"Time the boy is back, isn't it?"

She smiled vaguely. "Ralph can take care of himself."

"I don't want him flunking out."

"They don't assign homework the first night."

Again she showed she knew more than he supposed. Her apparent remoteness neither was due to, nor resulted in, ignorance. Suddenly he had the wondrous conviction that she could have listed by name every woman he had plugged in the last decade and a half, and then, without a word from him, explained away each encounter as having existed only in the malicious gossip of others.

She provided him with a secure castle from which to sally forth to spear the dragons. If you owned a wife with sex on the brain, you might end up with a nympho like Grace Plum...or Laverne, whose rebuff of him that afternoon now seemed suspicious, given her appetites. Was she getting it from somebody else?

Buddy padded back to the bedroom and lay down in the dark. Jealousy was the emotion most alien to his temperament. What he wanted, he took. What he could not have, he did not desire. He had no sexual imagination for movie stars or princesses. With women he was not jealous, but rather jealous-making. Thus he had always regarded that feeling as, like recumbent bathing, effeminate.

He had been true to Laverne because he had nothing left for anyone else. If that wasn't love, what was? He had visited her at various hours, usually without warning. He had never seen a cigar butt or an extra glass. When the sheets showed stains, they were always those he himself had made on his last visit.

There was something wrong with Laverne if she needed more than what he gave her in abundance. Who could it be? The grocer's delivery boy? A teen-aged punk? She had after all, wearing a cheerleader's getup, worked in a drive-in that served nothing but hamburgers and hotdogs. Buddy considered it a disgusting perversity if a woman consorted with a male much younger than she. Men of course had a greater range, but Buddy himself was repelled by any suggestion of adolescence. Not till a female had put in at least two and half decades, preferably more, was her veneer of instinctive selfishness worn away; unless of course she married very young.

With Leo out of commission, and until Jack gave notice at school, if in fact he decided to come full-time on the lot, Buddy could not spare himself for a stake-out on Myrtle Avenue. He must hire a private detective to watch Laverne's staircase, especially in the hours before noon, when he himself seldom visited, and again after midnight. He realized now that these periods would not agree with the schedule of a delivery boy. If fucker there was, he was someone older, and freer-freer than Buddy, free to make free with Buddy's woman in a place for which Buddy paid the rent.

His policy being never supinely to suffer mockery, Buddy considered that he might have extra work for Clarence after all. This thought, with the memory of his bath, had the effect of a soporific, and he dozed off.

He awakened easily, with an awareness of duty and yet a peaceful sense that he could perform it well. He put on the bedside lamp and compared his watch with the clock on the dresser. By compromise it was ten to eleven. Naomi would be coming to bed soon. Therefore he got into his white pajamas with the blue stripes and piping. One of the niceties of their marriage was that, from the first, they never displayed themselves to each other in less than underwear, and for many years not even in the final layer of that, she wearing at least a slip, and he a T-shirt above his drawers.

It was an unusual intimacy for him not to tie the fringed belt of his maroon robe. He did not do so now as he entered the hall, turned towards the living room, decided to check the basement door again-he had left it barely ajar; it might yet squeak or shudder at Clarence's brute pressure-reversed himself, and opened the door giving onto the cellar stairway. He closed it behind him on the first step. Reaching the second, he felt himself detained.

An end of his loose belt was caught in the jamb. One gentle yank would not serve. He gave it another, this time applying sufficient force to free the belt but also enough to dislocate his center of balance. He fell backwards down the stairs.

Naomi was wont to work on Mary Joy's diaries in the morning after Buddy went to the lot and, during the body of the year, Ralph to school. In summer, with Ralph usually around the house or yard till noon, she wrote late at night, waiting for Buddy to fall asleep, which with his clean conscience he did quickly, then rising to go to the secretary desk in the living room. Buddy drank little of any beverage; it was rare indeed for him to go to the toilet in the wee hours. He seldom stirred in bed or even breathed heavily. He was as polite when asleep as when awake.

