Chapter One
In which our heros discuss our heroine, snails are spoken of, and realtors use pornography.
God it's good to be back.
Chapter One
"What do you think I ought to do with her?"
The question was asked in French, but Oscar was an American; though he'd learned to think in the vernacular, in the past few months, he still paused to compose the words in his head before replying. It was a point of pride to speak in French, even if Felix understood English better than many native-speakers did.
"Do you have to actually do anything at all?" he asked, when he'd thought it through.
Felix Carvell, heir to millions, second in line for control of an international megacorporation, and currently wearing a nylon club shirt and leather dog collar, took another bite of his pasta, chewing thoughtfully.
"Well, I feel it's unfair to her, really," he remarked, steepling black-nail-polished fingers over his plate.
The object of their discussion was Portia Rainer, about whom it was always wise to be cautious. Oscar could not quite see how life in general was unfair to Portia; in the space of a year she'd gone from his underpaid intern in New York to a lady of leisure living rent-free in a Parisian suburb. Felix was always buying her fabulous clothes and expensive toys, and expected nothing but her jubilation and fashion advice in return. It was beyond Oscar's powers of understanding, but it made Felix and Portia happy, which meant that they didn't bother him while he was painting.
"She likes being in the newspapers," Oscar observed, thoughtfully.
"Yes, but always with me," Felix complained. "It's very difficult to get dates, if your picture's always in the paper with the same person. Smacks of monogamy."
"Are you sure she's the one it's unfair to?" Oscar asked with a small smile. Felix waved the question off, impatiently. "Well, you've got three options, I suppose," he continued. "You can make an honest woman of her -- "
"Non, merci!" Felix cried.
" -- or you can start dating someone else..." Oscar paused, but Felix didn't remark on that option, so he continued, "...or you can give us another job."
Felix looked at him over their dinner plates, curiously. "Every week you want new employ, Oscar. You must be patient."
Oscar sighed. "It's not right."
"I'm a very wealthy man, and you eat very little," Felix said with a smile. "We have to find the right medium for your art, first. Don't you enjoy your painting anymore? Perhaps it's time you began visiting other museums. You could go outside the city -- make a weekend of it. Or across the Channel, the British Museum ought to keep you busy for a while."
"It's not that. I like it. I do. But I'm not a painter, and we both know it. Give me something to build, something to remake," Oscar said. "Let me paint what I desire, not what I see, Felix."
"Does it frustrate you so?"
Oscar looked down at his hands, where paint was still caught in the cuticles. "Maybe not frustrate. Don't you feel inadequate, next to da Vinci and Picasso and the rest?"
"No," Felix said composedly. "Should I?"
"I do."
"You aren't happy, I think, unless you're feeling inferior," Felix observed. "The secret to how you get along so well with Portia, no doubt. And surely you enjoy Paris?"
"I don't enjoy having no work," Oscar retorted. "It was nice for a week, but..."
They fell silent, then, as they normally did when the subject of Oscar's work came up. The last job he'd done for Felix had involved burning down an antique hotel. It was a shared trauma between them, that none of Portia's teasing or Oscar's dissatisfaction could overcome. They'd returned to France after New York because France was where Felix was; France was their home now.
"What work would you do?" Felix asked finally. Oscar sipped his wine.
"Open an office in Paris, strike out on my own, or with Portia if she can tear herself away from the couture crowd," he said. "Unless you have a job for me. Carvell company builds things all the time, don't they?"
"Ugly industrial things," Felix said dismissively. "A waste of your abilities."
"Oh." Oscar looked irrationally pleased by this offhand compliment.
"If you begin in Paris, would you succeed? Running a company?" Felix asked.
"Not after the fire in Orcival, unless I can convince people I don't make arson a personal habit," Oscar answered. "But it'd be fun to try."
Felix considered this for a while. Oscar finised his meal, neatly, and drank the last of his wine. Portia was out at the opera, in Felix's box, probably flirting with the French upper class. He didn't think the rumours about Portia and Felix were hampering her in the slightest, but perhaps they were bothering Felix. Oscar had never asked Felix precisely what sort of person he preferred, and Felix had not, in over a year, volunteered anything.
