petrel}

Here's the beginning of my next short. Is the style the same as Paisley Tie? I hope so, anyways.


Miss French

To Lester Kenilworth, Jessica French seemed to be the ultimate secretary. she was smart, efficient, self-abasing, an excellent typist, an equally excellent stenographer, and brewed the office coffee to perfection. She was also not pretty, a fact which made his fiancée, Eloise Bradford, quite content to let her stay on at his office. Miss French, Lester thought, was like machine, only more personable. And as long as he kept the machine well-oiled with appropriate thanks and a few offhand compliments, it would keep running smoothly. Unfortunately, the compliments Lester classified as 'offhand' when applied to Eloise were not 'offhand' to Jessica. She drank them more readily than ambrosia and, in the few short weeks after she was hired, began to feel more towards Lester Kenilworth than mere company loyalty.

When a female begins to feels love stirring within her breast, she usually recourses to one of two courses of action: she smothers these feelings and lives on in almost saintly self-sacrifice or, more often, she endeavours to draw her loved one into her coils...arms; Jessica French chose the latter. Now everyone knows that to catch an animal you need to provide the correct sort of bait. A man is also caught with bait. (Some women claim that the male sex should really be classed as animals as they respond so readily to any stimulus.) Jessica knew that in order to ensnare Lester she would need to spruce up the old exterior, overhaul the chassis, whitewash the sepulchure( the one with the sign: Never Been Used). Her first step was to rid herself of the binoculars that passed for eyeglasses on the tip of her short nose. The next was to procure a chic new hairstyle for which purpose she arrived late Friday afternoon at Signore Seraglio's.

Signore Seraglio was a short, dapper man with patent leather black hair and scimitar-sharp mustachios which he used to the same effect as bulls use their horns in the arenas of Spain. The mere sight of an unkempt head of hair was enough to send him snorting furiously out of the gate. When Jessica French entered his salon, he shrieked unprintable expletives in Italian and hastily closed the shutters. He then rushed her into a small dingy room in the back of the shop.

"Signorina, I most humbly apologize, but to have this monstruositá of a hair in my shop... I cannot allow it to be seen or I will lose my clientela to Madame Thérése."
Jessica said she was sorry.

Signore Seraglio proceeded to do things to the [i]monstruositá a capelli[/] that Jessica would have approved of if only she could have seen more than a foot beyond her nose. When his hands finished whirling about her head like the proverbial dervish, she peered into the mirror. What stared back was not Jessica as she had known herself for the past six years, but a girl with a siren's ebony locks.

"Papa, I need some money," the girl said, and Jessica started and groped for her spectacles. Signore Seraglio smiled broadly as he ignored his daughter and Jessica looked once more into the mirror.

"Bellisima, signorina." And Jessica wonderingly admitted that it was indeed so. Red hair dipped just beneath her pointed chin in a straight, gleaming bob. She thought she looked like an actress or at least a woman of mystery.

"You looka good enough to eat-- like a Roma tomato." She pretended she had not just been compared to a vegetable. On the way out of the chair, she snagged her foot on a rung and only just managed to avoid leaving a deep noseprint on the gleaming floor. Signore Seraglio made a sigh of pleasure,

"The hair, it sweengs like beautiful grapes on a vine." Now that she was a fruit, Jessica decided to leave and let Lester eat her for lunch the next day: she should keep until then at least.

Four days later, Eloise Bradford arrived at the offices of Bradford, Billings, and Kenilworth to find her fiancé perched mantis-like on the edge of Miss French's desk, reading the morning paper. She, in true female mantis fashion, neatly bit off his head.

"What are you doing, Lester?"
"Eloise! What a surprise! I wasn't expecting you."
"Why shouldn't you expect me? I come every Wednesday and you take me out to lunch." Lester Kenilworth looked as uncomfortable as one is sure a male mantis must feel when his head is eternally parted from his body.
"I've already eaten," he whispered, painfully conscious that Eloise had not.
"But it's only a quarter to twelve." He squirmed.
"I...had a ...business meeting."

Eloise turned abruptly on her heel in a way that made one wonder if she had served in the German military in her youth, and collided violently with a wiseman bearing gifts. The coffee urn in Jessica's hands flew like a silver comet across the room, landing spectacularly in Lester's lap. Luckily, Jessica was just returning from the kitchen where she had emptied its contents into the dustbin and he was not injured(not seriously anyways). Eloise's attention was caught by all this action and her pin-curled blond head swiveled wildly between Lester(now affecting a very different position) and the renovated Jessica.

__________________
A man's subconscious self is not the ideal companion. It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour.

P. G. Wodehouse, Uneasy Money