Everything but the Squeal

13

Mr. Leaf was wispy and tremulous and saturated with failure, Mrs. Green was large and black, and Mr. Kale was slimier than okra, and a lot greener. Mr. Leaf and Mrs. Green had been all too obviously on the up-and-up, mostly because they both insisted on seeing my bona fides. I didn't have any bona fides, which was part of the point. Mr. Leaf had thrown up his hands and Mrs. Green had ejected us in a rather forceful fashion. We'd moved on to Mr. Kale. The day, as they say, was still young, and three is popularly supposed to be the charm.

“My, my,” Mr. Kale kept saying, glancing furtively at Jessica. “My, my. What a lovely child.” Three notwithstanding, Mr. Kale was no charm. He was small and olive and balding and threadbare, and one of his nostrils was twice as large as the other. The small one was pretty big. He wore loafers without socks to capitalize on his resemblance, from the ankles down, to Don Johnson.

“What's your standard arrangement?” I said. He was awful enough to qualify for serious consideration.

“Your regular agent gets ten percent,” he said, making a visible effort to wrench his eyes from Jessica to me. If it had made a noise it would have sounded like Velcro ripping. “But I'm not your regular agent. What we have here is a total package. Agent, manager, all in one. Image, training, preparation, representation, what-have-you. ‘No representation without preparation,’ that's our motto. Complete career guidance for the little thespian.”

“I beg your pardon,” Jessica said, straightening up as though she'd slipped her toe into a socket.

“Thespian,” I said correctively, “thespian.”

“She'll need head shots,” Mr. Kale said, gazing longingly at her.

“Sounds like a fatal wound,” Jessica said, her nose still out of joint.

“Can you recommend a photographer?”

“Best in the business,” Mr. Kale said promptly. “Nothing but the best, that's our motto.” The motto apparently didn't extend to his office, which was smaller than Blister's sinuses.

“So what's your percentage?” Jessica asked meanly.

“Twenty-five,” he said with a negligent little hand gesture. “Plus expenses.”

“Who's the photographer?” I said, putting my foot on top of Jessica's.

“Ah-ah,” he said, chiding me in a leaden fashion. The relatively smaller of his nostrils flared unappealingly. “Papers first.” Whimsy was not his strong suit. It was hard to imagine what might be. The room swam in front of me.

“Mr. Okra,” I said, without thinking. Jessica made a snicking noise and spit her gum into her lap.

“Okra?” he said, looking bewildered. “Who's Okra? Kale's the name, Homer Kale.”

“Mr. Kale,” I amended. “We can't do business unless we know you're really top-notch. What's the photographer's name?”

He gave me a con man's look, full of honesty and candor. The man could have dealt three-card monte one-handed. “Fink,” he said. “Norman Fink.”

Jessica gave up searching her lap for her gum, threw up her hands, and just laughed. “This is the pits” she said.

“Jewel,” I said, “shut up. On Melrose?” I asked Mr. Kale.

It was over for Jessica. “Jewel?” she said, choking. “Excuse me.” She got up and left the office. I heard her laughter even after the door closed.

“Excitable little girl,” Mr. Kale said, licking his lips with a tongue a Komodo Dragon would have envied. “But lovely.” He wiped his brow. He was wearing more rings than I would have thought he could have lifted.

“On Melrose?” I said again.

“Naw,” he said, waving the rings at me. “Way down. South. On Olympic.”

I got up. “Mr. Kale,” I said. “You'll hear from us.”

“It could be on Melrose,” Mr. Kale said, sounding surprised. “You want Melrose, maybe I could find one on Melrose.” I let the door swing closed while he was still speaking. Outside, I grabbed Jessica by the elbow and marched her into the daylight.

Brussels' Sprouts was something else again. It occupied the entire lower floor of a two-story ersatz Greek building tucked just above Sunset on Sunset Plaza. Doric columns guarded the door like erect concrete watchdogs. The door whispered inward as we stepped on the mat in front of it. The mat had little blue and yellow puppies frisking on it.

