Even a hare will bite when it is cornered.
Sept. 19. Dear Florida Power & Light:
It has come to my attention that despite my entreaties you still have not turned my power back on in my condo, due to you thought I had not paid my bill. The check is in the mail. Please reinstate the above stated relief henceforth. Sincerely, Larry Feldman.
Five days have passed. I’m at a new stage of grief-stupefaction-after Larry’s announcement, trying to fathom how I managed to land myself in an episode of The Sopranos in Asia. (This week’s episode: Is Dan saving the life of a monster?) Larry’s dominion over me is total: I’ve been horrified into a state of submission. Between the bombshell that he hasn’t rescinded his fatwa and the realization that I’m now for all intents and purposes an accessory, my mental state is disabled; I’m good for nothing more than being Larry’s manservant. He dictates, I type:
Sept. 19. Dear Mary:
Here I am in the hospital with nothing to do but wait. Feel like a prisoner, but even more painful is not being able to communicate with you. Is there any chance of your coming back to me fairly soon? Of course I will pay all your expenses and then some. Please let me know how much money you need and I will have Dan dispatch it. All my love, Larry.
One thing’s clear: Larry’s in his element, reigning supreme. Divulging his fatwa seems to have freed his creative energies, which are further fueled by infusions of imitation Do-Si-Do peanut butter sandwich cookies I managed to find in a local grocery store. His blood pressure is down to 190 over 120 and his mood bullish, his body weak but his drive ascendant. In his box-turtle shades and Businessman’s Running Shoes, conducting business through me from atop his thin-as-silk hospital sheets, he’s the ayatollah of the ninth floor. Since he ordered the A/C to be shut down, I’m wilting in the heat of central China ’s late-September furnace, so disenfranchised I’m not even allowed to correct his grammar.
Sept. 20. Dear Netflix:
You must have me mixed up with another Larry Feldman. I sent back all boxed sets of “Dirty Harry” eight or ten months ago. If you insist on charging me for someone else’s blunder, I will have no choice but to desist being a customer of yours and/or institute legal recrimination with no ado.
Sept. 21. Dear Nuvention Clearing House:
Thank you for your encouraging words. I do in fact have a new invention and one I think you can market to great advantage. Enclosed you will find the business plan for my latest proposal, as well as a personal check to cover the cost of registration. It is my belief that Fortune Rubbers, novelty condoms printed with Chinese cookie-style fortunes, could really strike pay dirt with the gay demographic as well as normal people.
Sometimes I can’t even tell which letters I’m writing for him and which I’m inventing, for sanity’s sake. Other times I forget where I am, sweating in the room where I’ve again risked life and limb to jury-rig extra sheets in the windows against the glare of smogshine that hurts his eyes. In the dim light punctuated by the Arabic gutturals from Al Jazeera that susurrate night and day, I muddle my Middle East geography and half think I’m hiding out with the Taliban in some Afghani cave. Only the periodic flocking of Chinese nurse-groupies relieves the desert mirage. (“Lar-ry! Lar-ry!” they chant when he makes an appearance in the hallway to hobble to the weight scale. He flashes them a V like Winston Churchill in his dotage.) That and the regular appearance of the KFC man, who has a double row of teeth like the keyboard of a harpsichord and who performs a high five with the patient each time he delivers a catered meal of Double Crunch with Honey BBQ sauce.
Artie to Larry: “Professor, look, both you same size now!”
Larry to Artie: “Yes, and that’s for the first time since my bar mitzvah, I believe. Look at Dan, he’s so skinny his shorts are falling off his hips.”
Or did I make that up? Daydreaming has become my only escape, a life-saving pressure valve that allows my brain to, among other things, revert to a time when the whole clan got along: Sam passing out silver dollars, Little Larry showing off his collection of switchblades, Burton patting him on the head, saying, “Aww, isn’t that cute.”
Sept. 23. Dear Florida Power & Light:
Know by these presents that I had 45 pounds of expensive beluga caviar in my freezer. If even one ounce of it is ruined due to you shut off the juice, this is to inform that I intend to seek financial relief in the amount of no less than $85,000.
