“Casey?” said Marcia. “Last chance. Then he goes into the crate.”
“Gnth.”
“That's a no,” said Marcia, addressing Marguerite.
“You are sure?” said Marguerite. “He's a
virrrr-
gin!”
“Nuhuh.”
“That is understandable. You'll both feel much more comfortable when you get him into your own
bou⦠doir
,” said Marguerite, tapping Marcia on one kneecap, and then the other, with two ten-thousand-dollar bundles of cash, in time with the last two syllables of her assurance. Then, turning to Rance, who was dressed in a snug squash-player's outfit, she said: “And au revoir to
you
, mon cher.”
She leaned over and landed a shade-more-than-platonic peck on the bridge of his nose.
“Oh my god,” said Rance. “Kiss me again. And again.”
An extraordinary tongue snaked out between Rance's lips and licked the bridge of his nose where Marguerite had kissed him.
“Nevermore,” said Marguerite, shaking her finger at him.
Rance began to whimper. In his shorts a convulsing bulge appeared. The swelling replipenis, having nowhere else to unfurl, forced itself out through the left-hand pocket, turning the lining inside out and threatening to split the seam.
“My goodness,” said Casey and Marcia.
Marguerite took off one of Rance's white Sauconys and extracted a bit of metal shaped like a grenade pin out of the sole of Rance's foot. Rance immediately deactivated.
“I will pack him for you,” said Marguerite, handing the little brass key to Marcia. “When the Federal Express drops him off, there will be two crates: Rand himselfâ”
“Rance.”
“âand a smaller crate holding the compressors, the equalizers, a remote, er, âkill-switch,' a very special saline for his eyeballsâafter rolling back into his head in ecstasy many, many times, the eyeballs, they dry out and sometimes get stuck, leaving him with a look, a stare, like⦠zombie? No good.”
“No good,” said Casey. Marcia double-barrel sneezed.
“Also in the crates? You will find manuals, tuning forks, Allen wrenches, spare earsâmany virgins bite them off, they lose control, so splendid are the petits-morts of their first session.”
“Session? That makes him sound a bit like a shrink.”
“No, that is our Dr. Vassbender, MD, PhD, still in development. He is not allowed to sleep with his patients, so, yes, a conundrum. But, so. That is neither here nor is it neither there. My point is, when the Federal Express delivers your crates? Take names and photographs. With time stamps.”
“I guess you've had trouble with deliveries,” said Casey.
“Bah,” she said, erasing with a wild swipe of her hand the entire subject of the failings of parcel couriers. “Please give me that crowbar.”
In truth, Marcia
was
looking forward to sex with Rance. It was her job as CEO of the Dollhaus to try him out and tune up any vibrations, tics, ratchetings, or other sour notes that might stall the erotic journey of a paying customer. If Rance was as fun as he was supposed to be, she might even double the price. Or triple. Or nonuple. One client a day and she'd be out of debt and even modestly wealthy before she turned thirty. Then she'd really get busy, opening Dollhauses all over the country and the world.
And if he wasn't so great⦠she could return his ass within sixty days for a refund. Minus a 32 percent restocking fee, but that would still leave her with a lower-six-digit pile of cash to launch venture 93, nascently a corpse-flower nursery out in Llano. A lotta dough in corpse flowers, Marcia had heard.
In the exciting days before and the sleepless forty-eight hours since their Vegas trip, Marcia had hired a decorator, found a general contractor,
commissioned a glazier capable of silvering very large panes for use as ceiling mirrors, queried a soundproofing company specializing in RWAR acoustic-decoupling technology, scheduled an appointment with a local Lloyd's of London agent, discussed architectural foundation requirements with a commercial bondage-and-discipline consulting firm, hired a wheelchair-ramp builder, compared security companies, and bartered from her old web-sharp high-school classmate Keerthy Anand the construction of a tony website in exchange for three prime-time hours with Rance.
“Can he brush my hair?” asked Keerthy. “I like sex and then hair-brushing.”
“I think so,” said Marcia. “I know he can do Topsy Tails.”
Keerthy squealed in assent.
Marcia hung up the phone and fell back onto the elbow-bed, exhausted. The phone immediately rang again.
“Hi, is he there yet?”
“No, he's not,” said Marcia. “I told you I'd call you.”
“FedEx tracking says he's on vehicle for delivery,” said Casey.
“It's 6 p.m.,” said Marcia, so tired she slurred her words. “He won't be here till tomorrow. I'm asleep. You go to sleep.”
She hung up just as the doorbell rang. In an instant, Marcia was in a state of raunchy wakefulness. She raced to the front door, snatching her Nikon hanging by its strap from a doorknob.
On her flagstone walkway Marcia found a team of three scrawny FedEx deliverymen sitting on a wooden crate about the size of an adolescent's coffin. All of its huge red arrows denominated
THIS END UP
were pointing to the left. A smaller, more cubic crate sat in Marcia's flowerbed of zinnias.
Marcia signed the dumb FedEx Etch A Sketch thing.
“Can you help me bring hâ them inside?”
“No,” they said.
“Hmm, well, stay put for a sec, gotta get a picture, you know, routine, for insurance and whatever.”
“No,” they said, and ran off in different directions.
Marcia was not going to call Casey. She wanted Rance for herself, privately, for a night. A secret.
Marcia stepped into the yard to examine the crates. She worked her fingers under one end of the big one, and lifted. Rance was five-eleven and weighed 110 pounds; the crating added at least 30 more. She could move
that much weight if she was at the Hyde Park Gym working the leg-press machine, but in a state of sexual perturbation and confronted with a handleless casket, she was quite helpless. Marguerite had said they'd experimented with different body weights: any heavier, and test subjects complained that Rance reminded them of a corpse (though Marguerite admitted this could have been a selling point in more instances than one might expect); any lighter and the recoil from Rance's enthusiastic pelvic plunging action tended to shatter verisimilitude.
