RetroXotique

  Johnny Diamond’s woman was singing, and I was listening.  I was also thinking that it was strange thinking about her as Johnny Diamond’s woman, but five years away inside can change a whole lot of things.

Irma had a voice like bruised velvet which was a perfect match for her full set of soft curves, all of them swaying slowly in the night spot’s soft peach spotlight which picked out every shimmering highlight of her packed to bursting point golden gown as she sang.  Yeah, she was even easier to look at than to listen to.

In the song, she ached about some guy who had left her.  The nights were so lonely now without him, and the rain on her windowpane flowed just like her tears.  But, well as she carried a torch song, I didn’t believe it for one minute.  No guy in his right mind would ever leave Irma.  Except for me of course.

But then, I hadn’t had much choice in the matter.  And as for being in my right mind, well that was another thing which five years in stir could change for the worse.

Johnny Diamond sat at a stage side table looking up dreamily at Irma though the wreath of his own cigar smoke.  A full glass of Vermouth stood untouched on the napkin before him, and standing behind him was a goon who blended into the club’s sophisticated ambience about as unobtrusively as King Kong shopping at a Tiffany’s counter.  Johnny did not like to be disturbed when Irma was singing – or doing any of the other things she did for him nowadays – and the gorilla in the tux was there to see that Johnny’s desire for privacy was strictly observed.

“Hello Johnny,” I said quietly.  “It’s been a while.”

There was a brief flicker of that old white-hot irritation in Johnny’s eyes as he turned his insolent black eyes towards my voice.   Then the flicker cooled into recognition, and his face arranged itself animatronically into a suavely genial smile that never impinged upon his eyes, except for a little unavoidable crinkling at the corners.

“Well, well, well,” he murmured.  “It certainly has.  Grab a seat, Mike.  We got a lot of catching up to do.  But if you wouldn’t mind waiting ’til Irma’s finished her song…”  He turned away from me and resumed his wrapt attention to Irma.  Something told me that my time away had not been nearly long enough in his book.

The piano player finished with a too tricky by half flourish and twitched his pencil thin moustache at his quintet to signify that some imbibing was now allowed.  He picked a long, very thinly rolled cigarette from behind his ear and lit up, drawing in exotic smoke with almost as much intensity as he used to watch Irma alight the stage.

Johnny flicked his eyes at Mister Kong who, like the well-trained giant gorilla he was, immediately picked up on the signal and lumbered to the side of the stage to offer Irma the support of a paw of not quite the capacity of the Grand Canyon.  Irma placed a satin opera gloved hand on top of this rough hewn excavator with fingers and opposable thumbs, pinched at her restrictively fish tailed hem with her other hand, and stepped downwards with a flash of fancy high heels and even fancier gams.

My eyes followed her leggy descent with a bit more raw hunger than was strictly polite.  Prison deprivation doesn’t exactly nourish the social niceties, and Irma was an awful lot of female sweetness to a guy who’d been on a bread and water diet for five years.  Right at the end of my look, after the tightly swathed thighs and the nipped in waist and the explosive overspill of deeply slashed bosom, our eyes met and she saw me for the first time.

A little shock of recognition; a slight touch of anxiety – maybe even some fear in those beautiful familiar baby blues.  But why fear?  Even five years in the clink couldn’t change the way I felt about her so much.  Unless she was afraid I was going to jump her right there in the night club.  Which, given how gorgeous she looked, might not have been such a bad way of getting reacquainted if she would just lie still for it.  In the past she had certainly not objected too much.

“Michael,” she said finally, her moment of uncertainty past. “My God, you look so pale, and thin!  Jack, can we get the cook to rustle up something substantial for him?”

Johnny grunted something about the cook being off duty, but he would see what could be done.  He didn’t sound too enthusiastic, though.

I gave Irma a twisted smile: “Never got much chance to work on my tan while I was away, and this is the suit I went in wearing.  Guess prison food and hard labour means it don’t fit so good anymore.  But you look even better than I remember, Angel.  Time has been kind to you.”

