The Hinky Velvet Chair (34 page)

The glorious hesitations and apologies and begging tumbled
out of him, and Clay grinned with silent glee.

At this moment, Randy took Jewel by the arm, led her
outside, and shut the door. Clay hid behind the Venus Machine and held his
breath.

Virgil didn’t seem to notice. “My love?” His voice trembled.

She squared up to him, her forty-two-year-old lip quivering.
“What about Sovay? Why did you bring her here? Why did you make me pretend to
be your sister? I know I’m not smart like her—”

“It was just money. I wanted it.” Virgil waved that aside. “Sovay
is nothing.”

“Nobody is nothing,” Griffy said in a firm voice. “I love it
when you talk nice to me. But you need to learn to listen to me. And I’m not
talking about Sovay.” She took a deep breath. “Would you still love me if I did
go to college?” Her chin trembled, but she smiled with chorus-girl tenderness.

Virgil turned and exchanged glances with Clay. His look
said,
See what happens when you fall in
love with a dumbbell?

Clay sent him a look that said,
You conned her. Now you have to fix it.

Virgil shrugged and turned back to Griffy. “Go to college if
you want to,” he said helplessly.

No, not the truth!
Clay rolled his eyes.

“When Julia got her second time on the machine?” Griffy
swallowed. “All I could think was, I want my Virgil back. I want him to love
me. And then I did it, and then you loved me. But it was all the Venus Machine!
Maybe I’ll get you away from Sovay, but what if that’s j-just the m-machine,
not m-m-m-meee?”

Her face crumpled, and Virgil wrapped himself around her.

“It’s not real, honey, it’s not real. It’s just a con,” he
kept saying.

“Poor Virgil. Stuck in a world with no magic.” She touched
his face. “I don’t think it’s a beauty machine at all. I think it’s a wishing
machine.”

“There’s no such—” Virgil started to say, and stopped.

Clay frowned at him.
You
have to fix a con with an other con. The mark will never believe that you
fooled her. Lied to her, yes, as long as you say, ‘But this is the truth, this
time.’ Her pride won’t accept being fooled. So you fix a con with another con.

A look of despair crossed his father’s face, as if he’d read
Clay’s thought. He took her by the shoulders. His hands trembled. “Honey, it’s
a fake.”

Clay could have strangled him.

She seemed to pull herself together. “No, really. Should I
get the reverse treatment on the Venus Machine?” She looked at him with big,
dumb, serious, blue eyes.

I could have told you
she wouldn’t buy that answer!

Virgil looked hunted. “What can I say?” His hands rubbed
together as if he couldn’t stop them. “If I tell you the machine’s a fake, how
can I explain how beautiful you look to me? If I say, go ahead, reverse it,
would that be fair to you, when you seem to get so much confidence from it? You
need the truth from me, don’t you?”

She sniffed, nodding.

He pulled her hand to his chest and his mouth twisted. “You’re
better at honesty than I am. What do
you
want?”

o0o

He held her hand, looking scared.
Virgil, scared!
Griffy was entranced.

“You first,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”

“I want to set things right with you. With us. It’s been a
lot of years.” He touched her hair so sweetly she had to bite her tongue to
keep
I love you
in. “The other night,
when you stepped out of that contraption, you looked like the girl I brought
home eighteen years ago. I realized you’ve been in there all the time.” He
smiled. “My big-hearted stripper girl, inside the clothes I chose and the
jewelry I bought and the elocution lessons I forced you through. I didn’t know
how much I took away from you. The you I want is the you I couldn’t change.”

Her heart swelled, but she sniffled and tossed her head. “Does
that mean I can say dese, dem, and dose now?”

He looked horribly uncertain.

She decided to put him out of his misery. “I’ll tell you
what I think. That machine didn’t do anything. It was you. I saw what you did
for Julia. She used to be like I used to be. Young and beautiful and wild.
Giving it away wherever she wanted. Somehow she lost all that — that free glory
— but you gave it back to her, Virgil. I saw that and I wanted you to give that
to me, too.”

He swallowed. “Honey, if you need to be free—”

“I need
you
to be
free.” She put out both her palms. “You have so much power and wisdom. You could
use them for good, if you wanted. You made a stripper into somebody worthy of
you.”

“Oh, Christ!” He covered his face. “I’m not worthy of you,
and you know it.”

Clay caught her eye and slid down behind the half-assembled
machine.

She touched Virgil’s hand until he looked at her. “I fell in
love with a good guy. Being good to people is harder than taking them.” She
smiled through tears. “That should interest a workaholic like you. A new
challenge.”

He drew a deep breath. “What should I do? I can do about anything,
but I don’t know if I can be a do-gooder.”

“Sure you can. You can help Clay convince Sovay and Julia
that the Venus Machine is fixed so it will cure them.”

Virgil sent a sideways glance in Clay’s direction. “He might
not thank me for that.”

Clay stuck his head out from behind the Venus Machine. “I
could use your help. Julia is the toughest mark I’ve ever met, and the most
honest, so it’s hard to fake her out. It’ll take both of us.” He told Griffy, “It’s
not real, you know. It was never real. I’m sorry if — if that ruins something
for you.”

“My boys. Always doing things the hard way.” She kissed
Virgil’s cheek. “There’s always one person who can make the magic happen for
you.”

“Now, that I can do,” Virgil said gallantly, putting his
arms around her.

Out in the stairwell, Jewel faced her sex demon.

“Virgil sets an improving example,” Randy said. “Let us make
peace. I want to live on good terms with you.”

She blinked. “Well, I want that, too. This situation drives
us both crazy. I think we can make it more bearable.” He nodded. She said, “I
guess I should be more patient. I know you used to have, like, this big estate,
and all these servants my-lording at you, like Mellish does. It’s gotta kill
you to be so dependent on me. I — I guess I can try to be less bossy. I mean,
who am I, I’m not a lord.” She gave a lame laugh.

“Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows ruefully, “you are no
person I would have met in the ordinary course of life.”

“I’m no what?” Her apologetic mood skidded.

He pursed his lips. The orange crushed-velvet coat and
ruffles looked right on him. “We are of different degrees.”

“We are what?” Jewel was getting the impression he was
insulting her. “Do you mean you’re a lord and I’m—”

“Common. Well, solid yeoman stock,” he amended. In his eyes,
she saw a picture of herself in a peasant blouse with a yoke over her shoulders
and two pails hanging from it. She was curtseying to Randy-in-lord-costume.

A milkmaid! I’m a
milkmaid next to His High Lordyness!

“Perhaps the lesser landed gentry. I understand your family
were farmers who worked their land.”

She gasped. “And this is
how
much
lower than a lord?”

He lifted a hand, as if to smooth over the insult. “This is
scarcely the moment for a lecture on the order of precedence. You would never
have been a servant. But we could not have met, let us say, at a ball, as
equals in polite society.”

“I suppose I would be too low for you to fuck!” she
exploded. “I would hope I’m higher than those
whores
you skanked around with, or, wait, was that
after
your mistress shitcanned you for
being lousy in bed?”

“Whatever a gentleman chooses to do, if he does it with good
ton
, cannot but be acceptable,” he
said stiffly.

“Say that in American. You’re in America now. Without a
green card, may I add.”

He looked tight and snooty and lordy and offended.
I have to start treating him like an adult.
He’s a hundred and ninety-eight years older than I am.
He didn’t have the
tools to be her roommate in her poky little apartment. It was up to her to set
rules and make it work. If she could just keep him from getting emotional!
I suck at emotional.

She relaxed. “Let’s make peace. I want to live on good terms
with you.”

“I said that first,” he huffed.

“That’s how peace negotiations start. We pick a goal
together. Is it a good goal?”

After a moment, he nodded. He started to speak, but the door
to the collection room opened just then, and Clay called them back in.

Virgil stood holding a voltmeter in his hand, touching the
probe to the Venus Machine and grunting.

Griffy was opening a beer bottle. Jewel took it from her and
sucked down half in one ice-cold swallow.

Clay led her to the Venus Machine. “Voilà!”

Jewel scowled. “Voilà what?”

He beamed. “It’s fixed. Took some doing, but once I worked
out what the ratios should have been on the lateral receptors, everything
snapped into place.”

She drank more beer. “Hm. No, alcohol doesn’t help. What are
you talking about?”

“We set it up wrong. God knows what Kauz did to those poor
people at the party. If you still have discomfort from your last go on this
machine, I think we can normalize that.”

She looked in his eyes and saw herself, smiling. “This won’t
electrocute my heinie like it did last time, will it?”

“Checking that now,” Virgil said, looking very technical
with his voltmeter and his frown.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like Clay to check it, too,” Jewel
said. Virgil looked at her. “Since you messed up last time.”

Virgil snorted, but he handed over the voltmeter.

“They’re going to cure Sovay, too,” Griffy offered. “As soon
as we know this works on you.”

Jewel sent her a
You’re
too nice to live
look. “Sovay’s in the kitchen, getting snockered.”

Griffy raised her voice. “You hear, Virgil? You’re to cure
Sovay. She doesn’t deserve what happened to her.”

“What does this do again?” Jewel said.

“Well,” Clay said, “the symptoms of arousal resemble the
symptoms of a heightened sympathetic nervous system.”

“So it’s kind of based on real medical principles,” she
said, blinking.

“Oh, Katterfelto didn’t know squat about real medicine, but
he knew plenty about the medieval invisible body, and he applied the work of
Renaissance thinkers toward a unified field theory.”

Griffy cleared her throat. “I think she just wants to know
how it works.”

“Quite so, quite so,” Clay said quickly. “Anyway, making it
simple and leaving out all the theory,” he made a face at Griffy, “a woman is
more attractive when she’s aroused. Her senses are heightened, her circulation
system runs at a higher level — that means pink cheeks, bright eyes, a little
heaving-bosom action. She’s excited by what she sees and hears, and that makes
her interesting, mating-wise. She’s prepared for mounting, if you want to be
biological about it.”

Griffy frowned. “I think that’s too biological.”

Jewel rolled her eyes. “I am a farm girl.” She remembered
Randy’s crack about solid yeoman stock and scowled at his lordship. “But this
is all newage.”

“I think it’s a wishing machine,” Griffy said.

Clay shrugged. “I only know the three-hundred-year-old
theories. If it screws up, who you gonna blame, the theory or your body? If I
were you, I wouldn’t blame my body.” He put down the gadgetry, held out his
arms, and twiddled. “C’mere.”

Cautiously Jewel walked forward.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her, a long, deep,
firm kiss that left her cross-eyed.

“What was that about?” she said groggily.

“I wanted to do that one more time, before I turn you back
into chopped liver.”

She slapped him, loud but not hard.

He kissed her again, even longer.

Griffy started laughing. Virgil whistled. Randy sniffed.

Clay stepped back and flourished a hand toward the green
velvet chair. “Will you take a seat?”

They didn’t strap her in this time.

Just as Clay was about to throw the switch, Virgil stopped
him and they debated for what seemed like eternity. Clay argued that they had
to keep the voltage low and not stimulate any secondary chakras, whatever the
fuck that meant.

A wishing machine.

Jewel wondered if she could get what she wished for if she
imagined it. And that was?
God, who ever
knows what they want?

She knew she was was sick of seeing men’s thoughts. Sick of
guys trying to hump her leg.

Before she could think further, Clay said, “Ready?” and the
big lever went clunk.