Iceberg Tempting Page 7

  In the six weeks or so since we started going out, I think that we both realized that we were kind of involved with each other, and goodbye was becoming less and less likely. We were no longer simply dating.

  Still, we hadn’t exchanged The Words, nor were we likely to any time soon. Not me, anyway. I don’t like what happens after those get out. So we weren’t exactly a couple, but we weren’t two singles, either.

  Chapter Nine

  Early May, and I was working on a story at my apartment in Bucktown when I got a visit.

  As my tires had not been slashed recently, and I hadn’t seen him parked around Maria’s place, I had pretty much put Mr. Clean aside. Maybe Maria had been right; just leave him alone, he’ll get the message eventually. I wondered about his name, Tod, not Todd with two Ds but Truncated Tod, as though the man was in some way not complete, not totally there.

  Suddenly Tod was knocking on my front door.

  I opened it, and here stood this big tall guy in a trench coat, a face similar to Puddy from Seinfeld; doughy was the word Maria had used to describe him. Yep, he was doughy. There was a curl of hair on his forehead, like a puffy Superman might wear. He was handsome in an insular, indoor fluorescent light sort of way. He was wearing white gloves; the kind pallbearers were issued. Sorry, that was just a little strange to me. “Can I help you?” I said.

  “I’m Tod,” he answered.

  “Gathered as much.”

  “I’m here to talk to you about Maria. Can I come inside? Eh?” Tod was looking past me, over my shoulder, looking with interest into my apartment.

  “Talk to me here, Tod,” I said. I wondered if he had designs on my shower.

  He folded his hands in front of him, and looked down at me a couple of different ways. “You must give Maria up, eh?” he said. “You must surrender her to me.”

  “What?”

  “She is doing evil, you know. Whatever she has done with you since us is evil.”

  Man, was he sweating? Old Tod was simmering right there in front of me, stewing in his own juices. I said, “If she’s so evil, why do you want her?”

  Tod gave the furrowed brow, the one that squeezed sweat into rivulets that streamed down the sides of his face. “You don’t understand, eh? She is committed to me. We made love, and she is mine now. I have conquered her. I’ll try to forgive this lewdness since then, but both of you are in the wrong here. She is mine, eh? No matter what she has done, she is mine by divine right. You must give her to me.”

  “Tod, have you ever heard of free will?” Don’t ask me why, but I was trying to reason with the man. “She’s not mine to give. Even if she were, I wouldn’t give her to you. You’re a creepy guy, you know.” I wondered what his next move would be. He was quite a bit bigger than me, so I hoped that it wouldn’t deteriorate into some wrestling match. But I’d do what was necessary.

  “She is two-faced,” he said. “Give her up for your own good.”

  “Tod, gotta tell you, Man, we almost called the cops about the tires, but Maria stopped me, so I don’t think she’s so evil. About those tires, if you were inclined, you could give me about a hundred fifty bucks for my troubles. And it’s the cops, Tod. Next time you slash my tires, I’m calling the cops.”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, smiling a forced smile. “No more tires for you.” Man, this was a bad guy straight from Marvel Comics.

  “Tod, no offense, but have you taken your Prozac today?”

  Tod turned around, and walked away. Good. No wrestling match. “You’ll pay,” he said, and started down the stairs. “You’ll pay, eh!” he said, a bit louder. And as he descended, progressively louder: “You’ll pay for this!”

  Fuckin’ looney, I thought, and closed the door.

  ***

  “Tod kept saying ‘eh?’ like he was Canadian or something,” I said to Maria that night at her place.

  “Did he say what he’s going to do?”

  “’You’ll pay,’ he said.”

  “He’s been saying that for months,” Maria said. “It might be biblical. I was expecting locusts, or a flood, but nothing. It’s all empty threats.”

  “Tod was wearing white gloves.”

  “He does that for Lent, I think,” Maria said. “Something about not touching anything worldly.”

  “Does that include his pecker?” I wondered.