“Shit,” Jessica said, looking down at the mat. Air conditioning rolled over us through the open door.

“Try Jeez-o-crips,” I suggested. “You're a little girl here.”

She gave me an arch look. “I'm a little girl everywhere. Ask my mom.”

“Yessss?” someone hissed. It sounded like Kaaa the Python in TheJungleBook.

“Where are you?” I said defensively. The sheer sibilance of it unnerved me.

“Over here,” the someone said as I blinked into the dark. “Behind the desk.”

“Jeez-o-crips,” Jessica said obediently as the door closed behind us.

The waiting room was bigger than the Nina and the Pinta combined. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom I saw that its walls were lined with enormous black-and-white photographs, pictures of the kind of little kids who go through life just begging for a pie in the face. They had freckles. They had missing teeth. They had straw in their hair. They featured suspenders, gingham neckerchiefs, and catcher's mitts. One or two had a burnt-cork black eye. All in all, they were about as cute as an advanced case of bubonic plague, but less contagious.

“Oh, good, you've got the door closed. May I help you?” the voice said.

The voice belonged to a tiny man in the kind of pleated linen shirt that's been popular for inexplicable decades in the Philippines. He was seated behind a big desk at the far corner of the office. No, I decided, he was standing. He had a pinched little face, topped off by a widow's peak that was pronounced enough to symbolize all the wives bereaved by World War One. He also had very hairy forearms. Short as he was, he could have traded forearms with Bluto, and Bluto wouldn't have noticed the difference. On top of it all was the kind of haircut that a friend of mine had dubbed turban renewal: to cover the fact that he was balding on top, he'd grown the hair on the back of his head about a yard long and combed it forward. It sat on his forehead like a knickknack shelf from which someone had stolen the knickknacks.

“Help me?” I said. Jessica nudged me. “Of course you can help me. We'd like to see Miss Brussels.”

“Mrs. Brussels,” he hissed. The phrase offered a lot of opportunity for hissing.

“Well, sure,” I said, feeling larger than I was by about two feet. His widow's peak hit me at the nipples. “That's what I said. Mrs. Brussels.”

He gave me a bright, cockeyed little bird's stare. “You didn't, of course,” he said. “What you said was Miss. Have you got an appointment?”

“Yes,” Jessica said bravely.

“No,” I said.

“Darlings,” he said, “make up your minds. I always have a headache on Mondays. You could be a tumor or you could be an aspirin. Personally, of course, I'd rather you were an aspirin. For one thing, you can get a refund on aspirin.”

“No,” I said, taking the frank, honest approach. “We don't have an appointment.”

“Well,” he said, looking at a book in front of him, “of course you realize that Mondays are very busy.”

“You'll be Birdie,” I said, reading the nameplate on his desk. That's what it said, Birdie. Other than the nameplate and the appointment book, which was the size of the average aircraft carrier, the desk was nearly barren. At one end of it stood a computer terminal, swiveled so that the screen was turned away from us.

“I'll be Birdie when the headache fades,” he said. “Until then I'll just be miserable. What would your business be with Mrs. Brussels?”

“This little darling here,” I said. “We're looking for representation.”

“Are we,” he said. “You realize that the usual method is to make an appointment first.”

“You couldn't see her on the phone,” I said. “You might have said no. So we decided to take a chance. Make a dimple, darling,” I said to Jessica.

Jessica put one finger to her cheek and smirked terribly. “My name is Jewel,” she said in a passable imitation of a Chinese singsong girl.

“She sings and dances,” I said. “Acts, too. Acts up a storm.”

“Not here, please” Birdie said. “Save it for Mrs. B. If you'll just take a seat, I'll inquire as to the state of her calendar.”

“It's in California,” Jessica said.

“Quick-witted, too,” Birdie said acidly. “Just what Johnny Carson is looking for.” He pushed a button under his desk and the door behind him slid open. “It's so Flash Gordon, isn't it?” he said, leaving us. He couldn't have been more than five-four, and he waddled.