She smiled an almost genuinely warm smile: “”Perhaps even a little too kind?”  She gave her satin-testing hips a little pat with her opera gloved hands, and I could see what she meant.  Though of course I didn’t mind one bit that she was now a bit curvier than I remembered; you can never have too much of perfection.  Her hair was a lot more blonde these days too: a shimmering shade of bombshell platinum teased in a fluffed and casual way that would take hours to achieve and regular bouts of primping to maintain.  It framed a face that was even more lushly sensual than I had dreamed about over these past years.  The old half-parted invitation in her full scarlet lips was still as challenging, and her face still held at that haughty tilt, though from my seat below her I reckoned that nowadays that angling of chin was as much to disguise a certain plumpness blurring the clean Hollywood arc of her jaw line as for any unsettlingly teasing effect.

“You got nothing to worry about from where I’m sitting, gorgeous” I reassured her.  “Last time I saw anything looked half as good was on a poster of Rita Hayworth hanging on my cell wall, and you got that piece of glossy paper beat hands down.  Why don’t you grab a seat and park it, and we’ll catch up on old times.  I been feeling real sentimental lately.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Johnny’s small negative shake of the head, and saw the wariness return to Irma’s eyes.  She covered up beautifully though:

“Sit down?  In this dress?  I daren’t risk that, Michael!  This thing’s definitely standing room only, and I’ve been standing in it too long already this evening.  No: you boys stay here and play catch up all you like.  Right now I’ve got to go ease myself out of this for a while before my next set or I’m likely to explode.  Do you mind awfully, Michael?  I know it seems terribly rude, especially as it’s been simply ages since I saw you last, but we’ll have a nice long chat later – I promise.  You will be here for a while, won’t you?  Not having to dash away suddenly again or anything, I hope?”

“Don’t worry, Angel.  I’m going nowhere anytime soon.”  The increase in tension at this was subtle but still noticeable, especially from Johnny Diamond.

“How nice!” she trilled.  “Until then, then.”

She took a long time to walk away and I took a long time to watch her doing it.  Her walk had lost none of that old full-curved and slowly sambaing rhythm as she peck-pecked her teetering-heeled way through the aisles of male admiration and girlfriend envy.  And I could definitely appreciate how her figure might need a rest from that thigh-checking and bum-squeezing gown, and vice versa, even though I couldn’t get enough of watching her pushing the limits of that shiny and beautifully bulbous envelope.

“Now, where were we, Jack?” I said once I could see her no longer.

Johnny’s smile was still in place, but his eyes were colder than black ice: “We were coming up to the place where I tell you that it might be very bad for your health, Mike, to hang around here too long – or at all.”

I traded him one of his smiles: “Aw c’m’on, Johnny  – is that friendly?  I only just got here, and besides, you owe me an awful lot of hospitality.”

“Oh yeah?  How do you figure that?”

“Well it could just as easily have been you away in the clink for five years.  Seems I kept you out of that, didn’t I?”

“Not the way I read it, Mike.  Way I see it, you got unlucky taking that bullet in the leg running away.  I was taking exactly the same chances, only I didn’t get hit.  How is the leg these days, by the way?”

I shifted uncomfortably just remembering that dark alley on that last run and the cops getting real lucky at our expense.

Well, mainly at my expense; it had cost me a tiny not so neat hole in the back of my leg.  The hole would have been a lot bigger if the guy’s police issue pistol hadn’t run out of bullets and he hadn’t needed to switch to an old .22 throw down he happened to have on him for planting at inconvenient murder scenes.  I guess you could call that lucky too.

But luck is a two way street; my luck had led me down the road to a five year stretch; Johnny’s had made him the undisputed kingpin of a crooked little town:

“My leg’s fine, thanks for asking,” I said.  “Oh, now and then a little twinge in real cold weather, but other than that I can’t complain, and we don’t get too much cold weather out here, do we?  But think about it, Johnny: if I’d spilt the beans on you I could have made my time run an awful lot shorter and easier, but I didn’t.  Don’t that earn me any brownie points?”

“Uh-huh. Then we’d neither of us have had anything to come out to.  You were just protecting your interests.  Besides, whatever else you got wrong with you, you’re not the snitching type.”

“Gee, thanks for the endorsement.  Only thing is, the way you’re talking now, I didn’t come out to too much anyway.”

The sudden calm was as palpable as a dice waiting to be thrown from a sweaty palm:  “Okay Mike, for old time’s sake, I’ll play.  What’ll it take to get you to walk, and I mean right now?”

“I dunno, Johnny – you tell me.  Seems you got a real nice deal going for yourself these days: the place is looking better than ever, and so is Irma.  Didn’t waste much time moving in there, did you, pal?”  There was a taste in my mouth sourer than five years of clink food could possibly have made it.

