Small World (12 page)

Roger tried to smile bravely and could only grimace.

She blew more smoke at him and then tossed a box of butts and her lighter to him. He scrabbled for them gratefully, careful to clutch the sheets with one hand, for the sake of modesty, and moving gingerly, so as not to have a stroke.

‘Stupid thing to do,’ she told him. He looked up, startled, from trying to make the lighter flame with fingers made of Play-doh. 'All that boozing. Spoils things, every time, doesn’t it?’

He sucked on the cigarette, relieved. She was offering him a screen for his injured pride. He’d take it as quickly as he took her cigarettes.

Dolly moved easily to scoop up something by her chair. He glanced up from the solace of his cigarette, his eye caught by the rising shadow as she lifted it. The black bird in his head cracked his skull and exploded outward. For a second, Roger could see nothing at all, nothing but the bolt of black lightning just behind his eyes. Then his vision cleared.

She sat there calmly with the minimizer, in its leather case, in her lap, the shoulder strap twisted in one hand. Her eyes met his. It was like looking at a big endless snake as thick as your thigh that was going to eat you, no matter how fast you moved. Then she smiled, like the angel she looked like, and tossed it ever so gently onto the bed at his feet. He couldn’t move to claim it. He was all light and empty as a bird's nest. The slightest movement would knock him out of the tree.

It was she who moved first. Dolly dropped her cigarette into an ashtray. It struck him that she must carry them in her pockets. There was always an ashtray there when she needed one. She stood up and stretched, as elegantly as a pedigreed cat. Her silky pajamas, the color of champagne, shook and rippled like leaves in moonlight.

She crawled onto the bed from the foot. The pajamas gaped in front. Roger could see her small breasts trembling in the silky shadows. The first wave of excitement rose in his belly, washing away the residual ill feeling, as if it were debris on a beach.

She sat cross-legged next to him. He could smell her fragrance and was, somehow and absurdly, touched. A woman smell. She drew fingertips over his mouth. At once he tasted the sourness of his saliva, the nasty nicotine flavor of his teeth and tongue. She began to hum very softly.

Roger couldn’t move. She moved for him, arranging them as it pleased her. He looked up at her, her throat arched, her chin high, as if she were flying and he was her broom. He felt her gathering him, taking him with her. He forgot, again, the device that had brought them together into this new world, tangled in the sheets at his feet.

‘I want to minimize something,’ she said.

‘Ummm?’

She blew cigarette smoke into his face. He waved it away, refusing to open his eyes.

‘I want to,’ she repeated.

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled.

She poked him in the armpit. It really hurt. He flinched and opened one eye in protest.

‘Come on.’ Dolly was out of bed, dropping the pajama top on top of the bottoms she had flung to the floor earlier, when she wanted something else.

He closed his eyes again.

‘No,’ she cried, and slapped his bottom flat-handed. It made a sloppy sound that demoralized him immediately.

It was evident she wanted his attention. He rolled over, trying not to grunt with the effort.

‘What time is it?' he asked.

‘Just before noon.’

He thought a moment. ‘Can’t,’ he decided, and flopped back onto the pillows. From that vantage he could watch Dolly hauling on a pair of jeans. Roger admired them. They were cut like a second skin, and probably cost more than his mother’s best coat.

She planted her bare feet on the floor and her hands on her jeaned hips. If she was unaware that she was blouseless. Roger was not.

‘Why not?’ she demanded.

‘Too many people around,’ he informed her. ‘Unless you want to shrink something you own, or want to buy. If you’re going to steal it, the first thing is to do it when there’s next to nobody around. Unless you want to get caught.’

She sat down unhappily and crossed her arms. ‘You could be right.’

‘I’m not in any kind of shape for it, anyway,’ he complained, feeling righteous.

You’re not in any kind of shape for anything,’ Dolly snorted.

Roger was effectively deflated. She was right, but still, it was unkind. He heaved over onto his belly, the better to hide it, and remembered that he’d left his rear exposed. In a back-handed scramble to cover all his faults at once, he missed Dolly putting on a brassiere and shirt.

