"Norman Spinrad - tHE FAT VAMPIRE" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

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THE FAT VAMPIRE

by

Norman Spinrad


(c) by Norman Spinrad
1 rue Maitre Albert
Paris France 7500
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When she returned from puking up the meat course in the ladies' room, the deserts were already on the table, enormous platters of profitrole au chocolate--six balls of vanilla ice cream encased in puff pastry and swimming in lakes of deep dark fondant.

"I took the liberty...." Armand said suavely, smiling at her as he wrapped his lips around a dripping spoonful.

Christine had never met a man like Count Armand Kubescu before.

True, Los Angeles was awash in slick continental types laying claim to nebulous titles of nobility, dressing like Ruritanian diplomats, and living it up with no visible means of support. It was an old Hollywood tradition. They fronted fancy restaurants and clubs, pimped for sleazy porn producers, sold real estate or used Mercedes, or gigoloed for ancient has-been starlets flush with the proceeds of their latest divorce.

Like most of these counts from central casting, Armand Kubescu had thick straight black hair impeccably groomed in some unisex Beverly Hills salon, intense dark eyes under dramatic brows, and a light generalized European accent. Like most of them, he was slim, graceful, affected a languid William F. Buckley slouch, and seemed ageless.

Ordinarily, Christine Coleman avoided such creatures like the plague they were. If they weren't gay, they were impotent, and if they weren't impotent, they were into slimy fetishes or dumb bondage numbers. If they weren't out to sell you something, they were out to sell you.

Indeed, in a certain twisted sense, they were a form of competition, predators working the neighboring ecological niche. Christine understood them all too well.

For Los Angeles was even more abundantly awash in beautiful women of a certain age which made them a bit long in the tooth for starlets, with a sprinkling of walk-on credits extracted on low- budget casting couches, a garage apartment in the hills, and a cranky twelve-year old used Porsche. Women just short of enough acting talent to make it as tv bit players, possessed of just enough pride to prevent them from sliding into hookerdom or the fading porn industry, and too indolent, face it, to wait tables in topless bars.

Women, who, like Christine, surfed through life at the fringes of The Industry via affairs with tv writers, minor-league actors, and production managers, odd jobs in Santa Monica boutiques, a very occasional walk-on in a commercial, ectoplasmic this, and crystal- channeling that.

The Count Kubescus and the Barons of Brentwood worked the feminine flip-side of much the same turf, and while the competition from them might be rather oblique, the idea of actually dating one of them had always struck Christine as the moral equivalent of fag haggery. Like, what was the point? To see whose reach for the check could be slowest?

But Armand Kubescu was different.


The man could eat.

It had been fascination, if not exactly lust, at first sight.

Allie Ellison had been one of Christine's closest girlfriends before she married Alex the Plastic Surgeon; in fact it had been Allie who had taught her the art of vomiting. How to tickle the back of the throat with a forefinger, the necessity of brushing after every in between course barf in order to avoid both halitosis and enormous dental bills.

"Bulimia, schmulemia," Allie had assured her, "Everyone who's anyone does it, hon. Jackie Onasis. Jane Fonda. Margaret Thatcher. Nancy Reagan. It's as American as apple pie alamode with chocolate sauce. Or you rather spend the rest of your life on lettuce and Rye-crisp?"

Christine had always had a sweet tooth, had always loved pasta, and barbecue, grease burgers and fried chicken, mashed potatoes with country gravy, huge steaks, slabs of bread slathered with butter or cheese, guacamole, cheetos, anything with chocolate, everything with whipped cream, and it all had a tendency to go straight to her belly and ass.

Having spent most of her adult life on starvation diets punctuated by occasional guilt-ridden binges, Christine had nursed a secret hatred for the sylphan Allie, who seemed capable of cramming anything and everything down her dainty throat without ever gaining an ounce, until Allie had revealed the Hollywood Diet Secret.

Then they had become the best of bathroom buddies, even engaging in projectile vomiting contests for accuracy and distance from time to time. If only men knew what really went on when the girls went off together to powder their noses!