Meanwhile the personal fusion between us, master and man, no longer even frightens me. I just accept it. That we’re indistinguishable from each other, one creature with borderline psychopathic tendencies, is accepted without qualm by the cashier’s office downstairs whenever I go to make a deposit of Larry’s money into his ever-ravenous account. When I borrow his camera’s memory card to back up his pictures into my camera, as he instructs, it feels like I’m being force-fed a brain implant. Entering his e-mail account to do his correspondence, I feel like I’m leaping into Larry’s body, like Patrick Swayze using Whoopi’s in Ghost. Is the merger almost done? Huwwo, have I really adopted his speech impediment as my own? I’m his lackey, what he might inexcusably call his personal coolie, captive to the mini-sagas that I can no longer orchestrate and which are more than ever like papal bulls, standing fully formed on their own outside the normal rules of discourse.
LARRY ON HIS OWN ETHNIC GROUP
Rarely met a Jew I didn’t respect. I didn’t say like, I said respect. Certain family members excepted. Oh, and except in Vegas, which is populated mostly by irrespectable Jews and irrespectable Italians, bofe wearing Hawaiian shirts.
LARRY ON SOLVING THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
While we’re on the subject, I may as well give you my suggestion for achieving peace in the Middle East. If I were the negotiator, first thing I’d do would be greatly expand the city of Jerusalem. Ninety percent of the old city goes to the Jews. Ninety percent of the new city goes to the Palestinians. The new stuff can be a pile of dirt, they just need to claim some land, and the Israelis should be responsible for developing it for them. They want a homeland, let’s create it for them. It’s called Enlarging the Pie.
LARRY ON PRIVATELY TUTORING HIS STUDENTS
Just because I take my teaching seriously, does that mean I don’t avail myself of the opportunities that present themselves to Privately Tutor my students? I anticipated your curiosity on this point. And the answer is: I’m not beneath it. I mean, I don’t make a practice of it, but on occasion, especially with ones from Puerto Rico. For some reason they’re the ones who always come up to you after the first class to invite you to their rooms for extra help. The five roommates, each one cuter than the last, they know to clear out.
On and on go the disquisitions, as relentless as the clouds of ivorygray smog through the hospital window, velvety and choking. I am so powerless that when I occasionally make a sound of protest, I’m shot down with no attempt to control the sarcasm from on high.
Me: You want me to write another letter to Mary’s uncle buttering him up about chinesepridemall.com?
Larry: Yes, Dan, unless you’re suffering writer’s block again.
Me: But if I may, Chinese pride, Emerald Isle pride, all these Web sites you’ve concocted-do you actually believe in any of these things?
Larry: What do my beliefs have to do with it? This is business. Do I believe in Eskimo pride, just because I own a Web site called igloopower. com? Theoretically, sure, why not, but it’s not something I’m emotionally invested in. Am I invested in gay pride? I don’t want to mislead you, so I’ll have to admit: not that much. Nuffing against them, even though I once got stuck behind a gay-pride parade for four hours and had to wonder, do faggots have to be that proud? But Chinese pride could be the biggest haul of all, now that I’ve been here and see what these people require. Mary’s uncle is a man I feel I could work with. He doesn’t say a lot, but he knows where the bodies are buried.
Meanwhile the dictation goes on at any hour, recording the devolution of our life here.
Sept. 25. Dear Colleagues & Godchildren:
A major development took place yesterday that I am most unhappy about. I left the hospital on my own accord for a little stroll but apparently the powers that be thought I was trying to escape and they have insisted that my subordinate Dan pretty much move into the spare room of my suite to keep watch over me. It is true that I did fall in the street and sustained some fairly impressive scabs on my elbows and knees but I am irked that Dan has to now be here even more with me, taking up the good couch and watching every single thing I do with that upper caste accent of his, not that he can help it. If any or all of you would like to write the hospital to petition on my behalf I will not stop you.