"Would you rather work for me, or open a Paris office?" he asked, as their plates were cleared. Oscar, still unused to a household where one did not do one's own dishes, thanked the maid while he thought about it.
"If you had real work for me, work that would satisfy me, I'd rather work for you," he said. Felix smiled.
"Then we will find you some!" he announced, with his usual puppyish cheer.
It was the tone of voice that Oscar had learned to dread.
***
Portia came home from the opera around one, bidding her date goodnight at the door; some pretty, rich man Felix knew by sight, who was inherently unworthy of her, but then so few were. Felix appreciated Portia's ascent into the upper class -- or perhaps the swath she cut through it -- as he might have a sculpture he'd made with his own hands.
She was so patently made for this life. She appreciated fine clothes, designer labels, and good food; if she stole the silverware, well, that was just a byproduct of years spent living on student-loan fundage and internship salaries, and besides, it wasn't uncommon among the French. Portia fit right in, except for the American accent in her speech and a certain edge that only seemed to charm the people who met her.
"Good evening," he said, looking up from the book he was reading as she passed through the living room on the way to the guest bedroom she'd appropriated and made hers. It was the one with the biggest closet.
"Felix!" she said, delightedly. "I thought you'd be out. Is Oscar still up?"
"Non -- in bed. How was the performance?"
"You want to know something weird?"
"I live for weird."
"Yeah, I know," she replied with a smirk.
"Share with me the weird."
"I think I like opera," she admitted in a whisper. "I mean, I started going for the pretty men and because I think watching violinists is really funny, but tonight I actually told Alexandre to shut up because I was missing the solo."
"Ah, you're getting culture." Felix shook a finger at her. "It can come to no good, Portia."
"Well, we still made out during the overture."
Felix smiled, and laid the book aside. He was aware that it looked peculiar to even see him reading; the contrast of his black-painted fingernails and leather cuffs with the deep calfskin binding of the book was something Oscar had actually done a painted study of. Felix had an art-critic friend who'd been immensely disturbed by it.
"Couldn't sleep?" Portia asked, unwrapping the shawl wound around her shoulders and folding it neatly over the back of another chair. She took the elegant hair-sticks out of her hair and let it fall, running her fingers through it in an attempt to loosen the hold of the mousse.
"I was waiting. I wanted a word with you while Oscar was asleep," he answered. "If you are tired, it can wait."
"Oscar's restless again?"
"I do not think 'again' applies when he has never stopped being restless," Felix murmured. "He...he wants work. He wants to feel that he has earned his way. I admit I am baffled."
"Oscar's very..."
"Bourgeois?"
"That's not nice," she scolded.
"I respect Oscar very much. He is a good artist, a good architect, a greatly devoted man, and he has seen ghosts. He talks to buildings. I wish I could," Felix added.
"Call it honest, then. Oscar's frightened that if he doesn't earn his way, one day everything he has is going to be taken from him."
Felix looked horrified. "I would never!"
"I know, I know. He does too, but he's been earning his own way all his life. And...I dunno, he likes it. You said it yourself. He talks to buildings," she said, relaxing back into the deep chair, shadows falling across her face.
"I must find him a building to talk to."
"Well, he could find it on his own."
"Non. Besides..." Felix glanced around the room. "Did you know my mother selected this house for me?"
"Yeah?"
"Oui. I liked it, but it was her choice. She and my sister decorated it, with my approval. And my father's. And...I grow into it, like those snails, you know."
Portia's blank silence indicated that his mental leap had lost her.
"The ones who build the shells. The little shells that have the chambers? It outgrows one, it builds another. They sell cheap art prints of them -- "
"Oh, right. Yeah."
"I am like one of those, only in reverse. The house becomes smaller and smaller. These books are not mine, the paintings are...well, some are mine. The furnishings are not mine. The pots and pans in the kitchen are not mine. The things that I own, in my spirit, become less and less."
