Free Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

says, "What’s it say?”
    Len goes out to start clearing the fish course.
    Leslie slides the tray of artichoke hearts back into the oven and says, "What’s it say, already?”
    Tyler looks right at Leslie and says, without even picking up the note, "‘I have passed an amount of urine into at least one of your many elegant fragrances.’”
    Albert smiles. "You pissed in her perfume?”
    No, Tyler says. He just left the note stuck between the bottles. She’s got about a hundred bottles sitting on a mirror counter in her bathroom.
    Leslie smiles. "So you didn’t, really?”
    "No,” Tyler says, "but she doesn’t know that.”
    The whole rest of the night in that white and glass dinner party in the sky, Tyler kept clearing plates of cold artichokes, then cold veal with cold Pommes Duchesse, then cold Choufleur à la Polonaise from in front of the hostess, and Tyler kept filling her wine glass about a dozen times. Madam sat watching each of her women guests eat the food, until between clearing the sorbet dishes and serving the apricot gateau, Madam’s place at the head of the table was all of a sudden empty.
    They were washing up after the guests had left, loading the coolers and the china back into the hotel van, when the host came in the kitchen and asked, would Albert please come help him with something heavy?
    Leslie says, maybe Tyler went too far.
    Loud and fast, Tyler says how they kill whales, Tyler says, to make that perfume that costs more than gold per ounce. Most people have never seen a whale. Leslie has two kids in an apartment next to the freeway and Madam hostess has more bucks than we’ll make in a year in bottles on her bathroom counter.
    Albert comes back from helping the host and dials 9-1-1 on the phone. Albert puts a hand over the mouth part and says, man, Tyler shouldn’t have left that note.
    Tyler says, "So, tell the banquet manager. Get me fired. I’m not married to this chickenshit job.”
    Everybody looks at their feet.
    "Getting fired,” Tyler says, "is the best thing that could happen to any of us. That way, we’d quit treading water and do something with our lives.”
    Albert says into the phone that we need an ambulance and the address. Waiting on the line, Albert says the hostess is a real mess right now. Albert had to pick her up from next to the toilet. The host couldn’t pick her up because Madam says he’s the one who peed in her perfume bottles, and she says he’s trying to drive her crazy by having an affair with one of the women guests, tonight, and she’s tired, tired of all the people they call their friends.
    The host can’t pick her up because Madam’s fallen down behind the toilet in her white dress and she’s waving around half a broken perfume bottle. Madam says she’ll cut his throat, he even tries to touch her.
    Tyler says, "Cool.”
    And Albert stinks. Leslie says, "Albert, honey, you stink.”
    There’s no way you could come out of that bathroom not stinking, Albert says. Every bottle of perfume is broken on the floor and the toilet is piled full of the other bottles. They look like ice, Albert says, like at the fanciest hotel parties where we have to fill the urinals with crushed ice. The bathroom stinks and the floor is gritty with slivers of ice that won’t melt, and when Albert helps Madam to her feet, her white dress wet with yellow stains, Madam swings the broken bottle at the host, slips in the perfume and broken glass, and lands on her palms.
    She’s crying and bleeding, curled against the toilet. Oh, and it stings, she says. "Oh, Walter, it stings. It’s stinging,” Madam says.
    The perfume, all those dead whales in the cuts in her hands, it stings.
    The host pulls Madam to her feet against him, Madam holding her hands up as if she were praying but with her hands an inch apart and blood running down the palms, down the wrists, across a diamond bracelet, and to her elbows where it drips.
    And the host, he says, "It will be alright, Nina.”
    "My