Count Geiger's Blues (14 page)
26
A Run to SatyrFernalia
Over the telephone, Grantham said, “It
says you’ve lost your edge, that’s what your Smite Them Hip & Thigh rave-up says to me, Thaxton.”
Thaxton. Not Xave or Xavier. A bad sign. “But McGudgeon’s band is good,” Xavier said. “Mikhail was right about them. Dead on the money.”
“Thanks,” said The Mick, sotto voce. He was sitting on a red stool across the living room while Bari, alarmed to learn that her lover had suffered another fainting spell at a concert, had come to Franklin Court to see about him. She lounged beside Xavier on the sofa, a hand on his arm.
“Uh-huh,” Grantham said through Xavier’s handset. “Now what’re you gonna give the kid for Christmas?”
“Unfair, Walt. I called that concert as I saw it. As I
heard
it. Smite Them are very good at what they do.”
“Yeah. You could say that of Hitler and Company too. Would you give
them
a four-star write-up?”
“Walt, that’s a bigoted cheap shot.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“You weren’t there—”
“Thank God for major mercies.”
“—but I was, and I reviewed them with the respect their performance earned.”
“You tripped and hit your head on the stage. To rehone your edge, you should go back to the ‘really good stuff.’ You and Stamz should return to your previous beats.”
“That’ll make Lee happy.”
“You’re not cut out to do pop entertainment, Xave.” (Calling him Xave was supposed to soften the rebuke.) “And the last thing I want from you in the coming weeks is a hallelujah chorus for a foul-mouthed comedian at Hooter’s or a round of sloppy kudos for a slasher flick.”
“I wouldn’t give those things—”
“Xave, who knows what you’ll do? Your nephew has screwed your artsy-fartsy head on backwards for you.”
“The spectrum of what I’m able to appreciate has been expanded, Walt. That’s all. I’m delighted it has.”
“‘Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton’ should be withering stuff, not nosegays and pulled punches—at least when you’re covering the crap that Lee and his gang usually do. Get well, okay?” Grantham abruptly hung up.
“I’m reassigned to my Fine Arts post,” Xavier said.
“Your first love,” Bari said.
“Yeah,” The Mick said, picking his nose, “but, hey, he’s got an
expanded septum of appreciation
. “
“Spectrum. Meaning I’m further away from licking my Philistine Syndrome. In fact, Mahler and McGudgeon are now equally capable of making me sick.”
“Awl riiight!” The Mick said, raising a fist.
Xavier ignored him. “But reassigned to my Fine Arts desk, I’ll be fair game for temporary blindness, falling hair, or involuntary echolalia every time I encounter something good.”
“After reviling junk for so many weeks,” Bari said, “maybe just getting back to the good stuff will stabilize you.”
“I don’t know,” Mikhail said. “Uncle Xave liked Smite ’Em’s show, but lookit—liking it put a fucking walnut over his eye.”
Xavier touched the bandage on his forehead. “Much more of this and I may just lie back and sip my hemlock.”
“What you need,” Bari said, “is a talisman, something you can keep with you even at a gallery opening or a ballet.”
“A talisman?”
“Something to override your syndrome so that you could cover an entire event without any ill effects.”
“A kind of phylactery? An asafoetida bag?”
“Sort of. Something that’s the product of superstition or the popular imagination, something to keep it close to your body—so close it’s almost a part of you.”
The Mick hopped off the bar stool. “I’ve got it. Not a bag of garlic or anything like that—but something a whole heckuva lot fucking better.”
“What?” Xavier and Bari said together.
“Got to call this dude,” Mikhail said. “And then maybe go on a little run.”
“Who?” Xavier said. “Who’d go on this . . . run?”
“You and me,” The Mick said. “Bari, if she wants to, but you’d definitely have to come with, unc.”
Great, thought Xavier. A “little run” at nine o’clock on a hot September
Saturday
night in Salonika. With his forehead gauze-wrapped and his body still twitching from Smite Them’s “septum”-expanding show, Xavier could think of many things that he’d rather do than go out on a “little run”—but, scooting aside, he let Mikhail punch out a code on the telephone.
