"Do you think he loves her?" Petunia sighed and got more comfortable on her bay window cushion.
"He loves the pizza," Louis Le Roux cracked. He was sitting in a bedpan on the window sill. From this cozy alcove they could see most of what was going on in the harbor. They could hear Dean Martin's voice coming from the jukebox in the pizza shop next to Marcel's Tattoo Parlor. A fat man was eating a slice of pizza and supervising Marcel the tattooist as he engraved a delicate rosebud on a young lady's derriere.
"Not him. Marcel. Does Marcel love her?" Petunia pondered.
"You've had too much champagne. Pardon me but you are a silly girl!" Louis commented.
"It was your idea that we should fortify our nerves with this stuff before entering the night," Petunia scooted a few inches away to express her displeasure and took a long sip straight from the Dom Perignon bottle.
"Come back, little flower petal! I regret having offended you. Excuse me. I did not mean to imply that you cannot hold your liquor when it is obvious to me that you can. I was merely suggesting that your are innocent of the crime we call 'love'," Louis explained.
"I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch..." Petunia sang, ignoring him.
"Mercy! What nonsense! Now you are being silly! When have you ever been alone or experienced loneliness? Marinate me at once! I have had a shock! More wine!" Louis Le Roux motioned with his claw for Petunia to pour more champagne into the bedpan. She complied. He sighed with relief and spit a little on the windowpane, as is a crab's habit.
"I forgive you, Your Royal Rudeness," Petunia reluctantly forgave him.
"Then I am fortunate once again and will take more care," Louis promised.
"See that you do," Petunia scolded.
"Oh, I will. I must. I am love's fool and I must obey,"
"You said I get three wishes provided the first wish is to wish you inside the body of a loveable man," Petunia repeated the terms of their deal.
"Yes. A man that any woman will not be able to resist. That is the gist of it," Louis confirmed.
"Why can't you give yourself wishes?" She shot him a suspicious look.
"My mistress installed the one way wishing magic mainly to protect me from predators. There was never a chef built that would boil a fellow who offered him three wishes if he wouldn't. Except, of course, that deaf chef, Otis! I bit his thumbs, alright! I bit his thumbs!" The memory of being held over that great kettle of boiling water made Louis clatter like loose nails in his bedpan.
"You mustn't let yourself get all steamed over it again! You're safe now. Just stay away from Otis," Petunia poured more Dom Perignon over him. She was too young to understand why he was marinating himself.
"Thank you, my dear. You are too kind," Louis began to focus on the job at hand.
"The matter with Marcel is that he has the expression on his face that one gets from reading too much Nietzsche. Marcel does not love the little lady in his lap at the moment. Marcel does not love any woman in any moment. I'm quite certain that he goes about saying things like, 'Art and nothing but art, we have art in order not to die of the truth.' I am convinced from our observations that Marcel is full of Nietzsche. I don't want you to wish me into Marcel and I certainly do not want to exchange places with that fat man," Louis told her.
The fat man looked up when the music stopped, fished in his pockets for more quarters and grabbed another slice of pizza to accompany him to the jukebox. Again the air was repaired with song. The fat man wandered over to get a closer look at the work Marcel was doing on his lady's posterior. He was so pleased that he made a bouquet with his fingertips, kissed them and threw the kiss to the heavens. He began to sing along with the jukebox, "There's no tomorrow! There's just tonight!"
"If you wish me into that ridiculous man..." Louis began to concoct a menacing threat.
"We agreed you would choose, but for the sake of argument, why couldn't you move into his shell and simply give up pizza? You're awfully picky," Petunia could hardly wait to be done with this and move on to wishes two and three.
Louis Le Roux spit more than the usual amount of champagne on the windowpane.
"I don't have the time to tell you all the reasons why that would be a stupid course of action! Don't be offended again, my dear, but you are an imbecile," Louis held himself in check.
"I still don't see why you couldn't move into him and lose weight," Petunia pushed.
"Move into a fixer-upper when tonight is the night I wish to bid for my love?" Louis was incensed.
"You have an impossible mind! I don't know why I put up with you! Can you imagine a man proposing to the love of his life with that little rosebud down there in the background demanding explanations? We don't have time for all this! The fat man won't do because he does not have the physical memory of love in his bones. The atoms of his body are not drenched in the memory of how to love a woman!" Louis ranted.
"You yourself said that you saw love in his eyes!" Petunia clearly did not know when to quit.
"Are you trying to drive me mad? Were you born to argue with me? Is that what you are good for? I shall have to bite you if you attempt to turn me against myself like that again! What I said was that there was evidence of love in that man. I didn't say what kind and how much. Your fat man loves everything in a diluted way. I am looking for a residence that has in it's walls the memory of undying, immortal love for one woman, love that defies everything, love...."
"I just remembered that I have something to do. I'll be right back," Petunia interrupted, jumped down from the window seat and went to the kitchen.
While she was gone, Louis Le Roux spied what he was looking for on the deck behind the 101 Crabs Jazz Club. It was most certainly a man in love, a man in nothing but love, pacing like a tiger in a cage for the want of the woman. This was the body he would ask Petunia to wish him into when she returned.
Petunia was busy pouring potions out of the kitchen window into the ocean below. She washed and rinsed the bottles and then carefully replaced the hyperactivity cures with distilled water. The sea lions made strange groans. Lobsters became loopy. Flabbergasted fish grew cross-eyed, ran into each other. They quit darting about and became very easy for the fishermen to catch.
When Petunia returned to the bay window, Louis Le Roux had his mind set.
"Wish me into that fellow over there in the green trousers! And wish it exactly so that my shell remains here in this pan and the man shell stays where it is. It wouldn't do for me to be seen leaving this shop. I might be accused of breaking and exiting. Meet me on the sport fishing pier and I'll give you the rest of your wishes. Watch the whales and think very carefully. I may be a while getting my affairs in order. Promise me you will wait for me there so I can find you," Sly Louis Le Roux counted on her lack of experience in these matters.
"I will," Petunia agreed. She did not hesitate to wish Louis into Mr green pants. All she could see was the back of his head and how he was removing the band that held his hair back in a neat ponytail.
Louis never told her what lady he was trying to win and it wouldn't have mattered much if he did. Petunia was not interested in her mother's love life. It never occurred to her that his tattoo of the broken heart with the name, 'Vicky', was a testimonial of his love for Victoria, Countess Victoria Von Van Dee La Fountainbleute, her very own mother.
Petunia's eyes danced to a different melody now. She knew that this would be the very last time she would sit in this bay window watching life go by. Her adventure was about to begin. Such were the thoughts that occupied her mind as she headed for the sport fishing pier.
~ TO BE CONTINUED ~