  ***

  The Cleaning Lady Controversy.

  Maria received a phone call from Chancellor Ullrich at the University of Dayton. He was a man of business, not the stuffy thirties wall portrait chancellor, but a for-real politician with a constituency, the Board of Regents at the college.

  “Hi, Maria,” he said, “We have Teresa Saba’s portrait, but I’m afraid you’ve told us a joke here. A few of us are still laughing. The question is, when are you sending the formal picture, the finished portrait?”

  I happened to be sitting next to Maria at that moment, and I watched as she made a face. “That is the finished picture,” she said.

  “Uh huh,” the chancellor said. “I was afraid that you’d say that. Here’s the deal. You keep five hundred dollars for your time and trouble, and we send the picture back to you. We have no need of it the way it is.” Long pause, silence on this end, too. “On the other hand, if you’d like to fix it, and give her the dignity that we feel she deserves, then the deal’s still on.”

  A lesser Maria would have said Okay, send it back, I’ll fix it. Not my Maria. “Send it back to me,” she said.

  “And you’ll fix it?”

  I watched as she flushed her portrait career down the toilet. “Not a chance,” Maria said. “That’s who that woman was. Bet she’d have been pleased with the picture. And you should be, too.” Then Maria hung up.

  I just sat there watching at her, not knowing what might come next.

  She looked right at me. “You asshole! Paint her with a feather duster, you said.” And there went another evening, not even into a death spiral this time. “Out!” she yelled at me, and it was the quick plunge into darkness; I was out of the door without so much as a kiss goodbye.

  That’s it. We’re done. There’s no fixing it this time.

  ***

  Three days, four, five passed without any word from Maria. It was actually pretty okay, this no contact thing, the no wrath of Maria part, anyway. I was sure that we were finished. I felt stupid. She wouldn’t have done the cleaning lady that way on her own. I blew it.

  So here’s where I probably made some bad decisions. Call me an idiot. It’s okay. I don’t mind. I called Gracie, the girl from Blockbuster Video. After all, she had a copy of ‘Putney Swope.’

  “Gracie,” I said, “You still got ‘Putney?’”

  “Nice to hear from ya,” Gracie said, and it was honey in her voice. “Uh, tonight? You have room for me tonight?”

  And like a fool, I said, “You bet.”

  Man, it was good to see Gracie, that cute face, that tight little body. I called for pizza, and popped old Putney into the machine, and there we were on my couch: a familiar face, a safe environment. Then why was I so nervous?

  After the pizza and halfway through the movie, Gracie said, “You really like this one, don’t you?”

  “What?” Was she talking about the pizza? The movie?

  “You found somebody new,” Gracie said.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You didn’t jump me when I walked in, for one. We’re sitting on a couch, fully clothed, and you haven’t even kissed me.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I leaned over and kissed her, but for whatever reason, it was just a brush against her lips, not the full wet passionate one.

  “Yeah, right,” she said. “Stevie, it’s okay, you know? You’re entitled. We’re not going steady or anything.” She laughed. “Steady, that’s funny, like we’re in high school.”

  Actually it wasn’t funny at all. It was pretty sad. I just didn’t desire Gracie, not a bit. Not a woody to be had there. Shit. That’s when I knew that it was
really bad, I had an incurable case of the Marias.

  Gracie got up. “You can borrow ‘Putney’ for a while.” She headed for the door. “If there’s a change, gimme a call.”

  ***

  From the moment that the agent in New York had written, ‘Send me the rest of your book,’ I’d started to see the old workplace like it was a glimpse into my rear-view mirror. If you thought I had lousy work habits before, you should stick your head in my cubicle at this point. The old inbox was stacked. I was hopelessly behind even by my measure, and it was probably only a matter of time before management would be on to me.

  I had a new story, and I was spending a lot of time writing it right there at work. Not like anybody had noticed, and I just looked like I was busy all of the time.

