"It may be a bit... special," Sukie offered, her plump upper lip closing upon her lower in a solemn way that looked nevertheless amused.
"What's special?" Van Home asked, pain showing, his face about to fly apart. "Tiny Tim was special. Liberace was special. Lee Harvey Oswald was special.
To get any attention at all in this day and age you got to be way out."
"This establishment needs moolah?" Jane Smart asked sharply.
"So I'm told, toots."
"Honey, by whom?" Sukie asked.
"Oh," he said, embarrassed, squinting out through the candlelight as if he could see nothing but reflections, "a bunch of people. Banker types. Prospective partners." Abruptly, in tune perhaps with the old tuxedo, he ducked into horror-movie clowning, (jobbing in his black outfit as if crippled, his legs hinged the wrong way. "That's enough business," he said. "Let's go into the living room. Let's get smashed."
Something was up. Alexandra fell a sliding start within her; an immense slick slope of depression was revealed as if by the sliding upwards of an automatic garage door, the door activated by a kind of electric eye of her own internal sensing and giving on a wide underground ramp whose downward trend there was no reversing, not by pills or sunshine or a good night's sleep. Her life had been built on sand and she knew that everything she saw tonight was going to strike her as sad.
The dusty ugly works of Pop Art in the living room were sad, and the way several fluorescent tubes in the track lighting overhead were out or flickered, buzzing. The great long room needed more people to fill it with the revelry it had been designed for; it seemed to Alexandra suddenly an ill-attended church, like those that Colorado pioneers had built along the mountain roads and where no one came any more, an ebbing more than a renunciation, everybody too busy changing the plugs in their pickup truck or recovering from Saturday night, the parking places outside gone over to grass, the pews with their racks still stocked with hymnals visible inside. "Where's Jenny?" she asked aloud.
"The lady still cleaning up in de laboratory," Rebecca said. "She work so hard, I worry sickness take her."
"How's it all going?" Sukie asked Darryl. "When can I paint my roof with kilowatts? People still stop me on the street and ask about that because of the story I wrote on you."
"Yeah," he snarled, ventriloquistically, so the voice emerged from well beside his head, "and those old fogies you sold the Gabriel dump to bad-mouthing the whole idea, I hear. Fuck 'em. They laughed at Leonardo. They laughed at Leibniz. They laughed at the guy who invented the zipper, what the hell was his name? One of invention's unsung greats. Actually, I've been wondering if microorganisms aren't the way to go—use a mechanism that's already set in place and self-replicates. Btogas technology: you know who's way ahead in that department? The Chinese, can you believe it?"
"Couldn't we just use less electricity?" Sukie asked, interviewing out of habit. "And use our bodies more? Nobody needs an electric carving knife."
"You need one if your neighbor has one," Van Home said. "And then you need another to replace the one you get. And another. And another. Fidel! Deseo beber!"
The servant in his khaki pajamas, abjectly shapeless and yet also with a whisper of military menace, brought drinks, and a tray of huevos picantes and palm hearts. Without Jenny here, surprisingly, conversation lagged; they had grown used to her, as someone to display themselves to, to amuse and shock and instruct. Her wide-eyed silence was missed. Alexandra, hoping that art, any art, might staunch the internal bleeding of her melancholy, moved among the giant hamburgers and ceramic dartboards as if she had never seen them before; and indeed some of them she hadn't. On a four-foot plinth of plywood painted black, beneath a plastic pastry bell, rested an ironically realistic replica—a three-dimensional Wayne Thiebaud—of a white-frosted wedding cake. Instead of the conventional bride and groom, however, two nude figures stood on the topmost tier, the female pink and blonde and rounded and the black-haired man a darker pink, but for the dead-white centimeter of his semi-erect penis. Alexandra wondered what the material of this fabrication was: the cake lacked the scoring of cast bronze and also the glaze of enamelled ceramic. Acryl-icked plaster was her guess. Seeing that no one but Rebecca, passing a tray of tiny crabs stuffed with xu-xu paste, was observing her, Alexandra lifted the bell and touched the frostinglike rim of the object. A tender dab of it came away on her finger. She put the finger in her mouth. Sugar. It was real frosting, a real cake, and fresh.
Darryl, with wide splaying gestures, was outlining another energy approach to Sukie and Jane. "With geothermal, once you get the shaft dug—and why the hell not? they make tunnels twenty miles long over in the Alps every day of the week—your only problem is keeping the energy from burning up the converter. Metal will melt like lead soldiers on Venus. You know what the answer is? Unbelievably simple. Stone. You got to make all your machinery, all the gearing and turbines, out of stone. They can do it! They can chisel granite now as fine as they can mill steel. They can make springs out of poured cement, would you believe?—particle size is what it all boils down to. Metal has had it, just like flint when the Bronze Age came in."
Another work of art Alexandra hadn't noticed before was a glossy female nude, a mannequin without the usual matte skin and the hinged limbs, a Kienholz in its assaultiveness but smooth and minimally defined in the manner of Tom Wesselmann, crouching as if to be fucked from behind, her face blank and bland, her back flat enough to be a tabletop. The indentation of her spine was straight as the groove for blood in a butcher's block. The buttocks suggested two white motorcycle helmets welded together. The statue stirred Alexandra with its blasphemous simplification of her own, female form. She took another margarita from Fidel's tray, savored the salt (it is a myth and absurd slander that witches abhor salt; saltpeter and cod liver oil, both associated with Christian virtue, are what they cannot abide), and sauntered up to their host. "I feel sexy and sad," she said. "I want to take my bath and smoke my joint and get home. I swore to the babysitter I’d be home by ten-thirty; she was the fifth girl I tried and I could hear her mother shouting at her in the background. These parents don't want them to come near us."
"You're breaking my heart," Van Home said, looking sweaty and confused after his gaze into the geo-thermal furnace. "Don't rush things. I don't feel smashed yet. There's a schedule here. Jenny's about to come down."
Alexandra saw a new light in Van Home's glassy bloodshot eyes; he looked scared. But what could scare him?
Jenny's tread was silent on the carpeted curved front staircase; she came into the long room with her hair pulled back like Eva Peron's and wearing a powder-blue bathrobe that swept the floor. Above each of her breasts the robe bore as decoration three embroidered cuts like large buttonholes, which reminded Alexandra of military chevrons. Jenny's face, with its wide round brow and firm triangular chin, was shiny-clean and devoid of make-up; nor did a smile adorn it. "Darryl, don't get drunk," she said. "You make even less sense when you're drunk than when you're sober."
"But he gets inspired," Sukie said with her practiced sauciness, feeling her way with this new woman, in residence and somehow in charge.