“Don’t be a sap, Mike.  It’s been five whole years!  Did you really think a woman like Irma would be alone for that long?  And as for this place, I worked real hard at building it up, and all your talents lie in other directions, so it’s not as if things would have worked out any better with you around.”

“We were partners once, Johnny; could be again.  I’m a useful guy to have in your corner – you know that.”

Johnny smiled grimly, took a drag in his cigar and poked it in Kong’s direction: “I got all the hired muscle I’m ever going to need, Mike.  Besides, we run a nice clean operation here now – it ain’t like the old days anymore.”

“You mean those nice policemen like their nice brown envelopes even better now that your business is booming enough to make those envelopes fatter.”

“What can I say, Mike?  It’s a big bad dirty world out there.  Only way to make it is to be even bigger and badder…”

“…and dirtier.”

He shrugged his tuxedoed shoulders:  “If you like.  Anyway, let me get you that meal Irma talked about, and a decent slice of folding money to make your journey pass sweeter.”

“If that’s the way it’s gotta be, Johnny.  Just let me go say goodbye to Irma first…”

His face suddenly became sour marble, losing even that fake salesman’s smile: “’fraid that won’t be happening, Mike.  It’s all been over between you and Irma from a long time ago.  She don’t want to see you.”

“Funny, that ain’t the impression I got just now.”

“You been away too long, Mike.  You can’t read her any more.  Not like I can, and I say she don’t want to see you.”

How close he was to needing an ambulance call right then, he’d never know:  “Okay, but I’d like to hear it from her own lips, if you don’t mind too much.”

“Well I’m afraid I do mind, Mike.  Joey, Mike here was just leaving.  See that he don’t get lost on the way, will you?”

The gorilla’s dense shadow began to cloud my vision, but I held up a palm towards him, and started out of the chair under my own steam:  “No need for that, Mighty Joey Young.  It’s not that it hasn’t been nice, but I’d like at least to make it appear like leaving was my own idea, okay?”

His huge paw rested heavily on my shoulder anyway, tilting me off-balance.  Suddenly my not so bad leg didn’t feel not so bad anymore.  I managed to swivel towards the still seated Johnny, whose manners were suddenly a lot less polished than his patent leather brogues:  “Okay, Johnny.  I can see that this is not going to work.  How about that  folding money you mentioned?”

He barely glanced up from his Vermouth. Then he fished a tight paper roll of dollars out of his tux and tossed it to me:  “This ought to cover that meal Irma promised you, and then some.  And I’ll make sure the moving money reaches you.  Give Joey the address of whatever flophouse you’re staying in before you leave.”

He was still staring into his glass through the wreath of his cigar smoke as laughing boy marched me away.

 The corridor to the exit was a long dour walk, made even longer by Joey’s insistence on playing very heavy-pawed pat-a-cake on my back all the way.   It was a game that seemed to amuse him mightily, even though I had set off at a seemingly willing pace.  Probably it made him feel good to be actually doing something for his keep other than shooting baleful glances at any of the club’s clients who looked even vaguely like troublemakers.  I imagined that that look would have been a good enough cease and desist order for even the toughest of customers.

But prison can turn a guy nasty, and lines get drawn there that nobody gets to cross if you are to survive the experience.  And that nobody included even guys a big and menacing as Joey.  Of course there were guys in prison with badges and uniforms and big key rings and even bigger night sticks and guns – those guys you tried to accommodate up to a point; they had a licence to tell you what to do and where to go. But everybody else…

Not that this kind of thing would happen too often to a newbie.  You just had to make sure to come down hard on the first guy to step over your own personal line – real hard. Or at least make things tough enough on him so that a second try might not be considered worth the trouble.

Joey didn’t know this of course.  Joey was just playing his own civilised little game, just as he would with any other hard nut customer.  It wasn’t really Joey’s fault that I wasn’t quite civilised anymore.

As we drew nearer the exit door, I let my pace drop a little, just enough for his pushing to have more and more effect on my shambling progress.  His hand hit my right shoulder and I spun and veered clumsily to the left:

“C’mon, Joey, give a guy a break here.  Can’t you see I’m going easy? What’s your beef?”