Yes, it’s true, I am his hostage, as he is mine. I haven’t checked out of the Super 2, but I spend more time in the hospital suite than anywhere else, frequently crashing on the couch in his spare room, just as I did after college. My life is all Larry, all the time: smelling Larry in my clothes, dreaming Larry in my sleep. By night our heads rest against opposite sides of the same hospital wall, completing the mind meld. By day I sit in my molded-plastic school chair and type.
Sept. 26. Dear Candey Blossoms Candidate AZ418B:
Please be advised that I do not now nor ever did in the past request a romantic dalliance with you. You sound like a nice girl but I am satisfied with the one I got. Plus you are Korean and I am specializing in China right now, even though you point out rather convincingly that Koreans have more advanced fashion sense than China girls. I thank you for your consideration, but please no more mash notes.
As for the elephant in the room, we make no further reference to it. The fatwa’s just there, lighting Larry up from the inside. In odd moments when I believe he’s sleeping I steal a glimpse at the Internet to try to gain perspective on the issue, Googling the history of the Motor Men and/or digging up strangely pertinent definitions.
cozen transitive verb:
1. To cheat; to defraud; to deceive, usually by petty tricks. Perhaps derives from Early Modern French cousiner, “to defraud; literally to treat as if a cousin (hence to claim to be a cousin in order to defraud).”
So much have I become his Mini-Me that I find myself thinking, Maybe there is something sweet about the life of a munitions dealer. After all, isn’t that the profession Rimbaud entered after resigning from poetry at age nineteen-how bad could it be? Larry’s shuffling walk, his stumbling gait, I now view as languid. Even the fatwa now makes a kind of mad sense to me. Larry’s not an evil monster. He’s merely concocted the perfect payback for his disadvantaged life. And it is perfect. Burton was the first golden boy of the overprivileged generation from which Larry was excluded. By screwing Burton, he’s in effect screwing this whole generation of rich snots, including me.
And by roping me in, he’s made me a party to my own screwing.
Only one thing is going to snap me out of this-seeing Jade hop two-footed out of her bullet train from Beijing to visit us.
“Hey there, 24.”
“Hello, 84.”
I’m touched by her smallness when we hug on the platform. Pulling away, I’m amazed by all I’d forgotten or hadn’t sufficiently noticed: those oblong nostrils, the bubbles in her teeth that keep re-creating themselves. She has a delightful thing she does with her tongue when she speaks. Sometimes it licks her bottom lip so it’s as glossy as lipstick, other times it curls beneath her back teeth in an almost impish manner. How had I overlooked this before?
And she’s so happy! “I nudge you,” she says, pushing my shoulder slightly.
“I nudge you, too,” I say, returning the endearment or whatever it’s supposed to be. This makes her happier still, her face both familiar and new, and so animated I can barely keep up with it. But then one last fleeting hug as her face takes a sudden downturn.
“Worried about you and Larry so much!”
So we’re off.
In the cab from the train station, I have a silent conversation. Cool God! You who maketh Situations Splendid! Thank You for the women You alwayssend my way. Where would we men be without them? Women arranged for me to find this hospital, women have been caring for Larry in this hospital, women do everything but pack my lunch and give me milk money! How in the world did You engineer them so fierce and loving? I even got e-mails in the last few days from my old Asian flames, Corazón and Company, who forgive me, of all things…asking what they can do to help! O Lordy Lord I long to praise, who chilleth out the passions of crazy lovers in due time and restoreth order between cousins, where would we be without You?
Per Jade’s request we go directly to see Larry. I usher her into our sheet-darkened cave, kicking Ring Ding wrappers out of the way, closing the door to the bathroom so no vagabond scents might offend her quivering oblongs. Just having someone in my corner to objectify things rouses me from the stupor I’ve been in since the Shabbos Duck. I reclaim myself.
The deposed ayatollah is snoring. Jade looks him over fondly, fretfully, maternally-the hulk reduced to a fetal figure under a blanket that shudders with his breathing.
“You really stay here now?” she whispers. “I thought you joshing me.”
