The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  “Whitefish, with the heads on and all, some kind of meat and tomatoes and cheese casserole, and a Caesar salad. I didn’t eat any whitefish. I don’t like to see a fish with the eye staring up at you, and I was afraid of bones. Besides, by the time dinner was served, I was a little looped.

  “Irv, you see, likes to drink, but I could tell he isn’t allowed to have very many unless there’s somebody else around. As soon as I’d drink half my drink, and it was Chivas and soda, too, he’d say, ‘Let me freshen that for you, Doctor,’ and he’d whip over to the bar. He’d add a couple of jiggers to his glass, too, except that he was drinking a full drink every time, not half-a-drink like me. The old lady noticed it, too, but she couldn’t say anything to him with me there. Old Irv was really putting the stuff away.”

  Larry sipped his coffee, and said: “He’s a retired furrier, about fifty-five or -six, somewhere in there.”

  “What about the girl? Shirley?”

  “Under thirty. I don’t know how much under thirty, but she was definitely under thirty, and she was unhappy about the situation, the date. I knew she wanted to go out, to get away from her parents, but there wasn’t any way to work it. And after dinner, once I started to play snooker, I didn’t want to go out anyway. Irv is a good player, and he beat me the first game. But I beat him the second two games. His problem, he doesn’t play enough with other people. He probably practices a lot, and you know how it is when you practice, you try a lot of shots you wouldn’t consider seriously in competition because they’re too risky. So he would try some of these risky shots, and he missed a lot. I haven’t played any snooker for four or five years, and I didn’t really get my eye back until the middle of the second game. I wish I’d known about the snooker table, I’d have taken my own cue stick along…”

  I laughed. “Shirley would’ve appreciated that,” I said. “Bringing your cue stick along on a first date.”

  Larry laughed. “Yeah. But what I mean is the way it worked out.”

  “Did Shirley play, too?”

  “No. She just sat in one of the high chairs and watched. She didn’t say anything then, and before dinner and during dinner she didn’t really get a chance to say anything. Her mother talked all the time, a real brittle woman, with a head of bleached blonde hair that looked like it was carved out of sandstone. You knew how hard it was by just looking at it.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “In a couple of weeks or so, all three of them are going on an around-the-world cruise. She talked about that. For the last year-and-a-half Shirley’s been in Israel, living on a kibbutz. When they went to visit her there, Irv and Helen, they were so appalled by the living conditions they brought Shirley home. The water was alkaline, they had outside johns, the food was bad, the place was unsanitary, and they worked the shit out of poor Shirley. They had her running a buzz saw, making furniture. Shirley, I gathered, didn’t want to come home, although she didn’t say anything at the table. But this ’round-the-world trip is supposed to be a present to make up for it. That was the implication, anyway. Shirley hardly opened her mouth, but she looked at me a lot.

  “Then, on purpose, but trying to pass it off, Helen, Mrs. Weinstein, said that the cruise would be a honeymoon gift for Shirley, if she wanted to take advantage of it.”

  “That was pretty blunt, Larry. Did they think, all this time, that you were Jewish?”

  “I think so, yes. Irv didn’t care, but Helen stiffened up when I finally said I was a Catholic. And it upset Helen, too, when I said that I thought they were all Catholics and that that’s what they’d told me at Electro-Date.”

  “They didn’t tell you that at Electro-Date.”

  “I know, but that’s what I said. Can you imagine some poor bastard getting married and having mother- and father-in-law along in the same cabin for three months?”

  “They’ll find someone. He’s got money, this guy.”

  “Irv’s got money all right. He’s rich, man. And a damned good snooker player. Why don’t you and I got out for snooker some night? Did you ever play it?”

  “I used to, but I don’t even know where there’s a table in Miami.”

  “We could play over at Irv’s. He said to call him any time I wanted to play. But that’s out, I suppose. I’m not interested in the girl, and if I went back, it might give her a false idea.”

  “Did you get a chance to talk to her alone? You said she didn’t talk much, but you haven’t told me anything she said.”