Still, she wasn’t hard to take with her clothes on, either. He couldn’t complain about the shape she was in. Her body was spare, not an ounce of extra flesh, and what there was, was tight and smooth. It didn’t seem quite normal for a woman her age to look that good naked. Roger felt his ignorance of women. He suspected that she cheated. There were operations if you were rich enough, he knew. And then he felt guilty and rather slimy. She probably just worked like hell at it.

She didn’t look like a nearly fifty-year-old woman who had been drinking and carousing the previous night. Well, maybe a little. Delicate blue veins on her eyelids, faint lines around her eyes and mouth, suggested a touch of age and dissipation. Roger liked them fine. There was something piquant about them, a suggestion of experience.

'I still want to shrink something,’ she announced. She was plying a silver-backed hairbrush vigorously through her hair. The spray of silver hair, the rise and fall of her shirted breasts with the swing of her arm, stirred pleasant sensations in Roger’s groin.

‘Well,’ Roger decided to keep her talking and brushing if he could, ‘tell me about it.’

So she did.

The Statue of Liberty stands in the harbor, afflicted with what appears to be a bad case of psoriasis. Every other city landmark (the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the World Trade Towers, and numerous others) has been mauled by the strongly acid rains of recent weeks. Business for dermatologists, the sale of acne medicines, rain coats, umbrellas, hats, car refinishers, and hair stylists is up. Jogging and dog-walking is down, and the cabbies have a new and violent complaint. Con Ed’s new coal-fired generators in New Jersey are blamed for what has so far been a mostly localized pollution, but neighboring states are waiting nervously for the wind to shift.

With no hope held out for its recovery, the bizarre disappearance of the Central Park Carousel was one more embarrassment to an already red-faced city administration. Small face was recovered when a fund established to accept donations from the public to replace the eighty-five-year-old landmark amusement was quickly exposed as the enterprising if fraudulent venture of a Queens garbage man and his brother-in-law, a city bus driver. It seemed, at week’s end, unlikely that the facts in the mystery would ever be discovered, but the city-dwellers joked that the Carousel was just one more victim of the acid rain. . . .

5.11.80    —
VIPerpetrations, VIP

It
was
drizzling nicely. Roger relaxed in his seat and reached out to squeeze Dolly’s hand.

‘What do you think?’ he asked, craning his neck to peek out the top of the windshield at a low ceiling of dirty clouds above them.

‘That nobody in their right mind is in the Park,’ she answered triumphantly. ‘Or out of doors.’ She withdrew her hand quickly to return it to the steering wheel.

‘Even the muggers,’ Roger grinned.

Dolly’s silver Mercedes-Benz crawled down Central Park South. It shared the road with a few cruising taxis. Another few cabs were parked and idling—despite the new emergency air-pollution regulations—near hotel awnings. It was too early for the street vendors or the horse-drawn carriages, which would not come out today anyway if it did not clear, for there was no really effective protection for the horses and their harnesses. The only pedestrians were much too interested in getting where they were going to get out of the rain to notice passing vehicles.

The target was not very far into the Park from this end. That was just as well, given the drizzle. And Roger was not as convinced as he had tried to sound that the Park wildlife was in fact seeking shelter from the evil elements.

Dolly parked around the corner on Central Park West, moaning when she glanced at the hood of the car, which had developed an unhealthy looking sheen of bubbles and smelled faintly of dead rats. She and Roger had covered all of their vulnerable flesh that they could, and shared an umbrella, walking quickly as if they too would rather be inside, into the Park. Roger carried the minimizer, in its case, slung over his chest, as well as an empty duffel bag.

At the top of a rise they came to a halt, looking down on an unglamorous, oddly shaped building.

‘Shit,’ Dolly muttered. ‘I forgot about the doors.’

Roger shrugged. ‘No problem.’

