself against your tongue and rape your snotty sinuses one by one, then slide down your windpipe, swing on slick vines through the smoke black jungle of your lungs, singing ape songs out your nose. And when you stir in your slumbers I'll hop an artery to the bustling terminal of your brain, pick a bunch of purple dendrites to feed the starving synapses, take a leak behind a dying axon and dive headlong into the sweet stream of your consciousness to see what swims there, to watch when slimy seven-headed envy hidden in philodendron shadows springs at pity in a pink dress gathering fallen sparrows' eggs, to be there when rage with its tongue cut out, waiting among dead mimosa blossoms tears at sorrow with steel claws walking weeping untouched and unmoved head down in her white gown, to float there myself on an inner tube with pink patches, playing a ukulele and singing merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream to show you I love you but in the meantime I never want to see your shitty face again and want you to know from the bottom of my soul that I wouldn't puke on your head if your life depended on it and find it inconceivable that the God who fashioned tarantulas and toads could have made a creature so ugly and cold-blooded as you, sweet thing, shining jewel in the crown of creation, whose breath is lilacs whose love lights the world. Yours ever faithful, I remain, groveling at your dainty feet, licking the ground you contaminate, choking on the air you breathe, ever truly in love with you, me. Oh, and p.s., everything I've ever told you is a lie. I do have a tendency to get a little whacked when chicks dump me. If I've said it once I've said it a thousand times, the only time I've written anything in my life was to get some chick to like me or to get over some chick who didn't like me anymore. Here's something I put together when I started writing stuff again in 1985 about having had my own business in 1984, hiring Felice, the whole shebang. It's more or less autobiographical, but I call myself Alan Dunstan. Melanie I call Melanie.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part One) Alan Dunstan called his business Slick Solutions, Inc., although, strictly speaking, it wasn't a corporation. He was sole proprietor. His office was in the basement of his and Melanie's apartment. A sliding glass door opened onto the patio. Huge heaps of dusty ivy growing over a weather-beaten fence formed one wall of the patio and the brick backs of buildings formed the other three walls. It was his own backyard, his own square of cement at the bottom of a small urban canyon. Melanie stayed mostly in the upper part of the apartment. Alan picked up the used syringes, the stray beer cans and pizza wrappers that came tumbling haphazardly down from the upstairs windows and hosed off the cement every week or so. A former tenant had left an aluminum lawn chair strung with green and white webbing out on the patio and sometimes, on the few mornings it was warm in San Francisco, Alan stayed in his blue terry cloth robe, took the phone outside, stretched out in the lawn chair with his face to the sun, and made calls while pigeons puffed out their chests and nests of baby pigeons cheeped in the window wells and sparrows twittered and bright green bottle flies dodged cobwebs and landed on sprigs of dusty ivy. Alan's business was consulting for startup companies. He wrote business plans, arranged financing and came up with marketing strategies. He sold encouragement, enthusiasm, pipe-dreams. He printed out twenty-year sales projections into the year 2004 and watched the gleam of avarice in his clients' eyes as they imagined themselves out hobnobbing with Gordon Getty and Steve Jobs. They priced polo ponies, they bought yachting caps. The way Alan saw it was that if they were going to waste hard-earned money trying to start a business, they could waste it on him as well as on anyone else. He sent out invoices. They came back with checks. Alan liked being in business for himself. He was proud of his business plans. They were imaginative. They were fun. They worked. His clients got financing. A few of them actually didn't go bankrupt within the first six months—and most of the rest of them thanked him anyway. He was proud of himself. He made money. He was forty-two. Melanie wondered when he was going to grow up. She was thirty-five. She made money. They weren't particularly happy or unhappy and, mainly, weren't expecting much of anything very major to happen anymore. One warm morning toward the end of January, after the sun had gone behind the building next door, Alan put on a suit and tie and took a bus downtown. He picked up a new insert for his desk calendar, read part of the introduction to a new book about some war between Microsoft and Apple, and at around two, decided to have a Cappuccino. There was a small Korean-owned coffee shop across from Macy's. He'd been going there off and on for years. The coffee shop had a big picture window facing O'Farrell Street and four or five small, black lacquered tables. All the tables were taken but there was a sign, loosely translated from the Korean, which read: SHARE TABLE PLEASE. The table Alan chose to share was the one by the window that already had a young woman sitting at it. She was alone, with an empty cup stuck to a section of Chronicle want-ads, and was intently filling out an employment application. Alan couldn't see her face. Her hair was in the way. But he could see the definite impression of a perky young nipple about the circumference of a new half-dollar pressed against a grey cotton shirt. The shirt was short. It didn't reach quite to the waist of a pair of black pleated pants. Alan noticed the bumps of her spine inching down under the elastic of a pair of pink panties. Her skin was dark and shiny. Gravity tugged her breasts against the fabric of her shirt. Alan's heart beat faster. His spoon trembled vaguely musically beside his frothy Cappuccino as he asked, in a gruff, businesslike voice, "Okay if I sit here?" The young woman looked slowly up from the form she was filling out and her eyes were clear, direct, skeptical, Asian-looking. She was just a kid. She looked around. All the tables were taken. Alan already knew that. He had on a tan Italian suit and a pretty blue silk Armani tie. She could hardly saying no. "Sure," she said uninterestedly, and went back to thinking about what she was going to write next. Her lips were pouty. They glistened without lipstick. She rested the end of the pen against her glistening lower lip, as if that helped her to think. Then she moved the pen slowly down toward to the employment application and filled in another space. Alan poured a circle of sugar into the chocolate sprinkled foam until it oozed over the side of his cup. He soaked it up with three napkins and left them on the saucer. The young woman's wrist was bent at an awkward angle. She made her letters carefully, like she was trying to stay inside the lines of a coloring book, and Alan felt fleetingly parental, like he might have been looking fondly across the dining room table at a daughter doing her high school homework, remembering her dirty knees and scabby elbows and the boogers in her nose. It would have been nice to have had a daughter who did homework at the dining room table. Melanie's daughter, Wendy, never went to high school at all; well, except for the classes they forced her to go to while she was in jail in Camarillo for stealing cars when she was fourteen. She could have been in jail for a lot worse things by then. The young woman glanced over at him. He read her name upside down. Felice. Felice Weiss. Nice. Pretty. Pretty name. Jewish, maybe. But she didn't look Jewish. She looked Asian. Jewish father, probably; probably some prematurely balding Jewish corporal who'd been too stupid to get out of going to Vietnam, who'd probably paid a pretty penny to get some saucy Saigon hooker to spend some time with him, then got her knocked up and brought her home with him because he hadn't ever had any luck with American women in the first place. "Are you looking for a job?" Alan asked. Felice stopped writing. Her fingernails were thick orange polish. The skin around them had recently been picked at. Her eyes came to rest on the knot in his tie. A delicate web of veins showed up at the insides of her wrists. "No. I'm planning the overthrow of the government," she said, and her voice was as clear and as direct and as skeptical as her eyes. "What are you, the FBI?" "Yeah. You want another cup of coffee?" She looked him up and down, cracked a quick, knowing smile, pointed to the daily special misspelled in green chalk on a small blackboard and said, as if suddenly recalling a salient piece of Mao's advice on guerrilla warfare, "How about one of those ham and cheese croissants?" "Sure." Alan shrugged. "...and a Cherry Coke," she said and folded the newspaper and the employment application and put them into the pink backpack on the floor next to her chair. They talked. Her lunch came. She was starving. They talked some more. She had a job as a file clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles on Fell Street. It took her three buses to get there from her little studio in Diamond Heights. The filing cabinets were full of roaches. She had taken the day off to look for another job. It was getting late. She was getting desperate. She was nineteen. She had quit high school when it had been more fun doing drugs with her friends in East Oakland, but was taking classes in Astronomy and Afro-Haitian Dance at City College. Alan told her about his company. She wished she had her own business. "My father had his own business. It went bankrupt." She smirked. She didn't talk in normal sentences, Alan noticed. She blurted out words like bursts from a machine gun like she thought she was tough, like she thought she was a gang girl, like she thought she could scare people. Alan smiled. He wasn't scared. "How come you don't just go to school full time?" he asked. "I have to work." "Why?" "To pay rent." "What's the matter with living at home?" "My father's an asshole." "Are they still married? Your parents?" "My mother died when I was eleven," she said flatly, but one of cheeks twitched imperceptibly and she looked lost and lonely and vulnerable and forlorn. "So, who gave you such a pretty name?" "My father. He told me it came from Kafka's girlfriend, but, like, who wants to be named after someone dating a guy who woke up as a cockroach?" "That's cute." Alan smiled. "I know. I'm adorable." She pronounced her last name, Weiss, like ice, and was half-Thai. Her parents had met in Bangkok. Her father had been stationed in Korea. Her mother had been a sixteen year-old Buddhist schoolgirl. "What did he do in the military?" Alan asked. "Fuck if I know. He got a purple heart for tripping over some boxes and cracking his head on a teletype machine. Now he acts like a war hero." "Lots of people do that." "Lots of people are assholes, too." "What makes him such an asshole?" "Nothing a lobotomy couldn't cure." "What does he do?" "He's an engineer for the government." "Is that why you want to take it over?" "I don't want to take it over, I want to get rid of it." Alan reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. There was a jagged, pinkish scar between the knuckles on her right hand. He brushed across the scar and asked, "How'd you do that?" "Washing dishes," Felice replied, casually withdrawing her hand and looking with some interest at her own knuckles. "A glass broke with my hand jammed up inside of it. It didn't hurt but I bled all over my black Van Halen T-shirt," she complained in a tinny, tremulous, whine which made Alan feel sorry for her all the more. He wanted to do something to make it better. He wanted to take her across to Macy's and buy her things. Any things. Whatever she wanted. Then Felice stretched her arms above her head and her shirt inched up, exposing the skin across her rib cage clear down to her bare brown little slit of a belly button and Alan blurted out, "Hell, Felice, maybe I should just hire you myself." "Are you serious?" she asked and her eyes blazed briefly, like he'd better be. Alan thought for a second. He always had wanted someone working for him, depending on him, some cute young secretary paying her rent with the money he gave her. But now? Sure. Why not? The only problem was they'd have to get an office. Felice couldn't very well come to work down in his basement. Melanie would have gone through the fucking roof. But maybe he needed an office. Maybe it was time he got an office, anyway. Maybe he needed all kinds of new things. "Well?" Felice asked. "I'm thinking." "I really have to get a job. I'd do almost anything." "When can you start?" "Tomorrow?" she asked flirtatiously. "Are you serious?" "Yes." "How much are they paying you? At the DMV?" Felice did some quick calculating, and came up with a vastly inflated amount of money. "Seven-fifty?" "A month?" Alan asked. "Yeah. I mean, no. An hour," she said. "Okay, I'll give you eight bucks an hour," Alan said. "Why don't you just meet me right here." He pointed to the top of the table. "Tomorrow morning at, say, like, around eight-thirty." "You mean, I'm hired!" "Sure. Why not." He smiled. "Yeaaa!" She opened her eyes as wide as her mouth. Then she added, "Can we make it more like around nine-thirty?" "Sure. We can make it any time you want," Alan said. "Nine-thirty's fine," she said and, as Alan got up to leave, Felice brushed her hair away from her clear, pretty forehead and smiled—and Alan presumed it was probably a little too early in the employment relationship to give her a raise, but the thought crossed his mind all the same.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Two) The next day, Karen Stanhope at the property management company was all business—dark suit, flouncy red scarf and a silver pen poised in her right hand. Make-up clung to hairs on her cheeks. The furniture smelled like chrome. She was one of those ballsy real estate women who could call a couple dumpy rooms "a small suite of offices" without batting an eye. "I have a small suite of offices in our Geary Street building we haven't had a chance to have cleaned yet, but..." The two women faced each other across Karen's desk. Alan hung back by the brass waste basket next to the door. Felice's hair had shiny, metallic red highlights, and was blown here and there like the more she didn't give a shit what it looked like the better it looked. Karen Stanhope's hair was slicked back so tight it stretched her face like a balloon. Felice giggled some but held her own. She had on a modest, businesslike black skirt and a loose orange Esprit shirt. Her feet plumped out across the instep of a pair of grey pumps. She dismissed Karen's eager pen with a weary nod and asked, "When could we see the space?" "Now, I suppose," Karen said, fumbling with a huge set of keys on a round silver ring. "If you don't mind showing yourselves." "We don't mind," Felice told her. "I think I'm going to like this job," Felice said, arranging a pile of yellow napkins in her lap. She pulled apart an Egg McMuffin, put the Canadian bacon into one side of the yellow Styrofoam box, batted her eyelashes and said, "I think you're going to be the best boss I ever had." "You haven't had much to compare me with." "I've had my share." "Yeah? So, how many has it been, kiddo?" "Are you going to call me that often?" She frowned. "What should I call you? Employee? Ms. Weiss?" "How about Felice? But, wait. That reminds me," she said, suddenly excitedly. "Well. It's kind of crude. But. Okay. Tarzan and Jane are just first getting to know each other, right? And they sort of stumble into each other, like, in Africa or somewhere, and Tarzan says, 'Hi. Me Tarzan, Lord-of-Jungle. Who you?" And Jane says, 'Me Jane.' And Tarzan frowns and says, 'What whole name?' Jane thinks for a second and says, 'Hole name, "cunt,"'" Felice finished by splaying her slightly scarred hand over her fully flushed face. "That's cute," Alan smiled—and thought, wow, I've known her an hour and already we're talking cunt talk. Felice continued on in a more professional tone of voice, "So, have you figured out why you hired me yet?" "Yeah. Because I like you. You remind me of myself. I wish I'd run into someone like me when I was your age. I'd be some kind of