"Honey?" he called out, popping off the cap.
"Yes, dear." She briskly walked in.
"How was tennis?"
"We won."
"Good for you!" She beamed.
"Withers must have double-faulted twenty times." He swallowed.
"Foot-faulted like hell, too, but we didn't call those. What'd you guys eat?" He barely looked at Polly Mauney, his wife of twenty-two years.
"Spaghetti Bolognese, salad, seven grain bread." She went through his tennis bag, fishing out cold sweat- soaked, smelly shorts, shirt, socks, and jock strap, as she always had and would.
"Got any pasta left?"
"Plenty. I'd be delighted to fix you a plate, dear."
"Maybe later." He fell into stretches.
"I'm really getting tight. You don't think it's arthritis, do you?"
"Of course not. Would you like me to rub you down, sweetheart?" she said.
While he was drifting during his massage, she would bring up what her plastic surgeon had said when she had inquired about a laser treatment to get rid of fine lines on her face, and a copper laser treatment to eliminate the brown spot on her chin. Polly Mauney had been filled with terror when her plastic surgeon had made it clear that no light source could substitute for a scalpel. That was how bad she had gotten.
"Mrs. Mauney," her plastic surgeon had told her.
"I don't think you're going to be happy with the results. The lines most troublesome are too deep."
He traced them on her face so gently. She relaxed, held hostage by tenderness. Mrs. Mauney was addicted to going to the doctor. She liked being touched, looked at, analyzed, scrutinized, and checked on after surgery or changes in her medication.
"Well," Mrs. Mauney had told her plastic surgeon.
"If that's what you recommend. And I suppose I am to assume you are referring to a face lift."
"Yes. And the eyes." He held up a mirror to show her.
The tissue above and below her eyes was beginning to droop and puff.
This was irreversible. No amount of cold water splashes, cucumbers or cutting down on alcohol or salt would make a significant difference, she was informed.
"What about my breasts?" she then had inquired.
Her plastic surgeon stepped back to look.
"What does your husband think?" he asked her.
"I think he'd like them bigger."
Her doctor laughed. Why didn't she state the obvious? I Unless a man was a pedophile or gay, he liked them bigger. His gay female patients felt the same way. They were just better sports about it, or pretended to be, if the one they loved didn't have much to offer.
"We can't do all of this at once," the plastic surgeon warned Mrs. Mauney.
"Implants and a face lift are two very different surgeries, and we'd need to space them apart, giving you plenty of time to heal."
"How far apart?" she worried.
Chapter Twenty-three
It did not occur to West until she was home and locking herself in for the night that she would have to set her alarm clock. Perhaps one of her few luxuries in life was not getting up on Sunday morning until her body felt like it, or Niles did. Then she took her time making coffee and reading the paper, as she thought about her parents heading off to Dover Baptist Church, not far from the Chevon, or from Pauline's Beauty Shop, where her mother got her hair fixed every Saturday at ten in the morning. West always called her parents on Sunday, usually when they were sitting down to dinner and wishing her place wasn't empty.
"Great," she muttered to herself, grabbing a beer as Niles sat on the window sill over the sink.
"So now I've got to get up at eight-thirty.
Can you believe that? "
She tried to figure out what Niles was staring at. From I this section of Dilworth, West would have no reminders of the city she protected were it not for the top thirty stories of US Bank rising brightly above West's unfinished fence. Niles had gotten really peculiar lately, it struck West. He sat in the same spot every night, staring out, as if he were ET missing home.
"What are you looking at?" West ran her fingernails down Niles's silky, ruddy spine, something that always made him purr.
He did not respond. He stared, as if in a trance.
"Niles?" West was getting a bit worried.
"What is it, baby? You not feeling well? Got a hairball? Mad at me again? That's probably it, isn't it?" She sighed, taking a swallow of beer.
"I sure wish you'd try to be more understanding, Niles. I work hard, do everything I can to provide you a secure, nice home. You know I love you, don't you? But you gotta try and cut me a little slack. I'm out there all the live-long day." West pointed out the window.
"And what? You're here. This is your world, meaning your perspective isn't as big as mine, okay? So you get pissed because I'm not here, too. This isn't fair. I want you to give some serious thought to this. Got it?"
The words of the owner were chatter, the buzzing of insects, the drone of sounds drifting out of the radio on the table by the bed.
Niles wasn't listening as he stared out at the forlorn King Usbeecee staring back at him. Niles had been called. There was disaster looming in the land of the Usbeeceeans, and only Niles could help, because only Niles would listen. All others looked up to the mighty King and mocked him in their minds and among themselves, thinking the benevolent monarch could not hear. They, the people, had wanted His Majesty to come. They had wanted his child-care centers and frescos, his career opportunities, and his wealth. Then they had turned jealous of his omniscience, of his all-powerful and praiseworthy presence.
Those here and from distant ports were lustful and plotting a takeover that only Niles could stop.
%9 "Anyway," West was saying, popping open another beer as her weird-ass cat continued staring out at the night.
"I'm chasing him south on Seventy-seven at about ninety miles an hour? Can you believe it? He should be in jail right now, you ask me."
She took another swallow of Miller Genuine Draft, wondering if she should eat something. For the first time since she'd had the flu several years ago, West was not hungry. She felt light and foreign inside, and awake. She thought back on how much caffeine she'd had this day, wondering if that might be the problem. It wasn't. Hormones, she decided, even though she knew that the beast was no longer raging, and in fact had been quiet most of the day, on its way back to its cave until the moon was in position again.
King Usbeecee was a potentate of few words, and Niles had to watch carefully to hear what the King was saying. Sunrise and sunset were the King's most chatty times, when windows flashed white and gold in a firestorm of pontifications. At night, Niles mainly studied the red light winking on top of the crown, a beacon saying to him, repeatedly, wink-wink-wink. After a barely perceptible pause, three more winks, and so on. This had gone on for weeks, and Niles knew that the code was directing him to a three-syllable enemy, whose armies this very minute were marching closer to the Queen City that the King ruled.
"Well, since you're so friendly," West said in a snippy tone to her cat, "I'm going to do laundry."
Startled, Niles stretched and stared at her, his eyes crossed as a similar firestorm flared inside his head. What was it the King had said? What, what, what? Earlier this evening, when Niles had been watching the King send him signals with the sun, hadn't the King flashed an agitated pattern, light going round and round the building, back and forth, back and forth, very similar to how the owner's big white box worked when she did laundry. A coincidence? Niles thought not. He jumped off the sill, then the counter, and followed his owner into the utility room. The fur stood up on his back when she dipped into pants pockets, pulling out money before wadding clothes and dunking them into the machine's basket. Other flashes of insight exploded in Niles' brain. He frantically rubbed against his owner's legs, and nipped her, sharpening his claws on her leg, trying to tell her.
"Goddamn it!" West shook the cat off.
"What the hell has gotten into you?"
Wft Brazil lay back in the sleeping bag on the floor of his new, one-bedroom, unfurnished apartment. He had a headache and couldn't seem to get enough water. He'd been drinking beer for two days, and this frightened him. His mother had probably started exactly the same way, and here he was following her path. He knew enough from all the interest in genetics these days to deduce that he might have inherited his mother's proclivity for self-destruction. Brazil was deeply depressed by this realization, and he was ashamed of his behavior and knew for a fact that West had only humored a drunk kid, and the performance would never be repeated.