Mayor of the Universe Page 16

  Fletcher nodded, and as he watched the small blue-haired woman in the ruffly dress laugh and talk with the crowd of women who were also on their way to the Ladies,’ he thought of Olive and how he wished she had lived to old age. But as he followed the elderly woman into the dining room, Fletcher and his memories receded until he was thoroughly, deeply Deke Drake, who was keeping a lunch date with his Aunt Edna.

  “All right, my darling, I love your jacket—it sets off those big shoulders of yours so nicely—and your color’s good, although how a busy man like you can find the time to sunbathe is beyond me—but I have one question to ask: six weeks? Six weeks since your last visit?”

  “Edna, I told you I had to go to South America. I sent you—what?—a letter a week, plus postcards? And didn’t I call you twice, even though long-distance from Bogotá costs an arm and a leg and a torso?”

  The old woman waved her hand. “Since when can’t you afford a torso?”

  With her fork, she dug out a chunk of pineapple from the mound of chicken salad collapsing on top of a frond of lettuce.

  “But I don’t want to talk about me,” he said, buttering a soft roll (stupid Americans—didn’t they realize that bread should have weight and heft?). “I want to talk about you. How are you? How are they treating you?”

  His aunt, who had more than enough resources to stay in Chéz Edna, had recently chosen to move into the Oceanside Manor senior citizen home.

  “It’s like a country club I never have to leave!” she had told Deke, “and I like to be around people my own age. People who voted for Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt!”

  “They treat me wonderfully,” said Edna, her fork rooting for more pineapple. “Don’t tell Cook, but the chef here makes her Beef Wellington look like meatloaf.”

  “So, you won’t ditch this joint and run off to the Greek Islands with me?”

  “I’ll go,” proffered a woman across the table, whose chin barely cleared the tabletop.

  “And I’d take you, Mrs. Orman,” said Deke, “but there’s your husband to consider.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? Call me Melvina. And don’t worry about my husband—he’d like it if I went away. It’d give him more time to sort his socks.”

  “Irving spends hours in front of his sock drawer,” explained Deke’s aunt. “Folding and refolding his socks, putting them in rows—”

  “—he fights wars with them!” said Melvina. “I’ll go in the bedroom and he’s busy staging the Battle of the Argyles!”

  Twirling her finger alongside her head, Edna mouthed, “He’s crazy.”

  “Not crazy.” Melvina looked at Deke and sagged. “Senile.”

  When he saw the spark of tears in the corners of her eyes, Deke reached across the table to squeeze her hand.

  “I always remember how kind Mr. Orman was in his business counsel.”

  “He’s still kind,” said Melvina, and as she nodded, the drapery of skin under her chin quivered. “Even in his senility.”

  When lunch was over, Deke’s aunt yawned, patting her mouth with her tiny, crocodile-skin hand. Each finger was studded with a ring, which in turn was studded with a different stone—a sapphire, an emerald, a ruby, a diamond.

  “Dekey, I think it’s my nap time.”

  “But, of course,” he said, adding a Maurice Chevalier flair to his voice. “A woman like you needs her beauty sleep.”

  Tucking her reptilian hand in the crook of his elbow, she allowed her nephew to escort her to her room.

  “So you’ll be my bridge partner in the tournament tomorrow?” she said, eying her bed with an emotion close to lust.

  “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” said Deke, and tasting the sharp bite of hairspray as he kissed the air above his aunt’s blue curls, he gently set her down on the piece of furniture she had been eyeing so covetously.

  Outside the senior home, he strolled to a gleaming red 1962 Alfa Romeo Spider, hopped in, and within minutes was cruising down the coastline at a brisk eighty miles per hour, a speed that normally would have inspired the highway patrolman on duty to give chase, but seeing the delinquent driver was Deke Drake, the officer merely tipped his hat. Deke returned the salutation with a toot of his horn.

  Having once been part of the motorcycle escort that led Adlai Stevenson into town and having been a drinking buddy of Totie Fields’s cousin, the patrolman was no stranger to celebrity. Still, watching the blur that was Deke Drake’s speeding Spider convertible, he felt touched by greatness.