hotshot by now." "Why's that?" "I could have used a little mentoring when I was your age. I could have used a start. I'm going to do with you all the things someone should have done with me." "Like what?" "I don't know. Like, I can probably work you into some sort of an equity position after awhile." "A what kind of a position?" Felice wrinkled her nose like an equity position may have been a sexual perversion, having, perhaps, something to do with a horse. "Equity. Where you get a piece of the action. Like, this guy I do work for, John Larson. He's an asshole, but he has some kind of 3-D graphics card that outputs to fax that has some big Japanese company drooling all over themselves." "Outputs?" Felice questioned the correctness of the term. "Yeah. Puts out. Gets together with. Interfaces. I don't quite understand it all myself, but these bunch of Fujitsu guys are ready to buy his whole company for like around five million bucks, of which I get five percent of if they do." "That's a quarter of a million dollars," Felice said. "Yeah, no shit. But the bad side is if they figure it out for themselves, I don't get diddly for what I've already done." "If what you're trying to tell me is I'm supposed to not get paid, forget it." Alan laughed and smiled and assured her, "No. You get paid. What I'm talking about are more like bonuses, like incentives." "I like bonuses." They were sitting by a window across from the big brown marble Bank of America Building. The fog had about burned off. It was getting bright. They concentrated on breakfast. Alan drank coffee. He liked just watching Felice, whatever she was doing. Her mouth was genetically twisted into a dry, dread, hopeless sneer, perpetually smeared with clear Vaseline Lip Balm. With the sun coming in the way it was and her head tilted sideways to keep bacon grease from dripping into her lap, Alan could see just the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip that made her look like about a thirteen year-old Arab boy—the dark, pouty, petulant, unscrupulous, surly sort of kid Andre Gide would have gone nuts about. "What are you staring at?" "You remind me of a guy in a book," he said. "A guy? Thanks a lot." "A cute guy," Alan amended. "You're really pretty." "I am not." She whined. "What's not pretty about you?" "My hand's all scared up. I had chicken pops." She pointed to an indentation in the middle her forehead. "My eyes are too wide apart. I'm too short. My teeth are jammed together from my father being too cheap to take me to the orthodontist." "Do you want to be perfect?" "Yes." "You're probably already too cute for your own good." "You should see me in the morning." "I'd like that." "I bet you would," she said and took a dainty bite of one of the slices of Canadian bacon. "Don't you eat breakfast?" "On weekends, yeah. Every Saturday Melanie and I have breakfast at Brother Juniper's Breadbox. That's the highlight of our week." "You don't talk about her much." "Melanie? There's not much to say. We've been together a long time. Since something like 1969. She had a daughter when I met her. Wendy. You guys are pretty close to the same age. You might have known her. You probably did drugs together over in East Oakland. We've pretty much got things all worked out." "That's sad." "No, it's not." "Why not?" "I have no idea. It doesn't feel sad." When they got to the suite of offices in the Geary Street building, Felice went in ahead of them. What light there was didn't seem to come from anywhere. The two rooms were small, one with a window overlooking Powell Street, one with a window overlooking Geary. There was a beaded bamboo curtain strung between the rooms. Some of the strings had broken. There were pieces of bamboo on the carpet. What was left in the doorway made random clicks like wooden wind chimes. "So, what do you think?" Alan didn't want to commit himself. Felice was hesitant, disappointed. "I don't know," she said. "Well, we're here. We might as well take a look," Alan said and held the bamboo apart for her. Felice slipped under his outstretched arm and moved warily into the other room. Her hair brushed his face and left a scent of hairspray and perfume and deodorant and makeup in the air. "We'd have to get rid of that." Felice stuck her thumb out at the bamboo curtain and curled up one side of her glistening upper lip like a surly dog. "Okay," Alan said. There was a discolored bed sheet held up by thumbtacks over the outside wall. You couldn't tell dust from shadows. The sheet billowed in a breeze. Alan pulled it down, popping the tacks like tiddlywinks across the room and exposing a rain-spattered window overlooking Powell Street. Felice shied away from the glare and said, "We'd have to get drapes." "Or window shades," Alan said. "I like window shades. With lace curtains. We used to have a window seat in the dining room when I was a kid. In the spring all the leaves came out and the lilacs blossomed and their shadows moved in huge, pretty patterns all over everything. It made you feel good. Just sitting there. Doing nothing." "You have a penchant for talking like a starry-eyed schoolgirl on occasion." "A penchant? Damn! I'm not sure I even know what that means. So, how about it? Window shades? Curtains? What do you think?" "I suppose so," she said reluctantly. Everything Felice ever did or said was reluctantly. She didn't like anything right off the bat. Things had to grow on her. Alan made a note of that. Against the far wall of the first room there was another window. "Oh, look! Come here." She motioned. "You can see down into Union Square. We can get binoculars and spy on people..." "...like birds in a cage." "Huh?" "That's a quote from King Lear. He loses a big battle at the end of the play and gets captured but doesn't give a shit—all he wants is for him and Cordelia to go live happily ever after in a prison somewhere. Like birds in a cage. 'And take on us the mystery of things, as if we were God's spies.'" "Who's Cordelia?" Felice asked. "His daughter." "It figures," she said disparagingly. "But I wouldn't mind getting us a bird, though. Something like a canary. Or a dove. A little white dove to coo along with me while I'm slaving away all day." "Okay. I get curtains, you get a bird. Deal?" She looked back out the window, not quite ready to finalize anything yet, and mused, "It's close to BART. And you can take me for drinks at the St. Francis." "It's cheap." Alan encouraged her. "We could spend all the money we save and fix it up really nice," she said, eyeing the dingy corners as if she had a few decorative touches already in mind. "But what about your clients, though? Think they'd be comfortable coming here?" Alan pretended to be considering the question while he pictured Felice shaking her head in wide-eyed, mock protest, feebly pushing him away as he bent her slowly across the desk they hadn't rented yet, nudged her knees apart, moved the skirt up the sides of her thighs, slipped a finger under the elastic of a pair of brand new bikini underpants he'd just bought her over at Macy's, buried his face between her breasts and felt her laughing the way a cat purrs. "Sure," he said. "They'd love it. And if they don't, we can always just take them over to the St. Francis. I don't think it'd be all that bad, myself." On their way to get another cup of coffee and think about it some more, Felice saw an arrow pointing up to the roof. That cinched the deal. To get to the roof, they had to climb out a window onto the fire-escape and go up an iron ladder attached precariously to the outside of the building. Felice went first. Alan languished beneath her. The ladder was painted a chalky white. Her feet slipped in and out of the backs of her shoes. There were pink calluses on her heels. Her underpants were light blue. She didn't wear pantyhose. Her bare legs were brown and shiny. The panties were on kind of crooked, a little askew, like maybe she'd been in a hurry the last time she took a leak. About halfway up the ladder, Felice missed one of the rungs and had to clamp her thighs around one of the railings. She had no sense of her own mortality. She was nineteen. Her heart gushed with mirth and misery catching up with each other so fast neither ever got a chance to really sink in. "I'd make kind of a big splat from up here." She giggled an infectious giggle and looked down at Alan looking up at her. He didn't answer. When Alan finally made it up the ladder himself, Felice was in a far corner, leaning over the cap of orange tiles on the wall around the roof. Alan crunched through cinders on the blacktop and came up behind her. Wind blew her hair back from her forehead as she turned toward him and said, "In nice weather, we can come up here and work in the sun. Wouldn't that be neat? We can, like, move the whole office up here and work in our bathing suits." "Sure," Alan said. "I'll take you bathing suit shopping one of these days. But, look what you've done," he pointed to white smudges on her skirt from where she'd clung to the ladder. Then he reached over to brush them off. "Oh, fuck," she said, shooed his hand away, wet two fingers and rubbed at the marks, leaving dark wet spots on the front of her skirt. "You look like you just got back from a hot date in the back of a Buick." "That's not exactly the way it's done these days," Felice said. "Yeah? How's it done these days?" "Wouldn't you like to know." She twinkled. Alan had it all pictured. They could bring a bottle of wine and the radio up there and make their own private roof garden. Cinders would stick between her tiny toes as she took mincing little Geisha steps over to a sunny, sheltered corner and spread out a big fluffy beach towel and the tendons at the backs of her legs would stretch as she smoothed it out at the corners. Then she'd lay back and fit a pair of white, mirrored Rivo sunglasses down over her eyes and would seem to doze. He'd leave her alone for awhile, let her relax. Baby oil would accumulate in dark creases across her stomach. Her forehead would glisten. Perspiration would drip slowly between her breasts. He'd come over, then, and brush a few of the cinders off her bare feet. She'd jump and say, "Alan! Come on, get away!" but she wouldn't mean it—and Alan would see himself reflected in the tiny mirrors of her sunglasses and wouldn't be able to tell whether she could see him or not as he stretched out next to her and traced the path of a drop of sweat down the front of her chest. "So? What about it? Yes or no?" "Sure. Why not," she said as if answering all the questions he might ever come up with all at once. Why not, indeed. There was no better answer she could have given.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Three) The next morning they went to work. Felice wore tight jeans and a red sweatshirt with small white human figures in the shapes of letters spelling out "Alvin Ailey" across her chest. Fine hair at the back of her neck dampened into soft reddish curls as the day wore on. Alan had on a pair of jeans and a blue sweatshirt that Melanie always told him made his eyes look nice. Alan and Felice filled the sheets that had been draped across the windows with piles of junk mail, broken Venetian blinds and old phone books left by the former tenant, dragged them like Santa Claus bags down the hallway and left them by the elevator. Then they washed the windows. Inside was easy but outside Alan had to hang over the sill five floors up while Felice held his legs under her arms. He poked a rag on the end of a broom handle as far into the top corners as he could reach and felt of his legs moving over her ribs and got the feeling he was falling—slowly, down toward the street, and had to catch himself, like out of the kind of dream if you don't catch yourself you die. Over the next few days, they painted the walls. Felice brought in a Japan Airlines calendar with a different Samurai warrior on it for each month and Alan put up a picture of some apples and oranges in a bowl next to a messed-up table cloth that was supposed to be the mountain Cezanne used to see out his kitchen window. He tried to teach Felice things. He recommended books: Lolita, Morgan's Passing, Dubin's Lives —anything he could think of where some old guy got to fuck some little cutie who didn't seem to mind for awhile. Felice didn't act very interested but Alan caught her reading a paperback Tales from Shakespeare behind a copy of Cosmo. Besides it was a two-way street. Alan thought U-2 was an airplane. Felice clued him in on all kinds of useful tidbits of popular culture. They rented a desk and a couple tables. Alan bought a new couch and brought in the down comforter off his bed at home and brought in his computer and brought the beautiful, blue, hundred year-old Chinese rug from his and Melanie's living room down to the office as well. Felice liked how the soft wool felt between her bare toes. Melanie couldn't understand why the hell he needed their living room rug. "Clients," Alan told her. Melanie looked up at the ceiling without moving her head and wished his idiotic, bullshit business would just hurry up and go bankrupt. From Macy's Alan and Felice got some window shades and three sets of lace curtains and, when they had finished hanging them, the two dumpy rooms had been transformed into something that looked more like a small apartment than a suite of offices. They sat next to each other on the futon couch and watched the curtains billow in the slight breezes and, Alan had been right, it felt good. After a few weeks, they had settled into a fairly predictable routine. Felice was due in at nine and almost always showed up before ten. As far as she could tell, so long as she was less than an hour late, Alan didn't mind. Besides, when she got there all he wanted was to drink coffee and talk anyway, and the answering service stayed on all night. They sent out letters, wrote proposals. Felice found some GQ's out by the elevator and brought them in to read behind her desk when there was nothing else to do. She liked looking at the models in their baggy pants. Sometimes Alan looked at them with her. Felice picked out ways she thought he should get his hair cut and pointed out the models she thought had cute butts or darling eyes or an especially cocky smile. Felice especially liked an especially cocky smile. Alan practiced smiling cockily in the bathroom mirror but said no thanks to the haircuts. There were some things he wasn't prepared to do on her account. A few. Not many. When he was around her, Alan felt like Felice was tugging his heart up into his throat like she had it on a hook. All the defenses he'd built up over the years crumbled to dust around her. He was helpless around her. His throat constricted; the things he said sounded like some jerk was saying them. He felt like a lop-eared little puppy dog who wanted nothing more in the world than just to lie on its back with its soft, pink belly exposed and lick between her tiny miniature little toes. Toward the end of the month, Felice turned twenty. Alan bought her a pair of gold earrings. He didn't give them to her right away. He bided his time. He waited for a propitious moment. Toward the end of he day, she glanced over the top of a magazine and asked, "What's the matter with you?" "Nothing. I'm wonderful. Are we about through?" he asked, moving around to look at the magazine over her shoulder with the earrings concealed behind his back. She had on a sleeveless green cotton shirt and no bra. It was impossible not to see the tip of a bare nipple brushing against her shirt from the inside, erect and tough and pink as an eraser on a pencil. "Yeah. I guess. About," she said unhappily. "Do you know what it's about time I gave you?" "My birthday present?" Felice wrinkled up her nose. "You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" "Shouldn't I be?" "Yeah. You should be. What do you think it is?" "Something really expensive?" "Well, it wasn't cheap." "Come on, come on, quit dicking around." She got up playfully, held onto the sleeve of his suit coat with one hand and tried to reach behind his back with the other. "Just give it to me," she said, with both arms around him, trying to snatch the package out of his trembling hands while the smell of her hair was overwhelming. "Okay, okay. Jesus. I'll give it to you...on one condition." "That we have an affair?" "Are you kidding?" He frowned. "So what's the