Chapter 21 – The Party Part I: Professor Edo Stuffs His Face
By ten o’clock all the guests had arrived. The house looked neat and inviting. Delilah had spent the day cleaning and rearranging furniture. Everyone remarked how lovely the place was, which made Giambone proud of her and pleased with himself. It was an acknowledgment that he had chosen right.
The house was not large but it was comfortable and attractive. The living room and the study were decorated in an eclectic Fifties style, with furniture and objets d’art that were culled from the thrift stores or trendy retro shops along Melrose and La Brea. The central piece of furniture in the living room was the crushed velvet burgundy settee, with a sweeping, well-stuffed taut back that rose gracefully toward the center and was anchored at either end by bulbous curled arms. In front of the sofa was a long glass table with two panes of glass that sandwiched covers of old Life Magazines bearing the images of Grace Kelly, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Jonas Salk and Adlai Stevenson. A La-Z Boy was tucked in one corner, upholstered in blue and yellow plaid. Two high-backed Chesterfields were against one wall. Separating them was a small table of inlaid coral, onyx and mother of pearl, the edges skirted with intricately fashioned brass ormolus. The floor was dark-stained oak, in the middle of which was a 9 x 12 rug that carried the reproduced image of an Edward Hopper painting, a woman alone in a hotel room clad in a slip and looking expectantly out her window onto a street lit by a solitary movie marquee. The walls were cluttered with framed prints of museum reproductions. There were also a number of overly painted abstract pieces collected by Delilah from friends who had dabbled with paint, or who spent a year or two in art school before settling for more conventional careers in the film and music business. They were canvases and Masonite surfaces on which acrylic paint had been flung, sprayed or dripped without conscious design or any undue troubling over the science of mixing colors. There was, as a kind of joke, a large black, red and gold velvet “painting” of the Las Vegas entertainers Siegfried and Roy, surrounded by their well-trained, well-fed white tigers. Many of the prints were campy, vivacious nudes a la Betty Page and other famous strippers active on the American burlesque circuit in the 1950’s, paeans to an art form, a tradition, a way of life, of which Delilah secretly felt herself to be a living representative and promoter.
Adjacent to the living room was the study. The walls were painted a dark green. The room was filled with dark shelves of mostly Giambone’s books, his most treasured possessions, which had followed him from before his days with the Plutoids through a succession of apartments and garages of friends, until their patience had been eroded and he was forced to borrow someone’s truck or van to move the collection to a new and more hospitable location. Against one wall was an old leather couch. Facing a window was a large walnut writing desk. Giambone spent much of his time sitting at the desk during the day in a straight-backed Morris chair, reading and smoking and absently gazing out the window toward the street.
On the desk in a picture frame was a nude photo of Delilah, a picture taken as part of a photo spread she had done for Penthouse Magazine when she was 18. She was nude but for a pair of roller skates. She faced the camera in a squatting position with her legs casually spread open, her elbow propped on her knee and her chin resting in her hand. Her body was slender and firm and completely tan. Her pubic area was thick and profusely grown with dark brown hair. She stared at the camera with an élan disproportionate to her years, and a bawdy confidence in the power of her body to extract material favors in the world. Giambone loved this photo, even if he didn’t like the way she had made her living. It was Delilah in an idealized form. She was youthful, sexual and uninhibited. Her pose, her direct eye contact with the observer, easily lent themselves to his fantasy that she was looking at him across the years, that everything about her, everything she had done, was all in anticipation of her future passion for him. Her sunny smile, the mirthful curve of her lips, the open posture of her legs, the suggestion of sexual mischief, of a dark alluring chaos in her eyes, all these qualities enchanted him and combined to persuade him that the young girl was still there in the Delilah he knew. He believed that the young girl she used to be, pliant, yet provocatively reckless, febrile and tight, still lived inside the Delilah of the present. He often masturbated while sitting at the desk and looking at this photo. He even thought of it while he and Delilah had sex. He imagined her as the young girl she had been, the young girl who required his firm guidance and his ability, unmatched by any other man, to bridle her restless lascivious being by the force of his loins, the pacifying effect of his penis on her wild, girlish nature. The photo seemed to challenge him to subdue her, as a daughter challenges her father by flaunting her inchoate sexual power, curious to know if it will have the same effect on him as other men, watching his reaction and charged by the knowledge that it is only a social taboo that keeps him from taking her, from subduing her, from punishing her wantonness with the force of his love.