He unlimbered the camera case. Dolly watched him carefully. Now and again she glanced around, loolcing for unexpected company. A large black dog bounded by them, trailing a frayed leash. No baying owner pursued him. The dog squatted in the patchy grass and then was off again, his spirits as undampened by the foul weather as his unkempt rusty fur was.

The minimizer looked like no camera that Dolly had ever seen, but it did sport something that looked like a lens. It occurred to her that for all she knew cameras, without their skins of plastic* chrome, and leather, might look exactly like the device in Roger’s busy fingers. She had watched Lucy use a Polaroid often enough, taking pictures of dollhouses and dollhouse furniture at shows, taking pictures at home of Laurie and Zach, and it might as well have been magic to her, the way it spit out squares of paper that mysteriously showed images within seconds. Dolly was watching Roger when he brought the device to his right eye, blinking into an aperture that looked like a piece of a L’eggs container. He depressed an obscure button. She whirled around to see the target building.

Where it had been, the ground was a crude naked octagon bordered by the pavement.
It
was still there, at the center of the octagon, about the size of the duffel bag Roger had deposited on the path. She bolted down the path, but came to a sudden stop at the edge of the octagon. Roger, the duffel bumping against one

thigh, the minimizer in its leather disguise thumping on his chest, scampered down the rise after her. He went without hesitation to the center point.

He bent to pick it up but she broke her freeze, lunged toward it, and snatched it up. It took both hands for it was a couple of feet in diameter and still heavy. Her breathing was shaky and excited. She looked straight at Roger for a brief triumphant second. His heartbeat jigged and jogged. She was so beautiful, with her fair hair capturing the feeble light, her cheeks ablaze with excitement and exertion. He couldn't mind her snatching it up like a greedy kid.

Between the two of them, they crammed it into the duffel bag, which was severely strained. Dolly carried the umbrella while Roger toted the duffel bag back to the car. Once in the car, on the way back to Dolly’s apartment, Roger found himself idly patting the minimizer, as if it were an old pet.

The city was coming awake. There was more traffic in the streets, more early pedestrians. A couple of joggers, a few dogwalkers, were clearly headed for the Park. Dolly and Roger passed them by, oblivious. Roger was thinking of breakfast, Dolly of getting home.

The Park kept its silence. The black dog drank sour water from a dead pond. Bits of paper rolled fitfully and aimlessly at the urging of an occasional gust of wind. The drizzle glossed the rocky outcroppings, the pavement, the serpentine drive.

A sign near the Central Park South entrance pointed forlornly into the Park.
Carousel
it said. A few yards further on, another signpost stood high above the heads of potential passersby. It pointed down on the forking of the path to
Carousel.
Up the gentle rise of the roadway and the roof would be visible, an eightsided roof, damp with light rain.
Carousel
the signs directed hopefully.
Carousel.

The black dog, doubling back, trotted cheerfully over the exposed ground to the middle of the octagon. He paused to sniff the very center. Then he whined, as if spoken to harshly, and trotted away. No Carousel there, for sure.

It wasn’t precisely tiny, sitting there on the glass coffee table. Twenty inches high, twenty-five or so in diameter. Roger tapped the doors, bays really, lightly in turn. He studied the cupolaed roof. Dolly paced around him, making him nervous as an ungrounded wire. He decided to take off the roof. It was a simple matter with a chisel dug in between the roof and walls, used as a lever to rip the sucker off. It came unevenly, in chunks, but it came.

Now it was possible for Roger to look down into the Carousel. A central drumlike structure that housed the machinery was revealed to him like the contents of a can of tuna fish. The dark forms of the Carousel were frozen in motion on the round green table that formed their endless pathway.

He set about removing the side walls, and then, with utmost care, the concrete floor. It was nearly noon before the carousel stood free of its housing, and Roger’s stomach was in a state of violent revolt. Dolly at least had stopped twitching and, with a cigarette clenched between her teeth, cleared away the debris into shopping bags. And she was mercifully quiet, except for a propensity to hum. Roger could imagine his mother, in the course of an operation like this one, chipping away at his brain with her chisel of a tongue, while he tried to work.