“Oh, ain’t no joshing matter.”
“Why he keep cell phone in Kleenex box?”
“So he won’t lose it, along with his important documents.”
“Why instruction papers taped all over walls?”
“To remind him where the Kleenex box is.”
Jade assesses the situation with a gravity I haven’t seen before. “Oy vay,” she concludes. “What Dr. X say about situation?”
“We haven’t been able to see him.”
“Ma?!” she cries, a hoarse whisper. “But this is the deal, you are here for Dr. X.”
“We’re just playing by their rules.”
Jade takes note of my helpless grimace, makes a decision. “No matter,” she declares. “We find Dr. X now, get the fresh scoop.”
Instantly Larry wakes up. “I’m coming,” he says.
“The patient spying on us!” Jade giggles, giving him a kiss on his cheek. “You overhear all our state secrets.”
“Huwwo, Jade, huwwo, Dan,” he says. Just by the pitch he uses, I can tell, mercifully, that we’re back to our original dynamics. His reign of terror’s over.
“But we have no appointment,” I note.
“We hunt him down!” Jade says.
Larry and I exchange a wary look, the first eyeball contact we’ve had in a week. Why hadn’t we thought of that?
“By the way, Dan, you don’t have to worry about my conduct,” he says as Jade and I help him put on his Sunday best. “I’ve mastered a blend just for situations like these-a unique mix of obsequiousness and assertiveness that I think you’ll appreciate.”
“Better to err on the side of shutting up,” I caution him. Sorry if that came out unkindly, but I’ve just come off a dark week, and with so much at stake in this meeting, we can’t afford to have anyone rock the boat.
“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” he replies good-naturedly. “It’s doubtful you’ll hear peep one from me.”
I’m not letting him off the hook. “Whatever you do,” I say, ducking into the bathroom to prepare, “just don’t pitch him any inventions.”
“Scout’s honor,” Larry says. He flashes me a smile meant to be charming.
On the fourth floor, Jade and I support a formally clad Larry by either elbow as we find a wall directory behind glass. Jade runs her finger down a list of Chinese names, and we travel through a maze of corridors until we locate the corresponding office number. The light under his door indicates that Dr. X is in. Larry stops me from knocking so he can push three mini Dove chocolates into his mouth. “Energy,” he explains.
“You sure you’re okay to do this?” I ask.
“Give me thirty seconds,” he says, pushing in three more. Finally: “Let’s do it.”
Just as I’m about to knock, though, another delay. Larry is looking at me as though a turkey just flew out of my nose.
“You took your earring out,” he says.
“You noticed.”
“I do have my ‘on’ days, Dan.”
“And let me tell you I never take out my earring for anyone,” I admit. “Not to interview heads of state, not to speak to a convention of shrinks, never. But just this once, I want to make sure there are no glitches.”
“I appreciate it,” Larry says. “This is a very straight individual we’re dealing with.”
Does Larry also notice that I’ve gargled with Listerine and scrubbed my nails? I haven’t taken this many precautions since the reunion with the kidnap cabbie. But after all, what if Dr. X receives a phone call from a certain medical colleague at Harvard-who doesn’t realize how he’s cooking his own goose-and deems it inadvisable to proceed? I need all the credibility I can get.
Larry and I both take a deep breath. Only Jade is completely composed, a blank slate.
We knock.
And are admitted into a plush office. Two walls are lined with ceramic eagles and parrots. In between the sculptures are expensive unopened bottles of imported scotch-more showpieces. The rest of the walls are taken up with photos of Dr. X smiling suavely with various sheiks and international CEOs. But in person Dr. X doesn’t smile as suavely. In fact, he doesn’t smile at all. He looks like a stern older brother of the pleasant man in the photos.
“Your country give us many problems,” Dr. X begins after ushering us to our seats.
I gulp.
“So many bad words, rumors about what we doing. They call us murderer! Say we kill students for kidneys! Members of Falun Gong outlaw sect. We never kill these person. Only murderer-criminals who deserve be killed!”
