long platinum braid poking out of a gray heap of primordial ooze. A beached walrus. A newborn humpback whale.
Elizabeth had made it upstairs.
Peaches approached the karaoke machine and ducked behind a speaker to address the ooze. “I hope this is okay,” she said loudly, because Elizabeth’s ears were encased in Saran Wrap and gunk. “Not sure how big you wanted to go, but the room is pretty full.” She shuddered involuntarily. “My husband worships Philip Glass.”
The “head” of the ooze turned slowly and stared up at Peaches with cool gray eyes. Elizabeth’s gross costume or artwork or whatever the fuck she wanted to call it looked like a massive dinosaur placenta. Peaches had asked her about the stench of formaldehyde. Apparently, the giant goo blob she’d encased herself in was partly made from fat cells of reptiles pickled in formaldehyde that she’d ordered in cans from a website for biology teachers. The other part was agar-agar, a jellylike sea substance from the health food store. The two did not mix well, and now that she was upstairs, the stench was almost unbearable.
It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through for a somewhat questionable result.
“Your husband is pretty worked up,” Peaches warned her. “I think he might be drunk, like you said.”
Elizabeth had forgotten to make a mouth hole. She couldn’t speak.
“Nnnngh,” she replied.
“Okay if I make some kind of announcement to get things rolling?” Peaches asked.
“Nnnngh.”
Peaches took a seat behind the drums. She wasn’t exactly sure when Elizabeth was planning to burst out of her nasty sac, but she didn’t want to be standing over her when it happened. She leaned into the microphone.
“Looks like we’re ready to get started with the karaoke portion of our evening. Just write your song selections with your first name on the pieces of paper stacked on the bar and on the tables by the window and drop them in the fishbowl over here, next to the karaoke machine. If anyone feels inclined to play the drums while someone sings, they’re here. We also have a tambourine. First I’ll get the ball rolling with a little drumroll.”
As instructed, she tapped out a military-style drumroll that segued into the beat of “Here Comes the Bride.”
Elizabeth rolled and oozed forth, exuding a gag-inducing odor. Members of the crowd began to notice her and took a startled step back, clutching their noses.
“Nnnngh,” Elizabeth moaned from inside her casing. “Nnnngh!”
The crowd took another murmuring step back. Peaches continued to thwack out the beat of “Here Comes the Bride.” Behind the bar, Tupper Paulsen looked very fragile and very pale.
“Nnnnghaaaa!!” Elizabeth burst out of the revolting gray heap of slime and rose to her full height, wearing only a black bikini. The bones of her hips and shoulders protruded from her torso like dorsal fins. Her ribs and vertebrae were easily counted beneath her glistening white skin.
As instructed, Peaches dropped into a mellower roll.
Remnants of gray ooze speckled Elizabeth’s thick black eyebrows and clung to her platinum-blond hair. Her face was not beautiful, but stately and ageless, with deep frown wrinkles and a thin mouth so downturned it almost looked like it had been put on wrong. Everything about Elizabeth seemed to defy possibility. She was like Stonehenge in human form.
Tupper made his way out from behind the bar and walked unsteadily through the staring crowd.
Peaches stopped drumming. “Introducing your host, the artist Elizabeth Paulsen,” she said into the mic.
Elizabeth bowed formally. Her social skills had suffered while she was away but her hauteur had not. “Sorry about the mess,” she apologized huskily to the rapt room. “My husband and I will clean it up while you sing.”
Tupper held out his hand and she stepped forth out of the goo, a messy Venus entering an awestruck, unprepared world. The merry, drinking crowd applauded and snapped pictures on their phones, thrilled to have been a part of one of Elizabeth Paulsen’s infamous works of art. They would embrace her now. If that’s what she’d been going for, she’d achieved it.
Chapter 16
Roy shifted his feet in the tight space and scribbled more notes. Wendy had found him a little closet and a legal pad and pen. On the other side of the door a bass drum pounded, cymbals clashed, and a woman growled, “Why can’t I get just one kiss?”
A literary critic from The New Yorker had written once that “the everlasting appeal of a Roy Clarke novel, however limited in scope, is his awareness that we are all