The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [56]
“Thanks.” It’s true enough, though. The Banzer suit has lead to other outfits, purchased with her own money—or her own credit, anyway—from casual to evening wear; tonight it’s something in between, a black stretch-silk blouse and a matching skirt. It’s been a while since she last wore a skirt. She’s also waxed her legs for the first time in years, and they feel pleasantly cool and slippery in the air-conditioning.
“And to think Chas told me you were a slob.” He smiles another flashbulb smile, his thick lenses refracting the reddish light from the hanging Moroccan lanterns and making his eyes look diabolically beady and small. He leans back against the wall and slides his head around like a charmed snake’s to the muted sound of the dance music, a layered agglomeration of record static and tape hiss. The deejay, a girl with short bleached blond hair in a tank top and baggy pants, stationed just beyond the Plexiglas wall, slides her head around in a fashion exactly similar to Couch’s. It takes Ursula a moment to realize that this is no accident, for Couch, with derision, or admiration, or both, is mimicking her.
“So what do you suppose is keeping Javier?” he says.
“He’s coming, too?”
“You don’t sound so happy!” he says, surprised and mock-surprised. “Is there trouble in paradise?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, well, you two seem to have gotten to know each other pretty well.” His miniaturized eyes widen into the most innocent of looks, by which she is supposed to infer that he knows something, whereas he couldn’t possibly know anything. Javier wouldn’t tell Couch; he doesn’t even like Couch. Not that he’s ever come out and said it—he never says anything bad about anyone—but she can tell by the way he avoids looking at him or talking to him when they’re together in a group. In much the same way, she’s come to notice, Javier tends to avoid just about anything that’s potentially unsettling or unpleasant. He’s never once gone with her to visit Ivy, for instance, insisting he has a phobia when it comes to hospitals. And even talking about Ivy’s illness makes him uncomfortable: usually he just nods sympathetically for a while, then takes the first opportunity to change the subject. His emotional evasiveness upsets her sometimes, but at the same time she’s learned to appreciate his delicacy, his earnest desire to protect her from anything that might make her feel angry or sad or hopeless, as she’s all too prone to do. Whenever her problems start getting to her, he’s always at the ready with new counteroffensives of distraction. The latest and most successful of these involves the savage girl. Without the girl’s knowledge, the two of them have adopted her. They leave her food—sticks of beef jerky, cans of tuna, Spam, creamed spinach, sliced pineapple—placing them on the pediment of the statue of Guy Banister while she’s off foraging. Occasionally they leave her fresh fruit and vegetables from the supermarket down the block, though she’s more suspicious of these. They still haven’t seen or heard the girl speak, but just the other day, to their immense joy, they witnessed some of the local street punks communicating with her in a crude sign language, bartering food and raw materials for stitched hides and inner-tube slingshots.
Encouraging though this may be for the prospects of a savage trend, things aren’t looking all that savage here at the Sarin Spa, as James T. Couch doesn’t fail to point out. He makes a taxonomical list of all the nonsavage breeds and species lounging around them on padded couches and little leather-covered ottomans: the ravers, the ragers, the eraserheads; the girls who wear pigtails and over-the-knee stockings; their sworn enemies, the girls who wear ponytails and just-under-the-knee stockings; and finally the inevitable hefty complement of style-challenged flatlanders, looking and feeling like they don’t belong, even though they comprise the majority, pay most of the covers, buy most of the drinks.