There I thought about Linda.
And drank.
In the morning, I woke in an alleyway, cleaned up a bit in a convenient men’s room, bought a new set of clothes with my Diners’ Club card, rented a hotel room with my Diners’ Club card, ate a meal with my Diners’ Club card, and quite systematically made phone calls until I located an abortionist. I made another phone call to Linda, cabbed to her apartment, and spent two hours in bed with her to prime her for the ordeal ahead. On the way to the greedy little rabbit-snatcher I stopped at my bank and cashed a check for a thousand dollars. The abortionist, God love him, did not honor Diners’ Club cards.
I had the unhappy thought, while I waited for Linda to come out of it all, that she might die under the knife. This would have been properly dramatic, but it did not happen that way. She recovered, and I kissed her, and never saw her again. Yet the experience, as I thought of it now, was jarring.
I had conceived a child, sure enough. Had gotten a woman to conceive one, at any rate. The entire arrangement was incomprehensible. The notion that a few idle moments — well, not so idle, but hardly serious ones — a few moments, call them what you will, of sack time with Linda Holmes had resulted in this entity, this child. And now this child like Macduff was untimely ripped from its mother’s womb, and was gone, flushed down the toilet of a friendly abortionist who didn’t honor my Diners’ Club card.
So I think I knew how Jodi felt, God bless her.
It was evening when the plane landed in Rio. It was winter, of course, but a winter in Brazil is not like a winter in New York. If we had been further south, there would have been snow around and all that. As it was, it was more like a New York spring. Cool, clear, a little muggy but not uncomfortable.
The combined officialdom of Rio de Janeiro passed us through Customs with no difficulty at all. Our passports, proclaiming us to be Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Christopher, were in good order. Our wee one, who behaved lamblike by calling us Mom and Dad in front of the baleful eye of a Portuguese-speaking flunkey, was received with smiles from every corner. He belonged to us, obviously, and they gave him no more trouble than they gave the rest of our luggage. We found a taxi, loaded ourselves and our suitcases and our moppet into the back seat, and gave the driver our destination a hotel named El Punto Finale.
“I think he’s cheating us,” I whispered to Jodi. “We’ve passed this corner before.” This after a long and round-about ride.
“But there’s no meter in the cab,” she said.
There wasn’t. By the time I had an explanation figured out, we were somehow in front of the hotel, and the driver was asking in English only slightly better than my Portuguese (and I speak no Portuguese) for a dollar, sir. Obviously, he hadn’t conned us. Obviously, everything was fine. I gave him two dollars because I had misjudged him and he grabbed up our suitcases, beaming crazily, and toted them into the lobby.
The clerk had our reservations, made for us via redoutable Al. We had a penthouse suite with a view of most of Rio — a room for us, a room for the kid, a room to sit around in, a room with a bar in it, and a pair of bathrooms. There was a thick carpet all over, and the bellhop told us in flawless English that he could get us anything we wanted.
I told him a bottle of Scotch would be nice. He asked us what brand, and I mentioned Vat 69.
He went away. He came back with ice, Vat 69, soda, and ginger ale. I made him take away the soda and the ginger ale — only in Brazil would anyone conceive of mixing Scotch with ginger ale. I poured drinks for Jodi and myself, glowered at Everett until he ran off to his own room, and drank.
“He could have gotten us anything,” I told Jodi. “Maybe I should have asked for something tougher.”
“Like what?”
“I should have told him to send up a girl,” I said.
“But you’ve got a girl.”
“Two would be twice as much fun.”
Jodi licked her lower lip pensively. “I knew a man who thought that way,” she said. “That two would be twice as much fun.”
“Who?”
“I don’t remember his name,” she said. “I knew him professionally, Harvey.”
“A client?”
“A client. It was a call job, Harvey. I was working through this agency, like any agent except their cut was more than ten percent. Closer to half, really. I got a call to go over to a co-op apartment in the east sixties. Money — you know?”
“I know.”
“So I went over there. There was this guy, maybe forty-five, and there was this girl, maybe thirty. I was maybe twenty-five myself at the time. A few years ago.”
She smiled. I poured more Vat 69 in her and more Vat 69 in my glass, and we touched glasses together. It’s an old custom you can get neatly fried. A colleague of mine once theorized that it was the clinking that stoned you. That if you did the same thing with glasses of skim milk you would have the same hangover in the morning. A theory, for better or for worse.
“She was a sort of sloe-eyed thing,” Jodi was saying over the brim of her glass. “And I thought it was a mistake, that they had sent us both there or something because some bonehead got his wires crossed. Or his fingers, or his signals. I can never keep my clichés straight.”
I told her to go on.
“But it wasn’t a mistake,” she said hazily. “It was for real. This forty-five type had a taste for orgies, I guess. He thought two would be twice as much fun you see.”
I say, “What did he want you to do? I mean, two could be trouble. Unless the guy had managed to grow a second—”
“No.” she said firmly. “He only had one of those, and it was a pretty ordinary one anyway. You know what he wanted us to do, Harvey? Do you have any idea?”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
She waited while I refilled the glasses. Then she said, “He had us take off all our clothes. Both of us.”
“That sounds like a pretty fair beginning.”
“And then he had me lie down on a bed, Harvey. On my back naked.”
“It figures.”
“And what do you think happened next?”
I made a pretty decent guess. It was what I would have done under the circumstances, and I figured, well, what the hell.
“He didn’t,” she said. “She did.”
“Huh?”
“She got on the bed with me,” said dear Jodi, “And she started to do things. Like feel my breasts. Here, give me your hand, Harvey, and I’ll show you—”
“And here, too. You know.”
Damn right I knew.
“And so she made love to me,” Jodi said. “This sloe-eyed thing made love to me, and the guy who was picking up the tab just stood there watching, and drooling a little. She did things for about half an hour and she damn well knew what she was doing.”
“How was it?”
Jodi thought about it. “Not bad,” she said. “Because I could close my eyes, Harvey, and pretend that it wasn’t a girl but a man. And you know what she was doing to me, of course. With her hands and her mouth. I’ve had men do that to me—”
“Like me,” I said, “for a starter.”
“That’s right. And I like it.”
“Damn right you do.”
“Don’t growl,” she said. “Anyway, it was just the same thing, and she was okay at it. And besides, I knew it was all an act, what she was doing. She was just a poor whore hired for the occasion, same as I was, and it wasn’t as though she was a lesbian or anything. So I didn’t mind it too much.”