This is not going well. I look at Jade but get nothing back. Do I see a chastened look on Larry’s face? But he’s impossible to read as well. There are plastic potted plants in all four corners of the room, looking rather proud of being plastic. A slight smell of toilet lingers in the air.
“ China is not so bad,” Dr. X continues in a scolding tone. “I am not a member of the Party, but I believe that for Chinese our system is the best. Not absolute freedom like you have, but little by little. We have over two-thousand-year history. Give China time. Maybe fifty, one hundred years we be like you. But not now. You want us implode like Soviet Union? No, slowly, slowly is the ticket, also quietly, quietly.” He takes off his orange-tinted Bono glasses and tosses them on his desk.” You understand?”
I understand. I cannot tell whether Larry understands. As for Jade-I’ve never seen her so unreadable. Her eyes trap the light to reveal zero.
“And don’t take picture of me with cell-phone camera when you pretend you text-messaging! No tricks like those, I not born yesterday…”
“No, certainly not,” I say.
“Last year simple,” Dr. X continues, putting his glasses back on. “I do more than hundred and fifty kidneys, important people all over world. When I do them, they become lifelong friends. They help me. One hand wash other. You understand?”
In case I didn’t, there’s a photo of Dr. X shaking hands and exchanging toothy grins with a famous sixties American radical I almost recognize. I can’t quite remember: What did the radical do to get on Nixon’s enemy list? And where’ve I seen those ceramic parrots before?
“This year very difficult. That is why number-one importance is silence. I do not tell government I work on Westerner. I perform in secret. If government know I need kidney for Westerner, they take knife to my program, shut down hospital. So number one is silence. You must protect my program.”
“I will tell the truth,” I say.
This is a tactical error for which I’m immediately taken to task.
“No truth, no lies. Just silence. Otherwise I not able to get permit to help foreigners, not just your cousin, everyone.”
“No, of course not, I understand.”
“Only silence…”
As though in response, the room falls into a hush. Just as the doctor ordered. I can make out the ticking from an antique grandfather clock in the corner, doubtless the gift of a grateful tycoon somewhere. Tick-tick…tock…
Am I not dressed properly? It’s well and good that I took out my earring, but the rest of my business attire is hardly up to snuff. Untucked shirt, goatee that hasn’t been groomed since I arrived in China, hat that isn’t quite as white as it was before encountering this air… No wonder Dr. X is directing all his comments to Larry and his Albanian threads. Every time the doctor is forced to swing his head in my direction, he keeps his eyes closed. At least we’re both two-fisted in the fake-power-prop department…
Tick-tick…tock…
There’s a sound to my left, a bullfrog warming up, tones so low I almost don’t recognize them for a minute. Then I realize they’re emanating from Larry’s throat.
“I couldn’t help noticing there’s no security on your office door,” he says.
“Why need security?” Dr. X says irritably. “We have guards at front door, many guards strolling grounds-”
“Why is because anyone already inside the hospital can access your sanctum with impunity,” Larry informs him expressionlessly. “What you need…”
To my horror, Larry regales Dr. X with a description of his “mock security system,” an ornate wall plate studded with plastic buttons: black, yellow, red. “But no wires, no fuse, no circuitry,” Larry informs him. “Besides being a plain wall plate, ninety-nine cents at most hardware stores, with about sixteen cents of added decoration, it’s nuffing.”
Dr. X contemplates the notion for a long minute. “It’s nuffing?” he echoes.
“That’s the beauty part,” Larry says. “It doesn’t send out a silent alarm to notify the police. Doesn’t set off a siren to scare the neighbors. It does nuffing but let the perp imagine the worst.”
I shoot Larry a warning look meant to signify, What happened to Scout’shonor? He shoots one back that signifies, What do Scouts know about building rapport?…and resumes maintaining his deadpan gaze.
Dr. X pushes out his chair an inch. “I hook up how?”
“Self-sticking adhesive on the back.”
Dr. X loosens the muscles of his face, and for the first time I can see that it would be a pleasant face-that is, if we were on the same team as those well-nourished CEOs. “How many I can buy?”
