"Goodness, I think you probably should have."

"Not me," Buddy repeated, with even greater conviction. "I consider the source." He made a sitting swagger. "Buddy Sandifer don't run from just anybody who comes down the pike."

While Naomi looked sympathetic, Buddy said: "I guess you heard a pack of lies. But do somebody a favor, they take it as their due and never make a peep. Why, just today I gave a preacher a real good deal. But you never get thanked for that in this life." The philosophical observation gave him the tragic strength to ask: "Whajoo hear about me? Some yellow-belly sapsucker send you a poison-pen letter? Well, that won't curdle my milk. I had bum raps before. Or maybe Gladys had her yap open: a lot of filth pours outa that sewer."

Buddy deplored the loose way Naomi's sister talked in front of Ralph, saying "goddam," "crap," and "I laughed so hard my pants would never dry." She was the kind of woman he most despised: the kind who thought she was lively. She had big legs and a flat chest, piss-colored hair and dirty freckles. On her overnight visits she refused to dislocate Ralph from his room and slept on the living-room sofa. Buddy had come upon her in various stages of undress throughout the years and was about as thrilled as if he had seen Leo in BVD's.

It occurred to him, for the first time, that she may have been hot for him for eons, purposely exposing herself in slip, shimmy, bath towel, but finally gave up and was now getting the knife in out of spite.

"That's ironic," said Naomi. "Gladys is your staunch defender. More than once she has said she could not imagine you with a woman."

"That could be taken two ways," Buddy said instantly. "But wait a minute-how come she's got her nose in this at all?"

"It seems that Vern is involved with a woman on his route."

"That mailman?" Buddy's brother-in-law was a little twerp who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful. "Aw, she must be talking through her hat. Some housewife probably gave him a cuppa coffee and a fresh cruller. My mother used to do that all the time."

Naomi shook her head. "He has asked for a divorce."

"I'll be good goddam."

"His friend is a widow, and she is pregnant."

Buddy felt personally violated. "You mean it?"

"Gladys has flatly refused."

"Good!" Buddy said spitefully. "He's a skunk, and probably a fool too: the woman's playing him for a sucker."

"Well, we don't know that. She may be sincerely in love."

"Oh, sure," said Buddy, "and the moon is made of cheese. Listen, she plays around with a respectable married man, she can take the consequences. As for that Vern Bursaw, I never trusted him from the word 'go.' Civil Service bum! I got to pay his salary, you know."

"Her name," said Naomi, "is Mary Wentworth. She lives over there but drives here every day to work in the bank."

Granite-faced, Buddy said: "I sold her the car."

Naomi sniffed in wonder. "Isn't it a small world."

"Gladys never knew that, I guess." When Naomi failed to respond, Buddy suddenly reversed his previous position, with the idea that if Gladys did know that and more, and had told her sister, he would show least guilt by praising Mary in a lofty manner. "That's a different kettle of fish, then. It's still as wrong as can be, but Mary Wentworth had a lot of trouble, her husband dying so sudden. He was a friend of mine, see, and I gave her a nice deal out of sympathy. I saw her at the bank just this morning. She's a hard worker and she's got some sense in her head. Maybe I could give her a word."

Naomi however looked negative. "Oh, I don't think that's expected of you, Buddy."

"You know what, Nay: if I didn't know you better I'd say you don't seem to want to keep those folks together."

Naomi opened her purse and got out a pack of Twenty Grands. "Why should I?"

Buddy realized this was more than they had talked, at one time, in years.

"Well, knock me over with a feather."

She said mildly: "I could never understand the attraction there."

"I figure she thought he was steady. Which turned out to be a laugh."

Naomi widened her eyes. "I mean, what he saw in Gladys."

Buddy did not hear this immediately, thinking as he was, from his experience of lechery, that the first element was access, of time and then of place; Mary would be at the bank during both daily deliveries made by Vern. So they had to meet at night, Saturday afternoon, or on Sunday, none of them times when a mailman worked unless he was on special delivery. Whereas it was quite reasonable that a used-car dealer might have professional appointments at hours when customers were free of their own vocational duties. Buddy had not gone into the business for that reason, but it was true that in another calling he could not have got so much cunt with impunity-nor could he have done so if he had had another wife than Naomi.

In this light, then, she could be considered indispensable. The recognition disturbed him to the degree that he allowed her statement to travel from his neutral eardrums to his critical brain.

