“You don't know art, in other words, but you know what you like."
“Right.” No hint of a pun in the man's tone. Could he be that calculating?
“Deco is mid-twenties. Parisian. The ladies’ compacts and the mirrors and the fringed Mondrianesque handbags and the pottery and the architectural moldings and the bronzes and the jewelry and the lighting fixtures.” The man's face glowed with enthusiasm and adoration. “The deco look. The look of the Paris Expo. Lalique and Mallet-Stevens and Desny and Bonet and all those dudes. This is a Desny right here,” he said lovingly, showing Eichord a piece of silver. “Ain't it a gas?"
“Yeah."
“You feel the power of it?” The mocking tone momentarily gone from the man's voice.
“Like a little Chrysler Building or Radio City Music Hall."
“Precisely so."
“Great."
“It all came out of cubism, see. Out of those marvelous Braque things, and the old man, of course, Pablo's seminal goodies. The cubists were the fathers of it, but then it got all hard and cold, streamlined. The prismatic geometric look. All suggestion. All line and sweep and rectilinear exaggeration and classical form and super-stylized angles and planes. Lightning bolts, ovals, repetition of rectangles and octagons, pyramids, silver and bright color and sun splash. The cubist prism, the Aztec temple look, the Egyptian pyramid, the mystic Secret Scarab, the mythical sunburst shapes of the Sun Gods.” He turned to a lit glass showcase. “My babies,” he whispered.
“Wow.” Eichord whispered back, caught up in it now. “Beautiful."
“My Roseville Futura.” He said it the way you point at a beautiful woman out by the pool or the tennis court as you tell your new business acquaintance, “That's my wife."
“Huh?"
“Futura.” His voice was barely audible. Reverence. “Roseville Pottery. The Smith'd fucking KILL to get one of these. These are the top three vases. The black is believed to be one of a kind. The most phallic fucking piece of Futura ever made."
“Yeah."
“I traded a priceless collection of Mayan and Peruvian terra-cotta phallics for that one piece. I would have given anything for it."
“What's that?” Eichord said, looking over at a table.
“Hmm?” The man in the chair had to look away from his precious showcase and glanced in the direction Jack was looking. “Oh, that goddamn thing. It's junk. I gave one of those assholes on Melrose out in L.A. a grand for it—just as a hoot."
“Is it a metal sculpture piece?"
“No.” The man laughed. He wheeled over to the round chrome object and did something to it and music squawked out of it. “It's a RADIO!” He laughed again.
“Wild."
“It's fucking outrageous. Art dreck-o. I love it all."
Eichord was hammered by the man's intensity and the feel of implicit latent power. The thought that kept nagging was, Could Alan Schumway get up from that wheelchair and walk? Do I yell fire? Or do I back off and stir the ashes a little and hope that when I move in to get him he hasn't packed up his wheelchair in his old kit bag and run away to Norway.
“Listen, one more thing, if I may. Somebody mentioned you have a, uh, personal secretary?” He looked down, not wanting to watch Schumway raise his eyebrows and do shtick while he tried to embarrass Eichord. “Does she live in? I was wondering if I might ask her a couple of brief questions while I'm here."
“Does she LIVE IN,” Schumway mocked. “Holy JEEZUS, Feste, you silver-tongued bastard.” Eichord smiled pleasantly while Schumway roared with laughter, then screamed at the top of his lungs, “NICKI!” And saying to Jack as he turned away, “I don't think she's here."
“Does she live here?"
“We hang out,” Schumway said. “Anything else you need right now?” Schumway stared into the glossy depths of the black deco vase.
Eichord doodled with the surface of his mind and had to fight from asking big Al from Norway, “Hey, Alan—is there a fjord in your Futura?"
North Buckhead
In the living room, Daddy was drunk and disorderly, and very much on. He was unpredictable when he drank too much. Sometimes he would get horny and want her, and the sex might be rough or it might be sweet and tender and remarkably gentle. Or he would fall asleep and snore like a dockhand and he would not want her. Or he would become jolly and gregarious and want to take her out and show her off. Drink with the guys. Party. He could be very funny. Or he might become brooding. Moody. Mean. He could turn ice-cold and very dangerous.
She was nude and stood looking at herself, shoeless and wet, toweling off after a delightful bubble bath. She loved her body. She was a very beautiful woman, even now. One of the uniquely lucky ones. She had the small bones that had made her so womanly. The Beverly Hills were perfect, neither too large nor too small, her ass high and firm. Very female in every sense. The hormones, both the IVs and the regimen of oral drugs, had helped her voice, which was already a sexy huskiness, and her skin, which was her worst feature.
Nicki wasn't perfect. Her hair was too coarse, but she could afford the best wigs money could buy. Her jawline was a bit wider than she liked, but Daddy said it made her more interesting-looking and he looked at her with a critical eye. He loved the look of her long, slim legs in high heels. She had starved herself for so long—through her teens, in fact—that she no longer thought of food as she once had. She would subsist on bits of fruit, vitamins, the bare minimum. She went up on her toes and posed, then stood hipshot, but she could catch a glimpse of those ugly things a mocking God had placed between her legs, and she quickly changed position. She would tuck tonight, tuck them back out of sight.
Nicki Dodd, nee Nicholas Dodstardt, was a freak. She was neither female impersonator, nor transvestite, nor transsexual, nor any of the other categories that run the gamut from cross-dressing straights to drag-queen homosexuals. She was a woman with a penis and testicles. Not a play woman. Not a make-believe, Halloween, limp-wristed, flaming, swishing, lisping, pretend-time closet-faggot woman, but a REAL woman, through and through. Biologically, psychologically, every other way a woman. Just not physiologically. She was a beautiful, soft, slim, sexy, dynamite show-stopper of a freak of nature. A woman with a dick.
It still bothered her. She wondered how enraged her daddy would have become if he'd heard the conversation she'd had a few weeks ago. He thought she was totally comfortable with her plumbing. Depressed after one of his rough numbers, paranoid from his growing carelessness, and maddened by the frustrations of his goddamned fucking therapy, she had called Baltimore. Just for information. Nothing more. Dialing a toll-free hotline so it wouldn't show up on their bill.
“Nurse Recruitment?” a pleasant voice said into her ear.
“Hi. I'm calling long-distance to inquire about your program. What are the prerequisites for working in the—I'm not sure what you call it—your gender surgery clinic?"
“The general surgery clinic? Just a second please.” No, you idiot, she said as the woman clicked off to take another call. An eternity later the woman returned. “I just have the regular university number. I don't have anything called General Surgery Clinic."
“GENDER surgery."
“Oh. Gender surgery.” A long pause. “Is that like, you know, sexual?"
“Yes.” Another long pause.
“I'm trying to figure out how to look that up."
The line made noises while the woman did things to a computer far away in Maryland. The obtuse woman came back. Made her wait again because someone had just come into view whom she thought might know these answers. Her voice was rather patronizing, or so Nicki imagined, when she returned to say, “The university no longer does them.” THEM. She couldn't bring herself to enunciate such a word. “So that's why I couldn't find it under Gender or Sex, you know, in the listings."