*
In Satan’s Cellar, not far from P. S. Annie’s, The Mick led them through scrap-strewn streets, under switchbacking fire-escape cages, and past wino-blockaded foyers of fleabag hotels to a cobblestone alley lit by sick fluorescents and teeming with people so far out of the plebeian mainstream that you couldn’t even label them hoi polloi. A few tuxedoed or evening-gowned slummers had wandered into the Cellar, but even they were poked up, strung out on alcohol or technodrugs. Xavier saw that Bari and he, imperturbably guided by The Mick, must look like Tory tourists on a walkabout among the urban damned. He wished that Donel and Bryan—or, better, Lee Stamz—were along to afford their expedition some muscle, for these alleys were Salonika’s stews. At least the bandage on his head made him look a little tougher than he was, a lot tougher than he felt. Some of the hard-trade types they ran into face-on glanced aside, sidled away. This section of the Cellar was like something out of Hugo or Dickens. Or an old comic book.
“Mick, where the hell’re you taking us?”
The Mick plunged on through the crowd, checking occasionally to make sure he hadn’t outrun them. At length, he turned into a side street with less light, fewer people, and a heavy, disabling reek. The stench seemed to be a mix of grease paint, stale roses, and homemade drugs, but Xavier couldn’t quite focus his suspicions about the place or determine a point of origin for all the overlapping odors.
“Here!” The Mick ducked into a three- or four-story building—collapsing, like all the others in the area. It had an almost elegant neon logo over its entrance:
SatyrFernalia
, which winked on and off, its tubes flickering crimson and violet. Briefly, The Mick reappeared in the doorway. “Come on. It’s okay.” Xavier and Bari followed him up the steps into the disintegrating shell. The Mick waited on the landing of a cockeyed stairway. Each step in its creaking scaffold seemed ready to give way to midnight and empty air. From the landing, The Mick beckoned them impatiently. Despite the stairs’ sorry condition, they rail-walked to a loft room constituting at least half the third story. They crossed this echoey space into a vast bay where a balding man in pleated pants and a houndstooth jacket hunched behind a counter reading the
Urbanite
in the spots cast by the flashlights mounted on three greasy iron poles. On one page of his newspaper sat a rodentlike beast—a gerbil, Xavier guessed—busily shelling sunflower seeds.
“Do for you?” the gerbil keeper said.
“Yo, slick, I called.”
The man looked Mikhail up and down. Xavier noted with some pleasure that he’d been reading his review of the Smite Them Hip & Thigh concert. Or, maybe, the story just under it about the variable fortunes of a dog track in Alabama. Xavier, as the gerbil cracked another sunflower seed, suspended judgment about these matters.
“Shake out the cobs,” The Mick said. “I did call.”
“Okay,” the man said. “I’m Griff. What you want’s back there. Somewheres. Go ahead and look.” He waved brusquely at the shadowy racks behind him, acres and acres of clothes, like a quartermaster’s barracks or an all-night laundry.
“How are we supposed to see?” Bari asked.
“Take you a coupla beamers,” rasped Griff, nodding at the poles supporting his flashlight lamps. At each pole’s foot was an iron plate on casters—Xavier, looking over the counter, realized they were to maneuver these unwieldy devices into the bay, like patients on IV drips walking bottled glucose down a hospital corridor. Sort of. Griff lifted a counter section to let them through. Guiding their flashlight poles into the bay’s warehouse, Xavier, Bari, and The Mick soon learned that SatyrFernalia specialized in mechanical sexual aids and sartorial aphrodisiacs. The costumes racked here were meant to stimulate the imaginations of their renters. (Were kinky trysts occurring in warrens around the building?) They had glimpses of waxed leather, polished brass, delicate lace, and intricate ivory or plastic devices . . . also of capes, hoods, tights, belts, scarves, and less identifiable garments.
“Mikhail,” Xavier said, halting the boy, “how do you even happen to
know
about this place?”
“You guys buying or renting?” Griff called after them.
“They’re buying,” The Mick said over his shoulder.
“Mikhail!”
“Easy, Uncle Xave,” The Mick said. “It’s superhero garb I skate on. They’ve got Scarab, Snow Leopard, Ladysilk, Decimator, Mantisman, Saint Torque, DeeJay, Gator Maid, Yellowhammer, Warwoman, MC2—”
“Damn it, Mikhail, that’s plenty!”