Giambone was kept busy welcoming the guests. His sister Trinity and her husband Harry showed up, as did his old friend Carson and his wife Beth. Quite a few of Delilah’s friends put in an appearance – her meditation instructor Harmon Vizard and his wife Zelda; a couple of women whose identical occupation of massage therapist seemed dubious, one of whom showed up with her date, a burly LAPD cop in a crew cut and Stanley Kowalski undershirt.
An actress friend named Tara Arizona Leigh made a grand entrance in cheap ball gown.
“I’ve known Delilah a long time,” she told Giambone. “Ever since we took classes together in the art of dramaturgy. That was before Delilah discovered through her breath work and a killer juice diet that her inner archetype is Terpsis rather than Thalia.”
Along for the ride was Tara’s tagalong boyfriend, an earnest fellow named John Smith who, obviously enamored of his achievement, announced that he had just graduated from a “very renowned creative writing program” where, in exchange for an obscene sum of money, he received a diploma with his name on it, hours of tendentious “feedback,” and the names of a couple of literary agents seeking the next new literary sensation with a photogenic face and a novel manuscript with movie written all over it.
Giambone greeted everyone as if he were a long-lost acquaintance. He hugged the men and especially the women. He appeared overcome with emotion to see each new arrival, as though every guest was meant to confirm the fact that he was a head of a household now and soon to be a father. They were there to honor him and pay tribute – a fact true enough in another era. But, really, most of them were there because they’d been invited, and it was a party; the occasion was not so important.
Giambone took whatever offerings the guests brought in the way of various beverages, offered them something to drink, and left them as soon as someone new walked through the front door. He seemed flustered in his role as host, although he loved the attention. He remembered how his father had acted under similar circumstances. The man was perfectly at ease. The memory of that made Giambone more insecure. He tried to temper both his anxiety and his ebullience with whiskey. The combination of alcohol and the embarrassment gave his face a pinkish cast. He was delighted and terrified. That Delilah was pregnant, and that people were present to publicly recognize his imminent role as a father, lent the occasion a gravity he hadn’t predicted. It was really happening. A child would be born to him. It wasn’t just in the mind that his life was now occurring. Soon he would have to face his creation.
Delilah had prepared the dining room table with trays of hors d’oeuvres, pasta and potato salads, fresh breads, cheeses, and sliced meats. There were French rolls, cooked shrimp, salmon carpaccio, herring and roe canapés, tiny, neatly trimmed finger sandwiches, assorted nuts, tortilla chips and salsa, and trays of desserts brought by some of the guests. She had arranged a caterer to provide everything. Giambone scoffed at this idea when she first proposed it. He believed it was the host’s obligation to cook for his guests. But since the magnitude of food was beyond his ability to manage, he let her do as she pleased, although he remained convinced that such an arrangement was antithetical to his origins and proper Italian hospitality.
“I’m not Italian,” she said, then ignored him, as she’d begun to do with most of his headstrong notions about the “proper” way of anything.
He was an expert, she thought, in having an opinion. But he was unable to move his volubly expressed ideas beyond the conceptual stage, no matter how proper they were. In any case, she was paying for the caterer, not he, a point that Giambone thought wise to leave uncontested.
Most of the guests had settled comfortably in various parts of the house. Delilah poured a glass of Cabernet. Feeling mildly lightheaded, she decided she was hungry. She circled the table of food and fixed a plate for herself, nibbling a piece of provolone as she went along. She was met at the boiled shrimp by Harry Edo, the husband of Giambone’s sister Trinity.
Edo was a short, fat, graying academic in his late forties. He was cocky, opinionated, blustery and spoiled like any number of his profession. He was also in the grips of a lifelong insecurity because of his diminutive physical stature. He had sought the cover of a Ph.D. like an inexperienced sailor seeks a harbor after sighting the first dark cloud on the horizon. An advanced degree gave him an effective bulwark and shield with which to set out in the world; a respectable protective device for concealing the narrow range of his real life proficiencies. He was deceptively gregarious. He had no interest in other people unless they seemed to take an interest in him. Then he mercilessly exploited their mildest curiosity, taking their polite and bland inquiries as license to extemporize ad absurdum on the things that he valued most in life – money, status and the accumulation of material goods. He was a parody of the conspicuous spender, the pathological American consumer.
