Mary Margaret shook her head. I, too, shook my head, but not in sympathy with her crazy old coot of a father. I shook it because I was still no closer to understanding why I considered her such a threat. She started to tell me about the eldest of her two brothers, something about him wanting to be a harness-race jockey (I think she said), another lunatic in a totally insane household — fifteen hundred bucks a week indeed! It suddenly occurred to me that Mary Margaret Buono was a call girl.
“Are you a call girl?” I asked.
“What?” she said, and burst out laughing. “Of course not,” she said. “Who would pay me?”
“Then how do you earn fifteen hundred dollars a week?”
“Some weeks even more.”
“How?”
“I’m a fashion model.”
I now knew why I was afraid of Mary Margaret Buono. Mary Margaret Buono, as I had suspected all along, was completely and totally out of her bird.
“A fashion model,” I said.
“Yes.”
(What do you model? I wanted to ask. Circus tents?) “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“Mm.”
“You’re thinking I’m not beautiful enough to be a fashion model.”
“Why on earth would I think that?”
“Because it’s true,” Mary Margaret said. “But take a look at my hands.”
I took a look at her hands. I am not an expert on hands, but I had certainly never seen lovelier hands in my life. From wrist to fingertip, from knuckle to joint, in length, width, girth, and depth, her hands were spectacularly beautiful. I fell immediately in love with her hands. I wanted to touch her hands and be touched by her hands, I wanted to sculpt her hands, I wanted to write sestinas about her hands, I wanted to go to bed with her hands. They did not seem to belong to her. You saw a pair of hands like that, and you expected someone tall and willowy and incredibly good-looking to be attached to them. You did not expect freckle-faced, pudgy, dumpy Mary Margaret to own those hands.
I once saw an old movie on television where a concert pianist had a terrible accident, and he lost his hands, and the surgeons gave him a pair of hands that used to belong to a strangler. So every time the pianist started to play Chopin, he got the urge to choke somebody. Looking at Mary Margaret’s hands, I had the distinct impression that the operation had been performed on her in reverse. She was really a lady wrestler or a roller-derby champ, and she had lost her hands in a six-car collision, and they had grafted the hands of a dead harpist onto her wrists.
“Those are some hands,” I said.
“They’re my fortune. Anytime you see a pair of hands on a television commercial or in a magazine ad, chances are they’re mine.”
“Those are really beautiful hands,” I said.
“Yes, they are,” she said, without false modesty. “I’m really impressed with them. I think I inherited them from my grandmother.”
“Those are really the goddamnedest hands I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“It’s funny I didn’t notice them before.”
“Lots of people don’t notice hands,” Mary Margaret said.
“I’ve got very good-looking feet,” I said. “But they’re nothing compared to your hands.”
“Well, thank you,” she said.
“I’d be happy to show you my feet sometime, if you’re interested.”
“I’d love to see them right this minute,” she said.
“In that case,” I said, and reached down and unzipped first the right fur-lined boot and then the left fur-lined boot, and then took off first the right sock and then the left sock, and got off the bar stool, and put my feet close together and said, “Voilà!”
“They’re extraordinary feet,” Mary Margaret said.
“It’s the arches,” I said.
“And also the way the toes are angled. There’s a very good gentle angle on the toes.”
“Yes.”
“I think I could develop a foot fetish for feet like those,” she said.
“They are beautiful,” I said.
“Does your grandmother have beautiful feet?”
“My grandmother is dead.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s quite all right.”
“Did she have beautiful feet when she was living?”
“I never had the pleasure of witnessing my grandmother’s feet,” I said.
“The only reason I ask...”
“Yes, is because...”
“Yes, because my grandmother had beautiful hands, you see...”
“Yes, I know.”
“You’ve seen my grandmother’s hands?”
“Never. I have never witnessed neither her hands nor my own grandmother’s feet, may she rest in peace.”
“Peter,” she said, “I would like to propose a toast.”
“Just let me get my socks back on,” I said.
“What for? I love looking at your feet.”
“Yes, but I don’t want everyone in the place running over to kiss them. Now where’d I put...? Okay. Okay.”
“I would like to propose a toast to...”
“Just a minute, please.”
“Did you see The French Connection?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember the scene where Popeye...”
“That’s Faulkner.”
“No, that’s The French Connection.”
“The scene with the corncob?”
“No, the scene with the feet.”
“Damn sock here doesn’t seem to...”
“Where he arrests this man...”
“Must be the wrong damn foot.”
“And asks him about his feet?”
“There we go.”
“Anyway, here’s a toast to...”
“Ooops, caught the little pinkie there.”
“Do you want to hear this toast or not?”
“Just let me get this other one.”
“What’d you say your grandmother’s name was?”
“Grandma.”
“Yes, mine too.”
“There we are, all tucked away. What’s the toast?”
“Here’s to picking feet in Poughkeepsie.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I thought you saw The French Connection.”
“Yes, but dubbed in English.”
“Oh,” Mary Margaret said.
“You two are getting ossified,” Robert said.
“You still owe me for my dress.”
“What dress?”
“It cost me two dollars and fifty cents to have it dry cleaned.”
“Huh?” Robert said.
“Robert,” I said, “I think we need another round here.”
“I think you need a week in the drunk tank.”
“Robert’s from California,” Mary Margaret said.
“Two more of the same, please,” I said.
“Which is where he learned how to ruin a girl’s dress,” Mary Margaret said.
“Huh?” Robert said, and went off for the drinks.
It occurred to me that I still didn’t know why I was afraid of Mary Margaret. It also occurred to me that I wasn’t afraid of her any more.
In my room, I curled up for a short nap and almost missed dinner. It was ten minutes to eight when I shook myself from total stupor and discovered that seven fire engines were racing to a false alarm inside my skull, bells clanging, sirens blowing and engines roaring. I staggered into the bathroom, took two Bufferin, went back to the bed, and collapsed on it. At eight twenty-five, I went into the bathroom again, this time to throw up. Outside the bathroom window, several wild animals were clawing at the pane and bellowing to be let inside. The fire engines in my head went wailing away into the distance, probably en route to Spanish Harlem. I hunched over the bowl in misery, remembering a time long ago when my father (in one of his more endearing moments) came home of a New Year’s Eve and puked all over my bed. The smell of vomit had lingered in my nostrils till St. Swithin’s Day, after which it rained for forty days and forty nights in accordance with tradition. I flushed the toilet.