condition?" "I forgot. There aren't any. Here you go, kiddo—knock yourself out," Alan said and tossed the package onto her desk. Felice used her polished nails like cat-burglars tools to undo the silver string and pick her way through the wrapping paper. Then she looked up and asked, "What does Melanie think about you buying me all these presents and things?" "I don't know. Should we call her up and find out?" "Well, let's see what it is, first," she said, working her way down to the earrings themselves. Then she said, "Earrings." "Gold earrings." Alan pointed out. "They're nice," she said without enthusiasm. Alan leaned closer to her hair, ostensibly to see if the store put the right ones in the box. She smelled steamy, like English soap, like she was fresh out of a hot bath. He could almost see the water in her eyelashes. "Would you quit it," Felice whined, slipping one of the tiny gold filaments through a pinkish hole pierced into her left ear lobe. "Quit what?" "Looking at me like that." "Like what?" "Like you're about to drool on my shirt." "Sorry. I just adore seeing things getting slipped into your darling orifices." "Eu, yuk!" She curled her glistening lips and laughed and said, "I don't want you even talking about my orifices." "Felice," he said. "This is stupid. I have to tell you something. I really want to sleep with you. You know that." "Yeah?" She curled her upper lip up another notch. "Well?" "Well, what?" "Are we going to do that or not?" "I don't see what good it would do." "Unfathomable good. You cannot begin to imagine the good." "Where do you suggest? Right here? On the floor? Right now? You want me to hike up my skirt and pull down my panties and lean over the desk? Or should we use the couch? Lock the door and turn out the lights and really get into it?" "Don't make it like that, come on. Wouldn't it just be a hell of a lot more comfortable around here?" "Sort of get it out of your system?" "Yeah. Crudely, yes. It's just not that big a deal, is it?" "Alan! How can you say such a thing?" She mocked him. "Well, I mean it would be, but...hell, I don't know what I mean. Why don't you just give it some thought is all I'm saying." "I have given it some thought, thanks. And here's what I think. I like you. I like working with you. I like talking to you. I really do. But if it gets too hard for you to be around me without getting between my legs—you should just fire me and get it over with. Besides, you wouldn't want it like that anyway, would you?" "Like what?" "Like by really heavy-handed manipulation and blackmail and coercion?" "No, probably not." "So, do we have to talk about this anymore?" "No." "Good." "I just wanted you to know it's something that's there. Something that exists. I didn't want there to be any misconceptions." "Okay. Thanks for telling me. All men ever think about's sex." "That's bullshit. How about if you and I go over to Macy's one of these days and maybe have you tell me what the hell all that perfume's doing over there, for example—all that display case after display case of lipstick and eye cream and bubble bath and body lotion and dilapadaries..." "Depilatories." "...and why there are row after row of high-heeled shoes. What possible reason could there be for wearing high heels except to make your ass look cute? They can't be comfortable. But walking around with the circulation to your brain cut off is a small price to pay for having a cute ass, right? Do you have any idea how important feet are? Feet are like a water pump in a car, they squirt the blood back up your legs and into your heart and into your brain—but women would rather have a cute ass than a functioning brain. And you! What about you! Why do you go around looking so goddamn gorgeous every minute of every day—and then complain when it works!" "I'm not complaining." "I'm hungry," Alan said. "So, take me out to dinner." "Okay," Alan shrugged. "For your birthday. What the hell." Felice chose the Carnelian Room on top of the Bank of America Building. They started with Martinis and, lolling an olive inside his cheek, Alan asked, "So, is this a happy birthday or what?" "Not exactly. I probably should have had a date, at least." "What about this?" "This isn't a date." "Why not?" "Get serious. We work together. You've been living with the same woman forever. You have a daughter older than me. Try and think when you were my age." "Yeah, I guess if some old broad kept trying to pick up on me when I was twenty I would have thrown up in her lap." "See!" Felice exclaimed. "But, so, whatever happened to all that older man stuff?" "I don't have anything against older men," Felice commented, glancing briefly up at their cocky young Italian waiter who had appeared with a bottle of Cakebread Cellars Sauvignon Blanc. By his expression, the waiter seemed to think Felice was probably being paid to say such things. "So, wait a minute." Alan, while concurrently calculating the guy's tip, got back to the where they'd left off. "So, you're saying what? It's just me?" "You know," Felice said wistfully, "I like this building. It's neat. When you get all your big bucks off of John Larson, we should get an office here." "This building sucks. Bankamerica Corporation had a contest to come up with the biggest eyesore on the planet and this is what won." Alan raised his eyes toward one of the gaudy crystal chandeliers. "It started a trend. Then they built that, and that, and finally that," he pointed to buildings out the high window, and ended up at the Transamerica Pyramid lit up like a big isosceles crossword puzzle across California Street. "Before them all you could see against the sky was Coit Tower." "In high school we used to call it coitus tower." "I'll bet you did," Alan mumbled longingly. "I wish I'd known you then." "Okay, that settles it. First thing tomorrow morning I'm going down to City Hall and having my age changed." "You can't change your age." "Sure you can. You just fill out a form, pay the six bucks and you're any age you want to be. They use the money to restore old Benny Bufano statues." "You're nuts." "You're right. So what? When I was your age, I was a bigger pain in the ass than you are. We would have hated each other's guts." "It's amazing you remember back that far." "I remember all kinds of stuff. It goes in cycles. I forget whole decades then there are spurts when I remember the tiniest little niplet of everything that happened." "What's a niplet?" "Robert Herrick uses the word to describe his lover's breasts." "Who's Robert Herrick?" "Some Elizabethan poet. He had a dream he was a vine entwined around his lover's body, mingling with her hair, growing between her toes, covering her like ivy on a mossy tree, and woke up in the morning stiff as a stalk." "Is that how you woo all your young chicks? By talking about dork poetry?" "I don't have any young chicks. You're the first young chick I've tried wooing since I tried wooing Melanie in 1969. She was nineteen, too." "Yeah, yeah, and she had a daughter my age. And got strung out on heroin and dumped you. What was that all about? I've never done heroin." "She sure liked it, I know that." "Did you ever do heroin?" "Yeah. Once. With Melanie and her new boyfriend. All they did is fuck each other all night long right in front of my face. It almost killed me." "So what happened? Tell me! Here, have some more wine." "She just turned into some kind of a fuck machine on heroin." "I get like that on cocaine," Felice said in a husky voice, doubling over slightly, imperceptibly tightening her grip on the stem of her glass. "Don't tell me things like that, Felice. Really. It's hard on me just thinking about you..." "Speaking figuratively, of course." "Are you going to sleep with me or not?" "Don't change the subject..." "What was the subject?" "Melanie and her new boyfriend...heroin?" "They just fucked each other a lot." "Why were you there?" "I have no idea. I wanted to be with her. I couldn't believe she didn't want to be with me. I had to see for myself. I saw. I still haven't gotten over it. Which might even be why I'm out here trying to seduce my nineteen year-old secretary." "Twenty. So just tell me the whole thing, from the beginning." Their dinners came. They ate. They drank more wine. Alan talked. Felice asked him questions. He told her things he hadn't ever told anyone. About Melanie. Personal stuff. Sensitive things. After awhile Alan picked up the check, added it up rather blearily, got a sour look on his face, put his Visa card down and asked, "So, are we about ready to go?" "Go where?" "I don't know. Home?" "I don't want to go home." "It's late. I should be getting back. Melanie starts asking questions." "I thought you guys had that stuff all straightened out." "I thought so too. Sometimes we do and sometimes we don't, I guess is the answer. Melanie always thinks I'm up to something, anyway." "Well, you are!" "No I'm not. This is all strictly business." He smiled. "It's not even ten. Let's go somewhere else. I know what! Let's go to Oz!" "What the hell is Oz?" "It's that lame, glitzy club on top of the St. Francis. We can go dancing! You'll like it. Lots of old farts go there." "Forget it," Alan said wearily. "Come on! Please?" "I'm tired." "So what? I've got some cocaine! Okay, here's the plan. We hop in a cab, stop by my apartment and do some coke and I change into my white dress—you'll love this dress, you will absolutely die when you see me in this dress. It is so slutty. I haven't ever worn it. I haven't had a chance to even wear it anywhere." "Some other night," he said. "I'm drunk." "So am I! You don't think I'd be saying any of this if I was sober, do you? Come on, it's still my birthday, remember." "Yeah, I know. Happy Birthday. And I promise, on your next one, we'll do anything you want—but, for now, my dear, I gotta go before I throw up." "I can't believe you! You tell me all this stuff about how you stay up for three days and drive ten thousand miles just to watch Melanie fuck some bald guy on heroin...and now you can't even take me dancing! On my birthday!" "Yeah," Alan said. "That's pretty much what I'm telling you. All this talking has made me feel like shit. There'll be other nights." "Oo-kaay," she said, dragging the word out so that it sounded like a threat. "What's that supposed to mean? I had my chance?" "I didn't say that," Felice pointed out, gathering up her pink backpack from beside the chair. The waiter returned with the charge slip. Alan signed it. The waiter left. Then Alan shrugged and smiled and said, "I've had other chances." "Yeah, and you blew them, too," she blurted. "I know. I'll probably blow a few more before my life is through," he said. "Too much happens, Felice, really. You fuck up so many times. Everything turns to a blur." "I don't know about that." "I didn't know about it either. That's why I like you." "Oh, thanks," she said. "Thanks a lot.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Four) The next day they talked some more, and the day after that and the day after that. Their conversations went on and on in long, winding convolutions—things he'd forgotten all about, he remembered clear as a bell; things Felice had never told anyone she told Alan. She didn't believe people. Especially not men. But also just people in general. Dogs, okay. People, no. They lie. They can't help it. They don't even know they're doing it. You can't trust them. You can't depend on anyone but yourself. Alan listened intently. She was such a kid; so wide-eyed and stupid he had a hard time not laughing, but she wore loose shirts and he got glimpses of her armpits when she did her nails. She talked on the phone and chewed a yellow pencil and let it rest against her glistening lips and touched the end of the eraser to the tip of her tongue. She walked barefoot on the Chinese rug and her toenails were such tiny little slivers they were hardly worth polishing, but polish them she did, always the same bright, thick polish as her fingernails. She was just such a chick, such a girl, so the epitome of femininity, so dripping with life and creation and attraction and allure. A few days after her birthday dinner, Alan bought a gram of cocaine from Dick Cherry after work one night. He simply did not see how they could help but stop off at the hot tubs some cold, blustery night—just a friendly expression of affection to consummate the conversations. All he wanted was to bury his face in her shiny brown belly and feel her laugh all over inside. Finally, toward the end of March, they got Felice her bird. "I'm afraid, Mr. Dunstan, I must insist," she said, picking a piece of imaginary lint off his suit and twinkling her mischievous Asian eyes into his crinkled up old Caucasian ones. "So let's just go get the fucker," Alan said. "We'll have to take it out of its cage and let it fly around sometimes, too. They need that, you know. You do know that, don't you?" The purchase of the bird was made at Robinson's on Maiden Lane. They could have found somewhere cheaper, but they were in a hurry. They got everything at the same time. Cage. Food. Gadgets the sales clerk talked them into getting. The bird never had a name. They were waiting for one to grow on her and, in the meantime, Alan and Felice mostly just called her "the bird." Or the stupid bird. Or the fucking bird. Or the stupid fucking bird. The stupid fucking bird was a bright white dove with red eyes and a scaly feet who lived in a huge silver cage suspended from the ceiling on a big black hook and cooed like a motherfucker, all the time, day and night, even after Felice was gone. "Just come on up to my office." Alan heard Felice on the phone. "Of course it's all right, don't be silly." She laughed. "I can probably get off early." Who she was talking to said something funny. Felice laughed again. "No, not too early," she dragged out the word, laughed once more and patted the receiver after she hung it up. "What was that about?" Alan asked. Felice pushed her chair back, clasped her hands behind her neck and yawned and smiled at the same time and said, "I have kind of a date. Okay if I leave early?" "What do you mean," he asked stupidly. "Someone's coming by to pick me up. How do I look?" She struck a pose, batted her eyelashes, messed up her hair. "Who?" Alan's heart galloped. "A client. Dick Cherry? Don't you just love that name?" "He's not a client. He's a smartass little coke dealer." "Yeah, I know. I've always been attracted to guys like that. Even in high school." She reached under the desk and retrieved the hand-painted Japanese make-up purse from her big red Puma bag, made her eyes wide and looked into them. "You've got a date with Dick Cherry?" "Does that make you mad or something?" "No. But Dick Cherry. Jesus. How'd you meet him?" "Here," she said brazenly. "He was by looking for you." She put another dab of lip cream on her already shimmering lower lip, smacked it up to her upper lip as Alan remembered the little brown vial of cocaine he'd bought. "Where are you going?" Alan asked. "I don't know." She ran a finger across one eyebrow. "Out to dinner, he says. But he'll probably just take me to his place. So is it all right? If I leave early?" "Yeah, sure. Go ahead." "You're jealous, right?" "It pisses me off a little, yeah," he said. "Sorry." "It's not your fault. I've ended up just absolutely adoring you, Felice. How do you account for that?" "Senility?" she asked, with her eyes all big and dancing. "Most likely, yeah. I'll tell you what it feels like, though." "I wish you wouldn't," she said. "It feels...it feels like I'm this thick, crusted over old...barnacle or something. Like, stuck to the side of a rock somewhere, like just above where the tide ever reaches...and all of a sudden the god damn moon changed or something and for the first time in years the tide's coming in again and I've just started opening up, like the fragile little pink animal I have living inside me is coming alive again. It hasn't even any skin on it. It's just raw nerves. Nothing's holding it together. The least little whisper of air shrivels it back up inside itself." "I thought we agreed not to talk about your little pink animal anymore." She frowned and smiled at the same time. "It's not even that at this point. I just really like you." "So you should be glad I finally got myself a fucking date, then." "You can leave whenever you want," he said and went into his office and said to himself