It was an unappetizing invitation.
Fred Rosewater, snorting with incredulity, turned to the advertising section of the paper, which was called, "Here I Am." Men and women confessed there that they were looking for love, marriage, and monkeyshines. They did so at a cost to themselves of a dollar forty-five cents per line.
Attractive, sparkling, professional woman, 40, Jewish, said one, college graduate, resides Connecticut. Seeks marriage-minded Jewish college-educated man. Children warmly welcomed. Investigator, Box L-577
That was a sweet one. Most weren't that sweet.
St. Louis hairdresser, male, would like to hear from other males in Show-me State. Exchange snaps? said another.
Modern couple new to Dallas would like to meet sophisticated couples interested in candid photography. All sincere letters answered. All snaps returned, said another.
Male preparatory school teacher badly needs course in manners from stern instructress, preferably a horse-lover of German or Scandinavian extraction, said another. Will travel anywhere in U.S.
New York top exec wants dates weekday afternoons. No prudes, said another.
On the facing page was a large coupon on which a reader was invited to write an ad of his own. Fred sort of hankered to.
Fred turned the page, read an account of a rape-murder that happened in Nebraska in 1933. The illustrations were revoltingly clinical photographs that only a coroner had a right to see. The rape-murder was thirty years old when Fred read of it, when The Investigator's reputedly ten million readers read of it. The issues with which the paper dealt were eternal. Lucretia Borgia could make screaming headlines at any time. It was from The Investigator, in fact, that Fred, who had attended Princeton for only a year, had learned of the death of Socrates.
A thirteen-year-old girl came into the store, and Fred thrust the paper aside. The girl was Lila Buntline, daughter of his wife's best friend. Lila was a tall creature, horse-faced, knobby. There were great circles under her perfectly beautiful green eyes. Her face was piebald with sunburn and tan and freckles and pink new skin. She was the most competitive and skilful sailor in the Pisquontuit Yacht Club.
Lila glanced at Fred with pity--because he was poor, because his wife was no good, because he was fat, because he was a bore. And she strode to the magazine and book racks, put herself out of sight by sitting on the cold cement floor.
Fred retrieved The Investigator, looked at ads that offered to sell him all sorts of dirty things. His breathing was shallow. Poor Fred had a damp, junior high school enthusiasm for The Investigator and all it stood for, but lacked the nerve to become a part of it, to correspond with all the box numbers there. Since he was the son of a suicide, it was hardly surprising that his secret hankerings were embarrassing and small.
A very healthy man now banged into the news store, moved to Fred's side so quickly that Fred couldn't throw the paper away. "Why, you filthy-minded insurance bastard," said the newcomer cheerfully, "what you doing reading a jerk-off paper like that?"
He was Harry Pena, a professional fisherman. He was also Chief of the Pisquontuit Volunteer Fire Department. Harry had two fish traps offshore, labyrinths of pilings and nets that took heartless advantage of the stupidity of fish. Each trap was a long fence in the water, with dry land at one end and a circular corral of stakes and netting at the other. Fish seeking a way around the fence entered the corral. Stupidly, they circled the corral again and again and again, until Harry and his two big sons came in their boat, with gaffhooks and malls, closed the gate of the corral, hauled up a purse net lying on the bottom, and killed and killed and killed.
Harry was middle-aged and bandy-legged, but he had a head and shoulders Michelangelo might have given to Moses or God. He had not been a fisherman all his life. Harry had been an insurance bastard himself, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. One night in Pittsfield, Harry had cleaned his living-room carpet with carbon tetrachloride, and all but died. When he recovered his doctor told him this: "Harry--either you work out-of-doors, or you die."
So Harry became what his father had been--a trap fisherman.
Harry threw an arm over Fred's suety shoulders. He could afford to be affectionate. He was one of the few men in Pisquontuit whose manhood was not in question. "Aaaaah--you poor insurance bastard--" he said, "why be an insurance bastard? Do something beautiful." He sat down, ordered black coffee and a golden cigar.
"Well now, Harry--" said Fred, with lip-pursing judiciousness, "I think maybe my insurance philosophy is a little different from what yours was."
"Shit," said Harry pleasantly. He took the paper away from Fred, considered the front-page challenge hurled by Randy Herald. "By God," he said, "she takes whatever kind of baby I give her, and I say when she gets it, too, not her."
"Seriously, Harry--" Fred insisted, "I like insurance. I like helping people."
Harry gave no indication that he'd heard. He scowled at a picture of a French girl in a bikini.
Fred, understanding that he seemed a bleak, sexless person to Harry, tried to prove that Harry had him wrong. He nudged Harry, man-to-man. "Like that, Harry?" he asked.
"Like what?"
"The girl there."
"That's not a girl. That's a piece of paper."
"Looks like a girl to me." Fred Rosewater leered.
"Then you're easily fooled," said Harry. "It's done with ink on a piece of paper. That girl isn't lying there on the counter. She's thousands of miles away, doesn't even know we're alive. If this was a real girl, all I'd have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish."
Harry Pena turned to the "Here I Am" ads, asked Fred for a pen.
"Pen?" said Fred Rosewater, as though it were a foreign word.