  Then I got a call, The Call. It was at work. Why wouldn’t it be?

  “Mr. Zielinski?” It was a prim female voice.

  “That’s me.”

  “Yes, hi, this is Wanda.”

  “Sorry?” I couldn’t place her at first. Omigod. “Wanda Tyler?” It was the agent, the one who wanted to see my book.

  “Yes,” she said. “Hi. I’ve read your novel, and there’s a few changes that we might look at.”

  “Excuse me, are you saying that you’re interested?”

  “Of course I’m interested. I want to be your agent. But there are some grammatical problems, syntax, nothing major. I’m not asking you to change anything, really.”

  Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

  I barely heard what she was saying. I was numb. Scared. Sweating worse than Tod.

  Ogodogodogodogod.

  I heard her voice again. “Are you still there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Wanda Tyler started to laugh. “I’m sorry, that’s the worst case of panic I’ve ever heard on the telephone.”

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  “Didn’t need to. Whattya think? Are you interested?” Wanda asked.

  “Yes.” Oh, god, yes, I was interested.

  “We’ll start at square one, okay?” She suggested several small changes.

  “Uh, okay,” I said to each of them. Of course it was okay. “Okay. And okay.”

  “I want to represent you,” Wanda continued. “We can do a contract, I can be your agent for this book, and we can discuss others as we go. How we doing so far?”

  “Uh, I’m okay.” I said okay a lot. Man, I was numb. I had lost circulation in my hands. My feet were doing the old cold sweat.

  “Now you could come to New York, which would probably be a waste of your time this early in the game, or I can just email this contract to you.”

  “Uh, send it to me here,” I said. I wasn’t on the internet at home, and the real business wouldn’t notice, or maybe they just didn’t care. If they did, the Computer Police would’ve dragged me off years ago for writing on the job.

  “Standard fifteen percent,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll take fifteen percent. Standard in the industry. But with me doing the selling, I can probably squeeze that much more out of them than you could by yourself.”

  Giving her fifty percent would have sounded good to me, hell, eighty percent was okay after so many years in the literary desert. Suddenly I was legitimized as a writer; not like I wasn’t a real writer before this, but now I had an agent, and one just doesn’t get that second thing without being pretty decent at that first thing.

  Jesus, I had an agent.

  Chapter Ten

  Maria said, “I can’t stay mad at you.” Man, did she look great, standing there in my hallway, long spring coat and heels, her hair down in that over-the-eye Jessica Rabbit pose. She knew that she looked good. “Gonna let me in?” Maria pushed by me, not allowing that I might not want this. She opened the coat. Naked underneath.

  “You, ah, drove like that, all the way here?”

  “Ooo, I felt so sexy, too.” And then it was the bed, and the sheer fun of makeup sex. There were certain things that we did now as habit; passionate kisses, each undressing the other, though she only had a coat. She wrestled with my pants, and off. God, she tasted great! She felt wonderful, and smooth, and tight, and warm, and I couldn’t get enough of her, but I certainly tried. Again I felt her knees pressing against my ribcage, and we reveled in several days worth of unspent sex.

  “Oooh!” she moaned.

  “Aaagh!” That was almost too fast.

  As we lay there, I said, “I missed you.” Guys never said stuff like that, but I meant it.

  ***

  Maria saw the pizza box from two nights before and said, “That sure was a large pizza that you had there, all by yourself.”

  Oh, shit, I thought. Please don’t make me explain that.

  Watching her think was very much like seeing an inevitable machine, a car wash, for example, as it went from chore to chore. Her eyes traveled around the room, from the empty pizza box, looking for the extra pop glass, and finding it, with Gracie’s lipstick on it. “Uh huh.”

  “Nothing happened,” I said, answering the question not asked.

  True artist that she was, Maria intuited the whole story: though I may have leaned toward fooling around with somebody else, I hadn’t done it. In seconds, I think she understood it all. She smiled, and it was a confident one. “It’s okay,” she said.

