Fury by Rushdie Salman

Author:Rushdie, Salman [Rushdie, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2001-11-09T05:00:00+00:00

Jack Rhinehart rang the next afternoon, sounding wired. “Malik, wassup. You still living like a guru in an ice cave? Or a castaway on Big Brother Is Not Watching You? Or does news from the outside world still reach you from time to time.—You heard the one about the Buddhist monk in the bar? He goes up to the Tom Cruise clone with the cocktail shaker and says, ‘Make me one with everything.’—Listen: you know a broad by the name of Lear? Claims to have been your wife. Seems to me nobody deserves as much bad luck as being married to that honey. She’s like one hundred and ten years old, and ornery as a cut snake. Oh, and on the subject of wives? I’m divorced. It turned out to be easy. I just gave her everything.”

Everything really was everything, he amplified: the cottage in the Springs, the fabled wine shack, and several hundreds of thousands of dollars. “And this is all right with you?” Solanka asked, astonished. “Yeah, yeah,” Rhinehart gabbled. “You should have seen Bronnie. Jaw on the floor. Grabbed the offer so fast I thought she’d herniate. So, can you believe it, she’s gone. She’s toast. It’s Neela, man. I don’t know how to say this, but she eased something in me. She made it all okay.” His voice became boyish-conspiratorial. “Have you ever seen anyone actually stop traffic? I mean one hundred percent without question arrest the motion of motor vehicles just by being around? She has that power. She climbs out of a cab and five cars and two fire trucks screech to a halt. Also, walking into lampposts. I never believed it happened outside of Mack Sennett slapstick two-reelers. Now I see guys do it every day. Sometimes, in restaurants,” Rhinehart confided, bubbling with glee, “I’d ask her to walk to the women’s room and back, just so I could watch the men at the other tables get whiplash injuries. Can you imagine, Malik, my regrettably celibate friend, what it was like to be with that? I mean, every night?”

“You always did have an ugly turn of phrase,” Solanka said, wincing. He changed the subject. “About Sara? Talk about rising from the grave. What cemetery did you find her in?” “Oh, the usual,” Rhinehart replied tightly. “Southampton.” His ex-wife, Solanka learned, had at the age of fifty married one of the richest men in America, the cattle-feed tycoon Lester Schofield III, now aged ninety-two, and on her recent, fifty-seventh, birthday had instituted divorce proceedings on the grounds of Schofield’s adultery with Ondine, a Brazilian runway model of twenty-three. “Schofield made his billions by working out that what’s left of a grape after making grape juice would make a great dinner for a cow,” Rhinehart said, and moved into his most exaggerated Uncle Remus manner. “And now yo’ ole lady she done had de same idea. She puttin’ de big squeeze on him, I reckon. Gwine en’ up bein’ dat well-fed heifer hersel’.” All over

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