“Joe Casale.”
“Joe, this is Mark Leyner. I was in about an hour ago to test-drive the new Capri and I think I left a book on the passenger seat. Can you have someone check and see if it’s there?”
“No problem, Mr. Leyner. Just hold for a couple of seconds.”
“Thanks, babe.”
A minute or two passed and Casale returned to the line.
“Mr. Leyner, I’m sorry but the Capri you drove is out on the road again. Where are you now?”
“I’m at the Hyatt Self-Surgery Clinic in New Brunswick.”
“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Leyner, why don’t I drop the book off at the clinic later this evening.”
“It’s not out of your way?”
“It’s no problem, Mr. Leyner.”
“Thanks, babe.”
I parked, slung my overnight bag over my shoulder, and went in to register. The clerk at the front desk keyed my name and American Express number into the computer.
“Mr. Leyner, what procedure will you be performing on yourself?”
I hesitated for a moment before responding. It seemed injudicious to divulge to this woman that a deceased rodent was impacted between my prostate gland and urethra and that the surgical procedure I intended to perform was a radical gerbilectomy.
“Appendectomy,” I lied.
“Mr. Leyner, do you have a preference with regard to O.R. accommodations?”
“Well, where do the real players stay?”
“The ‘real players,’ sir?”
I pushed my sunglasses down the bridge of my nose and superciliously eyeballed the desk clerk over the blue mirrored lenses.
“The players … the Stephen Kings, the Louis L’Amours, the Jeffrey Archers, and Ken Folletts and James Clavells.”
“Mr. L’Amour was in last month to perform his own cold-fusion blepharoplasty and he stayed in … let me check … ah yes, the Tivoli Suite.”
“I would like the Tivoli Suite, then.”
“Very good, sir.”
* * *
It’s 10:30 P.M. I’m in the Tivoli Suite and I’ve just self-administered a spinal block leaving my lower torso insensible to pain. I’m about to make my first incision when I hear the doorknob turn.
“¿Quién es?” I ask. “Who is it?”
With the exception of my instrument tray and my lower abdomen, which are illuminated by high-powered halogen lamps, the room is pitch dark. I tilt a lamp toward the door and discern a figure with a tiny head and a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene tucked under his flipper.
“Joe?” I inquire.
“It was right on the passenger seat where you left it, Mr. Leyner!”
“Thanks, babe.”
Joe turns to leave.
“Joe, wait a minute. How’d you like to come work for me?”
“Work for you, Mr. Leyner?”
“Yeah. Move into headquarters, coordinate the staff, oversee the bodyguards, y’know, do a little of this, a little of that — you’d be my adjutant, my aide-de-camp. It’s a great group of people, you get free medical treatment from Dr. Larry Werther — my cousin, my gastroenterologist — and basically I think you’d do a great job and I think you’d have a ball. What do you say?”
“Mr. Leyner … I think you have yourself an aide-de-camp,” Joe says, extending a flipper.
“Welcome aboard, babe.”
You enter the pink-and-yellow-splashed foyer and you’re swept quickly toward the inner sanctum. Flashbulbs pop as svelte spokesmodel and media liaison Baby Lago pours the Moët. Out of the corner of your eye, you see Arleen ravaging a french-fried yam. She’s wearing a short, provocative strapless dress by Emanuel Ungaro that’s candy-box pink and pale green. The dress is so provocative that you want to approach Arleen and perhaps caress the nape of her neck. But you dare not. Because there I am. Even more heavily muscled than you’d expected. More frightening and yet somehow more alluring than you’d imagined. My crisp white shirt is by Georges Marciano and costs about $88. My suede jeans — Ender Murat, $550—are rolled up, exposing calves that make you realize for perhaps the first time in your life how beautiful the human calf can actually be — when it’s pumped up almost beyond recognition. I’m being interviewed by a reporter from Allure, the new Condé Nast beauty magazine.
“I have a way of being noticed and being mysterious at once,” I’m saying, “like a gazelle that is there one second and then disappears.”
Joe Casale comes running in. “Mr. Leyner, Mr. Leyner — Maria’s on ‘20/20.’ You said I should let you know.”
“OK, babe, thanks. Everybody quiet down! Joe, turn it up.”
“Today Marla Maples, the twenty-six-year-old model-actress who first achieved notoriety as the ‘other woman’ in the Donald and Ivana Trump divorce, sits on death row at San Quentin as her attorneys exhaust their final appeals in an apparently futile attempt to save the blond serial killer from the gas chamber. Implicated in the deaths of Leonard Bernstein, Malcolm Forbes, Grace Kelly, Billy Martin, Muppet-creator Jim Henson, and reggae singer Peter Tosh, Maples has devoted her final weeks to a letter-writing campaign in support of a congressional bill that will require television sets manufactured after July 1997 to be equipped with a computer chip that provides caption service for the deaf.
“Marla, you’re young, you’re leggy, you’re busty — yet in a matter of days, the State of California is going to put you in a metal room and fill it with sodium cyanide gas. Do you have any advice for other leggy, busty, young women who might be experiencing peer pressure to experiment with serial killing and who might be watching tonight?”
“That’s enough, Joe. Turn the TV off, OK? Thanks, babe.”
I apologize to the Allure reporter.
“Now … where were we?”
“I was asking you how you got started as a writer, and, more specifically, how you got started writing liner notes for albums.”
“When I was six, I came home from school one day and I went down into the basement to look for a bicycle pump and I found the dead bodies of my parents. They were each hanging from a noose, naked. All their fingers had been cut off and arranged in a pentagram under their dangling feet and in the center of this pentagram of bloody fingers was a note and the note said: ‘Dear Mark, You did this to us.’
“A year later, I took a job as a bookkeeper at an insurance agency that was located in an old two-story brick building not far from here. And on my first day of work, a few of my colleagues took me out to lunch. After a long silence, one of them finally said that there was something very important that they needed to tell me. He said that about thirty or forty years ago, our office building had been owned by a very wealthy man. And this man was a chronic philanderer. And his wife knew about his affairs. And she decided that the only way to end his infidelity and to preserve their marriage was to get pregnant again, to have a ‘change-of-life baby.’ So she stopped using contraceptives and, sure enough, she got pregnant. The baby was born, a boy. And he was horribly deformed. He had neurofibromatosis — Elephant Man’s disease. The couple kept the child shackled in a storeroom in the husband’s commercial property. He was never brought to the couple’s home, but kept for his entire childhood in a dark, windowless storage room in the very building that this insurance company now occupies. The child, the monster child, did nothing to stop the husband’s philandering. In fact, if anything, the tragedy of this birth, of having to go every day to the storage room and find this chained horror writhing in its own excrement, simply deepened the husband’s despair and inflamed his bitter compulsion to betray his wife. All of this finally drove the wife over the edge and one night, while the husband was working in the office building, she set it on fire. The husband’s charred body was found, but somehow the deformity escaped. And although he’s never been seen, it’s rumored that on his birthday he goes foraging for a special meal of human flesh.