CHAPTER SEVEN:

  Coal Blackstone woke up, yawned and stretched her ivory arms towards the shafts of sunlight falling onto her bed from the balcony window.  Then she tossed off the duvet, and, lying happily naked in the golden light, stretched her endless legs in the same direction—but only one at a time.  It was her own form of lazy, supine tai-chi, and while she had few illusions about its efficacy as a set of spiritual exercises, it felt good enough for her to do it every morning—if she were alone—upon awakening.
     There was no photo session today and she was free, as far as a supermodel can ever be deemed free.
    “Linc?” she called out.  “Is there coffee?”
    “Soon,” came a masculine voice from down the hall.  “Can’t you smell it?”
     “I’m too busy yawning and stretching,” Coal answered abstractly.  “One activity at a time!”
     Linc smiled to himself as he poured espresso into two tiny cups, each bearing a silkscreened photo on its side of a Man Ray eye—with spidery eyelashes.  He was always amused by Coal’s perpetual meldings of discipline and torpor.  He loved how she made lassitude seem both graceful and purposeful. 
     Coal’s real name was Collette Blackstone, but she had renamed herself Coal when it began to seem to her, in the course of growing up, that her dark hair was steadily getting blacker and blacker—so black that it flashed vivid blue highlights in the sun. 
     And it wasn’t just the hair either.  Frankly, she had never thought of herself as the Colette type.  Certainly not the Gigi type.
By the time she had decided, at age seventeen, to permit one of her older, eager suitors to divest her of her virginity—which flowery task she felt he had accomplished clumsily and with unseemly haste—she was already quite far advanced into the careful, highly deliberate repositioning of herself that would soon make her one of the leading fashion models on two continents.    
     Linc had been with her for a year now, each of them a partner in a shape-shifting relationship that was elastic enough to accommodate their sometimes being lovers and their sometimes being just business associates.  It was usually week-on, week-off.  This week they were business associates.
     Although his last name really was Ford, Linc’s actual first name had been Gerald, and even though he knew perfectly well that nobody now remembered the brief and awkward tenure of the American president Gerald Ford, he still disliked the name sufficiently to have changed it to Linc—short for “Lincoln.  Lincoln Ford.  He liked it alright now, with the juxtaposition of the upscale “Lincoln” and the populist “Ford.”  And anyhow it was a good name for a fashion photographer.  He couldn’t imagine Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar or even Toronto Life’s Fashion commissioning a suite of photographs from anyone named Gerald Ford.
     “Linc, I need that coffee or I’m going to expire!”
    “Keep your shirt off,” laughed Linc, “I’m just bringing it now.” 
     Linc put the tiny cups on a small pink Limoges tray they kept specifically for that purpose.  Two fiercely strong expressos and four delicate McIntosh shortbreads—two apiece.  He then sat on the edge of the bed and watched Coal as she took a sip of the coffee and nibbled, dainty as a rabbit, at a biscuit.
     She glanced at him.  “You’re not actually gazing upon my maidenly nakedness, are you Linc—not after all this time?”
     “Time has nothing to do with it,” he grinned.  “And yes, I was.”   



CHAPTER SIX


     His worship Cass Tamburlaine looked at his aging Movado Serio wristwatch—the only thing he had on—and both cursed and yearned for his tardy mistress, Joy Pommery.
     “Three a.m.” he muttered.
     Just then came a courteous, token knock at his office door, followed by the softy plushy sound of the door opening out heavily across the sea of broadloom, and into the room strode the very Joy Pommery he had so summarily summoned from her sleep.  From his supine opposition, all Cass could see were her finely-crafted ankles and the hem of her soft creamy linen skirt.
     “What is the matter with you, Cass?” she asked, “except,” she added, glancing at his up-periscope, “for the never-to-be-appeased distention of your favourite organ?”
     Cass looked crestfallen.
     “I need you,” he told her as poignantly as he could manage it.
     “Oh for godssake, Cass, you don’t need me, you need an icepack!” 
     Cass moaned,
     “Get up off the carpet,” Joy told him.
     He struggled to his feet.
     “And put your clothes back on!”
     “Don’t be efficient,” muttered Cass, pulling on his boxer shorts and squirming into his Extra-large Ralph Lauren chinos.  “I’m running a fever and I’m suffering from an outsized randiness that you’ve been no help at all with….”
     Joy smirked.
     “Well, Cass,” she said, “being jerked out of bed by the telephone at two o’clock in the morning and roughly summoned to your office isn’t exactly this girl’s dream of  foreplay!”
     “…and I can’t sleep…”
     “You’ve never been able to sleep.  Not since I’ve known you.”
     “But it’s getting worse every day.”
     You’re getting worse every day,” said Joy, handing him his pink Hugo Boss shirt.  “Why don’t you concentrate more on your mayoralty duties and less on the rich, ever-shifting modalities of your hypochondria?”
     “It’s not hypochondria,” Cass told her, in what she thought was an oddly furtive voce.  “The fact is,” he said, his voice dropped now to a hoarse whisper, “somebody’s trying to kill me.”
     This struck Joy as funny.
     “Now Cass, who would want to do that?  Surely among the hundreds of thousands of people in this city who hate your guts, there isn’t any one particular party that’d be prepared to go that far?”
     “There are lots of such parties,” said Cass disconsolately.
     “Yes, this is a party town,” laughed Joy.
     “I’m serious, Joy.  I’m worried.”
     “Well, the fact is, nobody can investigate yet, Cass,” said Joy, picking up Cass’s Gucci Sporting Lace-up Booties from the carpet, “because so far, there’s no body!”
     “Let’s hope there won’t be,” Cass replied, falling back into his chair and stretching himself out of shape trying to pull on his black silk socks.
     “How about we get some breakfast?” asked Joy.  “That won’t kill you.  Especially if you pass on your usual platter of eggs and bacon and go with a nice, benign, egg-white omelette.”
     “I’m a tumescent guy, Joy,” Cass told her, throwing his cashmere overcoat cape-like over his shoulders and closing his office door, “I need a provocative breakfast, something big and thrilling.”
     “You need a psychiatrist, your worship,” said Joy, bounding after him down the corridor to the elevator.  