"Um...not that I don't care, Felix, because I like you and I do, but how did we get from Oscar to this?"
"I want a home," Felix said, with peculiar longing. "I want to find a place to live. I want you and Oscar to help me."
"This would involve a lot of travel, wouldn't it."
"Oui -- at least three or four countries."
"Looking at mansions and luxury flats?"
"And abandoned buildings, spaces to be made over."
"Spain, Italy?"
"Japan, America even."
Portia leaned forward again, the light from his reading lamp falling across her face.
"I think we can do that," she said with a grin.
***
"No, Ma -- no, Ma, it isn't like that."
Felix was mixing mimosas at the bar while Oscar paced the room on Felix's cordless telephone, regretting he'd ever given his family a land line number to call him on. Portia, resplendent in Gucci, crossed one leg over the other and flipped idly through a magazine.
"Listen, I'd like to come home for Christmas, but I don't know what I'll be doing then or if I'll be able to afford it -- well, yeah, I'm sure there are French architecture firms, but you don't -- my name is associated with the L&L, Ma. It needs more time to die down."
Felix passed Oscar a drink, and he downed two gulps of it before he realised it was spiked. Portia snickered at his expression.
"Yeah, it was gorgeous, but it BURNED DOWN." Oscar sighed and rested his forehead against the wall, next to the framed original of a political cartoon that had run two days after the L&L, the hotel Oscar had been restoring, went down in flames. In it, an exaggeratedly effeminate Felix -- if such a thing was possible on Felix's most extravagant days -- sprayed a burning dollhouse with a hose while Oscar and Portia, wrapped in American flags, stamped it out. Felix had it signed and coloured before he framed it.
Felix had an odd sense of humour.
Portia, glancing at Felix, folded the magazine back and held it up, smacking Oscar on the arm with it. Oscar, annoyed, pushed away from the wall and took it from her hands.
"Listen, I know it's late there, I'll look into things and I'll call you -- oooooh."
The glossy photograph was a home interior, with a high raftered ceiling and a row of picture windows, each fitted with a window-seat. The furniture was built into the floor, the same colour and texture, draped in muted-tone fabric here and there. An open stone hearth thrust up from the floor.
Portia, from behind Oscar, winked at Felix.
"I'm going to call you back, Ma. No, I'll email you. Yeah. Go to bed, it's like two am there."
Oscar, still looking at the photograph, hung up the cordless and set it on a nearby table. "This," he proclaimed, "is hot design."
"Haute," Felix replied, swallowing a sip of mimosa. "Impractical."
"But so sexy," Portia added.
"Like those fashion shows you go to," Oscar said, handing it back to her. "Haute couture."
"The point of which," Felix said, gesturing with his glass, "Is not to design clothing one actually wears."
"Don't you have some...girlfriend or mistress or something who wears haute couture?" Oscar asked. Felix gave him a boyish grin.
"I would not let her hear you call her anyone's mistress," he answered. "Non, she is, I know her...eh, it's uncomplicated."
"You mean complicated?" Oscar asked.
"No, I mean uncomplicated," Felix said firmly. "The point is, she misses the point."
"Portia, translation?" Oscar asked plaintively.
"Don't look at me, you're the one who picked up French like a greasy penny."
"Like a what?"
Portia rolled her eyes. "Couture is designed to indicate. So you dress up some size two model in a shirt made entirely of ruffles, and a size twelve woman buys an off-the-rack shirt with ruffled sleeves."
"But...this is a house," Oscar said slowly.
"Yeah, so?"
"So building an entire house where the table actually grows out of the hardwood floor is a bit too much effort to just make a point. This is a cool house all on its own," Oscar said. "I'd live here."
"And that, Oscar, is your fatal flaw," Portia sighed.
"You showed it to me!"
"Well, someone had to keep you from being strangled by your umbilical cord, and Felix and I want to talk to you," she answered. "Have a seat and some more juice."
"It's not juice."