"What's that you say? Christ, blood is thicker than water. You ought to stick up for your own, Nay."

"Why should I?" she asked again.

After all these years he had only now discovered she had no principles. "That's basic. You just do it, for pity's sake."

"Gladys," said Naomi, making a sanctimonious mouth, "is absolutely insensitive to other people. Basically she's always remained a little girl. I grant you Vern is coarse, but that is all the more evidence that he needs a woman and not a child."

"So what's the gist of this, then?" he asked. "You want him to go off with Mary Wentworth?"

"Not at all." She still held her cigarette unlighted. "My point is simply that Gladys should not oppose him if he wants a divorce."

"That don't make sense. If he gets a divorce he'll go with Mary. Where's your logic, Nay?" Buddy didn't really give a hoot in hell what the Bursaws did, or Mary Wentworth for that matter, yet he found himself enjoying this discussion. It was a novelty for Naomi to take a stand on anything, and in all these years he had never heard her say anything meaningful about her sister. Now it appeared that she had, for her, strong feelings in this regard. Perhaps she had them in other areas as well. It was also a novelty for him to consider that other people, especially women, had ideas and inclinations that they might conceal for ages before suddenly exposing them. Leo's transformation, for example, had taken him utterly by surprise. Now it turned out that he had underestimated Vern Bursaw. Mary was no Miss Roundheels: Buddy had had virtually to rape her the first time. Unless, on the basis of her experience with him, she had changed. The thought gave him no satisfaction; he had no respect for naturally loose women like Grace Plum.

Naomi was pointing the Twenty Grand at him. Buddy, who often used his own finger as a kind of weapon, squirmed when under somebody else's muzzle. He hailed a passing Chinese and asked for the check. It was not his waiter, and the request was taken stolidly.

"Suppose," Naomi said, "that Gladys persists."

"O.K., I'm supposing."

"Two possibilities. One, forced to live with someone he wants to leave, he hates her for the rest of their lives. Two, perhaps this whole thing is a test." Naomi made a squinting, sinister smile. "Yes, that has occurred to me."

Buddy was at sea. To cover up, he said: "Aw..."

"That Vern really wants her to refuse."

"This thing is getting pretty involved," said Buddy. "You're batting your brains out over maybe nothing, Nay. The whole business might blow over." Pretending to be bored, he was actually in the grip of a peculiar dread and half rising, his thighs against the constraining table, he swiveled his head desperately, looking for the waiter.

"Buddy," said Naomi, "I have never criticized you, and I'm not doing it now. But persons with your sort of integrity are perhaps innocent when it comes to the awareness that many people are devious. They do not say what they mean, and they do not mean what they say. Often they cannot help themselves in either case. They intend no wrong. They do what they must. They may be warped."

Buddy took the cue to say eagerly: "Like Leo. I never would of-"

"Like Mary Wentworth," said Naomi. "To your mind, she's a fine woman because you knew her husband, because you sold her a car, because she's a helpless widow. But all this while she abuses you behind your back."

Buddy's back was frozen at this moment. He felt that if he so much as altered his expression his spine would break like an attenuated icicle.

He murmured: "Is that right?"

"Therefore," said Naomi, decisively dropping her cigarette for emphasis, "Gladys would serve her own cause best by insisting on a divorce. If you see what I mean."

"I'll be damned," said Buddy with a staggering effort. "Well, I guess it's not the first time you do somebody a favor and they take it the wrong way."

"You see," said Naomi. "I predicted that would be your reaction. 'Buddy will be philosophical,' I told Gladys."

"Aw, sure..." He tried twisting himself gingerly on the seat, but was too brittle to go far. "The way I look at it..."

"Precisely. And I hasten to say that Gladys must be given a certain credit, which, childish as she is, amazed me. 'Gosh,' she said, 'I can't imagine Buddy doing anything like that. Why, he's a real Boy Scout.'"

Buddy knew for a certainty now that that bitch Gladys had been flashing her flat ass at him for years; he was happy to have denied her.

He also knew that he could not have Naomi murdered. He was too fascinated by her complex ignorance of him, in contrast to which Laverne's simple knowledge was superficial. It was Naomi alone who gave him a sense of mystery about himself.

The trouble was, he had no idea where to get hold of Clarence and call off the dog.

chapter 13.

