Jailbird

21

"Oh," she said, "I can't complain. I pull down about ten thousand a year." Sarah coughed, and that, too, was a cue, which I nearly missed.

"That's quite a cough you have there," I said in the nick of time.

"It won't stop," she said.

"Take two of these pills," I said. "They're just the thing." So she made swallowing sounds: "gluck, gluck, gluck." And then she asked what was in the pills.

"The most powerful laxative known to medical science," I said.

"Laxative!" she said.

"Yes," I said, "now you don't dare cough."

We did the joke, too, about a sick horse I supposedly had. I have never really owned a horse. The veterinarian gave me half a pound of purple powder that I was to give the horse, supposedly. The veterinarian told me to make a tube out of paper, and to put the powder inside the tube, and then to slip the tube into the horse's mouth, and to blow it down its throat.

"How is the horse?" said Sarah.

"Oh, the horse is fine," I said.

"You don't look so good," she said.

"No," I said, "that is because the horse blew first."

"Can you still imitate your mother's laugh?" she said.

This was not the premise of yet another joke. Sarah genuinely wanted to hear me imitate my mother's laugh, something I used to do a lot for Sarah on the telephone. I had not tried the trick in years. I not only had to make my voice high: I also had to make it beautiful.

The thing was this: Mother never laughed out loud. She had been trained to stifle her laughter when a servant girl in Lithuania. The idea was that a master or guest, hearing a servant laughing somewhere in the house, might suspect that the servant was laughing about him.

So when my mother could not help laughing, she made tiny, pure sounds like a music box — or perhaps like bells far away. It was accidental that they were so beautiful.

So — forgetful of where I was, I now filled my lungs and tightened my throat, and to please my old girlfriend, I reincarnated the laughing part of my mother.

It was at that point that Arpad Leen and Frank Ubriaco came back into the living room. They heard the end of my song.

I told Sarah that I had to hang up now, and I did hang up.

Arpad Leen stared at me hard. I had heard women speak of men's undressing them mentally. Now I was finding out what that felt like. As things turned out, that was exactly what Leen was doing to me: imagining what I would look like with no clothes on.

He was beginning to suspect that I was Mrs. Jack Graham, checking up on him while disguised as a man.