American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “Certain things?”

  “Don’t you love the smell of brewing coffee? It infuses a room with such a wonderful aroma. I drank tea earlier. I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’m doing these days. Now may I ask you, Ray—you seem like a man of the world—is it a natural thing for a husband to want his wife to urinate on him?”

  Ray blushed. And choked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “My new husband. He has this proclivity. He didn’t speak of it before we were married. But then afterwards—just last night, in fact—he asked me if I would squat over his stomach and pee all over him. He said that a lot of men enjoy this sort of thing. Is it something that you enjoy, Ray?”

  Ray remained speechless for a quarter of a minute.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve embarrassed you. Well, there’s my answer, and I thank you for it. I knew he was a freak. I held out hope that maybe I was just a little behind the times. After all, it took me a while to acquire a taste for bathtub gin. And I very much like my hair long like this. I didn’t see why I should bob it. But it just seemed to me that a husband asking a wife to pee on him was something very much outside the norm.”

  Ray stood up. “I should be going.”

  “You think I’m joking? I’m not joking. I threw my husband out of the house last night because of this. The very thought of it. Disgusting. And that awful way that he begged for it.”

  Amelia closed her eyes and shook her head.

  Ray took a step away from the table.

  “Before you go, I really would like you to tell me: Is this the sort of thing you would ever ask of your wife? I don’t see a ring on your finger, so I’m speaking in terms of your future wife. Would you ask her to empty her bladder all over you? Would that excite you?”

  Ray shook his head. Then he said emphatically, “No, it would not.”

  “Just as I thought. You’ve been very helpful, Ray. Are you sure that I can’t talk you into staying for that cup of coffee? I promise to change the subject.”

  Ray shook his head again. “I really must go.”

  “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “Please. Give it no more thought.”

  Amelia was going to walk Ray to the front door, but he fled too quickly for her to keep up with him. In his haste he dropped the cleaner’s library brush attachment (for the cleaning of portieres and draperies) and Amelia had to call after him and have him return momentarily to retrieve it. Then she watched him run down the street as if someone were chasing him.

  She sighed.

  It had felt very good to give voice to it. It felt even better to see Ray’s appalled reaction. So her equally appalled reaction the night before hadn’t been unreasonable! This gave her a warm sense of vindication.

  Amelia went into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet and relieved herself. She had been holding her wee for hours, knowing that once she released the urine that had been stored for so long inside her, the image of her husband would appear in her mind’s eye, writhing happily beneath her. And it would disgust her anew and make her question once again why she married a man who turned out to be so strange, and strange in such a repellent way.

  Yet as she sat and urinated, the feelings of repulsion seemed to be receding. It was a most amazing thing. In that moment Amelia came to recoil from her husband and his proclivity just a little less. She even considered, for argument’s sake, the logic of his position. That micturation was a natural act, and if he took delight in this natural act, especially when it involved the exclusive participation of his new wife whom he dearly loved, could not the case be made for there simply being those things that exist in this world in which some may find delight that others do not fully understand?

  Amelia Bream spent the remainder of the day giving additional thought to her husband’s position. It was a messy thing that he wanted her to do and he would be fully responsible for the cleaning up that it required, even if that cleaning necessitated the use of her brand-new industrial Hamilton Beach Carpet Washer. But Chester was a good man, a handsome and prosperous man, an officer in the Richmond Kiwanis, a man who loved every little thing about her, even those things that he had yet to learn.

  Such as the fact that she liked her toes sucked. Licked and sucked hard—like the heavy-duty suction of a Greater Energex vacuum cleaner.

  That evening Chester returned. Amelia greeted her spouse with loving arms. Then she whispered sweetly into his receptive ear, “I want to pee on you, Chester. And then I want my toes sucked. And later we’ll have raspberry cobbler. I baked it for you this afternoon.”

  1929

  TAKING A DIM VIEZ IN MICHIGAN

  Leonora Wallace was going blind. Glaucoma. Her mother knew this. Her friend Amanda Squalls knew this as well. Amanda worked in the Detroit Police Headquarters Building in Greektown. She was a file clerk in the Traffic Division.