RALPH GOT an almost sexual thrill from eating certain things by himself: Leona sausage with horseradish on buttered "real" rye bread, i.e., the kind that came unsliced and unwrapped; canned chili with dry soda crackers crumbled into it; above all, melted cheese between two slices of white bread, dark-browned in the waffle iron, impressed with the griddle marks and squashed flat as a wafer, goldenly oozing.

He got the Wonder Bread from the tin box and in the Frigidaire found a package of Kraft American, of which the individual slices had fused into a solid block. He was old enough to remember back to when they had an icebox in summer, and in winter a zinc cooling-chamber that hung outside the window.

He took out a fresh quart of milk and poured off the cream into a pitcher of green glass. He then filled an opalescent tumbler to the brim and drained it into his throat continuously, breathing normally through his nose, until it was empty, feeling the solid column of milk descend through his chest. He was cooled instantly: this could not have been done with a carbonated beverage.

He placed the cheese sandwich in the waffle iron and would look at it many times before it browned and melted, his fantasies confined to the anticipation of succulence. When it was done he pried it off the grids with a fork and took a huge bite too soon and burned his mouth during the moment of indecision as to whether to spit it into his hand or drench it with milk.

After having a lone supper Ralph might well have masturbated on his bed with the door open, an unusual luxury, had not the guilty memory of his cock's hardening against Margie's butt rendered him sexless. Her failure to move away suggested that she had been benumbed with fright and/or disgust. While he was so occupied, Laverne Linda Lorraine had fled. What she would have thought of his despicable, obscene swelling, the advertisement of his punkhood, was too awful to imagine.

Another of Ralph's rituals when he was by himself at home was to have a smoke or a shot of booze. Though disliking both tobacco and hard whiskey, he felt an obligation to Horse Hauser to report at least a minimum of wickedness, and could never bring himself to lie. Horse's own claims were of course impossibly extravagant: half a bottle of Four Roses in three hours, two big White Owls, etc. Once he allegedly lured in Wanda Wallace, a halfwitted neighbor girl of thirteen, and showed her his dong, stemming her tears with a handful of Lorna Doones and a little ring his uncle had beaten from an Indian-head penny. Pure bullshit, though Ralph had subsequently seen slack-mouthed Wanda wearing a copper ring on her fat pinky.

Honoring the responsibilities of friendship, Ralph went to see whether his mother had left any whole cigarettes behind. If not, he might collect the tobacco from a number of butts and smoke it in the ten-cent Missouri Meerschaum corncob he had bought for that purpose during the summer.

The coffee- and end-tables displayed only magazines and a few books of paper matches, one hawking an art course by correspondence, showing the cartoon face of a grinning shiny-black Negro with huge white eyes and teeth, below the legend DRAW ME! Ralph headed for the catty-cornered secretary desk on the shelves of which, behind glass doors, was the permanent library of the house, a matched set of six dull-green James Oliver Curwoods once owned by his maternal grandfather, and several more recent books in paper dustwrappers, dating from the time his mother had belonged briefly to some book club, but finding it rather expensive, the charges running to as much as two dollars per volume with the charges for postage and handling, she mostly used the public library.

Ralph was fed up with reading at the moment, which he either did incessantly or not at all. Currently he was in the phase of wanting to live in reality or, failing that, in his own and not someone else's fantasy. He tried the bottom drawer of the desk, where his mother kept her supply of Twenty Grands, which she bought at a cut-rate drugstore for eighty-five cents a carton, a saving of fifteen cents per ten packs. This drawer was locked. He went to his own room and got the key to his desk, a maple piece from Sears, Roebuck that matched his bed, dresser, and night table.

Used with precision, and a tongue in the corner of the mouth, the key worked in the secretary-desk drawer, and Ralph drew it open. In the foreground were three fresh packages of cigarettes. It occurred to him that, watching her pennies as she did, his mother kept count of this supply. This consideration, along with his distaste for smoking to begin with, discouraged him from the venture.

He must find another sneaky project with which to appease Hauser. Or simply conceal from Horse that he had been alone at suppertime. He had no keen natural taste for mischief. It had always seemed idiotic to him to go about on Ticktack Night, the eve of Halloween, throwing corn kernels against people's windows and hiding their trash-can lids; then coarse and rude to appear the following night in costume and false face to collect free candy from those who had been harassed.

When he explained this to Hauser, Horse said: "Christ, Sandifer, you don't know how to have fun." Thereafter he confined his efforts to dissuading his friend, as they got older, from throwing rocks at windows and setting fire to garages, but not from giving parked cars four flat tires or strewing back steps with garbage. Horse had to be given some leeway in the venting of his strange rage against normal, decent people. Ralph saw it as his own task to keep this within the limits of sanity without showing himself up as coward, ass-kisser, pansy.