“No need,” Larry says. “Once you give the word, I can have four dozen speeding their way to you, free of charge.”
Larry allows a small smile to squat on his lips. Dr. X does the same, filling the smile with the filter end of a Benson & Hedges cigarette that Larry leans to light, after which he leaves the Cosmos Club matchbook on the desk facing himself, so Dr. X has to strain a little to read it.
“I like the way this man think,” Dr. X says to no one in particular, exhaling yellow smoke, perusing the matchbook, exhaling smoke that’s even yellower a second time. “So to matter at hand. I need best kidney for this situation, suitable and young. I have already potential donor being check for disease, AIDS and so forth.”
“So wait,” I say cautiously. “Does this mean we’re moving forward?”
“I help you because you are friend of friend, but you keep secret top priority. I like Americans, but please, no more Americans! You getting last kidney in China.”
I mask my excitement by skimming my eyes over the medical tomes lined up impressively in the bookcase behind Dr. X’s head. A video titled Carnivore Babes is in among the tomes, making no effort to disguise itself. Jade maintains her blankness while her pupils make tiny flickering motions as though observing a Ping-Pong match under a microscope.
“We are peppering very many documents for permission to go through,” Dr. X continues. “Need strict order from high court. Paperwork in process for donor to sign, also his family, everyone be on same page, no coercion.”
I look over at Jade, who betrays not so much as a blink. I don’t need to look at Larry. I can hear the knuckles being cracked beneath his poker face.
I can hardly contain myself. “You pepper all the documents you need,” I say. “So do you mind if I ask who the donor is?”
“Bad-bad criminal,” Dr. X says. “Thirty-one years of age and already kill many people. Break in woman’s house, kill woman’s father, then decide he want no witness so come back and kill woman and woman’s baby. Very bad man!” he says with surprising vehemence. “I would kill him hundred times!”
Tick-tick…tock…
After a heated pause during which the toilet smell grows a little sharper, Larry and I choose the same second to both blurt out questions. I let him go first.
“Any way I can try out the kidney for a few weeks and get my money back if it doesn’t work?” Larry asks.
“Ho ho,” Dr. X says. “Like take for test drive!” Dr. X seems to enjoy the question. I’m the only one in the room, besides Larry, who knows that Larry isn’t joking.
My turn. “Any way I can see the operation?”
“See, how you mean?”
I mime adjusting the focus on a pair of binoculars. “See? Be in operating room to watch.”
Dr. X reacts as if I’ve uttered an ageless witticism. “Oh ho, equally funny. Not even in your country. Not anywhere in world. Surgeon get nervous, slash by mistake, bloody mess everywhere! Oh ho ho!” Dr. X says, leaning back to put his polished loafers on the desk. His eyes are more or less open when he swings his head in my direction. “You not such lousy fellows, you two!”
Even the grandfather clock seems to be enjoying our presence now. The glaze on the ceramic eagles, also the grins of the sheiks, seems to glint along with the bottles of show-off scotch. Besides me, Larry’s the only one in the room who knows I’m not joking.
I seize the opportunity to abet the surgeon’s good spirits with a measured amount of flattery.
“You are a young man to be in such a position of responsibility.”
“Only look young, perhaps!”
“Oh ho ho,” I say. “At the top of your game. And you have traveled the world, I see from the photos.”
“Oh, yes. I have been to your country six time. Conferences in Boston, Chicago, D.C., New York, Miami -”
“ Miami,” Larry says.
“My daughter goes to school in Miami,” Dr. X says.
Larry’s knuckle-cracking goes into double time.
“You know, of course,” I say, “that your patient, Larry, is a professor who lives just outside the Miami city limits. He is in a position to provide help for your daughter.”
“Oh, sank you,” Dr. X says, crushing out his cigarette eagerly in the soil of a plastic geranium.
“Whatever she needs,” Larry adds. “Jobs, references, apartments. I used to own a building not far from the water. Four apartments. They told me I needed to abide by rent control. I gutted the first three floors, made one jumbo apartment. Guess what? Bye-bye rent control!”