  Intergalatic Memo

  To: Tandala

  From: Charmat

  Do not doubt your methods (or lack thereof). I think you are correct in having Fletcher be “Fletcher” at the outset of each new experience and when interacting with you. I believe it makes him better understand the situation before he is completely absorbed by his alter ego, and at least one of you should understand the situation—ha!

  Revlor ran into a Head Council member while tanning on the Celestial Equator and tried in his sly way to extract information as to what the meaning of this mission is. Suffice it to say the UHC member did not appreciate Revlor’s inquisitiveness (they are so uptight on that board!) and consigned him to Contemplative KP. He is now wiping up spills in the Milky Way.

  As to that After-Eating-Cowboy-Stew-Fart you sent, I hope you know that in opening that particular Sense-O-Gram, several nearby stars extinguished themselves.

  Ames, the butler, welcomed the lord of the manor into the palatial great hall of High Palms, the grand beachfront estate Deke had grown up in.

  “And how is Miss Edna today?” asked Ames.

  “Quite well, thank you. Still the belle of the ball, no matter the circumstance.”

  “She’s a lady like no other.”

  Deke looked through the stack of mail—equal parts invitations and bills—set aside for him on the marble-topped side table.

  “She thinks highly of you, too, old chap. Just today she asked, ‘And is old Ames still mooning after the laundry girl?’”

  “I’m so glad my love life—or lack thereof—amuses you and Miss Edna,” said Ames, his dour expression unchanging. “Cocktails on the terrace, sir?”

  “Excellent idea. Right after my swim.”

  The lord of the manor loped up the grand curving staircase, and if standing by the butler there had been a movie director whose objective had been to capture grace and athleticism and style, he would have called into his megaphone, “Cut. Print it.”

  While Deke’s extracurricular career at Princeton had been colorful and sometimes rash (he had run a gambling operation that depleted the funds of two senators’ sons and had an affair with his comparative literature tutor, who also happened to be the daughter of the dean of the English department), he had been a serious and circumspect member of the swim team, setting several Ivy League records in the freestyle and butterfly. Now, only three pounds over his college weight, he dove into the water, and with his arms and legs moving with the precision of a factory machine he swam the length of the pool and back again. He swam for thirty minutes, altering his strokes every few laps, and when he stepped out of the pool and into the terry cloth robe Ames held open for him, there was waiting for him on an ironwork table a martini shaker, a glass, a small crystal bowl, and in the chair next to it a black woman in a tight pink uniform.

  “I told her you’d speak to her later in the kitchen,” whispered Ames, “but you know how pushy she can be.”

  “Why don’t you bring another glass?” said Fletcher, who upon seeing Tandala had regained consciousness of his own self.

  Pursing his lips, the butler walked stiffly into the house.

  “Well, well, look at you,” said Fletcher, his palm flat on the front of his robe so it wouldn’t gape open as he sat down.

  “Yes,” she said in her Caribbean lilt. “My Earth culture receptors have informed me that I am a maid. A person hired to clean up the messes of others?”

  “Well, the messes that can be cleaned up.�
��

  “And you,” said Tandala, watching as the man shook the martini canister. “Who are you?”

  “Deke Drake,” said Fletcher. “Deke Drake, international ladies man and jewel thief?”

  “Ahh, yes. The man no woman or diamond can resist.”

  “But how old am I—I mean, is Deke?”

  “I would say he’s a year or two older than you, Fletcher.”

  “But we’re back in the early ’60s, aren’t we? I mean, I’m driving a ’62 Alfa Romeo—sweet car, by the way—that looks brand new and the fashions—”

  “—you must remember: there are a lot of variables to time travel, Fletcher. Signals get crossed, sound and light waves bend in unexpected ways. My guess as to why we’re spending time in the early ’60s is because we’re returning to the time when you as a boy began acting out so many of your fantasies. Then again, my guess could be absolutely wrong. In the end we land where we land.”

  “It might behoove Lodge 1212—” said Fletcher, but seeing Ames open the French doors, he stopped his scolding and said, “So what exactly can I do for you, Miss Tandy?”

