His heart felt a speculative soar as he showered and dressed. A lonely birthday had to be an exception to the whole fidelity rap. As a not totally self-acknowledged Calvinist he was a master at exceptions. Life was a ladder on which some of the rungs were icy, slippery, precarious; one hedged a bit sexually, or in terms of business ethics, but that didn’t mean you had fallen to the primordial, bestial foot of the ladder. You didn’t have the easy out of Catholic penance, guppy munchers as Dad called them, but you had the Siamese Twins of Grace and Predestination on your side.

The dinner was pretty good and since it was his birthday, he did not puzzle long over the three desirable entrees: duck bigarade, duck Montmorency, lobster crêpes. He ordered all three, along with Montrachet and a Chambertin. This served to make the management suspect that he might be a restaurant critic, a trick taught Warlock by the artist and trencherman, Garth. You paid the bill, but the service and food tended to be first rate. Lucette, the waitress date, nibbled like a big bunny at her plate of poached vegetables, though she hit the wine pretty hard. Aurora came to mind. Was he attracted in some strange way to vegetarian women, or they to him? Would they finally suffer the mental problems of protein starvation, or was this a superior life instinct?

They went to her humble apartment, decorated in part by the same Manolete poster of yore, a coincidence he found charming. She sold him two grams of Peruvian rock, a mysterious term of the drug trade. He did a great deal of it to overcome the soporific effects of the meal, and was soon buzzing like a defective toaster. Lucette, it turned out, was a serious voice student “just waitressing for the bucks.” At his insistence she sang, accompanying herself with a guitar. Her operatic voice was embarrassing when singing popular tunes. Only a foot away on the couch she sang muddled lines of “I Believe,” “He Got da Whole Wurl in His Hand” (her pronunciation) and “White Rabbit.” He felt a fine spray of operatic spittle. Would this coke crazed cunt never stop? She finally did. They stripped following a subtle eye signal but then his dick wouldn’t work, an aftereffect of the drug he remembered from Aurora. They did hours of “other stuff” as Lucette called it. She was a gymnast who reminded him of Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. By dawn he finally got a genuine boner and covered her sleeping body with desperation.

Chapter 42