Shark Infested Custard Part 6

"It's a lot better than Glen Plaid," I said.

Jotey winked, and waited on another customer, Nita Peralta, Don's chubby Cuban secretary. I admired her costume, a silk white-and-red awning striped mini-skirted dress, tied around her bulging middle with a red silk sash. She also wore strawberry mesh stockings and green patent leather boots. Not wanting to get into a conversation with Nita, I moved away from the bar.

I knew a few of the people slightly-- Don's married friends-- but most of the guests were middle-aged strangers. The older men, many of them accompanied by their wives, were Don's customers, I supposed, invited to his birthday party so he could write it off legitimately as a business expense. Despite the heat, many of these older men wore dinner jackets and business suits. In Miami, the word "informal" on an invitation does not mean dinner jackets, it means sports s.h.i.+rts, Bermuda shorts, and tennis shoes or sandals. But older men, as a kind of compromise, almost always wear a suit and tie to "informal" parties. A suit for a businessman, like a soldier's uniform, is always correct, even though it's equally uncomfortable.

The weather in Miami is precisely the same as the weather in South Vietnam, and it's a d.a.m.ned shame that we cannot dress accordingly. When I call on doctors and visit hospitals, my company insists that I wear a suit and tie. I must keep my hair cut short, although the young doctors I see sometimes have bushy curls down to their shoulders. The rapport I gain with the older, far-right doctors, I lose with the younger far-left doctors.

I spotted Don right away. He was seated, with his daughter Marie on his lap, on the far side of the pool. He was talking to a middle-aged Cuban in a blue chalk-striped wool suit, and from the earnestness of their conversation, they were undoubtedly talking business. Don sold a lot of his English silverware to Cubans, he told me. His Cuban customers made up almost thirty percent of his business.

I decided to talk to Don later. Clara was at the other end of the patio, pus.h.i.+ng the baked beans and potato salad. I wondered, maliciously, if she counted the red plastic spoons and forks after the guests left.

Eddie Miller had told me on the phone that he would be staying overnight in Chicago and would miss the party, so I searched for Larry. I ambled about, nodding pleasantly, but not stopping, to avoid talking to anyone. I knew that Larry would be there soon, because there could be no date cheaper than to take a woman to a free birthday party, and he said he would be coming with a new Electro-Date. After listening to his story about the Weinstein date, I was curious to see what the dating service would come up with next.

Movement helped a little, but the dull pain in my stomach was undiminished. I had gained five pounds, and when I gain five pounds I eat only one meal a day, at noon, until I have dropped back to 195. Eating once a day enables me to lose the necessary amount, and I can still have a few drinks besides. Ordinarily, I return to one meal a day as soon as I hit 200, but somehow I had crept up to 205 before I noticed it. As an additional psychological crutch to maintain my weight at a st.u.r.dy 195, I have all my clothes tailored. If I zoomed, suddenly, to 210, for example, I would need an entirely new wardrobe. And at the moment, at 205, my trousers were uncomfortably tight at the waist. I wore the tails of my sport s.h.i.+rt outside my paints to gain an extra eighth of an inch. It was all I could do to stay away from Clara's groaning buffet, but I was afraid to go near it.

I stood for a minute or so, nibbling on an ice cube and watched a wide-a.s.sed girl climb out of the pool across the water, and then returned to the bar for another drink.

I was on my third drink, and still hungry, when Larry arrived. He was wearing his white suit, his "dating uniform," and he moved like a snow-covered mountain through the crowd as he headed for the bar. The woman trailed him, and I didn't get a good look at her, even when he got to the bar, because she was on the other side of him. Larry put his birthday gift on the bar, a greasy, clumsily wrapped package in green tissue paper, and ordered two bourbons with c.o.ke chasers. He was that way. He always ordered for himself and the woman he was with without asking what she wanted. With drinks, it didn't matter so much, but they corrected the order in a hurry when he ordered club sandwiches and they wanted a steak and a salad.

"What's that?" I said, tapping the package.

Larry grinned. "Don's birthday present. I got him a Colonel Sanders thrift-pack. Nine pieces of cold chicken. And I wrapped it myself."

"Your gift is worse than mine," I said. "I got him a book"

"Not really," Larry said. "I thought the thrift-pack might remind him of his batching days with us at the building."

"It will. But 1 don't think Clara will appreciate it."

"I hope not."

I picked up the greasy package, put it on the card table with the others, and returned. This time I got a good look at Larry's date. She was beautiful enough to know that the world would always be on her side.

Then I got a whiff of her, the full heady aroma, and it was like a hard right to the heart, a straight punch, with the entire weight of the body behind it. An odor, a smell, is almost indescribable, except, perhaps, in terms of other smells, but in one wordJannaire smelled Woman. I mentioned musk oil earlier, and the futile hope that it will bring out a person's individual odor. Most of the time it doesn't it simply smells like musk oil on the user. It seems as if most of the women in Miami and half of the gay men use it, but this impression is false. If there are five women sitting together in a room, and if only one of them is wearing musk oil, it is so powerful that it blends with the perfumes the other four women are wearing, giving the surrept.i.tious sniffer the impression that all five women are muskily anointed.

The musk smell on Jannaire was faint, because her own smell, or reek, to be more exact, of primeval swamp, dark guanoed caves, sea water in movement, armpit sweat, mangroves at low tide, Mayan sacrificial blood, Bartolin glands, Dial soap, mulberry leaves, jungle vegetation, saffron, kittens in a cardboard box, Y.WC.A. volleyball courts, conch sh.e.l.ls, Underground Atlanta, the Isle of Lesbos, and sheer joy-- Patou's Joy-- overpowered the musk oil. I was overwhelmed by the nasal a.s.sault, overcome by her female aroma, and although I could not, at the time, define the mixture-- nor can I now, exactly-- there wasn't the faintest trace of -milk-. Here was a woman.

"Jannaire," Larry said, "this is Hank Norton, my best friend. Hank. Jannaire."

She looked up at me with gold-flecked fecal-beige eyes. She was about five-two, but she looked shorter in gold flats. Her straight, dark brown hair, parted in the center and loose to her shoulders, was a dark bronze helmet, and it clung flat to her head as if she had just broken water after a shallow dive. There was at least a sixteenth of an inch of white showing beneath her pupils, and her bold dark eyes revealed the full optic circle. She wore a gold knee-length dress, shapeless at the waist and unbelted, with tiny golden chains for shoulder straps.

She raised her arm as Larry handed her the bourbon and c.o.ke, and a thick tuft of black steelwool under her arm bugged out my eyes. Except in Swedish and British films, I had never seen a woman with unshaved armpits, and I mentally visualized the same thick inky hair of her bush. Tiny stop-and-go rivulets of sweat inched down my sides as I began to perspire.

"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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 teliJannaire for you thatyour boss sentyou 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 h.e.l.l. 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 f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l with this income tax dodge. I keep running into one G.o.dd.a.m.ned 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 gra.s.sy 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 ofJannaire. 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 halfa.s.sed at best, but there're too many dating services competing. Anyway, when someone really b.i.t.c.hes, 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."

"f.u.c.k 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! 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.ned 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, n.o.body 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 d.a.m.ned thing-- or at least to reduce the force of it."

"Here," she said, pa.s.sing 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 b.u.t.t.

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 h.e.l.l 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?"