My left shoulder blade took a heavier, more deliberate hit, and I tottered forward and to the right, waiting for that predictable, playful little socket-dislocating pump from the palm heel.  I gave a genuine grunt of pain, and began to gripe again, and Joey didn’t let me down.

He slap-pushed through my right shoulder, sending me careening and spiralling across the corridor to the left.  I didn’t have to exaggerate the effects of his weight lifter’s push all that much: just enough so that I seemed to be spinning and struggling for balance as I turned.  There was a tricky moment when I had to put all my weight onto my bad right leg and I felt it tighten into an old numbness, but then I managed to push off it and redistribute my balance onto the other foot as I came around, apparently floundering.

I kept a look of pleading complaint on my face just long enough as my turn brought me around to face him.  His face still had that dumb-happy look of bullying pleasure on it as my fist followed through on the momentum of my spin and smashed into the off-guard slackness of his jaw.

Joey’s big face looked more shocked than hurt for a moment, and he staggered back just a half-step and tried to say something. I don’t reckon he was a very eloquent guy at the best of times, but it’s hard to say anything much with a dislocated jaw.  As he moaned in rage and pain and set himself to tear me apart, I chopped him hard through that thick neck which had an Adam’s apple in there somewhere in all that chorded musculature.  Now he couldn’t breathe or speak, and as his eyes began to fog from the lack of oxygen, I busted his nose wide open just for good measure with a straight left.

Joey seemed to decide that sitting down on the nice soft carpet for a while might be a good idea.  He folded himself ever so slowly downwards and still managed to hit the floor with a vibrating thud that rumbled underfoot like a minor earth tremor.  After a moment his big face took on a peaceful contented look like a very large choirboy dreaming of Santa.  Joey was having a well-earned snooze.

Reminding myself to thank Johnny for the gift of the roll of coins in my right fist, I bent down, hooked my hands in under Joey’s cavernous armpits, and damned near put my back out and wrenched my shoulders out of their sockets hefting and inching him over to the wall.  I left him propped carefully against it and checked to see he was still breathing.  Then I pulled the dress handkerchief out of his tuxedo’s breast pocket and cleaned off as much of the blood trickling from his nose as I could.  I frisked him, but didn’t find any artillery.  A pity, but then Joey had probably reckoned that he’d never need any more artillery than his fists.  I took a hip flask out of his pocket, and doused his shirt front in its contents.  Until his face started to show bruising and his nose began to swell up, it would look to anyone passing by that Joey had merely fallen victim to his own prodigious alcohol consumption.  Unless that passer by happened to be Johnny Diamond, that would buy me a little time to do what I had to do.

I felt all wound up and agitated, and my heart was thumping like a bongo drum at a voodoo séance.  I didn’t like feeling like that; didn’t like the unholy pleasure I had taken in taking Joey apart so clinically; didn’t like whatever it was that had made me feel not quite human.  There were other things I would rather have felt this excited about – like getting together again finally with blonde, gorgeous, fickle Irma.

Johnny Diamond, I decided, was another of those guys without a uniform or a badge.

Neither of the voices coming from behind the dressing room door sounded too happy – particularly not the female one.

“No, Johnny!  It’s not convenient, and I’m not in the mood!  Damn you, will you stop pawing at me!”

“Aw come on babe – what’s the matter?  ’Cos if it’s Mike turning up out of the blue like that, it’s all been taken care of…”

“Whatever do you mean, taken care of?  Johnny, I hope you haven’t…”

“Don’t sweat it, babe.  I didn’t have him hurt all that much.  Didn’t need to anyway.  A little folding money and he went meek as a lamb.  You’d be surprised how easy it was. Prison’s softened your old lover boy up some, I gotta say.  Either you’re charms are slipping or he’s really cooled on you.”

“He’s really gone? I mean didn’t he even want to see me first…?  Uh…! Johnny, what did I just tell you?  Don’t touch me like that!”

“Hell, if I’d known seeing him again would freak you out this much I’d have had him rubbed out way before he could get near you.  Jeeze, all of a sudden you’re goddamn untouchable!”