Harry Edo truly believed that success was measured by whoever had the most stuff at the end of the day. Nothing thrilled him more than telling others how much he had, and what he planned on consuming next, especially when it came to cars, Italian suits and computer gadgets. With no sense of irony, he failed to see any measure of ridiculousness in his quest to hoard more and more. Gluttony, avarice, and acquisitiveness were the tenets of his American religion. And no one had any right to challenge his God-given, constitutionally-decreed right to heap up riches. He became agitated and testy, fulminating against anyone with the audacity to point out that his S.U.V. was contributing to the boiling point of the earth, or that his diet of fatty foods and sugar was clogging the arteries of his heart like mortar between bricks, rapidly causing the mutation of his gut into an unbreachable dromedarian hump with no desert in sight.
Edo was moderately affluent and tasting for the first time the benefits of a cash flow that was expanding at a rate almost equal to his waistline. On top of his tenured professorship, he had begun a consulting business that was proving lucrative. He had a steady income from government clients who could afford to spend a lot of cash because it wasn’t theirs. Harry Edo worked out equations and formulas, helping bureaucrats determine the most equitable way to spend money on public education, making sure that the poor black kid in the ghetto got as much as the rich white ones in the suburbs. Practically every state in the Union needed his expertise. Public policy reform was his cash cow. His job was all about figuring ways to cut the public education pie so everyone got an equal share. But despite all the thought he had given to this proposition, all the cogitation about the fair and equal distribution of public revenue, it had made no impact at all in his personal life. He was unable to extrapolate from the equal-share-for-all proposition to the limitation of resources in general, in world terms. To witness his determination to consume as many of the earth’s resources for himself, without thought of the consequences, was to be struck dumb by his bald servility to his own appetite. To hear him talk about his car’s global positioning system, its heated reclining leather seats, or the actual dollar amount he paid for his new suit or his wife’s birthday present, was a gross spectacle whose origins could only be located in some dark emotional deprivation, the effects of which he had no control over. Harry Edo was a machine built for consumption.
“Great party you got going here, Delilah. All this food is dazzling,” remarked Edo, balancing his paper plate loaded down with baked beans, tiny pigs in a blanket and creamy potato salad. The hand that held his plate also steadied a bottle of beer. He pressed them both against his belly for better leverage and support. He picked up a spoon with his free hand and used it to excavate the surface of a lime green Jell-O mold.
“There’s plenty to go around. Eat as much as you like,” said Delilah. She hadn’t met Edo before.
“Are you kidding? This is my third trip to the trough. One look at me and you know I like to eat. No food is bad food, if you ask me. There’s hardly a thing I won’t touch. I can think of only two – Brussels sprout and beets. Beyond that, it’s open season on anything that walks, wades, or bends in the wind. I love it all.”
“That ought to make it easy for Trinity,” she answered, acting the polite hostess.
Delilah stared at Edo’ belly as he tried to balance the wobbly Jell-O on his spoon. She wondered how Edo and his wife worked out the mechanics of fucking. Delilah had never been with a man with such a huge gut. It repulsed her to think of such a large mass of fat swaying above her while its sweaty owner exerted himself inside her pussy. She imagined that rear entry was the best the couple could manage, Edo’s corpulent bowels resting on Trinity’s lower back, the poor woman racing against the clock to have an orgasm before she collapsed from the strain of supporting her husband’s enormous nutrient sack.
“Trinity has recused herself from my diet. She says she won’t be held accountable for my early death. ‘Just make sure you have a high limit on the life insurance,’ she says, ‘so I can afford the crane to lower you in the ground when the big one finally hits.’”
“What? An earthquake?”
“No. You know, the massive coronary.” Edo chuckled. “We eat different things. I like beef; she’s into birdseed. Look at her.”
Edo nodded in the direction of his wife, standing in the next room. Trinity was slim. She had muscle tone, something even approaching biceps. It was clear she worked out or vomited on a regular basis. Delilah was astonished that such a good-looking, healthy woman as Giambone’s sister had married a boor like Edo. She guessed it was Catholicism that kept them together. Maybe at one time Edo was attractive enough to delude Trinity into thinking he was a sound prospect. Delilah liked Trinity. She also hoped the woman was having an affair to compensate for the trials she surely had to endure with her bloated husband. If some way could be found to staple the man’s stomach, Delilah thought, it would free up enough surplus food to feed a small African village.