“Our next model, Ï10,000, will be equipped with internal ballast sponges, which one may fill, you see, with water, or with helium, depending on one's needs,” Marguerite had said.
Ballast or no, there was zero chance Marcia was going to get Rance inside on her own.
She looked up to see a strange vehicle idling at the curb.
“A hand?” said the vehicle's captain.
It was a man about her age she saw almost every day pedaling down the street on a tricked-out homemade recumbent tricycle. A thoroughly chromed work of art, a gold springer fork and a pair of bullet lights and a big high-back sissy bar backrest illuminated with a sexy painting of Julie from
The Love Boat.
A silly bike helmet resembling a dinner roll, four orange safety pennants sticking out of the sissy bar on long poles, and a small basket housing a yipping dog, were all that spoiled the overall lowride effect.
“Yeah. What's your name?”
“Porifiro. And that's Tom Mix,” he said, pointing to the dog.
Porifiro couldn't have weighed much more than Rance, but nevertheless he hoisted the crate onto his shoulder as though it were filled with balloons, and carried it inside.
“Just put it down by the bed, please. How can I thank you? Diet Sprite? Bacon? A hundred dollars?”
“No, thanks.”
“Want me to take pictures of you on your trike?”
“Okay.”
Against the setting sun, Marcia shot a roll of real 35 mm pictures, not stupid digitals, and promised she'd mail them in a few days.
“Let me have your hand, please,” said Porifiro. He produced a pen from somewhere and inked his address in Marcia's palm. “Say, would you always
wave to me and Tom Mix?” he added, undoing a bike lock that looked like a link of battleship chain.
“Promise,” she said, just before a great sneeze knocked her into the grass. For four days Marcia did not answer her texts or phone or email or door or Casey's shouts of “Pygmalion!” from the front yard. Schmidt, who in the past had spent not a whole lot of time outside, found himself living under a vast pecan tree in the backyard while fearless possums stole his Snausages at night and craven squirrels dropped pecans on his head all day. In retribution for all facets of this outrage, Schmidt gnawed at the corners of the house, rounding them off to a height of five feet, his maximum reach.
O, how his life had changed since his mistress spurned him so!
March 1988
It was unseasonably hot and humid. When Justine got home from school, temperatures had hit the upper nineties and the front door had swollen shut. Justine had to shoulder it open. Inside, bugs had been coaxed from their wintering and were colonizing the living-room windows. Her own room reeked of paste and printer's ink, a sheen of condensation had treacherized the toilet seat, Dartmouth's water dish had been taken away and replaced with a casserole dish filled to the rim with water and ice cubes. The dust in the air illuminated by the afternoon sun was motionless, fixed, like a galaxy. Dot's blankets were on the floor, her TV tray crowded with Coke cans and beer bottles. Dot herself was stretched out on the divan. Her sweat-heavy green satin nightgown stuck close to her body and was bunched up mid-thigh, exposing the scab-colored sarcomae that randomly patched her legs and which looked, to Justine's eye, impatient.
Ready.
“Dot?”
Dot didn't move.
“Dot.”
Dot opened her eyes.
“I'm up.”
Justine ran over and turned on the air conditioner, which groaned like a trash compactor and expectorated trillions of mold spores into the room.
“I think we should go to a regular doctor.”
“Bring me a Coke, would you, darling?”
“Okay, but let's go to St. David's. I have Troy's Aspen today.”
“I'm fine. Just hot.”
“I mean, I want you to give up on this Sherpa guy and see a regular doctor. I finally decided Sherpa's a quack. Let's go now.”
“You haven't even met him.”
“He makes you drink disgusting teas all day. How is that helping?”
“I told you, we've been to regular hospitals. Good ones, Mass General, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai, lots of other places. Money's gone, baby, all our savings, everything we could get from beneficent programs, generous doctors, test studies. The only treatment costs more than most anybody can afford. We hitched here from Baylor in Dallas. The last trucker dropped us off nearly a mile away from here, and Lou carried me all the way to your front door. Did you know that? No place else to go. He was terrified of coming here, afraid you'd hate him, afraid of Charlotte and Livia.”
“I love Lou,” said Justine, not wanting to know why Lou thought so much fear and hatred was due him. She never wanted to know. She loved him just like he was. “And everybody's getting along fine. And I love you, too.”
“And I'm glad we came. But understand, Sherpa's what we got leftâhe's the last chance, and cheap enough so Lou can afford him with his Registry job.”
“Let me just run you over to St. David's so they can give you some fluids at least, and maybe talk to somebody. They can't refuse an emergency.”
“Just go get me that Coke. Get one from the bottom shelf, now. Things're colder, you know, on the bottom shelf.”
“When is Sherpa going to do the final treatment? Why isn't he ready yet?”
“He says if he does it prematurely, then it'll ruin everything and I'll die. And there has to be a trial run with a surrogate first, anyway, which he wants me to audit so I can see what my own treatment will be like. The right time has something to do with the weather, barometric pressure. He won't know when until that day, and he'll call us. Kind of like a liver transplant.”
“Or like a Soviet execution. He's a quack. I think he's just getting as much of your money as he can before you⦔
“He's not a quack. It's just nontraditional medicine.”
“He's a nut. A quack.”
The air conditioner roared. The den was growing cold.
“You need to let this go now, Justine. I appreciate your candor and your position, but I'm doing this. A lot of sacrifices have been made.”
“What if I called an ambulance?”
“I wouldn't forgive you for it.”
At 6:15 a.m. on the following Sunday, the phone rang. Justine ignored it, and it stopped ringing. Then, from Charlotte's room across the hall: