by Dan Fante
I was staring. Leering. But I didn’t care.
“Please, let me go slip something on,” she whispered, looking away.
“No. I like you the way you are. Just stand there.”
I held up my jug. “How about a nightcap? One drink for the good of the company. It won’t kill you.”
“Actually, I’ve had a bit of wine already…it helps me sleep.”
“C’mon.”
“Very well. But only one.”
I took a hit then passed the bottle to the skinny girl. She downed most of what was left with one gulp.
Screwing Portia on the pull-out bed in the chauffeur’s room was like trying to run backward. Clumsy. Elbows and knees everywhere. And nearly without participation.
Ten minutes after we started, when I couldn’t cum, she sucked me off.
“Well…did you enjoy that?” she asked finally.
I checked my jug. It was empty. “Any liquor in the office?”
“There are two bottles of that inexpensive limo champagne in the fridge. Shall I get one?”
“Get both.”
“I feel quite good. Sex relieves stress, you know.”
“You’re right. So does drinking.”
“Well…I’ll get the champagne.”
“Good idea.”
For the next half hour we lay wordless, sipping fizzy wine, crunched together on the mattress. Two fools connected by the darkness.
eleven
The next morning I picked up one of our freebie geriatric clients. My dispatch slip read, “J. C. Smart: The Garden of Allah Villas.” Portia had mentioned that Mrs. Smart was eighty-seven years old.
I knew the address on Crescent Heights Boulevard because I’m into Hollywood history and used to drink coffee at Schwab’s drugstore around the corner on Sunset.
The Villas was an elegant retirement community composed of a dozen thirties-vintage single Spanish-style bungalows at the mouth of Laurel Canyon. It had once been Scott Fitzgerald’s old stomping ground.
I was a few minutes early so I parked on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, in front, and read from the new novel by the underground writer Mark SaFranko.
J.C. lived in bungalow #1. The outside of her tiny, white-fenced yard was well manicured, and her small garden was festooned with freshly blooming roses and carnations.
I knocked on the door.
No answer.
I knocked again. Maybe J.C.’d had a heart attack and was floating facedown in her tub, the old girl’s aluminum walker tipped over on the bathroom floor.
Then the door swung open and there she was, dressed to the nines and fully made-up and holding a big, expensive-looking red leather handbag. “You’re late,” she barked.
“Our pickup time is for nine o’clock,” I said. “It’s nine o’clock.”
She was grinning. “I beg to differ. It’s nine-oh-two Greenwich meantime. You might possibly consider resetting your watch.”
“You’re Mrs. Smart, right?”
“You may call me J.C.”
“Well, good morning, ma’am.”
“My proper name is Joyce Childers Smart. I’m a retired English lit teacher and not a bank president. So the diminutive J.C. will do just fine. And you are?”
“Bruno Dante.”
My reply seemed to lighten my client’s expression. “Dante,” she smiled, “as in La Divina Comedia?
“The same,” I said.
“Ah, the Comedia. How appropriate given your propensity for tardiness and embarrassing justifications. Tell me, Mr. Bruno Dante, have you read your namesake’s work?”
“Yeah, I have, but it’s been years,” I said.
“And…”
“Well, it’s okay. Not my favorite piece of literature, but interesting, I guess.”
“Interesting? And not your favorite tidbit of writing from the Middle Ages? The Divine Comedy. Really?”
“The car’s in front. Shall we go?”
“Are you, by chance, related to a writer named Jonathan Dante?”
“He was my father.”
J.C. was beaming. “Well, well, well. My husband and I knew Johnny. He was a fine writer. As I recall he died and then all of his books were republished a few years later. He got quite famous.”
“That’s right.”
Mrs. Smart extended her hand and I shook it. “How nice to meet you,” she said. “Nothing replaces good breeding.”
Then my new client leaned past me and glanced at the black stretch limo parked at the curb. “You want to take me—in that?”
“Sure. First-class transportation. You deserve the best, right?”
