Shark Infested Custard (10 page)

       "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.

       "I'll get you one," I said. There was no beer at the bar, but I knew there would be beer in Don's refrigerator.

       "Stay here, Jannaire," Larry said. "I've got to make a phone call."

       "We'll be right back," I said.

       Larry and I entered the kitchen, and he jerked his head toward the hallway. "Let's go into Don's study for a minute."

       We entered the study and Larry turned on the desk lamp. "Did you smell her, Hank?" he said. "Driving here from Hojo's in the car I had to turn off the airconditioner and roll the goddamned windows down."

       "I'll take her off your hands, Larry," I volunteered casually.

       "How? I can't just ditch her. She's liable to report me to Electro-Date, and I've got three more dates coming. Unfortunately," he said bitterly.

       "No problem. You said you had to make a phone call. I'll just tell Jannaire for you that your boss sent you out on an emergency mission of some kind. You wait in here a couple of minutes, and I'll take her out to the golf course. That'll give you a chance to say 'Happy Birthday' to Don and bug out."

       "You don't have to do this for me, Hank. I got into it, and I..."

       "What the hell. You'd do the same for me."

       "I'm not so sure that I would. What is that smell, Hank?"

       "Woman, that's all, woman."

       "Did you see her fucking armpits? I've never seen a woman with unshaved armpits before, have you?"

       "No, but it kinda turns me on."

       "It turns me off! After I finish the three other dates, I'm going back to stewardae. The hell with this income tax dodge. I keep running into one goddamned fantasy after another."

       "Is Jannaire a Catholic?"

       "She must be. There isn't a Protestant in American who'd let hair grow under her arms."

       "Okay, Larry. Give me a couple of minutes," I said, "and I'll get you out of it."

       "Right. I'll just talk to Don a second, and split. It's a lousy party anyway, isn't it?"

       "They always are."

       I got two cans of beer out of the refrigerator, and rejoined Jannaire at the bar. Jotey, behind the bar, was pointing out Don and Clara to her with his long black forefinger.

       "Let's go out by the golf course to drink these," I said. "If people see us with beers, they'll all want one."

       I popped the tops and handed her a can as we walked toward the No. 8 green, and skirted the sand trap. The green was on a gentle berm of filled earth, and we sat on the grassy slope facing the lighted backyard. The row of candles along the border made the milling people around the pool resemble actors on a stage set, with the candles serving as footlights.

       "Where's Larry?" she said.

       "I don't know how to tell you this, Jannaire, but he said he simply couldn't stand you. So he left, and I promised to take you home."

       "I could tell he didn't like me," she said, "but you don't have to take me home. I can get a cab back to the Hojo's on Dixie."

       "Why Hojo's?"

       "That's where I left my car."

       "Larry's crazy," I said. "You're the most attractive woman here tonight. Perhaps you said something to irritate him. Larry's very sensitive, you know."

       "I don't know what it could be. I know he didn't believe me when I told him I didn't have any last name, but it's true. I had my name changed legally to Jannaire five years ago."

       "From what?"

       "That's what he asked. But that's the way things always go with me. Men either like me or they don't from the first moment we meet. And more men dislike me than like me. It's always been that way, ever since high school."

       "What do you do, Jannaire?"

       "About men, do you mean?"

       "No. I 'like'' you. We've already got that established. Work, I mean."

       "Many of the women here tonight would know—a lot of them, I think. I design clothes, pant suits, mostly, under the trade name of Jannaire. I also own the Cutique, on Miracle Mile in the Gables."

       "Cutique?"

       "Awful, isn't it? But they remember the name, women do, and they come back. I also own two apartment houses, and I'm a silent partner in a few other business ventures. I keep busy."

       "I don't understand this dating business, then. Why would a woman as attractive as you, and with some money besides—and a business—sign up with Electro-Date?"

       She laughed. "Does Larry tell you everything?"

       "No, but we're friends, and we live in the same building. And he did tell me about Electro-Date."

       "To tell you the truth, Mr. Norton..."

       "Hank, for Christ's sake. I'm not going to call you Miss Jannaire."

       "All right, Hank. That's an odd name, too, isn't it?"

       "Come on, back to the truth about the electronic dating."

       "I happen to own twenty percent of Electro-Date, and it isn't doing very well now, although it started out well enough. Miami is much too small for accurate matching, which is always halfassed at best, but there're too many dating services competing. Anyway, when someone really bitches, as Larry did after his first date, they call me. I study the application questionnaire and sometimes take the next date myself. I'm sure if Larry and I had had a chance to talk together, as you and I are doing now, I could've overcome his objections to me, whatever they are."

       "No," I laughed. "Not unless you shaved under your arms."

       "Fuck him, then! Do you want to blow a roach?" She opened her little gold mesh bag, and took out a stick. "Go ahead," I reached for my lighter, "but I never smoke pot. It doesn't do anything for me, and I've been brainwashed. I'm a detail man, and by the time we've finished our indoctrination course, we never touch anything in the drug line."

       "Mary Jane isn't a drug," she protested.

       "I know the arguments. And I can counter every one you bring up, too. But in my job, with drugs of every kind available to me, I leave them strictly alone. They scared us badly during training. I'm even nervous about taking an aspirin. And aspirin can be dangerous too. In some people, it burns holes through the stomach lining."

       I lit her cigarette. She inhaled deeply, held it in, and said through closed teeth, "What's a detail man?"

       "Drug pusher. I'm a pharmaceutical salesman for Lee Laboratories, and my territory includes Key West, Palm Beach, and all of Dade County. I'm supposed to see forty doctors a week and tell them about our products. I brief them, or 'detail'' one or more of our products, so they'll know how to use them."

       "There're a lot of drug companies, aren't there?"

