We went and he ordered two glasses of Chianti without consulting me and then loaded up a couple of plates. He said, “Salute,” and clinked his glass against mine, after which he tossed off half his wine at a gulp. “So, Phil, tell me about the detective business.”
“There’s not much to tell. It’s a job like any other—”
“Nah, come on. Pretty exciting, eh? I see your name in the papers sometimes, you don’t get your name in the papers if you got a job like any other job.”
“Well, once in a while there’s some excitement. Mostly, though—”
“You meet plenty good-looking women, eh?”
“Well...”
“Sexy young blondes with big tits. Few of those, eh?”
“Well...”
He leaned close to me; his eyes were very bright. “How many times you screw one on your desk?”
“What? Uh, I’ve never—”
“Big tits, little tits, you never screwed one in your office? Desk, floor, how about a couch you got in there?”
“No. Look, Tony—”
“I always wanted to do that,” he said wistfully. He finished his wine in another swallow-. “Screw a sexy young blonde, bada boom, bada bing, right there in my office. Once I had a chance, this secretary I had, but she was too old, too fat, fatter than Roseanna. Gotta be worth it, you take a risk like that. You know what I mean, Phil?”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“You ever screw somebody in your office, you make sure it’s worth it, make sure she’s some sexy young blonde with big tits. And don’t let Kerry find out. I like Kerry, I don’t want to see her unhappy.”
Jim Carpenter saved me from any more of this by bringing up somebody he wanted DiGrazia to meet. I wandered back to where Kerry had extricated herself from the dragon lady. She said, “You seem to be getting along pretty well with Tony. He’s a sweet old guy, isn’t he?”
This was not the time or the place to tell her about Tony’s favorite fantasy. I said, “That’s one way to describe him,” and let it go at that.
Kerry dragged me around and introduced me to some people. That wasn’t so bad because she was right there beside me, but the room was filling up, spilling over into the smaller one adjacent, the noise level was up into the high-decibel range, and it was inevitable the shifting tide of bodies would pull us apart and I’d be on my own. The guy who wrote that no man is an island must never have been lost in the stormy sea of an overblown cocktail party.
The last thing Kerry said to me before we got separated was, “You’ll be fine. Just go ahead and mingle.” Right. I was mingling by myself in a corner, hanging on to a fresh glass of red wine with both hands, when a woman I’d never seen before came sidling up. Sexy young blonde with a well-developed chest — if DiGrazia saw her, he’d probably try to hire her on the spot.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“Are you anybody?” she asked.
“...I’m sorry?”
“Anybody. You know, in the advertising business.”
“I’m not in the advertising business.”
“Oh. Well, are you anybody in any other business?”
“I don’t know what you mean by anybody.”
“You know, important. Are you important?”
“Only to myself and my wife, and then not all the time.”
“Does that mean no?”
“Yes. I mean, no.”
“Well, which is it?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought so,” she said, and walked away.
I was standing there wondering what had just happened when another woman’s voice said, “There you are.” Talking to me — and I wished she wasn’t. Paula Hanley, with Andrew in tow.
“We’ve been looking all over for you,” she said in her shrill, breathless voice. “Haven’t we, Andrew?”
“Oh, sure,” Andrew said.
“Isn’t this a fun party?”
“I can think of better words for it,” I said.
As usual Paula was a vision — the kind an acidhead might have on a bad trip. Lemon-yellow hair, pumpkin-colored lipstick, a sea-green outfit topped off by three or four scarves in violent shades of purple and orange. One of the most expensive interior designers in the city and she looked like the survivor of a paint factory explosion. Go figure.
“It’s been months since we’ve seen you,” she said. “Hasn’t it been months, Andrew?”
“Months,” Andrew agreed. He took a sip from a very large glass of what I guessed was gin. That and the mixture of boredom and annoyance in his expression said he didn’t want to be here any more than I did.
“How’re things on the god and goddess front?” I asked Paula. It was the only conversational gambit I could come up with.
“The what?”
“New Age tantra. The Holy Sexual Communion.” That had been her grand passion the last time I’d seen her — a sexual enhancement fad based on a 1500-year-old tradition that involved chanting, massages with scented oil, beating on elkskin drums, and providing private parts with names like Wand of Light and Valley of Bliss.
“Oh,” Paula said, “we’re not into that anymore.”
Big surprise; she changed fads as often as she changed underwear. “Didn’t work out, huh?”
“Oh, no, it was a wonderful few months. Spiritual love in which orgasm is truly nonessential. Wasn’t it wonderful, Andrew?”
Andrew took another large sip from his large glass. “One of the crowning experiences of my life,” he said.
She gave him a look, decided he wasn’t being sarcastic, and said to me, “We’ve progressed into other areas of intimacy, with even greater satisfaction. Of course I can’t discuss them in an atmosphere like this, but if you and Kerry are interested...”
“No,” I said quickly. “We’re just fine in the intimacy department. Everything working the way it should.”
Andrew snickered.
Paula asked me, “Have you tried acupuncture?”
“What, as a sexual aid?”
“No, no. As a method of healing.”
“I don’t like needles.”
“I don’t, either. You hardly feel the ones they use. And they’re the disposable ones, of course, so you don’t have to worry about disease.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Acupuncture is marvelous,” Paula said, in the ecstatic tone she reserves for brand-new fads and follies. “It cures all kinds of ailments — arthritis, bursitis, insomnia, allergies—”
“It doesn’t cure anything,” Andrew said. “It’s quack medicine.”
She turned on him. “How can you say that?”
“I can say it because it’s true. It’s in the same class with massage, herbal treatments, and spiritual healing.”
“Alternative therapies, every one,” Paula said with acid sweetness. “Isn’t chiropractic considered alternative therapy?”
Red splotches appeared on Andrew’s puffy cheeks. “Just because the goddamn A.M. A. refuses to recognize the benefits of chiropractic medicine—”
“Or the benefits of acupuncture.” She swiveled my way again. “It really does work. For a while I had serious digestive problems, and they vanished, I mean completely vanished, after only three sessions with Dr. Dong. And what he did for my sciatica—”
“Dr. Dong. My God!”
“Andrew, the man can’t help the name he was born with. Besides, Dong is a perfectly common Chinese name—”
“And he’s a perfectly common Chinese quack.”
“He is not a quack! He has been in business twenty-five years, he’s a graduate of the Shanghai Chinese Medical School and diplomate of the National Board of Acupuncture Orthopedics—”