Along with the cigarettes the drawer held several of those big dull-red envelope file-folders fastened each with its own attached string. These had a deadly, legal look: no doubt they were stuffed with deeds and mortgages and tax bills signed and sealed and recorded in the county courthouse, a big solid block of dreariness, staffed by baldheaded men and dumpy women. Ralph had been there once, in the city, with his father years ago, stopping off en route to get a baseball glove at a discount from a guy who owed his dad a favor.

Ralph wondered whether prying into these documents would meet his obligation to Hauser. What people owed on their houses and how much tax they paid was confidential data. The trouble was this crap bored him so much that he could not consider its revelation a crime. However, the drawer had been locked, and he had opened it with an unofficial key. "I broke into the desk and went through my parents' legal records," he could say, and leave it at that. Hauser always soon interrupted anyway in his jealous urgency to go you one better: "My old man's two hundred bucks in debt to some sheeny finance company. They got him by the nuts."

If Ralph were going to say that though, he should actually do it, however quickly. He undid the string on one folder and looked within. He saw a leatherette volume inscribed in gold My Diary-1939 It was closed with a strap that terminated in a little brass lock.

Dropping it back inside the folder, he saw something else: a little blue bankbook. He claimed it and opened it to a page listing several deposits and interest payments, at the end of which appeared the sum of $752.87. The name at the top was Mary Joy, and the bank had a city address. He returned it to the big envelope and tied the strings.

He undid one more folder and found inside not a private diary as such but a regular book, a volume bound in purple cloth and entitled, in silver script, My Diary, 1936, by Mary Joy. This book he had never seen around the house. He did not as yet intrude within its covers. In the folder was also a sheaf of opened and smoothed letters, the parent envelopes secured above each by the giant-sized crisscross paperclip that held the lot.

The one on top, when the canceled envelope was bent away, was revealed to read: DEAR MARY JOY:.

Here's your copy. We trust you are well under weigh on the volume for 1937. Some early reactions from our members have come in and are altogether positive. Your feminine approach-whether or not you are actually a woman-is unique among the editions we have printed thus far. We anticipate that it will create its own demand for subsequent volumes.

Indeed, so strongly do we feel this that we are in a position to offer you a fifty-dollar bonus for the next, as an incentive that might encourage you to complete it without delay. If you could complete the current volume by the end of August, we might then go to press and have it ready for distribution to the members as the Holiday selection.

Also, another note of interest. Responding to the requests of a number of members who own personal moving-picture projectors or belong to social groups which have one in common, we are considering the making of movies, probably, at least to begin with, of the one-reel length, say fifteen minutes each of screen time. Perhaps you could think of incidents from the Diaries which might come across with special effectiveness in such a form, and prepare a scenario or two on speculation. Naturally, these should be confined to scenes involving adults. We would not have the facilities to train animals, and such episodes as the seduction of the giant colored imbecile by the eight-year-old Mary Joy, though one of the high points of the '36 Diary, would for obvious reasons not be practical. Thus far, by using only first-class mail and by proceeding with the caution of a private club whose members (including certain highly placed members of the legal profession) have a mutual interest in discretion, we have not run afoul of the law, and we wish to keep it that way.

We'll pay twenty-five dollars each for the scenarios we accept.

Yours very truly, THE SELECTION COMMITTEE.

The respective names and addresses were of more interest to Ralph than the text, which was so cryptic in essentials. How his parents got hold of a letter sent to Mary Joy, P. O. Box 121, in the city, from Continental Products, P.O. Box 537, Maspeth, L.I., New York, was intriguing in the degree to which it defied explanation.

There were two more letters in the sheaf. The bottom one said: We like the Diary for 1936 very much, and are happy to offer you $200 for the right to print it and distribute it in a limited private edition for the members of our club. Because of its nature, this type of book cannot be registered in the orthodox manner with the Copyright Office, and our printing of it does not constitute legal publication. But if you expect to have further lucrative association with us, you will regard our right as exclusive.

May we also state that insofar as you have sent us the manuscript without solicitation on our part, that if you have another motive than you represent-that is, to be frank, extortion or blackmail, or if you are a law-enforcement officer-your procedure implicates you equally with us, if the former; and in the latter case constitutes entrapment.

