Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Read online

  I got out of bed and walked slowly naked into the bathroom, aware of her eyes feasting on me. I never would’ve done that back in my fatso phase, not slowly. I’d have grabbed a towel or something to cover my big butt. Now it was skinnier. Shapely, almost. She climbed into the shower with me and soaped my back and I soaped hers and she soaped me some more and then we writhed together under the hot water, all slippery and soapy, and dried each other off with enormous fluffy towels.

  And then we did other things.

  And afterward I lay, scratch marks on my back, my hard drive tingling with bliss, Sugar in my arms, feeding me a croissant stuffed with blackberry jam and a perfectly poached quail’s egg on a triangle of brioche. And felt the urge to get dressed and get out of there. What was wrong with me?

  “You just get younger and younger,” she said. “Move in with me, Guy. It’ll be just like it used to be, except better. I’ve got a million in the bank, and the apartment is all mine. We’ll throw away the fish lithographs and make it our little love nest. The best is yet to be. My heart is a caged animal, Guy, and you hold the key in your hand.”

  There was a barely audible growl from the corner and a grinding of teeth. You didn’t have to be fluent in German to know what he was saying: “You move in here, and your troubles have just begun.”

  “We’ll make a happy life together,” she said, her pale green nightie draped loosely on her naked body, her cheek pressed against mine. “We’ll go to the movies, we’ll cook together and read poetry aloud, and we’ll dance in the dark and do wonderful impulsive things like dropping everything and flying to Montana just because we want to, and walking up a mountain trail in the summer rain and singing Neil Young songs. That was the problem before, Guy. We weren’t impulsive. We were cautious. We dated for six years, and I can count the number of crazy impulsive things we did on one hand. But look at you now. You’re elegant. Dashing. A new Guy. I always begged you to lose weight, and now you have, darling. Oh Guy, you’re the handsomest, sexiest man in Minnesota. And probably other states as well. Marry me.”

  And the dog said, “Go ahead, try it, and you’ll wake up one morning with one less testicle.”

  The thought of singing “Heart of Gold” in a high voice in a public place did not appeal to me, nor did reading poetry aloud. “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” okay, and maybe some Robert Frost, but most poetry requires you to go limp with awestruck wonder at stuff like dew on the grass, and clouds in the sky or deer in the underbrush. Sorry, but I’m not a fourteen-year-old girl.

  And then I remembered Naomi, the yacht on the Aegean, the underwater kiss. Women possess an infallible rival detector. If you so much as peck another woman on the cheek, your Primary Woman can sense this and she will hunt the peckee down and remember her scent and monitor your movements ever after. It was only a matter of time before Sugar said, “Tell me about you and Naomi Fallopian. Are you sleeping with her? Have you ever, or are you hoping to in the future?” And Naomi would phone in from Phoenicia: “So what’s this I hear about you and that O’Toole woman?” If Naomi and Sugar found out about each other, they would drop me simultaneously, and I’d be suddenly loveless and penniless and pathetic.

  It wasn’t easy to tear myself away. Sugar begged me to stay for lunch. “Scallops, my love, on a bed of basmati rice. And then you, my love, on a bed of silk and satin.” I had to lie and say that Larry B. Larry was meeting me at the office in an hour. She wanted to drive me to St. Paul. “No, no, darling, I want to keep you out of this.” The truth was, I needed to be alone and think. A man loves wild passionate sex, and then he would like to be solo for a while in an undisclosed location. Maybe climb a tree and sit on a high limb for a few hours. And look at the sky.

  “Be careful,” she said. She kissed me good-bye (many times and many places), and I glanced down the front of her shirt at the two friendly puppies lying in their hammocks, and I promised to be in touch, and waltzed out the door and down to the corner where a taxi was parked and climbed in and said, “St. Paul. Downtown.”

  “You work around here?” the driver said. He was a big fellow. He filled up half the front seat. Balding, with a long thin braid hanging down.

  “You could say that.”

  “Night shift, huh?”

  “Sometimes. When I’m lucky.”

  “My girlfriend works a night shift at the hospital. We’re saving up our money because in January her and me are having a baby.”

  “She and I,” I said. “Not ‘her and me’—‘She and I are having a baby.’”

  He slammed on the brakes, and the cab skidded toward the curb, and a bus swerved around us, honking. “That’s not funny,” he said. “Where do you get off saying a thing like that?”

  “I was correcting your grammar.”

  “And leave my grandma out of it, too, you jerk!”

  “You said ‘her and me are having a baby.’ It’s ‘she and I.’ That’s all.”

  “I ain’t taking that from you—” And he lunged over the front seat and grabbed my jacket and took a swing, and I managed to open the door and slide out, and he came galumping around and grabbed my shirt, and I had to hit him hard, an elbow to the ribs and a right jab to the chops, and he fell down and lay whimpering on the boulevard. I saw the roll of twenties in his shirt pocket, and I grabbed it. “I ought to charge you tuition,” I said. “The College of Etiquette. You just learned why you ought to think before you lose your temper. A couple hundred bucks might make it more memorable. But I don’t want your money—” and I stuck the roll in his mouth. “I just had sex with a fabulous lady and then a fine croissant as well, and I’ve got all the cash I want. But that doesn’t change the fact that ‘she and I’ are having a baby. Your girlfriend and I. And she told me that your sperm are weak swimmers, barely motile, and that’s why I was brought into the case. Let me know when the baby comes, and I’ll send a box of cigars.” And I turned away and then turned back and said, “Last time I saw a mouth like yours, it had a hook in it,” and walked fifty feet to the bus stop just as the express to St. Paul rolled up—no need to break into a trot—and boarded and (get this) I had exact change in my right-hand pants pocket and dropped in the six quarters and they played the first six notes of “Dinah” exactly as Thelonious Monk played it in his 1955 Blue Angel recording. Talk about smooth. Perfect timing. And then the nubile young woman I sat down across from looked up and smiled at me. She smiled and held the smile and was about to say, “Don’t I know you?” and I was about to reply, “No, but give it time, darling, give it time.” But before she could say it, the bus stopped, and she got up to get off and looked back at me with that I-will-always-look-back-on-this-as-a-tragic-missed-opportunity expression on her face. And I gave her a Look-me-up-I’m-in-the-book look. She got off, the door closed, and I farted. It sounded like Jack Teagarden’s growly trombone in the second chorus of “I’m Coming, Virginia.”

  12

  Getting lucky

  SO SUGAR THOUGHT I WAS the handsomest, sexiest man in Minnesota. She who had often in the past addressed me as “Lard Ass.” In general it had started to dawn on me that I was indeed becoming rather gorgeous. My size L shirts were billowy, and I was tucking in the tails, not leaving them hanging out as I had in my spare-tire days. The 38 waists were sagging on my hips—which now were bony, not humps of flab—so I switched to 36, a little snug but not for long, and by June I was a 34. My chins didn’t wibble-wobble when I shook my head. Even my earlobes seemed skinnier. Women in coffee shops gave me the eye who had never eyeballed me before. Several women in their twenties flirted with me. Brazenly. Sidled up on the street and asked for directions to the Cathedral but in a way that suggested they’d be glad to skip the Cathedral and accompany me to a bar for a cool drink and some frank conversation. Soon I needed a belt to keep up the 34s and was looking at 32. I felt weaker, the worms made me queasy when they got jumpy. And ever so often I let some t
hunderous farts, big boomers that smelled like deceased penguins. But I was turning into a show horse. Definitely. I was in better shape than when I was seventeen and graduating from Ira R. Globerman High School on West End Avenue. Back then, thanks to high metabolism, I could pack away eleven hot dogs at a sitting, and now tapeworms gave me all the metabolism a man could want. I was doing forty sit-ups at one sitting and almost fitting into a 32-inch waist and wearing skimpy briefs to show off my tight glutes. Not bad for an old man.

  My landlady, Doris, noticed my slenderness. She, who took a quasi-spousal interest in my comings and goings, said, “You’re looking rather skinny, Mr. Noir, hope that doesn’t mean you got some sort of wasting disease and one day we’re going to detect a powerful stench and the cops have to break down your door and there you are on the floor in your skivvies and your body bloated and your glassy eyes staring up at me. It takes a long time to get the smell of a dead body out of an apartment, and even then they’re hard to rent, so if you’re about to croak, I’d rather you go out in the street and save me the headaches. Or when you sense the end is near you could dive off the High Bridge. You hit the water, it’s as good as hitting concrete. How about it?”

  I assured her that I had plenty of shelf life left, but she wasn’t buying it.

  “I’ve seen it before—there was a gentleman named Hobbs who tried to lose weight on a diet of bran flakes and mothball crystals. He played piano in the lobby of the Lowry Hotel and everything he played sounded like ‘Till There Was You.’ He got so fat he had to sit sideways at the keyboard and play one-handed, and one summer he lost about two hundred pounds real fast, went from pumpkin to string bean. Went off to work one day and was knocked down by a small child on a tricycle and hit his head on the pavement and couldn’t remember ‘Chopsticks’ and had to go to work as a chicken plucker. This isn’t some harebrained weight-loss scheme you bought from an ad in the back of Field & Stream, is it?”

  “Just trying to take care of myself, like every other guy my age. The days of wine and roses have become the days of tea and rosehips. A sad story. I used to be Mr. Excitement, and now I’m Mr. Appropriate.”

  She studied me through narrowed eyes. “What is Elongate?” she said.

  I feigned ignorance. “A long gate? Is this a joke?”

  “Those pills you took. In the silver foil wrapper.”

  I had switched to new worms, since the old ones seemed to be slacking off, and like a dope I had put the wrapping in the garbage, which Doris studies like an archaeologist. The woman knew as much about me as if she were my wife.

  “Those are vitamin E pills, Doris. They give me illusions of youth.”

  “Don’t go taking some pills you bought off the Internet that they make in some tiny Caribbean island that contain God knows what. People have sent away for stuff like that and wound up losing a kidney.”

  “All’s well, Doris. Don’t give it another thought.”

  But I started to wonder: How much did Doris know? Had she listened to my voice-mail messages from Naomi? Was she maybe in Larry B. Larry’s pocket? Someone that cranky and abusive you assume is playing you straight, but anyone can be bought if you can meet their price.

  My phone rang. There was a high-pitched tone at the other end. Someone’s fax machine. I yelled, “Wrong number! I am not a fax machine!” Hung up. Two minutes later same thing. I whistled into the phone, hoping to confuse the circuit, and hung up. Two minutes later, ring ring ring. And eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Technology! Nerds taking revenge for us not inviting them to our parties. So I had to trek on down to Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark and borrow their fax machine and haul it up to my office and plug the son of a gun in and receive the fax, which was, of course, a menu for a taco joint, Nacho Mama, and then haul the machine back to Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark, a huge inconvenience.

  On the other hand, I did run into Birch Bergquist, who visibly brightened at the sight of me and said, “My God, you look great.” A compliment from a gorgeous woman makes my whole day. It is better than finding a twenty-dollar bill behind the sofa cushion.

  My plan was to slim down to a 28 while avoiding the Bogus Brothers and buy me a white linen suit and go away on a fourteen-day cruise of the Aegean aboard the MS Bellissima. I’d read the brochure. I could imagine lounging around on the afterdeck, tanning myself, surrounded by a bevy of sloe-eyed beauties in diaphanous dresses listening spellbound to my stories of detection and the darkness of the human heart. I had big plans. I’d travel around Italy while my eight-room apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park was replastered and painted, the bedroom looking out at the treetops, the kitchen redone with Mexican tile floors and countertops, all described in a splashy story in Lifestyles of the Rich and Handsome. (GOTHAM’S MOST ELIGIBLE BACHELOR LAVISHES FORTUNE ON $4.2 MIL PIED-À-TERRE), me in a silk running outfit, an attractive personal assistant named Deirdre pouring cream in my coffee.

  Why not?