“Put you in your place, didn't he, Jewel?” Jewel collapsed resentfully onto a couch, and I took a closer look at Birdie's desk. It was empty of any personal touches except for a Lucite frame holding a color picture of a little Yorkshire terrier, a breed I've always despised. “Purse dogs,” a friend of mine calls them, “society ladies put them in their purses to bite anyone who tries to steal their wallet.” There was also a little plaster-of-paris paperweight with the impression of a tiny dog's paw pressed into it. Below the paw, it said in shaky pencil, “Woofers, June 1988.”

I swiveled the computer workscreen toward me. I was looking at some kind of data base, a single record, idaho, it said, and then the date, fingers: 2000 orders. Then there were a couple of names, followed by five-digit numbers. Last request, the screen said: fingers: 1200 orders, special orders: it said: page down. Lacking the nerve to push page down because I wasn't sure I could get back to the first record, I swiveled the screen back into its original position. “Fingers are a boom market in Idaho,” I said.

“They've got a lot to give the finger to in Idaho,” Jessica said from a maroon plush couch where she was staring in dismay at a copy of JackandJill magazine. ” ’PeeWee to Marry,’ ” she read aloud. “Who the hell is PeeWee?”

I ignored her. Most of the furniture in the waiting room was half-size, perfect for children. Toys glimmered in the corners like the refuse of an overenthusiastic Christmas. There were wooden ducks with pull-ropes for the newly mobile and, at the other end of the spectrum, electronic baseball games and computerized time-wasters that were StarWars ripoffs. Most of the books and magazines were profusely illustrated with pictures of squirrels and other sanctioned rodents wearing hairbows and bow ties.

“Well,” I said, folding myself into a chair so small that my knees hit my chin, “isn't this nice?”

“Simeon,” Jessica said, “you look like a paper clip.”

“Call me Dwight,” I said. “You Jewel, me Dwight, okay?”

“You ridiculous,” she said, giving up on JackandJill. “Can't you find someplace else to sit?”

“Jewel. Try to behave. This could be the place.”

She sat up, looking apprehensive. “Really? Why?”

The room didn't seem to be miked, and I couldn't see a hidden camera, but that didn't mean there wasn't one. Any- way, I wasn't sure I could explain why. I reached over affectionately and pinched her wrist, hard enough to get her attention. “For your career, Jewel,” I said, between my teeth, “this looks like the big time.”

“Bug time, you mean,” she said. I pinched her harder. “Yowk,” she said. “Okay, okay. If it looks good to you, Dwight, it looks good to me.”

We passed what seemed like a decade in silence, if you didn't count the electronic beeps of a StarWars game, which Jessica beat the bejesus out of in three consecutive passes. The phone blinked eight or nine times, but it was answered from inside. “They design these for cretins,” Jessica said, tossing the game aside.

“There's nothing wrong with Crete, honey,” Birdie said, coming back into the room. The door sighed closed behind him. “Very lovely, all mountains and ocean and fishermen.”

“Oceans and fishermen usually go together,” Jessica said sourly.

“Well,” Birdie said archly, seating himself, “there are fishermen and fishermen.”

“They all smell like fish,” Jessica said.

“What’re you, a lactovegetarian?” Birdie asked, exposing a nasty streak and half an inch of swollen gum.

“Will she see us?” I asked.

“A few minutes,” he said, pulling himself up to the computer and tapping a couple of keys. “She's on the phone now.” He looked over at the instrument on his desk. “She's on three phones,” he said proudly.

“She must have a lot of ears,” Jessica said.

“Witty child,” Birdie said, staring at the computer screen. “Perhaps you'll excuse me.”