"You've got one, don't you?"
"Sure, I've got one." Fred handed over one of the nine pens distributed about his person.
"Sure he's got one." Harry laughed. And this is what he wrote on the coupon facing the ads:
Red-hot Papa, member of white race, seeks red-hot Mama, any race, any age, any religion. Object: everything but matrimony. Will exchange snaps. My teeth are my own.
"You really going to send that in?" Fred's own itch to run an ad, to get a few dirty replies, was pathetically plain.
Harry signed the ad: "Fred Rosewater, Pisquontuit, Rhode Island."
"Very funny," said Fred, drawing back from Harry with acid dignity.
Harry winked. "Funny for Pisquontuit," he said.
Fred's wife Caroline came into the news store now. She was a pretty, pinched, skinny, lost little woman, all dolled-up in well-made clothes cast off by her wealthy, Lesbian friend, Amanita Buntline. Caroline Rosewater clinked and flashed with accessories. Their purpose was to make the second-hand clothing distinctly her own. She was going to have lunch with Amanita. She wanted money from Fred, in order that she might insist, with something behind her, upon paying for her own food and drink.
When she spoke to Fred, with Harry Pena watching, she behaved like a woman who was keeping her dignity while being frog-walked. With the avid help of Amanita, she pitied herself for being married to a man who was so poor and dull. That she was exactly as poor and dull as Fred was a possibility she was constitutionally unable to entertain. For one thing, she was a Phi Beta Kappa, having won her key as a philosophy major at Dillon University, in Dodge City, Kansas. That was where she and Fred had met, in Dodge City, in a U.S.O. Fred had been stationed at Fort Riley during the Korean War. She married Fred because she thought everybody who lived in Pisquontuit and had been to Princeton was rich.
She was humiliated to discover that it was not true. She honestly believed that she was an intellectual, but she knew almost nothing, and every problem she ever considered could be solved by just one thing: money, and lots of it. She was a frightful housekeeper. She cried when she did housework, because she was convinced that she was cut out for better things.
As for the Lesbian business, it wasn't particularly deep on Caroline's part. She was si
mply a female chameleon trying to get ahead in the world.
"Lunch with Amanita again?" Fred whinnied.
"Why not?"
"This gets to be damn expensive, fancy lunches every day."
"It isn't every day. It's twice a week at the very most." She was brittle and cold.
"It's still a hell of an expense, Caroline."
Caroline held out a white-gloved hand for money. "It's worth it to your wife."
Fred gave her money.
Caroline did not thank Fred. She left, took her place on a fawn-colored cushion of glove leather, next to the fragrant Amanita Buntline in Amanita's powder-blue Mercedes 300-SL.
Harry Pena looked at Fred's chalky face appraisingly. He made no comment. He lit a cigar, departed--went fishing for real fish with his two real sons--in a real boat on a salty sea.
Lila, the daughter of Amanita Buntline, sat on the cold floor of the news store, reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which, along with William Bur-rough's Naked Lunch, she had taken from the Lazy Susan book rack. Lila's interest in the books was commercial. At thirteen, she was Pisquontuit's leading dealer in smut.
She was a dealer in fireworks, too, for the same reason she was a dealer in smut, which was: Profit. Her playmates at the Pisquontuit Yacht Club and Pisquontuit Country Day School were so rich and foolish that they would pay her almost anything for almost anything. In a routine business day, she might sell a seventy-five-cent copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover for ten dollars and a fifteen-cent cherry bomb for five.
She bought her fireworks during family vacations in Canada and Florida and Hong Kong. Most of her smut came from the open stock of the news store. The thing was, Lila knew which titles were red hot, which was more than her playmates or the employees of the news store knew. And Lila bought the hot ones as fast as they were tucked into the Lazy Susan. All her transactions were with the idiot behind the lunch counter, who forgot everything faster than it could happen.
The relationship between Lila and the news store was wonderfully symbiotic, for hanging in the store's front window was a large medallion of gilded polystyrene, awarded by the Rhode Island Mothers to Save Children from Filth. Representatives of that group inspected the store's paperback selection regularly. The polystyrene medallion was their admission that they had not found one filthy thing.
They thought that their children were safe, but the truth was that Lila had cornered the market.
There was one sort of smut that Lila could not buy at the news store--dirty pictures. She got them by doing what Fred Rosewater had so often lusted weakly to do--by answering raunchy ads in The American Investigator.
Large feet now intruded into her childish world on the news store floor. They were the feet of Fred Rosewater.
Lila did not conceal her red-hot books. She went on reading, as though The Tropic of Cancer were Heidi:
The trunk is open and her things are lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three times, four times... I'm afraid she'll go mad... in bed, under the blankets, how good to feel her body again! But for how long? Will it last this time? Already I have a presentiment that it won't.
Lila and Fred often met between the books and magazines. Fred never asked her what she was reading. And she knew he would do what he always did--would look with sad hunger at the covers of girly magazines, then pick up and open something as fat and domestic as Better Homes and Gardens. This is precisely what he did now.
"I guess my wife is out to lunch with your Mummy again," said Fred.
