Slugfest Read online

  I strode toward my area of the exhibit floor, careful not to let Lucy’s higher-than-I-normally-wore heels get caught on any of the carpet seams. David was resplendent in a tuxedo that fit too well to be rented. He kissed me on both cheeks. The usually chatty Nikki barely nodded, ignoring me and pouring all her attention into a triangle of baklava and a plastic glass of wine from a nearby bar cart.

  When she finally spoke, it was to shove a piece of paper in my direction. “Here. I saw this note on the message board—it’s about that bag. I copied the number for you.”

  “That was thoughtful. I saw it, too. I’ve tried him twice, but there’s been no answer. Maybe I should leave a note for him.”

  I grabbed one of my business cards from the Plexiglas container on the table and started writing the kid a note, but quickly outgrew the space on the tiny rectangle.

  “Use this,” Nikki said. She handed me a five-by-seven postcard that had thumbnail pictures of her most treasured antiques on one side.

  “Thanks.” I scribbled a longer message and my coordinates, and planned to post it later. Nikki looked pouty and her two-word answers told me something was wrong. She attacked another wedge of baklava. I looked to David for an explanation.

  “What’s going on?” He was as clueless as I.

  “Whatever it is, you have five minutes to move on. I don’t want to be stuck between two harridans all weekend. I’ve already got one on the other side.” His light touch broke the strained silence.

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine,” Nikki said, breaking off another honeyed chunk of pastry and shoving it into her mouth. Whatever was bothering her had generated a classic case of anger eating.

  She swallowed hard and washed it down with a big gulp of white wine. Uh-oh.

  “Go like this,” I said, rubbing the front of my borrowed Balenciaga.

  Nikki looked down and saw a shiny glob of honey slowly moving down the front of her dress. She foolishly rubbed at the spot with a cocktail napkin, which turned the small sticky spot into a larger one covered with flecks of white paper.

  “That’s just great. First I have another fight with Russ and he says he’s not coming, then I start to feel the beginnings of a cold sore, and now Mrs. Moffitt is going to see me and think I’m a slob.” Something akin to a whimper came out of Nikki’s mouth.

  David volunteered to fetch a glass of water, but the dress was silk and water would only make things worse. Nikki’s eyes welled up and her artfully applied smoky eyes were in danger of becoming Pagliacci eyes. I risked goose bumps for the next three hours and peeled off Lucy’s jacket. “Here, put this on.”

  She looked me up and down. “Like that’s going to fit me?” she said. One lone tear spilled down her face. I could almost hear Pavarotti—it was Pagliacci time.

  I unpinned the red silk flower I’d fastened to the deep V of my neckline. “Try this.”

  She still looked like the sad clown in a velvet painting, but her watery eyes now held a spark of hope. I fastened a piece of folded napkin to the stickiest spot and pinned the red flower on top of it. It covered the stain and even added to the look of Nikki’s simple black sheath. She sniffled and tried to collect herself.

  “For cold sores? I have a friend who swears by lysine. Take handfuls before you go to bed tonight. No nuts, no chocolate, and go easy on the alcohol.”

  “You’re being so nice to me.” She was instantly contrite. “You know, my ego’s not that fragile.”

  “Nikki, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “If you didn’t like my arrangement, you could have just told me. You didn’t need to sneak back and change things.”

  I stood ten feet back and squinted at Primo’s booth trying to see what Nikki was fussed about, while she produced a pocket mirror to fix her face and check out the flower pin.

  “The pin looks great, but I look awful.”

  To the naked eye, the arrangement was the same as we had left it the previous night. Except perhaps that Pink Flamingo, the tall thin birdlike sculpture, was a little farther to the left than it was yesterday. And maybe Kelly, a hunk of hammered metal contorted into an elaborate, abstract spiral, was slightly farther to the back of the booth.

  “It is different. What a good eye you have,” I said, hoping to patch things up. “But I didn’t change a thing, I swear. Maybe it was the staff, maybe I was too close to the flow of traffic or the electrical outlets. Who knows? Help me fix it?”

  She brightened visibly, then launched into rearranging Primo’s creations. “The workmen usually know better than to move things, even before the curious incidents in the night started happening. Which reminds me, there was another one early this morning. Dog poop. In the Gramercy Park exhibit.”

  “Well, at least that you can pick up. Nasty but not really damaging.”

  “It is when you throw it down a recirculating well. I don’t know what smelled worse, the poop or the bleach they used to clean it out. It was reeking when I got here at four P.M.”

  She fussed with the flower pin, dislodging the paper napkin that had kept the honey from touching Lucy’s silk rose. That would cost me, but at least she hadn’t said yes to borrowing the jacket.

  “I’m going to the members’ lounge to fix this. Give me the postcard you wrote for the kid. I’ll post it on the bulletin board.”

  After Nikki left, so did the drama. David and I took our places, waiting for the games to begin. I unearthed my recharged laptop, plugged it in, and pulled up the first page of the quickie slide show I’d slapped together.

  “PowerPoint,” David said. “Cutting edge.”

  It was. For a woman who owned a manual lawn mower. Fifteen minutes later, just as the reception was to begin, the lights went out and the entire convention center was plunged into darkness.

  Twenty-nine

  Cell phones lit up like fireflies in the summertime or cigarette lighters at a rock concert, and there was a faint Close Encounters–like glow coming from the main doors and the escalator beyond, where the nightly news cameras had been set up. But not enough to see by. My computer kicked into battery mode, so I had slightly more light than my booth neighbors. With no windows or skylights, the enormous space was like a giant cave, except for the few dots illuminating the exit signs.

  After a brief moment of alarm—this was, after all, a public building in New York City—there was a ripple of nervous laughter, then the finger pointing began.

  “It’s those damn lamps,” I heard someone say through gritted teeth.

  David’s unflustered voice came out of nowhere. “I beg your pardon. What makes you think it wasn’t your tacky fountains. Not only are they hideous, eighties, new age crap, they’ve got everyone around here running for a pee at twenty-minute intervals.” That part was true enough, although I never really understood the biology behind that.

  David and the fountain lady—his less friendly neighbor on the other side—had been engaged in a custody battle over the community outlet located squarely between their two booths. They were to share the power strip but with an outlet extender, or whatever those things were called. You could plug in as many items as you wanted and not realize you were reaching critical mass until the lights went out. Was that what had happened?

  Fountain Lady, whose real name had been rendered unreadable by flowery, overcalligraphied lettering, had a twenty-by-twenty space in which she had attempted to re-create Niagara Falls, in tabletop miniatures, choreographed to canned harp music. By the end of the show, in addition to feeling that we’d all overdosed on diuretics, everyone within thirty feet of her booth would likely feel hypnotized.

  In fairness, crammed with floor lamps, table lamps, and sconces, David’s booth was also a sensory overload, but we liked him so we minded less. Unfair but true. Since the day before, when one of the fixtures in his booth shorted out and temporarily stopped the waterworks, it had been all-out war between the two exhibitors.

  “For heaven’s sake,” he’d said, in his playful way, �
��lighten up. The show’s not even open yet.” She hadn’t, and now under cover of darkness the sniping had escalated.

  Background noises ranged from giggles to the occasional clatter of a metal object dropping to the purposeful steps and walkie-talkie noises of those trying to rectify the situation. Someone yelped as if she’d walked into a cactus.

  Minutes ticked by as we waited for the convention center’s emergency generator to kick in. All over there were mutterings of “sorry” and “excuse me” as people bumped into each other as they foolishly tried to get around in the dark. I stayed put, feeling around for a water bottle and eventually just sitting on the carpeted floor of my booth with my legs stretched out in front of me, trying not to wrinkle.