if she had any god damn brains it would be him she was going out on this big date with—but knew immediately that just simply wasn't true. If she had any brains she'd be doing exactly what she was doing, the slut fucking bitch. There was a knock on the door to the outer office. "It's open," Felice called without moving. Alan watched through a crack in the door to his office. She knew exactly the sort of first impression she wanted to make—the rug in front of her, the curtains at her back, billowing. Dick Cherry inched into the office. He was tall, with blond curly hair, nice blue eyes, pretty teeth. He had on a thin red tie, loosened at the neck, and a rumpled cotton sport coat with the sleeves pushed up his forearms. He made his way toward Felice and self-consciously shoved a small white box onto her desk. The box had a red string tied around it. "I don't know if you're gonna like it or not," Dick Cherry said. Alan came in from the other room. "Oh." Felice looked up. "You know Dick, right?" They acknowledged each other without shaking hands. Alan eyed the little box and asked, "So, what's all this?" "I don't know yet." Felice flirted up at her guest. "It's a present. Don't you just adore unwrapping little packages?" "I couldn't pass it up," Dick said to Alan. "Just the thing for our little Felice here." He indicated her with a thick, callused, long-nailed, yellowish thumb. Felice unwrapped it expertly. Inside there was a single earring in the shape of a small man tied to a chair. She held it up in a shaft of sunlight coming through the window. The little man's head was bandaged. He was bleeding red paint onto the ropes that tied him to the chair. "Oh!" Felice clucked her tongue. "Isn't he darling!" She slipped one of Alan's gold earrings out from the piercing in her ear and put the new earring in its place. The little man twisted next to her throat in obvious pain and devotion. Felice picked up her coat and said, "So? See you tomorrow?" "Sure." Alan made a feeble attempt at coming up with some kind of smile. "Try not to stay working too late, okay?" she said. "I don't want you all grouchy in the morning." "I'll be all right," he said. "See you later, Alan," Dick Cherry added cheerily. Alan knew they were glad to get out of there. He hadn't been cordial. It must have been uncomfortable for them—the poor darlings! But what was he supposed to do? Shake the shithead's hand? Take him aside, tell him, man to man, listen, you go have yourself a hell of a time fucking the living shit out of our little Felice here, now hear? What? Like a goat. With a hundred dollar bill up her cute nose. Pulling her ass apart with those callused thumbs of his and her with her head tilted, mouth open, eyelashes fluttering, starting to drool. Semitic, churlish lips glistening around his cock in her mouth. The tip of her pink tongue. Tough nipples like erasers on pencils. Juicy, sucking sounds in and out of her pussy and her face in sneering, churlish, smiling pain. The smell of her everywhere. Sounds she couldn't help making. The way she would taste. The way she would dry on a person, thicker than sweat. You'd never want to wash it off. If you ever got her on you wouldn't want to get her off. If you ever got her in you you'd never want to get her out, you never could. Alan locked the door, turned out the lights, put the cover over the bird cage and checked through a crack in the shades to see if he might see them—holding hands crossing over toward Union Square, hugging each other under a palm tree, laughing by the statue. But he didn't. He quit looking, sat down on the couch and, without paying much attention, unzipped his pants and jacked-off into the down comforter. It didn't make him feel any better. He closed his eyes. Felice was bound to get bored with the guy. Dick Cherry really was just a fucking prick. He was cute. Yeah. But how long does that last. A day? He'd have to hear all about it in the morning—what a selfish fucking stupid asshole Dick Cherry had turned out to be. Alan wouldn't mind. He'd tried to tell her. Hey, don't say I didn't try to tell you. He opened his eyes. Shadows filtered through the curtains across Cezanne's apples and oranges and it dawned on Alan that it was going to cost fifteen bucks to have the comforter cleaned, then said fuck it and jacked-off again just to get his money's worth. The next morning happened fast. Alan got in early. Felice called at ten-thirty. "I'm not going to be able to make it in, today," she said. Her voice was shaky. "Is that okay?" There was a pause. "I'm not feeling well at all." "Where are you," he asked. He sounded calm. He wasn't. "You got me. All I know is there's chickens and things crowing their guts out all over the place. Is that any help?" "Well, how about if you just don't bother to come in at all then." "Oh, thanks a lot. I knew it'd be all right. You wouldn't even want to see me today. Believe me," she said. "Felice," he said. "Listen carefully. I mean tomorrow too. Let's just say you don't work here anymore, okay?" There was another pause. Background noise changed in the receiver. "You mean I'm fired?" she whispered. "Yeah. I don't have any other choice." Felice didn't say anything. "It's what I was talking about yesterday," he said. "Are you there?" "Yeah. What am I supposed to be, some nun? God. I really don't get this." "Sure you do," he managed to say. "Don't you think we should at least talk about it?" "So, talk," he said. "Well, it's not very convenient right now." "Okay. See you later, kid. Sorry." "You should be." "I am." "I hope your shitty business goes bankrupt." "It probably will." "Don't mail my check. I'll pick it up." "Okay," he said and hung up. Alan wrote her out a check, put it in her desk and waited. The walls of his heart pounded when he saw women her size wearing sunglasses a couple blocks away. He caught up to them. It was never her. San Francisco's full of small Asian-looking women in tight pants, loose shirts and sunglasses a couple blocks away. His toes throbbed at night. They were stiff in the morning. He turned the pages of the Samurai calendar. In April there was a picture of a warrior on a black stallion and the bird came down with a cold. She coughed and sneezed. Chills ruffled her feathers. Sometime toward the end of April she developed a rash across the bridge of her beak. It affected her appetite. She didn't do much cooing anymore. Alan went to Robinson's and got some drops to put in her water. They didn't work. By the beginning of May she'd quit eating entirely and just sat listless and fidgety at the bottom of the cage, not making any more sounds at all other than the sounds of the rustling of the newspapers on the bottom of her cage. One night, well into the middle of the month, Alan was in the office late. It was dark. Quiet. The sounds of newspapers rustling were louder than ever. The bird wasn't any better. She was worse. She was having convulsions. He watched her for awhile. Then he got up and opened the door of her cage and reached in and pulled her out and carried her over to the window. He opened the window with one hand while the bird clung to his other hand. He petted her from the top of her head down her strong folded wings and out to the ends of the feathers in her tail. She clutched his finger with hot scaly feet. The first time he tried to throw her out the window, she didn't let go. She just flapped her wings and held on for dear life. He talked to her. He told her, "Look, you stupid shit, you're just going to die up here. Is that what you want? You want to just fucking die up here?" Her eyes glowed reddish in the dark. She cocked her head. Neon signs blinked and buzzed in the stillness. One by one, Alan pulled her claws from the backs of his knuckles and flung her with both hands, up and out into the night. If that didn't cure the bitch he didn't know what would. And she actually flew for a minute or two; first over to a window ledge at the hotel across Powell Street and then down to an awning above the jewelry store. She preened herself and seemed to settle—as if into a new cage. Then she flew again, halfheartedly this time, and landed in the street and looked all around and started pecking at the pavement—like her appetite had suddenly returned, and Alan still thought she might be all right. A slow moving cable car rolled past. People pointed at her. She was a celebrity. Tourists from all over the world clucked their tongues at the little white pigeon in the road. The running board passed right over her but she came out from under it unscathed—oblivious, serene. You poor stupid dumb fuck, Alan said. People shook their heads at her in all kinds of different languages but the poor ignorant stupid dumb fuck just kept pecking away at the cement until one of the new, blue and white DeSoto cabs ran her over. Her body sounded like a little bag of egg noodles. Felice should have been there.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Five) Alan Dunstan balanced a carryout cup of coffee on his briefcase, pulled open one of the front doors of his office building and didn't recognize himself for a second. Who was that guy? A small, sort of nondescript older fellow with lines wrinkling up like bird's nests around the corners of his eyes? The door was heavy glass. His reflection moved with him. An orange and white Number 38 Geary bus roared away from beside the St. Francis. Bright, dreamlike cars followed in its wake. Sun glinted off chrome. Stars of light moved across the glass and disappeared into the dim lobby. Alan juggled the coffee from one hand to the other and twisted through the door. His suit smelled fresh from the cleaners. Inside it was quiet. His tie patted him like a fern. The tie was blue silk with flecks of white and stopped exactly at his belt. Sheer black socks went up to his knees. His shoes fit like pigskin. The belt, shoes and briefcase were all of the same soft crackled black leather. The suit was grey; Italian. It cost five hundred bucks—and the guy had given him a deal. The only thing wrong, really, was the shirt. It sagged across his chest and felt tight at the waist. A fitted shirt somehow didn't quite fit right anymore. "You might care to try our Gentleman's Cut," an immaculate homosexual clerk with blue-rimmed, blue-tinted glasses had told him at the shirt shop on Post Street. The clerk's beard was brown and red, neatly-sculpted as a brush. Out of boredom, he pared the cuticle on his middle finger with white, even teeth. There was remarkably no hair anywhere but where it belonged and his suit looked better on him than it did on one of the silver mannequins hidden among a clump of fake palm trees. "You might care to stick your Gentleman's Cut up your ass," Alan had thought. "Prissy prick motherfucker," he thought again that morning as he avoided the elevator and headed for the stairs in the back of the lobby. It was because of all the fags and all their chrome-plated health clubs and fitness centers and bath houses and wine and cheese and fashion and all the rest of all that homosexual bullshit that some New York Jew bastard had gone and changed the way they cut a god damn shirt in the first place. It wasn't for the sake of trying to get his shirts to fit again that he used the stairs, however. He started up the back stairs with the vague notion that some kind of physical exercise might take his mind off Felice. By the third floor, his calves were tightening up on him. Muscles throbbed in his shins. He held on to the banister and pulled himself up one step at a time. Coffee sloshed in the cup and he was more than just out of breath when he got to his office, his heart thumped, he was dizzy. Climbing the stairs hadn't helped but also it was the thought this might be the morning he'd find a note slipped under the door—a smug, friendly announcement from Felice, a scent of her soap still fresh in the hallway. Something. Anything. But there was only the same sign screwed into the door; SLICK SOLUTIONS, INC. What a fucking stupid ass name for a business. The curly-cues around his name made him cringe. Who had he thought he was? It appeared that the sign hadn't been tampered with but Alan refused to accept things as they appeared. He searched for the most minuscule clue. She could have scratched something on the plastic with the tip of a barrette. A strand of her hair could have caught in a screw—it could be there, dark and reddish, trembling in a draft. Or, hell, she might just have planted a big, pouty kiss on the sign; a sadistic, meaningless whim to taunt him. That would have been something. As it was, there was nothing. But, wait a minute! He couldn't get the door open. Something had been slipped in—and Alan's heart started up again. He felt like an archeologist. If it was from Felice he didn't want to disturb the way it lay. The way it lay could help in the reconstruction of how and when and why she finally broke down and came crawling back. It would be something they could laugh about. She'd lean her head against his chest. He smelled her hair again. Then she'd look up, kind of sheepishly, waiting to be forgiven. Of course she knew what coming back would entail. They both knew. It would have to be on the floor. There wouldn't be time to go anywhere fancy. What impeded the door, however, was one of Karen Stanhope's overdue rent notices. Nothing had changed. The office was the way he had left it the night before, the way he and Felice had fixed it up at the end of January. Except the bird cage was empty. Alan felt himself start to cry. The feeling stopped. It always did. He wished it wouldn't stop more than he wished it wouldn't start. He looked out the window. He was sweating. There weren't many people out yet; a bum asleep in a far corner of the park, a few tourists, the flute player. There wasn't much traffic. A cable car stopped, rang its bell, started up again. Nobody got off or on. Union Square was quiet; green hedges, grey cement—pigeons on the statue, sparrows in the palm trees. Then Alan noticed a woman; a pretty young woman in an orange dress with long blond hair. The dress stood out against the green of the grass. She was barefoot. The dress was tight, slit up one side. She was kneeling. There were birds in front of her. She held out her hand. She was facing toward him but didn't look up. He steadied himself against the window frame. The glass was spattered and dirty again. What remained of the dove was almost indistinguishable between the cable car tracks; a few oily feathers and some blackened white bones. He opened the window. Fresh air from the ocean dried the sweat, made him shiver. Far away there were sirens starting up. The blond woman was still as a tree. She had pieces of bread in her hands. The birds were sparrows and a few starlings not paying much attention. One of the birds hopped closer. The woman didn't move. Her dress covered her knees. Her breasts touched her arms. One of the sparrows then, one of the ones from farthest away, flew toward her and came to a fluttering stop on the back of her wrist. The woman seemed to have expected it. The bird pecked at a piece of bread then looked up, looked sideways and, as suddenly as it had arrived, took off again leaving a line of sunlight in the air. The woman got to her feet. She brushed her hands together and shook the crumbs from her lap and looked up—right at Alan, directly into his eyes as if she'd known he had been there all along. He felt ashamed. Caught. Found out. Discovered. Like she could see into his poor, stupid mind and knew what a liar he was, how useless and selfish and deluded he'd always been, how it would have been better if he hadn't been born. Then she waved. It couldn't have been at anyone else. And it was a friendly enough wave, like what she'd found out in that one brief, penetrating glance would remain just their little secret. Berries growing at the tops of the palm trees were the same burnt orange color as her dress. The grey sleeves of his suit went with the cement. Different colors of green went with each other and the buildings were at odd, sharp, geometrical angles to one another so that the whole scene looked as if it might have shaken into place at the end of a kaleidoscope. The sirens were fire-engines. They had come closer, tearing up O'Farrell, careening around corners, blowing their tremendous horns. The woman walked away without looking back. Her legs moved under