"I guess she is," said Lila. That ended the conversation, but Lila continued to think about Fred. She was on level with the Rosewater shins. She thought about them. Whenever she saw Fred in shorts or a bathing suit, his shins were covered with scars and scabs, as though he had been kicked and kicked and kicked every day of his life. Lila thought that maybe it was a vitamin deficiency that made Fred's shins look like that, or mange.
Fred's gory shins were victims of his wife's interior decorating scheme, which called for an almost schizophrenic use of little tables, dozens of them all through the house. Each little table had its own ashtray and dish of dusty after-dinner mints, although the Rosewaters never entertained. And Caroline was forever rearranging the tables, as though for this kind of party one day and another the next. So poor Fred was forever barking his shins on the tables.
One time Fred had had a deep cut on his chin that required eleven stitches. That fall hadn't been caused by all the little tables. It had been caused by an object that Caroline never put away. The object was always in evidence, like a pet anteater with a penchant for sleeping in doorways or on the staircase, or on the hearth.
That object, the one Fred had fallen over and cut his chin on, was Caroline Rosewater's Electrolux. Subconsciously, Caroline had sworn to herself that she would never put the vacuum cleaner away until she was rich.
Fred, thinking Lila wasn't paying any attention to him, now put down Better Homes and Gardens, picked up what looked like one hell of a sexy paperback novel, Venus on the Half-shell, by Kilgore Trout. On the back cover was an abridgment of a red-hot scene inside. It went like this:
Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely they might have had a light inside. 'Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,' she whispered, her voice husky with lust. 'Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.'
'It's a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,' the Space Wanderer replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. 'I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.'
'But you have found your answer, you have found your answer,' she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.
He said something that she did not hear. She thrust him out at arm's length. 'What was that you said?'
'I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn't happen to be the one I'm primarily looking for.'
There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifix-ion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.
10
LILA BUNTLINE PEDDLED her bicycle through the muffled beauty of Pisquontuit's Utopian lanes. Every house she passed was a very expensive dream come true. The owners of the houses did not have to work at all. Neither would their children have to work, nor want for a thing, unless somebody revolted. Nobody seemed about to.
Lila's handsome house was on the harborfront. It was Georgian. She went inside, put down her new books in the hallway, stole into her father's study to make certain that her father, who was lying on his couch, was still alive. It was a thing she did at least once every day.
"Father--?"
The morning's mail was on a silver platter on a table at his head. Next to it was an untouched Scotch and soda. Its bubbles were dead. Stewart Buntline wasn't forty yet. He was the best looking man in town, a cross, somebody once said, between Cary Grant and a German shepherd. On his lean midsection lay a fifty-seven-dollar book, a railroad atlas of the Civil War, which his wife had given to him. That was his only enthusiasm in life, the Civil War.
"Daddy--"
Stewart snoozed on. His father had left him fourteen million dollars, tobacco money mostly. That money, churned and fertilized and hybridized and transmogrified in the hydroponic money farm of the Trust Department of the New England Seafarer's Bank and Trust Company of Boston, had increased by about eight hundred thousand dollars a year since it had been put in Stewart's name. Business seemed to be pretty good. Other than that, Stewart didn't know much about business.
Sometimes, when pressed to give his business views, he would declare roundly that he liked Pol
aroid. People seemed to find this vivid, that he should like Polaroid so much. Actually, he didn't know if he owned any Polaroid or not. The bank took care of things like that--the bank and the law firm of McAllister, Robjent, Reed and McGee.
"Daddy--"
"Mf?"
"I wanted to make sure you--you were all right," said Lila.
"Yup," he said. He couldn't be positive about it. He opened his eyes a little, licked his dry lips. "Fine, Sweetheart."
"You can go back to sleep now."
Stewart did.
There was no reason for him not to sleep soundly, for he was represented by the same law firm that represented Senator Rosewater, and had been since he was orphaned at the age of sixteen. The partner who looked after him was Reed McAllister. Old McAllister had enclosed a piece of literature with his last letter. It was called, "A Rift Between Friends in the War of Ideas," a pamphlet published by the Pine Tree Press of the Freedom School, Box 165, Colorado Springs, Colorado. This was now serving as a bookmark in the railroad atlas.
Old McAllister generally enclosed material about creeping socialism as opposed to free enterprise, because, some twenty years before, Stewart had come into his office, a wild-eyed young man, had announced that the free enterprise system was wrong, and that he wanted to give all his money to the poor. McAllister had talked the rash young man out of it, but he continued to worry about Stewart's having a relapse. The pamphlets were prophylaxis.
McAllister needn't have bothered. Drunk or sober, pamphlets or not, Stewart was irrevocably committed to free enterprise now. He did not require the bucking up in "A Rift Between Friends in the War of Ideas," which was supposedly a letter from a conservative to close friends who were socialists without knowing it. Because he did not need to, Stewart had not read what the pamphlet had to say about the recipients of social security and other forms of welfare, which was this:
Have we really helped these people? Look at them well. Consider this specimen who is the end result of our pity! What can we say to this third generation of people to whom welfare has long since become a way of life? Observe carefully our handiwork whom we have spawned and are spawning by the millions, even in times of plenty!
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater Page 9