Festival of Deaths(12)

The other thing Maximillian Dey had always wanted was a wife. It was because of this want of a wife that no one ever had to wake him up to come into the studio in the middle of the night. Maximillian was always awake in the middle of the night. He was also always out. After-hours clubs, Greek boîtes, Israeli dance joints, Spanish folk music forums where everybody had to bring their own bottles—Max knew them all. He went easily, night after night, from the more conventional entertainments of the Queens singles bars to the more exotic precincts of what one of his roommates called “clean sex shows.” He knew the only place in town where a man could see a stripper who just stripped and nothing else. He also knew practically every unattached young woman in the city, except the ones he wanted to meet, and that was the problem. When Max said he wanted a wife, that was exactly what he meant. He wanted a young Catholic woman who believed in virginity, looked like Farah Fawcett, and wanted to have at least eight kids. He wanted a woman who would stay home and look after the house and be proud of him if he made enough money to send all their children to Catholic schools. He wanted, in fact, exactly the sort of woman he would have married if he’d stayed in Portugal, but he never would have admitted that. If he’d stayed in Portugal, any woman he married would have gotten fat.

Maximillian carried a beeper because it made him feel important, and because DeAnna Kroll hadn’t had the heart to turn him down when he asked for one. Almost nobody had ever had the heart to turn Maximillian down for anything. He had been a pretty baby and an even prettier child. He was a positively beautiful young man. He was tall and slender and fine boned and soul eyed. He had the kind of face younger women were drawn to and older women melted for. He was a case study in the proposition that beauty is its own excuse. God only knew, women were always making excuses for him.

When he first came in to the studio after being called, Maximillian did what he always did: helped Shelley Feldstein move things from one place to another. Then, when Shelley had what she wanted, he went back to the storeroom to see if there was anything else that needed to be done. Like everyone else on the show, he was somewhat cavalier about union   work rules, which he could get away with because the Gradon Cable System was somewhat cavalier about just about everything. Nobody who worked for Gradon stood on ceremony. Max went to the storeroom and looked around for things that needed to be put away. People were always hauling down boxes or unearthing trunks and then leaving them in the middle of everything. Americans were remarkably disorganized in that sense. Today, though, there was nothing. The storeroom floor was clean and shiny. The charwoman must have been in with the mop. The storeroom shelves were orderly. DeAnna Kroll must have been here herself on one of her housecleaning rampages. Max turned on the lights and walked all the way to the back of the room, looked around, looked at the ceiling, looked at the floor. Then he sighed and started out again. He didn’t want to go home. He was much too revved up for that. His roommates made him crazy. He didn’t want to spend an hour or two in a Greek coffee shop. When the shops got too crowded, the owners didn’t like you taking up space with a cup of coffee and the morning paper. This was where a wife would really have come in handy. If he’d had a wife, he wouldn’t have had no alternative but to hang around feeling useless.

He was just about to leave the storeroom—to try the back hall, to see if anything had to be done there—when DeAnna Kroll came in, jumped a little at the sight of him, and then began to look thoughtful.

“Max,” she said. “I didn’t think of you.”

Max smiled politely. It was a kind of smile he had learned early. It was usually very effective. “You should think of me always,” he said. “It is how I think of you.”

DeAnna Kroll shot him a look that said she wasn’t having any—DeAnna Kroll never was; she was the closest thing to an impervious female Max had ever met—and told him, “You can solve a problem I’ve got. You can at least solve half of it. Do you have a clean sweatshirt?”

“Of course,” Max said. “I have a clean sweatshirt and a clean shirt. In my locker. I always keep them there. This job—”

“I know all about your job. Go wash up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Go wash up,” DeAnna insisted. “Go to the men’s room and strip to the waist—you’re sweating like a pig; I suppose Shelley’s been running you ragged—anyway, go wash up and put on a clean shirt and a clean sweatshirt and come meet me in the greenroom as quick as you can. That’s where I’ve got the women.”