Shuteye for the Timebroker Page 24

  Summoned by intercom, Morgaine’s office assistant—the perky, petite Nia Poole—conducted the first candidate in.

  Sally Strumpet, the whole world knew, was fashion-model tall, “but not as skinny as one of those masochistic walking clothes hangers. I’m quite nicely padded in fact, from addiction to Cheesecake Factory goodies. In a perfect world, they’d use me as their spokeswoman!” She possessed a “tawny mane of curls that owes more to nurture than nature—nurture being defined as the tender ministrations of the fabulous Mr. Jean.” She liked to dress casually, especially for her rough-and-tumble job as videocam operator for a cable news program. But she could stun a room of men when really dolled up, like that time when she crashed the UN reception for President Putin. (It was at the UN that she had met Esteban Badura, who was present so far from his sheep to testify about global warming in his South American homeland.)

  The woman who entered the office now matched many of the Sally Strumpet specs. But Riley could immediately tell she wasn’t right for the impersonation. Her face was too harsh and angular, her attitude too cruel. The planes of her cheeks looked like they had been sharpened on a grindstone. Without being invited, the woman sat down and crossed her legs as if she were Sharon Stone under interrogation. Spotting Morgaine’s dead cigar, she took that icon as permission to light up a cigarette of her own.

  “This gig include medical coverage? ’Cuz I’ve got this pre-existing condition—”

  Riley rolled his eyes, trying to signal Morgaine to cut this interview short. But the agent was politely persisting in questioning the woman, as if she could ever possibly stand in for Sally Strumpet.

  Once the first candidate left, Morgaine turned hopefully to Riley. “So, what’d you think?”

  “Harv, I would sooner dress up in drag myself than hire that woman. She would disgrace Sally’s good name. Jesus, I thought she was going to slit both our throats for the sheer thrill of it with those daggers she called fingernails!”

  “All right, maybe she wasn’t perfect. But we’ve got nineteen more to go.”

  The next woman radiated more of Sally’s innocent joie de vivre. But when she saw Morgaine’s library she uttered a brazen squawk and said, “Jesus, look at all them books! What’re you guys anyway, perfessers?”

  The third candidate also failed Riley’s inspection when she opened her mouth. It was not her choice of words but rather the timbre of her voice, which sounded like Fran Drescher’s filtered through George Burns’s vocal cords.

  And so the afternoon went, each succeeding woman presenting some fatal flaw of either looks, character, or intelligence. Four hours after they had started, both Morgaine and Riley were exhausted and dispirited.

  “I thought number twelve had potential—” Morgaine gamely ventured.

  “You mean potential to fall forward onto her face at any minute? Oh, excuse me, her face would never hit the ground! I’ve never seen such an outrageous boob job. She had to have ten pounds of silicone in each tit, for Christ’s sake!”

  Morgaine smiled wistfully at the memory. “I was going to ask you if we could alter the next printing of your book to include some amplified chest dimensions for Sally, but I guess you wouldn’t—”

  Riley surged abruptly out of his chair, nearly tipping it over. “Damn it, Harv, that tears it! It’s bad enough I created this monster in the first place, but I’m certainly not giving her retroactive knockers bigger than her head! Like none of the previous readers would even notice the changes, either! Look, I’m going home now. Call me when you need me again.”

  “That’ll be tomorrow. Those women all came from just one agency, and I’ve got dozens of others lined up.”

  “Wonderful, just wonderful. I can hardly wait.”

  * * *

  In the taxi back to his apartment, Riley was plagued by a kaleidoscope of shifting faces. All the mock Sally Strumpets he had interviewed rose and fell before his mind’s eye, leering and grimacing, beckoning and taunting. They had all been just close enough to the “real” Sally to freak Riley out. He felt that some malign deity had stolen his brainchild and warped her over and over again, creating twisted versions of his ideal.

  When Sally had existed only in Riley’s mind, she had been utterly self-consistent and utterly authentic. Her transfer to the printed page had diluted her nature and character a trifle. But this final attempt at actually instantiating her in the flesh threatened to corrupt her entirely. Was it possible for a Platonic ideal ever to manifest itself in this degenerate realm? Yet cruel circumstances dictated that he had to continue trying.