I glare at Larry. “But of course there will be rent control for your daughter,” I say.
“Goes without saying,” Larry says, glaring back at me. “This building wasn’t even in Miami, it was in Boston.”
“Whatever she needs,” I repeat. “And I myself live only a plane ride away!”
“Only a plane ride!” Dr. X is delighted by this.
“So we must host you the next time you come to visit your daughter. Larry can show you the best spots for food.”
“Oh, sank you very much.”
“You like sea cucumber?” I ask the surgeon. “Larry is something of an aficionado when it comes to sea cucumber. He knows the best restaurants for sea cucumber in all of Miami!”
“Oh ho ho,” Dr. X says cheerily. He actually rubs his hands together.
Larry’s not one to be outdone, unless it’s in his strategic interest to be so. “And of course you know that Miami is one of the major sea-cruise capitals of the world,” he adds.
“Yes?” Dr. X asks, anticipating happy tidings so acutely that he raises his eyebrows with pleasure. Handsome, handsome man, I decide.
“Yes. To look at my corn-fed appearance, you might think I’ve never ventured beyond the Bible Belt. Maybe just to Montreal to buy knockoff meds. But how wrong you’d be. I don’t think even Dan knows this about me, but I have taken numerous deep-discounted, spare-no-luxury cruises out of Miami, courtesy of one of my ex-students from Puerto Rico who now functions as a flack for one of the major liners.”
“I like cruise very much,” Dr. X says, wide-eyed. “To where they go?”
“They’re so cheap I don’t even ask where,” Larry replies. “She gets me special deals to the tune of two hundred and forty-five dollars per person including port charges for a week in a penthouse suite, outside balcony, marble tub with Jacuzzi, freebie shrimp cocktail at any hour, all the chocolate strawberries you can eat. Good for your head, all this luxury? Put it this way. For two forty-five, that’s the cost of a single psychiatric appointment, and which do you think will make you feel better about yourself? Bottom line: Anyone I say, she can set up with identical privileges.”
“Ooohhh,” Dr. X says, nearly speechless. “You are fortunate man in your connection, I see.”
“Not really,” Larry replies flatly. “She wasn’t anyone I even cared for, particularly. (By this I mean I never felt moved to Privately Tutor her. Very light-skinned, but still not my type. All I did was give her a ten-day extension, and she considers herself forever in my debt.)”
“But I share your zest for foreign experience,” Dr. X says.
“Oh, I see what you’re driving at,” Larry corrects himself. “No, no zest, not for me, not really. Travel makes me depressionistic. Matter fact, after I get home from this trip, if I ever step more than ten yards from my condo again, please shoot me.”
Tick-tick…tock. Jade’s eyes are as dark as marbles.
“Hold everything,” Larry suddenly says. “I may have misspoken. There actually may be a twelve-dollar port charge I didn’t report in the Bahamas.”
“Twelve dollar I can manage!” Dr. X chortles, coming around the desk to clap Larry on the shoulder. “I like the way you operate, Larry. Good head on you shoulder!”
“The appreciation is mutual,” Larry replies without emotion, discreetly shrugging out from under Dr. X’s hand. “And meantime we will keep your secret very silent,” he says.
“Yes, first thing is silence…”
“If asked, Dan here will find a way to disguise all the pertinent facts,” Larry says.
“Disguise very important,” Dr. X says. “Sometime matter of life and death.”
“Dan’s very strong in that department,” Larry says, opening up a second line of assault while I adopt an expression of deep modesty. “Every manner of persuasion. You should have seen the masterful way he talked his way out of things when we were kids.”
“Yes, me, too,” Dr. X says, chortling at the memory. “In Cultural Revolution, I pretend my family all a bunch of poor peasant!”
“That truly is amusing,” Larry says with an unamused expression.
“Just a bunch of hilly-billy dirt farmer!” Dr. X says. He is doubling over with laughter. “Rural weed pokers, even with advance degree!”