He was indeed the perfect husband of legend. Naomi knew herself as no housewife to match. In the kitchen she could barely boil water. As laundress in earlier years she usually pressed more wrinkles into a shirt than she ironed out. Buddy calmly began to take his linen to the Chinese. Long ago he had suggested hiring a woman to clean, but Naomi dissuaded him: a pointless cost, vacuuming soothed her, polishing filled the void. In truth, if cleaning had been done at all in recent years, her sister Gladys, with the zeal of the mindless, had done it when she stayed over.

Neither was Naomi motherly by nature. In the irony of life, Gladys, who was childless, had the maternal instincts. She had cooed at Ralph as a baby, and even regarded it as a privilege to change his diapers, the more soiled the better. But then when they were girls it had been Gladys, two years older, who had wanted to mother Naomi through the onset of menstruation. Gladys was not simply immune to physical disgust; she seemed to delight in experiences which would have evoked it in others. Thus her unwitting example had suggested many scenes in the diaries of Mary Joy.

If the truth be known, Gladys was actually rather masculine in that. The Diaries were successful because men doted on what was loathsome. Buddy was the sole exception, owing no doubt to his many feminine qualities; he was gentle, generous, tolerant, and behind his mask of jolly vanity, riddled with self-doubt. His sexual drive was, mercifully, weak.

Naomi had had only one man in her life. If, when she was a girl, a tramp exposed himself, she calmly looked the other way. If, when dancing, in her high school years, a boy pressed his ridiculous bulge against her abdomen, she backed off. If a tongue was intruded into a polite goodnight kiss, she bit it; if a hand got fresh, she slapped the attendant face. Though a virgin she was well aware of vulnerability of testicles and was not hesitant to cock a knee.

Even with Buddy, to whom she had given her heart immediately because that was all he had requested in his shy courtship, she had been none too keen to share a bed. But when he appeared, that first night of the honeymoon they took at home in the little flat, because he had just been hired by the local Essex agency, after he had pulled the Murphy bed from the wall and gone discreetly into the kitchen while she used the bathroom and pulled on the same flannel nightgown she had worn for some years as a maiden (it was January and the coal-oil heater exuded more stink than warmth), after she had climbed in and covered up with the gray U.S. Army surplus blankets, Buddy came out, attired-well, she could not resist him in brown derby, a huge red bow tie with white polka dots, a suit of long underwear, and rubber knee boots. He carried a ukulele, which he strummed to no tune, and was singing, abominably, "The Yanks are coming..."

Naomi's was not a sheltered imagination: it was afforded great range by the restrictions of her life, which were happily self-imposed. She had always been notorious for her modest wardrobe and her disinterest in cosmetics. The mirror-sight of herself wearing jewelry caused her to smirk. What moved her was written language. Among the furniture of her memory were the names "Chesebrough," the company that made Vaseline, and "Burroughs Wellcome," who produced Empirin Compound. She read every label, whether that cemented to the Castoria bottle or that, forbidding its removal under pain of law, which dangled from anything stuffed with Kapok.

If while walking on the pavement she stepped first in chewing gum and then on a detached page of a magazine, she peeled off the latter and read it while awaiting the bus. One such fragment comprised pp. 29-30 of a publication entitled, according to the running head on one side, Hotdog. Much of page 29 was occupied by the photograph of a young woman with tremendous bare breasts. On page 30 was a column of jokes, concluding with a special notice, in a printed box, to the effect that the editors of Hotdog, in charity to victims of the Depression, would be happy to give a free goose to any girl who called in at their offices.

The column was flanked on either side by a number of advertisements: the "draw-me" darky of the correspondence art school, the taxidermy institute's stuffed-squirrel-holding-ashtray, the novelty company's exhortation to "fool friends and policemen" by purchasing a device with which to throw your voice inside locked trunks and closets, and an offer of ten of the "kind of books men like" for one dollar, postage paid by the seller, Continental Products.