Delilah decided to change the subject. Talk of food and eating bored her. To her it was just fuel. She had never understood the passion of it. She ate to keep herself going, not for any implicit pleasure it gave. She had Protestant tastes. Her favorite dish was oatmeal and raisins.
“Tony tells me you’re like a professor or something, is that right?”
Edo’ eyes lit up. “Yes,” he said. “I torture people and get paid for it.”
“So, what is it that you profess to know,” she asked him.
She smiled to make him understand that she was asking in the spirit of polite fun. It was a party, after all. She sensed that Edo wouldn’t mind or even catch on to the mild form of contempt she held for pedantic types. She’d been paid to fuck a few over the years, socially awkward souls who trembled any time they were forced to leave the comfortable and tiny province of their acquired knowledge. She was always surprised at how little common sense they had, how little empirical understanding of the art of living in a world where Ph.D.’s had no currency. They were tiny lambs and she devoured them every time one lost its way and crossed her path.
“Oh, it’s an arcane field of knowledge, which is a good thing. Few people understand it. The ones that do, like myself, can write our own tickets as consultants, you know, over and above my teaching duties. In fact, on Monday I’m flying to Alabama to straighten out a mess down there. The tax formula is almost medieval for school funding. Poor kids in that backward state are getting the shaft. Meeting with the governor himself. Never been to Alabama. Can’t imagine what the hell there is to do in Mobile at nighttime. Probably end up getting drunk with a few good ol’ boys in the Marriott lounge. Hope they don’t start talking any of that racist crap, you know, try to feel me out, see where I stand.”
“Why don’t you just tell them exactly where you do stand?”
“Well, it ain’t that easy. I’m there on business. I can’t afford to alienate the client.”
“I guess you get the big bucks for mastering delicate political situations, huh?”
“You know, you’re right. You’ve got to learn the game. It takes years of practice. It’s kinda like a stud horse, a special breed with a high degree of specialization. Not every horse is cut out for the job. There are only a certain few who can rise to the occasion. Ha, ha! You know what I mean?”
“You mean you’re kind of like that horse in your particular field?”
“Exactly. That’s right. I’m an academic stud. Ha, ha! Never thought about it that way, but I like it, I like it. Damn, this potato salad is good.”
“An academic stud sucking off the public tit, that’s brilliant, Harry.”
Delilah was surprised just how irritating this man Edo was. She wanted to pop his gut, just pierce it with a sharp instrument and watch him deflate.
Edo turned serious. He suspected Delilah was having a joke at his expense. He soured a little. His voice became self-righteous.
“Well, you know, someone has to tell these assholes how to spend our money. That’s my job.”
“And I don’t envy it either, Harry; having to stand around Marriotts drinking with a bunch of bubbas. But thanks just the same. It’s crusaders like yourself who make sure these politicians don’t squander our tax money. I think it’s great what you’re doing. Really.”
Delilah wanted to keep it light. Edo was technically a member of the Giambone clan. As objectionable as he was, she couldn’t afford to insult him.
“Why, thanks,” he said. Edo seemed confused, not sure whether Delilah was sincere. He decided she was. Why wouldn’t she be? A smile of swelled pride trotted across his face, parting the hairs of his mustache.
“So, what is it that you do,” he asked her, just in case he was mistaken and she was ridiculing him.
He quickly surveyed the furniture in the room. He figured the best way to get even was to engage in a game of who makes more money than whom. This way he was certain he could restore his superiority.
“Me,” Delilah asked, seeing what he was up to and not prepared to lie down and let him piss on her. “I am an artist.”
Edo smiled. “Oh,” he said, before screwing his face into a pantomime of pain. “That must be rough.”
She laughed, throwing her head back. Then she looked him hard in the eye. Her face was cold and her mouth rigid.
“You might think so, Harry, but it’s a bubba-free kind of existence and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’ve never been forced to listen to one bad lounge act in a Marriott hotel. The artistic life has its plusses.”
The warmth returned to her face, and she winked at him.
“And,” she said, “all that starving we artists do helps us keep our figures, no?”
