"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

But that time was not now. Now she was dead, and she had that to think about.

CHAPTER

2



On Tuesdays on his lunch hour Glandier drove to The Bicentennial Sauna on Lake
Street and got his ashes hauled by whoever was available. He wasn't choosy. The important
thing was to get back to his desk by two o'clock. Not that anyone would have cared if he'd
been half an hour late. But _he_ cared. He liked to parcel his time into neat whole-hour
bundles, a habit he'd carried over from school, where the bells demarcating the hours also
signaled a shift of mental gears.

He did, naturally, have his favorites. For a blow job he liked Libby, who was the
youngest girl at the sauna and sort of thin and frail. She never got down on her knees in front
of him without a little wince of disgust. This had such an immediate positive effect on Glandier
that he'd scarcely got his cock down her throat before he'd shot his load. In some ways that
seemed a waste of $25, but while it lasted it was great, and for the next ten or fifteen
minutes too. Also, it left more time for lunch.

His other favorite must have been the oldest of the lot. Sacajawea she was known as
among the clientele of the Bicentennial. A real squaw with a fat ass and big sagging tits and
lots of makeup around her eyes. She had a way of drooping her eyelashes down and lifting
them up that was sexy as hell though probably just as phony as the lashes. He liked the idea
of her having to act like she thought his performance was really hot shit, the way when he
was screwing her she'd croon encouraging obscenities, or gasp them if he'd reached that rate
of delivery; the way he knew she was grateful for his regular patronage and $5 tips, she being
nothing to look at; the way, after he'd got his breath back, she'd start sucking him off again,
gratis. Not to much purpose, usually. He could get it up again; that wasn't the problem. But
usually he couldn't shoot his load a second time in the forty-five minutes he allotted himself.

The weekly visit to the Bicentennial was a substitute for his former weekly visit to the
downtown St. Paul office of Dr. Helbron, a psychiatrist who specialized in combating the
depressions and anxieties of upper-echelon executives at 3-M, Honeywell, and other Twin
Cities - based multinational corporations. Dr. Heibron had suggested the Bicentennial himself,
claiming that all Glandier needed to start feeling like his old self was a little pussy on a regular
basis. How could he refuse the experiment with his own doctor promoting the idea?

And it had worked. While he was not precisely his old self again, he couldn't complain
any longer of disabling depressions or sudden insane bursts of anger. Those had been the
symptoms that had sent him to the doctor's office originally, on the advice of the company's
personnel director, Jerry Petersen. Back at that time - the summer of '79 - Glandier had done
all he could to act like his old self-confident self, smiling a lot and cracking jokes, but while he
might disguise his depressions, the anger, when it came, was not so controllable. Before he
could think about it, he would flip out and find himself making a scene in a restaurant or
berating one of the girls in the office for something probably not her fault. There was a kind of
demon of righteousness in him that leapt out like a rattlesnake and with no more warning.
After a few such scenes had come to be witnessed by his associates, it had been suggested