The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [45]
“You’re mocking me,” he at last decides.
He says this so earnestly that she laughs. He goes off to the kitchen again and comes back with a plate of crepes and a bowl of whipped cream.
“My God!” she exclaims. “You can cook, too?”
“ ‘Too’?” he asks, pulling out her chair. “What else can I do?”
She smiles, preferring to let the other skill go unmentioned. Instead she sits down and asks, “So what else did the Gypsies teach you? Can you hypnotize bears? Escape from locked boxes?”
“The Gypsies?”
“Where do you really come from, anyway? Tell me about your childhood, Javier.”
He sits down and helps himself to a crepe. “It wasn’t all that interesting, really. Probably not that much different from anyone else’s.” He pauses, his eyes losing their luster, his expression flattening. But immediately he brightens again, reaching for the berries and powdered sugar and sprinkling them onto his crepe. “Except for the aviary, maybe.”
“The aviary?”
He nods. “The aviary in the west wing of the castle. My mother, the grand archduchess of Borogrovia, was mad about birds. She was mad about many things. She was quite mad, in fact.”
“All right, I give up,” she says. “You obviously had some kind of horrible traumatic childhood you don’t want to think about.”
He looks up, a little startled.
“An abusive baby-sitter, I’ll bet,” she goes on. “Or maybe a rat ate your baby brother.”
He smiles. “Both. You found me out.”
“Just shut up and eat.”
For a minute they cram themselves with crepes and berries and cream and coffee, and then they start talking again. She prompts him about the decor, and he explains, a little apologetically, that over the last few years he’s made his apartment into a kind of ongoing exhibition of trends, both living and dead. He points out the shimmering red and gold curtains lining the kitchen door, a manifestation of the seraglio theme currently in vogue. This is a trend he predicted, he tells her, based on the growing popularity of Arab music and cuisine. He points to an Arab headdress draped over a sinuous-necked liqueur bottle in the display cabinet.
“Kaffiyeh,” he says. “Two years from now they’ll be wearing these in the inner city. One year after that, middle-class Jewish kids will be pissing off their parents by wearing them to raves. You’ll see. The drama of this flowing headgear is going to bring down anti-Arab sentiment to a thousand-year low.”
“You really believe fashions can change things that actually matter?” she asks.
“They can and do. All the time. You see those moonboots?” He gestures toward the pair of large, puffy, silver boots occupying a silver cake stand on the serving table in the corner.
“How could I miss them?”
“Kids started wearing those things to school four years ago. Chas spotted them and advised our clients. The next season silver jackets showed up in the nightclubs. Sci-fi movies boomed that year. Last year Congress approved an increase in NASA’s space-exploration budget. And this year in the nightclubs it’s sparkling neon polyester and transparent plastic. In their minds these people are already colonizing other planets. It’s part of the dawning of a global consciousness. Those outfits will lead to trade agreements with North Korea, international peace accords!”
Ursula laughs. “How do you figure that, exactly?”
“Think about it,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “What can national boundaries possibly matter to people who wear sparkling pink jumpsuits?”
He leans over and kisses her on the cheek, then blushes at his own boldness. She laughs again. He smiles.
“You ready to go do some shopping and fine dining?” he says.
“What do you mean? It’s a weekday. Don’t we have work to do?”
“Sure. Work. What do you think I’m talking about? If you’re too tired, though, I’ll understand.”
“Too tired for shopping and fine dining? Are you kidding?”
“The main thing is I just want to make sure you don’t get tired of me.”
“I’m sure you’ll get tired of me first.”
“No,” he says with a quiet laugh. “I don’t