“Shhhh,” said Bari. “Can’t you see why he’s brought us here?” She turned her flashlight pole so that its beam whitewashed a rack of costumes. Motes swam blurrily. Braidwork, piping, and strange medallions glittered.
“Frankly, no. None of this epic tackiness makes a
soupçon
of sense to me.”
“Your talisman’s not exactly a talisman, Xavier. It’s a costume, a stalwart’s outfit. Pick one out.”
“That’s crazy.”
“We didn’t pick our way into the seediest part of Salonika to have you nix The Mick’s idea without a trial, Xavier. I mean it, choose one.”
Xavier realized that he could not win here. Bari and The Mick had allied against him. The Mick was his ward for who knew how long, and Bari was . . . the woman he loved, a fact that gave her leverage. He felt like a child resisting his mother’s insistence that he try on new clothes for Easter: doomed. His talisman wasn’t a talisman—no amulet, coin, or magic feather—but an entire
costume
. Would that work? Would that afford relief from the absurd horror of the Philistine Syndrome? On a nearby rack, Xavier rummaged through costumes, squinting at an emerald-green leotard, a cape made to resemble a fanlike spiderweb, an ermine sheath with a cat’s face and gloves clawed with bamboo plectra. His fingers found and pulled out a suit shining like hammered tinfoil. He handed this costume out to Bari. The Mick took one of its sleeves.
“Count Geiger! That’s it, Uncle Xave.
That’s it!
”
Bari also fingered the fabric. “I’m not sure what it’s made of, but it’s porous enough to wear under a suit without bulking you up too much or giving you heatstroke.”
“Under a suit?”
“You could wear it
instead of
a suit, but you’d get ribbed at work. Better to wear a suit over it, like Clark Kent wearing his Brooks Brothers over his flashy BVDs.”
“Heatstroke be damned,” Xavier said. “I’m more likely to come down with the everlasting Count Geiger’s Blues.”
“Or everlasting relief from your problem,” Bari said.
“Stop bitching,” The Mick snarled. “You’re buying this fucking costume.” He swallowed the snarl. “Aren’t you?”
Back at the counter, Griff spread the silver bodysuit out and folded it as if it were a handkerchief. Griff’s gerbil sat in the pocket of his houndstooth jacket, its paws hooked over the lip, its tiny eyes glittering. It looked at Xavier with the same contained derision that McGudgeon had fixed on him at the Grotto East. Griff lifted the folded bodysuit and placed it in a box not much larger than a man’s billfold.
“Great choice: lightweight, stylish. One grand in greens, please.”
Xavier imitated apoplexy. “
One grand!
”
“A bargain, sir. We clear that much a week renting out this Count Gargle outfit.” He picked a sunflower seed off the newspaper pile and handed it to his gerbil, which accepted the seed and ducked out of view to crack it.
“If it’s so profitable, why sell it?” Xavier asked.
“We got three others just like it out now. Makes good sense to underwrite another coupla costumes with a straight-up sale or two. Occasionally, anyway.”
“If you don’t buy it now, unc,” The Mick said, “I might hotfoot it again.”
“Don’t tempt me, Mikhail.”
They bought the costume. Xavier shared the cost with Bari, who threatened to dump him if he didn’t let her chip in: a tender sort of blackmail.
“Sorry I already boxed it,” Griff said. “Hope you didn’t plan to wear it home.”
27
The Suit
From that evening forward,
Xavier developed a secret relationship with his Count Geiger suit. Wearing it every day (although it put him in mind of the “garments,” officially blessed underclothes, that some Mormons wore, believing them charms against a host of unspecified injuries), he had to admit that the Suit seemed to work for him. He went back to editing the
Urbanite
’s Fine Arts section, labors he could now perform without feeding plum assignments to Ivie Nakai, Donel Lassiter, or Pippa Wiedmeyer.