Delilah placed her hands on her hips, and provocatively thrust her chest out. Edo laughed uncertainly.
“Well, uh, yes. That’s certainly true,” he said with some hesitation.
He was put off balance slightly by the silhouette of Delilah’s breasts. Allusions to sex made him nervous, with his wife in the next room.
“And one in a million does strike it rich,” he offered with renewed brio, regaining his sense of control. “Jack Giambone sure did. Though, it’s doubtful that noise he makes can be called art. But he sure as hell has the money to buy it. Have you seen his collection? You should sell him some of yours. Has he ever seen your work?”
“Uh, I don’t think so. I do performance art, and we haven’t met yet.”
“Performance art, huh? I don’t follow that too much. Kind of like acting, right?”
“It’s about creating illusion to illuminate the truth.”
Delilah felt like being deliberately solemn just because she figured it would irritate Edo, a meat and potatoes guy.
“What you see is what you don’t get, is that it.”
“It depends.”
“On what?”
“On how much money you’ve got.”
“Ah, yes. Money. If money buys truth, then I guess I could say that I’m in the same business as you are, although I don’t exactly use metaphor to provide it. In my business, people pay for the truth straight up. They don’t wanna spend time getting bogged down in subtleties. Just the facts, the numbers, that’s all they want.”
It piqued Delilah that everything that came out of Harry Edo’ mouth was contentious. He seemed intent upon drawing lines in the sand with each comment, as though being adversarial was the only tactic he had for persuading himself and others of his singularity in the world. She wouldn’t let him, not while he was stuffing his face with her cheese blintzes.
“I think you do just the opposite,” she told him. “You hoist up an idea and call it truth, and then design an illusionary system to go around it. You and your clients operate under the illusion that everyone is equal. You all buy into that scheme. Somebody’s gotta wash the dishes.”
“Well, you gotta point there, Delilah. If you say the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are invalid documents, then I guess you’re right. That’s the premise were going on. If that’s an illusion, well, it’s a pretty damn good one.”
“I think we work it from different ends, Harry; I create illusion so my clients…my audience, can pretend that they’re free; freely participating in the performance and the simulated experience of freedom during it. But they’re not. They will always be subservient. You pretend that we’re all equal and free, then cook up schemes to strengthen and promote that illusion. We work from a different premise.”
Edo gobbled up a cracker with a slab of blue cheese spread on it, then took a swig of his beer. He eyed Delilah like she was a provocateur. She could tell he wasn’t used to being challenged. In his business, he was a soothsayer. He had the parchment that said so. All in the princely realm honored it. He was an estimable personage, albeit one with a blustery Western swagger, not the donnish mien of the Ivy League. Yet he had gorged upon the solid conviction that book knowledge was the nearest equivalent on earth to knowledge of the divine. He was a true believer in the hierarchical orthodoxy of higher education, the various rungs of which brought the seeker into a special coven akin to a priesthood, where mental erections were wagged and parried (his being the largest) and worshipped like ancient stele inscribed with abstruse antiphonies to a gender-neutered god, who sanctioned the vain mummery of their myopic fellowship before the herd of the illiterate and insecure.
“Well, that sounds pretty interesting what you do, Delilah. Too bad it’s not something you can sell to Jack. Like I say, he likes pictures. With one client like him you’d never have to worry about whether Tony ever gets another job.”
Edo said this with obvious pleasure, as if he knew where her sore point could be found. His eyes narrowed behind his thick glasses and the corners of his mouth tightened. His head cocked to one side. He pretended to pick at the food on his plate before locating some thinly sliced salmon on a toasted sesame oval crouton. He devoured it in one bite then looked directly at Delilah while he chewed the raw flesh of the salty pink fish.
Delilah resented him immediately. She also guessed that his vulnerability lay in his body. But she resisted the temptation to openly malign it. She was still under the influence of the idea of karmic retribution. She was working on herself at all times, resisting scores of impulses, like murder, revenge and slander. In another lifetime, Edo would have likely made a satisfying victim of her wrath.
“Not everyone is governed by the accumulation of wealth,” she answered, knowing it was a tepid reply. “The pursuit of the almighty dollar to the exclusion of everything else has a nasty habit of eroding the soul. Tony and I don’t have any interest in a barren life surrounded by all that money can buy. It’s hollow.”
