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.”