the dress. Her hair was the only blond in sight. It didn't go with anything. It seemed to be leaving all by itself. Alan wanted to call to her. He wanted to say something. He wanted to yell. But what? Stay there? Wait? Stop. Don't go. Come back. What? It wouldn't have mattered. One of the bright, speeding fire-trucks roared past under the window just then anyway; blaring its siren, blasting its horn. He could have said anything. No one could have heard. He could have screamed his guts out. No one would have known. Maybe he did. It was really impossible to tell. He didn't know himself. He had work he could have done, of course, but he didn't do it. He could have checked with the answering service for the first time all week, but he didn't do that either. He closed the window and pulled the shade and turned around and faced his small suite of offices and pushed his aching vertebrae into he window frame and relaxed the muscles in his throat and leaned back until his head bounced against the wood with a nice solid thump. That felt good. He did it again and saw bright starry specks in quick blackness. He did it once more. Harder. It hurt. He quit. The rooms were a mess. It was spring. The calendar still said May. But it didn't feel like spring. Maybe if he straightened things up, got rid of some of the crap on the floor. He could borrow a vacuum cleaner from the hair salon down the hall. Spring cleaning! Hell, yes. Just what the doctor ordered. He took a sip of cold coffee and sat the cup on the edge of Felice's desk, then pulled out her top drawer like it was contaminated. There was an orange emery board with long, sweeping scrapes of her fingernails still engraved in it. He opened the drawer wider. The check he'd written was still there. He took it out, unfolded it, looked at her name, tore it in two, tore it in four, tore it in eight and put the pieces back into the drawer. There were a few bobby pins toward the back of the drawer. A tube of clear Vaseline Lip Balm. The pencil she'd chewed on as she twisted the ends of her hair while she talked on the phone. Getting rid of the stupid fucking bird had only been the beginning. Alan stood up resolutely and maneuvered the bird cage off its hook. It was light. It fell into his arms like an empty bushel basket. That gave him another idea. He filled the cage with unopened mail and old newspapers, then cleaned out Felice's desk. The emery board, the pieces of her check, the pencil, loose, left over strands of her hair, a schedule of classes from City College, everything. He filled the cage so full it was about to burst. Paper bulged out between the wires like the way, where was it? In China? The Wild West? Where they wrapped wet slitted rawhide around guys and left them to dry in the sun? And the leather shriveled up? And the skin that bulged out from the slits in the rawhide was sliced off with razor sharp knives and when the leather was removed so was the skin and veiny blue and pink sexless people screamed off in no particular direction without any eyelids? He couldn't remember where he heard about it, all he knew was the cage reminded him. He hugged his arms around it and backed out the door and left it by the elevator and cleaned up everything else that could reasonably be cleaned up. It was spring. Alan's answering service was called Phone Mates. It was run out of a dingy storefront in the Tenderloin by Manny Griggs and Maury Wacholder, a couple gay guys in their fifties who'd come up with the name long before some big company had stolen it off them as the name for an answering machine. That was a point of some pride with them. They made sure their customers were aware that initially the name Phone Mates had been theirs and theirs alone. On Sundays Manny and Maury went fishing out at Ocean Beach. Maury was the one who fished. Manny sat in a beach chair and did the Jumble from the Sunday Chronicle. Back home, Maury cleaned the fish. Manny cooked it in a new and more elegant way each time, prepared elaborate sauces, served it with rosettes of radishes and bouquets of cauliflower, then Maury came along and ate the whole thing like a fucking pig. He belched and dipped his sleeves in the soup and talked with his mouth full and mopped up his plate with Wonder Bread, and no matter what kind of fancy pineapple upside down cake Manny had gone to all kinds of trouble to serve for dessert, Maury always had a peanut butter sandwich dunked in a glass of milk instead. Sometimes it made Manny want to cry. Sometimes he did cry. They'd been together for years. They were meant for each other. "Phone Mates, how may I help you, please?" Manny answered alluringly. "So, how was the day at the beach?" Alan asked. His voice cracked. "You're among the living! We were beginning to wonder." Karen Stanhope had called. And a guy Alan didn't know—some Asian name. And John Larson. "Sales brochure? Big question mark. Urgent," Manny whispered. "Some of your clients haven't been sounding too happy lately." "It's not a happy world, Manny. So, how was Sunday dinner?" "Oh, splendid!" He brightened. "Maury caught us a great big granddaddy of a sea bass. It battled him and battled him to the last sinews of its strength. But. Shit. Hold on, will you? Oh, hell. Call back later. Can you do that?" "Sure," Alan said. It felt nice having someone who wanted to talk to him—even if it was just some whispery old fag. He'd written the messages on the back of an envelope but, except for the Asian guy, already knew who they were and what they wanted. Karen Stanhope wanted the rent and a copy of his proof of liability insurance. It was a provision of the lease. Alan didn't have liability insurance. What the hell was he supposed to show her? And John Larson wanted the sales brochure which was supposed to have been finished a week ago. What the hell was he supposed to show him? Alan crumpled the envelope and tossed it toward the trash bag hanging from a freestanding crochet hoop Felice had found down at the Goodwill on Howard Street. It used to be fun, trying to make baskets. Now that she was gone, Alan tried to make a basket or two now and then himself but it wasn't the same. It wasn't that much fun anymore. It wasn't much fun at all. The paper made a lazy parabola through dust in the air. He didn't see it land. He'd warned her not to go down there. There were crippled-up old black guys on crutches in the alleys on the way to Howard Street and tough, mean young black guys with posts in their ears and heroin in their veins. She was asking for it—striding the way she did in her white high-heels and that blue knit dress—she was going to get it, too. Raped. Beat up. He should have just raped her himself. Tied her up. Gagged her. Drugged her. Better him than black guys in an alley. They'd find her between two garbage cans—dress around her neck, the crotch ripped out of her panties, one of the high-heels broken off inside her, pieces of shattered sunglasses, unexplainable lacerations, a pretty brown knee turned inside out, a patch of torn blue...

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Six) John Larson had a meeting set up with his investment group for Thursday afternoon. Tomorrow. Thursday at two-thirty p.m. in one of the meeting rooms at the Sheraton Palace. Alan called John's number and hung up. Then he closed his eyes and hit the redial button. John answered. Alan hung up. He hit the redial button a second time. John answered again. "Look," Alan said in as menacing a voice as he could muster, "Everything's done but I still don't have Lou's and Marshall's pictures." "Forget the fucking pictures, I told you." John sputtered. He had a hard time expressing things. He thought too far ahead of himself. He was an engineer. "When did you tell me that?" "I left a message with your fucking fag answering service on Wednesday! Last Wednesday! A fucking week ago. Go without the god damn pictures, I said." "Are you serious?" "Don't fucking bore me you didn't get the fucking message. You fucking didn't do the job. Have some fucking balls. We've moved the son of a bitch back already because of your horseshit. It's not a fucking game, Alan. People are..." "Tomorrow morning, for sure," Alan cut him off. Waves of hot, prickly embarrassment made him feel like he was glowing. "Tomorrow morning or you don't get fucking paid. Tomorrow morning or you get your fucking ass sued off. And what about Tanaka? He been by there yet? He wants you and him to get together." "Who's Tanaka?" "One of their fucking marketing guys, I don't know." "Yeah, I think I got a message." "Look, Alan. I don't know what's going on with you, and personally I don't fucking give a fuck, all I know is I need that brochure in my hand for the meeting tomorrow...at two fucking thirty pee fucking em in the fucking afternoon..." "You'll have it, don't worry. Who set it up with these guys in the first place? Take my word, okay?" "Yeah, right. But, I mean, fuck . . ." "Tomorrow morning. By eleven. For sure." There wasn't much left to be done—finish correcting the proofs, put in a few phoneyed up revisions to the projections. The art work had been done since last week. The print shop could get it out by tomorrow morning if he pushed them, if he paid them an exorbitant amount of money to stay late and finish the fucker, if he begged and pleaded. Alan had it done by a little after three. He put the whole project, art work, copy, instructions, the whole ball of wax into an envelope and into his briefcase and left in plenty of time to get it to the printer before they closed—and pretty soon everybody was going to be off his back for maybe like about thirty seconds or so. People had to start getting off his back pretty soon. They really did. In the hallway by the elevator the bird cage was gone. The building crawled with thieves. Nothing was ever worth anything. The elevator door lurched open. A small Asian man in a shiny brown suit was already inside, staring at the linoleum on the floor like that was a job he'd been given to do. "What floor, please?" the Asian man asked. "I got it," Alan said and pushed the button, himself. Then he thought for a second the guy had asked, "What for, please?" and tried to come up with an answer. The marble floor was slightly concave in front of the elevator in the lobby. The building had seen better days. Alan stopped in front of the directory, partly to let the little Asian guy get the hell out the door before he tried striking up some kind of god damn pidgin-English conversation about what a nice country is America. The case was locked, but the glass was broken. Fuck Karen Stanhope, Alan thought, she can whistle for her proof of insurance until they fix the place up a little. She could whistle for her fucking rent money too. What could she do? Evict him? He looked at his jagged reflection in what was left of the broken glass just as it dawned on him, Tanaka! Motherfuck. The little Asian guy had probably been that Tanaka fucker! And he'd probably been looking for him. Son of a bitch! Now he was probably going to go back and tell his buddies what a total asshole and inconsiderate xenophobic jerk Alan was and John Larson would be the one who could whistle for his money. And it was all Alan's fault, of course. Everything was always all Alan's fault. Fuck everybody, he thought. Then, just to top the whole shitty day all off, he heard newspapers rustling and thought the dead dove had somehow come back to haunt his ass, until he saw the back of a pink jacket bobbing around behind an unmanned security station. Alan put his briefcase on the floor, leaned against the table and peered over the edge. It was just one of the bag ladies. She was on her hands and knees, trying to get a piece of cardboard out from the bottom of a Safeway shopping cart. The cardboard was stuck. The woman wore unmatched gloves, each with a few fingers missing. Her nails were long, unpolished, dirty. She had the good stuff in the cart and had stuffed the rest of the crap behind the security station. His and Felice's ex-bird cage was among the stuff worth keeping. That made Alan feel proud, useful, of some value to the fabric of society as a whole. The cart tipped onto two wheels. The woman must have felt Alan standing there. She glanced up over her shoulder and said, "Why'nt you take a pitcher, Bozo-the-Clown." She was tall and had on layers and layers of clothing; skirts, pants, jackets, you name it. She was like a walking thrift store. Frizzy red hair stuck out from under a green scarf. Her face was dirty. The jacket had white fur at the wrists. It was a child's jacket. The sleeves came up almost to her elbows. She had freckles on her forearms. Her face wasn't wrinkled. She didn't look old, she just looked nuts, and the way she talked proved it. She had two personalities, each with a distinct voice. The first was calm, sensible, rational—but then she added comments in a second, sort of ventriloquist's voice, out of the side of her mouth. Her eyes were crazy green. She squinted at him like she was trying to shoot green daggers into his forehead. "You want some help?" Alan asked and had to smile. Each time the bag lady tried to shoot a dagger at him her nose wrinkled up like a rabbit—and nobody had ever called him Bozo-the-Clown. It made him feel almost like giggling. It gave him a whole new image—suddenly he was this big, goofy-looking guy with huge feet, a Kabuki face and orange pompoms for buttons who made people laugh for a living. "Save it for the army, Buster Brown." The bag lady grunted, still pulling at the cardboard. It tore loose. She stomped it flat with a pair of raggedy red hightop sneakers, kicked it behind the security station and started pulling at the cart. One of its wheels had twisted backwards. She jerked it from side to side. "You're just making it worse." "You should have thought of that the first time, Mr. Parmesan Cheese." Alan took a dollar bill out of his suit pocket and laid it on top of the table. "Keep it for yourself, Ralph," the woman said, stuffing the bill into one of her many pockets. "Go give it to all those insane motherfuckers up at Superior Court with wigs on. What we need is like a hole in the wall, Mr. Potato Head." "Let me ask you something?" "Take it, take it. I don't want it—lying, jizzbag, prick, bastards." "I don't want it," Alan smiled. "I just want to know if you're really nuts. Or do you just go around acting nuts to fuck with people like you think I am?" The woman seemed taken off guard. She smiled broadly and said, "Call me Priscella. That's not my name. Please to me meet you, I'm sure." She held out her hand. Alan responded reflexively. Her bare fingers sticking out the ends of her gloves were freezing. Then she tickled the palm of his hand with one of her long fingernails. The woman let out a maniacal cackle. She slapped her skirts. Her face turned red. She drew the child's coat tighter around herself and said, "You're who's nuts, Mr. Kawasaki. I know you like the insides of a book." She pointed at him and kept laughing as she dragged the cart through the front doors. The twisted wheel left skid marks on the marble. "You're the one who's loony, Tommy Tune." Out on the street the bag lady stamped her feet and shook her skirts like a Moulin Rouge cancan dancer and finally, with an indignant flip of the green scarf, took off down the sidewalk, pulling the overloaded, slightly musical shopping cart behind her on a long, shiny green dog leash, still imbedded with at least half of its original rhinestones. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was nuts. The lobby was dim, greenish, like an aquarium. Waves of self-pity rolled over him. He was a torn off piece of useless seaweed floating at the edge of an ocean of self-pity. He couldn't even keep up with a whacko bag lady. She'd run circles around him. He was supposed to know how to use words, at least. That was his business. How was he supposed to make money if bag ladies made more sense than he did. Guys like John Larson would chew him up and spit him out like so much flaky fish food. No wonder Felice wouldn't fuck him. How could anyone blame her? Then he got serious for a minute and started thinking, hey, maybe he really was nuts. He felt like his whole life he'd been living in a series of happy little fish bowls, like the ones down in Woolworth's, one of the ones they keep you in until you're old enough to get plopped into one of the bigger fish bowls. And when they plop you in the big one, it's a little weird for awhile, but you make friends. Then your friends get bought. Die. Whatever. Kids pick you out, buy you, take you home with them, throw someone else in along with you. Some chick fish. Some other chick fish. You all have babies together. Then the kids that bought you get bored, grow up, lose interest, flush you down the toilet. Maybe that was what going nuts is, Alan thought—you're still alive and swimming against an impossible current through sewer pipes out to a treatment plant where they fill you full of chemicals and turn you loose into a vast indifferent ocean where you have to make your way among slack-jawed lamprey eels and pretty pink poison anemones whose job it is to suck your heart out and eat into your brain with its terrible enzymes and everything's after you all the time and you have to hide all the time and that's all you ever do. Okay, knock it the fuck off, Alan said to himself and bit the inside of his cheek and looked around to see if anyone might have been listening. He should just move back home—set up his office back down in the basement again. Get back to the way it was. On the patio baby pigeons had been born again. They were learning to coo. He'd been happy. He had made money. People had thanked him. Just then a flash of orange went past the glass doors, a sweep of blond hair. It was the same dull orange, the same long hair as the woman in the park. It was her. Alan hadn't thought she was real. The way the bird had flown into her hand came back to him the way dreams come back. He went outside and followed in the direction she'd been going—toward Powell, then toward Market Street. The sidewalk was crowded. He thought he got glimpses of the dress but people kept getting in the way. He lost her. He had to find her. He was running. Then. Son of a bitch! He'd forgotten about his briefcase. Where had he left it? Back in the lobby. On the floor. Motherfuck. Someone would steal the son of a bitch for sure. He kept on going anyway. When he got to O'Farrell he stopped. John Larson's seething face popped into his consciousness like a piece of raw meat. He tore back up the street again. When he got back to his building, the briefcase was gone. He looked everywhere. A slow sinking frantic feeling settled over him. Chills prickled up between his shirt and skin. Now what? Start over? There wasn't time. Just the art work itself would take days to redo. He still had the proofs, but proofs wouldn't cut it. And he could just print out the rest of the stuff again. Maybe he could call John? Explain things. Yeah? Explain what? Alan bit the inside of his cheek again. Maybe he could just go prostrate himself naked in John Larson's office. John would know what to do—there must be special cattle prods made for such occasions. Back outside again, Alan looked up and down Geary Street as if the briefcase might have been hanging from the flag pole in front of Lefty O'Doul's or sitting on top of the Plain Truth rack. It wasn't. It wasn't anywhere. The bag lady was hemmed into a brick alcove, sort of gently flexing at the knees. The wind had come up. She was resting one hand on a gold plated fire hydrant and blowing warm breath into her other hand. Alan peeked around the corner at her. "What is this? Love Boat? If it's the complaint department tell them they've got all the god damn signs upside down again." "Did you happen to go back into my building a minute ago?" Alan asked. "Was I born under a rose in the snow?" "No," Alan drew a rectangle in the air. "Did you see my briefcase?" "Police state? Nuh-uh, not in this country we don't. How about why don't you just toddle on off about minding your own bee's wax, ball 'n Jax? Take it up with Carnegie Hall." "What about my briefcase?" "Did I steal it?" "Yeah." "Take it up with Mrs. Gretzweiler," the bag lady said and, with her long dirty thumbnail, pointed to the jewelry store next door. Alan went in. A tiny, gray-haired woman with wire glasses and powder in her ears had his briefcase behind the counter. She thanked him for claiming it. Back outside again, the bag lady was laughing up the sleeve of her pink snowsuit. Alan held up the briefcase and said, "Thanks." "Don't thank me, Don Quixote, thank little blondie the bombshell, Little Miss Lemonhead in a Orange Creamsicle dress. She done it for you." "How do you know her?" "Hooker looking? Slit up the side? Barefooted? Everyone knows her. Ask the Rose Man." "Where is she? I mean, where does she hang out? Do you know?" "Sure thing, Cock Robin. Give me the five bucks you been saving up to go to the zoo and I'll take you there." Alan pulled out a wad of bills, "All I've got's a ten." "All the better, Bronco Billy," she snapped it out of his hand. "I'll take you there twice." She motioned for him to follow along with her as she yanked her shopping cart sideways out from the alcove and started pushing it toward Powell Street. "Right down here past Marvin's Gardens is where she's usually usually at but I ain't making no promises. Promises, promises. Keep your lying, jizzbag promises. I ain't making any. Ever. Never. Not any. None. Not ever." They walked together down to Powell again, then turned right toward Market Street. They made a cute couple—Alan in his suit and tie and briefcase and the bag lady in patches, pulling her cart. When they got to the cable car turnaround, the bag lady sat down on one of the granite steps in front of the old Bank of America Building and patted a spot next to her. Alan brushed it off and sat beside her. There were escalators going up and down into the Powell Street BART Station. A woman in dreadlocks was reading Tarot cards. Punks and skinheads slouched against the railing, biting into cold slices of Blondie's thick-crust pepperoni pizza. "What you usually find to eat?" Alan asked the bag lady. "Oh, we find the artichokes in a delicate oyster sauce particularly delectable." "Who are we?" "Us." She pointed to her chest. "Me and my ilk, Harvey Milk." Alan looked at her closely. Her hair was pretty. Her face could have been cute. "What's supposed to be the matter with you?" he asked. "Nothing a little cooperation can't cure. You got any?" "Do you know the story of this bank?" He patted one of the stone steps. "No. What's the gory story, borey boy." "A. P. Giannini used to work here. It was the first big main branch of the Bank of America. He sat at a desk in the middle of the floor. You could walk right up and talk to him. Try that now. It takes three days to see some dipshit secretary and she just tells you to put it in writing, which you already knew, you know?" "Exactly!" The bag lady corkscrewed a finger into he air. "I can't tell you how many times that happens every day of the week, Mr. Meek. Mr. Thou Shalt Inherit the Earth. Mr. Thou Shalt Not Kill Spiders." "So where's the blond girl?" The woman pointed up. There were five bright banners flapping in strong gusts of wind on tall black poles around the cable car turnaround. Above them, higher up, in one of windows in the Woolworth's Building, the Flood Building, actually, if you wanted to get technical, Alan thought he saw a speck of orange fabric. It may just have been a coat on a coat rack. He couldn't tell. "What's the matter, Skeezits? It ain't good enough for you? You think you're gonna find better? That's what they all think." "I don't know," Alan said without knowing what he was saying. He got up and took off toward the entrance to the Flood Building while the bag lady stayed sitting there with a smirk on her face like she owned the place. Up in the building Alan got fatalistic. He found the room where he thought the woman might have been but she wasn't there anymore if she'd been there in the first place. There wasn't even an orange coat on a rack. There wasn't anything orange in the whole room. The room was empty. He looked out the window. Down on the steps of the Bank of America Building, the bag lady was gone. He didn't seem to be there himself anymore either. She'd weaseled him out of ten bucks. That was it. That was all there was to it. Well, what the hell. She needed it more than he did. He needed it like he needed a hole in the wall. Ha! She was funny. Wires lay in coils on the floor. He'd never found anything he'd ever looked for, well, not by looking for it, anyway. The main floor of Woolworth's was its usual crowds of foreigners rifling the souvenir counters and Asian girls in Catholic high school skirts and lumbering transvestites; the old, the diseased, the depressed—then he saw a fresh, tiny little blond girl about three years old and wearing a faded dress with all its bows untied, trying to get a quarter into one of the ten cent gum ball machines. Her hair was one big sticky tangle that hadn't been combed since the day she was born; whoever got stuck with the job was going to have to shave her bald and start from scratch. The machine only took dimes. The kid didn't care. One way or other she was going to get that big fat coin into that tiny little slot no matter what. Alan knew the feeling. She worked at it and worked at it. She tried everything: frowning, squinting, cocking her head, biting her lip, sticking out her tongue. The quarter didn't fit. That was all there was to it. Her hair fell into her face. She pushed it away and started fresh and her hair slid slowly back in front of her eyes again. Alan was on her side all the way. They both stood there expecting a miraculous, torrential outpouring of gum balls any second now—red and yellow jawbreakers popping like popcorn in the aisles and the kid dancing like a Cossack trying to grab them so all at once she couldn't hang on to even one. People would stop what they were doing and come to her aid. That withered old woman by the lingerie rack would scoot one of the jaw breakers out of a crack with the rubber tip of her cane. Everyone would get in on it. The black guy in the Giants cap would take it off and fill it up for the kid. She'd make the lap of her dress into a nest full of gum balls and walk around the rest of the day with her underpants showing. Then what really happened was the poor kid dropped the damn quarter. The withered old woman kept getting into the black guy's way. The quarter spun under a counter. The kid started to cry. Her mother showed up. She whispered for the kid to stop crying. The kid didn't stop. Her mother shook her by the tiny bones in her shoulders and slapped at her bare, prancing legs. The kid moved like a matador. Finally her mother just yanked her up by one arm and stuffed her face into her shoulder and carried her out the front door. Alan followed them. They headed down one of escalators going into the BART Station. He was right behind them. Then. Fuck. Fucking fuck and fuck again. He had to get to the printers. What the hell had he been thinking? He turned around and ran back up the down escalator. The big gold and black clock at Powell and Market said it wasn't quite five. Son of a bitch. The printer usually closed pretty promptly, but maybe he could still make it. He looked for a cab, then ran and hopped on a Number Thirty-one Bus. From Van Ness, he could run and maybe still make it. He got to Van Ness. He ran. He didn't make it. The printer's was closed. He banged on the window. Nobody heard. Nobody was inside. Everyone had left for the day. Maybe if he got there early tomorrow. The meeting wasn't until two-thirty. Maybe if he was there waiting by the door when they opened. It was kind of a big job, but it couldn't have been that big a job. He relaxed. The day was over. He'd done everything he could do.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Seven) Mitchell Brothers' is a big blue building with tropical fish and dolphins and killer whales and seaweed and sprigs of coral painted on the outside walls like a huge aquarium. It was on Alan's way home. He went in. There was more to it than that. He was hoping maybe one of the women there might take his mind off Felice for awhile; some cute little black chick, maybe, with popping white eyes in the darkness and thick, slurpy lips and a broken tooth who would sit on his lap for a few bucks and talk to him like they were old friends from somewhere neither of them had ever been before. Someone real. Felice had become all that ever went on in him anymore. She wasn't real. He'd never seen her again. She could have been dead. The woman behind the cash register wanted twenty bucks. Alan gave it to her. She gave him a ticket. He went down a mirrored hallway. Either way he looked, to his right or to his left, he saw himself reflected over and over, getting smaller and smaller off into infinity. He was a parade of shrinking, graying blond men in the same grey suit and black briefcase, marching toward a den of iniquity. They tell you it's a den of iniquity all the way there. They don't make any bones about it. There are warnings not to be offended by any conceivable form of explicit sex or pornography or perversion. The signs lead you on. You think it's going to be Sodom and Gomorra. You expect midgets and Great Danes. There are grainy newspaper blowups of Marilyn Chambers being carted off by vice cops. She's looking smug. The cops are looking like they don't give a shit. Past the mirrors there's a red curtain. A guy looks at your ticket. Through the curtain there are red velvet chairs. They rock. The stage has a runway jutting out among red velvet rocking chairs. It's disappointing. The only thing that happens is women take off their skimpy clothes and dance down the runway and take off their shoes and perform gynecological feats on the bare floor. Men put money in front of them. The women pick it up in ingenious ways. When they're done, they put their skimpy clothes back on and show up in the audience and sit on the laps of men and men give them more money. It works out to around a dollar a minute. They get paid minimum-wage. Everything's strictly on the up and up. They make three or four hundred dollars a day. Some work harder than others. The girl on stage was no cute little black girl but a good sized Scandinavian blond. Some reggae guy was singing about electricity. Alan couldn't make out the words. He sat in one of the back rows. There was a ceiling fan and a mirrored ball which moved spots of light across the stage, and the curtain, and the chairs, and the walls, and into his eyes like an occasional flashbulb. He picked out one of the spots and followed it as it moved faster and slower, changed shapes, grew into ovals, shrank into to dots—then disappeared altogether and, when it showed back up again, he couldn't tell which one it had been. Twenty bucks seemed like a lot of money. The music stopped. The big blond was done. She dragged her clothes off the stage behind her. The curtain closed. A voice over the loud speaker wanted to hear it for Joy. Men clapped. Snatches of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony came on. The curtain opened again. The loud speaker asked everyone to welcome Betina from Brazil. The same men clapped. Punk rock music started up. B-52's? He didn't know. Felice would have known. She could have told him. She loved it when she knew stuff he didn't know. He had even pretended to be stupider than he actually was, just to give her extra opportunities. Betina sauntered into the spotlight in a pink prom dress. Alan heard footsteps through the wall behind where he was sitting—and pretty soon Joy showed up through the red velvet curtain. She took a deep breath and began making her rounds between the backs of chairs and the laps of men. Alan's eyes became accustomed to the dark. The aisles were crawling with the bodies of women. The men stayed in their chairs. You could hardly see them. They didn't move. Ovals of light floated over them and the bodies of women sidled up to them like so many fiddler crabs sidling up to so many clumps of seaweed on a moonlit beach, fiddling at them with bare arms and legs, plucking dollar bills from secret crevices, and sidling on down to the next dark, motionless clump. It was macabre, primordial—made his bones feel cold inside. Felice had turned him into someone he didn't like. The women were eighteen, nineteen year-old kids. The men could have been their fathers. But it was a way to make money. And dancing pumped their hearts and shot blood into their brains. Sitting on a few laps never killed anyone; the job