“I know the genre. I remember one, had a gal in a French maid’s costume with a feather duster sticking out her ass.”
Tessler laughed fondly at the memory. “You never ought to have gotten the likes of that one. That was made to order for a customer in Marshall, Minnesota. Model was a hillbilly gal from Tennessee someplace, damned if I can remember her name. One of those who’d do just about anything, I used her when I got special requests. Stuff the other gals wouldn’t.”
“Like what?”
He reached into his file cabinet and pulled out a third folder, marked “MADE-To-OrdEr,” and handed it to me with an odd, crooked half-grin. Inside was a passport to a whole wide wonderful world of idiosyncratic sexual interests most of the world didn’t dream existed: amputee pin-ups, Tijuana-style bestiality, even crisply and artistically rendered coprophilia. “Crazy what gets people going, ain’t it?” Tessler said.
“Where do you get the stockings? My wife’d kill for a pair.”
“It ain’t easy. There’s a black market here in Kansas City, too, and brother I tell you I pay through the nose for the goddamn things. But for some reason you can’t sell the weird stuff without ’em.”
“There’s a gal I’m here to see, and she’s a little sore at me right now. Pair of nylons would really fix things up with her.”
“Huh. I can send you down to see a man about that. Can’t guarantee he’ll deliver, but you can try.”
We arranged for him to get a set of glossies from folders one and two to Lester on approval, and I left the studio with the address of the man with the hosiery. I’d turned down with some regret Tessler’s offer to watch the filming of a stag in the afternoon, but I didn’t know how long I’d be in town. Maybe I’d come back tomorrow and have a gander at the process.
I TOOK THE bus downtown. There was a very pretty redhead seated across the aisle from me, and she gave me such a warm and inviting smile that I nearly moved over to try and pick her up. But I reminded myself that I was here to see Vickie, not to accost strange women on public transportation. She crossed her bare legs and I chuckled inwardly at the thought that the stockings I was about to procure for Vickie were probably all it would take to separate the redhead’s pretty knees.
I rang the buzzer at the warehouse according to the code indicated: one, three, two. Presently an obese Negro wearing a banker’s pinstripes and a grey fedora to match opened the door.
“Merle Tessler sent me,” I said.
“That so. What makes you think I know who that is?”
“He said to tell you the soup is in the cans, whatever that means.”
He laughed, a genuine and hearty guffaw. “Come on in, tell me what it is I can set you up with. I’m Dewey.”
The warehouse was immense and only half full, but it contained rare treasures. There were stacks of tires, and to my left sat a half-dozen brand new adding machines. Above those was a shelf full of Smith Coronas, pre-war models that looked as though they’d never even been beribboned. There were stacks and stacks of shoeboxes on one wall reaching almost to the ceiling, with ladders mounted on rollers and rails to maneuver from one top shelf to another.
“Holy moley,” I said. “Take a look at that.”
“Yeah, we got a lot of merchandise. If Tessler says you okay we can do business. What you after, exactly?”
“Said you could sell me some nylons for my girl.”
“Nylons, sure. Would she like silk better?”
“I guess she would.”
“How many pair?”
I thought two pair for Vickie would about get me in the door, and another couple pair for Sally might get me out of the doghouse when I got back to Wichita. Dewey got me what I needed and I paid his exorbitant fee gladly in cash. “Thanks,” I said.
“That’s all right. You come on back any time. Merle says you okay, that’s good enough for me. You work with him on those fuck movies?”
“No, but I used to sell his dirty pictures when I was in the army.”
“Yeah? You a supply sarge?”
“That’s right. Work for Collins Aircraft down in Wichita now. Or at least I did until last night.”
“Do a lot of business with quartermasters. Got a lot of shit to get overseas.”
“I know someone just getting started up.” I wrote down Lester’s information and handed it to Dewey. “He’s a good man, just got to Japan from the European theater.”
Looking around at all that illegitimate booty I started to get a warm, nostalgic feeling. Here was a man whose business was finding out what people wanted but couldn’t get, finding out how to get some of it, and peddling it to the delighted customer at an exorbitant markup. There was creativity in this, and adventure, even a sense of fun. If staying in Wichita as husband and father was my inevitable fate, how much sweeter would it be if I were running this type of operation? “I don’t suppose you could use a man down in Wichita?”
“No,” he said. “The whole black market’s winding down with the war over. Shit, next year there’ll be new cars rolling off the line in Detroit and nylons in the department stores and no one’ll even remember rationing. Anyway we never had too much luck down in Wichita. You know who Stan Gerard is?”
“I know the name,” I said, though in fact I’d met him once in my youth and had made, sorry to say, a bad impression.
“Well, he runs this whole operation up here and a few things down in Wichita. The problem with Wichita is every time you get something good set up, the local competition drops a dime on it. We had a man there last year selling skag in a hotel downtown; first thing you know is some local pusherman called the cops. That’s a real low class of crook you got down there.”
“Mr. Gerard still doing okay after Boss Pendergast dropped?”
“Hell, yes. There’s always somebody to play ball with. Never be another Pendergast, though. You hear Harry Truman hisself went to the funeral? He was still vice president then and there was some people complained and he said ‘Tom Pendergast was a friend of mine and I was a friend of his.’ That’s class, in my book.”
