The walls were covered with scores of mounted animal heads: deer, moose, fox, bear, a snarling puma, lacquered trout with their vital statistics engraved on plaques. All the specimens looked moth-eaten and tired, almost goofy. One was particularly grotesque—a gray, lumpy, porcine thing with Quasimodo features and yellow mandibular fangs that hooked over a sneering upper lip.
“Wally Warthog,” said Nova, stopping next to a serape-covered couch.
“Good-looking fellow.”
“Charming.”
“Does Mr. Lowell hunt?”
She gave a staccato laugh. “Not with a gun. These came with the place and he kept them. He planned to add some of his own—critics and reviewers.”
“Never bagged any, huh?”
Her face got hard. “Wait here, I’ll tell him you’ve arrived. If you need to, fix yourself something to drink.”
She walked off toward the left-hand door. I went over to the bar. Empty bottles lined the floor. Premium brands, mostly. On the counter were eight or nine cheap glasses that hadn’t seen water recently. An old refrigerator was filled with mixers. I washed a glass and poured myself some tonic water, then returned to the center of the huge room. As I sat on a needlepoint rocker, dust shot up. In front of me was a coffee table with nothing on it. I waited and drank for ten minutes; then the door opened.
CHAPTER
28
His face appeared two feet lower than I expected. He was sitting in a wheelchair, pushed by Nova.
The famous face, long and hatchet-jawed, with a bulbous nose and deep, dark eyes under shelf brows, now white. His hair was gray-black, worn past his shoulders and held together with a beaded band: the Venerable Chief look. His skin, liver-spotted and creased, was as rough as the ceiling beams.
My eyes dropped to his body. Wasted and spindle-limbed, reduced to almost nothing above the belt-line.
He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and dark pants. Everything bagged and sagged, and though the trouser fabric was heavy wool, I could see his kneecaps shining through. His feet were encased in cloth bedroom slippers. His hands were huge and white and grasping, dangling from the thin wrists like dying sunflowers.
As Nova propelled him forward, he glared at me. The chair was an old-fashioned manual, and it squeaked and wrinkled the rug. She positioned him opposite me.
“Need anything?”
He didn’t answer and she left.
He kept glowering.
I gave him a pleasantly blank look.
“Good-looking piece of veal, aren’t you? If I was a fag, I’d fuck you.”
“That assumes a lot.”
He threw back his head and laughed. His cheeks were flaccid and they shook. He had most of his teeth, but they were dark and discolored.
“You’d let me,” he said. “Without hesitation. You’re a starfucker; that’s why you’re here.”
I said nothing. Despite his crippled body and the size of the room, I began to feel hemmed in.
“What’s in the glass?” he said.
“Tonic water.”
He gave a disgusted look and said, “Put it down and pay attention. I’m in pain, and I don’t have time for any lumpen-yuppie bullshit.”
I placed the glass on a table.
“Okay, Little Dutch Boy, tell me who the hell you are and what qualifies you to be treating my daughter.”
I gave him a brief oral rÉsumÉ.
“Very impressive, you now qualify for a variable-rate mortgage of your IQ. If you’re so smart, why didn’t you become a real doctor? Cut into the cortex and get to the root of matter.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He pitched forward, winced, and cursed violently. Gripping the armpieces of the chair, he managed to shift slightly to the left. “William Carlos Williams was a doctor and he tried to be a poet. Somerset Maugham was a doctor and he tried to be a writer. Both sour, pretentious fucks. Mix-and-match works only in women’s fashions; something’s got to ebb, something’s got to flow.”
I nodded.
His eyes widened and he grinned. “Go ahead, patronize me, pricklet. I can chew up anything you serve me, digest it for my own benefit, and shit it back at you as high-density compost timbales.”
He licked his lips and tried to spit. Nothing came out of his mouth.
“I’m interested,” he said, “in certain aspects of medicine. Cabala, not calculus. . . . A fool I knew in college became a surgeon. I met him, years later, at a party teeming with starfuckers, and the pin-brain looked happier than ever. His work; there was no other reason for him to be satisfied. I got him talking about it, and the bloodier he got, the more ecstatic—if words were jism, I’d have been soaked. And do you know what brought the greatest joy to his dysphemistic face? Describing the scummy details of exploratory surgery, while eating a cocktail frank. Cracking open the bones, tying off the veins, swan-diving into the heat and jelly of a stinking, cancerous body cavity.”