THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror by Thomas M. Disch

Author:Thomas M. Disch [Disch, Thomas M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 35

“I hope you’re not the sort to bear grudges,” said the bleeding poet, holding out his plastic tumbler for a refill. “Ordinarily I’m not a rapist.”

“I wouldn’t have called that rape,” Giselle assured him. “More just an ordinary grope.”

“In my heart it was rape.” Berryman furrowed his brow and shook his head in self-accusation. “As though any woman would want to be pawed at by a bloody cadaver. Has that damned bottle disappeared again?”

Giselle looked around for the bottle of Chivas Regal, which had indeed vanished from where she’d put it down beside the box on which she was sitting. It was the oddest thing. The ring let her take any bottle off the shelves, open it, drink from it, possibly even smash it to bits, but the moment she looked away from it and stopped thinking of it, it returned to where it had been, resealed and untasted. It was as though as a ghost one could eat and drink only the ghosts of food and liquids. “Just a minute,” she told Berryman, “I’ll get us another.”

Berryman continued to bask in self-reproach. “And you so pregnant you look like you modeled for the Venus of Willendorf. My God, I’ve behaved like a beast.”

Who was the Venus of Willendorf? Giselle wondered, pushing herself up to her feet. She was hugely pregnant, that was so, and if this John Berryman had been any sort of gentleman, he’d have offered to get his whiskey for himself. Ah, but of course, he couldn’t; she had the ring, and wasn’t about to lend it to him. She was not such a fool as that; nor he, to do him credit, such a fool as to suggest it.

She crossed the store to the Scotch section, where she had to wait for a girl with an empty knapsack on her back to make her slow-motion choice among the various prices and labels. It wasn’t possible to reach the shelf the Chivas was on till the girl had moved aside.

“Once,” said Berryman, raising his voice, “in one of my Pussycat poems, I wondered if Hell would be any worse than what we’ve got, here and now, on Earth. What do you think?”

Her only answer was a laugh. She’d had that much to drink that she no longer felt shy in front of the poet, who turned out, for all his talk about how famous he’d been, to be a pretty average person. A bit of a lech perhaps, but a clumsy lech, a lot like the Cretin senior, Ron Plotkin, she’d dated in her sophomore year. At last the girl with the knapsack decided to take a gamble on the second-cheapest Scotch and moved out of the way. Giselle took the Chivas from the shelf and returned to the little conversation pit they’d made by stacking Gallo boxes in the untrafficked corner of the store devoted to liqueurs and sherries.

“Put it another way,” he went on, undaunted by her laugh. “Is this Hell, and am I in it?”

“This?” She laughed again.

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