  This story is only partially about Amanda Squalls. But it is important to know where she worked. Were it not for Leonora’s weekly trip to meet Amanda for lunch at New Hellas Café and eat saganaki and drink wine—Detroit had for the last several years flouted the Prohibition statute with near impunity—were it not for a friendship that included weekly luncheons of flaming cheese and lively gossip and Amanda’s acicular opinions on the subject of how her forty-one-year-old friend Leonora should spend the second half of her life—the benighted half—there should be no story.

  Leonora lived with her mother in Redford Township west of Detroit. Although the two were very close, Leonora enjoyed the time they spent apart, especially her visits to the Kunsky Redford Theatre not far from her house. The Kunsky was a beautiful new movie palace with a colorful Japanese garden motif, and Leonora was one of its most frequent patrons.

  Sound was coming in. And sound movies couldn’t happen too soon for a woman who was fast losing her eyesight.

  Leonora worked as a sales clerk for C.S. Smith Hardware, a vocation that guaranteed she’d soon be unemployed. She was the store’s first lady sales clerk, hired for her “chromo-smarts.” Leonora sold house paint. She was exceptionally adept at guiding her customers through the lengthy catalogue of available hues: Beaver Brown, Chocolate Brown, Colonial Yellow, Dove, Fawn, Terra Cotta, Pea Green, Nile Green, Golden Green, Emerald Green, Willow Green, Pearl Gray, Mother Goose, Cremnitz White, Brickdust, Sauterne, and American Vermilion (for firehouses). This is only a partial list.

  “I’m going to miss it,” said Leonora to her friend Amanda over lunch during one of those Tuesdays in October when the nation, though faced with an unstable stock market, was still gay and prosperous, and most of its citizens’ problems could still be solved without jumping out of windows.

  “Miss what?”

  “Color. All the color in the world. I know the name of every color there is. And if a color doesn’t have a name, I’m quite good at making one up.”

  “Such as?”

  “Hmm. See the ribbon on that woman’s hat? The cloche with the turned-up, scalloped brim? What color would you say the ribbon is?”

  “It looks yellow.”

  Leonora shook her head. She smiled impishly. “That isn’t just yellow, Mandy. It’s yellow with a slight cast of white. I would call it Canary in the Snow.”

  “You would, would you?” Amanda laughed and took of sip of her thick, muddy Greek coffee.

  The waiter came by to see if the two women would be having their usual dessert: baklava.

  “We’re so terribly drab and boring, aren’t we, Pavlos?” said Amanda with a wink. “But the baklava is so sinfully good that I don’t ever want to try anything else. What about you, Leonora?”

  “Baklava,” said Leonora with authority.

  The two women watched the handsome and hirsute young waiter walk away.

  “I want to have his baby,” confided Amanda. “How about you, my dear?”

  “That train has already left the station, love.”

  “I have no idea how you could possibly have reached the advanced age of—what is it, darling
? Are we at the mid-century mark for you now?—without your ever having had a taste of—”

  “I am forty-one,” snapped Leonora. “But regardless, that window has closed, and I’ve made my peace with it.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that for a minute! You haven’t lived at all. You’ve let the parade pass you by. And now…” Amanda bit her lip. She closed her eyes and leaned forward in her chair, wanting very much to say something her sensitivity to Leonora’s feelings would not permit.

  “Just spill it, Amanda.”

  Amanda pulled a cigarette case from her pocketbook and fumbled with the clasp. “And what is it you think I want to say?”

  “I think, sweetheart, that you want to say that I have defied all the bookmakers’ odds. I have lived and worked in a city, or rather very near a city of men. Of every sort of he-man steelforger, shipbuilder, carmaker—every sweat-dripping, brawny-limbed, big-shouldered, woman-hungry man that there could possibly be and for some reason known only to God, I have not had the good fortune to bring any of them permanently into my life. Or into my bed. And now I must live with the conse—”

  “Sweet Jesus, Leonora. You’ve never been to bed with a man? Please tell me you’re joking!”