Naomi had been a wife for almost a decade and a half, and a mother for almost as long, and yet had no sense of the kind of book men liked. In Buddy's grasp she had never seen any volume but the telephone directory. Her father had been a plumber and though deft with his hands when they manipulated a wrench, with a pen he was at a loss, hardly able to scratch his signature, and when holding a newspaper he was generally asleep behind it.

Her own addiction to the printed word had been acquired on the model of her mother, who went regularly to the public library and also belonged to a little group of like-minded women who would get together over coffee and cake once a month and discuss the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox ("Laugh and the world laughs with you") and Felicia D. Hemans, authoress of "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck."

In school Naomi's peculiar strength was in English. Her composition on Black Beauty was read aloud by the teacher; she could recite from memory twice as much of Evangeline as was required; and at quite an early age she began to read adult books such as the novels of Gene Stratton Porter.

Many diaristic episodes were suggested by memories of the favorite books of her childhood, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Girl of the Limberlost (relations with animals), and, in honor of the taste of her young-womanhood, the romances of Maysie Grieg and Ruby M. Ayres (gentlemen suitors with whips and manacles). Perversions and corruptions, that is, of what Naomi found good and true. Because, except for Buddy, that was what men liked-the realization of which confirmed what she had believed her life long, but with the difference that she had never before seen the utility in it.

And had not yet with the arrival of the first plain-wrapped parcel from Continental Products, addressed to "Mr. N. Sandifer," which when opened yielded ten "books" that were really little pamphlets filled with the kind of jokes printed in Hotdog, most of them mildly scatological, concerning flatulent fat ladies or the preacher's wife seen dusting her aspidistra in the window of the manse.

But included in the packet was an announcement of yet another series for those readers who craved "spicier" fare, and the quoted price implied as much: a dollar each, two-fifty for any three. Never profligate with the household money Buddy gave her, Naomi was wont to accumulate quite a little fund by the end of each month, enough usually so that she could refuse one week's allowance in four, and with pride accept Buddy's affectionate reproof. As to her personal consumption, two housedresses, bought on sale, lasted her a year, and Twenty Grands, at ten cents a pack, were inferior to fifteen-cent Lucky Strikes only on the gauge of snobbery.

However, a motive that she neither questioned nor explored caused her to invest still another precious dollar in Continental's latest offer. This arrived as a thirty-two-page booklet entitled Clothed in Innocence, with no explanation as to why it had replaced her choice, What the Butler Saw through the Keyhole.

The slender paperbound volume proved to be a singular work concerned primarily with the wardrobes of its characters and only as an afterthought with anatomy.

When I arrived at Wyndham Manor to take my new employment as upstairs maid, I was directed by the housekeeper, clad in severe black bombazine, to the servants' quarters and instructed to exchange my serge traveling-costume for the clothing laid out in readiness on the counterpane of my garret bed. To my astonishment, this raiment consisted not of the customary uniform of those in service, but rather of a short, many-pleated skirt of the design of that worn by a ballet-girl, but made of mauve silk; an extremely abbreviated jacket, hardly long enough to extend over my adolescent bosoms, and constructed of an utterly transparent white lawn; flesh-colored stockings of the finest weave and an elaborate ribboned harness which, studying carefully, I understood at last to be a suspender-belt. Finally, a pair of maroon-coloured high boots of supple Russian leather, with lacings of lemon-yellow ribbon. No intimate garments having been provided, I retained my own, side-closing knickers and an underwaist, both of simple but clean cotton cambric. When I was fully attired, I had only just turned to inspect my ensemble in the full-length pier-glass, an unusual piece of furniture to be found in a servant's mean room, when the door was flung violently back on its hinges, and a tall, imperious, hawk-nosed gentleman strode in, wearing a burgundy-hued velveteen jacket embroidered with black clocks...."

