Count Geiger's Blues (16 page)

31
A Rival?

Two nights later—
luckily, the weekend when he could send his staff members out on assignment—Xavier caught a cab to the riverside neighborhood where Bari had her atelier. In his Sam Spade trench coat, he stalked up and down the tree-lined avenue in front of it. (The trees stood ribby and frail beside the greasy water, inmates of winter’s concentration camp.) His breath was visible, each puff a dialogue balloon in a Unique Continuum comic featuring the DeeJay, or the Decimator, or, that stalwart of stalwarts, Count Geiger. In this godawful weather, Xavier was glad for his pseudo-mesh long johns, but not for their skintight reminder of his unshakable syndrome.

Bari seemed to be avoiding him. Whenever he telephoned, an answering machine intercepted his call. A voice—
not
Bari’s—asked that he leave a message at the sound of the bleeping beep. The insecurity of his teenage quasi-nerdhood rising from his past like a fumigatory cloud, he feared that she’d grown bored with him, that in Tokyo, Milan, or London she had succumbed to the big-shouldered charm of some jet-setting moneybags, the sort of hunk she’d belonged with from the get-go, the incongruity of her fling with a bush-league newspaper critic finally striking even her as, well, incongruous.

Across the avenue from the drawbridge into her fashion factory, Xavier saw a light in a half-shuttered second-story window. At one o’clock on Sunday morning, she was still at it, or else finally relaxing after a long day sketching, cutting cloth, draping dummies, and starting over when the results proved cockeyed or clichéd. An industrious gal, this illustrious Bari person. The door beyond the drawbridge, a broad mahogany plank screened by a portcullis, boomed as if taking a jolt from a battering ram. The portcullis ratcheted up, the door groaned open, and a man in a pea jacket left the atelier to cross the bridge linking the old mill to the barren winter street: a young, virile-looking guy with shoulder-length hair, a despicable December tan, and blue eyes sparkling like chiseled diamonds.

My cuckolder, thought Xavier. Probably a millionaire playboy from Aruba, Majorca, or Saint-Tropez. In short, a jerk.

Xavier accosted the jerk as he came clomping heelwise down this side of the bridge. The man’s eyes overflowed with panic, his chin tick-tocked in search of a beat cop or a taxicab, and his gloved hands fisted at his chest in a reflex that may’ve been more face-saving than menacing.

“Who the hell are you?” Xavier huffed. “And what’re you doing here?”

The guy started stammering, hurling saliva from his lip corners like Sylvester the Cat: “St-st-st-stop. Don’t s-s-sock me.” He grabbed the lapels of his own pea jacket and pulled it open with the anxious disdain of a flasher. What Xavier saw then was a costume, the mottled frost-and-charcoal bodyshirt of the Snow Leopard, a UC stalwart. Well, that was a hot meringue in the kisser. Had Bari come to such a pass that she’d developed a fetish for guys gussied up in superhero drag? (Holy roentgens.)

“Give me a good reason not to—
shove you into the river
,” Xavier improvised.

“I’m a r-r-registered tr-trademark of Uncommon C-C-Comics,” said his leotarded rival. “You m-m-might get s-sued.”

Then the jerk in Snow Leopard garb struck Xavier in the chest and galumped off at a Quasimodo-ish clip bewilderingly out of synch with his svelte physique. Xavier picked himself off the sidewalk, found a grease stain on his trench coat, and, cursing, seized a handful of gravel from the planter beside the drawbridge. Because the seven staffers living downstairs made crossing that bridge and rattling her portcullis an unhappy option (someone other than Bari would intercept and deflect him), Xavier stepped back and hurled his gravel at the second-story window. He was scooping up another round when someone came to the window and, seeing him, struggled to lift the sash. (Ah, Bari herself!) She raised it high enough to ask him who the holy hell he was and why he’d rained pebbles on her window.

“Bari,” Xavier pleaded.

“
Xave?
God, lover, haven’t you got the feeble motherwit you were born with?”

The balcony business from
Romeo and Juliet
or
Cyrano
, achingly bittersweet. But when Xavier only stood there mute, Bari vanished and showed up a moment later at the downstairs entrance. Then she led him into the meat-locker-cold foyer as if he were a foundling in need of adoption.

“Who was that guy? What was he doing here?”

“Hold your ponies. Come upstairs.”