  “I’m not.”

  “What about the doughboy?”

  “You mean Adam, with the reproductive wound?”

  “Or the Glidden salesman. What was that handsome young man’s name?”

  “It was Vincent. Vincent liked colors even more than I did. He liked other pretty things as well. He collected lace.”

  “Poor, poor girl. And now you’re going blind. And you won’t even be able to see what it is that you’ve been missing.”

  “That was beyond cruel.”

  “It’s true. Have you ever seen a man without his clothes on? Even if by accident? Your father?”

  Leonora shook her head. “What’s more, I am uncomfortable with this conversation.”

  “But surely you must know what a naked man looks like.”

  “I am not a nun, Leonora. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “My heart is breaking.”

  “It’s my cross to bear. Let’s change the subject. I may decide not to come for lunch next week if you don’t turn off the pity faucet. And you’re being rude. Not to mention lewd.”

  Leonora was forced to suspend her reproach of her friend; Pavlos had returned with dessert and Leonora’s eyes were now level with his crotch, the perimeter of darkness in her narrowing glaucomatous field of vision fortuitously irising in on the waiter’s groinal contours, both to Leonora’s temporary delight and to her ultimate gloom and despair, for this was yet another reminder of what would be lost to her once her eyesight disappeared altogether.

  But there was truth to what Amanda said, and Leonora knew it.

  By the following week, Leonora had come to an important and rather bold decision that she felt she should share with her best friend. She could not—would not, it was now clear—lose her eyesight without having seen a man in the flesh, in all his flesh, an image that would create a lasting visual memory through all the years she would spend in darkness. She had reached the apex of this decision while watching Coquette, featuring a one-hundred-percent chattering Mary Pickford and the ruggedly handsome football-player-turned-screen-actor Johnny Mack Brown, whom Leonora would very much like to have glimpsed showering in some stadium locker room during his gridiron days.

  It would be asking a lot of Amanda, but Leonora wished to enlist her best friend in soliciting some kind of viewing for Leonora’s transitory pleasure and permanent retention. Amanda knew men—men of sufficient build who might agree to give Leonora a free look. Amanda knew Detroit coppers, both those who carried guns and those who wore gloves and directed traffic with balletic grace. She knew tough-as-nails, square-jawed federal agents, some of whom chased rum runners with patriotic zeal and others who were on the take but no less sthenically appealing. Amanda might even be able to entice a strapping young Canadian Mountie to ford the Detroit River from Windsor and remove every stitch of his uniform and undergarments (while keeping the Stetson securely in place). Leonora was sure that Amanda, after some initial sniggering, would agree to her odd yet desperately articulated request.

  Tuesday came and Leonora found herself sitting in a chair in the Traffic Division of the Detroit Police Department waiting for Amanda. Her heart was pounding. Leonora had never in her life attempted anything so impetuous. And yet, Leonora’s lifetime of prudence and circumspection had brought her to a point she was not proud to admit to. Men had shown interest in her. She had politely turned them down. Men had sought to bed her—she was sure of it. But she had been afraid and somewhat put off. Is this all that men think about? Leonora didn’t believe herself to be priggish, and yet their advances—the advances of most of the men she’d met—seemed boorish and sloppy and presumptuous, and she would have no truck with them.

  That was the old Leonora. The new Leonora wanted to see a live naked man in all his muscular glory before time ran out.

  There was a man sitting next to her—a man perhaps in his mid-thirties—a good-looking man with curly black hair, a smooth-shaven face and half dimples that revealed themselves when his ear caught the punch line of a joke being told by another man a couple of chairs away. The good-looking man said hello to Leonora when he sat down and tipped his homburg brim politely before removing the hat altogether.

  The clerk at the window called his name. It was James. James Touliatos.

  “Aren’t you next?” said the man, turning to Leonora. “You were here before me.”

  Leonora shook her head. “I’m just waiting for a friend. She works here and we’re having lunch together.”

  The man—Mr. James Touliatos, who bore a slight resemblance to Pavlos the waiter, but was, thought Leonora, even better looking—got up from his seat and carried a sheaf of papers over to the window.