After announcing himself as her master, the hawk-nosed gent demanded the removal of her wretched underwear before his eyes and the resumption of the transparent jacket, directed her to replace the boots according to a complex scheme, strolled around her, lifting the ballet skirt here and there with the tip of his gold-headed walking stick to pluck at the "suspenders," which from their location seemed to be garters, discoursed on fabrics, buttons, buckles, and the like, and only several pages farther on drew from his pocket a tin of shoe wax, fell to his knees, and polished her boots to a mirror gloss.

Then, his fingers stained with red wax, he removed from his fawn trowsers his massive virility and with a few quick strokes of his lace-cuffed wrist brought it to a rigid stand and then to a spasmodic disgorgement of its copious, creamy secretions. Soon my Russian-leather toes were inundated in his rich spendings.

Subsequent chapters struck the same note with various other members of the manorial household, both family and servants, and the narrative culminated in an orgy of costume in which the classes, and sexes as well, were extravagantly confused, cook wearing the master's shooting suit, groom donning the nanny's uniform, and the mistress dressed as a male Highlander, her kilt cut away in front to display her natural sporran, a rare display of genitals in this company.

"By Lady Penelope Clavering" appeared on the title page. Whether or not this was a pen name, Naomi did not question that the style and the theme treated were those natural to a woman: the gracious language, with its limpid rhythms, the displacement of focus from vile anatomy, willy-nilly common to all, to its coverings, which could be regulated by taste, reflected much the same sensibility and cultivation as that of her favorite respectable authoresses.

Was it sacrilegious to suppose that were Mary Elizabeth Braddon to try her hand, in mischievous caprice, at erotica, the product might resemble Clothed in Innocence?

Naomi had written nothing but letters since her last high school book report, on The Four Million, by O. Henry. At the Christmas prior to her discovery of the fragment of Hotdog three months later, Gladys had given her a blank diary, the first she had ever owned, though when they were girls Gladys had kept one for a while and in it recorded crushes, invariably unrequited, on successive boys. To hear such passages read aloud was unbearable.

At the time she found the ad placed by Continental Products, Naomi had yet to inscribe a word in the blank journal. It would have been nonsensical to enter the events of her typical day, which though never boring her while in progress would, abstracted and falsified in language, look otherwise to the reader, who in utter philosophical absurdity, must by definition be only the writer thereof, namely herself-else it were no diary. Naomi always had a firm command of identity. "Nay knows her own mind" had long been heard throughout the family.

In possession of Clothed in Innocence, however, she was caused to believe, as she had never been by the work of Ruby M. Ayres, et al., with its realistic delineation of romantic love, that when it came to lust, a totally fictitious subject, she herself could do as well as Lady Penelope Clavering, what was required being merely the unleashing of fancy. The result brought a dollar for each thirty-two pages. Naomi had married Buddy the day after graduating from high school. She had saved but never earned. All her life such money as she received had been given her by men, merely, as it were, for existing as daughter and wife.

It amused her to think of serving as noncorporeal prostitute to anonymous and undifferentiated hordes of men; to be paid and not to be touched; to infect them like a succubus. In this spirit she began the fluent account of Mary Joy's assault on the virilities of half the world. For it was indeed Mary who, beginning at age eight with the seduction of the huge Negro, set her partners in motion, including even those, like the whip-wielding Chinaman, to whom she might for her own ends temporarily relinquish physical command but over whom at all times she retained moral authority.

The composition went as fast as Naomi could move her fountain pen, requiring little deliberation and no pretext; her imagination proved to be a miraculous pitcher always brimful of slime. Having backtracked to January 1, she came forward to March 15 in a week's writing, alternating between reminiscences of earlier times and current adventures.

At the accumulation of seventy-four pages she halted and wrote a letter to Continental Products, giving as return address the postal box she took downtown.

DEAR SIRS:.

I am a woman of 30. During the past 22 years I have had every type of sexual experience, and I am still going strong today. Recently I decided to set down, in diary form, an account of my activities, both present and, through flash-backs, past, including much childhood material. I enclose for your consideration copies of ten pages of the diary in reference.

