I saw a woman flirting with a bearded academic on the subway,” Chas says, his voice made even drier and more acerbic through the phone connection. “Told him she had a thing for cunning linguists.” He gives her a deadpan look, his eyes rimmed with redness behind the thick, smudged pane of glass.
“I saw a woman wearing baby socks as earmuffs,” Ursula replies.
Chas considers this for a moment, tossing the phone receiver from hand to hand.
“I saw a bum try to lick a frozen candy apple he found in the snow,” he says, running a thumb and forefinger over the stubble to either side of his goatee. “His tongue got stuck to it.”
Ursula toys with the cord of her phone. “I saw a bald bodybuilder look suspiciously from side to side before displaying his vintage Pez dispenser to a friend,” she says.
Chas laughs to himself, an almost silent rasp.
“Which dispenser?” he asks.
“Goofy. Why?”
He shrugs. “No reason, no reason. Just curious.”
The little booths stretch across the room. To either side of her women sit talking over the phones to their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons.
“They’re letting you out, Chas,” she says. “There’s nothing they can do. No one’s testifying.”
Chas seems unimpressed by the news. “Figured as much.”
“They’re not bringing charges against Ivy, either,” Ursula says.
“Or you?”
She shrugs. “They reviewed the footage and decided it was an accident.”
“ ‘Accident,’ ” he repeats, weighing the word. “Too bad for Couch about that accident. All that money of his.”
“Yeah, too bad,” she agrees. “I guess there’s a lake out there somewhere that won’t ever get subdivided.”
Chas gazes at her admiringly, his sinuous smile appearing.
“I’m not too worried about James, though,” she goes on. “He’s already going around chatting up the clients, restarting the business from scratch.”
He nods. “Sounds like Couch.”
They sit in silence for a minute.
“Me and Ivy are taking a trip,” she says. “Getting out of town for a while.”
Perhaps he knows she wouldn’t tell him, or perhaps he himself thinks it’s better for him not to know. Either way, he doesn’t ask where.
“She’ll like that,” he says.
“What about you, Chas? What are your plans now?”
He steeples his fingers, regarding with distaste the dirt beneath his manicured nails. “I’m thinking Japan,” he says. “That’s where the action is. They’re gearing up to dominate pop culture the same way they did with electronics a generation ago. They’re rewriting the English language as we speak.”
He reaches behind his back and pulls from the waistband of his orange prison pants a thin stack of white paper, folded neatly down the middle into a little booklet. He holds it carefully by the edges, perhaps to keep it clean.
“I want you to give this to Kyle Dice at Nestlé.”
He holds the papers up to the glass. They are filled with precise, minute handwriting, penciled in evenly spaced lines, adhering neatly to the same invisible margins on every page.
“I’d appreciate it if you could type it out first,” he adds. “But the main thing is to get it to him ASAP.”
Ursula shakes her head wonderingly. Chas still has an angle, even now.
“So you’ve gone right on doing business from prison,” she says. “Just like a drug lord.”
“No, not business. I expect no payment. It’s a gift.”
“ ‘A gift’?”
He nods, flipping through the pages and regarding them with something akin to tenderness. “Seeing this product hit the shelves will be all the payment I need. Actually,” he says, looking up, “it was really your idea, Ursula. I just ran with it.”
“My idea?” she asks. “I don’t remember having any idea.”
“Shit,” he says matter-of-factly.
She waits for him to say more. He doesn’t.
“ ‘Shit,’ ” she repeats.
“Yes. But not just Shit. Nestlé Shit. The perfect kid food. It can work, I’m sure of it.” His crystal eyes sparkle through the glass. “I want people to eat shit . . . ,” he says contemplatively, nodding to himself as though he has just articulated the most rationalistic and soothing of utopian visions. “. . . Then my work here will be done.”