The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [98]
His little eyes watch her, serenely afloat in their fishtank lenses. She looks at Chas. Chas nods. Then shakes his head.
“Where the fuck is my drink?” he mutters. “Anyone want anything? Sonja?”
“Lemon drop, without the alcohol,” Sonja says.
Chas considers the request, shakes his head again, and walks off.
Cabaj and Lucien begin chatting Sonja up again, and Couch leans over and whispers in Ursula’s ear:
“Good thing your kind of sex isn’t Chas’s bag. Otherwise you might have even broken his big old iceberg of a heart, too.”
Ursula grips his arm tightly and pushes him a couple of steps away from the group.
“What do you mean, my kind of sex?” she demands.
He gives her an innocent look. “You mean you didn’t know?”
She backs him against a wall.
“Well . . . ,” Couch says. “I probably shouldn’t be spreading gossip anyway.”
She digs her fingernails into his arm.
“Ouch!” he yelps. “That hurts! OK, if you insist.”
She lets go. He inspects the synthetic material of his sleeve, rubbing it smooth with his palm as he talks.
“Ivy told me she and Chas never did it,” he whispers. “She said Chas thought she was too beautiful to touch.” He smiles, shakes his head. “Apparently Ivy agreed with him. So they’d do it without touching. She’d get herself off in a mirror, and he’d get off looking at her, like a picture in a girlie magazine! That’s the only way they ever did it! Funny, eh?”
Ursula nods. Couch returns the nod, staring at her coolly and matching his rate of nodding evenly to hers.
“Well,” he says, “I guess that goes to show there is such a thing as being too beautiful, eh? Good thing most of us don’t have that problem!”
“Good thing,” she repeats, refusing to look away, refusing to show anything. She channels it all into her fists, into her legs. Her toes curl until they cramp in her high heels, and her face, just maybe, shows nothing.
Couch is lying, she thinks. But then she remembers part of the story Ivy told her about her and Chas, something about her feeling her power and him feeling his power.
Couch isn’t lying.
“And speaking of Ivy,” he announces in a louder voice, “what say we pay her a little visit tonight?”
“Ivy?” Cabaj erupts, turning from his huddle with Lucien. “We can go see her?”
Couch lets his gaze linger on Ursula for another moment before turning to Cabaj.
“Well, virtually,” he concedes.
“Ah. Virtually,” Lucien muses.
“We’ll have to find Camille and get her permission.”
“I know where to find her,” Lucien says. He turns and floats off through the crowd.
“Interesting guy, that Lucien,” Couch says to Cabaj. “Although maybe a little, I don’t know, effeminate?”
Cabaj doesn’t seem to know how to answer this. Chas returns with a couple of drinks, and the group goes on talking. Meanwhile, Ursula breathes in. She breathes out. She breathes in again. The gist of the conversation permeates her skin. Ivy’s website is about to go on-line. The only thing this means to her at the moment is that she can’t slip away, that she’s trapped here with Couch and the rest of them, because she has to act normal, and being normal means wanting to look at more pictures of her “kooky” sister.
Lucien returns with Camille, who leads them, her anklets clinking, up the spiral staircase to her study. A bulky computer occupies the middle of a long glass table. The monitor plays a silent screen saver showing Middle City being slowly devoured by giant cockroaches. Camille sits down at the terminal and opens the browser, and Couch leans over her and types the address, then proceeds to navigate them through the various entertainments of the site: a short biography of Ivy written by “fashion expert James T. Couch,” replete with childhood pictures; a section on her mental breakdown, containing a couple of newspaper articles and the famous accompanying photograph; and the transcript of a brief interview, conducted, of course, by “fashion expert James T. Couch.” It flashes by too quickly for Ursula to discern anything other than that the questions are on the