Should you be interested in publishing the entire work in book form, please let me know. In any case, it is not necessary to return the manuscript, the original of which is an actual diary, in my possession and maintained daily.

Sincerely yours, MARY JOY.

Naomi had not intended to inscribe another word in the private volume until Continental responded, but to her amazement she found that the day on which she did not write was emotionally barren and physically attended by headaches, indigestion, and muscular cramps, from none of which she had ever suffered before and from all of which she got relief almost as soon as she lifted her pen. Therefore she proceeded with Mary, and by the time the answer came, three weeks later, her heroine had sailed around the calendar on an ocean of semen and was currently in port for Christmas, having a go at her long-lost father, who was dressed as Santa Claus.

The letter to Continental Products was answered on the stationery of the Eros Literary Society.

DEAR MISS JOY:.

The specimen pages of your Diary have been read with great interest by each of the several members of the Committee, and without exception have met with approval. We would definitely like to reserve a look at the finished work when it becomes available. We're afraid we can offer no financial encouragement at this point, but we await the completed Diary with some eagerness. If it realizes the promise of these ten pages, we may be in a position to make you a generous offer for the rights to its publication.

A word of explanation: the Eros Society is a subsidiary of Continental Products, specializing in the private printing and distribution of high-quality works of erotica. Our subscribers pay an annual membership fee that entitles them to receive one selection each quarter of the year. These are luxury volumes, handsomely bound, often gilt-edged and with marbled end pages, and sometimes profusely illustrated by leading artists.

It might be of great use to you to become yourself a subscriber. An awareness of what your predecessors have accomplished in this field could not but be encouraging; many of them bear the celebrated names of World Literature. Our selection for this past Winter was THE WHIPPINGHAM PAPERS, by the great poet Algernon Charles Swinburne. For Spring we have chosen UNDER THE HILL, or Venus and Tannhuser, by the renowned artist-poet Aubrey Beardsley.

As a (prospective) author you would qualify for a discounted subscription, at a reduction of fifty dollars from the standard fee. On receipt of your certified check for $100-made out to Continental Products, not the Society-we will enroll you and send you by return mail the Beardsley volume.

Meanwhile, our best wishes, THE SELECTION COMMITTEE.

Naomi passed up this offer, but in three days she finished her record of 1936 and sent it off to Maspeth, L.I.

The letter of acceptance was pleasing, the check less so: $200 against an anticipated thousand or more, considering the fee paid by the Eros subscribers. But she was new at the profession and not an old hand like Swinburne and Beardsley; and it was also the first payment she had ever earned for anything.

And the suggestion that she try her hand at motion-picture scenarios appealed. During the summer and fall, then, she applied herself to characters and plots for movies to run the specified quarter of an hour each. These efforts were not successful. Her specialty, the outlandish conjunction of a young girl with a partner dissimilar by reason of age, race, species, etc., had been disqualified by the letter from the Society, and Naomi's vision turned fallow when asked to envision the kind of encounter that could be depicted by living actors, who would be constrained by common sense from whipping themselves raw and could not by nature display the colossal organs essential to her type of storytelling, with its reliance on the preposterous.

In desperation she arranged a situation or two in which a man in his years of maximum vigor met, stripped, and topped a girl in the full flush of sexual maturity, but the results were excruciatingly banal, no matter the positions represented, the orifices employed, which after all were finite in number. A certain quality was absent, and was not to be provided by filling the imaginary room with more fanciful personages of the same breed; an orgy of these automata was even more tedious than the grapplings of the lone pair. Naomi was at a loss when not allowed to be fantastic.

Eventually she admitted as much to the Selection Committee, who in fact agreed, confessing they had had the same complaint from their other living authors and had given up the project.