"It's part juice," Portia argued. "And I think you should know Felix has a plan."
Oscar glanced at Felix, who nodded gravely. There was a pregnant pause, broken only by the sound of Oscar downing the entire drink in half a dozen gulps.
"Okay," he said. "Go on."
"The magazine," Felix said, "is from an agent. He is going to find me a house."
Oscar unfolded the magazine and found the spine, flipping to the front cover. It was typically understated, like most of the services provided to those who were as wealthy as Felix. There was no title, merely a photograph of what looked like a Greek beach.
Complete with topless sunbather.
There was a woman in a bathing suit on the table of contents, too, sitting in an elegant ceramic-tile hot tub. They were artistic photographs, but there was no way around the nipple that was showing. Artistic it might be, but at the end of the day it was still a nipple.
"How do you tell your real estate from your pornography?" Oscar asked, examining the picture. "I mean there's no price listed in either one, and there's so much nakedness in both."
"And you get turned on by both," Portia retorted. Oscar scowled.
"My agent," Felix continued, cheerfully and unflappably, "is going to find a house for me. We meet with him tomorrow and you must be there Oscar, to tell me what is stupid. In houses. Such as, oh, too many windows, no-one owns houses with that many windows in Siberia, much too cold."
"You want to live in Siberia?"
"Non, but it is a good example. I have told him to look for things which are...rustic?"
"...rustic?"
"Rough. Unfinished. In need of fixing."
Oscar gave him a mildly suspicious look. "Why?"
"So you can fix it," Felix said cheerfully. "Make it couture if you like. Tables growing out of the floor, lightbulbs set in clear glass walls."
"Felix, that wasn't...really what I had in mind when I said -- "
"You will, won't you? Oscar?" Felix said imploringly.
"If he cries his eyeliner's going to run," Portia whispered.
"Do you want lightbulbs set in clear glass walls?" Oscar asked.
"I leave that up to my architect," Felix said, with a practiced wave of his hand. A skull ring glinted on one finger. Portia grinned.
"Shame the women don't come with the house," Oscar muttered.
God it's good to be back.
Chapter One
"What do you think I ought to do with her?"
The question was asked in French, but Oscar was an American; though he'd learned to think in the vernacular, in the past few months, he still paused to compose the words in his head before replying. It was a point of pride to speak in French, even if Felix understood English better than many native-speakers did.
"Do you have to actually do anything at all?" he asked, when he'd thought it through.
Felix Carvell, heir to millions, second in line for control of an international megacorporation, and currently wearing a nylon club shirt and leather dog collar, took another bite of his pasta, chewing thoughtfully.
"Well, I feel it's unfair to her, really," he remarked, steepling black-nail-polished fingers over his plate.
The object of their discussion was Portia Rainer, about whom it was always wise to be cautious. Oscar could not quite see how life in general was unfair to Portia; in the space of a year she'd gone from his underpaid intern in New York to a lady of leisure living rent-free in a Parisian suburb. Felix was always buying her fabulous clothes and expensive toys, and expected nothing but her jubilation and fashion advice in return. It was beyond Oscar's powers of understanding, but it made Felix and Portia happy, which meant that they didn't bother him while he was painting.
"She likes being in the newspapers," Oscar observed, thoughtfully.
"Yes, but always with me," Felix complained. "It's very difficult to get dates, if your picture's always in the paper with the same person. Smacks of monogamy."
"Are you sure she's the one it's unfair to?" Oscar asked with a small smile. Felix waved the question off, impatiently. "Well, you've got three options, I suppose," he continued. "You can make an honest woman of her -- "
"Non, merci!" Felix cried.
" -- or you can start dating someone else..." Oscar paused, but Felix didn't remark on that option, so he continued, "...or you can give us another job."
Felix looked at him over their dinner plates, curiously. "Every week you want new employ, Oscar. You must be patient."
Oscar sighed. "It's not right."
