While the rest of them played dice at the bar, Hurt tried to stop doodling the blurbs he thought he might get (“Sweeping”) and concentrate on the holes in the outline of his multigenerational domestic literary novel. What had really happened to Mr. Timberlake’s late wife? Hurt had assumed a lingering cancer. But what if the son, Skunk, were to blame for his mother’s death? That was always a winner. Forgot his humble place as a craftsman of pie catalogs, became ambitious, tragically so, wrote about his mother on a napkin. And what, suicide? That earnest cliché?
Hurt remembered some women’s butts he had seen on TV. Why? There had been a suicide on the show. His brain was trying to tell him something.
They were characters on a space show and whenever they went marching up the ramp into their spaceship you could see their butts.
Their pants were tight but gave the impression of being sturdy, accurate, and functional, as though the special-effects team had researched them. You thought, yes, those are what space pants will really look like in the future, made of silver car upholstery. These pants are necessary for their well-being and survival in the subzero wastes of outer space. It is a coincidence how you can see the outlines of their butts.
It was a universal joy, looking at the butts of hot ladies in space-suits. People had been doing it since the dawn of entertainment.
Hurt got the notion that Skunk’s mother had been a calendar model in the late 1960s, a pinup in astronaut gear, cocking a big ray gun against a cheesy, wrinkled backdrop of the moon. A calendar called Hot Ladies of Outer Space. No, Hot Ladies of Science Fiction. It could be a book title, one of those book titles that promises something other than what the book delivers to teach readers a valuable lesson. Hurt could be one of those dudes who goes slumming in genre fiction to universal acclaim.
Interesting to have a fat loser like Skunk, who probably spends all his time on the computer looking up images of hot ladies in space-suits with the “safe search” option turned off, discover that his revered mother had been one of those very ladies.
When did “hot” become a synonym for “sexy”? Every word he ever chose reminded him of how much he didn’t know and was too tired to find out. Sexy Ladies of Science Fiction.
His pen was poised, doing nothing over the napkin. Hurt wasn’t going to remember any of this when he got home.
Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction. Would have sounded classier, more respectable to the ears of the time.
It was a problem, marrying a leggy international beauty to a meek little priss like Mr. Timberlake. Or was it kind of perfect?
Mr. Timberlake lived in Hurt’s house, and by extension in a town like Hurt’s town. There would be a chemical plant slowly poisoning the surrounding areas: huge pipes through which they blast a scent like magnolia that covers the town and makes everyone feel relaxed. It’s to cover up the acrid stench of fatal chemicals.
It would be a perfect place for the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction calendar tour. The headquarters of the chemical company are in Rome. The Italian chemical company is one of the sponsors of the calendar—the sponsor. They are sending the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction on a tour of all their chemical plants for publicity. Hurt’s novel would span the globe. “A globe-spanning tour de force,” he jotted.
What kind of job would a gentleman like Mr. Timberlake have at a chemical plant?
He might have been a research chemist who now in his retirement maintains a small personal laboratory in a back shed. There he creates the most refined soaps the world has ever known and gives them out on special occasions. He never sells them.
Mr. Timberlake has a superior sense of smell. This gives him a reason to sit in his dilapidated lawn chair, soaking his feet, staring at nothing, smelling all the many smells of nature in their many combinations, smells so subtle that no one else can discern them, and he translates them into soaps that the layman can enjoy — soaps that hint at the smells only Mr. Timberlake can smell, soaps that represent the nearest we will ever come to experiencing the world through Mr. Timberlake’s extraordinary nose. He considers everything to be nature, including diesel fumes. His ideas are so advanced that he seems like a crackpot to many, including his resentful and belittling son Skunk.
What does it say about the relationship that Mr. Timberlake has given his son such a nickname? Or that Skunk has given it to himself, in defiance?
The soaps of Mr. Timberlake are ethereal. They dissolve like the skirls of foam on the shore.
What was a skirl?
Look up skirls when you get home, Hurt.
Everybody Hurt knew had a nice phone, the kind you could sit in a bar like this and look up skirls on.
Not Hurt.
Hurt had a bar napkin. Hurt had bupkis.
Bar napkins were supposed to make you feel like Hemingway or Picasso.
The soaps of Mr. Timberlake can barely withstand a single dampening. It’s like washing your hands with a frigging moonbeam.
Skunk spends all his time losing money on internet gambling. Some bad men come to him.
Your father’s recipes are worth a fortune. We want to analyze them so we can make the soaps last longer. (This is strictly against Mr. Timberlake’s elegantly expressed philosophy of soaps.)
All Skunk has to do is distract his father while the bad men use bolt cutters on the shed door.
But then something goes horribly wrong. So the dust jacket would say.
Hurt felt that this version of Mr. Timberlake was becoming too brilliant and grandiose. Mr. Timberlake was no wizard. And who was that lousy son of King Arthur? The one in black armor? That wasn’t Skunk, no sir. Skunk didn’t have the black metallic heart of a usurper. Mordred.
Forget the magical soap that makes your dreams come true. It put Hurt in mind of that awful movie where Dustin Hoffman was a benevolent gnome who owned a shop where all the toys came to life.
Dustin Hoffman would be great as Mr. Timberlake in the movie version, though. “Hoffman returns to form in this sure-to-be-timeless classic.”
He wrote MALE SECRETARY on the napkin and everyone was too busy shooting dice to notice. Hurt tried to remember why he shouldn’t be writing on the napkin, which brought him back to his original idea. How had Skunk inadvertently caused his mother’s death by writing on a napkin?
There was the tontine angle. Hurt had wanted to write about a tontine ever since he had encountered the concept on an episode of The Simpsons in 1996.
Forty years ago, all twelve Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction made an appearance in the lobby of a swank Miami hotel. They laughingly hid an antique brooch under a three-foot-tall cylindrical ashtray filled with immaculate sand. The last surviving DLOSF will come back and claim it.
Now all of them are gone except Sally Silver and her best friend, her friend who never left the business, her rich and glamorous friend who lives high on the hog as the hostess of a literary salon and occasionally plays faded old beauties in somber independent dramas about Alzheimer’s disease. If Sally Silver hadn’t ditched it all for Mr. Timberlake, this might have been her life! But she is not jealous. It has been so long since she has seen her old friend. A trip to Miami will be just the thing to revive both of their spirits, for of course the old movie star with all her attainments and glory has secret troubles of her own.