  How he would find the strength to face tomorrows interviews and any subsequent ones, he could not say.

  When success had finally visited Riley, he had immediately done two things. He had quit Royale magazine—not in a thundering fit of denunciations; after all, he had not been mistreated, and the amiable if dead-end job had paid the rent—and he had gotten new digs. From a crappy studio in Hell’s Kitchen he had moved to a modest co-op on the Upper East Side. Doorman, concierge, snooty neighbors, expensive little pampered dogs, the whole works. Riley hadn’t enjoyed his new living quarters as thoroughly as he had thought he would. The sterility of the neighborhood depressed him. But he felt his new status as a best-selling (anonymous) author required him to live in such respectable terrain.

  Up in his co-op, Riley kicked off his shoes, took a beer from his immaculate Sub-Zero fridge, and slumped down in front of his theater- sized TV. With alcohol and cable, he vowed to shut his brain off for the night.

  Halfway through Who Wants to Create a Reality Show?, a program that followed competing teams of amateurs in Hollywood trying to pitch a reality show, there came a rather assertive knocking on Riley’s door. Muzzy from his fourth beer, he staggered to answer the summons. Halfway to the door, he wondered who could be visiting him, and how they had gotten past the building’s staff without Riley’s being informed.

  Riley tried to peer through the peephole but couldn’t get his bleary eye to focus. “Screw it.” He twisted the handle and yanked the door inward, banging it into his unshod toes.

  “Jesus Christ!” Riley bent to soothe the aggrieved foot. When he straightened, his visitor had impertinently stepped inside.

  Sally Strumpet wore black jeans, nicely packed, and scuffed red leather clogs. A ratty leather jacket gaped open to reveal a white shirt over an ample but not outrageous bosom. Her irrepressible mass of curls was partially tamed by a scrunchie, but a few tendrils escaped to frame her face. She stood an inch or two taller than Riley, and her smile was the same one she had displayed when she had triumphed over weather-girl Gwen York, her hated rival, for the affections of Jack Burleigh, the newsman at the station where they all worked.

  Rileys brain threatened meltdown. Disaster klaxons seemed to fill his ears. Yet somehow he could still hear Sally clearly when she spoke. Her voice was as poignantly real as his mother’s, and as sexy as Kathleen Turner reciting Anais Nin’s pornography.

  “I understand you’ve been looking for me, so here I am. Are you alone now? Is this a good time?”

  “Who—who are you?” The question was meaningless in the face of Sally’s majestic presence, but Riley could summon up no other words.

  Sally stepped boldly inside and closed the door behind her. “Oh, I think you know quite well who I am, Mr. Big.” The woman winked and grinned at this play on Riley’s surname, but when Riley remained stone-faced, her brave expression cracked a little. “Unless you’ve forgotten me so soon?”

  Riley found himself somehow on the far side of the room from the woman, his instinctive retreat stopped only by the windows (which afforded him a minuscule view of Central Park when he craned awkwardly). “You’re some kind of actress. You have to be. You can’t be Sally Strumpet. She doesn’t exist. I invented her.”

  Sally spread her arms wide and arched her back like a lazy tiger, lending a disturbing prominence to her chest. “Do I really look like some cheap figment of your imagination? You can bel
ieve whatever you want about my origins, but you can’t deny I’m real.” Sally slapped her generous butt. “At least that’s what the scale tells me every morning.”

  Riley began to grow irritated. “You have to be a joke, right? Well, it’s not funny. Who sent you? How did you get this address? Are you from one of the tabloids? Where’s the camera?” Riley could just see his goofy face plastered all over Page Sixes around the globe under the headline Hoax Author Unmasked / Falls for His Own Scam.

  The intruder assumed a truly crestfallen look that verged on the tearful. “Gee, Mr. Oh-So-Big, I know I’m not much to look at or every man’s dream date, but no girl likes having her very identity denied. Are you asking me to just shrivel up and disappear?”

  Riley felt sheepish at his rudeness. Whoever this woman was, she had done nothing yet to earn his disrespect. Better to take her at her impossible word and see where such a tactic led. “All right then, you’re Sally Strumpet. What are you doing here?”

