“So—Typhphani, tell us your fantasy.”

“My fantasy is, I meet this guy, and we walk on the beach, and then we fuck?”

After a while, “And . . .”

“Maybe I see him again?”

“That’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s my fantasy.”

“Yes Djennyphrr, you had your hand up? What’s your fantasy?”

“Being on top when we fuck? Like, usually he’s on top? My fantasy is, is I’m on top for a change?”

One by one, the women in this group describe their “fantasies.” Vibrators, massage oil, and PVC outfits are mentioned. It doesn’t take long. Maxine’s reaction is, is she’s appalled. This is fantasy? Feeuhnt-uh-see? Her sisters in Romance Deficiency Disorder, this is the best they can come up with for what they think they need? Schlepping through her bedtime routine, she takes a good look in the bathroom mirror. “Aaaahh!”

It is not hair or skin condition tonight so much as the Knicks second-color road jersey she’s wearing. With SPREWELL 8 on the back. Not even a gift from Horst or the boys, no, she actually went down to the Garden, stood in a line, and bought it for herself, paying retail, for a perfectly good reason, of course, having been in the habit of going to bed with nothing on, falling asleep reading Vogue or Bazaar, and waking up stuck to the magazine. There is also her mostly unavowed fascination with Latrelle Sprewell and his history of coach assault, on the principle that Homer strangling Bart we expect, but when Bart strangles Homer . . .

“Obviously,” she remarks now to her reflection, “you are doing much, much better than those public-access losers. So . . . Makseenne! what’s your fantasy?”

Um, bubble bath? Candles, champagne?

“Ah-ah? forgot that stroll by the river? all right if I just step over to the toilet here, do some vomiting?”

•   •   •

SHAWN NEXT MORNING is tons of help.

“There’s this . . . client. Well, not really. Somebody I’m worried about. He’s in twenty kinds of trouble, his situation is dangerous, and he won’t let it go.” She does a recap on Vip. “It’s depressing the way I keep running into the same scenario time and again, every chance these clowns get to choose, they always bet on their body, never on their spirit.”

“No mystery, quite common in fact . . .” He pauses, Maxine waits, but that seems to be it.

“Thanks, Shawn. I don’t know what my obligations are here. It used to be I didn’t care, whatever they got coming, they deserve. But lately . . .”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t like what’s going to happen, but I’d feel bad ratting this guy out to the cops too. Which is what led me to wonder could I just pick your brain a little. Was all.”

“I know what you do for a living, Maxine, I know it’s all ethical trip- wires, and I don’t like to put in. Do I. OK. Listen anyway.” Shawn tells her the Buddhist Parable of the Burning Coal. “Dude is holding this burning-hot coal in his hand, obviously suffering a lot of pain. Somebody comes by—‘Whoa, excuse me, isn’t that a burning-hot coal in your hand, there?’

“‘Ooh, ooh, ow, man, yes and like, like it really hurts, you know?’

“‘I can see that. But if it’s making you suffer, why do you keep holding on to it?’

“‘Well, duh-uhh? ’cause I need to, don’t I—aahhrrgghh!’

“‘You’re . . . into pain? you’re a nutcase? what is it? Why not just let it go?’

“‘OK, check it out—can’t you see how beautiful it is? lookit, the way it glows? like, the different colors? and aahhrrhh, shit . . .’

“‘But carrying it around in your hand like this, it’s giving you third-degree burns, man, couldn’t you like set it down someplace and just look at it?’

“‘Somebody might take it.’

“So forth.”

“So,” Maxine asks, “what happens? He lets go of it?”

Shawn gives her a nice long stare and with Buddhist precision, shrugs. “He lets go of it, and he doesn’t let go of it.”

“Uh, huh, I must’ve said something wrong.”

“Hey. Maybe I said something wrong. Your assignment for next time is to find out which of us, and what.”

Yet another one of these shadowy calls. She should get on to Axel and tell him Vip’s a frequent visitor to the South Fork, then pass on the card-number fragments she was able to copy down off the videotape. But not so fast here, she cautions herself, let’s just see . . .

She runs the tape again, especially the dialogue between Vip and whoever’s behind the camera, whose voice is maddeningly just there at the edge of her memory . . .

Ha! It’s a Canadian accent. Of course. On the Lifetime Movie Channel, you hear little but. In fact, it’s Québéquois. Could that mean . . .

She gets on to Felix Boïngueaux’s cellular. He’s still in town chasing VC money. “Heard anything from Vip Epperdew?”

“Don’t expect to.”

“You have his phone number?”

“Got a few of them. Home, beeper, they all ring forever and never pick up.”

“Mind sharing them?”

“Not at all. If you get lucky, ask him where our check is, eh?”

It’s close. It’s close enough. If it was Felix behind the camera, Felix who sent her the tape, then this is either what social workers like to call a cry for help from Vip or, more likely, seeing it’s Felix, some elaborate setup. As to how this shuffles together with Felix being down here allegedly looking for investors—back burner, it’ll keep, disingenuous li’l schmuck.

One of the phone prefixes is up in Westchester, no answer, not even a machine, but there’s also a Long Island number, which she looks up in her crisscross at the office, already queasy with a suspicion, and sure enough, it’s in the flip side of the Hamptons, all but certainly the amateur-porn set Shae and Bruno live in, where Vip has been making excuses to slide away to, to pay his dues to the other version of his life. The number brings an electronic squawk and a robot to tell Maxine sorry, this number is no longer in service. But there’s something strange in its tone, as if incompletely robotized, that conveys inside knowledge, not to mention You Poor Idiot. A paranoid halo thickens around Maxine’s head, if not a nimbus of certainty. Ordinarily there wouldn’t be money enough in circulation to get her inside bomb-throwing distance of the east end of Long Island, but she finds herself now dropping the Tomcat in her bag, adding an extra clip, sliding into working jeans and a beach-town-appropriate T-shirt, and next thing she’s down on 77th renting a beige Camry. Gets on the Henry Hudson Parkway, hassles the Cross Bronx over to the Throgs Neck Bridge, the line of city towers to her right crystalline today, sentinel, onto the LIE. Cranks down the windows and tilts the seat back to cruising format and proceeds on eastward.

17

Since the mid-nineties when WYNY switched formats overnight from country to classic disco, decent driving music in these parts has been in short supply, but someplace a little past Dix Hills she picks up another country station, maybe from Connecticut, and presently on comes Slade May Goodnight with her early-career chartbuster, “Middletown New York.”

I would send you, a sing-in cowgirl,

With her hat, and gui-tar band,

Just to let you know, I’m out here,

Anytime you need a hand—

But you’d start

Thinkin, about that ol’ cowgirl,

And where she’ll be after the show,

Same hopeless

story again,

same old sorrowful end, for-

-get-it, darlin, I already know—

And don’t, tell, me,

How,

To eat, my heart out,

thanks, I, don’t,

need no—knife, and fork,

list-nin to

trains . . . whistle through

The nights without you,

Down in Middletown, New York.

[After a pedal-steel break that has always reached in and found Maxine’s heart]