A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

against the wall. Behind the young woman was a closed door, which must have led to Maurais’s private office.

I sat down, and the girl glanced at George. “Cute dog,” she said. “Beautiful eyes. It’s like he’s got eyeliner.”

“I know,” I said. “I love him very much.”

That made her nod uncomfortably, and then she picked up her phone to study it some more, to kill more seconds and minutes and years of her life, which made me think of my phone and yearn for it.

Which is how it works: you see someone playing with their phone and then you want to play with yours, like an addictive yawn, and so I got mine out and of course the battery was dead.

“Could you charge my phone by any chance?” I asked the young woman, and she said, “Yes,” but then Ken Maurais came through the glass door.

He was about five nine, early seventies, and his frosted hair was between dye jobs. It was half gray, half blonde, and he had a big horsey face, losing its fight with gravity. He was nicely dressed in a wool blazer, gray slacks, and a dark purple shirt. George lunged for his crotch and Maurais stepped back, not happy about it.

I then stood up and reached out my hand. “George Mendes,” I said. “We have a twelve o’clock appointment, but sorry about the dog. He loves good-looking people.”

My little joke made Maurais smile, and he displayed a rather large set of white chompers, an expensive implant job. He gave me his hand to shake and it was thin and practically boneless, which is always disturbing.

“Ken Maurais,” he said, and as we held hands, George got his nose against Maurais’s zipper, but now Maurais didn’t mind, and he let go of my hand to caress George and said to me: “What’s the dog’s name?”

“George,” I said, and as soon as it came out of my mouth, I wanted to scream.

“You’re both named George?” he asked, sharp on his feet, unlike me, who was doped in two different directions, north with the Adderall and south with the Dilaudid.

But then I rallied, somewhat, and said, “I know it’s peculiar, naming him after myself, but more important, I really want to buy a house with a pool and was hoping you could help me.”

As a follow-up, I then gave him my best winning smile, and he gave me the once-over, but since realtors are very forgiving of the human race—they have to be to sell houses—he said to the receptionist, “Julie, can you bring us some water?” and then to George and me, he said, “Come into my office.”

We followed him in and he had a nice view of Hillhurst, and on the walls were various diplomas and licenses, along with a David Hockney poster of a naked young man, with exposed buttocks, lifting himself out of a Los Angeles pool.

It was a handsome painting—actually a poster reproduction from the Liverpool Museum—but I wondered what Maurais’s other clients thought of it. It was certainly bold, and I imagined it gave Maurais great pleasure to sit at his desk and look at the young man and remember old love affairs, which in my own way I was all for: better than staring at a phone.

I put my Trader Joe’s bag of cash on the floor and lowered myself into the customer’s chair. My face and arm were throbbing, but not too bad, and I could control my jaw swivel if I remembered to. “I like the Hockney,” I said.

“I know it’s scandalous,” he said, easing himself into his chair, “but to me it says: LA! And that’s what I’m in the business of: selling Los Angeles.” I noticed a stack of his FOR SALE signs in the corner: the airbrushed photo of him must have been ten years old.

Julie came in with our waters—two small bottles of Perrier and two drinking glasses—and then left us, closing the door behind her. We poured our drinks and Maurais took a pill bottle out of his blazer pocket and knocked back a tablet with the Perrier.

“Nitro,” he said, indicating the pill, with some embarrassment. “Unfortunately my heart is 50 percent butter. Maybe more. Could be all butter. And I’ve had a busy morning, too much for this ticker.”

I wondered what he had been busy with and said: “I like a butter sandwich myself.”

“Don’t even say it! I could live on bread and butter. Who needs dinner? Just give me the bread. So how can I help you, Mr.…oh, God, please tell me your name again. I’m so sorry.”

“No problem,” I said. “It’s Mendes with an s. The same thing happens to me: I always forget people’s names the second they tell me.”

“Me, too,” he said. “If I don’t get a person’s name the first time, I can go years without knowing it and it’s very embarrassing. Though lately I’ve mostly given up and just tell everyone I have dementia.”

Then he showed me his teeth again and I smiled back, and he said: “So what are you looking for, Mr. Mendes? A house with a pool? Julie did tell me over the phone that you’re perhaps looking at the two to three million range.”

“Yes, that’s right. Or four million.”

“Even better,” he said, but I could see a little something in his eyes. He wasn’t a dummy, this man, and he knew what people with money looked like, what they smelled like, and I wasn’t pulling it off. I had come in with a Trader Joe’s bag, was wearing old khaki pants and my second-string blue blazer, and there was something very wrong with my face. None of this said rich person. None of this said: I can buy a four-million-dollar house. The one thing in my favor was that George was with me and we had the same name. That might signal rich.

“Where are you living now?” he then asked, gently probing to see if his instinct was correct.

“I’m over in Topanga,” I said. “But