  Sally brightened up into a semblance of mild outrage. “I’m pissed! You’re trying to find someone to impersonate me. I don’t want some cheap tramp parading around the world and abusing my image like a street vendor’s knockoff Prada handbag. Those girls you interviewed today were all dimwits and roundheels!”

  Roundheels. That was an archaic term Riley loved and one that he had put in Sally’s mouth on more than one occasion. “How—how did you—?”

  Sally winked. “Oh, I see a lot of things. Anyhow, you don’t need to look any further for someone to hide your authorship behind. You’ve got me now. Tomorrow morning, you’re going to call Morgaine and tell him to cancel the auditions. Then we’ll go in and meet with him to start arranging my public appearances.”

  Riley considered the ultimatum. This woman, whoever she was, looked and acted so much like Sally Strumpet that no other candidate could possibly compete. Sure, she was brash and crazy, maybe a stalker even, bursting in on him like this instead of just showing up at Morgaine’s office during the auditions with the other candidates. But why not accept fate and use her as she proposed?

  “Suppose I agree to your plan? What’re your terms?”

  Sally waved the question aside. “Oh, I’m sure we can work out something mutually agreeable.”

  “Well, OK then. I guess we’ve got a deal.”

  Riley extended his hand to shake, fully expecting to encounter the grip of a ghost. But Sally’s handshake was firm and warm.

  “Now, where can I reach you tomorrow?”

  Sally shucked off her jacket and threw it on the couch. Twin flicks of her feet disposed of her clogs. “Right here, if it’s OK with you. I don’t have any other place to stay at the moment. And I figure that since my life story bought this place, I’ve got as much right to be here as you. Unless you’re seeing someone else these days. It wouldn’t be the first time a guy ditched me after I helped him reach success.”

  Riley hardly knew how to respond. He did owe his current stature to Sally Strumpet. But this woman wasn’t her—was she? How could she be? He had invented Sally! Yet this familiar stranger acted so certain of her own identity—

  Riley contemplated another lonely night spent in his empty bed. “No, I’m not seeing anyone else. You can stay.”

  “Great!” The couch received Sally’s shapely butt alongside her jacket. She smiled wickedly up at Riley and patted a cushion. “Now, have a seat. Relax. We’ve got a lot to talk about. Remember my third sutra? ‘Intense private conversation between a man and a woman is the high road to a low-down activity.’” She giggled and looked at Riley with a becoming blush creeping across her cheeks. “God, I’ve never actually said that to a man before. But I know that you above anyone will understand.”

  * * *

  Riley had never seen Harvard Morgaine at a loss for words. The agent was generally unflappable, ready with a rude comeback or salty quip for any circumstance. But encountering the forceful reality of the woman who refused to answer to any name other than “Sally Strumpet” left Morgaine deflated, empty of easy rejoinders or useful conclusions.

  Riley and his agent sat unaccompanied in Morgaine’s office. Sally had been dispatched on a shopping trip with Morgaine’s assistant, Nia Poole, abetted by the agency’s credit card. Along with her lack of residence, Sally claimed not to have any current wardrobe other than the clothes on her back. That deficit was being remedied even as Riley and Morgaine sought to piece together their thoughts.

  Riley spoke first. “She didn’t lay any claim to my royalties then?”

  “No, not a cent. She signed the contract I had ready without a second’s hesitation. Salary of five thousand a week for an unspecified period. She quoted one of the sutras: ‘Needy girls do not have to be greedy girls.’”

  “Number fourteen.”

  “Whatever. It’s damn good money, sure, but not a patch on what she might’ve asked for, if she really is sticking to this crazy claim that she’s the one and only Sally Strumpet, author of your book.”

  Morgaine took the dead cigar from his mouth and studied it a long moment before speaking again. “And Christ knows, I might’ve sided with her if she pushed the claim. Sorry, kid, but she’s that good.”

  “You’re telling me. I almost believe her insane story myself.”

  Riley recalled what had happened last night.

