The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [23]
“All right, kids. I guess I can let you in.”
He rechecks the room and then leans in closer.
“Diet water,” he whispers.
“Diet water,” Javier repeats sagely, and the two of them nod.
Ursula studies Cabaj’s face feature by feature. She finds evidence of booze in his flushed cheeks and the faint skein of capillaries on the tip of his nose. She finds evidence of poor grooming in the form of a couple of recently clipped nose hairs beached on the reef of his upper lip. She finds no trace of irony. She feels the vodka beginning to burn a hole in her stomach.
Javier keeps nodding sagely for a moment longer, then shakes his head. “I don’t understand,” he admits.
Cabaj smiles. “No problem. Think about it: water is fattening. Not literally, of course. I mean, it doesn’t contain or produce fat. But still, you know, it does keep those dieters from losing as much weight as they could, right? Because the water is retained. I mean, how often have you heard women complain about water retention? How much heavier it makes them, how bloated it makes them feel?”
“Diet water,” Javier repeats, his forehead showing the struggle beneath to join these two words into a single idea. He turns to Ursula, a small, troubled knot on his brow. “Is it true, Ursula? Does water make you feel bloated?”
“Sure. Every time I drink from a fire hose.” As punctuation, she downs her vodka.
Cabaj acknowledges her wit with a laugh and a hot hand on her back.
“We’ve perfected an artificial form of water,” he says, a keen blaze in his eyes. “It passes through the body completely unabsorbed. It’s completely inert, completely harmless. It’s extremely simple to manufacture, and we’ve got all the compounds used to make it on the fast track for FDA approval. But of course, with a product this . . . as I said, revolutionary, there might be some entirely . . . foreseeable degree of reservation on the part of the consumer. So I’ve got to figure out just the right pitch. I mean, the thing’s gonna take some finesse, you dig?”
Cabaj is now leaning in so close that his aftershave vapors sting Ursula’s face.
“But . . . ,” Javier says, “but won’t people be thirsty?”
Cabaj guffaws, his bulk rippling beneath the satin shirt. “No problem. They’ll buy more. They can drink all they want, guilt-free.”
Cabaj is in high spirits. Javier’s smile is weaker.
“Well. . . .” Javier laughs, scratching his head. “. . . Well, Ursula, diet water. What do you think of that?”
Ursula looks at him, at his strained half smile, his liquid, frightened-looking eyes. It occurs to her that he may be feeling the same hole in his stomach that she is.
“It had to happen eventually, I suppose.”
Her response seems to cheer him.
“That’s true,” he says, smiling a little more genuinely now. “I’m amazed I never thought of it myself.”
“If you had, you’d be a pretty rich son of a bitch,” Cabaj says. “Or whoever you worked for would be, anyway.”
Javier nods. “Our agency can help you with this,” he says.
Cabaj smiles slyly. “You think so?”
“We’ll tell you exactly the kind of pitch people are in the mood for. As I told you, we’ve got contacts in every major city in the world, and a research department that can tell you everything there is to know about your target market.” He hands Cabaj his card. “Give us a call. We’ll make your beverage go down so smooth people won’t know how they lived without it.”
Javier’s crooked-toothed smile loiters on his face like a vagrant who doesn’t really want to be there but has nowhere better to go. He glances at Ursula and quickly away, again his eyes retreating to the comforts of the liquor-bottle landscape. Cabaj, she now sees, is staring at her.
“Excuse me—Ursula, did you say your name was?”
She nods.
“You’re a model, aren’t you?”
“No, sorry, never done that.”
“Oh. I was almost sure. But I’ve been looking at head shots for two weeks straight. I look around and see nothing but head shots. Still, I could’ve sworn. . . .” He pauses, his jaw slightly unhinged. Without looking away