The Landlord. Kristin Hunter

      —Yes, but why should it be so touchy? his reasonable mind questioned.

      Because he made it so terribly urgent, came the instant, reasonable response.

      Elgar sprawled disgustedly in the butterfly chair while Lanie coiled lazily on the India-print couch, regarding him with large, calm eyes. How could she be so casual five minutes after he’d been hacking away at her most sensitive spot? Repeated jabs and blows toughened, he supposed.

      “I’m getting less sweet though, Lanie,” he announced. “Come taste me and see. Every day in every way I’m getting more and more sour.”

      She laughed and declined his invitation. “Oh, not you, Elgar. I don’t believe it. Why?”

      “I am the proprietor of a madhouse, that’s why. An apartment house over on the corner of Poplar and Jackson. Your precious torch singer is one of my crazy tenants.”

      Lanie whinnied with joy. “You’ve bought a house with Marge Perkins in it? Oh, Elgar, you’re so lucky. You don’t know how lucky you are.”

      As if Marge Perkins were a valuable antique or something. Well, maybe an antique, at that. But non-negotiable on today’s market.

      “Lanie,” he said, “you’re an athletic woman, you’d have done fine at track meets. Especially if they’d had an event called Jumping to Conclusions. Oh, in that you’d have taken all the medals. Actually I am the unluckiest of men. I think I was born under the Dog Star.”

      Her big mobile mouth drooped in a pout. “Oh, Elgar, really. Look at you. You’ve got everything. Looks, money, everything. Still, you’re always complaining.”

      He raised a warning finger. “Didn’t you hear me? You should listen more closely when I speak to you. I said my tenants were crazy. I meant it. One of them held a gun on me today. Another one chased me out of the house with a tomahawk.”

      She hooted. She whooped. She writhed, kicked, and wriggled in indecent spasms of laughter. So much enjoyment, all at Elgar’s expense. He suffered keenly. But when she noticed his agonized expression hers too became serious.

      “Oh, Elgar. Poor Elgar. Are all of your tenants colored?”

      He nodded sadly.

      “Have you collected any rents from them yet?”

      He shook his head.

      “None at all? Oh, poor baby.” She got up, came over, took his face in suddenly gentle hands. Her eyes were melting. “Poor Elgar. You do need help.”

      He looked up at her, baffled.

      “They’ll run rings around you, Elgar. They’ll destroy you. They’ll drive you mad.”

      “I doubt it,” he said, “not.”

      “Ever wonder how underdogs survive, Elgar? Through cunning. Craftiness and cunning. It’s passed along from generation to generation. By word of mouth, by example, and by heredity. Only the clever ones survive. By now every underdog in this country has it. The necessary talent and know-how for beating the enemy.”

      “Who’s the enemy?” he asked.

      “Society, you poor bastard. You.” Lanie seemed to have one brightening thought in all this gloom. “At least you have Marge living there. Society’s been good to her. She ought to be on your side.”

      “She,” he said, “is the one who met me at the door today with a revolver. And held it on me while I ate my breakfast.” He patted his stomach delicately. “I still have heartburn.”

      “Hmmm,” Lanie said thoughtfully. “She must have had a little hard luck lately. Is she still pretty?”

      Elgar shuddered. “She’s a great, big, hideous wreck. A monster. She practices witchcraft. And looks it.”

      “But the voice, Elgar?” Lanie asked urgently. “Is the voice still there?”

      “Clear as a bell. I recognized it the minute I heard your record.” He pondered for a moment. “It’s weird, hearing such a sweet young voice come from such a horny old rhinoceros.”

      Lanie, lost in nostalgia, missed the heavy-handed pun. “She was always tall,” she said. “But she used to be elegant. Slim and graceful. Well.” She jumped up suddenly and shook herself like a young mare impatient to be rid of flies. “Let’s get going.”

      “Where?” he asked, amazed. It was after three A.M.

      “To your house, of course, idiot. I have to look the situation over. And I want to meet Marge Perkins.”

      She tweaked his ear painfully as she went by. “Oh, you’re lucky you’ve got me, Elgar. You don’t know how lucky you are. I can save you from a real mess, believe me. Back in three.”

      She was moving, in high gear, from her night-time languor to her daytime personality—brisk, efficient, overpowering—and Elgar was being towed along, in spite of vivid visions of tenants wielding deadly weapons with deadly seriousness on being aroused at this hour, and his being unable to blame them.

      A managing woman, that was Lanie. A lady Chairman of the Board who had missed her calling.

      He’d first seen her in action on the morning after one of his Great Debacles, a night spent barcrawling to postpone Plan S, and had known immediately that she was one of those rare ones who Always Knew What to Do. One crisp look at him and she’d called out, “A Bromo!” before he spoke a word, following it up with “Black and a cannibal!”

      It sounded ghastly, and it was—black coffee and a raw-beef, raw-egg-yolk sandwich—but her hangover cure worked. From then on he ate breakfast at the D-R’s counter every morning, and always let Lanie order for him, sensing his wishes from the way he looked. She never failed to distinguish Elgar’s French-toast mornings from his soft-boiled-egg ones.

      He was often grateful for her competence, but sometimes he wanted to shake it out of her. Managing women like his mother drew Elgar irresistibly—yet also threatened, like Mothaw, to set him dangling like a pretty golden charm from their bracelets. Large important women lent splendor and significance to conquest, and so he liked them—but he much preferred Lanie’s night personality, languid and permissive, to her awesome daytime self. Much.

      In three minutes exactly she was back, terrifyingly transformed.

      “I don’t know how I’m going to play it, Elgar. Probably by ear. I may decide to let them think I’m your wife. A heartless Jewish bitch. Do I look the part?”

      She did: not the least terrifying thing about Lanie was her ability to look any way she wished.

      She had coiled the thick russet hair close to her head, and put on a tunic, a lead-colored thing brocaded in silver, heavy and opulent, flaring over black stretch pants like a coat of mail. She looked medieval and noble, like Joan of Arc in full battle regalia. And also a little like Joan of Arc’s horse. Stowed in her leather saddle bag, in a cellophane envelope, was the next presto-chango outfit: a starched white uniform and sensible white, ripple-soled shoes.

      “Lanie,” Elgar said as they got into her struggle-buggy, “I’ve often wondered why you wait tables for a living. You’re smart, you’re good-looking, you could do anything you wanted. Sometimes I wonder if you’re like me.”

      “Like you how?” she asked in a tone that rejected all possibility of comparison.

      “Doing penance for your crimes. The ones you haven’t committed.”

      She laughed—a little nervously, he thought.

      “Lanie, I want to shake your hand,” he said earnestly, grabbing it. “I think you live with the horrors as much as I do. But you rate congratulations. On you, they don’t show.”

      She laughed again, nasal and cynical. “Look closer, my friend.” Then she pulled her hand away from his and twisted the ignition