“Dan, too,” Larry continues, killing two birds with one stone-making points with Dr. X while taking potshots at me. “During his hitchhiking days, he used to convince his drivers they wanted to go where he was going, not where they were going, even if it was miles out of their way. Did you know he was voted Con Man Who Will Sell the Brooklyn Bridge by his senior class in high school?”
“Well, I was also voted Best Actor, because I wanted to channel my abilities into something artistically acceptable,” I say, firing Larry a cautionary look.
“Didn’t I tell you? My cousin!” Larry says, beaming at me proudly but also with more than a little malice.
Dr. X stops his wheezing to look me over admiringly: my ratty sandals, my filthy white hat. “Yes, that truly impressive,” he says.
“A total bunco artist!” Larry brags.
I cross my legs and clear my throat and do everything but kick Larry under the table to let him know it’s time to start wrapping up.
Larry ignores me.
“All the best writers are like that,” Larry expands. “Faulkner was considered a total goldbricker by his townsfolk. Frank McCourt, the review of ’Tis in his hometown Limerick paper was headlined ‘’Tisn’t.’”
Now I do kick Larry while Dr. X rocks with hilarity at this new information. Down below, where I meet Larry while pretending to adjust my Velcro sandal, I mutter, “How the fuck are you in possession of these facts?”
“Hey, I read the funny pages like everyone else,” he mutters back, before bobbing above the table again. When I ascend, Dr. X is scribbling his personal cell-phone number on a business card, just in time to present it to me with both hands and the slightest of bows.
“Sank you,” I say, giving him mine, not quite so impressively. But he seems to enjoy the splotches on my well-traveled card, perhaps figuring that an organic business card goes with my getup.
“Perhaps at our next meeting, I will tell you details about my latest breakthrough,” Larry tells Dr. X. “A UFO hotline so people who think they’ve seen a flying saucer won’t feel so alone. They get a friendly voice on the other end of the line taking down their information with the respect they may or may not deserve.”
“UFO! I am UFO buff, big time! Tell me details now!” Dr. X begs.
Larry sadly shakes his head no. “1-800-I SAW UFO, is all for now,” he says.
Dr. X is jittering with so much excitement I half expect him to haul out a violin and start playing “Danny Boy.” Instead he comes around from behind his desk and urgently starts rubbing both of Larry’s shoulders. “I love UFO! UFO give me chance to sharpen party-host abilities, entertain my friends at soirees with many creepy tales!”
“I look forward to telling you more after the surgery,” Larry says indifferently.
“Me as well!” Dr. X confirms, rubbing both of Larry’s shoulders energetically. “So now we have to wait for surgery, but not so long,” he says.
“I hope so, because Larry is visibly weaker than when we got here,” I say. “As you know, he took a fall recently-”
“We are aware of these developments. We monitor closely,” Dr. X says, handing me a camera and gesturing Larry and Jade to clump together with him for a group photo.
“How long do you estimate before surgery?” I say, focusing.
“When get order from high court, perhaps one week, two weeks,” Dr. X says, directing a few phrases to Jade in Chinese while composing his all-purpose professional smile for the portrait. “Usually many months, but since you special friends, I insist to get done sooner. Shhh, secret…”
Two weeks!? How did we just blast past the Badminton Boys from the Middle East? I contain my excitement. I contain my guilt. But what can I tell you-I’m an American: How I channel my guilt is to ask for more.
“If it can be done any sooner, we’d appreciate it…”
“Sooner the better,” Dr. X says. “I know you must be eager to get home to your two little boys.”
Click! Dr. X posing with his suave international smile. Jade staring into the flash so no light escapes her eyes. Larry looking as happy as a mug shot. Carnivore Babes barely managing to fit inside the frame.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “Of course. How’d you know I have two-”
No time to finish my question. Everyone is already shuffling to the door. Pocketing his Cosmos Club matchbook, Larry glides languidly out of the office arm in arm with Dr. X. Jade and I follow in stately fashion, like the parents after a wedding ceremony. We finally managed to get our least-marriageable daughter hitched…