With my face partially hidden by Jessica's discarded edition of JackandJill, I watched Birdie futzing around with the computer. What I saw was a middle-aged male secretary, a homosexual member of the lost generation, the last generation that was uncomfortable with the idea of coming out of the closet. I saw a prissy, probably obsessively neat little man who went through life feeling short-sheeted, a man who counted his change in supermarkets and felt grieved when it was right, a man who doubted the advertised beef content of wieners. Presented with a bill in a restaurant, he would have added it twice and then fudged on the tip. His party lost the election. His disposable razors wore out too soon. He never had enough money. Handed the daughter of the Pork King, he might have looked on her as a one-way airline ticket to Crete. The question was, who the hell was Mrs. Brussels?

He caught me staring twice and smiled in happy misunderstanding. I smiled back. We were getting along great. The phone rang a few more times, and he weeded out the unwanted from the wanted callers in a voice that had all the regret of a funeral director learning that the client was dead. Finally, his phone buzzed discreetly, and he rose the four inches that marked the difference between his sitting and standing heights and rubbed his hands in the best Uriah Heep imitation I'd seen in months.

“She'll see you now,” he said.

“Just don't tell us to walk this way,” Jessica said unwisely. “I don't think I could do it.”

“Honey,” Birdie said, but this time he said it to me, “you're going to earn your money.” We followed him through the Flash Gordon door.

Mrs. Brussels stood up to greet us. Her suit was brilliantly tailored, but it had nothing on her manner. “Mr. Ward,” she said, echoing the name I'd given to Birdie, “and this is Jewel. Jewel Ward?” she asked.

“Not actually,” I said, choosing the larger of the two chairs in front of her desk. The other was sized for a child, and Jessica climbed grumpily into it. “Jewel Smith,” I said.

“Smith,” she said, sitting down. “Jewel Smith. We'll have to do something about that. If we come to an arrangement, of course.” She gave me a radiant smile, and I gave her the best I had in return.

“How did you get my name, if you don't mind my asking?” she asked, beaming with democratic impartiality on both Jessica and me.

“Through the Actors'Directory:’

The smile went a little rigid and her gaze wavered. “How ingenious. How did you ever think of doing that?” She was sitting up straighter than she had been a moment earlier.

“A friend suggested it.”

“A friend,” she said with the same smile fixed in place. It did nothing to her eyes. “Is he in the business?”

“He's a teacher,” I said.

“What level does he teach?” It was a question I hadn't anticipated.

“College,” I improvised.

She blinked at me. For the first time since we'd entered the room I felt that she was at a loss for words. Something, for her, didn't add up, and she didn't know where to go next.

“It makes good sense,” I said, to fill the silence. “Where else could you go through pages of kids and get their agents' names and addresses?”

“At least,” she said, relaxing slightly, “you can find out who's active.” I still had the feeling that she was watching me, but I had no idea why.

“And you can see what kinds of kids they've got and how good the photographs are,” I said, trying to figure out what was going on. “You can see whether you've heard of any of their clients. It can tell you a lot.”

She sat back in her chair. “I suppose it can,” she said noncommittally. “Of course, many of my clients are featured in the directory. Most of them are doing very well indeed. I must say, fortune has looked favorably on our little enterprise in the last three or four years.” Whatever had caused the uncomfortable moment, it had passed.

“That's why we're here,” I said. I had placed the emotionless smile. She had something of the third-grade teacher about her, the one who could smile at you while she was explaining why you weren't going to see fourth grade within your expected lifetime.

“It's unusual,” she continued, as though I hadn't spoken, “for me to see anyone who hasn't made an appointment. But Birdie explained your reasoning to me, and he also told me what a remarkably beautiful little lady you've brought with you.” She glimmered at Jessica, who gave her a cool nod. Jessica, as I was beginning to realize, had good taste. Dismissing her lack of responsiveness, Mrs. Brussels said, “She reminds me of the young Margaret O'Brien.”

“She has skills,” I said, “that Margaret O'Brien never heard of.” Jessica gave me a quick, evil look.

“I'll stipulate that she's talented,” Mrs. Brussels said comfortably.

“What's ‘stipulate’?” Jessica said suspiciously. She still hadn't gotten over being called a thespian.

“It's lawyer talk, sweetie,” Mrs. Brussels said. “It means that I'm willing to believe that you've got talent.”

