Читать книгу Unzipped? - Karen Kendall - Страница 11

HAL SWUNG INTO the driver’s seat, started the ignition and checked the rearview mirror before backing out of his parking spot. What the hell? Who the hell? Oh. It was him. His new appearance was going to take some getting used to.

“Okay,” said Shannon, his tormentor and scourge. “You want to head toward Avon, Hal.”

He had a strong suspicion that he didn’t want to do that at all. “Why?”

“We’re going to update your eyewear now.”

“I just got these glasses a year and a half ago. I don’t need new ones.”

She blinked rapidly. “The frames are new, too, or just the lenses?”

“The lenses.”

“That’s what I thought. Those frames date back to about 1989, don’t they?”

“Uh…”

“Never mind.” Shannon reached over and cupped his jaw, tilted his chin toward her.

Hey, I’m trying to drive, here, woman! But he didn’t say it. The touch of her fingertips awakened exhilaration in him, plucked at some hidden longing that he didn’t want to acknowledge. A sweet lemon scent tickled his nostrils—her hand lotion?

“We need something smaller, lighter, with a more rectangular shape,” she said, after moistening her lips.

Was it his imagination or had her eyes gone smoky for an instant? No, what we need is to get naked right here on Route 4. Hal jerked his gaze back to the road.

“And I’d like you to try a set of contact lenses.”

“No. They irritate my eyes and drive me crazy.”

“When was the last time you tried them?”

“College.”

“They’ve made some improvements since then. Some of the new extended-wear lenses are so thin and flexible that you can’t even feel them.”

Hal sighed and kept driving. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day, and every moment spent with Shannon Shane was time he wasn’t tracking the source of his information leak. If he didn’t find it before the IPO… Such a possibility didn’t bear thinking about.

He put a hand up to tug on the whiskers normally abundant on his chin. Damn it! Nothing but skin. How far would this transformation go? The back of his neck was cold, too, and his head felt lighter. Hal wondered if this was how a sheep felt after its wool got harvested.

He looked over at the source of his torment, but Shannon now seemed lost in a world of her own. The fingers of her left hand drummed restlessly on the leather seat between them, every now and then gripping the edge and then losing purchase, falling back to the cushion. The drumming began again seconds later. Her smooth olive skin stretched taut across the fine bones, seeming to barely contain her energy.

She seemed disturbed, deep in thought, trying to come to terms with something.

What went on in the brain of a goddess? Hal found himself vaguely surprised that he wondered. For surely goddesses didn’t ponder much—they just accepted the worship of others as their due and basked in the glory.

Shannon was obviously not in the least dim, but he doubted that she was contemplating the philosophy of Nietzsche or Kant.

She roused herself out of her reverie long enough to give him adequate directions, and soon they were turning into the strip mall that housed Fashionocular, scene of his next trial by fire.

The vague sense of doom hanging over Hal morphed immediately into dismay as he followed Shannon through the door. Hundreds—thousands?—of blank spectacles met his gaze, rows upon rows of them, running from floor to forehead level. He’d never seen so many at once. He’d always bought his glasses at one of the lower-end department stores, and had never chosen from more than perhaps fifty styles.

He looked around. Horn-rims, wire-rims, plastic-rims of every possible width. Round lenses, cat’s-eye lenses, elliptical lenses, rectangular ones. And you could see the world in any hue: blue, green, yellow, tan, pink or even purple. The frames all stared at him, mocked him, disembodied though they were.

“I can’t possibly try all these on,” he said to Shannon. “I’d need hours…even days.”

“Of course not,” she said. “You’re going to work with Marta, trying on different contacts, while I select between five and ten pairs. Okay?”

“But I don’t want to stick little bits of plastic onto my eyeballs. I told you that….”

She nodded until he wound down a bit, feeling that she’d actually listened to him this time. Then she stuck a finger in his back and propelled him toward a plump, pleasant-looking woman.

“Marta? This is Hal Underwood. He’s a little squeamish about contact lenses, but I think he’s only tried the hard ones, years ago. I’m putting him into your care.”

“Hi, Mr. Underwood. We’ve got all kinds of soft lenses now that you can’t even feel, I promise. And look how handsome you are! Why would you hide that face behind glasses?” She smiled flirtatiously at him.

Handsome? The woman was hallucinating. Or more likely, Shannon paid her to butter up the clients she brought in.

Muttering to himself, and wondering when he could get back to his office and pursue more worthwhile things than his appearance, Hal sat in a squat rolling chair in front of a counter that held a circular, magnified mirror. Marta asked what his vision was—20/600 in the left eye and 20/740 in the right—and then brought out several little boxes and sanitized her hands.

Then she reached with her forefinger and thumb into the tiny well of a contact case, and came up with something that looked exactly like a round piece of plastic wrap.

Hal stared at it.

“It’s painless, really,” Marta promised. “You put it on your index finger, like this, and add a drop of solution. Then guide it into your eye and blink.”

He grimaced. “And then how in the hell do I get it out?”

She dimpled and demonstrated. “You’ll grasp it just like this and pluck, presto.”

Yeah. Pluck, presto. Hal had a feeling he would die with the little pieces of Glad wrap still on his corneas. He hoped they were sticky so they’d hold the coins over his eyes when he got buried.

But aside from some blinking to get rid of excess solution, he had to admit the lenses were comfortable—and he even saw more clearly. His old glasses had obviously not been strong enough. He felt absolutely nothing in his eyes, and accepted Marta’s recommendation of two-week extended-wear contacts.

