Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [65]
“What’s a nice Jewish woman of a certain age …”
Ma Varuna cut Jocko off by hurling Master at him. “Your question wants to know nothing. It wants only to reveal a bile-poisoned self. I do not answer narcissistic questions.”
The monkey straddled Jocko’s shoulder, leaned its face into the man’s and twisted the wiry hair of his eyebrows into unsightly clumps. Of the many descriptions of Ma Varuna that come to mind, “nice Jewish woman” was one of the more remote. If anything, she looked like some kind of ballet star, male or female I couldn’t tell.
Ma Varuna clutched a handful of her tunic’s hem, and arranged it like a veil over her head, then dragged it across her nose and lips in one silky, sinister movement. “The truth is that which the heart spits out over the tongue’s barricade,” she announced through the flimsy veil.
Jocko was planning to work through his virility hangups on my beat. As a temp, which I define as a worker freed of professional pride and of corporate loyalty, I wasn’t about to let that happen on my ME beat. If the man had been tormented by kinkier sins, if, for instance, he’d been a seer of invisible malice, if he could detect auras the way Larry could or if he’d eavesdropped on inaudible threats from alien galaxies, I might not have called time-out with a patronizing query like “Room service, anyone?”
“I have the brew that Mr. Legume needs.” Ma Varuna glided off the hotel sofa with the Flash’s kick-boxing speed and strength. “Room service doesn’t.”
“Rice,” I corrected. “Jock Rice.”
“Get the kettle,” Ma V barked. “Top shelf, hall closet. You’ll find the cup and saucer in their traveling case right next to the kettle.” She cheetah-walked across the suite and disappeared into the bathroom but didn’t close the door. I asked myself what a woman from Delaware was doing reminding me of Frankie Fong.
The electric kettle wasn’t the whistling aluminum kind Mama boiled water in for her midmorning instant Folger’s. Ma V’s was a sleek, foreign, ceramic appliance in its own vinyl traveling case, wedged between a carry-on and a satchel-sized pocketbook.
“Just get the kettle down,” Ma called from inside the bathroom. The water was running in the sink. “I’ll brew our friend my health special. You’ll be a changed man, Mr. Jack.”
I lifted the compact kettle and the cup-and-saucer set out of their cases and brought them into the bathroom. Ma V had a small Tupperware container of what looked like tea leaves open on the counter and the hot water faucet going full force. “Just leave the stuff there, I’ll take care of it,” she said. If I were making tea for myself I’d have started with cold water, but I filled the appliance just enough for a cup, unplugged the hairdryer and plugged it in. She pulled on a pair of disposable plastic gloves, the kind that you buy in pharmacies, not supermarkets, and measured four pinchfuls of the dried leaves into the cup. “I’ll take care of it,” she repeated.
I went back out into the sitting area where Jocko was sulking and Master climbing the drapes. “I guess I’ll get some kind of story out of this,” Jocko muttered. “What’s she concocting? Something the FDA doesn’t know about?” But when Ma Varuna emerged from the bathroom with the steamy cup, he changed his mood and mind. “What’s in the brew, ma’am? A new Asian anti-oxidizing agent?” He’d already begun to line up great new body, effortless good times, romantic dates.
There’s something to be said for the California epidemic of despair-deficit disorder.
“A bile eliminator.” Ma Varuna, still wearing gloves, placed the cup and saucer on an end table close to Jocko. “Bottoms up!”
I liked the amber color of the infusion, but not the aroma. Master scrambled down the drapes and scooted into Jocko’s lap. Monkey piss probably smelled as weird.
“Cheers!” Jocko upended the glass and downed the herbal broth in one breath-held-in draft, the way expendable cowboys do on TNT oldies just as the saloon doors swing open and the bowlegged Bad Guy struts in.
He went down faster, heavier, clumsier than any