The final, middle letter expressed satisfaction at Mary's acceptance and noted the enclosure of a check for two hundred dollars.

Ralph next turned to the book itself. The title page said nothing about Continental Products, but announced, below author and title, "Privately printed for the exclusive use of the members of the Eros Literary Society. Not for public sale or distribution. Of an edition of 600 copies, this is Copy No.-," no number being given.

Ralph's habit when inspecting a book was after studying the frontispiece to open to the first page of the text and read one paragraph; then turn rapidly to somewhere around the middle and scan there; and finally to swoop to the last page and read the final sentence.

The opening of Mary Joy's 1936 Diary was: New Year's Day, 8 A.M.-Lying here upon my pink satin sheets, my black-lace nightie drawn up above the twin swellings of my creamy-white breasts, tipped with erect rubicund nipples surrounded by large roseate aureolae, I greet the fresh new year with an exploratory finger in the deepest recess of the warm, moist grotto between my heaving ivory thighs, and think of another Jan. 1 on which, like the year, I was too a virgin....

Ralph wrinkled his forehead: something weird here. He was more perplexed than aroused however and therefore read no further in this passage, but split the book at the halfway point and read: Again and again Wing Loo applied the vicious whip to my apple-round, pink bottom. The massive, opium-crazed Oriental, his naked, yellow, rotund belly slimy with sweat, his eyes narrowed to mere slits in his shaved head, was more stimulated than dissuaded by my anguished screams. Gradually, cunningly, each blow of the steel-tipped lash fell closer to the vulnerable cleft between my nether cheeks, until at last the ultimate target was reached, the metal point stabbing profoundly within the tender linings of my rosy labia, raking them with fiery agony. The pain was insupportable. I swooned...then returned to consciousness with the realization that I was no longer being punished. Instead, a delicious warmth arose from my well of womanliness and began to suffuse throughout my limbs even unto the tips of my toenails, prickling like electric current to the very ends of my long golden tresses....

This passage was sufficiently bizarre to prompt Ralph to trace back to where it began, as an entry for July 4, 9 P.M.: I awakened to the sound of exploding firecrackers this morning. To me this noise is inextricably intermingled with other explosive memories of the homeland of fireworks, China, where I spent so much of my girlhood as the only daughter of an American missionary....

Ralph wondered whether this, written so finely, could be called a genuine dirty book. He had never seen one before. Unlike the filthy cartoon eight-pagers, it was innocent of foul language. Perhaps that was why he was not aroused: that, along with the failure of Mary Joy thus far to get beyond stink-finger and ass-beating and get fucked-fucked by a man, that is, for now, having turned elsewhere, he saw that on September 27 she was being mounted by her pet St. Bernard.

Hauser claimed he jacked off a dog once, and also quoted a story of his brother Lester's about a petty officer who, when stationed at San Diego, went on liberty across the border in Tijuana, Mexico, where he watched a Shetland pony jazz a greaser girl in a nightclub act. Both these tales had sounded like lies to Ralph, and now, all at once, he realized that Mary Joy was lying about everything. This book was fiction; which was to say, pure crap from beginning to end about nothing that had actually happened or that really mattered.

He dropped the Diary into the folder and fastened the strings. He had no interest in the contents of the other folders, which could be imagined. What they were doing in the same drawer as his mother's cigarette supply was inexplicable. That he had never seen her write in a diary was as nothing when put alongside his conviction that she was sexless. It would also be typical of her to keep cigarettes in there for years without having the curiosity to examine the other burdens of the drawer.

She lived on a different layer of being from the rest of the race, now that he thought about it: quietly, serenely, above the battle as it were, which is why she was so suited to his father, who was always in the thick of it and seething behind his mask of apparent self-confidence. Ralph understood this consciously for the first time, although he had long instinctively felt the radiations when in his father's presence, which always made him obscurely uneasy. It occurred to him now that his father was a nervous wreck, unable to remain at rest for three consecutive minutes, unable even to speak without frantic gestures of the chin and fingers soon followed by a kind of dancing escape. His fancy clothes were also a symptom of this condition, as were his abrupt phrasings and sometimes lately even his operation of an automobile.

"Mary Joy," then, on the evidence of her texts, to characterize which there could be no other word, again, than "nervous"-being whipped by a Chinaman?-must be associated in one fashion or another with his father. That she might indeed be his father under a nom de plume was the most unlikely idea, despite the line in the letter that questioned her sex only to dismiss its importance.