  Leonora could hear snatches of his conversation with the clerk. Since the clerk had the louder voice, she got only half of the exchange: “Here is the application for certificate of title. Fill this out. The fee is a dollar. Have you owned a car before? Are you aware that the receipt of registration must be carried in the car at all times? What kind of vehicle is it? No reason. I just like cars. Except Fords. Don’t tell them that in Dearborn or I might find myself out of a job.” The two men laughed. Leonora thought that Mr. James Touliatos had a friendly, engaging laugh.

  Amanda came out. She said that she couldn’t get away. Someone from the Secretary of State’s office was coming over for a meeting and they needed a stenographer. She was very sorry, but perhaps they could see each other over the weekend. She’d come up to Redford and they could go to that new musical picture, Applause with Helen Morgan. Cities were banning it all over the country, so it had to be good.

  Amanda returned to her office. James had overheard the conversation. He approached Leonora. “You’ve been stood up for lunch. If I might be so bold, given that I’m a total stranger to you, how would you feel if I took you to lunch?”

  “I would say, sir, that you are total stranger to me and no.”

  James nodded. He ruminated. “I wouldn’t be a stranger to you if you got to know me. My names is Touliatos, by the way. I’m a welder with Great Lakes Engineering Works in Ecorse. I help to put freighters together.”

  He helps to build freighters, thought Leonora. He has large arms. He must have a nice physique. I’ll say no again as any proper woman would, but if he persists, I will pretend that he has worn down my resistance and agree to have lunch with him.

  She said no again. The man put on his hat, tipped the brim, and walked out.

  Leonora died a little inside. She didn’t get up. She sat for the next moment ruing her decision. Then something miraculous happened. Mr. James Touliatos returned. He walked straight up to Leonora and said, “I’m going to ask once more, not because I’m a rude s.o.b., but because you seem like a very nice woman, you’ve been stood up for lunch, and I feel just a
little sorry for you. I also note from the absence of a wedding ring on your finger that you aren’t married, and I happen to think that you might be a charming and stimulating table companion.”

  “Sir, you have won me over,” said Leonora with relief, and with a sudden feeling of reckless abandon that took her by surprise.

  James had a favorite restaurant he wanted to recommend. The New Hellas on Monroe.

  The two ate and drank and talked for over two hours. James loved his job, but he was getting ready to move to upstate New York and try his hand at farming. His life was a series of discrete chapters. He said this made it interesting. He had been married, but the marriage hadn’t worked out. He saw his young daughter in San Francisco twice a year.

  Leonora talked of her job, a little of her mother (trying her best to couch her impatience with her mother’s all-too-mothering personality in gentle, non-critical terms), and then over baklava and American coffee, she confided to James that she was going blind.

  She didn’t happen to mention the other thing.

  James had a sister who was blind. She lived there in Detroit. James wanted Leonora to meet her. James asked if Leonora might wish to go to his sister’s apartment and say hello.

  “That would be nice. I mean, having someone I could talk to—someone who could give me a sense as to what to expect.”

  “My newly registered car’s just down the street. I’ll drive us over.”

  “You mean right now?”

  “Why not?”

  Leonora shrugged. A jolt of happiness shot through her. It mattered less now, her original mission. Just to know someone who could help her now that the lights were rapidly dimming—what an unexpected gift that would be!

  *

  James rang the bell. The sister was not home. “I have a key. We’ll go up and wait for her. She’s probably out shopping.”

  Leonora grew suspicious.

  “It’s all right. She won’t mind.”

  It was Leonora who minded. It didn’t feel right. Although James had been funny and warm and kind, Leonora didn’t trust people easily. But this had to change. Because life is difficult for a blind person who is incapable of putting trust in those whom she meets—those who have the benefit of sight. The blind man who asks for help crossing the street, isn’t the request usually made of a total stranger? A balance must be struck. A balance between commonsensical caution and faith in the good intentions of the majority of human beings—even brash young men who don’t take “no” for an answer.