  “If I ever do anything like this again, the exhibitor is springing for the chair,” I said. “My pals who registered chose poorly.”

  “That’s a newbie’s mistake. Everybody does that once. If you’re planning to leave that computer on battery, angle it toward the bar. I’m going to get us drinks and I don’t want to be bayoneted by a garden ornament.”

  “I told you. They’re art. People suffer and die for art all the time.”

  “All due respect to Primo—and Picasso—but I’m not ready to die for any art that started life as a bicycle.”

  I pulled myself to my feet and obliged him by tilting the laptop slightly to the right. It threw off just enough light for David to make his way to the now unmanned bar, swipe a bottle of wine and glasses, and steal back to our booths.

  “Success. I don’t know what it is, but it was easier to bring it back here and pour it by the romantic light of your laptop. I didn’t want to spill anything on myself. Doesn’t Nikki sell candles? Speaking of which…”

  That’s right. Where was Nikki?

  “Probably in the lounge,” I said, “repairing her eye makeup and tearstained cheeks. I hope she wasn’t mid–cat eye when the blackout hit.”

  David dragged over the chair from his booth and we shared it, clinking plastic cups and waiting for the lights to come back on.

  “I once heard that nine months after the East Coast blackout, there was a spike in the local birthrate,” he said. “It’s a sad commentary on our society, when people need to have the lights out in order to do the deed. Although in some cases, I can understand the need.”

  The wine wasn’t bad. I held the bottle up to the computer screen and grazed the keyboard with my fingertips to resurrect it from sleep mode. “Looks like Sancerre.”

  After a few moments of silence, I asked David if he suspected another act of sabotage. We kept our voices down.

  “I hadn’t thought of that. I was too busy defending myself to the Maid of the Mist. But you might be right. The Javits Curse strikes again.”

  Thirty

  I didn’t believe in curses. Not since I’d read The Hound of the Baskervilles in the seventh grade. Someone was intentionally disrupting the show. But who? And why? What was there to gain by making a couple of hundred people uncomfortable? If it was the protesters outside, surely this wouldn’t gain any converts to their cause.

  After ten more minutes, which felt like sixty, the lights clicked on one hall at a time, to the cheers of hundreds of relieved exhibitors. Kristi Reynolds handled herself well and kept the peace with a brief announcement declaring that, just like in the garden, sometimes the unexpected happened, but a good gardener was prepared for anything. Applause rolled through the convention center like the wave at a sports event. Somewhere a champagne cork popped. Those predisposed to outrage continued to be outraged.

  The loudest comments emanated from Allegra Douglas, who was not only outraged but who advocated legal action—although against whom and for what wasn’t entirely clear. The rest of us were just happy to get the show on the road.

  When the doors finally opened for the reception, members and press poured in, drinks in hand, and irritation and outrage were replaced by the heady anticipation of a successful and profitable event.

  “My only complaint,” David said, “is that it cut short the cocktail hour.”

  “The bars look open to me, although this one will be short one bottle of white wine.”

  “Yes, but here they’ll have to stand in line. In the prefunction area, waiters circulate with drinks. The more alcohol, the more sales.”

  “So, then it’s fortunate we’re near that bar?”

  “Much better than the toilet. Everyone thinks proximity to a restroom is the best placement for a trade show, but they’re wrong. Better to be near the booze. One chandelier sale last year paid for my entire show. I credit the Bombay gin.” I made a mental note for my next show.

  After the initial rush, the attendees spread out, some naturally gravitating toward the display gardens, others to the specimen plants already judged, and still others making a beeline for new products. In that area, as expected, SlugFest drew the biggest crowd. The packaging, kept under wraps for days, had finally been revealed with a flourish—the ceremonial undraping of a mounted poster on an easel. It was a clever rendering of a slug, similar to the chalk outline police used to mark the place where a body was found, only instead of chalk the outline was drawn in silver, like the trail left by a slug. Market research had probably shown anything was better than putting an actual slug on the package, although slugs were making a comeback. There were places on the West Coast where slugs, particularly banana slugs, were considered cute. But most gardeners would be hard-pressed to find any slugs cute.