  I believe in progress. Look at Barack Obama. The guy was a state legislator and then he wrote a fine book and gave a big speech, and suddenly people were excited about him running for president. And lo and behold, a black guy with an odd name beat a war hero. Usually the heavyweight beats the lightweight, but an ordinary horsefly has been known to drive an elephant crazy. The Washington Post did the same to Richard Nixon. The world turns. People demonstrated in the streets of Cairo and shouted “Down with Mubarak,” and other people joined them, and the army refused to shoot them, and eventually the regime fell. Ditto Qaddafi. And look at Oxford. It started out as a shallow bend in a stream where herds of dumb cattle could be made to cross, and over the years it’s become quite a prestigious university. We live by improvements. Bad luck can change. Redemption is within reach. For weeks, Joey Roast Beef wandered around unable to distinguish his left foot from his right hand, and then he went to a shrink who gave him a little pill and next day Joey sat down and wrote a poem. Joey, a poet! Who knew?

  This Is Just to Say

  I have taken the body

  that was in the icebox

  and which you were

  probably saving for evidence.

  Forgive me it smelled bad

  So pale and so cold.

  It just goes to show you never can tell. He was so pleased, he sat down to write another.

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit informants. Love is not love

  Which goes to the cops with what it finds.

  A guy like that I’d have to remove.

  Oh no, it goes straight for the mark

  And posts a lookout for the break-in,

  It is the car that’s waiting in the dark

  To race away after all the stuff is taken.

  And then he quit taking the pills because he felt so good and he stopped writing poems and he got mad at me again. So maybe it all evens out in the end.

  13

  Joey again

  JOEY ROAST BEEF LIKED ME just fine all that spring and then in June I went back on his shit list. Senile dementia is funny that way. It comes and goes. He had forgotten what he was mad at me about, but he knew that something was stuck in his craw, so he buttonholed me in the Five Spot one sweet summer night—came beetling splay-footed along the bar, his jowls bouncing on his starched shirtfront and the red tie with the purple bacilli, and he jabbed a hairy finger in my sternum and said, “What gives, Guy? What’s goin’ on? Something is. You owe me money? You been bad-mouthing me, or what’s happening? Fill me in.”

  “Joey, we had a disagreement about American foreign policy toward Canada, and you argued for patience and negotiation, and I argued that we ought to bomb their hockey rinks and show them we mean business, and now I see that you were right and I was wrong and we’re pals a
gain.”

  “You’re lying. You tried to pull a fast one on me, and I was gonna pump you full of lead. I remember that much, ya crum bum.”

  I suggested we sit down and make peace over a fine Scotch. He shook his head. “You’re lying to me, Noir, I can see it in your shifty eyes. You think just because I’m eighty-two, you can sneak one past me. Well, you can’t.” And he reached in for his shoulder holster and I had to restrain him.

  “Don’t have a coronary over it. You’re a beautiful man, Joey. You’ve been like an uncle to me. Let me buy you a drink.” And I waved to Jimmy. “Coupla Scotch and sodas! Ice on the side. And a boiled egg and some pickled pigs’ feet.”

  Steam was coming out of Joey’s ears. He was not to be pacified. He struggled to pull the gun out and called me vile names, and I was afraid he would shoot himself in the armpit. He spat a big gob in my face. “You’re dead, Guy. I wash my hands of you. And don’t expect me to speak at your memorial service. I am going to skip the whole thing and have a big lunch until after they put you in the ground, and then I’m gonna come over and piss on your grave. So I hope they bury you in a raincoat.”

  He was beyond reasoning with, so I shoved his gun into the ice bin and ankled it on out the back and down the alley and into the back door of the old Visitation convent, now a fancy office complex, and into the elevator and up to the fifth floor and the former chapel that—miracle of miracles!—had been made over into the Minnesota Musical Theater and an audience was waiting for the curtain to open on Two to Duluth by my old flame Beatrice and her new love, the librettist John Jensen, she having ditched her husband Brett who suffered from memory loss and was busily writing things he’d written years before and that were not improved by the passage of time. I squeezed into a seat in the back row and hunkered down, but Beatrice spotted me and leaped up and galloped back and gave me a big showbiz hug. “Darling!” she cried. “It’s been too long!” The boyfriend looked pretty much as you’d expect a John Jensen to look: pale, bony, wary, limp handshake, a look of chronic pain.