  “Well, we didn’t talk alone until I actually left. When I got ready to leave, her mother called her into the kitchen for a minute, and Irv went to get my coat. I’d taken it off when we played snooker, and left it in the rec room. When I opened the front door, Shirley said, ‘I’ll ride down to the lobby with you.’

  “We got into the elevator, and about the sixth floor she pulled out the red emergency knob and stopped the elevator. I was still a little high, and when the elevator stopped suddenly that way I lurched against the wall. She looked into my eyes, through those blue-tinted glasses of hers, and said: ‘Are you circumcised, Larry?’

  “‘No.’ I said.

  “‘Let me see it,’ she said.

  “I took out my cock and showed it to her. She looked at it for a long time, as though she’d never seen a dong before, at least an uncircumcised dong, and then said,? don’t care.’

  “‘What do you mean,’ I said, ‘you don’t care?’

  “‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that it doesn’t matter to me whether you’re circumcised or not.’”

  “She was propositioning you, Larry. That is, she was telling you that she was available.”

  “I know that, Hank. I put it away, zipped up, and took the elevator off emergency. It really turned me off, man, not that I was turned on by her in the first place, but it was all so weird, standing there with half-a-buzz on, you know, with my dong out, and the way she stared at it. Maybe a soft, uncircumcised prick isn’t a beautiful thing to see, but it’s mine, you know, and that curious, scientific look she had, the blue-tinted glasses, the way she leaned over, with her hands on her hips—I don’t know, Hank, I just don’t know. For a moment there, it scared me. I had a funny feeling, or a premonition, that it would never get hard again.

  “Anyway, when we got down to the lobby, I gave her a good-night kiss, a long slobbery one. And she responded, too. But there was nothing there, man, nothing. My balls were ice cubes. So much for the first date. I think I’ll put down about thirty-five bucks for this one on my expense account, and call it a night.”

  Larry rose, and picked up his white jacket. He put his rolled white tie into the left jacket pocket.

  “Something’s wrong with the computer at that electronic dating service,” I said. “You couldn’t have been matched any worse if you’d picked up a lez at a gay bar.”

  “I know. Tomorrow I’m going to call Electro-Date and raise holy hell. Even though I’m not a Catholic I said I was a Catholic and I’m entitled to either a Catholic or to someone who has lied about it the way I did.”

  I laughed. “Say that again.”

  Larry grinned. “I can’t.”

  After Larry left, I thought about this strange evening for a few minutes, and then went to bed myself. The dating service didn’t enter my thoughts again until I ran into Larry with his second date at Don’s birthday party, a week later.

  That’s when I met Jannaire.

  8

  There were more than twenty cars parked on Don’s lawn and along the curb and on neighboring lawns by the time I got to his house for his birthday party. The quiet of the suburban neighborhood was bothered by gibbering drums which pulsed above the shattering rise and fall of voices from the poolside patio. I learned later that some maniac had given Don a birthday present of three LPs of the authentic tribal drums of Africa.

  Clara Luchessi, in a losing effort to keep as many people out of her house as possible, had centered the festivities around the pool and patio. The bar, the tables loaded
with catered food, and even two green-and-white striped tents, with extra swimming trunks and bikinis, one tent marked HE and the other SHE, as dressing rooms, were outside. There were no emergency latrine facilities at poolside, however. One still had to go inside the house to use the john, or else pee in the pool.

  There was a lopsided pile of birthday presents on a card table at the far end of the pool. I added mine to the pile and checked the birthday card again to make certain the tape would keep it secure on the package. My present to Don was in poor taste, but it wasn’t really for Don’s benefit—it was for Clara’s. I had found a used copy, almost in mint condition, of George Kelly’s Craig’s Wife, in Maggie’s Old Book Shop, and I had talked Maggie into giftwrapping it for me. Don would read the play and laugh, knowing it was a joke. But if Clara read it, she might, quite possibly, take some of the pressure off Don around the house.