The foyer had an elevator, a cage with a long mirror, two dented metal stools, and an old cherrywood hat-tree on which various off-the-wall accessories hung—hats, gloves, scarves. As the cage creaked upward, Bari slipped a sheepskin vest from the hat-tree over a jumpsuit in which Xavier knew she often worked. She wasn’t, thank God, in a French peignoir or a leather teddy with revelatory cutouts.

“His name’s Howard, Xave. Howie Littleton. He’s both a model and a couturier. We were working.”

Bari’s studio, when they entered it, floored Xavier. He almost staggered back from the sight of her in-progress designs—surrealistically airy skirts, Technicolor blouses, decal-covered leggings, copper-lamé capes, flocked jerseys—which Bari and her assistants had placed about the studio on wire armatures, or hung like parachutes from the ceiling, or fanned out against the umber bricks like street-rad tapestries. But there was more happening here than hue and dye, fabric and stitchery. Xavier recognized the clothes—or at least the style that had dictated their patterns and color schemes—as a homage to the garish costumes of the characters in the Unique Continuum of Uncommon Comics: gangsters and palookas, stalwarts and sidekicks, baby-faced kids and scar-faced psychos.

“My spring line,” Bari said. “The motif is—”

“—Nick City camp. It’s lifted, wholly secondhand. Bari’s of Salonika will have to change its name to . . . to Bari’s of SatyrFernalia.”

“Hold on, Thaxton.”

“You did a deal with the UC child abusers. You bought a franchise. UC’s going to make as much money from this as you are . . . maybe more.”

“Settle down. If the line sells, everyone will do okay. What’s wrong with that?”

“Gak.”

“Gak yourself. In fact, I wish you would. You’ve no right to be jealous of Howie or scornful of our work. There’s real avant-garde creativity on display here, and the fact that it’s also colorful
fun
is not an excuse to turn blue and badmouth us.”

Xavier settled down. He took off his coat, hung it over a torso frame already sporting an outfit inspired by Saint Torque’s sexy getup, and wandered aimlessly about the studio looking at the clothes patterned on the costumes of other UC stalwarts. He felt as he had in the clothing bay of SatyrFernalia, like a character in an animated cartoon. A light fixture could have fallen from the ceiling, compressing his body to the size of a Campbell’s soup can, and he would have waddled about the room, balancing on first one side of his bottom rim and then the other, coldly sizing up the work of the woman with whom his uncompacted, real-life self was in major-league love.

What a drag. What a kick. What a testament to the multi-faceted weirdness of life.

*

“A pox on Howie.” Xavier sat down cross-legged on the mound of cushions strewn over the floor of Bari’s entertainment nook. “A pestilential pox.”

Bari, her hands inside her vest, did not sit. “It was our visit to SatyrFernalia that inspired all this. Plus Mikhail’s hots for UC-oriented designs. You might be interested to know, Thaxton, that—”

“Call me Xave. Or”—plaintively—“lover.”

“—it was Howard Littleton, the gentleman you’re poxing, who designed the Count Geiger costume saving your ass from, well, whatever.”

“It may not be saving it from anything.” He filled Bari in on recent events, including his bad time at the Parataj, a carnival of pus, upchuck, and embarrassment.

“Oh, Xave, I’m sorry.”

Better.
Better
. He argued that he was doomed, that he’d missed her the way the castrated Abelard had pined for Heloise, that his life was almost meaningless. His syndrome and her refusal to marry him had deprived it of all joy. She brought up his duty to The Mick, tweaked him for surrendering so easily, pointed out that the Suit had given him a magical reprieve. Its potency might still not be exhausted, and, even if it were, some as-yet-undiscovered talisman might give him permanent immunity.

“Like what?” Xavier wondered.

Bari sat on the cushion beside him, hooked a finger over his collar, and rubbed his stalwartly BVDs. “Who knows? A medicinal nape patch, maybe. A daily cup of Postum. A weekly handjob from a lady using a first baseman’s mitt.”

“I’m doomed.”

“Then I’d be an
idiot
to marry you.”

“I have insurance, bought before my syndrome ever developed. Bari, you’re my primary beneficiary.”

“What about The Mick?”

“A contingency recipient. Lydia and Phil will take care of him.”

“I don’t covet or need your insurance. And I’m not about to marry a man in chain-mail skivvies who whines about being
doomed
. Tell me something
good
about having this weird-ass ailment.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not. Give me upbeat. Give me positive.”

