organic rosemary peeled face, and her lipo-suctioned tummy? If he’d wanted to be sitting here alone approving credit charges like an effing Wall Street tycoon, he could’ve stayed in Jersey with his wife.
So that was the second thing.
Then he got up and ordered breakfast, and when it came, his eggs had runny whites, even though he’d specifically said, no runny whites. And they gave him that sourdough toast again. Who could eat that crap? It was enough to make a guy puke. So he’d ordered up a new breakfast, but that took a little while, and in the meantime, his coffee got cold.
So that was the third thing.
When Baby finally showed up, shortly before noon, carrying a half-dozen shopping bags, and with a starstruck bellboy carrying another dozen, Big Julie wasn’t feeling very romantic.
“You have to see what I got!” Baby squealed as she tipped the bellboy, her smile sparkling for Big Julie alone.
“I can see you got plenty,” Big Julie groused.
The bodyguard, glancing up over the stock market quotes, thought of something he needed to do somewhere else and glided out of the room, if a man who was six-four and weighed two-thirty in the buff could be said to glide.
Baby dropped the bags on the sofa and rushed over to Big Julie, throwing her arms around him. “Don’t be mad, honey. I got everything for you. You want me to do you credit, don’t you? And you were sleeping so hard, and I know how much those late nights take out of you. I couldn’t wake you. And I got you a present. I hope you like it!”
Big Julie eyed her with disfavor. “If I’d wanted to wear out my credit cards in Vegas, I could have brought Marilyn.”
And so, of course, that was the fourth thing. Because no self-respecting Baby would let a reminder of the wife back home go unchallenged.
“Marilyn!” Baby shrieked, dropping her arms from around Big Julie’s shoulders and stomping off toward the bedroom with her shopping bags. “That’s what you want? You want Marilyn? Well, go ahead and call her! Get her here! You don’t spend time with me, you don’t take me nowhere, we don’t even go down to the casino or out to eat or nothing. And I go out to do a little shopping to kill some time while you’re sleeping so you’ll be proud of me, and now you bring Marilyn into it?”
Big Julie had spoken in haste. He really hadn’t meant that he would rather have brought Marilyn. Ever since his wife had discovered that Baby accepted very munificent gratuities as well as a clothing and automobile allowance to entertain her husband, which she did regularly and energetically in a condo that he’d bought for her overlooking the ninth green of the Rocky Shores Country Club golf course, there’d been trouble at home. In fact, ever since Marilyn realized that every afternoon when Big Julie went out to the country club to swing his driver he was getting a hole in one, Marilyn had added murder to her daily to-do list. Big Julie’s murder.
Not that the physical side of Big Julie’s marriage hadn’t been stale for some time. It wasn’t Marilyn’s tchotchke collection, her plastic-covered furniture, and her extra-large, frozen-from-Costco pans of lasagna that she served every Sunday at family dinners. It was Marilyn herself. That lasagna had packed on the pounds over the years, and although Big Julie liked a woman with meat, Marilyn had tried to rein herself in with the aid of industrial-strength undergarments. Her corseted figure was so rigid with elastic polymers that once when Big Julie found the courage to give one of her tits a little squeeze, there hadn’t been any give to it at all. It was like squeezing a traffic cone strapped to her chest.
In short, Big Julie quickly realized that he had nothing to gain by alienating Baby’s affections with talk about Marilyn.
“Baby,” he said, his voice placating. “I didn’t mean nothing.”
Baby stopped behind the couch and dropped her shopping bags on the cushions in front of her, planting her fisted hands on her curvaceous hips. Her chin-length, blond, curly hair was tousled, her red lips were parted, and her breasts, those glorious globes of heavenly bliss, strained against the flimsy fabric of her sundress. Suddenly Big Julie didn’t feel quite so oppressed.
“Baby, honey,” he said again. “You know that everything I have is yours. I was just missing you. Come on, now. Give me a kiss.”