That evening Tony Vacuhhi, seated at the desk in the front room of his fiat, dialed the official phone number of the optometrists’ convention.
“Let me talk to Hugh Collins,” he said.
“Dr. Collins isn’t here,” the voice, a functionary’s voice, answered.
“Well, I gotta get hold of him,” Vacuhhi said. “He wanted some information, and now that I got it for him I can’t get hold of him.”
“I can give you his private number,” the functionary said. “Just a moment.” And right then and there Tony Vacuhhi got the number he wanted.
“Thanks for your help,” he said and hung up.
Leaning back in his chair, he dialed the number.
“Hello?” a man’s voice answered.
“Dr. Collins? I understand you’re in charge of the entertainment for the convention. My name is Vacuhhi, and I’m a representative here in San Francisco. I represent various top-line entertainers and artists in this area. As a matter of fact, we specialize in the type of entertainment appreciated by the various conventions, and we make it a sort of special effort on our part to satisfy the convention people when they get here in town, and save them a lot of effort and embarrassment in procuring this kind of entertainment on their own. Especially where they might not know exactly how to go about it, if you understand what I mean.”
“Yes,” Collins said, “I see.”
Swiveling in his chair, his feet upon the window sill, Tony Vacuhhi that.”
“You can come over here,” Collins said, “or I can meet you someplace.”
“I’ll come over,” Vacuhhi said, flipping a pencil eraser up into the air and catching it in his coat pocket. “Now it might even be possible for me to arrange to bring along one of these particular entertainers, who has special experience along the lines we’re discussing. She’s a young lady quite popular in this area. Her name is Thisbe Holt; you may have heard of her. What would you say if I brought her along and then we could settle the deal right there on the spot and you could get it off your mind once and for all and turn your attention to the other various items you have to work on?”
“Suit yourself,” Collins said. “She’s—the right kind for this?”
“Absolutely,” Vacuhhi said. “She has a great deal of visual appeal, and that’s generally appreciated at conventions.”
Collins gave him the address and said, “I’ll expect you then.”
A yellow-and-black Mercury convertible crunched up into the driveway before Hugh Collins’s home. The top was down, and in the convertible were a man and a woman; the man was lean-faced and the woman was young and pretty, with reddish hair and a full, unlined face.
Hugh Collins thought how lucky it was that he knew a guy like Posin, who could put him in touch this way. Opening the front door of the house, he stepped out to greet Tony Vacuhhi and Thisbe Holt.
“Keep your coat around you,” Vacuhhi was saying to the girl. She seemed quite young, not more than twenty. In the evening wind her hair fluttered and sparkled. “What do you mean this is costing you money? Where would you be earning money this time of day?”
“I could be at the Peachbowl,” she said.
“Yeah, except the Peachbowl doesn’t open until nine o’clock. If you have any sense and—” He noticed Collins. “Are you Mr. Collins?”
“That’s right,” he said. They shook hands. “Come on in and I’ll fix you a drink.” He could tell little about Thisbe because she kept her goat tight around her.
“Nothing for us,” Vacuhhi said, “but thanks anyhow.” As they passed into the house, he nodded to Thisbe. She slid her coat off and laid it over her arm, seeming to rise up at the same time, as if she were stepping out of warm, undulating water.
“Hello,” she said to Hugh Collins.
She was a tidy enough girl, with rather stocky legs. Her breasts were the largest he had seen in years, and they were placed very high; they wagged from side to side as she pushed her coat out of the way.
“Is that really her?” he asked Vacuhhi. “That’s not something she’s got stuffed in there?”
Thisbe wore a tight silk dress, already stretched and wrinkled. The dress could not survive such pressure; it was beginning to give at the seams.
“That’s a size forty-two chest,” Vacuhhi said.
“Cut the kidding.” But Collins was impressed. The girl, Thisbe, walked stagily about the room, her shoulders back and her buttocks tightened, so that both breasts lifted, wobbling a trifle, an engaging and outlandish sight showing that they were reality part of her, not just stuck on afterward.
“Imagine growing up with those,” Vacuhhi said excitedly. “All the way through grammar and junior high school.”
“Does she know?” Collins said.
“Sure she knows. But she thinks they’re just flesh; she don’t think anything particularly about them. Like they were hands or something.”
Thisbe had come close now. “I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Collins.”
“Same here,” he said. “But if you’re going to talk to me, put your coat back on.”
She did so, struggling with the sleeves. Neither man moved to help her; the two of them stood together, looking on.
“What do you do?” Collins asked.
“I’m a song stylist,” she said. “You know, like Lena Home.” With her coat on and buttoned, she seemed quite ordinary. Her face was actually plain, plump enough to sag at the jowls; her skin was clean but not a good color. Much too pale. Her chin lines were indistinct. Despite her mascara, her eyes seemed small, almost malformed — bad eyes, he decided, and damn near crossed. Her hair was really her strongest point—not considering her mammoth breasts. But at least she was young. He could not help contrasting her with his wife, Louise, who was currently visiting her family in Los Angeles. This girl was fifteen years younger. Her red hair looked quite soft. He wondered how it felt to the touch.
“You could certainly do with another name,” he said.
She leered at him, a frightful smile made up of jagged teeth and white, expanded gums. Never, he decided, would she get anywhere. Chest or no chest. She had a gross, aggressive quality—or lack of quality—as if she were physically shoving herself forward. Wiggling, pushing, trying to get just one more step up. He felt oppressed by her.
Still, she did have an overabundant “visual appeal,” and in a hotel room, among ten or eleven men, she would be a sensation. Just exactly what he needed for the show after and above the public entertainment Guffy had already made his room available for this, and they had all chipped in money.
“I made up the name,” Vacuhhi said. “Don’t blame her.”
“Don’t you know who Thisbe was?” the girl demanded. Evidently she had read up on it. “She was in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ ”
“She was a wall,” he said.
“No, she wasn’t a wall. She was the girl in the play they did; she was separated from her lover by a wall.”
“Well,” he said, “what do you do? Get up and read?”
“I told you very clearly, I’m a song stylist in the manner of Lena Home. You surely have heard of Lena Home.”
“Get off it, Thisbe,” Vacuhhi said. To Collins he explained, “She does a bubble act, but it’s not like anything you ever saw in your life. Wait a minute and I’ll go get the bubble.”
He went out to the car and returned carrying a gigantic plastic bubble.
“Developed by the United States Navy,” he said, tossing the bubble down; it struck the living room floor and rolled without breaking. “A float, a marker float.” The bubble was transparent, but its texture was uneven; the rug and floor beyond it were magnified, distorted.