  The soft night air was muggy, with the humidity at ninety percent, according to my car radio, but a warm heavy breeze huffed across the patio from the flat green fairway beyond the back of the house. Don’s backyard pool was merely an easy lay away from the No. 8 green of the Miccosukee Country Club. Around the edges of the yard, and along the fairway border, Clara had placed lighted candles. They were upright in sandfilled paper sacks, and the surprisingly good light made the faces of the guests slightly distorted because they were lit from below There was a strong electric light above the bar, however. The bartender, Joe T., or Jotey, as he was called, was a black man who bagged groceries regularly at the Kendall Kwik-Chek. All four of us guys had hired Jotey as a bartender at one time or another for parties because he had surprisingly good judgment. If someone was about to get overloaded, Jotey would gently taper him off by reducing the alcoholic content of his drinks. Moreover, because Jotey didn’t have to go to work at the Kwik-Chek until ten a.m., he would come back willingly, early the next morning following a party, and clean everything up for an extra ten bucks.

  “Mr. Norton,” Jotey said, as I reached the bar; “a J.B. and soda.” He grinned, and handed me my drink.

  “It’s a lot better than Glen Plaid,” I said.

  Jotey winked, and waited on another customer, Nita Peralta, Don’s chubby Cuban secretary. I admired her costume, a silk white-and-red awning striped mini-skirted dress, tied around her bulging middle with a red silk sash. She also wore strawberry mesh stockings and green patent leather boots. Not wanting to get into a conversation with Nita, I moved away from the bar.

  I knew a few of the people slightly—Don’s married friends—but most of the guests were middle-aged strangers. The older men, many of them accompanied by their wives, were Don’s customers, I supposed, invited to his birthday party so he could write it off legitimately as a business expense. Despite the heat, many of these older men wore dinner jackets and business suits. In Miami, the word “informal” on an invitation does not mean dinner jackets, it means sports shirts, Bermuda shorts, and tennis shoes or sandals. But older men, as a kind of compromise, almost always wear a suit and tie to “informar” parties. A suit for a businessman, like a soldier’s uniform, is always correct, even though it’s equally uncomfortable.

  The weather in Miami is precisely the same as the weather in South Vietnam, and it’s a damned shame that we cannot dress accordingly. When I call on doctors and visit hospitals, my company insists that I wear a suit and tie. I must keep my hair cut short, although the young doctors I see sometimes have bushy curls down to their shoulders. The rapport I gain with the older, far-right doctors, I lose with the younger far-left doctors.

  I spotted Don right away. He was seated, with his daughter Marie on his lap, on the far side of the pool. He was talking to a middle-aged Cuban in a blue chalk-striped wool suit, and from the earnestness of their conversation, they were undoubtedly talking business. Don sold a lot of his English silverware to Cubans, he told me. His Cuban customers made up almost thirty percent of his business.

  I decided to talk to Don later. Clara was at the other end of the patio, pushing the baked beans and potato salad. I wondered, maliciously, if she counted the red plastic spoons and forks after the guests left.

  Eddie Miller had told me on the phone that he would be staying overnight in Chicago and would miss the party, so I searched for Larry. I ambled about, nodding pleasantly, but not stopping, to avoid talking to anyone. I knew that Larry would be there soon, because there could be no date cheaper than to take a woman to a free birthday party, and he said he would be coming with a new Electro-Date. After listening to his story about the Weinstein date, I was curious to see what the dating service would come up with next.

  Movement helped a little, but the dull pain in my stomach was undiminished. I had gained five pounds, and when I gain five pounds I eat only one meal a day, at noon, until I have dropped back to 195. Eating once a day enables me to lose the necessary amount, and I can still have a few drinks besides. Ordinarily, I return to one meal a day as soon as I hit 200, but somehow I had crept up to 205 before I noticed it. As an additional psychological crutch to maintain my weight at a sturdy 195, I have all my clothes tailored. If I zoomed, suddenly, to 210, for example, I would need an entirely new wardrobe. And at the moment, at 205, my trousers were uncomfortably tight at the waist. I wore the tails of my sport shirt outside my paints to gain an extra eighth of an inch. It was all I could do to stay away from Clara’s groaning buffet, but I was afraid to go near it.

