The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [117]
“A Communist,” Ursula repeats, getting her mind around the concept.
Couch chuckles. “Chas! A Communist! Rich, ain’t it?”
She shakes her head and laughs. In spite of her disillusionment, she can’t help seeing the humor in this.
The woman fans Couch’s arm with a sheet of card stock to dry the alcohol, then takes a tube of K-Y Jelly from a silver cart parked beside her, squeezes out a dollop onto a ruby-nailed finger, and rubs it over the same area. Couch glances down at his arm, then down the front of the woman’s smock.
“So can’t he just apologize and shut the stupid thing down?” Ursula asks.
“Well, he could, but then he wouldn’t be Chas. He’s dragging his feet, talking to lawyers. Every extra day he keeps the thing going, viewership goes up and money pours in. He’s proving his theory. That’s all he cares about. He doesn’t care that it can’t last. He doesn’t care that the sponsors are bugging out and the last of our regular clients are running like hell. The Gap just dropped us like a hot potato, even after telling us they’re going to follow us word for word on the ‘Conspiracy against the Children’ report. We’re getting badmouthed on radio call-in shows, on talk shows—Jesus, even the E! network thinks we’re creepy. Which is all fine and synergistic as far as ratings go, but when the moral-outrage industry is done having us for lunch, it’ll hand us over to the camera-mugging, I-can-fight-communism-as-good-as-the-next-guy career politicians, and those people will have us for dinner. This couldn’t be happening at a worse time, Ursula. Chas really broke the piggy bank promoting this website. He’s put the company in debt, and not just to me personally but to several far less forgiving creditors. At the moment there’s enough money in that room to pay off enough of our debt to make it manageable and keep us afloat. But between Ivy’s flushing it down the toilet and Chas’s courting a costly and protracted legal defense, you, me, and Ivy aren’t going to have a pot to piss in by the time this blows over.”
With a histrionic flourish he wipes his high, flushed forehead with a table napkin, distancing himself, through parody, from what Ursula perceives to be a clearly heartfelt anxiety. The red-smocked woman presses a sheet of tissue paper to Couch’s bicep, smoothing it on with her fingers. When she pulls it off, the design sticks to his arm: a woman in short shorts, long legs, spiked heels, no shirt, with breasts shaped and dotted like a pair of dice, and a barbed tail snaking out of her behind.
“Well,” Ursula says. “Ivy listens to you, for some reason. Can’t you convince her to go and do something a little less disruptive? Can’t you convince her she can save the world through macramé or basket weaving or something?”
“She doesn’t trust me anymore,” Couch says sighing.
“Why not?”
“She says I’m in cahoosion with the Imagineers. I don’t have to tell you how much it hurt me to hear her say that.”
“Well, what do you want me to do? You think she’ll listen to me?”
Couch holds up his hands. “Let’s just assume,” he begins slowly, “just for the sake of argument, mind you, that I had a surefire little idea, an idea about a little speech you could make to Chas. And let’s just assume that this surefire little speech could not fail to convince our dear old boss that it’d be in his own best interest to step down—you know, sign over the company, for a nominal buyout fee, of course; I mean, we’re not monsters or anything—but anyway, to pass the baton, so to speak, to make way for some new leadership in the outfit.”
In front of Ursula steam begins to rise from a steak au poivre that has just appeared. A thin blond waitress in a white shirt and apron manipulates a knife and fork over Couch’s plate, cutting his fillet