The Hinky Velvet Chair (11 page)

And then do what? I
can’t move a freakin’ muscle.
Just breathing, she could feel the seaweed
wrap chafe her nipples.

Jewel closed her eyes again. She thought of walking
ankle-deep in the creek on a hot summer day, and the smell of mint plants in
the marsh out behind the back forty. The music hit some deeper tones.
Huh.
She thought about lying on her back
in the sun, crushing peppermint plants under her. Bobby Wiflheimer was with
her, and he slid a finger into her panties.

Her eyes popped open. Her breathing was shallow and fiery. “How
long does this take?”

She thought about an alien bursting out of her chest — no,
not an alien, more of a big old donkey schlong — tearing out of this goddam
mummy-wrap and—

She must have drifted off. Her eyes opened again. “How long?”

“Shhh, you’re doing beautifully. Now we’ll open your second
chakra.” The attendant held something over Jewel’s tummy, not touching her. The
restless feeling in her ying-yang jumped into high. “Do you hear the low tones?”

A deep-voiced flute began playing. “Yeah.” Jewel’s eyes
closed. She lay under the stars by the creek, alone thank goodness. Her nerves
sang with damped-down lust, lust that slept because she lay still. Nothing
moved. The gleaming creek didn’t make a sound.

And yet, now she felt she was not alone.

Finally,
she
thought.
I can’t seem to do this on my
own.

Do what?
she
wondered, and then she felt a sly presence like an invisible smile. It seemed
far away, and yet also touching her, putting its finger on a nerve running up
the middle of her body, a nerve that zinged and jumped.

She felt two powerful impulses. She wanted to jump up, run
around, scream, find the intruder and beat the smile off his facelessness with
her fists. She also wanted to lie still and let the intruder make her desire
swell like an ocean wave.

Far away, the attendant
Ommed
again. Her fingertips
touched the mummy-wrap here and there.

Jewel didn’t feel a thing. Her whole mind focused on
locating that invisible smirk, that mischievous poking, teasing presence. Just
when she thought she’d found it under her tailbone, it melted away, then
returned, tracing a circle around her nipples, counting hairs on the inside of
her thigh, tickling the roof of her mouth til her eyes rolled up in her head.
The longer she lay still, the less she felt she could move. And yet she felt an
urge to thrash and squirm.

Slowly, so as not to attract the notice of the chakra
cleanser, she tightened every muscle in her buns, and felt a momentary rush.
Oh, yeah.

Then someone began to moan.
Is that me?
No, it was the new-age Muzak. It moaned the way she
wanted to moan. Only she mustn’t. She mustn’t move or speak. That woman would
know.

With that thought, Jewel felt a great stillness fall on her,
like a heavy hand clamping the back of her neck, like a heavy blanket of winter
coats piled on the bed, like an ocean wave rolling over her so heavily, no
grain of sand shifted under her.

And the invisible smiler swooped in, shadowing her thoughts,
filling her lower body with bliss.

The invisible finger touched a nerve in the hollow of her
right buttock, sending a shiver up to her right ear. She could hear the nerve
twang like an electric guitar note fuzzing out, a sound so alive that it bashed
around inside her belly, trying to get out. The guitar-note got louder. It
crawled sizzling up her side, up her shoulder, to the base of her throat.

If I don’t come soon,
she thought,
I’ll scream.

She drew in a long breath.

The invisible smiler put a firm thumb on the trigger between
her legs.

Jewel arched her back and screamed. Sexual release flew out
of her in all directions. At last she could move. She thrashed back and forth
and half-rolled off the massage table, her flying legs knocking over candles
and chakra-cleansing equipment, until strong arms grabbed her around the waist
from behind and she lay still again, quivering like a scared horse, her eyes
rolling.

The overhead light flashed on.

The attendant stood by the door, gasping, her hand splayed
on her heaving chest.

On the ceiling, bits of seaweed wrap stuck to ceiling tile
and light fixtures. The walls were spattered with the green gunk they’d
schmeared on her.