  Lauryn Peete and two of her students were at the bar and I overheard the teacher say to the bartender, “Memorize these faces. Don’t serve them alcohol. Not even if they say it’s for me. Understand?” It sounded as if she’d said it before, perhaps at each of the bars dotting the floor of the convention center. But the message was delivered with good humor and the kids didn’t seem to mind—or maybe they’d already made their own beverage arrangements. Their uniforms for the evening were black T-shirts and black pants, even Lauryn, and for a moment I wished I were one of them and not a woman in a borrowed spandex dress that required her to hold in her stomach for the next four hours.

  The high school’s garden was a triumph, one of the most innovative at the show, with plants growing out of rusted lard cans and trailing from seemingly abandoned grocery shopping carts. Working streetlights and neon signs flickered all over the double-wide display garden. The centerpiece was the fire escape, flanked on either side by iron bins that looked like mini Dumpsters. Primo’s found-object creations would have fit right in.

  Nikki was still missing in action but her husband, Russ, unexpectedly showed up in the nick of time to cover their booth and handle queries. Just as she’d predicted, he proceeded to move everything except the sarcophagus. Perhaps the urge to rearrange things was what had brought them together at a support group meeting like AA or Dieters Anonymous. Maybe it was a nervous habit.

  I wasn’t nervous. After all, my livelihood did not depend on what happened here over the weekend. I’d already made enough on the one sale to the Anzalones to cover Primo’s tab at the Paradise Diner for the next two years. And powering toward me with her two suitors in tow was Mrs. Jean Moffitt.

  David took my plastic glass and spun away. “Smile.”

  Rick and Mrs. M. drew near, but Jensen kept his distance, taking pictures of Primo’s sculptures from every conceivable angle.

  “Thank you for coming back,” I said. By example, David again reminded me to smile. I did, but I felt like an idiot, grinning for no apparent reason. It had been a long time since I’d had to glad-hand and wear an insincere expression solely for business purposes. I’d already resorted to flirting to make a sale, so perhaps merely smiling could be considered raising the dialogue.

  “Instead of Mr. Jensen taking pictures, I’d be happy to burn a CD for you right now or e-mail you the images,” I said, grinning like a beauty queen.

  “Jensen enjoys his hobbies. Photography is one of them. He’s quite accomplished. They’re more for his
amusement than my own, although he does keep a record of the significant displays at the shows, so that we don’t inadvertently repeat someone else’s concept. We wouldn’t want to be accused of plagiarism or whatever the botanical equivalent of that would be. What crime would you call that, Miss Holliday?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. Graft?” It was weak, but she appreciated my willingness to play along and laughed more than the joke merited.

  “Do send your pictures along. Rick will play them for me.” She motioned to the bag hanging on the back of her chair and Rick pulled one of his employer’s cards out of a thin silver case. For the second time I was close to getting the coveted card. In the meantime I started the slide show on my laptop and she was intrigued enough to stay, even though Jensen had moved on. Mrs. Moffitt asked me to pause the presentation three times for closer looks at the pieces.

  “That one,” she said. “Go back.” I hit the back arrow and then realized the piece she was interested in seeing was the one I’d sold to the Anzalones.

  “I’m sorry. I haven’t had a chance to update the presentation; that one has already sold.”

  “I find that exceedingly irritating. I was beginning to like you.”

  “I just made the sale, ma’am. At the show.”

  Rick reminded her that I’d offered to play the PowerPoint presentation for her two days earlier before the show had opened, but she didn’t want to wait.

  “If Rick says so, then I must forgive you. He is the most honorable and moral young man I know. Sometimes it’s quite tedious. May I ask who the buyer was?” I didn’t see any reason not to tell her, so I did.