“Oh, soul. Yes,” Edo answered. “The vaunted soul. Now if you wanna talk about illusions, that’s a grand one. I think it’s interesting that the proscriptions of the world’s great religions against hoarding lucre never apply to the guys runnin’ the show. You know, the ones in the flowing garbs, fingering the gold baubles and jewel encrusted crucifixes and all that. I have little use for soul. It’s an ancient Ponzi scheme.”
“Somehow I knew that about you, Harry.”
Delilah laughed in a half-hearted attempt to keep it light. Edo was, after all, her guest. She wanted to get away from him, but he kept addressing her.
“Yes. I am an irreverent sonofabitch, it’s true. Still, a man’s gotta live. And if soul is the reason someone would turn down a meal ticket, then the thinking that recommends that, in my heathen opinion, will do more evil than any empire builder. I mean, for instance, look at Tony….”
Delilah winced. “What about him?” Edo kept bringing him up, like he smelled blood somewhere.
Edo looked pleased that she should ask.
“Well, I never understood why he cut himself out of the gravy train. Jack as an employer is not the worst thing in the world. But it looks like those two are on the rocks for good. How long has it been since they talked to each other?”
“I haven’t the faintest.”
She was curious now, but hated to go through Edo for any information. It made her feel subservient. She didn’t want to depend on him for anything.
“Couple of years at least,” he said, answering his own question. “They used to be close, you know, or as close as anyone can get to Jack. Nobody knows what happened. Neither one will talk about it.”
Delilah could tell Edo was prying, hoping she might be able to enlighten him on some of the family intrigue because of her relationship with Giambone.
“That’s Tony’s business,” said Delilah. “I don’t interfere in his family affairs.”
Edo nodded and smiled. She could tell he wasn’t buying it.
“Well, whaddya gonna do,” he said. “These Giambones are crazy. Still, you oughta see if you can get him to patch it up with Jack. It’s not like Tony’s gonna get a call from IBM tomorrow.”
“Very funny, Harry. That’s kind of obvious. Tony does his own thing. He’s always got something lined up. He’s got work comin’ from the movie studios. He’s content. That’s all that matters.”
“Movies. Sure. That’s perfect for him, a dreamer like him. Tony may be content, but the real question is how content are you.”
Delilah was getting angry. She started to protest but Edo interrupted.
“No, I know. I’m not tellin’ you anything. Tony is an artist, really…”
Delilah relaxed a little. She picked at the salsa on the table wishing Edo would leave. She was over the conversation. Edo took her silence as her tacit consent to go on, however, accustomed as he was to hearing his voice, his thoughts, swallowed up by entire classrooms of minds who had paid enormous sums to hear him speak without interruption.
“…though an artist of what exactly, I’m not sure. But fatherhood will focus him.” Edo said this to patronize Delilah, appealing to what he believed was her instinct for becoming a parent, as if the suggestion of children would melt her growing chilliness, as it necessarily must any woman at the thought of babies.
“It sure got me centered,” he went on. “And I’m doin’ great. Before I met Trinity, I frittered my money away, too. Nothing like a wife and kids to sober you up and sow a little fiscal discipline. It was rough at first but, hey, look at us now. Trinity doesn’t need to work. We both drive a Lexus, and the kids are in private school. In wives’ screams begin responsibility.”
Edo laughed at his little joke. Then he paused for a moment, looking thoughtful.
“Still,” he continued, “without Jack, I don’t know how Tony is gonna manage. But I’m sure you guys will figure it out.”
Edo looked at Delilah with mock pity, and scooped some bake beans into his mouth.
“Excellent lay out, Delilah. Really,” he said, motioning to all the food and taking a swig of his beer.