And, of course, underneath her, on the table, a very
familiar woody prodded her in the back.

“Don’t move,” Randy said in her ear, “or you will roll off.”

o0o

Well, it was a huge scene. You’d have thought this was some
low-class joint where nobody ever did anybody on a massage table before.
Masseuses and manicures came to the door to peek. Hairdressers and holistic
healers gabbled in the hallway. The chakra cleanser had hysterics. Jewel lay
still while bits of her mummy-wrap dripped off the ceiling onto her, and Randy
clung tight to keep her from falling off the table, and voices in the open
doorway said words like, “fat, exhibitionist, deviant, sexual perverts.”

Then her two stogie-smoking fans shoved to the door.

“It’s her! Wow!” said stogie fan number one.

“Move, I want to see!” said stogie fan number two.

“That lady is a lady, you jerks!” said the green-haired kid
from the latte shop.

“Miss Hess, are you all right?” said Griffy’s chauffeur.
Thanks for telling them my name. At least
it’s not my real name.

“If you get a picture, I want one.” That was the shoeshine
boy from the main lobby.

A flash went off, and Jewel recognized the paunchy tourist
from downstairs, grinning at her behind a formidable camera.

At that she struggled out of Randy’s grasp and rolled
gracelessly off the table, away from view.

Now the gawkers were saying, “hunk.”

“I most humbly beg your pardon,” her naked sex demon
said at his lordliest to her chakra cleanser. “It was unforgivable in me to
distress you, madam.” His high-bred voice seemed to calm the chakra lady.

“Oh,” she whimpered, “well — it’s not — you — I—”

Jewel stuck her head up in time to see Randy bow and kiss
the chakra cleanser’s hand. “So sorry to have troubled you.”

Her whimpers turned to simpers. “Oh, sir.”

The camera flash went off. Jewel ducked behind the table
again.

“Hey!” cried the chivalrous barristo. “You can’t take her
picture without her consent!”

Scuffling broke out in the hall. Something crunched. The
tourist yelled. When the fighting seemed about to become general, Randy
shouted, “Silence!”

And lo, they all shut up. Under the massage table she saw
Randy’s bare feet and ankles move into the hall.

Jewel crouched behind the table, silently swearing.

Eventually her worshippers were shooed out of the hallway
and, she hoped, out of the spa. Then Randy said at the doorway, “Perhaps one of
you might bring her a hot cup of tea? Too good of you. And if someone could
find my clothes?”

The sound of the chakra cleanser’s hiccups receded.

Jewel heard the door shut. She stood up. “Well!”

Randy was looking at the walls and ceiling. “Interesting. I
suppose you couldn’t tear it away in time.” A flap of seaweed fell on his
upturned face and he picked it off, studying it. “The pressures involved must
be sufficient to—”

She socked him on the arm. “You followed me!” she hissed.

“You are not safe here. With tones so green, you need
protection from lewd men,” he said with a straight face.

“I was doing fine until you showed up!” she lied.

He took her robe off its hook on the wall and hung it around
her shoulders as someone opened the door.

“Excuse me please? Hello?”

Jewel yanked on her robe, hiding behind Randy’s
altogetherness and blushing.

A tubby little guy wearing rimless spectacles and a white
lab coat over a gray suit and tie appeared at the door. “I am the Institute’s
director, Dr. Kauz.” He handed some folded clothes and a pair of shoes to
Randy. “Yours, I believe?”

So that was Randy in the waiting room! Jewel put it all
together at last
. Uh-oh. He was listening
to me dish on him to Griffy. That’s why he zapped into the massage table.

Jewel yanked her fluffy belt tight and stepped out from
behind her sex demon. “I’m sorry. He follows me everywhere. Get,” she hissed to
Randy. “Dressed.”

Dr. Kauz was looking at the walls and ceiling, his little
mouth hanging open.

“You should not be alone with him,” Randy murmured.

She pointed at the door. “Wait for me in the waiting room.”

Randy shrugged into his trousers and shirt, then turned
smoldering black eyes on her. “I shall be near, if you need me.”

