Small World (16 page)

When he looked up, she had turned back to him. There was barely controlled panic in her eyes. Moving to him quickly, she pushed her small iron body into him. He clutched the minimizer a little tighter and pulled away from her.

‘Roger,’ she pleaded, ‘please.’

He shook his head. ‘I'm broke,’ he blurted. ‘I can’t stay anymore. I’m going home. Cutting my losses.’

‘No,’ she said. Then she laughed lightly. ‘Silly boy, why didn’t you say so? I’m so absent-minded about money, you know. I never thought of it.’ She reached for her handbag jerkily.

Roger stopped. He knew better. She thought about money all the time. He hadn’t lived with her as long as he had and not noticed that. He had an ugly suspicion that she was as slim as she was because she didn’t like paying for a decent menu. He’d leave as soon as he had the satisfaction of her begging him to stay. The minimizer hung heavy on his chest. He felt his heart beating against it.

She was coming to him now with a wad of cash in each manicured hand. Stuffing the money in his pockets.

•There, darling,’ she murmured, ‘I’ll see that you have what you need. Everything.’

Her hair tickled Roger’s face with its silky tendrils. Her hands, emptied of the money, slipped around him, hugging him. Roger closed his eyes, breathing in her perfume.

Oh, Ma,’ he muttered.

‘What?’ Dorothy looked up at him.

‘Oh, nothing.’

She ran a hand through his kinky hair. ‘Listen, darling. I have been a
bitch.
I haven’t thought about you at all. I want to make it up to you.’

Roger nodded, numbly. He understood, just then, exactly how flies felt as they dropped into the spider’s web. He wanted the bait, could almost taste it, and his appetite was not diminished, no, it was excited by the vision of the spider at the center of the web. Even the sticky stuff had its own electric feel.

‘What do you want?’ she whispered.

He heard it.
Do what you want.

Clearing his throat, he said, ‘I saw this statue today.’

She was unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Yes.’

'It was this god, or something. The sea god.’

‘Neptune,’ Dolly supplied the name.

‘Yeah. With mermaids sort of all wrapped around him.’

She had stopped her caressing and rubbing and unbuttoning. She just looked at him.

'Would you mind,’ he stammered, ‘ah, pretending to be a mermaid?’

Dolly thought about it, decided quickly. ‘Of course not, darling. It’s sort of cute. Tell me, just what do mermaids do?’ 'Well,’ explained Roger, putting the minimizer back in the drawer and hoping she wouldn’t notice how much he was sweating, ‘I imagine . . . ’

‘What?’ she encouraged him.

‘I think we’d better fill a bathtub first,’ he decided. ‘Then I can show you.’

Roger thought she was asleep. Since he wasn’t the least bit sleepy himself, he slipped out of bed and into the living room of the suite. Flicking on the television, he watched the tail end of a movie. He waited patiently through what seemed like an hour of commercials and then the machine music of the late-night news came on. He slid out of the chair he was sitting in to a belly-down position on the pile carpeting. Settling his face in his hands, supported by his elbows, he prepared to worship.

She looked wonderful, as great as in the
VIP
feature. Her make-up was fairly heavy, her hair done a little more elaborately. She was wearing a V-neck sweater, reminiscent of the fifties. Those incredible boobs did amazing things under the fine soft weave of the wool. The color on the hotel TV wasn’t just right, and Roger didn’t have the energy to fix it, but he could tell the sweater was supposed to be a deep rich red, the same as the gloss on her full lips.

He wondered idly if Dolly would ever consent to pretend she was Leyna Shaw. She might be offended if he asked her to be a real person.

Dolly must not have been sleeping as heavily as he thought for Leyna had barely gotten through the economic news, all bad, when she appeared, shrouded in her white satin robe, and took his chair. She said nothing, only watched and listened.

Roger was surprised when after a few minutes he felt her cold foot jabbing his naked bottom.

‘Turn that crotch off and come back to bed. I want to sleep.’

