The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [9]
P Paola. A force of nature, a Sicilian volcano with lava in her veins. Velvety black eyes, raging raven hair, and a body to breed gladiators. One night not enough, but must play by the rules …
O Odile. Six feet tall, obscenely healthy, but she had her breasts done. Women, write this down: small is fine, drooping is fine, SILICONE REVOLTS US ALL. When we want balloons we’ll go to the circus.
N Niagara. (Her parents honeymooned at the Falls.) One of those salontanned women who try to look jet-setting and sexy with a pumpkin-coloured face …
M Marietta. A shortish fortyish Mensa-intelligent Afro-Portuguese fuckstress furiosa who scratched and screamed as I tongued from sole to crown …
L Laurie. Shorn pubic hair is bad enough in porn mags, but in real life? Women, stop this, now. All you’re doing is fuelling some child pornographer’s fantasies. AND PLEASE, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE: no shaven thunderbolts, hearts, arrows, exclamation points, X marks the spot or team logos. Rings, ball bearings and dangling chin-up bars should also be banished. As should buttockless underwear that cleaves to the crack …
A green-haired waitress interrupted his reading. Leaning over the table, she slid the bill underneath his cup, along with something else: the restaurant’s business card. Under the waitress’s blouse, Norval remarked, was nothing but the waitress.
“You’re Norval Blaquière,” she said, lisping with a tongue ring. “The actor thlash writer. You were amathing in Rimbaud in London. And I read your book—twithe. Tho romantic! And tho thad … God, how I cried over that book!”
Norval calmly shifted his gaze toward the card, which bore a handwritten message in red.
“You’re probably asked this all the time,” she continued, with slumbrous eyes and th’s for all sibilants, “but did you get a lot of rejections for Unmotivated Steps?”
“No.”
“You had a hit right off the bat?”
“I started at the top and worked my way down.”
“I was also wondering if … well, you’re probably asked this all the time, but I was wondering if you have any advice for aspiring writers?”
Norval squinted at the antic red letters, as if written wrong-handedly. “Yes, don’t become one.”
“You wouldn’t recommend it?”
“There are too many already, too many welfartists walking around calling themselves writers and artists who actually do fuck-all, besides filling out grant applications.”
The waitress laughed, pushed the hair back out of her eyes. “But seriously, what’s the best way to get published these days? Any advice?”
“Yes. Don’t recount your dreams, don’t puke up your diary, don’t write anything before age thirty.”
“Really? That’s not what my creative writing teacher said.”
“That’s why he’s teaching.”
“And didn’t you write your novel in your twenties?”
“Learn from my mistake.” Norval looked up from the card and gazed at her piercingly, as he gazed at every woman. “A rare Z. Pity it’s not your turn.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You’ll be up …” he paused to calculate, “ … in a couple of months. I will call, Zoé, depend on it.” He drew a mint twenty from his billfold.
“But I wasn’t—”
“Now if you’ll excuse me …”
On the sidewalk, or rather the gentrified cobbles of a pedestrian walkway, Norval examined the pedestrians: an assortment of tourotrash, fashion lemmings and inadvertent comedians. Some of the women, he judged, had made wearable purchases. None of the men had. What were they thinking when they stepped into those clothes? What did they see in the mirror? There is no reason for the nineties, which will go down in fashion history as the buffoon decade, to be dragged into the zeroes. A baseball cap, worn frontward or backward, knocks fifty points off your IQ. A bucket hat? Seventy-five. Pants with the crotch at kneelevel, revealing the cleft of your arse, making you walk like a penguin? A hundred. These articles are perhaps acceptable for four-year-olds, or circus chimps, but adult men?
“Excuse me,” he said, “what would you keep in a pocket on your calf ? And do you not realise that by storing toilet