Looking down on the atrium, he began to dream. He dimmed the lights, got rid of all the people eating yoghurt and calzone. Around the fountain he assembled a full orchestra consisting of stunningly toothsome women wearing nothing but their instruments. He put the cellists out front. Yes. There's just something about nude women cellists. He had them play the cigarette song from act I in
The scene was set. There remained only the piece de resistance: Heather, buxom, pink, and entirely au naturel, looking like one of Renoir's bathing beauties, sitting in the uppermost bowl of the fountain, with him, drinking champagne (Veuve Clicquot, demi-sec) from iced flutes.
He went back inside and called Heather.
"Hi," Heather said, sounding very throaty, "I can't come to the phone right now. Leave a message and I'll call you back as soon as I can. If you want to speak to an operator, press zero."
He left a message asking her if she wanted to have dinner that night at Il Peccatore, then went back outside to see if his
He sat at his desk and turned to the work at hand with the enthusiasm of a man changing a flat tire on a sweltering day on the interstate. It was to ghostwrite an op-ed piece for congressman Jud Jawkins (D-Ky), challenging an NIH study showing that children of smoking mothers have 80 percent more asthma attacks than children of nonsmoking mothers. Nick sighed.
He wrote: "No one is more respectful of the work carried on at the National Institutes of Health than I, yet it is unfortunate that at a time when so many ghastly severe health problems face our nation — AIDS, skyrocketing cholesterol levels, and the recent outbreak of measles in my own home state, to name but a few examples — that the NIH has become so riven with political correctness that it is spending precious resources to bombard the American people with information that they already have."
It was one of his more conventional devices — the old Deja Voodoo — but it would have to do. He was just cranking up some moral counter-outrage and pleas for common decency and fairness when there was a rap on his door and Jeannette said, "Am I interrupting?"
He looked up from his dissimulations to see Jeannette's head sticking out from behind the door. She looked much more relaxed than she usually did. She'd furloughed her ice-blond hair from its normal prison of a bun at the back and had it loosely ponytailed with a barrette. She was in her standard Don't Mess With Me dark blue suit, worn tightly so as to show off every minute of every sweaty hour at the health club; but she'd added an explosively colorful silk scarf from Hermes or Chanel that gave her the look of a rich woman on the prowl for fun. Nick had to admit that Jeannette was looking mighty fine this afternoon. Maybe one of her focus groups had told her to lighten up and lose the dominatrix look. After all, the whole idea of having a spokesbabe was to take the viewer's mind off cancer and heart disease and emphysema, not to beat back their own libidos with a chair and whip.
"Hi," she said in a friendly way. "Am I interrupting?"
"No," Nick said. "I was just making some op-ed mush."
She closed the door behind her. "God," she said, "I'd
"Ah," Nick said, "easy as breathing."
"I can recite the one you did for Jordan when Deukmejian banned smoking on flights in California. 'I have a lot of respect for Governor Deukmejian. It's his respect for the Constitution that concerns me.' October eighty-seven, right?"
Nick blushed. "Lot of good it did."
She sat down, crossed her stockinged legs, which, Nick noticed, looked very sleek today. He looked up and saw that she'd seen him purloining a glance at her gams. He looked down at his op-ed and frowned as though he were trying to think of the right word.
"What's up?" he said in a businesslike way, though it was by now obvious to both of them what, precisely, was up.
"I've got this idea that I'm really excited about."
