The Savage Girl by Alex Shakar

Author:Alex Shakar
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061863462
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-12-21T06:14:37+00:00

Famous

The restaurant in the Pangloss Hotel is a five-star affair with five-star prices, but the theme is greasy-spoon-diner all the way. The booths are upholstered with leather dyed the particular reddish hue of vinyl dyed to resemble dyed leather, and the marble tabletops are rimmed with grooved stainless steel, just like the common faux-marble Formica tabletops they strive to imitate. Of course James T. Couch was the one who introduced Ivy to the place, and for the last couple of months it’s been her favorite restaurant, the one she insists on coming to time and again. Today, thank God, Couch has other things to do, so Ivy and Ursula are here alone. No sooner is her sister seated across from her in their regular booth than she torches the tip of a cigarette with a new gold lighter, takes a long drag, flips up the hinged lenses of her sunglasses, then turns over her uncannily plastic-looking frosted-crystal water glass and knocks some ash into it, like a cat marking its territory. By now the busboy knows neither to try filling Ivy’s ashing glass with water nor to bring her a fresh glass of water, which would inevitably get ashed in as well, and the waitstaff knows not to tell her that smoking isn’t permitted. When other patrons complain, the maître d’ passes on to them the same sob story James T. Couch passed off on him along with a hundred-dollar bill—that the smoker in the far corner booth happens to be none other than Ivy Van Urden, the renowned schizophrenic fashion model for whom a constant influx of nicotine is that sole and thinnest of threads from which her sanity dangles. For all Ursula knows, it may be true. The medication Ivy takes has been making her increasingly stiff, and the cigarettes, perhaps due partly to the nicotine stimulant and partly to the constant use of limbs, lips, and lungs required to manipulate them, seem to serve her in much the same way a can of oil did the Tin Man, keeping her just limber enough to clank along.

The ceremonial ashing-in-the-cup accomplished, Ivy moves on to her ritual appreciation of the view: the booths are lined with interior windows that look out into the hotel lobby, and for a good five minutes Ivy follows the lobby’s various motions as closely as a die-hard football fan watching his home team deploy its offense. She tracks the elevators, rising like air bubbles in glass tubes; scrutinizes the glass-domed fountain, blasting glimmering jets of mercury; then loses herself in the lobby’s conveyor-belt product display. Encased in thick, yellowed glass, the conveyor belt rises out of the lobby floor by the far wall, circles around and passes right below their window, then proceeds spiraling along the vast rotunda wall up fifty stories to the glass of the artificial skylights, through which shines the light of three artificial, pastel-colored suns: a red giant, a blue dwarf, and, as the designers chose to call it, a green goblin.

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