“Don’t even joke about that, Johnny.  You know I don’t want Mike rubbed out.  I never did.  I care about him still.  It’s just that…”

“Just that you’re better off with me, babe. That’s why you…”

“Don’t you dare say any more!  You know how it hurts me when you call me a gold digger.  All you men are the same.  You look at a woman like me and you can think of only one thing.  You think just because I’m blonde and gorgeous and sexy that I’m only good for that one thing.  But I need some things too, Johnny, and nobody’s going to just give them to me.  I’ve got to make sure that…”

“Sure, sure – I know, babe.  You’ve got to go out and hit the mother lode before those gorgeous stocks of yours start to slip.  Hell, they’re already slipping if you ask me.  Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you can’t even get into your stage show dresses lately without…”

“Stop it, Johnny!  Don’t say it.  I won’t listen to this.  I’m still gorgeous and you know it.  Otherwise why would you make such a fuss about Mike calling around?  Answer me that!”

“We both know the answer to that, babe, and it’s got nothing to do with how great you might still look.  You’ve got just as much to lose if he finds out as I do – remember that.  And if I go down, you’re gonna find it hard to hook up with another meal ticket in this town.  Not one as gilt edged as mine, anyhow.  Most guys with my type of dough like their broads a bit slimmer and younger – no offence, doll.”

“Why you…!  Get out!  Get out right now, or I’ll…”

“Calm down sugar, or you’re liable to bust a gusset.  And don’t forget you’ve got another show to do this evening in that dress.  I’d really hate my customers to be disappointed in any way, or it might have to come out of your wages.”

“You complete bastard!  I’ll never let you touch me again…”

“Oh sure you will, honey.  Tomorrow you’ll go out buy yourself some new hair and a manicure and a facial and a dress that fits without hurting and a fur coat to keep your big ass warm, and maybe even a new girdle – and you’ll be able to afford it too with the money you get from me.  Then you’ll get all clever again and think better of it, and you’ll be nice as pie to me again and waiting all warm and fat in my bed.  Hell, I might not even keep you waiting too long – if I ain’t got nothing better to do.”

I heard Irma scream at him and something crash against the inside of her dressing room door, and then I slunk back into the shadows behind the corridor corner as Johnny emerged, his face set between a smirk and a snarl of suppressed rage as he slammed the door behind him and stalked off stiff-legged towards the gaming rooms.

It seemed the path of true love had hit a few potholes – which suited me just fine.

Johnny had been careless in not bothering to check on Joey’s progress, and Irma had been even more careless about locking her dressing room door after he’d left.   She had her lovely bare back turned towards me and was still hitching herself back into her show gown as I entered.

I allowed myself a moment to admire the view of her rump roundly squirming itself into the metallically shimmering squeeze of that poured-on lamé before I let out a low appreciative whistle:

“Hubba-hubba, Angel!  Need any help with that?”

“Damn it, Johnny, I meant it!  You can…”  She began to turn angrily towards me, her hips and thighs constricted awkwardly within the slightly skewed gown, and then she stopped.  The voice was all wrong for Johnny, and only one person ever called her Angel.

A montage of emotions passed across her face, some of which weren’t too flattering to a guy’s ego.  Other people’s fear has never done too much for me, and the idea of Irma being even a little bit afraid of me made me feel downright queasy.  But whatever was behind that fear, she got it under control quickly enough.

She forced a smile as she pinched the cups of her gown’s stiffly contoured bodice between painted thumb and forefinger nails, hiking her big creamy breasts back into their customary state of deliciously compromised modesty:

“Oh, it’s you, Michael.  I’m afraid you’ve caught me at an awkward time, with my… boobies hanging out – but I forgot: you used to be quite accustomed to that, darling.”

I grinned; she seemed to have fallen very easily back onto her usual teasing strategies:

“It’s been quite some time, though.  I think I can just about stand to look at them again, Angel.”

“You’re welcome, I’m sure.  But Johnny said you’d already left…?”

“Well you know Johnny.  Johnny says more than his prayers sometimes.”

Irma reached behind her, biting into her lush lower lip as she struggled with her gown’s back zip.  She breathed in deeply, almost popping out of her bodice again:

“Look, I’m due on stage right now.  Do you mind if we continue our chat later?”

“Sure thing, Angel.  I’ll be waiting right here.  My social diary ain’t exactly full these days.”

“Do you think that’s wise, Michael?  Johnny can get frightfully jealous, you know.  What if he sets that Neanderthal on you again?”

“Who – Joey?  I’m afraid poor Joey’s gonna be out of commission for a while.”

“You mean you…?”  Her voice found itself unwittingly pitched between shock and a primitive excitement which caught me slightly off-guard.