“Mr. Dante, son of Jonathan Dante, I did not just win second prize in one of those lurid televised game shows. I’m a rich old lady and not a crack dealer. I do not hold with glitz and ostentation. Please tell me, does your firm have other, smaller cars?”
I thought about it for a second. “Only my own car. My Pontiac,” I said. “It’s twelve years old. But it is a four-door.”
“What color is this Pontiac?”
“Color? Light brown. Beige, I guess.”
“That’ll do for next time. I now intend to open an account with your company. I’ll provide my credit card information and whatever else you require.”
“Sorry, I thought you knew. You ride free of charge. Our deal is to drive seniors in the neighborhood to and from their doctor’s appointments at no charge.”
“I pay my own way. I always have.”
“Hey, no problem. You’re the customer.”
“Precisely,” she nodded. “Now wait here a moment. I’ll have to get Tahuti.”
“Tuhootee?”
“T-A-H-U-T-I. My cat. We go everywhere together.”
J.C. closed the door in my face then stepped back inside her bungalow.
Half a minute later she was back, beaming, holding in her arms the fattest monster black cat I had ever seen. “Bruno Dante, meet Tahuti.”
The beast opened its heavy eyes, glanced at me, then closed them again. “We can go now,” J.C. whispered.
On the street I opened the rear limo door for my passenger and her beast. J.C. shuffled toward me up the sidewalk then waved me off. “I’m not an oil sheik nor am I with the State Department, Mr. Dante,” she said. “Tahuti and I ride in the front seat.”
“Whatever you say,” I said back, knowing when I was licked.
After I got in behind the wheel I was about to start the car when J.C., now done situating Tahuti on her lap, leaned toward me. “And Mr. Dante, one more thing,” she chimed, eyeing me coldly in my chauffeur’s cap.
“What would that be?” I said, fearing the worst.
“Please, no cheap thrills.”
It turned out my passenger was also a speed-talker. While I drove I learned that she was an avid reader, that she’d gobbled up every mystery series of novels ever written. Every one. Her unoccupied garage space behind the Villas contained, at her count, thirty-five thousand books. J.C. still read four books a week and had once spent time as a fiction editor at DeMoore Brothers in downtown L.A. Her poetry and short fiction had been published in anthologies and literary journals and she’d been married to a screenwriter named Arthur Smart who had cashed in years before on the ninth fairway at Riviera golf course. Art once worked at MGM Studios as a contract writer with Jonathan Dante. His big hit was the fifties musical film A Crowd of Stars, and as a writer/producer-partner he’d made a fortune from his percentage of the gross and willed the whole bundle to J.C.
My customer went on. She once sat between Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo while dining at the Brown Derby with her husband and William Saroyan, after Saroyan had been awarded but declined the Pulitzer Prize. She and Basil Rathbone had been intimate pals. The last blast of spontaneous unsolicited information aimed at me was the strangest: I learned that, for the last thirty years, in her spare time, J. C. Smart had become an expert tarot card reader. Ba-boom.
My customer’s doctor’s appointment was in Santa Monica, ha
lf an hour away. Tahuti purred loudly during the whole ride.
The ritzy building had gold-rimmed double-glass doors and a new bright green awning that reached to the street. I parked in front in the handicapped zone.
I got out to help her but before I could hurry around the car J.C. had opened her own door. She and the cat were on the sidewalk.
“I’ll be back in half an hour. No more,” she said. “Where will you be?”
“Right here,” I said. “Waiting.”
J.C. handed me her credit card. “Will this do to open an account with your firm?”
“That’ll be just fine,” I said back.
Twenty minutes later I’d called in J.C.’s information and was waiting, reading the movie reviews in the L.A. Times, when my passenger door popped open. She tossed her purse on the seat, then she and Tahuti got in. After situating the cat on her lap she turned to me. “Shall we go?” she said.
“Where to? Back to your bungalow?”
“No, actually. I’ve got a special errand,” she beamed, ten thousand facial wrinkles appearing, then flattening out. “I’m meeting my granddaughter. We’re off to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. Do you know where it is?”
“Ten-four,” I said.
“Tell me, Mr. Dante, what does the recitation of those numbers signify, if anything?”
“Sorry. That’s two-way radio jargon. It means, ‘Okay, I heard you loud and clear.’”
“May I suggest that we continue our conversations absent trucker shorthand?”
“Sure.”
“Thank you.”
I shifted into “D” and began pulling the big stretch out into traffic. “So,” I said, breaking a clumsy silence, making small talk, “how did it go at the doctor’s? Is everything okay?”
J.C. snickered. “Well, I’m dying, Bruno, if you must know. That’s how it went. May I call you Bruno?”
“Sure. But c’mon, you look fine.”
“I am fine. But I have a vertebral-basilar aneurysm. Apparently it’s inoperable and could rupture at any time.”
“You’re smiling?”
“It amuses me because I received that diagnosed eleven years ago and I’m still very much here. Doctors are fools: Pompous, overeducated, self-important, boring, pedantic frauds. I’ve had better luck reading my horoscope in the Times.”
And then my customer sighed deeply, stroked her fat kitty, and turned toward me. She quoted a guy I knew and admired from my wasted days at college.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
The Lady of Shalott.
“Do you know that one, Mr. Dante?” she asked.
“Believe it or not, I do,” I said. “Tennyson, right?”
“You may go to the head of the class, young man. No homework for you tonight. By the way, I want the side entrance to Neiman’s, please.”
Reaching over, J.C. pulled a magazine out of her purse then held it up. A thick copy of the fashion magazine Ooh La La. On the cover was a glossy photograph of a beautiful, tall girl with long black hair in a low-cut white dress. Two huge dogs were sitting at her feet.
“That’s her, my granddaughter,” J.C. said. “I’m meeting her.”
“That’s your granddaughter?”
“Marcella. Marcella Maria Sorache. I call her by her given name but everyone else, including her mother, my status-obsessed daughter Constance, uses her nickname, Che-Che. I find it absurd and insulting. The name makes the child sound like a stripper.”
“She’s a very beautiful woman.”
J.C. snorted. “My daughter Constance’s second husband is a Milanese ne’er-do-well named Gianluca. He inherited a good deal of money, but thank God, also excellent genes. Against my protests the child was raised in Italy and schooled in New York and Switzerland.”
“Sounds like she could have done worse.”
“Bruno, kindly do not annoy me. I’m an old lady and I don’t want to burst a blood vessel and breathe my last in this ridiculous automobile.”
Outside Neiman’s side entrance were half a dozen photographers, milling around, waiting for someone—a celebrity or a movie star—to leave. J.C. eyed the group. “Nuts,” she whispered, “I might have expected this. They’re here for Marcella.”
“They are? Are you sure?”
“Clearly you don’t read tabloid newspapers or watch enough television, Bruno.”
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “Help me out.”
“My granddaughter is a model. That should’ve become obvious.”
I smiled at J.C. “Believe it or not I somehow put that together on my own.”
“What you may not yet have put together is that Marcella is the spokesperson for a cosmetic line called La Natura. Her face appears on television commercials twenty times a day.
“Oh.”
“And the child just divorced her drug addict husband, Todd. Todd Adamson.”
“The guy everybody calls Terrible Todd? The rock singer?”
“Now you’re current. Apparently, in the last few months, they’ve become quite the tabloid couple.”
“Hey, well now I know. Che-Che and the guitar player everybody calls Terrible Todd. Ooo-eee.”
“I’m pleased to have spared you the thrill of reading Snitch magazine.”
“Hey, maybe I’ll buy one just for fun.”
J.C. glanced down at the two books on the seat next to me. One novel was by Mark SaFranko and the other by Tony O’Neill. “So, you’re a reader too?”
“I am, believe it or not.”