Secreting the costume under his clothes, Clark Kent-style, did create some minor problems. Its lightness, flexibility, and micromolecular thinness aside, it still contrived to make Xavier sweat. The fact that September and October were a little cooler than usual mitigated this tendency, but Walt Grantham insisted on maintaining a year-round work-environment temperature of seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Sometimes, encased like a laminated cheese slice in his stalwartly long johns, Xavier tried to imagine that a cooling blizzard had swept through Salonika, that soothing snows were drifting through its late-autumn asphalt canyons and tarry culs-de-sac. And he began to dread
next
summer, still seven months away.
Every night, Xavier hand-washed his costume. It dripped dry in an hour, then he’d spray it with a commercial fixative obtained by his nephew for an exorbitant fee at SatyrFernalia. The fixative dried on contact, but, usually, Xavier sat in his bedroom, naked, luxuriating in his evening respite from the Suit’s tyranny. Eventually, he’d put it back on, for if he dawdled too long without wearing it, a snatch of Beethoven’s
Ninth
, overheard from an adjacent apartment, could trip a pernicious somatic response—Xavier never knew what sort—and threaten his livelihood. So he was careful. Dressed in the Suit, he could enjoy historic recordings by Gluck, Gershwin, and, yes, even Gregor McGudgeon. Without penalty, he could read all that he most admired, see all the films and artwork deserving his attention, listen to all that he deemed meritorious. For Xavier, this was freedom—even if imprisonment in, and subtle manipulation by, the Count Geiger outfit was freedom’s despotic price.
*
The Suit had other disadvantages, some too personal or intimate to record. (But let’s relate one anyway.) In brief, like a bundling board, the Suit literally got in the way of Xavier and Bari’s evolving physical relationship.
Although he could roll its tinfoilish sheath onto his naked person with speed and precision (a kind of body-sized prophylactic), the costume was damned hard to skin out of. On those evenings when The Mick wasn’t home—finally, he’d made a friend or two at Ephebus—it was frustrating for Xavier to discover that he couldn’t unzip, unpleat, unholster, or disencondom himself fast enough to address the urgency of his or Bari’s passion.
Bari still had not agreed to his marriage proposal, noting that the fashion products of Bari’s of Salonika were now so popular that she’d be unable to fulfill the vows that he, as a Suthren male of old-timey values, would expect her to meet. On the other hand, in The Mick’s absences, when her work didn’t call, she still liked to “do the deed” (her words), and it drove Xavier crazy—crazier—to have to wage all-out war on his Reynolds Wrap skivvies to take advantage of her randy moods.
“Don’t rush,” Bari’d whisper. “Please don’t rush.”
But generally he did, pinching the porous, pliant foil, digging at it with his fingernails, struggling doltfully to prise apart the invisible seam bisecting it into vertical body halves, making so many unseemly noises—grunts, moans, curses—that Bari often wound up laughing, albeit with a flushed face and visibly perky nipples. It wasn’t as bad as daily victimization by the Philistine Syndrome, but almost.
Things would have gone better if he’d just asked Bari over
after
struggling free of his Count Geiger duds. Then he could’ve met her at the door in a dressing gown. But that approach was so clinical it sabotaged the element of romance essential to a fulfilling erotic encounter. For spontaneity was a crucial part of the mix, and Xavier didn’t want to assume too much, on any given evening, about Bari’s desires. If she’d had an especially grueling day, for example, all she wanted was a shoulder to cling to, and he was more than happy to oblige. Meeting her at the door in his dressing gown would have been like placing a bowl of condoms on his coffee table or slapping an X-rated cassette into the VCR as soon as they finished dinner.
One evening, The Mick away taking an acoustic-guitar lesson in a neighborhood called Sinatro Heights, Bari showed up in a state of diffident rut. The Suit (as they both referred to it, subjecting its tyrannical traits to glum upper-case mockery) had thwarted them at least twice before. But this evening was different—Bari had brought two small packages, neither bigger than a man’s wallet, wrapped in silver, gold, and ebony foil. “Excuse me a sec,” she said, retreating to Mikhail’s room but reappearing, moments later, in a sexy Saint Torque costume, rented, as it turned out, from the gerbily Griff Sienko at SatyrFernalia.
Xavier, smiling, “You look—”
“Don’t say it. I know.”
“
Scrumptious
was the word I had in mind.”
