After 20 years as a restaurant critic, Maurinette Meede planned her days to keep her appetite sharp: only amateurs judged things they didn’t desire. One clammy November Saturday, Maurinette planned to test an authentic-looking new trattoria with a late lunch. She stayed between her mint-colored sheets till noon, then took to the couch with a cup of cafe au lait, two cigarettes, and a catalog of Erte prints.
“Er, no thank you,” said the receptionist. “I just had some.”
“Sacre coeur!” said Maurinette, and slammed her copy of Chiculture on the counter.
“Never be timid, it’s merely annoying!” Maurinette’s mother had always told her. She stamped among the smelly hutches, then spied the red-sock creature through the glass door of an office. His back was to the door and he was wearing headphones, viewing and reviewing the same ten seconds of the forest-fire scene from Bambi on a small black-and-white screen. His legs, which rather resembled Bambi’s, were propped up on a stack of unopened UPS packages. He smoothed his combover with one hand and worried the buttons of the VCR remote with the other. Maurinette raised her fist to knock but then heard a clink behind her–as of scotch bottle on snifter.
“In bed? It’s four!”
“That’s what you said the last five times. I thought we did all right by that thing, considering…”
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Pill snorted. “Yes, and you had just described it for several hundred words, so we were pretty sure it could be done.” Maurinette strove to express towering rage by popping out her eyes. Pill sprawled back into a pile of comic books. “Lady. Look.” She flipped through the dictionary, then pushed the mustard-stained tome at Maurinette’s face.
