Page 128 - Just Deserts

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Vozkonsky, returning with a sack of cut-rate libations, peered into
the smoky recesses of his living room. Yes, his red-rimmed eyes had
not failed: a new face nestled among the bean-bag cushions and
foam-rubber couches furnishing the only room in his apartment large
enough to hold a very small crowd. Willing and eager hands
unburdened him, leaving his own appendages free to clear a way
through the freeloaders and hangers-on to the newcomer.
“Anita?”
His gruff baritone evoked a slight facial twitch in the object of his
address. She looked up from her Styrofoam wine cup and focused on
his Falstaffian face and figure.
“Oh, so you remember my name, Nikolai? Yes, it’s me, from over
the sea. London was such a bore. And I thought one did not have to
travel far from home in order to be unappreciated. You might have
written.”
Vozkonsky descended cautiously into an adjoining tangle of
people and objects. Someone, in a display of casual bonhomie,
shoved a half-empty bottle into his hands. “Written? It seems like
you left only last week. Your absence was barely long enough to
make my heart grow fonder.”
Anita Fix pouted, an unflattering expression on her pinched
features. She tossed her head, a vestigial mannerism from her long-
haired youth. “Five months, Nikolai. A long time to stay drunk, even
for you.”
His joviality was inextinguishable. “Perhaps I could have induced
you to enter my name in the Guinness Book of Records on that
account, my dear. Is that not a British publication?”
“Yes, and owned by a brewery, in which you may as well own
stock. Enough billing and cooing: what’s the dirt? I’ve missed tons of
juicy gossip, I’m sure of it.”
Vozkonsky frowned, great ridges of fat converging on the bridge
of his nose. “Not much, I guess. When you’re at the center of the
universe, it all seems so mundane. Our quaint little lives might seem
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