Next she made several attempts to write fiction in another form than the diaristic, taking as model the English-lady's novels of which she had long experience as reader-even copying out certain sections verbatim, to which she then supplied erotic content. But lust and romance were as oil and water She learned formally what she had always known by instinct: that because sexual congress was ludicrous in life, its depiction must necessarily follow suit, nay, go it more than one better if interest were to be provoked from the reader, who having come into the world with genitals was himself a born clown. Pornography was a form of farce, inspiring neither terror nor joy, representing neither aspiration nor achievement, proceeding towards no goal.

Time being Mary Joy's sole structure, then, the chronicle was the only format that would serve. The seasons as they came, the passing holidays, the very modes of time, even as simple morning, afternoon, and night, were inspiring. Mary Joy lived in a world that seethed with possibilities.

Recently, having grown bored with exotic male characters, gadgets, and animals, Naomi had for the first time given Mary an episode with another woman, a robust Swedish masseuse named Helga. This had proved so satisfying that she was eager to compose a sequel. Having gone to the bedroom for a hand-kerchief and found Buddy sound asleep, she believed she might chance a session with the current diary at an earlier hour than usual, though of course he might wake up and Ralph was due to return.

But it had occurred to her long since that neither of the men in the household posed a threat to her privacy. Since the onset of his adolescence, Ralph had never looked at her. If she were replaced with a window dummy he might not know the difference by Thanksgiving, and not then if someone else served him the plateful that matched his tastes (all white, lots of gravy because it's dry). As to Buddy, he was attentive to anything but, being a talker, the written word. To him the secretary desk was as sacrosanct as a ladies' room; he had never approached it in all their years together. The bookshelves could have held the grosser, cheaper wares of Continental Products: he would not have seen a title. Coming upon her as she wrote in a diary, he would retire as discreetly as if he had accidentally entered a bathroom already occupied.

Naomi worked clandestinely for the sake of the secret itself, not from fear of discovery. She had always been an intensely private person, often when they were girls concealing from Gladys, driving her sister mad, knowledge of, say, where she had disappeared to on Saturday morning (the public library) or Sunday afternoon (the attic, where she read the library books she had hidden). Naomi despised the aboveboard, the revealed, the known, and with the character of Mary Joy, who had no secrets, whose essence was accessible to all, she was complete.

Thus she was happily writing away-Helga's great bulk, muscular but not obese, was laboring over the recumbent body, trim, lithe, but not skinny, of Mary-when in the rear of the house Buddy fell down the basement stairs.

He missed the first three treads, but struck the fourth with his shoulders and the edge of the fifth with his head, snapped on the whip of his neck, which broke, so that he would probably have been a goner even if he had not continued to descend rapidly to the concrete floor, meeting it finally with the sound, which he did not hear, that a sugar melon might have made if dropped from the same height.

A certain excitement of creation had caused Naomi to gulp more cigarette smoke than could be managed by her windpipe. She coughed elaborately, clearing her irritated throat, obscuring with these noises the sound of Buddy's fall. Therefore he died in secret, apprising nobody.

chapter 15.

CLARENCE THROUGHT the least he could do was say goodbye to the widow who lived down the hall and sometimes fed him. However, on reflection he decided it was more than he could accomplish. Given the aroma in the hallway, it seemed likely she was cooking supper. He had swallowed nothing since the dry baloney sandwich he had as usual taken along for lunch. Leo would on request bring him back coffee and pie from the Greek's, in which he was himself unwelcome, but Leo had not appeared at the lot that day.

Once Clarence hit the road he would be able to get no hot food until he reached another town with a colored district, and so far as he knew it was solid farmland for a good many miles west. But one thing leading inevitably to another-if she fed him she would, and with justice, expect compensation-he would end up with a full belly and empty balls, in which condition he would no doubt fall asleep and not get started to California until the next morning. By that time the man for whom he worked would be looking for him with a gun.

So he picked up the shopping bag into which he had packed all his possessions except the Sunday suit, which he wore, and sneaked past the widow's door and down the stairs. He walked the two miles back to the lot, found the '38 Packard where he had left it after buffing its body to a splendid sheen, unlocked it with the keys from his vest pocket, and slid onto the leather under the steering wheel.