“Well, I may not be the only man around with this weird-ass ailment.” He told Bari about Wilbon T. Stickney, who couldn’t listen to Jerry Clower albums anymore, or look at his favorite truckstop artwork, without getting a bellyache or a thumb wart. Stickney, to ease the symptoms of his lower-case philistine syndrome, read restroom graffiti and watched boxing matches on TV. That didn’t strike Xavier as an upbeat gloss on his ailment, but at least it proved he wasn’t the oddest duck on the planet.

“Was Stickney exposed to radioactivity too? He must’ve been.” Bari thought. “I guess knowing you’re not alone could help you come to terms with your problem.”

“I don’t want to ‘come to terms with my problem.’ I want to be cured of it.”

“Join a support group,” Bari said. “
‘All PS sufferers: Enlist in group-therapy sessions designed to calm fears and bolster self-image.’
” She framed this announcement with her hands, pantomimed rolling it onto a billboard.

“A support group of two? Me and ol’ Wilbon T. Stickney? Now,
that’s
uplifting.”

“There could be others. A public announcement would draw them into the open.”

“And if there aren’t any more, maybe ol’ Wilbon T. and I could bribe a few lepers or AIDS patients to sit in with us.”

“Hold the simpering sarcasms, okay?”

“Most folks will think PS stands for poke salad. Ol’ Wilbon T. and I will end up dialoguing, if it’s even possible, with salad-gas snorters.”

“Forget I said anything. Drown in self-pity.”

Xavier said, “You
like
this Howie Littleton, a.k.a. the Snow Leopard, character?”

*

Bari rose, switched on CNN, and returned to the cushions next to Xavier’s as if he were a stranger on an EleRail platform and there was nowhere else to sit. She hadn’t thrown him out, but she refused to talk unless he identified his offense and hurried to clean it up. Living with this woman seemed an unlikely goal, marriage as inconceivable as persuading a mullah to take communion.

The news sequenced past in a montage of video clips and talking heads. Another unbelievable week:

Without renouncing his office, the Pope had married a divorced Irish countess with six children. In a display of ecumenical bonhomie, Jimmy Swaggart, Makarios IV, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and an unnamed Catholic chaplain from the U.S. Sixth Fleet had officiated at the nuptials.

Meanwhile, Arizona had seceded from the Union, declaring itself a satrapy of the United Arab Emirates, and inviting qualified widows and orphans from Abu Dhabi to homestead parcels of the Papago Indian Reservation west of Tucson. This secession owed something to the black-market price of kachina dolls and something to the intention of the Phoenix Suns to play a yearly home-and-away series with the Riyadh Sheiks.

A man in North Carolina had invented a lighter whose flame burned downward so that pipe smokers could light up without singeing their eyebrows or straining on the insuck. At the National Institute of Science, an irate spokesperson claimed that such an invention defied the laws of physics.

According to archeologists in Thule, Greenland, Santa Claus had been “a real human being,” probably an altruistic Viking with a taste for metheglin (i.e., mead) and caribou. The archeologists had the bog-embalmed corpse, complete with desiccated organs, both internal and external, to support this claim. One of the body’s discoverers held up for the camera the rotted scraps of a cardboardy red suit.

Alternative President J. Danforth Quayle had officially opened his Alternative Republican White House in South Bend, Indiana, near the University of Notre Dame. He was now screening applicants for speech therapist, first press secretary, spin-control team, second press secretary, and an articulate ophthalmologist to swear that his famous deer-in-the-high-beams gaze was actually a steely Stare of Command. And a Hollywood producer had just signed Quayle to play Robert Redford’s part in a remake of
The Candidate
. To minimize costly retakes, Quayle would lip-synch Redford’s dialogue from the original 1972 soundtrack.

Xavier glanced over at Bari. She aimed her chin like a rifle at every talking head. Each of CNN’s reports seemed to have her transfixed.

“This just in,” said a female reader. “A Placer County farmer has raised a six-legged horse. Dubbed Cockroach, it was recently sold to Hallelujah Stables in Raceland, Tennessee.
‘I know Cockroach’s going to win his new owner money,’
Deke Hazelton told us.
‘He scuttles rather than runs, but whatever you call it, he does it fast.’
Hazleton thinks his farm’s proximity to Plant VanMeter may have had something to do with his horse’s six-leggedness and fears local pregnant women may also deliver
‘monsters.’
Con-Tri officials deny that plant emissions caused Cockroach’s abnormality. Radiation levels around the facility, they argue, are well within NRC regulations.”