"I'm a very wealthy man, and you eat very little," Felix said with a smile. "We have to find the right medium for your art, first. Don't you enjoy your painting anymore? Perhaps it's time you began visiting other museums. You could go outside the city -- make a weekend of it. Or across the Channel, the British Museum ought to keep you busy for a while."
"It's not that. I like it. I do. But I'm not a painter, and we both know it. Give me something to build, something to remake," Oscar said. "Let me paint what I desire, not what I see, Felix."
"Does it frustrate you so?"
Oscar looked down at his hands, where paint was still caught in the cuticles. "Maybe not frustrate. Don't you feel inadequate, next to da Vinci and Picasso and the rest?"
"No," Felix said composedly. "Should I?"
"I do."
"You aren't happy, I think, unless you're feeling inferior," Felix observed. "The secret to how you get along so well with Portia, no doubt. And surely you enjoy Paris?"
"I don't enjoy having no work," Oscar retorted. "It was nice for a week, but..."
They fell silent, then, as they normally did when the subject of Oscar's work came up. The last job he'd done for Felix had involved burning down an antique hotel. It was a shared trauma between them, that none of Portia's teasing or Oscar's dissatisfaction could overcome. They'd returned to France after New York because France was where Felix was; France was their home now.
"What work would you do?" Felix asked finally. Oscar sipped his wine.
"Open an office in Paris, strike out on my own, or with Portia if she can tear herself away from the couture crowd," he said. "Unless you have a job for me. Carvell company builds things all the time, don't they?"
"Ugly industrial things," Felix said dismissively. "A waste of your abilities."
"Oh." Oscar looked irrationally pleased by this offhand compliment.
"If you begin in Paris, would you succeed? Running a company?" Felix asked.
"Not after the fire in Orcival, unless I can convince people I don't make arson a personal habit," Oscar answered. "But it'd be fun to try."
Felix considered this for a while. Oscar finised his meal, neatly, and drank the last of his wine. Portia was out at the opera, in Felix's box, probably flirting with the French upper class. He didn't think the rumours about Portia and Felix were hampering her in the slightest, but perhaps they were bothering Felix. Oscar had never asked Felix precisely what sort of person he preferred, and Felix had not, in over a year, volunteered anything.
"Would you rather work for me, or open a Paris office?" he asked, as their plates were cleared. Oscar, still unused to a household where one did not do one's own dishes, thanked the maid while he thought about it.
"If you had real work for me, work that would satisfy me, I'd rather work for you," he said. Felix smiled.
"Then we will find you some!" he announced, with his usual puppyish cheer.
It was the tone of voice that Oscar had learned to dread.
***
Portia came home from the opera around one, bidding her date goodnight at the door; some pretty, rich man Felix knew by sight, who was inherently unworthy of her, but then so few were. Felix appreciated Portia's ascent into the upper class -- or perhaps the swath she cut through it -- as he might have a sculpture he'd made with his own hands.
She was so patently made for this life. She appreciated fine clothes, designer labels, and good food; if she stole the silverware, well, that was just a byproduct of years spent living on student-loan fundage and internship salaries, and besides, it wasn't uncommon among the French. Portia fit right in, except for the American accent in her speech and a certain edge that only seemed to charm the people who met her.
"Good evening," he said, looking up from the book he was reading as she passed through the living room on the way to the guest bedroom she'd appropriated and made hers. It was the one with the biggest closet.
"Felix!" she said, delightedly. "I thought you'd be out. Is Oscar still up?"
"Non -- in bed. How was the performance?"
"You want to know something weird?"
"I live for weird."
"Yeah, I know," she replied with a smirk.
"Share with me the weird."
"I think I like opera," she admitted in a whisper. "I mean, I started going for the pretty men and because I think watching violinists is really funny, but tonight I actually told Alexandre to shut up because I was missing the solo."
"Ah, you're getting culture." Felix shook a finger at her. "It can come to no good, Portia."
"Well, we still made out during the overture."
Felix smiled, and laid the book aside. He was aware that it looked peculiar to even see him reading; the contrast of his black-painted fingernails and leather cuffs with the deep calfskin binding of the book was something Oscar had actually done a painted study of. Felix had an art-critic friend who'd been immensely disturbed by it.