  I stood for a minute or so, nibbling on an ice cube and watched a wide-assed girl climb out of the pool across the water, and then returned to the bar for another drink.

  I was on my third drink, and still hungry, when Larry arrived. He was wearing his white suit, his “dating uniform,” and he moved like a snow-covered mountain through the crowd as he headed for the bar. The woman trailed him, and I didn’t get a good look at her, even when he got to the bar, because she was on the other side of him. Larry put his birthday gift on the bar, a greasy, clumsily wrapped package in green tissue paper, and ordered two bourbons with Coke chasers. He was that way. He always ordered for himself and the woman he was with without asking what she wanted. With drinks, it didn’t matter so much, but they corrected the order in a hurry when he ordered club sandwiches and they wanted a steak and a salad.

  “What’s that?” I said, tapping the package.

  Larry grinned. “Don’s birthday present. I got him a Colonel Sanders thrift-pack. Nine pieces of cold chicken. And I wrapped it myself.”

  “Your gift is worse than mine,” I said. “I got him a book.” “Not really,” Larry said. “I thought the thrift-pack might remind him of his batching days with us at the building.” “It will. But I don’t think Clara will appreciate it.” “I hope not.”

  I picked up the greasy package, put it on the card table with the others, and returned. This time I got a good look at Larry’s date. She was beautiful enough to know that the world would always be on her side.

  Then I got a whiff of her, the full heady aroma, and it was like a hard right to the heart, a straight punch, with the entire weight of the body behind it. An odor, a smell, is almost indescribable, except, perhaps, in terms of other smells, but in one word Jannaire smelled Woman. I mentioned musk oil earlier, and the futile hope that it will bring out a person’s individual odor. Most of the time it doesn’t; it simply smells like musk oil on the user. It seems as if most of the women in Miami and half of the gay men use it, but this impression is false. If there are five women sitting together in a room, and if only one of them is wearing musk oil, it is so powerful that it blends with the perfumes the other four women are wearing, giving the surreptitious sniffer the impression that all five women are muskily anointed.

  The musk smell on Jannaire was faint, because her own smell, or reek, to be more exact, of primeval swamp, dark guanoed caves, sea water in movement, armpit sweat, mangroves at low tide, Mayan sacrificial blood, Bartolin glands, Dial soap, mulberry leaves, jungle vegetation, saffron, kittens in a cardboard box, Y.W.C.A. volleyball co
urts, conch shells, Underground Atlanta, the Isle of Lesbos, and sheer joy—Patau’s Joy—overpowered the musk oil. I was overwhelmed by the nasal assault, overcome by her female aroma, and although I could not, at the time, define the mixture—nor can I now, exactly—there wasn’t the faintest trace of milk. Here was a woman.

  “Jannaire,” Larry said, “this is Hank Norton, my best friend. Hank. Jannaire.”

  She looked up at me with gold-flecked fecal-beige eyes. She was about five-two, but she looked shorter in gold flats. Her straight, dark brown hair, parted in the center and loose to her shoulders, was a dark bronze helmet, and it clung flat to her head as if she had just broken water after a shallow dive. There was at least a sixteenth of an inch of white showing beneath her pupils, and her bold dark eyes revealed the full optic circle. She wore a gold knee-length dress, shapeless at the waist and unbelted, with tiny golden chains for shoulder straps.

  She raised her arm as Larry handed her the bourbon and Coke, and a thick tuft of black steelwool under her arm bugged out my eyes. Except in Swedish and British films, I had never seen a woman with unshaved armpits, and I mentally visualized the same thick inky hair of her bush. Tiny stop-and-go rivulets of sweat inched down my sides as I began to perspire.

  “Jannaire..?” I said.

  “She doesn’t have a last name,” Larry said. “She said,” he added, in disapproval.

  “How do you do, Jannaire?” I took the glass out of her hand, and placed it on the bar. “You don’t have to drink that. You can have anything you want.”

  “I’d like a beer, I think.” There was a catch in her voice, and she ended the sentence with a rising inflection. She ended all her sentences with rising inflections, I soon discovered.