The hostess made her face squinchier. “How many more times?”
“Eleventy squidillion!” Lotta said.
“That seems like too many.”
“You seem like too many!”
“That is hurtful and I will hold it against you forever. But also I will help you to do with your body what you say you want to do, only first you must promise you will go away after, because I don’t like you, because you are hurtful, and in addition you must tell me: What is a ‘teeth’?”
“ ‘A teeth!’ ” Lotta said, in her normal voice. “Hilarious! They should hire you on to write for them. For real.”
“Your pal really seems to agree,” the hostess said. “He’s really crackin up.”
“He’s a novelist,” said Lotta. “Novelists don’t watch MBR.”
“Oh yeah?” the hostess said, again in the voice. “Well, the Mean Baby Robots don’t read novels.”
I made a bunch of laugh sounds.
The hostess winked at Lotta. Lotta winked at me.
“So what kind of server you want me to send over?”
“Oh, anyone,” Lotta said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Feeling adventurous.”
“Ha! No,” Lotta said. “Any dedicated server, thank you very much. We’re just gonna eat.”
“I know, girl, I know—still I gotta ask. Company policy. You know what, though? Two of my dedicateds called in sick today, and the third one’s slammed. Why don’t I get you started?”
“Oh, that’s great,” Lotta said. “I guess we’ll get a couple slice flights—I mean if that’s cool with you, Belt. That way, you can try the largest variety of exotic toppings—Belt’s never tried your pizza.”
“Slice flight’s the move,” the hostess advised me.
“Sounds good,” I said.
“And to drink?”
“You have lemonade?”
“Ooh, lemonade. A real toughguy, huh? Total J.K. I mean if you’re working the program or something, I support you entirely. Our lemonade’s actually great. Fresh-squeezed. Lotta?”
“I don’t know,” said Lotta. “It is a little early to drink, I guess…”
“If you want to—” I said.
“No no. A fresh-squeezed lemonade sounds great,” Lotta said. “To aid my body,” she added, in the voice.
“I am using my legs to transport me toward the kitchenplace,” the hostess, departing, said over her shoulder.
Lotta began to unload her cures into the built-in nest in the center of the table. She did this with a lip bit, perhaps in concentration, perhaps from disappointment. I worried I’d shamed her.
“You know, I really won’t mind it if you drink,” I said.
In response, she offered a nonchalant wave that, given the bitten lip, could just as easily have meant “It’s fine” as “I’m making the effort to pretend it’s fine, but really, I’d rather you continue to convince me to go ahead and order a drink.”
And in the wake of this wave, I noticed once again—and once again felt penitent for noticing—a wild flapping of her upper-arm meat.
“I mean you almost have to drink, right?” I said. “It’s a tavern in a brothel. They must get pretty angry if you don’t buy sex, but if you don’t buy sex or alcohol…? Like, didn’t the hostess seem maybe kinda angry? I mean maybe you should just order a—”
“You angling to get me drunk, Belt?” said Lotta.
“I—”
“Just kidding! Jeez. And no, you big sweetheart. They don’t get angry about it. If people weren’t comfortable coming in to just dine, it would undermine the whole bait-and-switch strategy. Though I guess it’s not exactly a bait-and-switch strategy, more like a stock-the-cookies-in-the-cracker-aisle strategy, or a stock-the-loss-leader-at-the-back-of-the-store-so-they-have-to-walk-past-all-the-other-more-desirable-and-more-profitable-products-to-get-to-it strategy. Like I bet you go to Pang’s White Hen for milk, right?”
I couldn’t recall having ever bought milk, let alone from Pang, but I said, “Sure, yeah,” so as not to obstruct her arrival at whatever insight it was she was riffing toward.
“It’s the cheapest milk in town,” she said, “is why. Pang can’t possibly make any money on that milk, but the milk not only gets you through the door, it gets you walking past all kinds of brightly packaged chips and sports drinks and candy bars and whatnot. So it’s a little like that here. Not to say they lose money on the pizza—maybe, I don’t know. But they definitely make more money on the sex and the drinks. And some people come in cause they just want some pizza, and that’s all they get, but some who come just because they want some pizza get tempted by the drinks once they’ve sat down and so they buy some drinks too, and maybe that opens them up to buy sex, plus then—and this is maybe the cleverest part of the strategy I think—there’s also people who want to buy drinks or sex but won’t admit it to themselves, so they tell themselves they’re just coming in for pizza, but really what they’re doing is making themselves available to temptation because that way they can feel like the drinking or sex is out of their control. Or less in their control. I’m one of those people. Not with drinking or sex, I don’t mean—really. Really. But with food itself, though. Like, I said to myself, when I decided we’d come here, that all I’d get would be a Caesar salad, but by the time I ordered, I was totally convinced that if I got the Caesar, you’d know it was because I was trying to eat healthy, and because you’re such a sweetheart you’d order salad too, denying yourself the pleasure of eating pizza, like in solidarity, like to help me be healthy—and what a shitty lunch, right? Salad? That sucks. So I decided I’d order pizza after all, telling myself that it was because I didn’t want you to miss out on the pizza but kinda knowing at the exact same time that I was just looking for an excuse to go off my diet. And then I thought, ‘Lotta, if you’re gonna fuck up your diet, then fuck up your diet, no reason to half-ass,’ so instead of just a slice of veggie or whatever, I ordered us slice flights. Anyway, if they didn’t serve salad, I couldn’t have convinced myself that we should come here—same way as if they didn’t serve pizza, then people unwilling to admit they wanted to drink or buy sex wouldn’t come here.”
“But so they do want us to drink and buy sex,” I said, “even though they serve pizza.”