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. He scrambled up and punched the on/off button on the TV. ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘So jerk off,’ Dolly said rudely.

Roger grinned. ‘I could, if I could watch Leyna Shaw while I was doing it.’

She didn’t seem to think that was very funny. She slammed into the bedroom.

‘Hey,’ Roger said, following her, ‘I was just joking.’

‘I’d appreciate it,’ she informed him coldly, ‘if you didn’t mention that bitch in my presence again.’

‘Is she your enemy, or something?’ Roger was genuinely curious. How could anyone really hate a woman that beautiful?

‘Yes, that’s exactly what she is. She’d like to make a joke out of me, that’s what.’ ‘Well, I’m sorry.’

There was a long silence in which they both tossed and turned.

‘Roger.’ Dolly probed with her fingers into his armpit, to see if he was still awake. ‘You’d better know this, now.’

‘What?’ he asked, finally sleepy.

‘I have a lot of enemies. There are always people who hate anyone who has something they haven’t got. Money, power, physical prowess, good looks, the right family. You know?’

‘Sure.’ Roger understood that rap. His mother hadn’t raised any fools. It was a rough old world.

‘So there are people who hate me, even though I haven’t done anything to them.’

Roger made sympathetic murmurings.

‘She’s one of them.’

•Who?’

‘Leyna Goddamn Shaw!’ she exclaimed.

‘Oh.’

‘You’re a darling, Roger,’ Dolly went on, ‘but you have to start paying attention. You’re like a kid. You only think about what you want to think about. You have to start using that wonderful brain for day-to-day living.’

‘Ummm,’ Roger agreed. He was slipping away.

Dolly sighed, sat up, and reached for her cigarettes.

What a fuck of a day. At least she had the Doll’s White House rack. Her hand shook, holding her lighter, and she had to steady it with the other. She must be experiencing something like the post-Christmas let-down. Wanting a thing so badly and then, once having it, it wasn’t quite enough.

Or maybe it was just postcoital blues. She studied the dark bulk
:f
Roger rolled up in the sheets. She’d had to be drunk to do it the first time. He was such a nebbish, utterly classless. She’d heard of women who liked to screw their chauffeurs and gardeners, but it had never had any charm for her. They must, she thought, have been bloody bored with the alternatives, their husbands and their friends’ husbands.

Still and all, she must have intuited something about him recause there was something special there. Inexperience, which was a little startling in this day and age, and a natural wild talent. Aided and abetted by the same plunging desire for knowledge that made him a crackerjack, if slightly mad, scientist.

Nick cast Roger in a shadow today. But she could testify, couldn’t she, that when it came time to turn down the sheets, she’d take Roger. Nick was a few years back, but she hadn’t forgotten.

He had his basic carnal acts down cold but there was no real feeling, except for the chilling sensation that he was holding back because he didn’t really care. He might have been feeding his cats. Roger, now, didn’t know the meaning of holding back.

An ash drifted onto the bare skin of her torso. She brushed it away languidly, not minding the secondary prick of fire. Goddamn, life was complicated. And always changing. Roger had reminded her what men were good for after she had given up on them; he had brought a dead part of her back to life again. All she really wanted now was the dollhouse and the minimizer. And Roger. Like all men, he would become boring quickly enough. She never doubted that. But she knew she would get along just fine when that happened. The certainty of it added the spice of perversity. She would have her fun, however long it lasted.

The city fell away behind them rather quickly. It was always a surprise to Dolly to realize how small Washington really was. They drove the interstate highway through the suburbs and patches of undeveloped countryside. For the most part, the traffic was bound the other way and they made excellent time.

Roger showed Dolly the model of the Washington Monument with the pencil sharpener in the base that he had purchased for his mother. She spared a distasteful glance from the road.

‘I could have shrunk the real thing,’ Roger boasted like a small boy.

‘Why didn’t you?’ Dolly asked. She thought to herself that his mother might as well have the original ugly as a copy.