  “I’m speaking for Helena,” said Tandala, not missing a beat. “And on behalf of her, I am requesting a raise.”

  “If Helena needs a raise, don’t you think she should come to me herself?”

  “Helena is shy, Mr. Drake. And I—I am not.”

  “No, you are not,” agreed Fletcher as Ames set an empty martini glass in front of him.

  “She is the best laundress I have ever seen,” said Tandy as Fletcher took a skewer of olives out of the crystal bowl and put them in the glass. “She can get stains out like nobody’s business, and the creases she irons are sharp enough to do damage.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly sold me,” he said, passing Tandy the filled martini glass. “A raise will be reflected in her next paycheck.”

  Beaming, Ames asked his master if there’d be anything else.

  “I think we’re quite well taken care of. Why don’t you relax, Ames; I shan’t need you until dinner.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the butler with a crisp little bow.

  Watching him leave, Fletcher laughed softly.

  “Can you believe I said the word shan’t in a sentence? By the way, very clever way to endear yourself to old Ames.”

  “Everyone knows he fancies Helena.” Tandy sipped at her drink and made a face. “Isn’t it funny that he can be bewitched by a woman even more foreign than I am?”

  “That’s a bit of an overstatement. Helena’s from Poland—you’re from outer space.”

  “I am talking about this incarnation,” said Tandy, waving her hands in circles around her face and chest. “As my dark and bounteous Jamaican self! Your butler can fall for someone who has a different native language, but he has no time for me!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s said things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  The look of anger on her face was softened by hurt. “Yesterday I was going into the kitchen and he told me to ‘move my big black ass.’”

  “Ames? He must have been joking.”

  “Is that funny to you?”

  “No. Truly . . . I’m truly shocked. He’s always been nothing but an absolute gentleman to me.”

  “He’s your butler,” said Tandy. “That’s his job. And of course you’re a color he approves of. Believe me—‘big black ass’ is not the worst thing he’s said to me!”

  “Then I’ll fire him.”

  “Fletcher, I’m not here to disrupt things—well, at least not intentionally.” She sighed. “Officially, I’m here to observe. And what I’ve observed . . . Hoola, baby, to dislike someone for the mere piffling fact that their outside coloring is a little different!”

  “Tandy, it’s ignorance, pure and—”

  “—ignorance is not the word! Can’t you humans see how your many misguided hatreds are so restrictive . . . so earthbound?”

  “We’ve got to stay earthbound. Because of the gravity and stuff.”

  “I know I am what you call ‘preaching to the choir.’ So I shall stop.” She tended to her drink as Fletcher looked toward the beach and the mild surf.

  “How about this view?”

  “Yes,” agreed Tandy. “Earth is not chintzy in its beauty.”

  “Even though its inhabitants rank at the bottom of universal life forms?”

  “That’s the great heartbreak! You’ve got all this beauty, but there seems to be a perverse need to match it with ugliness.”

  “Ouch,” said Fletcher, studying the row of palm trees whose garish wigs of leaves poked above the tiled roof of the guesthouse. “So we’re doomed?”

  “Fletcher, you must remember we Lodge 1212 members are the eternal optimists.”

  “I thought you were the fun seekers.”

  “One and the same.” She swigged down the rest of her drink and dragged the last olive off its skewer with her teeth. “I must run. Clarence and I are going to the movies tonight.”

  “Who?”

  “Clarence. The chauffeur you, Mr. Drake, never use because you like driving yourself.”

  “Ahh,” said Fletcher, nodding. “That Clarence. Say, are you and he—”

  “—I have no idea what we are. Remember, I’m as new to all of this as you are.”

  “And now what am I supposed—”

  “—Fletcher, I am your alien sidekick, not your babysitter. My guess—judging from history—is you’ll find out.”

  Fluttering her fingers in a wave, she scurried alongside the pool, the orbs of her behind bobbing under the thin skirt of her pink uniform, and by the time she was gone Fletcher, for all intents and purposes, was too.