  Several hours of talking, mostly by Sally, had served to update Riley on everything in Sally’s life that had purportedly occurred to her since the close of Secret Sutras. Not once did she depart from the implicit assertion that she was the fictional heroine of Riley’s book. Her narrative had been utterly consistent with the events of the book, forming a sequel that Riley might have written himself. He experienced a genuine pang at the sad fate of handsome shepherd Esteban Badura, lost to a rapacious melanoma engendered by the ozone hole over his native land. Riley even felt himself tearing up when Sally recounted how her Tierra del Fuegan in-laws had heroically taken over the sheep-herding duties, allowing Sally to return to the United States and seek solace in work and possibly even a new companion. Imagine Sally’s surprise when she found herself a celebrity thanks to a certain book.

  Afterward, as half-promised, Riley and Sally had indeed moved to the bedroom. There, Riley experienced what was simply the best sex of his life. He was hardly surprised that he knew intimately all of Sally’s turn-ons and could pleasure her with unfailing insight. After all, he had invented her, right? It was like God knowing what went on in, say, a cat’s brain.

  The congruity between Sally’s desires and Riley’s moves engendered in Riley a greater confidence than any he had ever felt before while in bed with a woman. Even if this impossible incarnation of Sally failed to fulfill Morgaine’s need for a PR-campaign beard, she was doing wonders for Riley’s libido.

  But there was one creepy thing about their lovemaking: Sally’s ability to anticipate all of Riley’s specific desires. How could the creation know the creator so well? Had this happened with Galatea and her sculptor? Riley began to wonder who really filled which role, and grew slightly nauseated with a kind of freshman existential angst.

  But he wasn’t truly spooked until, on the verge of sleep, Sally quoted the twenty-fifth sutra: “‘The only thing better than after-play late at night is foreplay early in the morning.’”

  Having heard that, Riley jolted out of his drowsy stupor and lay awake staring at the ceiling for the next three hours.

  There were only two dozen sutras in the published book, one for each chapter. In an early draft, Riley had indeed included a twenty-fifth, the very maxim Sally had just quoted.

  But no one, not even Harvard Morgaine, had ever seen that deleted chapter. Riley had been saving that twenty-fifth sutra for a sequel.

  Morgaine snapped his fingers in front of Riley’s face. “Don’t go catatonic on me so soon, Small. I need you to keep your head screwed on straight during this charade. It’s going to be a year and half, more likely two, until the movie debuts and we can gradually phase this chick
out. We’re going to have to work hand in glove with her all that time. If she’s going to send you to la-la land every time you think about her, then we’ve got a problem. We need you to ride herd on her in public and feed her lines.”

  “Feed her lines? You’ve talked to her, Harvard. She knows the book better than me. And as for improvising, she’s more totally in character than De Niro. And what do you mean, ‘ride herd on her’?”

  “I’ve got it all set up. You’re her publicist now. You’ll accompany her everywhere, make sure she doesn’t flip out and screw us over somehow. I even got you a salary from Aleatory House! After all, before today, they didn’t know you even existed.”

  “Oh, now, Harvard, wait just a goddamn minute—”

  “There’s no backing out, Small. We can’t just turn this broad loose unsupervised. And I can’t do the hand-holding, I’ve got a fucking literary agency to run. Look at it this way: it’s the exact same schedule you’d have to follow if you were actually known in public as the author, but this way you’re getting an extra paycheck for your time.”

  “Oh, Jesus, this is totally humiliating. To stand there in the shadows like a flunky while she gets all the glory. I can’t believe this.”

  “Believe it—or else.”

  Laden with packages, Sally and Nia returned several hours later, hours that Riley had spent pissily bemoaning his lot to a hard-hearted Morgaine.

  Sally dumped an armful of Bergdorf boxes into Riley’s lap. “Whew! I’m exhausted.”

  “Why?” Riley asked.

  “What’s my favorite color, Mr. Big?”

  “Uh, pumpkin.”

  “Correctomundo. You have any idea how hard it is to find a matching bra, thong, and sandals in pumpkin?”

  * * *

  The next three months of Riley Small’s life were composed of equal parts boredom, jealousy, pride, humiliation, and excruciating bliss. He felt like a torture victim who had earned conjugal visits between sessions on the rack.