  So we settled into a Saturday night, eating Chinese, her choice, instead of pizza. I’m sure that there’s a hidden message in there somewhere.

  ***

  Lou informed me that eight weeks had passed since it had become obvious to everyone there that we were dating. He’d already won the pot.

  I said, “You mean that nobody else in this place thought we’d make it past eight weeks?”

  “Uh, no.”

  ***

  We didn’t know it at the time, but there was a rift at the University of Dayton; some wound had been opened there years before and had been festering for a long time. There were factions and divisions within the Board of Regents. Chancellor Ullrich had aligned himself with the more conservative faction, no surprise.

  What he hadn’t understood was that the cleaning lady’s eleven million dollars spoke far more eloquently than he. Not everyone there was Old Money; a few of the Regents had started out a lot closer to her than to the aristocracy. They saw the feather duster, and they had laughed at first; but then several of them recognized its deeper meaning. Teresa Saba was one of them, a person of working ideals.

  The picture was more than acceptable to the Regents. The cleaning lady was America personified. Maria had captured the woman’s essence, and had encapsulated her spirit, right there on canvas.

  Boy, was that portrait newsworthy.

  ***

  I came home to Bucktown from work, parked my car on the street like a normal person, and went inside. This was a non-Maria evening, which was okay, I was working on that new story. I got a glass of diet Coke and cranked up the old computer. I put last night’s disk into the machine, and tried to call up the story.

  No response. Hmmm.

  Kick out the disk, push it back in. Nothing.

  Reboot the machine, kick it out, push it back in. Nothing.

  Fucker, what did I do? Flaw in the disk? Was something wrong with the machine?

  Try another disk. Nothing! Hey, that’s a novel, my second one!

  I started to panic. My work was gone! Try another! And another! Jesus, all of my disks at home were blank!

  Calm down, willya? I took a disk from my briefcase. I put it in the machine. This’ll tell me, was my machine okay?

  It was. Today’s writing was there. I tried another disk from my portable stuff. Okay. Whew.

  Time to assess. My disks at home were blank, and I didn’t know why. I had my portable backup, current stuff, in my briefcase. All of my novels were also safe in other places, a complete set of them at work, and Lou the First Baseman also had a set. I’m not totally stupid.

  So what had happened here? And
I start to think, Tod. Is that nuts? What nastier thing to do to me, than to erase my writing? If I wasn’t a little goofy about my novels and significant stuff and hadn’t saved them all over the planet, wouldn’t this be sweet revenge for Mr. Clean?

  He had attempted to erase me. Oh, this boy was evil.

  I walked around my apartment, looking for Tod clues. What else had he done to me? Things were shifted, just a little bit. There were a couple of small trophies on my mantel, sharing space with Maria’s bathroom mirror. Dust rings showed, from things being moved. It occurred to me that Maria could have been looking around in a bored moment too, and had done the shifting of inanimate objects, some time when I was passed out, some recent Sunday morning. I couldn’t tell who might have moved things.

  And that’s it. I just couldn’t tell. This asshole had invaded my space and had probably gone through all of my possessions. That was very creepy indeed. I felt violated, somebody had been into my writing, and he did it with evil intent.

  So on an evening that I probably would’ve written a chapter in my next best-seller, I copied everything again, then I made a second extra copy, one for Maria’s apartment. She could mark it something different, recipes, put the disks in a plastic zipper bag. I could ask her to put it at the bottom of her filing cabinet or in a cookie jar or in her underwear drawer.

  I was freaked out for the entire evening.

  ***

  “Are you sure it’s Tod?” Maria asked me, like I’d better be careful not to falsely accuse him.

  “Jeez, Honey, let’s get behind me on this one, okay?” I told her. “This would be like Tod sneaking into your apartment and stealing your paintings.” And she was strangely silent. “Oh, don’t tell me he did something like that, please don’t tell me that.”

  “Just one,” she said. “He only took one painting.”