“Who are these writers? I’m not familiar with either of them.”
“I guess you could say that O’Neill and SaFranko are part of a new wave of fiction writers. I like their stuff.”
“Are you also following in your father’s footsteps? Are you a writer as well?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. If James Patterson can have a bestseller I presume that any day now some homeschooled lackwit with fifth-grade credentials will win a Pulitzer and become the new John Steinbeck.”
“I wasn’t homeschooled, J.C.”
“I wasn’t referring to you.”
“That’s good to know.”
“It appears that I will need your help, Bruno. A small favor.”
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever.”
“I’d like you to go inside and tell Marcella that I’m waiting for her here in the car and that there are photographers everywhere as well. Will you do that?”
“Sure. Do you know where she is?”
“I did mention that La Natura is a cosmetic line. Where then would you suppose that the spokesperson for a line of makeup, making a personal appearance, would be in Neiman Marcus?”
Once again I felt my pee-pee being slapped. “At the makeup counter?” I said.
“Bravo, Bruno!”
There was Che-Che surrounded by women and fans and a cable TV camera crew. She was six feet tall and ridiculously beautiful. I made it past the crowd then whispered to her that her grandmother was waiting in the limo at the side entrance and that there were guys with cameras there too. Che-Che smiled and nodded and said she’d be out in a few minutes.
As she left the building I was standing by the rear door of the limo waiting to open it. After signing an autograph or two, when she started to cross the sidewalk, one of the photographers—a guy a foot taller than me wearing an L.A. Lakers cap—jumped in front of her and began clicking. I sidestepped the guy, then body-blocked him in an effort to clear Che-Che’s path. He got even by elbowing me in the stomach. Hard. Then the jerk was right in her face again, snapping away.
I wasn’t hurt but I was mad. It had been a couple of years since I’d clouted anyone and this guy was twice my size and must have assumed he could bully me. Eddie Bunker, the writer, once told me the secret to brawling: Always get in the first punch. This putz had it coming. Eddie would have been proud
. A nice surprise left hook to the cheek, à la Bernard Hopkins.
The guy looked shocked. He grabbed his face then fell against Che-Che as his camera hit the ground and broke.
I opened the back door and hustled J.C.’s granddaughter into my limo. As we pulled away, “Laker Cap” was still standing on the sidewalk holding his face.
J.C.’s hand was on my arm. “Thank you, Bruno.”
“No big deal,” I said. “I don’t like being strong-armed. The guy was out of line.”
“I won’t forget today,” she whispered. “That was very gallant.” Then she turned to her granddaughter. “Are you all right, Marcella?”
“The cocksucker deserved it. What a cazzo. Nice hook, Bruno. That’s your name, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Bruno.”
“That motherfucker’s been in my shit for three days. Ever since I got to L.A.”
“Marcella, do you mind? I’m in the car too. That language is simply uncalled for—I know, how about lunch, dear? Let’s put this unpleasantness behind us.”
“Sure, Nana. That’s a good idea. Anyplace where I can get a drink is fine with me.”
Then Che-Che lit a cigarette. She was rattled and pissed off. “You know, that blowjob Morty Shiff isn’t paying me enough to go on TV and front his line of goop and powder. I don’t need this crap. I should’ve asked for more money. A lot more money.”
“How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” J.C. whispered. “Please dear, you’re upsetting me. That’s quite enough.” Grandma was now attempting to comfort wide-awake, jumpy, fat Tahuti. “And please, do you mind not smoking in an enclosed car.”
“Okay, Nana, you’re right. I’m sorry,” she said, then tossed her butt out the window. “But between fuckin’ La Natura Cosmetics and that coke-slamming guitar player ex of mine, my goddamn life is a zoo. I’m really sick of this shit.”
As it turned out our problem wasn’t over. A few blocks later I saw two cars following us: a green two-door and an open, yellow sports car. I recognized both the guys riding in the passenger seats from outside the department store.