He had won the pissing contest. Delilah was angry, but she smiled. She hated Edo and wanted to kill him, but what he told her, if true, she would have learned eventually. Edo’ disclosure made her feel nauseous. The room she stood in and the next room telescoped, diminishing in size. All the people in it seemed to be tiny creatures squeaking at the end of a long tunnel. She did all she could, fought with the full force of her will to keep from lying down on the floor, or on the table in the dishes of chip dip and tabouli. It didn’t matter where. She could feel the dutiful smile of the hostess still on her face. Could feel vaguely the presence of Edo as he moved around the table filling his plate again. She rested her hand on the table to steady herself. Why, she thought, had she come this way, down this road, knocked up and saddled with a ne’er do well, all for the prospect of money. She had taken a risk. She understood finally that money was what she valued most. Just like Edo did. Just like everybody in the world did except Giambone, apparently. She wanted the child, she kept telling herself. It was better than money, or at least something that plenty of money might make a pleasant experience. But she had to feed it. She would have to feed it. And she didn’t know how. Not with her body going the way it was now. She had, with one bad decision, one ill-conceived gamble, done irreparable damage to the one instrument she relied on to make her money in the past, her body. Without it, she was, like Giambone, useless. Before she met Giambone, she used to think that one day she might buy her own club, when her body got too old to keep her customers happy, customers always hungry for somebody different, somebody a little younger. Her income had always been yoked to the condition of her body, and she knew that, as the years went by, her income would decrease as her body went into decline. She needed to fall back on something solid, something dependable to survive. And she castigated herself now to think that she could have been so weak as to think that a man, any man, either Giambone or his brother Jack, would sustain her. If she were to keep herself going, it would not be through a man, not one man. It would be through all men. She would have to sell what all men want and desire, of which they can never get enough, and for which they will pay and pay and pay again – the fantasy of their sexual mastery over women; their imaginative freedom to manipulate the female body for their own gratification. This is what all men wanted. This is what all men dreamed of when they dreamed at all, on the most rudimentary level of desire: to command woman’s response, to design its outcome, to direct her movements according to his will, to debauch her as an organism no more sentient than a radio-controlled doll. She would incite and exploit their lust, their utterly helpless need to be reduced to a sexual compulsion without impediment, to arrest themselves in the circular freedom and bondage of sexual impulsion. This was the one thing she knew best. She would solicit their imaginations and their ready compulsion to ejaculate. She had learned one thing: it was the easiest money in the world to make. It was a crowded field, but the customer base never dried up. Ever since she’d come to L.A., as a 17-year-old girl from Pismo Beach, she had been a student of the male mind; not the thinking, rational mind, that mind that Harry Edo employed, but the mind that did not formulate beyond the simplest equation of obtaining the purest sense of self-autonomy, the sensation of omnipotence, the exhilaration of complete mastery over another human being. The most necessary thought of a man, after the contingencies of food and shelter, was how to enslave others to do his bidding – for sexual release, for luxury, or mobility, or the freedom to extinguish lives that opposed his will. Delilah would concentrate her efforts on man’s unrelenting thought of sexual release, a profession where she had already made a long apprenticeship. She would take men like Harry Edo, who were abundantly, preposterously assured of their superiority in the human food chain, and engineer them, distill them to auto-reflex machines, unthinking and trained only in reaching into their back pockets for thin wafers of plastic, and reflexively emitting wet puddles between their legs, or the legs of human black widows who sucked their essence steadily, but not exhaustively, making sure, always making sure, there was just enough of the marrow to replenish itself, to build up enough substance to repeat the conditioned response again and again: plastic/puddle, plastic/puddle, plastic/puddle.
Edo’ pomposity enraged Delilah, the more she thought about him. There he was, stuffing his fat face with the fruits of the earth, touting his economic agility, his super status as a winner in the capitalist marketplace, demonstrating his business acumen by the cars he drove, the clothes he wore, and the tremendous girth of his leviathan-like belly. Delilah wanted to exercise her own will to power in a more barbaric way than merely exploiting his male weakness for stuffing his penis in warm holes. She wanted to strip him naked in a classroom full of his graduate students, tie him on his back to a desk and squat over him and empty her bowels directly into his hyperactive mouth orifice, then invite his horrified grad students to do the same, which they would, every one of them, after having had a semester’s worth of his arrogant, blubbery, self-satisfied blah blah blah, and each one would climb up on the desk and squat over his brown-stained mouth and shit a river down his gullet until it spilled out and flowed like lava across his entire pink whale of a body, whereupon Delilah would transport him to the halls of the Capitol in Alabama, straight into the legislative chamber or the governor’s office, where she would parade him at the end of a leash, shit-stained and rank, until everyone was evacuated, seeking relief from the hellish stench, and the State Police were called, who, when they arrived, would arrest Edo for fraud, for masquerading as an expert when he was nothing but a blowsy, bag of shit.
