Koko (14 page)

“They found a new one.”

“So I see.”

“I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.” She tried to smile sideways at him, but
failed. “I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s
tremendous
travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!”

“Must be highly stimulating.”

“I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.”

“And women clothed in white minister to your every need.”

“Unfortunately.”

Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When
she relaxed, she said, “This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that
she’ll pray for me.”

Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.

“At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must
be really sick of hearing my name.”

“I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while.
You seem to enjoy elevator travel.”

For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.

“I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,” Michael said.
“Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.” Stacy’s face
settled back into the mask of illness. “I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.”

“Alone?”

“With a couple of other people.”

“Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.”

“I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants
crossing against rickshaw traffic.”

“Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.”

“I’ll bother if I want to.”

“Don’t do me any favors.” She turned her head away from him. “I mean it. Don’t bother.”

Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned
forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. “I’m sorry you’re angry with
me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.”

“How could you know what I feel? I’m so
stupid.
You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.”

“Believe it or not, I have some idea,” he said.

“Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr. Poole?”

Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.

She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before
escaping the hospital.

That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, “Wild,
sign me up, man.” Harry Beevers said, “Outstanding. I was wondering when you were
going to come through for us.” Tina Pumo said, “You know what my answer is, Mike.
Somebody’s got to mind the store.”

“You just became my wife’s hero,” Michael said. “Well, anyhow … would you mind trying
to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House—somebody
there ought to know it.”

They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.

One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through
a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of
the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on
top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file,
dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For
a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white
rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light
his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow.
A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across
the front seat.

All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything
was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area,
the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up
at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either.
He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would
happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their
next bottle of Rolling Rock.

The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that
the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a
marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit,
purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered
through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody
looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise
crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a
cordon sanitaire
of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he
could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he
went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara
on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.

“I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,” Tina said. “I was supposed
to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking—”

“I know her,” the bartender said. “She might be in later.” He retreated to the other
end of the bar.

Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie.
May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La La.
He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away
from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about
sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise.
She was exactly his type. “I want to take you home with me,” he said. The girl opened
her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, “I don’t go home with narcs.”

That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the
city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took
down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light—if
you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced in another. For a long time
they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant
from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic
between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate
the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into
the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter
couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had
recently moved into the restaurant’s “office,” a little room in the basement, because
Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens.
Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the
couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room,
and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.

This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal
situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but
she wet the bed—the mattress—whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting
got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers
was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and
simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling
Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.

Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began
having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with
wasps and spiders.

The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about
misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.

The day before Maggie put another ad in the
Village Voice
, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called
Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. “Oh, sure,” Tina grumped, “I spend
all day in bed reading poetry.” But he looked up the number in the book. The woman
who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre
said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to
a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy
Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me
transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who
referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned
from it with the information that ten years ago Mr. Underhill had written requesting
that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial
displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through
his agent, Mr. Fenwick Throng.

“Fenwick Throng?” Pumo asked. “Is that a real name?”

The next day was Wednesday, and after getting Vinh off to the markets and Helen to
school, Tina set out to buy a copy of the
Village Voice
at the newsstand on the corner of Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue. Many newsstands
were closer, but Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue was only a few blocks from La Groceria,
a café where Pumo could sit in pale sunlight streaming in through long windows, sip
two cups of cappuccino while pretty waitresses with white morning faces yawned and
stretched like ballerinas, and read every word of the
VOICE BULLETIN BOARD.

He found a message from Maggie right above the drawing
in the center of the page:
Namcat. Try again same place, same time? Bruises and tattoos. You should fly East
with the others, taking Type A with.
Her brother must have heard about their trip from Harry and then told her.

He thought of what it would be like to go to Singapore with Poole, Linklater, Harry
Beevers, and Maggie Lah. Instantly his stomach tightened up and the cappuccino tasted
like brass. She would bring too much carry-on luggage, half of it paper bags. Out
of principle, she’d insist on changing hotels at least twice. She’d flirt with Poole,
pick fights with Beevers, and virtually adopt Conor. Pumo began to sweat. He signaled
for the check, paid, and left.

Several times during the day he dialed Fenwick Throng’s telephone number, but the
agent’s line was always busy.

At eleven o’clock he gave unnecessary instructions about closing the restaurant, then
showered and changed clothes and hurried off to the Palladium’s back entrance. For
fifteen minutes he stood and froze with half a dozen other people in an area like
a dog pound enclosed by a wire fence, and then someone finally recognized him and
let him in.

If it hadn’t been for that
New York
article, he thought, I wouldn’t even be able to get in here.

This time he was dressed in a Giorgio Armani jacket that looked vaguely like chain
mail, voluminously pleated black trousers, a grey silk shirt, and a narrow black tie.
They might mistake him for a pimp, he thought, but not for a narc.

Clutching a beer bottle, Pumo walked twice up and down the entire length of the bar
before he admitted to himself that Maggie had stood him up twice in a row. He wound
his way through the mob to the tables. Extravagantly dressed young people, none of
them Maggie, leaned toward one another in pools of candlelight.

All of a sudden, everything’s falling apart, Pumo thought. Somewhere along the line,
my life stopped making sense.

Young people swirled around him. Synthesizer rock blared from invisible speakers.
For a moment Pumo wished he were back home, wearing blue jeans and listening to the
Rolling Stones. Maggie was never going to show up, tonight or any other night. One
of these days, some hulking new boyfriend would show up at his door to collect the
plastic radio, the little yellow Pony Pro hairdryer, and the Bow Wow Wow records she
had left behind.

Pumo fought his way up to the bar and ordered a double vodka martini on the rocks.
Hold the olives, hold the vermouth, hold the rocks
, he remembered Michael Poole saying in Manly’s
little club, where there had been no olives, vermouth, or ice, only a jug of suspicious
yellow-tinged “vodka” Manly claimed to have obtained from a colonel in the First Air
Cav.

“That’s the happiest you’ve looked all night,” said a low voice beside him.

Poole turned and saw a tall, ambiguously sexed apparition in camouflage fatigues beaming
at him. Bare shaven skin gleamed above its ears. Aggressive, shiny black hair swept
across the top of the apparition’s head and hung down its back. Then Pumo noticed
the apparition’s breasts bulging beneath the fatigue shirt. Her hips flared beneath
a wide belt. He wondered what it would be like to go to bed with somebody with white
sidewalls.