VICKIE WAS IMPRESSED when I handed her the stockings that afternoon a little before five. “Jesus, Wayne, and here I was all set to read you the riot act for being an unpredictable son of a bitch.”
“Go put on a pair and we’ll go dancing.”
A light snow was coming down when we left the apartment. We danced to the Frankie Masters Orchestra at the Phillips hotel downtown, then got a table in the dining room. Over dinner she talked about hospital politics and a tentative plan she had about moving to Minneapolis for a job at a nursing school.
“What about the doctor?”
“Which?” she said.
“The one you’re married to.”
“Oh.” For just a second she looked uncomfortable, as if she’d been caught doing something wrong. “He doesn’t have any immediate plans to come home, so I’m not including him in my decisions.”
“Thinking about filing?”
She chewed the bite in her mouth very slowly before responding. “I don’t really believe in divorce.”
“You’re not Catholic, are you?”
“No. I just don’t believe in it.”
I watched her methodical dissection of her KC strip and wondered what it would be like being married to a really smart woman. Sally was a-one in the looks department but she’d come up a little short intellectually, raised in a house where no one ever read a book. Vickie was as intelligent and educated as I was, more so in some areas. She didn’t take any guff, either.
We talked for a while about the orchestra—neither one of us had thought much of it—and the state of the world, and then she asked me point blank why I was there without any advance notice.
“I got fired.”
“Fired? Jesus.”
“It’s nothing, the old souse doesn’t even remember he did it, probably. But this lets me put the fear of God into him. Might tell him I had some job offers up here.”
She raise
d an eyebrow. “I’ll bet you could find something here if you really wanted.”
“Maybe. I talked with a fellow today who runs a photo studio.”
“I didn’t know you were interested in photography.”
“Sure I am. Thinking about ways to make money at it.”
“Like open up a portrait studio, shoot weddings, things like that?”
“Things like that, yeah.”
SEVERAL HOURS LATER we were lying in her bed, exhausted. After the first time I lay there for twenty minutes and felt the urge again, and to my surprise, an hour or so after that the need arose again. After that one, in the dim lamplight of her bedroom, diffused through the sheets as if through a scrim, I took a good look at her and tried to figure out how she got to me the way she did. Her face was long enough to qualify as horsy, with a nose to proportion, ever so slightly bulbous and two or three degrees off-true to the left; her teeth were a little too prominent, her lower incisors an ivory jumble, and with her hair up her ears looked like saucers. There was no denying, though, that she got me going in a way few others ever had.
“Jesus, it’s still freezing in here,” she said.
She jumped out of bed stark naked and ran in short quick steps to the hall closet. After a moment’s clattering and the sound of something heavy tumbling to the hardwood she came back into the room with an electric space heater. Crouched down on the bedroom carpet, tits aquiver, she plugged it into the wall and closed the door to the hallway. Then she took a flying leap back onto the bed and dug under the covers, pulling herself close to me, shivering so hard I wondered if she was playacting.
“Holy shit it’s cold. Something’s wrong with that radiator.”
“You know those space heaters are a fire hazard.”
“I know.”
“You ever see what’s left of a human body after a housefire?” I said.
“I’m a nurse, Wayne. I’ve seen stuff that’d curl the hair on your balls. Wouldn’t it be romantic, though, going out together like that.” Her breasts were pressed against my chest, warm as buns from the oven.
“Sure, burned to a crisp, just bone and ash and suet. Just like in the movies.”
“Our skulls’d crack open from the heat,” she said, a note of real excitement entering her voice. “And they’d find us in the ruins, locked in an embrace, still smoldering. It’d take them a long time to figure out who you used to be, I bet,” she said.
“My wife’s having a baby,” I said without really planning to.
She nodded. “You didn’t tell me that before.”
“Thought you might not let me stay.”
“You’re right about that, but you’re forgiven this time,” she yawned, and she turned out the light and kissed me, and though we stayed quiet after that it was a long time before I managed to get to sleep.
SEVEN
TWO CAN LIVE AS CHEAPLY AS ONE
THE WHOLE TIME I knew her, which is to say the last ten years of her life, Sally’s mother had an awful odor that clung to her like a shroud, as though she’d never learned to wash properly, or had stopped caring at some point. I didn’t see how Sally’s father stood it, in fact had trouble picturing how Sally had ever been conceived. If Mr. Tate had endured some sort of brain injury that had removed his olfactory sense I hadn’t heard about it.
Neither she nor her husband displayed much affect at all, even when provoked. I could remember one night in high school when Sally and I got drunk and stayed out until four-thirty in the morning. We got home to find them waiting in the parlor, fully dressed, as though they were always up and Sally always out at that hour.
Sally, on the other hand, was a model of personal hygiene, especially after I introduced her to the thrill of muff diving. She was never shy about displaying her emotions, either; many’s the time she threw me out of her house for some slight I didn’t even know I’d committed. I taught her salty language and how to tell a dirty joke, and though I never made a reader or a scholar out of her she seemed an otherwise perfect mate when I married her at twenty-three, shortly after my graduation from Wichita U.
