I took up a vigil in front of her house. For a solid week I sat in my parked car and watched the door with all the fanatic devotion of a pilgrim at a shrine. Nothing. She neither came nor went. I rang the phone off the hook, interrogated her friends, haunted the elevator, the hallway, and the reception room at her office. She’d disappeared.
Finally, in desperation, I called her cousin in Larchmont. I’d met her once — she was a homely, droopy-sweatered, baleful-looking girl who represented everything gone wrong in the genes that had come to such glorious fruition in Breda — and barely knew what to say to her. I’d made up a speech, something about how my mother was dying in Phoenix, the business was on the rocks, I was drinking too much and dwelling on thoughts of suicide, destruction, and final judgment, and I had to talk to Breda just one more time before the end, and did she by any chance know where she was? As it turned out, I didn’t need the speech. Breda answered the phone.
“Breda, it’s me,” I choked. “I’ve been going crazy looking for you.”
Silence.
“Breda, what’s wrong? Didn’t you get my messages?”
Her voice was halting, distant. “I can’t see you anymore,” she said.
“Can’t see me?” I was stunned, hurt, angry. “What do you mean?”
“All those feet,” she said.
“Feet?” It took me a minute to realize she was talking about the shoe business. “But I don’t deal with anybody’s feet — I work in an office. Like you. With air-conditioning and sealed windows. I haven’t touched a foot since I was sixteen.”
“Athlete’s foot,” she said. “Psoriasis. Eczema. Jungle rot.”
“What is it? The physical?” My voice cracked with outrage. “Did I flunk the damn physical? Is that it?”
She wouldn’t answer me.
A chill went through me. “What did he say? What did the son of a bitch say?”
There was a distant ticking over the line, the pulse of time and space, the gentle sway of Bell Telephone’s hundred million miles of wire.
“Listen,” I pleaded, “see me one more time, just once — that’s all I ask. We’ll talk it over. We could go on a picnic. In the park. We could spread a blanket and, and we could sit on opposite corners—”
“Lyme disease,” she said.
“Lyme disease?”
“Spread by tick bite. They’re seething in the grass. You get Bell’s palsy, meningitis, the lining of your brain swells up like dough.”
“Rockefeller Center then,” I said. “By the fountain.”
Her voice was dead. “Pigeons,” she said. “They’re like flying rats.”
“Helmut’s. We can meet at Helmut’s. Please. I love you.”
“I’m sorry.
“Breda, please listen to me. We were so close—”
“Yes,” she said, “we were close,” and I thought of that first night in her apartment, the boy in the bubble and the Saran Wrap suit, thought of the whole dizzy spectacle of our romance till her voice came down like a hammer on the refrain, “but not that close.”
HARD SELL
SO MAYBE I come on a little strong.
“Hey, babes,” I say to him (through his interpreter, of course, this guy with a face like a thousand fists), “the beard’s got to go. And that thing on your head too — I mean I can dig it and all; it’s kinda wild, actually — but if you want to play with the big boys, we’ll get you a toup.” I wait right there a minute to let the interpreter finish his jabbering, but there’s no change in the old bird’s face — I might just as well have been talking to my shoes. But what the hey, I figure, he’s paying me a hundred big ones up front, the least I can do is give it a try. “And this jihad shit, can it, will you? I mean that kinda thing might go down over here but on Santa Monica Boulevard, believe me, it’s strictly from hunger.”
Then the Ayatollah looks at me, one blink of these lizard eyes he’s got, and he says something in this throat-cancer rasp — he’s tired or he needs an enema or something — and the interpreter stands, the fourteen guys against the wall with the Uzis stand, some character out the window starts yodeling the midday prayers, and I stand too. I can feel it, instinctively — I mean, I’m perceptive, you know that, Bob — that’s it for the first day. I mean, nothing. Zero. Zilch. And I go out of there shaking my head, all these clowns with the Uzis closing in on me like piranha, and I’m thinking how in christ does this guy expect to upgrade his image when half the country’s in their bathrobe morning, noon, and night?
Okay. So I’m burned from jet lag anyway, and I figure I’ll write the day off, go back to the hotel, have a couple Tanqueray rocks, and catch some z’s. What a joke, huh? They don’t have Tanqueray, Bob. Or rocks either. They don’t have Beefeater’s or Gordon’s — they don’t have a bar, for christsake. Can you believe it — the whole damn country, the cradle of civilization, and it’s dry. All of a sudden I’m beginning to see the light — this guy really is a fanatic. So anyway I’m sitting at this table in the lobby drinking grape soda — yeah, grape soda, out of the can — and thinking I better get on the horn with Chuck back in Century City, I mean like I been here what — three hours? — and already the situation is going down the tubes, when I feel this like pressure on my shoulder.
I turn around and who is it but the interpreter, you know, the guy with the face. He’s leaning on me with his elbow. Like I’m a lamppost or something, and he’s wearing this big shit-eating grin. He’s like a little Ayatollah, this guy — beard, bathrobe, slippers, hat, the works — and he’s so close I can smell the roots of his hair.
“I don’t like the tone you took with the Imam,” he says in this accent right out of a Pepperidge Farm commercial, I mean like Martha’s Vineyard all the way, and then he slides into the chair across from me. “This is not John Travolta you’re addressing, my very sorry friend. This is the earthly representative of the Qā’im, who will one day come to us to reveal the secrets of the divinity, Allah be praised.” Then he lowers his voice, drops the smile, and gives me this killer look. “Show a little respect,” he says.
You know me, Bob — I don’t take shit from anybody, I don’t care who it is, Lee Iacocca, Steve Garvey, Joan Rivers (all clients of ours, by the way), and especially not from some nimrod that looks like he just walked off the set of Lawrence of Arabia, right? So I take a long swallow of grape soda, Mr. Cool all the way, and then set the can down like it’s a loaded.44. “Don’t tell me,” I go, “—Harvard, right?”
And the jerk actually smiles. “Class of ‘68.”
“Listen, pal,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.
“The name is Hojatolislam.”
Hey, you know me, I’m good with names — have to be in this business. But Hojatolislam? You got to be kidding. I mean I don’t even attempt it. “Okay,” I say, “I can appreciate where you’re coming from, the guy’s a big deal over here, yeah, all right…but believe me, you take it anyplace else and your Ayatollah’s got about as positive a public image as the Son of Sam. That’s what you hired us for, right? Hey, I don’t care what people think of the man, to me, I’m an agnostic personally, and this is just another guy with a negative public perception that wants to go upscale. And I’m going to talk to him. Straight up. All the cards on the table.”
And then you know what he does, the chump? He says I’m crass. (Crass — and I’m wearing an Italian silk suit that’s worth more than this joker’ll make in six lifetimes and a pair of hand-stitched loafers that cost me…but I don’t even want to get into it.) Anway, I’m crass. I’m going to undermine the old fart’s credibility, as if he’s got any. It was so-and-so’s party that wanted me in — to make the Ayatollah look foolish — and he, Hojatolislam, is going to do everything in his power to see that it doesn’t happen.