had its ups and downs. And as for the men, they got to get touched, aroused; flattered, patted, petted, perspired upon. Surreptitious fondling took place. There were condom machines in the men's room in case you wanted to accidentally come in your pants without making a mess. The curtain closed. The intermission music was Jazz. A new announcement was made. The curtain opened. The spotlight shot on. It was Felice. The loud speaker called her Kim. The loud speaker said she was from Korea. Alan knew better. Electricity poured through him. Each little hole in his skin was riddled with hot fiery pricks of light. Waves of surprise and guilt and jealousy rolled over him. He was burning up. She was different. Her mouth glistened, still without lipstick, and her lips still curled into a churlish snarl. Her hair was redder, more messed up than ever. It had been three months. She was older. The bleeding man earring Dick Cherry had given her still dangled in her ear. She had on a black, wide-shouldered business suit with a white scarf around her neck and sequined shoes that picked up the spotlight. Her legs were bare. At first she didn't dance but just strode her long confident strides down the runway. The music was the Beatles song about here come old flattop. She looked into the eyes of men—riveted them to their chairs. She hiked up her skirt. Her panties were prim white cotton. Then she started dancing. Her legs were strong. She knew what the music was about. She unbuttoned the jacket and left it on. He couldn't see her breasts. Every hair on his body stood up like quills. She unzipped the skirt and left it on. The song ended. She went behind the curtain, seemed to relax, caught her breath, ran her hand through her hair, messed it up, made it stick out in sharp spikes catching the light. Then she took off the jacket, tossed behind the curtain, arranged the scarf across her bare chest and came back out into the spotlight again. Alan picked up his briefcase and moved down behind two young guys in the front row. He didn't want Felice to see him. The next song was a woman singing in a strange voice about a radio. Alan couldn't pay attention. Felice kicked the skirt off the end of a sequined shoe and was down to nothing but panties and the scarf. She was so pretty. She slipped off the shoes. She looked so young and fresh and nice, like she'd just stepped out of a hot bath, and sat on the stage like she was getting ready to paint the little slivers of her toenails; one knee up to her chin, thighs and breasts brushing. If she looked up, she'd be glad to see him. Alan just knew it. She would have missed him. She would have wanted to talk to him. She'd want to have a drink after work. The guys in front of Alan were drunk. One whispered hoarsely, either to himself or to the other guy, it was hard to tell. "Jesus. Look at the nipples on them tits, man! Damn. Can't you just taste her clit between your teeth? Mmm." Felice could hear him. She pulled the crotch of her panties to one side. The tendon inside her thigh stretched like a bowstring. The drunk guy squirmed. The other guy put a dollar on the stage. Felice brushed it back into the runway and smiled with her thick, sneering lips smeared with a new tube of Vaseline Lip Balm. Then she saw Alan. Her jaw popped open. He saw her back teeth. She stood up. Her third tune had started, Mick Jagger doing the one about the bleeding man--like Felice's earring, Alan thought. She still had her panties on, but she was done, she was through, she was out of there. She picked up her money quickly, without thanking anyone, and turned and the muscles in her calves tightened and her ass plumped out in strong, perfect semicircles as she walked away. Alan waited in the corridor leading from the stage. No one had seen him slip back there. There was a paint spattered tarpaulin draped over sections of scaffolding. He hid. She had to walk past him. Sweat from his hand made the handle of the briefcase smell like new leather. He balanced it over his shoulder like a club and could almost feel himself swinging it. She wouldn't know what hit her. He could kill her, physically, not leave her alive. The canvass made a kind of tent. He could drag her back there. It was dark. The music was loud. No one would hear. He could strangle her with her scarf. Then what? Touch her. So he would know in his flesh forever what it had been like to touch her, to feel inside her mouth, to touch her tongue, to pinch her pouty lips between his thumb and finger and take off her shoes and hold her feet until her toes turned cold. Felice's spike-heels nailed into the hollow floor like her legs were hammers. She was so sure of herself. She carried the jacket and skirt in front of her like she was on the way to the dry cleaners. Alan stepped in front of her, startled her. He smiled, tried to look cute. "What are you doing here?" she whispered. "I want to talk to you." "We're not supposed to meet customers." "I'm not a customer, Felice. Jesus. When do you get off?" "Wait for me up the block. We can have a drink, if you want." "I do," he said. She walked past him and the end of the white scarf dragged on the floor. They had daiquiris. A peach daiquiri and a strawberry daiquiri. The peach daiquiri was hers. It had a slice of peach on the edge of the glass. She ate it between her teeth and licked her lips with her tongue. Alan gave her his strawberry. She was still seeing Dick Cherry. On and off. Off and on. Alan wadded the cocktail napkin into a ball and straightened it out again and wadded it up once more and bent the little red straw from his drink back and forth. "So, have you hired a new secretary?" Felice asked. "No. You're irreplaceable." "Yeah," she said sadly. "Isn't that always the awful thing about unrequited love. Don't you just want to kill me?" He threw the napkin at her. She ducked, laughed. It made him feel good when he made her laugh. "I should kill you," he said. "I really should. Except it wouldn't do any good." "Sure it would. I'd be dead." "No you wouldn't." "I wish you'd get over that. I don't have anyone to talk to anymore," she shook her head. "I miss that." "I'm not going to get over it." "That's too bad." "Tell me about it," he said. "But, what are you doing working there?" He pointed back down the street. "What's it like?" "Working there? What does it look like it's like?" she asked—deadpan, droll, irritated, pained. "The money's good." "I really am sorry, you know." "It's not your fault." "I was the one who fired you." "Oh, yeah. I forgot. You fucking asshole." She threw the napkin back at him. "I liked my little job. We were fun together." "I had good reason, Felice." "No you didn't." "Yeah, actually, I did. Which brings me to why I wanted to talk to you." He bent the straw again. It broke. "There's something I need to know. This is hard." He held his palms open across the table. "In my life..." "In your long, long life," she interrupted. "There's been one thing that's been really important to me." "Jumping my bones." Her eyes looked up into her forehead. "No. I just adore you. That was always the whole trouble since about two minutes after I met you. I've never been able to be myself around you. Not even for a second. And all I want to know. You have to understand this. I'll do anything." "Like what?" "How about if I let you pull out all my grey hairs with a pair of rusty pliers?" "It's not your grey hair, Alan." "That's not very encouraging." "I've never been very encouraging. Have I?" "No. You never were. I don't know how this happened." "It's not something I haven't heard before, though. Men get infatuated with me all the time. Don't ask me why." "Let me just get this over with, then," he interrupted. "I'm not talking about right now or next week or next month or even in a year. But do you think. Ever. Under any possible set of unforeseen circumstances you could like me?" "I like you right now." "Equally. Physically. We could like each other?" Felice thought for a minute and wrinkled up the corner of her mouth and shrugged and said, "Posthumously?" "Other than posthumously?" "Mistaken identity?" She laughed. "Other than mistaken identity." "I don't think so." "Why not?" He practically wailed. "You're too hairy." "That's it?" "Not entirely. God, Alan. Come on. How can I explain it? You're either attracted to someone or you're not." "And you're not attracted to me." "Right. Do you enjoy this?" "Yeah. I love it. Just answer the question." "I don't see how." She shook her head. "What if I gave you money?" She looked at him sideways, lowered her voice and said, "I do that once in awhile. If the guy's not too repulsive and it's enough money." "You mean with guys you meet there?" Alan pointed back toward Mitchell Brothers' and felt powerful drugs twitching his nerves, making him sweat. "It's not much more than what I do anyway. Lap dancing isn't exactly sitting on grandpa's knee." "I'll give you money, Felice." "You don't trick with your friends," she said casually. "How can you want to be friends if you don't want to even get to know me?" "Sex has a tendency to screw things up." "How much more screwed up can they get?" "I'm not going to let myself be manipulated." "That makes me feel terrible." "Sorry." "There's nothing I could ever do?" "Nothing I can think of." "Felice," he said and paused. "I absolutely adore you." "I know," she said. Things got quiet. The drinks were gone. Alan looked into his glass and said, "I guess we're about through talking, then," and looked up expectantly. "Haven't we about exhausted the subject?" "He looked into her eyes. They were clear, direct, bored; hadn't changed, never would. "Well, you know what?" he asked. "No." She smirked. "What?" "I don't believe you," he said. Felice shook her head and turned her lips slightly inside out and said, "I'd love to know what it's like to have a man's ego for about a fraction of a second." "You want to know something else?" Alan asked. "This is going to sound stupid, but it's totally true. If you liked me you'd like me." "Hey, goddamn." She snapped her fingers. "Why didn't I ever think of that?" They waited for her bus at the corner of Polk and Post. The fog was sprays of water like dew clinging to her lip cream. Alan sat his briefcase on a cement trash can. They sat next to each other on the bench. Twice Alan asked, "Never?" Felice didn't answer. She wrote out her new address and phone number and gave it to him. Their fingers touched. "I don't have many friends," she said. The bus pulled up. She got on, moved toward the back door, waved. There were empty seats. She could have sat in one. She stayed standing. Maybe so he could see her wave to him, Alan thought. So he could see her standing there. Looking so cute. Maybe she was still trying to tell him something. The bus started to roar away from the curb, but the light turned red. The driver had to stop. Alan crossed Polk Street in front of the bus. The driver was pissed. He'd been ready to go. Alan didn't look back. He wondered now what? How do you ignore a direct statement of uncompromising fact? How do you get around it? What kind of lie can you come up with? It's like death. It's more final. You can kid yourself about the dead. He looked at the paper Felice had written her number on and crumpled it up and threw it away. Anything that had been in her presence he had to crumple up and throw away. He'd never be able to get on another Number 19 Polk Street Bus; couldn't ever eat another peach. He missed her already. Besides, he'd memorized the address anyway. He knew where she worked. He could always find her. He kept walking and thought to himself that, shit, it had to be at least a little reciprocal. There just wasn't any way around that. But, then again, fuck, maybe there was. He tried to talk himself into a new idea. Maybe just to have the feelings was enough. The sadness. The tenderness. Maybe that was the only way they could ever last, grow more intense, not go away—what did it matter how stupid whatever caused them was, the feelings were all that was important anyway. He could writhe in childish agony over the impossibility of love for as long as he lived. Felice was perfect. Never, never, never. She was someone he could remain doubled over in delicious agony about forever. She didn't even seem to mind. She seemed to sort of like it, in fact. It was going to be hard to find someone like that again. But still, there has to be at least a spark of the possibility of some unforeseen hope. If there's not at least that you're just stupid. So, what about posthumously? She did say maybe posthumously. How could that work? He could fake his death—have her invited to the funeral, grab her into the casket with him and close the lid. No one would hear her above the sound of dirt being shoveled in. Or mistaken identity? Hell, yes. He could dress up like an Old English Sheepdog and follow her home with its big mournful eyes. How could she resist? Logic overwhelms sex eventually. It must. It has to. You can't hang on to nothing. To never. Your ego won't let you. That's all there is to it. Felice was right again. It was nothing but ego; big, fat, stupid, male ego. Try it sometime. Assign an indomitable ego some enchantingly insurmountable task, then sit back and watch it's fucking ball bearings burn out. The son of a bitch just won't stop; smoke shooting out the poor fucker's ears—something has to give, nothing will. You've got to forget it. But how? It wasn't just ego. It wasn't just sex. He utterly and absolutely adored every little molecule of her intelligence and wit and spirit and soul. Yeah, it probably was just sex. No it wasn't. Sure, it was. No. Yes. No. Woe, oh woe. He went on. On and on. It got boring. There wasn't any room left in his mind for anything else.

Chapter Three Slick Solutions, Inc. (Part Eight) When he got home, Alan checked through the slits in his mailbox. It looked empty. He opened it anyway. It was empty. He continued down the hallway and unlocked the door to their apartment. The chain was hooked. The door wouldn't open. Maybe Melanie was trying to tell him something. She should have been trying to tell him something. In fact, she probably should have just flat out told him plenty. But she had a few quirks of her own. Nobody's perfect. Except Felice. He knocked. Melanie peeked out the crack. She had round explosions of baby powder around her eyes like a raccoon. The baby powder kept leftover mascara from stinging her eyes in the middle of the night. She needed her sleep. She fought for it. She drank Sleepytime Tea laced with tryptophan and put ear plugs in her ears and wore a white silk mask that made her look like the Lone Ranger's girlfriend. She had all kinds of tricks. Not just for sleeping. Tricks for all occasions: cucumber slices to relax her eyelids, mayonnaise to make her hair shine, eating egg shells to get her teeth cleaner than just by flossing three times a day—she could have written a book of odd ways to get yourself more comfortably through the agonies of everyday life. She found them in magazines or heard about them from women at work. She'd try anything. The odder the better. Melanie slid back the chain and asked, "Where've you been?" Alan ignored the question. Her hair was on top of her head in a pink towel. That made her eyes look even more huge and solemn than usual. She looked scared. "What's the matter?" he asked, frowning. "Nothing. I've been hearing noises...coming from the patio." They went into the kitchen. Alan leaned over the side of the table and cupped his hands to get a better look through white reflections of the stove and refrigerator. It was pitch black out in back. He couldn't see anything. Alan felt brave, protective. Like a cave man. Like the king of the castle. "I'll go down and check it out." Down in the basement, Alan wasn't in much of a rush. He took off his coat and pants and hung them on the back of the closet door and hung the tie on the doorknob and put on jeans and a red sweatshirt. Then he got his little black Beretta out from a dresser drawer, checked that the clip was full and a cartridge was in the chamber, clipped the holster to the back of his jeans, pulled the sweatshirt down over it and went out on the patio. Wind rustled the ivy. Fog sprayed his face. It was cold. Windy. Felice was probably still on the bus. Nothing stirred. Lights were on in the upstairs apartments. Melanie had her head out the