coo your sweet nothings. You’ve shown him who’s boss around here. You’ve shown him you’re the alpha male, not him. And there’s your Ike Walsh of 60 Minutes… He’s a little pissing monkey.”
Whereupon he disappeared into his office.
::::::Ike Walsh is a little pissing monkey! And he’s about to be interviewed by Ike Walsh!:::::: Magdalena had never heard Norm say anything quite that contemptuous before, although many times she had heard him refer to TV people in general as suggestible and inflammable children “innocent of any conceptual thinking whatsoever.”
Right now the operative word was inflammable. The TV news shows were all hot to exploit the results of a National Institutes of Health study showing that an astounding 65 percent of all “hits” on the internet were at pornographic sites. The NIH—the US government!—was warning of a pandemic of pornography addiction. It had risen from naughty to a national health crisis. “They’re critically nil,” Norman liked to say, referring to the tiny inflamed brains of the TV people. On the other hand, he didn’t mind appearing on their shows. “They exploit so-called pornography addiction,” he’d say—he always threw in the “so-called”—“and I exploit them.” He was great at it! Magdalena knew she was more than a bit biased, but Norman was wonderful on television… so calm, so well-spoken, so all-knowing… and yet good-humored… and the way he looked—but now he thinks he’s going to treat the fiercest man on television as a tiny pissing monkey?
At that moment Norman emerged from his office, beaming, gleaming with enthusiasm. God, he was good-looking! Her americano prince! Blue eyes… wavy brownish hair—she preferred to think of it as blond… tall, a little fleshy, maybe, but not really… fat. He was forty-two, but he had a strong face, and the energy of a thirty-year-old… make that a twenty-five-year-old. Her friends were forever clucking and fuming and warning her that he was almost twice her age… but they had no conception of Norman’s vigor and strength and joy of living. When the two of them got up in the morning, both of them naked—she had never slept that way with anybody before—she could tell that underneath the good healthy… padding… he had a really good build. blip Nestor was only five-seven and bulging with muscles here there everywhere… bulging!… so grotesque!… Norman’s hair, so thick and wavy and blond… blond! she insisted… made all that “jacked,” “ripped” stuff Nestor talked about irrelevant. She was living with the americano ideal! If there was anyone who was more thoroughly not Hialeah, more completely above Hialeah, on a higher, more intellectual plane, she couldn’t imagine who. The whole world was opening up to her. Oh sure, people in Hialeah liked to make their americano jokes. But in their hearts they knew that outside of Miami, it was the americanos who ran things… ran everything.
Now Norman stood beside her desk. He put a photograph down in front of her. “Take a look at that, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will be repaid.’ That’s the epigraph to Anna Karenina, by the way. Anyway, our big bear’s sin is onanism, and he shall pay for it.”
Remarks like that, so offhand and natural to Norman, intimidated Magdalena terribly. She had no idea what an epigraph was. She had a vague notion of Anna Karenina… somebody in a book? On onanism, she drew a complete blank. A sixth sense told her not to touch epigraph and Anna Karenina. Anything that had to do with writing, with literature, intimidated her most of all. It hit her sorest point, her lack of education in the books you were supposed to have read, the artists whose paintings you were supposed to be familiar with, the great composers—she knew nothing—about any composer. She had heard of one name, Mozart, but knew absolutely zero about anything he might have composed… So somehow… onanism was safer.
“Onanism?”
“Masturbation,” said Dr. Lewis.
He moved around behind Magdalena, as she sat at the desk, in order to see the photograph from her vantage point. He put his hands on her shoulders, then lowered his head until his chin rested on her shoulder and his cheek was touching hers. She breathed in his cologne, which was called Resolute for Men. Norman’s condo in Aventura had a huge bathroom with a vast marble countertop beneath a tremendous wall of mirrors, and when she went to her sink in the morning, there would be Norman’s stout, manly can of Resolute