"Couldn't sleep?" Portia asked, unwrapping the shawl wound around her shoulders and folding it neatly over the back of another chair. She took the elegant hair-sticks out of her hair and let it fall, running her fingers through it in an attempt to loosen the hold of the mousse.
"I was waiting. I wanted a word with you while Oscar was asleep," he answered. "If you are tired, it can wait."
"Oscar's restless again?"
"I do not think 'again' applies when he has never stopped being restless," Felix murmured. "He...he wants work. He wants to feel that he has earned his way. I admit I am baffled."
"Oscar's very..."
"Bourgeois?"
"That's not nice," she scolded.
"I respect Oscar very much. He is a good artist, a good architect, a greatly devoted man, and he has seen ghosts. He talks to buildings. I wish I could," Felix added.
"Call it honest, then. Oscar's frightened that if he doesn't earn his way, one day everything he has is going to be taken from him."
Felix looked horrified. "I would never!"
"I know, I know. He does too, but he's been earning his own way all his life. And...I dunno, he likes it. You said it yourself. He talks to buildings," she said, relaxing back into the deep chair, shadows falling across her face.
"I must find him a building to talk to."
"Well, he could find it on his own."
"Non. Besides..." Felix glanced around the room. "Did you know my mother selected this house for me?"
"Yeah?"
"Oui. I liked it, but it was her choice. She and my sister decorated it, with my approval. And my father's. And...I grow into it, like those snails, you know."
Portia's blank silence indicated that his mental leap had lost her.
"The ones who build the shells. The little shells that have the chambers? It outgrows one, it builds another. They sell cheap art prints of them -- "
"Oh, right. Yeah."
"I am like one of those, only in reverse. The house becomes smaller and smaller. These books are not mine, the paintings are...well, some are mine. The furnishings are not mine. The pots and pans in the kitchen are not mine. The things that I own, in my spirit, become less and less."
"Um...not that I don't care, Felix, because I like you and I do, but how did we get from Oscar to this?"
"I want a home," Felix said, with peculiar longing. "I want to find a place to live. I want you and Oscar to help me."
"This would involve a lot of travel, wouldn't it."
"Oui -- at least three or four countries."
"Looking at mansions and luxury flats?"
"And abandoned buildings, spaces to be made over."
"Spain, Italy?"
"Japan, America even."
Portia leaned forward again, the light from his reading lamp falling across her face.
"I think we can do that," she said with a grin.
***
"No, Ma -- no, Ma, it isn't like that."
Felix was mixing mimosas at the bar while Oscar paced the room on Felix's cordless telephone, regretting he'd ever given his family a land line number to call him on. Portia, resplendent in Gucci, crossed one leg over the other and flipped idly through a magazine.
"Listen, I'd like to come home for Christmas, but I don't know what I'll be doing then or if I'll be able to afford it -- well, yeah, I'm sure there are French architecture firms, but you don't -- my name is associated with the L&L, Ma. It needs more time to die down."
Felix passed Oscar a drink, and he downed two gulps of it before he realised it was spiked. Portia snickered at his expression.
"Yeah, it was gorgeous, but it BURNED DOWN." Oscar sighed and rested his forehead against the wall, next to the framed original of a political cartoon that had run two days after the L&L, the hotel Oscar had been restoring, went down in flames. In it, an exaggeratedly effeminate Felix -- if such a thing was possible on Felix's most extravagant days -- sprayed a burning dollhouse with a hose while Oscar and Portia, wrapped in American flags, stamped it out. Felix had it signed and coloured before he framed it.
Felix had an odd sense of humour.
Portia, glancing at Felix, folded the magazine back and held it up, smacking Oscar on the arm with it. Oscar, annoyed, pushed away from the wall and took it from her hands.
"Listen, I know it's late there, I'll look into things and I'll call you -- oooooh."