“Come on now, Angel.  Did you really think I’d let anything hustle me out of our goodbyes?  And Johnny may be a whiz at organization and keeping books, but he’s a lousy judge of muscle.  So I’ll take my chances if that’s okay by you.  Don’t worry; I’ll be real nice to Johnny if he should happen to pop by.”

“Don’t underestimate him, Michael.  When he’s in one of his dark moods he’s capable of some shocking things.”

“And what gets him into one of those moods – or can I guess?”

“Well it’s certainly not my fault that he gets so jealous!  I know I certainly give him little enough cause.”

Looking at her now as she struggled to zip herself into that sexy gown and to then stay inside it, I could quite understand how a man could get awful jealous, even with very little cause:

“Here: let me help you with that, Angel.  I promise not to linger too long about it, or breathe on you too heavy.”

“Would you mind awfully, Michael?  I swear I don’t know what’s the matter with this thing.  It fit me perfectly just last week.”  She did a tight little swivel on her high strappy heels and presented her lovely pale and powdered back to me – and her even more lovely half-zipped rear.

As I looked down to find the zipper tab, I could see inside the V of its parting that Johnny had not been idly provoking Irma’s vanity about one thing.   These days my dream blonde’s curves were as sternly girdled as Margaret Dumont’s, though admittedly to far more alluring effect.

A formidable latticework of lacings criss-crossed her ample showgirl bottom through a sequence of eyelets in the rigidly panelled and boned contraption Irma evidently deemed an essential accessory nowadays in order to preserve her sexy but svelte chanteuse image.  As I took a firm grip on that dramatically figure hugging gown’s zipper tab and inched it with some difficulty into closure about Irma’s sternly suppressed nether curves, my fingertips traced incidentally over the economically tailored satin of that butt-cupping glamour gown and felt the unyielding slick explosiveness of the parabolic carapace beneath that gown.  Just how many dress sizes did that thing enable Irma to reduce by, I wondered.

And perhaps I wondered a little too long about it, because even through all that  curve-contouring armoury I could feel her stiffen:

“Oh all right, all right!  So I’m wearing a girdle these days!  The way you and Johnny act about it, you’d think it was some sort of a crime.  Well I’ve got news for you, Michael dear:  every woman with halfway decent curves wears a girdle nowadays – even your dream girl Rita Hayworth.  And as for that Mansfield broad, I’ll just bet she positively creaks when she wiggles.  It’s the Look, damn it, and I’ve got to have it in my line of work…  God, but this dress is tight!”

“Now hold it there, Angel!  I’m definitely not complaining.  And just in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not Johnny either.  Whatever downright unappreciative remarks he’s been making about you, that’s his own cockeyed business.  You know I could never get enough of you, and if he wants to kill what he has with you right now, then I’d be more than glad to see him do it.  Only drawback is, I kinda hate to see him hurt your feelings.”

Her eyes softened a bit, and some of that wariness slipped out of them:  “You know I’d almost forgotten how sweet you could be, Michael.  But really, hanging around here is not such a good idea; not if you truly do care about Johnny hurting me.  But if you’ll tell me where you’re staying, I could slip away later on – that’s if you’d care me to.  Johnny has earned himself the cold shoulder treatment tonight at least.”

“Sure, doll.  But I should warn you, it ain’t exactly the Ritz – the Madison Motel out on Greenmount.  Maybe I could spring for a meal somewhere nice – Johnny’s treat.”  I showed her the roll of dollars, and she grimaced fetchingly.

“Johnny can be such a cheapskate when it suits him.  But don’t worry about it, I’ll see he pays you that money he promised – plus a fat bonus if you’re especially nice to me.”

“Being especially nice to you ain’t gonna be too hard, Angel.”

“Until later then, Michael.”  She stepped real close to me – perfume and body heat close – and smooched me on the mouth with her smoochey lips.  It was a kiss I could feel all the way down in my hip pocket, and I could still feel the residual twin impressions of her big cantilevered breasts on my ribcage as she stepped back again and wiped away a smudge of lipstick from my face.

“Now I really must go, darling.  How do I look?  Is everything on straight?”  She fluttered her very long eyelashes playfully and gave a delicate little wiggle of those ample hips.  I imagined I could hear a faint hint of her Mansfield strength girdle creaking.

“Sure, doll” I said, “Everything about you is better than perfect.”