A dismal omen: the first customer this morning was an old woman with shoe polish in her hair, who handed me a dollar (sixty-two cents short but I couldn’t bear to quibble) that was translucent from age, as soft and warm as living tissue. Then after a slow, dreary day, at 8:00 PM, with the shop empty—relief and fury. He appeared!
[click here for the first episode and here for the previous one.]
Breezed in with the voluptuous, beautiful Maggie Townsend, on his arm. I watched from behind the swinging door at how she slid out of her ankle-length coat, wiggled in her low-cut dress, and squirmed in her chair. And from where I stood, Carlos the militant ascetic, Carlos the nonpracticing homosexual, seemed oddly flushed. His attention horribly, peculiarly riveted. Stephanie’s big block-shaped backside obscured my view. As if she knew. Or not as if—of course she knew! Maroon hair bristling, she asked if they wanted my “artery cloggers?”
Then as Carlos’s covert operative, she stepped far enough left for me to see him ease himself free from his leather jacket and smooth an Irish sweater over his chest. He was telling Maggie that he couldn’t recommend anything except maybe my brownies. I watched him take off his fleece stocking cap. His hair was loose, clean for a change, and to tell the truth, beautiful. He reached for the girl’s pale, plump hand and pressed it to his 47-year-old mouth.
And I clutched the doorway. Maggie leaned over the table, her big tits pressing into it as she whispered passionately. A second later, the vicious Stephanie caught me watching them, and with a snide grin, flapping their receipt. “Pellegrinos, Malcolm. No ice. No brownies.”
I had six carrot cakes baking. Vaguely aware I was hyperventilating, I began crossing the room to take them out of the oven, when I felt his breath on the back of my neck. He touched my shoulder, traced a line down my spine to my waist. If I hadn’t bitten my tongue I’d have moaned out loud. As it was, my traitorous body shuddered with unmistakable, horrible, pleasure. “You can always tell a true saint,” he whispered, “by how long and how hard he resists.”
I wheeled around, confused and desperate. Because the words were his, the breath, the touch—but the voice was Stephanie’s! And it was she who was standing there, grabbing my belt loops. She narrowed her mean little eyes, released me abruptly, and said, “Go on. March on out there, Malcolm. Be a man, and just—ask.”
(click here for the next episode)