window. It was dark, damp, eerie. There was nothing there. Nobody. But it was still sort of creepy, nonetheless. "Well?" Melanie called down from the kitchen window. "Okay, you dirty rat, come on out of there," Alan said. "Come out, come out, wherever you are." "Don't be funny. Are you still planning on doing the laundry?" "How about I do it tomorrow?" "I've got my bed all torn apart." Back inside, in a sudden frenzy of mindless activity, Alan gathered up his dirty clothes and stuffed them into a sheet, slipped on his fur lined flight jacket, slid a pocketful of change off the dresser and into his pants' pocket, dragged the sheet upstairs, stuffed in Melanie's things, got the box of detergent from beside the refrigerator, slung the sheet over his shoulder and limped across the street with the headlights of a newspaper truck honing in on him like a laser guided tank. One thing he'd learned from living there was you never wanted to do the laundry without a pocketful of change and your own detergent. The change machines at the Laundromat didn't work and the detergent dispenser was even worse. Not only did it not give you any soap, it stuck your dimes halfway and halfway out. It wasn't the money, it was the effrontery of the things. Inside, under the fluorescent lights, a gaunt old Vietnamese guy paddled up to the change machine in a pair of worn out rubber thongs. The straps weren't broken, the soles had worn through. Alan couldn't keep his eyes off the guy's feet; gnarled-up old toe joints, calluses halfway up his instep. He'd never seen anybody go all the way through the thick blue soles of a pair of those thongs they sell out of barrels at Safeway before—and, God, did the guy ever have a way with vending machines. He slipped in a quarter and out popped two dimes and a nickel; bam, just like that. Then he jammed two dimes into the soap machine and there was the gentle, muffled clunk of a small box of Tide falling into the tray and the guy shuffled over to a washer and, using a few bent brown teeth to bite the box open on the way, dumped in the soap, shut the lid and paddled out the door with the a sweet trickle of water dousing his raggedy clothes before Alan had even decided which washer to use yet—Jesus, he said to himself, no wonder they won the fucking war. Alan got his own laundry going and sat on top of the warm, sloshing machine until he heard a disturbance outside; shouting, laughing, a bottle spinning on gritty cement—probably just transvestite hookers up to no good again. Alan didn't even look anymore. He and Melanie lived near a whole nest of transitive hookers—like you wouldn't want to be around if an earthquake sent them all scurrying out from their cheap hotel and into the street like a bunch of albino newts from under a rotting log; running in circles, clutching their crotches, frantically grooming their Clairoled hair, torn between the embarrassment of being caught with a hairy dick hanging out and not wanting to waste such a once in a lifetime opportunity to flaunt the cute little estrogen induced tits they'd worked so hard to sprout. Standing in line at the grocery store, Alan and Melanie used to see one or another of them buying cigarettes in men's clothes—still unshaved and it was hard to tell smudged mascara from a black eye. The transvestites didn't like Melanie. She was everything they wanted to be. They called her names. Snooty twat. La dee dah. It made her feel bad. They seemed to like Alan all right. There was one he kind of liked himself. He always wanted to talk to her. She had long black hair and a tiny little boy-like butt she couldn't find pants to fit right. She was always on the lookout. The slightest toot of a horn got her heart all aflutter. He had no idea what he would have said, but he thought he would have liked to talk to her all the same. They could have gone for coffee. Her girlfriends would have positively died. He was a hell of a lot cuter than the guys she usually hung out with—guys with crescent moon tattoos and cigarette burns on their arms and corn silk whiskers growing out from between festered zits—speed freak urban guerrillas out having their way with the native girls. The black-haired transvestite let them have it, too. Alan figured he wasn't her type. He always made a big splash with her girlfriends, though—they whistled and clucked their cheeks—but the black-haired one just rested her wrist on her hip and shook the kinks out of her hair with her nose in the air whenever he walked by. Which was no doubt why she was the one he wanted to talk to in the first place. The machine clicked off. The spin cycle slowed. Alan dragged over one of the baskets with their wheels perpetually clogged with string, threw in the wet clothes, dragged them to a dryer, put four or five dimes into the slot, and, when the clothes got going good, added six or seven additional dines. You didn't get a lot of time for a dime. Melanie's frilly bras and blouses chased his ugly underpants around like wraiths. Alan hoisted himself back up onto a washer. Melanie would be happy. She liked clean sheets hot out of the dryer. He was looking forward to clean socks in the morning—then—shit! The briefcase! Again! Son of a fucking bitch! He actually physically hit himself in the head with the heel of his hand as he remembered it still at the bus stop, balanced on the edge of that goddamn trash can. Felice had been the cause of that too. She was the cause of everything, the slut. The bitch. The slut fucking bitch. She fucking fucked guys for money. What a cunt. And the urge came over him just to go over to her new address and shoot her full of all the bullets in his little black gun—but it would have taken too long. The bus ride. Finding her house. Seeing her light on, so soft and dim and yellow and alone. Hell. Plus, by the time he got there he knew he would have just ended up drooling all over anywhere her feet might have walked anyway. There was no way the briefcase could still be there. John Larson's face loomed into his consciousness. Alan had to go see. Just to know for sure. It was the time of night that the transvestites started congregating as flat-out women in front of the Laundromat. They sauntered up one or two at a time in their slinky outfits, and pretty soon it was a dozen or so; useless bras falling off broad shoulders, hairy armpits doused with the imitation Opium and Shalimar they sell over loud speakers at Woolworth's. A bony redhead in a white fringed flapper dress was adding a few finishing touches to her makeup in one of the dark next door windows. Her girlfriends stood guard, fidgeting, veins full of fresh methamphetamine, hearts full of hope. It was a formidable group. Alan made his way through them on his tiptoes, not looking too closely, hardly breathing. Past the transvestites the street was empty, lit up only by the liquor store window. Occasional headlights slowed down and speeded up again going past the stop sign at the cross street. Then there was a woman heading slowly toward him with her head down. Probably just another transvestite hooker on her way to join her buddies. But as he and the woman came closer and closer to each other it started looking more and more like the black-haired one. She was holding her hands at her sides, thumbs and fingers touching, making ovals, like a dancer in a ballet. She had on black, spiky, high-heels and a short black skirt with fishnet stockings. He stopped. Her heels made them the same height. Her mouth was fresh red lipstick, a shy smile, eyes batting. "Are you looking for me?" she asked. "Not really," he said. "Could you just give me five dollars then, please?" "Sure," he said. He reached in his pocket and gave her a five dollar bill. "Thanks." She smiled. Her teeth were crooked. "Are you going to be around here for awhile?" "Yeah? I mean, maybe. I mean, I hope not." "Could you keep an eye on my laundry? Don't let anyone steal it?" "I could try." It was like the first real job she'd ever had in her life. Alan felt worthwhile. "It's in the third dryer down. Thanks," he said and took off around the corner, down Post Street heading toward Polk. When he got to the trash can where he'd left his briefcase, he'd been right. It wasn't there. There was a woman leaning against a brick building by the trash can. Alan couldn't tell whether she was a transvestite or not, but he presumed she was a hooker of some sort. All he could tell for sure was she looked like she was freezing to death. There were a couple guys waiting for the bus. Alan was glad he'd had sense enough to have put on the old Army Air Corps flight jacket he won off his father pitching horseshoes. His father had won it shooting pool off a guy in the army in 1942. It had brown stuffed animal fur for a collar and tar on the sleeves and torn cuffs and a broken zipper and Alan wouldn't have traded it for any other jacket in the world. There were old movie posters in the window of the building against which the woman was leaning; Jean Peters, John Hodiak—people nobody knew who they even were anymore. The woman leaning against the building was a tiny little thing all bundled up in a long wool coat down to her ankles and low-heeled boots up to the knee. There was no way of telling what she might have looked like under all that. A bronze Pinto pulled into the bus stop. The driver leaned across the seat and rolled down the passenger window. The tiny hooker stuck her head inside. Negotiations broke down. The car drove off. She returned to the corner. A man came up and asked where she was from. She said Hawaii. He wanted to know if she was Filipino. He went away. She looked over at Alan, smiled, took a few steps toward him. He took a few steps toward her. They met in the middle of the sidewalk. "You look like Nanook of the North," Alan told her. "Pardon me?" she said. "Forget it." He waved. "No, I'm sorry. What did you say? I didn't hear." She wasn't pretty. She'd had bad skin in high school. Her lips were thin. She had hair on her cheeks. She wasn't ugly. Her eyes were nice. She looked part Indian. Eskimo, maybe. Dark. Cagey. Curious. "What'd that guy want?" Alan asked protectively. "He thought I was Filipino." She shrugged. "What'd you tell him?" "I told him I was Spanish and Hawaiian. "I would have said Eskimo, but maybe it's just the weather." "Actually, I think Eskimos and Hawaiians came from the same place. I was born in Oakland but live on Maui." "What are you, visiting relatives?" "Not exactly, no," she shook her head sadly. "So, what are you doing?" "I'm working. Did you have something in mind?" "Yeah. I left my briefcase here about an hour ago. Right on top of this trash can. You didn't see anyone pick it up, did you?" "Not that I noticed, no. That's it?" she asked disappointedly. "I don't know. You should probably be a little more downtown, actually, around the big hotels. This is kind of a weirdo area." "I don't work in San Francisco very often." "I've got an office downtown. Right across from the St. Francis." "You want to take me there?" He thought about it a minute. She looked so lost. So forlorn. "You know, actually, I should probably go down there anyway. I need to get some stuff that was in my briefcase. Sure. Why not. We'll just hop in a cab. You'll be way better off." "I don't even know the going rate around here." "Around here it's not that much. Like around forty bucks. Up around the St. Francis it's like a hundred, minimum. You shouldn't sell yourself short." Then all of a sudden there was a gigantic commotion. One of the guys who'd been nonchalantly waiting at the bus stop barged in between Alan and the woman and announced triumphantly, "You're under arrest." He held up a badge. Alan felt sorry for her. She probably hadn't even had a single customer all night. He told the cop she wasn't doing anything. The cop looked puzzled. Another cop showed Alan a badge and said, "She's undercover vice. We've got the whole thing on tape." "You mean me?" Alan pointed at his chest. "I'm under arrest?" The next thing Alan thought about was the gun clipped to the back of his pants. He wasn't worried about what they had on the tape. He was worried about the little Beretta clipped to the back of his pants, however. A third cop came over; obviously the boss—trench coat, snap-brim hat, the works. He asked Alan if he had any weapons, "Knives? Grenades?" He thought that was cute. He patted his pockets, the pockets of the flight jacket. But he didn't pat the back of his pants. Alan worried that he was going to have to go to jail. What about the laundry? What about John Larson and his fucking brochure? And then, of course, there was what Melanie would say when she had to come get him out of jail for trying to pick up a hooker while he was out doing the laundry. Talk about pissed. "Are you taking me to jail?" Alan asked the main cop. "Nah. You can be up on the next corner in no time." "What did I do, though? Can you tell me that?" "Solicitation for prostitution." "Don't you have to mention sex or money or something?" "I'm not going to argue about it. We've got the tape." "What if the tape doesn't say anything?" "The DA drops it. Nine times out of ten they drop these anyway. I don't know why we fucking bother." The tiny bundled up vice cop kept on working while the second cop wrote Alan out a notice to appear. She was a real go-getter. The city was getting its money's worth. As he was leaving she caught his eye and said, "Sorry," with a nice, cute, sheepish, sympathetic little gloat. "That's okay," Alan told her. Back at the Laundromat, the black-haired transvestite was still standing guard. His clothes had finished drying. "I just got fucking busted!" Alan told her. "For soliciting!" "I get fucking busted all the time," she said. "Well, I don't. I felt sorry for the chick. She was freezing her ass off. What do they do, anyway? You have to go to court?" "I don't know," she shrugged. "I don't get busted for being a John. I just say I did it. They give me a free lawyer. I say I won't do it any more." "Hey, can I ask you about some other things?" Alan blurted out. "Sure, hon. You got another couple bucks?" "Yeah. I got all kinds of money." He took out some more money, gave it to her. "I just want to ask you something sort of personal." "Okay." "What I want to know is, like, you're a guy, right? So how do you get rid of all your hair? Like on your arms and chest and everything?" "Nair," she said flatly. "That's it? That's all you want to know? I'd have told you that for free." "How does it work, though?" "You just slap it on and let it sit there and wipe it off." "Does it like hurt or anything?" "Burns a little if you leave it on too long. Why? You planning on working the neighborhood?" "No. Christ. I've been with the same woman for twenty years." "I know. I've seen you. You and your wife. Down at the U-Save on Geary. You two seem nice together. She's a beautiful woman." "She's not really my wife. We're not actually married." "What-ev-er," she said. "I got an extra bottle. If you want to try it." "Nair?" "Sure. I'll get go get it. That's really all you wanted?" "Yeah. That's all I wanted. Weird, huh?" "Not to me it's not." "Go get me a bottle. I'll give you twenty bucks." "You can buy it at Wallgreen's for three ninety-five." "I don't care. I want some. Can you meet me back here in five minutes?" "Twenty bucks. Sure. You want two bottles?" Alan brought the laundry inside. Melanie was waiting to make her bed. The pretext he used to go out again was that he'd left his briefcase at the Laundromat. She rolled her eyes. She didn't trust him. He didn't trust her. But they'd learned to cross bridges when they came to them. He didn't mention he'd just been arrested for soliciting a vice cop, either. You want to keep the bridges you have to cross to a minimum. Nor did he mention the transvestite hooker waiting for him. That was no bridge. And as for getting busted, he hadn't done anything, had he? So that wasn't a bridge. Felice, on the other hand. Well, they never actually did anything, either, but he presumed it could reasonably be construed as a bridge of some sort, nonetheless. Back out on the street again, the black-haired transvestite was waiting for him with a bottle of Nair. Alan gave her a twenty dollar bill. She thanked him. That was that. He had no clear idea what he was even going to do with it. He just wanted to have it. Just in case. In case of what, he didn't know.