  Live Field Report/Sense-O-Gram

  To: Charmat

  From: Tandala

  Several gifts from Florida: spray from an Atlantic Ocean wave. Feel the adventure and longing. A walk through an orange grove. Pick the heavy fruit that drips from the trees like round orange tears. The smell of the Okefenokee Swamp. I wonder if Earthlings know how many secrets are buried in that dank ooze? Lastly, a fried plantain I bought from a Cuban street vendor. A food that makes you want to move your hips.

  It was a much younger Deke Drake who found himself in a bedroom that embraced swank and didn’t let go. Here, velvet was an accent fabric, supporting silk, the obvious boss of the room. Silk covered the settees and divans that were arranged in small intimate collections, silk draped in great soft pleats from windows tall and wide enough to drive a Rolls Royce through, silk covered the duvet and the dozen pillows of a bed whose four posters were spiraled in carved flowers and curlicues.

  The vanity and armoires, dressers, and end tables had first been used by French royalty centuries past (carved on the inside of one drawer were the words Martine aime le roi) and among the portraits of ancestors were several small paintings—a Manet, a Monet, and one by the niece of the bedroom’s occupant. It was odd that this watercolor of limp daisies should engross Deke Drake, a connoisseur of fine art, but looking closely one would see that it wasn’t the artistry of the painting that intrigued him but its more utilitarian purpose. The painting served as a door opening to a safe, a safe that was being successfully cracked.

  Party music from a small combo rhumbaed up the wide staircase and slunk under the bedroom door as he turned the lock.

  He had decided he was not going to be a jewel thief to work by cover of darkness; at this moment light from a central chandelier and two bedside lamps lit his efforts. An invited guest of the party downstairs, he hadn’t yet announced his presence, instead slipping in through the servants’ entry and up the back staircase, walking softly to Marjorie Allen’s bedroom.

  Ah, Marjorie, he thought, admiring the dowager’s taste as he took a string of pearls that had been scraped out of the shells of dozens of discriminating oysters and a cuff necklace containing eight rows of diamonds that seemed to sparkle and wink at Deke in conspiratorial delight. There was a ruby ri
ng and emerald earrings, and the thief filled the false bottom of his doctor’s bag with all of them, and when his pillaging was through, he shut the safe door and closed the hinged painting of the flaccid daisies.

  Not ready to have his relatively new career foiled by a moment’s carelessness, he looked around the room as he padded across the cushiony carpet, making certain no monogrammed handkerchief or cigarette lighter had fallen from his pocket. Passing an ornately framed mirror, he ignored his handsome, youthful reflection and slipped down the servant stairs and out the back door, walking to his car where he safely locked the doctor’s bag in the trunk of his Dusenberg.

  Briskly he walked back to the mansion and into the party.

  “Why, Deke, you’re late!” scolded Marjorie Allen, sidling up to him as soon as he reached for a flute of champagne from a passing waiter.

  “Sorry, I had some last-minute business to attend to. A crisis in Cairo.”

  “Oh, Deke, you work too hard.”

  “And that’s why I play as hard as I do.”

  The elder woman’s smile was filled with coquettishness and paper-white dentures. “Then I must invite you into my sandbox soon!”

  Deke wiggled his eyebrows and they shared a laugh, and then Barbette Thigpin of the Thigpin Box and Crates fortune asked Marjorie if she’d pretty-please sacrifice Mr. Drake for one moment so that she might dance with him. She spilled a little of her champagne on Deke’s dinner jacket but made up for it by pressing her breasts, sheathed in baby blue taffeta, against his chest, and whispering that Deke could choose whatever fine she must pay for her clumsiness.

  Hmm, he thought, how about the entire contents of your parents’ safe?

  Out loud, he said, “Well, I do have a penalty box in my bedroom.”

  “Ooh,” said Barbette with a giggle. “Do I have to sit in it?”

  “If you’d like. But I’d prefer you recline.”

  Barbette purred into his ear like a contented cat, and Deke pulled her tighter as he led her in a cha-cha around a couple whose bank account contained much more fluidity than their dance steps.