“Beats the one that was surfacing through my vocabulary—it’s hard to be positive about the couturier’s design approach.”
Xavier nodded toward The Mick’s room. “So what’s in the other little box?”
“Later. If this” —lifting her arms, doing a quarter pirouette— “does anything for you now.”
“Oh, yeah.”
And, in fact, it helped to see his heart’s first lady clad in a costume as corny and kitsch-freighted as the Suit that, there in his living room, he speedily stripped to. It helped a
lot
. Xavier found a seam of tenderness in himself that he had not explored in a long time. Beside it, so to speak, he located a hidden seam in his Count Geiger costume that let him explore this tenderness with Bari at pleasurable length. Eventually, Bari dragged herself off to The Mick’s room only to show up again, revitalized, in the outfit of a modern Amazon known to UC-comic readers as Warwoman. To Xavier’s amazement, more hanky-panky ensued. His strength was renewed, tried, depleted, and renewed again. The mechanism of this renewal—minus the fumbling and frustration that the Suit ordinarily inflicted on him—seemed to be the synergistic effects spawned by two SatyrFernalia costumes interfacing in lubricious cahoots. So there was a way to sidestep at least one of The Suit’s major shortcomings, and, through this method, Xavier knew several welcome kinds of relief.
*
After these diversions, he Suited again and carried Bari a glass of pink-grapefruit drink. In the lotus position on his sofa, she sat sinuously brushing her hair. “We could be married at Christmas,” he said, handing her the glass. “The festiveness, the color, the . . . the anticipation.”
“Oh, yeah. Whose?”
“Mine,” Xavier said. He feared that if he didn’t put a band on her finger and an official state imprimatur on their relationship, she would break it off and turn to another. You could also escape from a marriage, of course, just as you could be faithless within it, but Bari was in many respects still an orthodox Suthren girl, and if he took her to the altar, he’d have her. Really have her.
“We’ve danced all over this topic.” Bari sipped her pink drink in the minimalist costume that the First Couturier had fashioned for her. “Not tonight too.”
“Christmas would give us plenty of time to plan.”
“Only if we substituted a Saint Torque or a Warwoman outfit for my wedding gown, lover.”
“I’d have no objection.”
“I bet you wouldn’t. Would you stand up in the Suit?”
“Well, I’d—”
“I’m assembling my line for the February couture in Paris. That’s occupying all”—glancing down at herself—“well, not quite
all
, of my energies at present, and if I agreed to marry you at Christmas, it wouldn’t be fair to you as my new husband to put you on hold for the following two months. I was lucky to get away tonight. Designing a new collection’s like laying out strategy for a global war. How many times must I explain this to you?”
“If you’d do it in person, every night would be fine.”
Bari set her glass down and drew the multicolored shawl draping the sofa back around her shoulders. She patted the sofa. “Sit down, Xave.” He sat. “Don’t doubt me, okay? I hate being doubted, and preemptively possessed, and jerked around by someone else’s insecurities. You should be more worried about how you and The Mick stand than about how you and I are doing. You and I are doing fine.”
“Is Mikhail the reason, I mean, is he the—”
“He’s got nothing to do with my determination to hold off a while. Is that what you’re trying to ask?”
“I guess it is.”
“What paranoid rot. Sure, I’d like to see you guys hitting it off like frat brothers, but that’s not a precondition of our marrying.”
Xavier stared at his glittery thighs. “Right now, Bari, we’re into mutual tolerance. He’s back at Ephebus, and although he’s still doing crappy, I don’t ride him as much and we can take breakfast together without throwing Pop Tarts at each other.”
“Commendable.”
“Know what’s helped?”
“His knowing you’re all he’s got Stateside. His protector and food source.”
“Maybe. What else?”
“Your rave for Smite Them Hip & Thigh.”
“Yeah, there’s that, I guess. What else?”
“Your expanded septum of appreciation.”
“And?”
“I don’t know, lover. What?”
“This Suit. He’s proud of himself for getting us to buy it. He’s proud that it’s helped me. But mostly, he’s proud that he has an uncle running around in aluminum-foil long johns in secret impersonation of a comic-book stalwart.”
“Well, sure,” said Bari, laughing. “Well, of course.”