“You haven't seen me do anything,” Jessica said, dimpling again. It had been her least attractive skill at the age of four. I hadn't seen it since.

“Mind of her own,” Mrs. Brussels observed.

“You don't know the half of it,” I replied.

“At any rate, talent is mainly a matter of training. It can be learned. What can't be learned, what's much rarer, is beauty and, of course, presence. This little girl has a great deal of presence.” She gave Jessica a look that dared her to voice a contradiction. Mrs. Brussels had little mid-forties laugh crinkles around her eyes, fine bones, a full lower lip, all topped off by a mass of auburn hair held up by a few pins arranged in an oddly Victorian fashion. Wisps of fine hair framed her face. She looked like Colleen Dewhurst playing Colleen Dewhurst. There was a little too much flesh under the skin, but not so much that it kept swinging back and forth after she'd finished shaking her head. Once I got past the image of the terrible third-grade teacher, she reminded me of nothing so much as the prettiest of all my elementary school friends' mothers. I had gone to his house largely to see her.

Jessica acknowledged the challenge with a disdainful sniff. Maybe she just resented being called a little girl.

“She's very special,” I said. I paused before the word “special.”

“And you're her what?”

“She's my ward,” I said.

“Like your name,” she said brightly. “Ward.”

“Exactly,” I said. “Isn't that a coincidence?”

“It certainly is,” she said, watching me with an entirely new expression.

Jessica, feeling excluded, began to fidget.

“You're legal?” Mrs. Brussels said.

“Well, Mommy and Daddy aren't here.”

“They could show up,” she said, one hand under her chin. “Where are they, anyway?”

Jessica heard her cue. “They're dead,” she said.

“Is that so?” Mrs. Brussels said, her face turning into a postcard of sympathy. “That's terrible.”

“Oh, golly,” Jessica said, “you don't know how I cried.” I was proud of her; she resisted the impulse to wring her hands.

“And now”-Mrs. Brussels in her most motherly tones- “you have no one but Mr. Ward, here.” Her eyes, when she turned them to me, were older than rocks.

Jessica looked at me proudly. “He's all I need,” she said. “He's wonderful.”

“They died in Idaho,” I said. “A car wreck.”

“What a sad story,” Mrs. Brussels said perfunctorily. “And you said you were her legal guardian?”

“Legal enough,” I said.

“Because there are contracts,” she said.

I looked at Jessica, who had withdrawn into herself. She was sitting on her hands like Wayne Warner.

“And are you willing for her to travel?” Mrs. Brussels said in the tone I would have used to ask if it were sunny. And why not? If I was right about her, and I was sure I was, all we were talking about was the Mann Act.

“I'm a frequent flier,” Jessica said remotely.

“What a delightful child,” Mrs. Brussels said. Her voice sounded like a knife being sharpened on a whetstone. “So precocious. I'm sure we can work something out, Mr. Ward. There are the standard papers, of course. Nothing special, all to your benefit and little Jewel's. Perhaps we could draw them up overnight and you could come in tomorrow and sign them. You and Jewel, I mean.”

“Sure,” I said. “Be delighted. Call me Dwight.”

“And where are you staying? Since you've just come here from Idaho, I mean.”

“The Sleep-Eze Motel,” I said, “on Melrose.”

She gave me the crinkly smile. “Nice place,” she said. She directed a glance toward the computer terminal on her desk, which had just whirred and beeped. Eyes on the screen, she tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear. “And now,” she added, “I have work to do.” Without looking up from the computer, she extended a hand to me, ignoring Jessica completely. “We're going to do just fine,” she said. “Great career. Come tomorrow, tennish? Birdie will show you out.”

“Tennish,” I said.

Birdie showed us out.

In the parking lot, Jessica tugged at my hand. “That woman is a snake,” she said. “What was the big deal about the Actors'Directory? She acted like you'd goosed her.”

“Jessica,” I said, “I think you've got a future in this line of work.”

She got into the car, sat back, and glowed.