‘Too many tourists.’

‘Excuses, excuses. So shrink them.’

‘Jesus,’ Roger said, ‘I think we’d get stomped on good. It’s a little obvious, you know.’

‘No, darling,’ Dolly retorted, ‘we could stomp on the tourists, then.’ She laughed.

‘Be messy,’ Roger observed, to stay in the spirit of the conversation. The idea wasn’t really very appealing to him.

Dolly negotiated an intersection. ‘Really, we ought to zap a little souvenir while we’re in town.’

‘What did you have in mind?’ Roger was prepared to be reasonable, although another adventure might be a little close on the heels of the last one. ‘How about the real White House?’ he joked.

‘Uck. Wouldn’t have it.’

‘Too many people anyway,’ he said. ‘Would you really want a

houseful of little tiny press secretaries and secret service men?’ He noticed a passing truck. It was full of frozen dinners. It said so on the side. He could use a frozen dinner. He had managed a hot dog again this morning while sightseeing, but Dolly showed no signs of noticing that the lunch hour was passing even now, as surely as that truck full of chicken pot pies.

'Actually,’ she was saying, ‘what the Doll’s White House needs is some dolls to live in it. And,’ she poked him, to get his attention, and then punched the cigarette lighter, a familiar cue to Roger, 'the one thing that nobody makes in miniature that’s any good is dolls.’

Roger gave her a cigarette. ‘Lucy can’t?’

‘She said no. Won’t touch it.’

Roger had to admire a person who said no to Dolly. He was beginning to look forward to meeting this Lucy.

•Why?’

‘Not her area. She said she’d ask around, try to locate someone for me. But outside of the Disney operation, I suspect there’s nobody that could do it for me. Except you.’

‘I could zap one of those big animated robots they use at Disneyland,’ Roger offered.

Dolly hissed smoke through her teeth. ‘Sounds perfectly hideous to me.’

‘Oh.’ Roger turned it over in his mind.

Dolly tossed her cigarette butt out the window.

•Listen, Roger. Have you ever minimized an animal?’

‘Of course. Laboratory-size animals.’

Did it work okay?’

‘Sure. Great. I had a terrific beagle, an inch and a half long.’ ‘Can’t you do that to people?’

She stole quick glances from her driving at him.

He fingered the camera case in his lap.

Jesus.’

•Well?’ she demanded.

‘Well,’ he took a deep breath, ‘so far as I know, and I know nore than anybody about this, the process isn’t reversible. You can't unminimize something.’

Oh.’ This time she did the thinking. ‘I wish you’d consider it as an option. Really think it over. Maybe we could work it out.’ Yeah.’

They were within sight of the white picket fence that enclosed a generous patch of lawn and trees, fronting on Lucy’s house. Roger could see a small shallow plastic swimming pool sitting in

muddied splendor in the very green grass. Dolly tooted the horn on the truck.

Zachary Douglas, sitting on the edge of the pool, in a pair of faded swim trunks, was trying to stick his toes, one by one, into the nozzle of a garden hose. His feet were very muddy, up to the ankles, almost to his knees; and the grass immediately around the swimming pool looked satisfyingly wet.

Laurie, serving tiny plastic cups of tap-water tea to her mother and grandfather, shouted when she saw the truck turn into the driveway, where it stopped behind Lucy’s battered old compact wagon.

‘Gee!’ she shouted.

Zachary looked up for a second and then returned to the serious experimental work in which he was engaged. It was much more interesting than the grandmother he called Gee. He knew from past experience she wasn’t into mud.

Mr. Novick was listening to another ball game, broadcast over the transistor radio in his shirt pocket via a plastic plug in his ear. He was half-asleep as a consequence of lolling a good part of the day in the sun and heat and having consumed two ham sandwiches for lunch. Only the incipient demands of his bladder, overloaded with cups of Laurie’s ‘tea,’ kept him awake. He straightened up to present a more dignified front to his daughter’s mother-in-law.