Where was I? Yeah. On the line with Happy here. My mind has a tendency to wander. Indulge me. It helps, time-wise.
“Okay. You want to tell me what symptoms you got?” She told me. “Call a doctor,” I joked. “Look, give me a break. This is—what? The second time this year? The third?”
“It’s different this time.”
“It’s the new role, Happy. That’s all it is.” In her new series on Daydrama, Happy was playing the stock part of a glamorous forty-year-old with a bad case of time-anxiety. And it was getting to her—of course it was. “You know where I place the blame? On your talent! As an actress you’re just too damn good. Greg Buzhardt and I were—”
“Save it, Lou,” she said. “Don’t bore me out. It’s real. It’s time.”
“I know what you’re going to do. I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to ask me to drive over.”
“I’ll pay.”
“It’s not the money, Happy, it’s the time.”
“Take the dollar lane.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re, you must be kind of serious this time.”
So I stood on the shoulder, waiting for Roy to bring up my Horsefly from the stacks. Well, Happy is an old friend and one of my biggest clients, also an ex-wife of mine, and I had to do the right thing. For a while out there I wasn’t sure what time it was supposed to be or whether I had a day or night situation on my hands—but then I saw the faint tremors and pulsings of the sun, up in the east. The heavy green light sieved down through the ripped and tattered troposphere, its fissures as many-eyed as silk or pantyhose, with a liquid quality too, churning, changing. Green light: let’s go. . . . I had a bad scare myself the other week, a very bad scare. I was in bed with Danuta and we were going to have a crack at making love. Okay, a dumb move—but it was her birthday, and we’d been doing a lot of tranquilizers that night. I don’t happen to believe that lovemaking is quite as risky as some people say. To hear some people talk, you’d think that sex was a suicide pact. To hold hands is to put your life on the line. “Look at the time-fatality figures among the under classes,” I tell them. They screw like there’s no tomorrow, and do they come down with time? No, it’s us high-credit characters who are really at risk. Like me and Danuta. Like Happy. Like you. . . . Anyway, we were lying on the bed together, as I say, seminude, and talking about the possibility of maybe getting into the right frame of mind for a little of the old pre-foreplay—when all of a sudden I felt a rosy glow break out on me like sweat. There was this clogged inner heat, a heavy heat, with something limitless in it, right in the crux of my being. Well, I panicked. You always tell yourself you’re going to be brave, dignified, stoical. I ran wailing into the bathroom. I yanked open the triple mirror; the automatic scanlight came on with a crackle. I opened my eyes and stared. There I stood, waiting. Yes, I was clear, I was safe. I broke down and wept with relief. After a while Danuta helped me back into bed. We didn’t try to make love or anything. No way. I felt too damn good. I lay there dabbing my eyes, so happy, so grateful—my old self again.
“You screw much, Roy?”
“—Sir?”
“You screw much, Roy?”
“Some. I guess.”
Roy was an earnest young earner of the stooped, mustachioed variety. He seemed to have burdensome responsibilities; he even wore his cartridge belt like some kind of hernia strap or spinal support. This was the B-credit look, the buffer-class look. Pretty soon, they project, society will be equally divided into three sections. Section B will devote itself entirely to defending section A from section C. I’m section A. I’m glad I have Roy and his boys on my side.
“Where you driving to today, sir?” he asked as he handed me my car card.