Hal peered at himself in the mirror, still shocked at his changed appearance. He’d noticed before that the little Latin bandit Enrique had left his hair in uneven but somehow choreographed chops and wisps. He touched it, mildly revolted by the waxy, sticky goop the stylist had worked in.

But, well…look at that. He had Brad Pitt’s hair, if not his box office draw. Especially without the glasses, and with his new improved vision, he didn’t look half bad. Huh. Now if he could only find the source of the info leak, he’d be One Hundred Percent Man.

SHANNON SHORED UP her initial assault with a half dozen choices in designer eyewear. She cornered a reluctant Hal and slipped them on and off his face. Really, it was quite amazing how different he looked in each pair. More and more sophisticated. More and more confident—even authoritarian.

She debated between the last two pairs: one with a heavier, dark rectangular frame and the other with a lighter, more streamlined rimless frame.

“Hal, do you have any preference?”

“Nope,” he said. “I just want to be able to see.”

She decided in favor of the heavier frame. His strong angular jaw balanced out the glasses well, and they gave him an aura of power. Pair them with that hair, a little stubble, a black cashmere V-neck and…yum. You could find yourself wanting to skinny-dip in those Bahama-blue eyes of his.

He cleared his throat and looked away.

Shannon realized with a start that she’d been staring at him for about five minutes straight, and blinked. Come to think of it, he’d been staring at her, too.

And he’d been looking inside, trying to figure her out, not slobbering over her body and thinking of dragging her off to a cave by the hair. After years of experience, she could tell the difference.

She pushed the thought away and told Marta which frames they’d purchase. And then she braced herself, because with the nonglare coating, the shatterproof glass, the cool sunshade attachment and the costly designer frames, Hal was going to—

“Whaaaat?! How much did you say?”

—have an aneurism and a heart attack all at once.

“YES, BUT WHAT YOU’RE NOT understanding, Hal,” she told him in the privacy of the Explorer, “is that Marta can’t help the prices! She doesn’t make them up, she just works there. And you make her feel really bad when you squawk over the total.”

“Well, it makes me feel really bad, too! Who pays over six hundred dollars for a pair of glasses? I don’t see any diamond studs in them….”

“Hal, listen to me. You’re paying for a whole image, here. You’re essentially going to be advertising for your company, and you want to project an image of intelligence, decisiveness, sophistication. You want people to have confidence in your work, so—”

“So I’ll show them the damned product. Why does it matter what I look like? Is our society really that shallow? I should be able to do my own at-home, bowl-over-the-head haircut and wear glasses frames fashioned from a coat hanger! None of this has anything to do with how good I am or how effective my software will be in streamlining business processes. This is bullsh—”

Shannon threw up her hands. “Should, should, should,” she said, exasperated. “In an idealistic world, Hal, all of that would be true. But that’s not the kind of planet we live on.” She blew out a breath, shook her head and twisted her hair into a knot. She dug into her bag for a pencil and secured the curly mass on her head.

“Look. Why don’t you take me back to Finesse, okay? It’s obvious that you’re completely hostile to this whole process, and quite frankly you’re hurting my feelings at this point. I’m just trying to do my job, not bilk you of your life savings.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched a muscle jump in Hal’s jaw. She turned away and looked out the window instead, at the road rushing under them like gray flannel, the grass an emerald blur, telephone poles whizzing by like matchsticks. The neat Cape Cods became pale flashes, their unique weathered charms lost in a fog of succession.

Did her birth mother live in one of those? Or in some stucco place in Florida? A limestone house in Texas? A ski chalet in Utah or Colorado?

Hal’s voice reached her on her imaginary journeys. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.” He reached out and put his hand on her arm.

A frisson of strange awareness shot through her. She turned to him, surprised. It was rare, in her experience, for a man to apologize. His gaze bored into hers, and again she had the feeling he saw far more than she was used to.

He had a small mole in the middle of his right cheek—on a woman it would have been called a beauty mark—and she found herself wanting to touch it. She did no such thing.

“I know,” she said. “Thanks.”

He nodded and she let the noises of the car comfort and steady her. The sound of the wind rushing past, the rumble of the engine, the muffled tap of brakes as they slowed for a turning vehicle ahead.

“Did you grow up around here, Shannon?”

The question caught her by surprise. “Close.” She hesitated, anticipating his reaction. “Greenwich.” A lot of people assumed she was a snob when she told them she grew up there.

“Interesting. You don’t seem like the Greenwich type.”

“I’m not.” She left it at that.

“How did you get into this line of work?”

“Oh. Well, a friend suggested it, actually. My friend Jane, who’s a co-owner of Finesse. We were all in dead-end jobs—at least they were—I was just a miserably failing actress, out in L.A. with a hundred thousand of them.” She laughed self-consciously.

“That takes guts,” Hal said.

“No. It takes naiveté and delusion.” She chuckled again, but even to her own ears it sounded forced.

“You can call it what you want to, but I call it courage. To put your dream on the line like that, to move away from everything familiar…”

I could kiss him. The thought didn’t shock her as much as it should have. I could kiss him for saying that to me right now. It’s like he knows how badly I need to hear it.

They had turned into the parking lot of Finesse, and Hal idled the truck near her sodden car, the only other one in the small lot.

“Thank you,” she said to him. Then she leaned over and acted on her thought.