The glossy photograph was a home interior, with a high raftered ceiling and a row of picture windows, each fitted with a window-seat. The furniture was built into the floor, the same colour and texture, draped in muted-tone fabric here and there. An open stone hearth thrust up from the floor.
Portia, from behind Oscar, winked at Felix.
"I'm going to call you back, Ma. No, I'll email you. Yeah. Go to bed, it's like two am there."
Oscar, still looking at the photograph, hung up the cordless and set it on a nearby table. "This," he proclaimed, "is hot design."
"Haute," Felix replied, swallowing a sip of mimosa. "Impractical."
"But so sexy," Portia added.
"Like those fashion shows you go to," Oscar said, handing it back to her. "Haute couture."
"The point of which," Felix said, gesturing with his glass, "Is not to design clothing one actually wears."
"Don't you have some...girlfriend or mistress or something who wears haute couture?" Oscar asked. Felix gave him a boyish grin.
"I would not let her hear you call her anyone's mistress," he answered. "Non, she is, I know her...eh, it's uncomplicated."
"You mean complicated?" Oscar asked.
"No, I mean uncomplicated," Felix said firmly. "The point is, she misses the point."
"Portia, translation?" Oscar asked plaintively.
"Don't look at me, you're the one who picked up French like a greasy penny."
"Like a what?"
Portia rolled her eyes. "Couture is designed to indicate. So you dress up some size two model in a shirt made entirely of ruffles, and a size twelve woman buys an off-the-rack shirt with ruffled sleeves."
"But...this is a house," Oscar said slowly.
"Yeah, so?"
"So building an entire house where the table actually grows out of the hardwood floor is a bit too much effort to just make a point. This is a cool house all on its own," Oscar said. "I'd live here."
"And that, Oscar, is your fatal flaw," Portia sighed.
"You showed it to me!"
"Well, someone had to keep you from being strangled by your umbilical cord, and Felix and I want to talk to you," she answered. "Have a seat and some more juice."
"It's not juice."
"It's part juice," Portia argued. "And I think you should know Felix has a plan."
Oscar glanced at Felix, who nodded gravely. There was a pregnant pause, broken only by the sound of Oscar downing the entire drink in half a dozen gulps.
"Okay," he said. "Go on."
"The magazine," Felix said, "is from an agent. He is going to find me a house."
Oscar unfolded the magazine and found the spine, flipping to the front cover. It was typically understated, like most of the services provided to those who were as wealthy as Felix. There was no title, merely a photograph of what looked like a Greek beach.
Complete with topless sunbather.
There was a woman in a bathing suit on the table of contents, too, sitting in an elegant ceramic-tile hot tub. They were artistic photographs, but there was no way around the nipple that was showing. Artistic it might be, but at the end of the day it was still a nipple.
"How do you tell your real estate from your pornography?" Oscar asked, examining the picture. "I mean there's no price listed in either one, and there's so much nakedness in both."
"And you get turned on by both," Portia retorted. Oscar scowled.
"My agent," Felix continued, cheerfully and unflappably, "is going to find a house for me. We meet with him tomorrow and you must be there Oscar, to tell me what is stupid. In houses. Such as, oh, too many windows, no-one owns houses with that many windows in Siberia, much too cold."
"You want to live in Siberia?"
"Non, but it is a good example. I have told him to look for things which are...rustic?"
"...rustic?"
"Rough. Unfinished. In need of fixing."
Oscar gave him a mildly suspicious look. "Why?"
"So you can fix it," Felix said cheerfully. "Make it couture if you like. Tables growing out of the floor, lightbulbs set in clear glass walls."
"Felix, that wasn't...really what I had in mind when I said -- "
"You will, won't you? Oscar?" Felix said imploringly.
"If he cries his eyeliner's going to run," Portia whispered.
"Do you want lightbulbs set in clear glass walls?" Oscar asked.
"I leave that up to my architect," Felix said, with a practiced wave of his hand. A skull ring glinted on one finger. Portia grinned.
"Shame the women don't come with the house," Oscar muttered.