CHAPTER FIVE:


 
     At the very same moment that Bliss Carmen had been reassuring Michael there was no reason to be afraid of the Mayor (or a whole raft of other things she had named), the Mayor himself—his Worship, Cass Tamburlaine—was lying on his back, stretched out on the dove-grey, wall-to-wall, deep-pile carpeting that made his office feel like a soft, mushy parking lot. 
     A stack of Racing Forms supported his head.  He had felt feverish and so had hastily, almost frantically, pulled off his tie and had stripped off his shirt.  Which gave him the appearance, from the waist up, of a fallen Sumo wrestler.  Perspiration glistened on his swollen body like basting on a turkey.
     It was one o’clock in the morning.  The city out the window looked almost as bright now as it would have been at noon.  There’s no goddamned night anymore, thought Cass.  Only round-the-clock glare. 
     He stared at the ceiling and discerned, in the indeterminate patterning of the figured plaster work, the bone-white image of Joy’s face.
     Joy Pommery had been Cass’s mistress for six months now.  He liked her.  He called her Joy Pomegranate.  She had a thin, ferrety face, wide boyish shoulders, remarkably persistent breasts and the strong, willowy legs of a tennis player or a tightrope walker.  He found her a perfectly adequate partner, if not perpetually thrilling.
     His Worship was feeling more feverish by the moment.  Clambering to his feet—no small undertaking—he reeled to his desk and phoned Joy.
     “It’s Cass.  Can you come to my office?”
     “What now?  Cass, it’s almost 2 am,” said Joy.
     “I know I know.  Listen I don’t ask much of you.”
     “Alright.  I’ll be there in half an hour.”
     Cass hung up the phone.  Then he struggled out of his trousers, peeled off his socks and shucked down his shorts.  Unfortunately, he didn’t feel any cooler.
     But he did feel satisfyingly virile.  Being naked in his office always aroused him.  He bobbed over to the window and looked out.  There were the standard noises in the dark, scarcely discernable through the sandwiched layers of industrial glass: distant streetcars, the vibration of subways, the howl of a passing ambulance, dissolute car horns.  He bobbed back to his desk and, feeling disinclined—and physiologically unprepared—to sit in his cavernous leather chair, lay down on his back again on the sea of carpet.  He looked like a fleshy submarine with its periscope up.
    “I wish she’d hurry,” he said out loud.
      

CHAPTER FOUR:


 
     “A young woman got on the subway today,” Tom tells his wife Violet and a couple named Pretty and Oscar with whom they’re having dinner. “She was a rather hefty girl and she has this crooked little dog with her on a leash, and she’s carrying this big white box, which obviously has a cake in it”.
     “How did you know it was a cake?” Pretty asks.
     “It was a cake,” Tom says.  “There’s a certain kind of bakery box, you know? White cardboard.”
     “With bakery string,” adds Violet.
     “Anyway, it’s rush hour and the subway car is packed solid and this big burly girl is beginning to get pushed and jostled and she seems to be growing very protective of this cake.  She’s holding it as delicately as she can, as if it’s a time bomb…”
     “Or a baby”, says Violet.
     “But people keep bumping into it anyhow.  At one point you can hear this dry ‘thunk!’ sound which was probably a chunk of the icing breaking off and falling to the bottom of the box…”
     “One of those big, hard turquoise roses”, Violet suggests.
     “Yeh, that’s what it sounded like,” Tom says.
     “The kind you can break a tooth on,” adds Oscar.
      “And then, a minute or two later,” Tom continues, “there’s another cracking sound and now the box rattles when the girl transfers it to her other hand, and just as she thinks he’s finally got it pretty well defended, a couple of teenage kids get on, and they shove each other around and yell and of course they smash right into the big girl’s box, first denting it and then knocking it completely out of her grasp and onto the floor of the subway car.  And what do you think happens after that?” Tom asks his wife and their friends.
     “She screams.  Curses?” Violet suggests.
     “Weeps?” asks Pretty.
     “Nope, just the opposite!” says Tom, with something like triumph in his voice.  “She stoops down and slowly picks up the box, tightens her grip on the weird little dog’s leash, looks around at all the other subway riders—who are staring at her now as if she’s from Mars—raises the box over her head, and hurls it with all her might the full length of the subway car!!  Just as the box bounces to a stop at the other end, spilling out the remains of her cake onto the feet of the rush hour passengers and showering bits of icing all over everybody, the train pulls into a station.  The girl backs towards the opening door.  “Take it then!” she screams.  TAKE it!!”  And then backs out onto the platform, pulling the dog after her as the doors close.”
     “And that’s it?” Asks Oscar, intensely engaged up until now with his Crème Caramel.
     “Yes, that’s it”, says Tom.
     “Good story”, says Oscar, spooning up the last of the caramelized sugar in his dish.
     “I wish I’d been there,” says Violet wistfully.  “Me too,” says Pretty. 
     “Well, I was there”, says Tom, “and it was no friggin picnic.”