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

"Dinner tonight?" he suggested as he swiped the last of the egg yolk from her plate with the final chunk of bread. "I know a wonderful German place out in the Valley, hunter's stew, then perhaps a Schnitzel ala Holstein, a Black Forest cake, or the most marvelous pear and cheese strudel...."

"Uh...I'm afraid I'm tied up for the next few days," Christine lied, the thought of another enormous meal enough to green her gills.

"Friday, perhaps?"

Christine thought about it. He was a gentleman, he was charming, he had a fat stack of credit cards, and he was a wonderful lover, despite the fact that she hadn't exactly been at her best last night. Considering the usual tapped-out tv writers and Hollywood sleazebags she had been attracting lately, a girl had to be crazy to pass on a man like this, didn't she, a man whose only apparent flaw, if you could call it that, was this unholy appetite.

What was the problem, anyway? He was more than willing to take care of anything she couldn't handle, and besides, she knew the Hollywood Diet Secret, didn't she? The thought that it was Allie Ellison who had taught it to her, Allie, who had nevertheless turned into a land whale, perhaps thanks to the influence of the Count, gave her some pause.

But after all, Allie was married now, she had probably put on all that blubber before she ever met Armand, that's what marriage did to a girl, didn't it, you got lax once you had landed yourself a Bel Air Plastic Surgeon, you let yourself go. A warning for the wise.

So she accepted a dinner date for Friday before she kissed Count Armand Kubescu good bye. And after he left, remembering Allie, she went straight to the bathroom and did her dietary duty.

Nevertheless, when she stepped on the scale, she discovered, to her befuddlement and consternation, that she seemed to have gained two pounds overnight.


It was certainly the strangest affair Christine had ever found herself trapped in, stranger than the coke-head production manager with the closetful of leather and chains, stranger than the transvestite tv writer, stranger even than the agent with the chicken-suit and the brooms.

And trapped did seem to be the word for it. Lalaland being what it was, Christine had certainly dated her share of kinks and weirdos, had found herself in bed with any number of out-to-lunch pervos, and admittedly had continued brief affairs with some fairly bizarre sexual freaks as long as she thought there might be some advantage in it for her. But she had never before found herself unable to extract herself from a self-destructive relationship that seemed to have no pragmatic reason to exist.

Admittedly, Count Armand Kubescu was always a perfect gentleman. Admittedly, he wined and dined her as she had never been wined and dined before. Admittedly, he always picked up the huge tab. Admittedly, he was an excellent lover who seemed interested only in pleasing her. Admittedly, he made absolutely no demands, sexual or otherwise.

But there was something elusively perverse about it all nonetheless. Traditionally, men treated women to lavish meals in order to get them into the bedroom, everybody knew that, it was a mating dance as old as the human species. Armand Kubescu, however,
seemed to turn the old game inside out and upside down. He seemed willing and able to provide as much or as little of whatever sort of sex she might desire in order to seduce her into the dining room with him.

That was all that they did. They screwed and they ate. They ate and they screwed. With the primary emphasis on the food. Three dinner dates the first week, five the second, and by the third week, he was dragging her to lunch, too. He always stayed over at her place, and always cooked them a monster breakfast the morning after.

By the third week, Christine was throwing up six, seven, eight, ten times a day. But it did no good. Every time she stepped on the scale the morning after a heavy date with Count Kubescu, she had gained another pound or two. By the end of the third week, she had put on 22 pounds.

She knew that she had to break it off. Already, she was popping buttons on her blouses. Already, she couldn't squeeze her blubber into any of her jeans and pants. If this went on much further, she wouldn't even be able to get into her Porsche.

But somehow she just couldn't. Every time she tried, the words just wouldn't come, and she found herself making a date for the next meal, and the next, and the next. Perhaps the permanent state of overstuffed torpor she found herself waddling through in a glaze was interfering with the processes of her brain.

On the other hand, what could she say? Armand was a perfect gentleman and a perfect lover, and gave not the slightest hint of disgust at the grossly-bloated state of her once-perfect body. And though part of her had long since come to anticipate the next cuisinary orgy with bilious dread, the meals always were delicious, he always did pick up the tab, and the sex afterward never left anything to be desired despite her present unwholesome appearance.

Face it, in her loathsome hippoid condition, how could she attract any other man into her bed, let alone a lover like Armand, let alone someone who would pick up all these enormous dinner tabs for the privilege?

She was trapped. In between meals with Armand, she made endless firm resolutions to break it off, but in his presence, her will always faded away, as if he had cast some weird spell on her, like Tammy and her Scientologist, Erma and her channeler, Tess and her vegetarian guru, like Bela Lugosi in all those dumb old vampire movies.

Finally, on the morning after an eight-course Chinese banquet topped off by Death by Chocolate sundaes at C.C. Brown's and a breakfast of chocolate-chip waffles with raspberry syrup and ham steak, she lumbered onto the scale to discover that she had now put on 33 pounds.

Her panties wouldn't even fit anymore. She couldn't even read the damned scale without bending forward to peer over her gut.

She had to do something. But what?

She desperately needed some advice. And the only person she could think of who might supply anything remotely relevant was the woman she had stolen Armand away from, if that was indeed what she had really done, his previous victim, her one-time best bathroom buddy and present-day fellow globuloid, Allie Ellison. #

Considering the circumstances, Allie had been surprisingly cordial on the phone, and readily agreed to meet her for lunch at the Green Goddess, a Beverly Hills tea-room, whose decor tended towards ferns and potted palms, whose menu featured greens, sprouts,