The clock crept towards the final five minutes of the current session. Any second now the first of the clients being attended to would leave the shelter of the curtains. Guinevere swallowed hard. Which of her assistants could be persuaded to handle this job for a hundred-dollar bonus?
“Danny-boy,” she whispered, “take Mr. Mulligan in charge and do whatever he wants.”
“But, Gwinnie—!”
“Do as I tell you!” She stamped her foot.
After all, he is a considerable celebrity …
Forcing herself to overcome her nausea, she said, “Forgive me, won’t you, Mr. Mulligan? But—well, this is rather an incongruous guise to find you in!”
“Incongruous my insalubrious hole,” Chad Mulligan grunted. “It’s the same way I’ve been looking for the past two years or more. What I’m going to find incongruous is what I’ll be like after your mechanics have overhauled me. But I’m giving up. I’m quitting. The sheer God-blasted inertia of this asinine species has defeated me. I can’t make people pay me attention whether I argue, or bellow, or daub myself with shit. I propose to pretty myself up and join the rest of you Gadarene swine in debauching myself magnificently to death. All right, where do you want to put me so your other customers won’t see the state I’m in?”
And he added over his shoulder as Danny-boy led him away: “Send someone out for a quart of liquor, will you? I need something to nerve me for this.”
the happening world (8)
BE KIND TO YOUR FORFEITED FRIENDS
LOCALE: since it was illegal by city ordinance to occupy that much space by herself what Guinevere had done was to make a settlement on her husband whom she was divorcing largely because his name was Dwiggins and get him to buy with it the vacant apartment below her penthouse and then lease it to her for an indefinite period at a peppercorn rent which was not illegal and the chief method by which the ostentatiously wealthy in the modern super-crowded city secured for themselves that ultimate in contemporary status symbols a home many times larger than one person could reasonably require—to wit two rooms one above the other forty-eight feet by thirty-two, two (ditto) thirty by eighteen, two (ditto) twenty-one by eighteen, four bathrooms en suite and two not, four additional toilets, two kitchen-eateries, and a roof-garden which Guinevere had had as it were hollowed out by an ingenious architect so that it became a bower with its main level corresponding to the lower apartment and the upper containing the automatic watering and fertilising sprays together with the artificial sunlight lamps required to keep the plants and flowers healthy.
CONTENTS (PERMANENT): the largest unit-based suite of polyform furniture ever manufactured for a private customer including large tables convertible into desks or screens and small tables convertible into book-racks or trolleys and chairs upright convertible into chairs relaxing and chairs relaxing convertible into lounges and lounges convertible into sofas and sofas convertible into beds and beds convertible for single or double or multiple occupation and so on—in theory capable of adapting the apartment for everything from a well-attended political meeting with everyone sitting around paying serious attention to the subject in hand to a party like the present one with everyone paying serious attention to the subject hoped to be in hand eventually.
CONTENTS (TRANSIENT IMMOBILE NON-PERISHABLE): the latest decorations and pictures and ornaments and models of phone and TV and polyformer and holographic record reproducer and cosmoramic projector and even books—though the latter were hanging in the balance as potentially non-fashionable.
CONTENTS (TRANSIENT IMMOBILE PERISHABLE): an assortment of seven dozen different kinds of foodstuffs guaranteed by the catering company to be accurately twentieth-century in substance and appearance but not necessarily in flavour—certain essential compounds in such items as free-ranged chicken and slow-smoked bacon being no longer reproducible under modern manufacturing conditions—plus bottles and cases and barrels and boxes and jars and cans and packs of liquor and incense and wine and marijuana and beer and even tobacco to give the guests a decadent life-in-my-hands thrill that would also be properly in period.
CONTENTS (TRANSIENT MOBILE BUT IN A SENSE EQUALLY PERISHABLE): a hundred fifty people including the hostess and her guests and many human staff from the catering company which had a good reputation among the new poor of the happening world for concealing payments to waiters and cleaners by inflating their charges for purchase of goodies and thus enabling them to escape the moonlighting tax supposed to wipe out the profit a fully-supported recipient of welfare might derive from odd jobs like these.
EXCUSE AND REASON: making the guests pay forfeits which if she chose she could make so hideously embarrassing the victims would never want to see her again.
COST: about three thousand dollars.
VALUE RECEIVED: that would have to wait until the end of the party to be assessed.
* * *
Click and cram the elevators cycling, splash and crash the guzzling well begun.
* * *
AUDIO: the most bearable re-made recordings from the latter part of last century, not the most recent (stuff from the nineties was intolerably vieux-jeu). No, it had to be from the seventies, endowed now with a certain quaint charm, and on top of that it had to be the kind of music which led most directly to what was currently acceptable in the real world outside—chants sans paroles in the rather bland monotonous rhythms of five against four and seven against eight. The quality of the recordings was lousy and the divisible-by-two rhythms seemed banal and boring after subtleties like five against eleven. But each of the records allegedly had sold a million.
If someone comes in wearing Arpège Twenty-first Scentury or anything else like that what shall I make her—or him—do?
COSMORAMIC: mostly the fashionable colours of the nineties because they were currently bearable—apple-green, sour lemon-yellow, and the inevitable pale blues—but changeochrome was newer than the century and there wasn’t a moiré setting on the projector which would have been marginally allowable, so it was all stark flat colours and rather drab.
Come to think of it, that stuff of Mel Ladbroke’s is new, so what if someone drecky claims forfeit off him for bringing it? The hole; it’s my party and I say what’s allowed.
GUSTATORY: likely to be the biggest success of the party, no whistlers or moonjuice or any other this-very-instant drinks, but that weird cocktail chart dug up from about 1928 and programmed specially into the consoles—things called “Old-Fashioned” and “Bosom-Caresser” ought to appeal if only for their amusing silly names. Also the food exotic. Out of period, but absolutely unavoidable, generous supplies of antalc, disgorgeant and counter-agents to the most popular lifters, Yaginol, Skulbustium and Triptine. Not permitted at the party, all too new, all post-turn-of-century, but people would certainly turn up orbiting on one or two or maybe all of them.
Snff…? That’s Dior Catafalque, I swear it is! Whereinole did she dredge it up? It’s been off the market for twenty years! Make a point of asking her what it is; recognising it would date me …
SARTORIAL: the most incredible, the most phenomenal mish-mash assembled under one roof this generation except maybe in the General Assembly of the UN.
That girl’s wearing Nipicaps. I can tell—who better? Bit early to start imposing forfeits but that will be a lovely lovely start. Something mild—after all, they’re one of my own products—but something forceful enough to make people realize I mean business. One moment: girl? That’s no shiggy! Well, that forfeit defines itself, doesn’t it? Yum!