Something had changed while I was off to war. Her parents were dead, of course, but I sensed there was relief in that, at least inasmuch as she’d never again have to watch a friend pretending not to notice the old girl’s piquant ichthyological bouquet. My own mother’s homey qualities may have leached into her over the duration, but one of my first acts on returning was to treat my no longer blushing bride to four years’ worth of the filthiest jokes the Army could drill into a man, and she laughed so hard she had to change her underwear. And for those first months she was right along with me the way she used to be. I was out with her as many nights for fun as I was with old man Collins for the sake of the job.
It wasn’t the war years that changed her, then. It was the little intruder gestating in her belly. I thought long and hard about what Dr. Groff had told me about those chemical and hormonal changes, and I suspected that when the baby abandoned its claim on Sally’s womb the natural urges and imperatives of motherhood would counteract the waning of those chemical changes as her body returned to its normal state. In other words, her transformation to simpering homebody risked being permanent.
Her capacity for anger returned, however. I was almost grateful to see the old spitfire resurrected when I walked into the apartment on my return from KC. There was shrieking and crockery was thrown—just a coffee cup, but a nice Maggie-and-Jiggs touch—and a detailed discourse on what a rotten son of a bitch I was to leave her alone with no way to reach me. It turned out that the whole time I was gone Millie Grau was trying to get hold of me, and was very surprised to be told that Mr. Collins had sent me on a business trip. While Sally railed at me, I stuffed the message into my shirt pocket. Maybe when I walked back into Collins’s office I’d have a job offer to scare him with.
“You get right on the horn and tell the old man you’re sorry you disappeared. You have a wife and a baby to support.”
“First of all,” I told her, “I’ll tell him whatever I damned please. Second, I don’t have a baby yet.” I proceeded to explain to her my theory about the change in her behavior, and suggested that I knew people who could take care of the situation for us if we wanted to return things to the way they’d been before the war, when we were happy.
Her weapon this time was a cast-iron skillet that had belonged to her mother. Even though it just clipped the back of my skull it drew blood; curiously, this got me no sympathy. I retreated and with Sally screaming obscenities and threats from our open door I ran down the building’s main staircase to the street, where I hopped into the Olds and headed straight for the Eaton Hotel, where I got a four-dollar room for the night. This, I suspected, was not going to blow over without my eating a lot of crow.
IN THE MORNING I went to see Dr. Groff again. He didn’t seem surprised to see me back so soon.
“I want to know if there’s any way to induce an abortion without the woman knowing.”
“Use your head, Ogden, how’s she supposed to not know she’s not pregnant any more?”
“I mean is there a way to do it so it looks like a miscarriage?”
He shook his head, scowling. “Nope. None that I’ll be part of. I’ve done my share of angelmaking, but never without it being the woman’s express wish. I don’t know of any other doctor who’ll do such a thing either.” He drew back and his expression softened. “Listen, you’re a nervous first timer, it’s understandable you get crazy ideas. Don’t worry about it, things won’t change as much as all that. Look at it this way: every single ancestor of yours back to Adam and Eve did it. Why should you be the one to break the chain?”
I WENT STRAIGHT to my office and found another envelope addressed to DWAYNE OGDUNN on my desk. I put it into the cardboard grocery box I’d brought along with me and started cleaning out the desk for dramatic effect. Mrs. Caspian immediately dialed Miss Grau, without having spoken a word of greeting. My intention was to empty the desk and get out,
the better to leverage my position, but as I was on my way out with the desk’s meager contents I found Herman Park blocking my path.
“You need to come with me, Mr. Ogden.”
“I’m going home,” I said.
“You’re coming with me to see Mr. Collins at his house, on his orders. Now you’ve treated me decent, Mr. Ogden, and I’ve got no itch to hurt you, but Mr. Collins said I was to go ahead if that was the only way.”
“Let me follow you in my car.”
“You don’t have a car. The one you drove in on belongs to Collins aircraft, and if you want to drive off with it later you’d better see the old man now.”
WE GOT INTO another company car, an Olds identical to mine but with a different smell to it, and drove out to the southern part of College Hill. Collins’s house was large even by the standards of the neighborhood, a three-story colonnaded stone house on an enormous wooded lot. A frail, white-haired maid who looked too old to be in service answered the door and led us in to see Collins. As we passed through the ornately decorated foyer—Oriental antiques of jade and brass on an oak chest, an enormous full-length oil portrait of old Everett in jodhpurs with his goggles hanging around his neck, a burbling fountain with a statue of a spitting nymph—I caught a glimpse of one of Mrs. Collins’s paranoiac eyes staring at us from an open sliver of a sliding door. Having met my gaze she slammed the door shut with surprising vigor and produced a solid bang.
Collins was upstairs in his room, under the covers with the lights out, when the maid led us in. “He’s expecting you,” she said.
“Mr. Collins?” Park said. “Here with Ogden.”
Collins mumbled something incomprehensible from his blanket.
“What’s that, sir?” Park said.
Collins shouted and thrashed. “Medicine, goddamnit, did he bring the fucking medicine?”
The Adjustment Page 6
