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Festival of Deaths(5)

By:Jane Haddam


“Such as what?”

“Such as those women I told you about. I went to their support group. The women whose husbands won’t perform cunnilingus.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line, and Lotte smiled to herself. In one of the odder divisions of labor on The Lotte Goldman Show, it was Lotte herself who checked out support and self-help groups and twelve-step programs for possible guests. DeAnna had tried it and found herself to be too conspicuous, and neither Lotte nor DeAnna trusted anyone else on the staff to do the initial work. Once Lotte had found a group she thought had possibilities, she put Maria Gonzalez on the case, or whoever had Maria’s job at the moment. Talent coordinators never seemed to last long on The Lotte Goldman Show.

“Ah,” DeAnna said on the other end of the line. “Cunnilingus.”

“You have to admit it’s provocative,” Lotte pointed out.

“I know it’s provocative,” DeAnna said, “but I thought we had reservations. I thought we’d decided that these women were Looney Tunes.”

“Of course they’re Looney Tunes. If you want my private opinion, I think the leader of that particular group is a full-blow delusional schizophrenic with better-than-average coping mechanisms. But that’s not the point. This is an emergency. We have to do something very quickly. Isn’t that right?”

“You’ve been dying to have these people on, haven’t you? You’ve just been dying to.”

“Something like that,” Lotte admitted. “I think I can see myself, leading the discussion. How many calls do you think we can get about the explicitness of the language?”

“How explicit do you want to be?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No,” DeAnna said. “Let me think. We’ve got to have the husbands. That’s the key.”

“You’re right. The husbands. It would be very good if one of them got on and said that he wanted to perform cunnilingus on his wife, but she would not let him.”

“It would be better if one of the wives had never had an orgasm. It’s really too bad we just can’t hire actors for these things.”

“Someday we should go on the program ourselves,” Lotte suggested, “and talk about how easy it is to do without sex and what a relief. Then we should cancel the program and take off for the south of France.”

“I can’t take off for the south of France,” DeAnna said. “Sherleen would never forgive me. They don’t have street people there.”

“Yes, they do, DeAnna, I have seen them. But the street people are not black.”

“Maybe Sherleen could get interested in being French. Never mind. I’ve got to make some phone calls. Cunnilingus.”

“Cunnilingus,” Lotte said solemnly.

“Would you mind coming in about an hour early? You probably won’t get to do anything but sit around, but at least I’ll be able to stop worrying about having everything in place, and if I can get hold of these people we can do a quick extra format run-through. Though why we do any format run-throughs at all is beyond me. Australian Aborigines know our format well enough to duplicate it.”

“I’ll be in an hour early,” Lotte promised. “Go do what you have to do and stop worrying. Everything will be all right. Everything always is.”

“Everything is always all right because I worry myself to death,” DeAnna said. “Never mind that, either. I’m going to get off the phone. I’ve got to make one more stab at finding Shelley Feldstein. Cunnilingus.”

“Cunnilingus,” Lotte repeated, for what must have been the third time. The phone went to dial tone in her ear, and she put the receiver back into the cradle.

The Dorothy Cannell novel was lying open on her knees. Lotte picked it up, stuck a stray piece of paper from the night table into it, and put it aside. Her cigarettes were on the night table, too, a habit she had started early and been unable to break. She took one out of her silver cigarette case and lit up.

DeAnna would go out and set up a program on cunnilingus, and they would run it, and it would rate well. Lotte knew all that to be true. She also knew that the older she got, the less interested she seemed to be in any of the things they did programs about. Sex was like eating and sleeping and shopping and all the rest of it, something people did over and over and over again, something that didn’t seem to get anyone anywhere. Just where Lotte wanted sex to get people, she didn’t know. She didn’t know where she wanted to get herself. But there it was.

She swung her legs out of bed and stretched.

Today she would go into the office early and that would break up the time. This afternoon she would have lunch with DeAnna at Viva Tel Aviv, and that would be a positive pleasure. This evening she would take a call from her brother, David, who would tell her it made no sense to keep kosher when she could never remember to observe Yom Kippur. Tonight she would be up too late, too restless to sleep.