       "Sure. And a lot of detail men, and a lot of doctors. But my job, especially for Lee Labs, is one of the best jobs in the world, if not the best. I work about five hours a week, when I work at all, and I make a decent living."

       "How can you call on forty doctors in five hours?"

       "You can't. I fake it, turning in my weekly report from the info in my files. Also I telephone from time to time—the doctors' secretaries—to make sure the doctor hasn't died on me since the last time I actually called on him. But I can usually make ten or fifteen personal calls in an afternoon when I want to. And if I set up a drugs display for one day in a hospital or medical building, that counts as forty calls for the week. I like my work, though, and I'm really a good salesman. I feel sorry for doctors, the poor overworked bastards, and I like to help them out."

       "Do they always let you in? Just like that?"

       "Most of them do. There are three kinds of doctors, you see. It's impossible for a doctor to read everything put out by the drug companies on every drug, but a few try. They all need a detail man to explain what a drug does, its contraindications, and so forth. So one doctor refuses to see detail men, and reads all of the literature, or tries to, himself. Another doctor never reads anything, but depends entirely on a detail man to brief him. The third kind doesn't read anything or see any detail men either. And if you happen to get this guy for a doctor, your chances for survival are pretty damned slim."

       "So they see you, then?"

       "Most of them, but you can't always overcome their prejudices or their ignorance. For example, I might ask a doctor, 'What do you know about migraine?' Half the time, he'll tell me that migraine headaches are psychosomatic, and that you can't do anything for them. He doesn't want to listen, you see. His mind is made up. ln a case like that, you say, 'Okay,' and get onto something else. But when you're lucky, you'll run into an intelligent doctor, and he'll say, 'I don't know a damned thing about migraine. I get four or five cases a week, and I can't do anything for them.'

       "So then you tell him. It so happens that we've got a product that reduces or even stops migraine headaches. What happens, you see, is that tension, or something, nobody knows what it is exactly, causes the blood veins in your temples to constrict. Now this isn't migraine, not yet. But these veins can't stay constricted too long because you've got to get blood to your head. What happens, pressure builds, and the man can feel his migraine coming on. Then, all of a sudden, the tight veins open up and a big surge of blood gushes through these open vessels, and there's your migraine headache. What our product does is keep the veins closed. They open eventually, but gradually, slowly. Without the sudden surge of released blood, the headache is either minimized or it doesn't come."

       "How did you learn all that?"

       "Well, in this case, we had a two-day conference in Atlanta, with all of the detail men from Lee Labs in the Southeast present. We had a doctor who has spent his life studying migraine. He briefed us, and our own company research men who finally developed the drug briefed us. We had two films, and then some Q. and A. periods. Then we all got drunk, got laid, and flew back to our own territories. But the thing is, a doctor who came out of medical school ten years ago, let's say, was told that you couldn't do anything about migraine. 'It's psychological,' they told him. So he still believes it, and he won't listen to you. And if he doesn't read anything, and he won't listen to you, if a patient has a migraine and goes to him, he'll tell him that the headache's all in the mind. It's a shame really, because such people can be helped by our drug."

       "I've never had a migraine."

       "They're pretty bad. They can last for hours, or even for days, sometimes. You're nauseated, and you lie flat on your back in a dark room with a wet towel over your eyes. It'll go away, eventually, but when a person gets a warning it's coming—you know, the tightening of the temples and so on—he has time to take our product and prevent the damned thing—or at least to reduce the force of it."

       "Here," she said, passing me the stick, "take a drag. Sharing is part of the high, you know."

       To please her, I took a short toke and returned the butt.

       There was a happy shout, and I watched the guests gathering near the bar. It was time for Don to open his presents.

       I rarely talked about my work, and not always truthfully when I did talk about it. But I had opened up to Jannaire, and probably bored the hell out of her. She had seemed interested, however, and the subject was interesting—at least to me. I wanted her to like me. She was a mature woman, at least thirty, I figured, and I couldn't talk to her about inconsequential matters the way I did with younger women. I also realized, sitting there, that I hadn't dated or slept with a woman older than twenty-five since I came to Miami. I wanted to kiss Jannaire. In fact, I wanted to rape her, right there on the No. 8 green, and yet I was reluctant to put my arm around her, afraid that I would be premature. Talking with Jannaire gave me an entirely different way of looking at a female.

       "Do you want to watch Don open his presents?" I said.

       "Not particularly. I should go, I think. I haven't even met the host or hostess..."

       "This isn't a good time to meet them, either. Suppose we go somewhere and talk? To my apartment, perhaps?"

       She laughed. "Apparently you like me better than Larry did."

       "I'll just say 'so long' to Don, and wish him a happy birthday. Do you really want to meet him?"

       "No, not in the middle of the big production number."

       It was a production number. A circle of chattering bodies surrounded Don and the card table loaded with presents. Don sat in a chair beside the table, while his daughter, glorying in being the center of attention, opened the presents, one at a time, and handed them to him for inspection. Don would read the card aloud, and the guests laughed or applauded his loot. Clara, with a pencil between her teeth like a horse's bit, held a yellow legal pad. She would write the donor's name down, make a cryptic note of the present, and later on she would write nice letters of thanks, which Don would sign as his own. It was a grim business.

       I stepped up to Don, put a hand on his shoulder. "Happy birthday, Don," I said in an undertone. "I'm splitting."

       "What the hell is this?" He said unhappily. "Eddie is in Chicago, Larry just left, and now you—my best friends, for Christ's sake!"

       I grinned. "Look what I'm leaving with—no, don't look now, and you'll understand."

       I nodded politely to Clara, and ran after Jannaire, who was already at the end of the patio and opening the gate in the Cyclone fence that led to the street.