He rolled gravely through the local streets. Buddy had never permitted him to drive a car farther than from the gravel service area into the garage; the machines were brought around from the front lot by the white men. He had no bill of sale, no registration, and no driver's license. He had however screwed on a set of plates he had taken from Buddy's personal car that afternoon, replacing them with dealer's tags on the Sandifer Buick.

For his own credentials he took from the shopping bag a much more useful passport than any made of paper for the alien country through which he would drive for many days: a chauffeur's black cap, which he had bought with the money Buddy had given him for the pocket watch and flashlight he would not need. There was a clock on the dashboard, for that matter. There was also a radio. He had no idea of how long it would take to reach California, but if he was still on the road next Sunday morning he intended to listen to a religious broadcast.

Laverne knocked for a long time at the door of the convent before noticing the pale rectangle on the brick wall alongside, indicating that a sign had been removed. The place was obviously deserted. She had to walk four blocks, leaving the area of warehouses, lofts, and small wholesalers, to locate a drugstore with a telephone. The directory was missing from the little shelf outside the booth. Also, she did not have a nickel with which to call Information. Neither could she find in her purse a piece of money smaller than a two-dollar bill, gambler's bad luck. Being a proud, independent sort, she was averse to asking that a note of this denomination be changed without a purchase.

She went to the marble counter and ordered a hot-fudge sundae from the soda jerk, a pimpled teen-aged kid in a white overseas cap, who was closing the containers in the ice-cream wells.

Like Buddy's son, he blushed when he had to talk to her.

"Sorry, ma'am, the machine that heats the fudge is on the blink." Suddenly she knew it was one of those days when she would be frustrated in every fucking thing she tried.

She shook her head in the picture hat. "I guess you better tell me what you got. If I wanna banana split you'll be outa bananas, right?"

He shrugged and looked miserable, throwing one shoulder at the wall clock and his chin towards the prescription department, where some old baldy in a gray jacket was locking drawers and cabinets with an officious clatter.

"It's closing time, and he likes to be on the dot. Maybe a cherry Coke or something to go?"

Laverne climbed wryly off the stool. "Naw, I never drink on the street. I don't want to get run in."

"I'm real sorry." He looked it.

Laverne gave him a glorious smile. "Gee, kid, it ain't the end of the world. Buck up."

"You're a good sport, ma'am." He was scarlet from forehead to neck.

Twisting from the waist to emphasize her breasts, she wondered how much longer she could produce that effect on males.

On a whim she mounted the iron footrest of the stool, leaned over the counter, and beckoned to him as if to share a secret. When his wondering face came close enough, she gave him a great big red-hot smooch on the mouth, jumped nimbly down, and left, hips rolling, before you could say Jack Robinson.

Ralph waited forever at Elmira's, but Margie didn't show. Imogene Clevenger did though, alone, looking the worse for wear. He had never before noticed that she was somewhat out of proportion from the waist down: her legs seemed shorter than they should have been, given the length of her trunk, and her ankles were rather sturdy. His preference was for the suggestion of vulnerability given by fine bones.

She wore a rumpled skirt and a blouse in which you could see the impression of the big safety pin that secured her slip strap above the right bosom.

Pausing opposite his booth, she smiled in a weird, crinkled way and said: "Hi, Ralph."

This was unprecedented, and if it had happened a few days earlier Ralph would have been overwhelmed. Now he was rather suspicious. He gave a distant nod.

"Mind if I sit down?" she asked, and then as if in afterthought put a wearily coquettish hand on her hip and simpered.

"Waiting for somebody," Ralph said, frowning.

"Not Horace Hauser, I hope." She was so dispirited she had to put a hand on the booth top to support herself. "They just picked up his big brother."

Her face, which Ralph had previously believed unbearably delicate, now looked beefy. It was also wearing an expression he would have called peevish had her mouth not begun to quiver.

"What for?"