“Or even if I don’t. Now scram.”

With a dark look at Dr. Kauz, Randy scrammed.

“Most remarkable,” Dr. Kauz said to Randy’s back. Then his
watery blue eyes bugged out at Jewel.
“Himmel!
You must be the lady with the too-green aura!”

She looked at her green-schmeared arms. “There was a lot of
seaweed,” she began. Then she remembered Virgil tut-tutting over her Kirlian
photographs, a hundred years ago this morning. “Uh, that’s what they say.”

He looked her up and down with awe. “You wish to shower.
Then if you would step into the next room, my psychespectrometer will soon
pinpoint the trouble.”

“Can’t be too soon for me,” she muttered.

Jewel congratulated herself on getting the spa director’s
attention. First part of her mission, accomplished. After her shower, Kauz led
her in triumph through the spa, his spectacles flashing, his round face
flushed.

As they passed through the dining area, she saw Randy
drinking coffee with Sovay, Griffy eating salad alone, and three window
cleaners in coveralls plastered to the outside windows, their hands cupped
against the glass, looking in. She avoided meeting their eyes. Everyone was
staring at her.

“Julia, are you okay?” Griffy said.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she kept saying.

Randy, Griffy, and Sovay got up and followed her.

In the psychespectrometer room, Dr. Kauz explained the
principles of colorimetry. It had something to do with refracting and
sublimating implied light given off by the human body, in effect, the aura,
blah, blah, blah. The machine itself looked like a big-ass, white-panel-faced
flourescent light fixture, hanging perpendicular to the floor, with wires
connecting it to several monitors and a printer. Behind the panel was a chunk
of humming hardware that Dr. Kauz called “the transformer.”

He made her stand in front of the psychespectrometer while
he fiddled with the controls.

Griffy said, “This is Julia Hess. She’s suffering from—”

“Stumm!”
Kauz touched his lips. “I see very
well how she is suffering.” He picked up Jewel’s hand very gently. The round
spectacles flashed.
“Fräulein,
kindly
stand there.” He switched on the spectrometer and squinted into an eyepiece.
“Mein Gott,”
he blurted. “Look at this.”
He switched on an overhead monitor, and Jewel craned her neck to look. She
caught her breath.

The monitor showed a moving form in blazing acid green.

“Yow.” Griffy stared. “What is it, Doctor?”

Jewel scratched her cheek, and the image on the monitor
scratched with her.

Kauz seemed transfixed. “Vot happened to her?”

“Is she supposed to be that color?” Griffy said.

“She is not!”

Sovay slumped against the door. Randy loomed beside her,
eyeing the equipment with suspicion.

Jewel stared at her green self. She swallowed.

“How should she look?” Griffy said.

“I demonstrate. If you would exchange places?” Kauz waved to
Griffy and she sat. Her rainbow-colored image appeared. Kauz tapped the screen.
“Miss Julia’s chromatic distribution should be more diverse,
so wie.
Exchange again, please?”

Jewel returned to the psychespectrometer. Again the
scintillating acid green image filled the monitor.

Kauz seemed fascinated.
Maybe
I can lure him over to Virgil’s house.
She felt very Clay-like, very
undercover.

“How does such a woman survive in this world?” Kauz mused.

“That Venus Machine did it!” Griffy said. “They put her in
it last night and she’s been different ever since.”

“Machine?” he said murmured, peering into the eyepiece again
and twiddling a knob. “Charged. Like cloudful of lightning.” He shook his head.
“Incredible.”

“My — my brother is appraising a machine for this lady,”
Griffy said, nodding toward Sovay. “It’s a Cattywompusomething.”

“Kat-ter-fel-to,” Sovay pronounced with scorn.

Kauz jerked his head up. “Katterfelto?” The round spectacles
filled up with his boogling blue eyes. “Can it be — is it possible that you
mean Katterfelto’s Miracle Venereal Attraction Accelerator Apparatus?” He
spread his hand over his chest. “Has it reappeared?”