“Listen,” I told her one day, “I suppose you have rubber sheets.”
“No good,” she said.
“You’ll ruin your mattress.”
“It’s already ruined. When I tried a rubber sheet, the water collected in the depression under my behind. I lay in it all night and caught cold.”
The thought of that pee-induced cold maddened me. Ah God, the bizarre body awry, messes caught in underwear — love tokens, unhealth a function of love.
There were so many I can’t remember them all.
I knew I had to leave Old MacDonald. I was held down, you see. Who knew what secrets might not be unlocked if I could get my hands on the prescriptions those ladies brought in! When my father died and left me four thousand dollars, I used it to open the store I have now. I signed notes right and left to get my stock and fixtures together. My wife thought it was madness to gamble this way in the depth of the depression, but I was pining with love.
There were so many …
Let’s see. These have been a few of the women in my life:
Rose Barbara Hacklander, Miss Hartford of 1947, 38–24—36, a matter of public record. What is not a matter of public record is that she had gingivitis, a terrible case, almost debilitating, and came near to losing the title because of her reluctance to smile. She wanted to shield her puffy gums, you understand. Only I, Bernie Perk, her druggist, knew. On the night before the finals she came to me in tears. She showed me — in the back of the store— lifting a lip, reluctant as a country girl in the Broadway producer’s office raising the hem of her skirt, shy, and yet bold too, wanting to please even with the shame of her beauty. I looked inside her mouth. The gums were filled, tumid with blood and pus, enormous, preternatural, the gums of the fat lady in the circus, obscuring her teeth, in their sheathing effect seeming actually to sharpen them, two rings of blade in her mouth. And there, in the back of her mouth at the back of the store, pulling a cheek, squeezing it as one gathers in a trigger — cankers, cysts like snow- flakes.
“Oh, Doc,” she cried, “what will I do? It’s worse tonight. The salve don’t help. It’s nerves — I know it’s nerves.”
“Wait, I can’t see in this light. Put your head here. Say ‘Ah.’”
“Ah,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. “Ah!”
“What’s to be done? Is there anything you can give me?”
“Advice.”
“Advice?”
“Give them the Giaconda smile. Mona Lisa let them have.”
And she did. I saw the photograph in the newspaper the morning after the finals. Rose Barbara crowned (I the Queenmaker), holding her flowers, the girls in her court a nimbus behind her, openly smiling, their trim gums flashing. Only Miss Hartford of 1947’s lips were locked, her secret in the dimpled parentheticals of her sealed smile. I still have the photograph in my wallet.
Do you know what it means to be always in love? Never to be out of it? Each day loving’s gnaw renewed, like hunger or the need for sleep? Worse, the love unfocused, never quite reduced to this one girl or that one woman, but always I, the King of Love, taking to imagination’s beds whole harems? I was grateful, I tell you, to the occasional Rose Barbara Hacklander for the refractive edge she lent to lust. There were so many. Too many to think about. My mind was like the waiting room of a brothel. Let them leave my imagination, I prayed, the ones with acne, bad breath, body odor, dandruff, all those whose flyed ointment and niggered woodpile were the commonplace of my ardor.
Grateful also to Miss Sheila Jean Locusmundi who had corns like Chiclets, grateful to the corns themselves, those hard outcroppings of Sheila Jean’s synovial bursa. I see her now, blonde, high-heeled, her long, handsome legs bronzed in a second skin of nylon.
I give her foot plasters. She hands them back. “Won’t do,” she says.
“Won’t do? Won’t do? But these are our largest. These are the largest there are.”
“Pop,” she whispers, “I’ve got a cop’s corns.”
A cop’s corns. A cornucopia. I shake my head in wonder. I want to see them. Sheila Jean. I invite her behind the counter, to the back of the store. If I see them I might be able to help her, a doc like me. Once out of view of the other customers Sheila Jean succumbs: she limps, I feel the pinch. That’s right, I think, don’t let them see. In my office she sits down in front of my rolltop desk and takes off her shoes. I watch her face. Ease comes in like the high tide. Tears of painless gratitude appear in her eyes. All day she waits for this moment. She wiggles her toes. I see bunions bulge in her stockings. It’s hard for me to maintain my professional distance. “Take off your stockings, Miss Locusmundi,” I manage. She turns away in my swivel chair and I hear the soft, electric hiss of the nylon. She swings around, and redundantly points.
“I see,” I murmur. “Yes, those are really something.” They are. They are knuckles, ankles. They are boulders, mountain ranges.
“May I?” I ask.
She gives me her foot reluctantly. “Oh, God, don’t touch them, Pop.”
“There, there, Miss Locusmundi, I won’t hurt you.” I hold her narrow instep, my palm a stirrup. I toss it casually from one hand to the other, getting the heft.
“Ticklish,” Sheila Jean says. She giggles.
I peer down closely at the humpy callosities, their dark cores. There is a sour odor. This, I think, is what Miss Hartford’s gingivitis tastes like. I nod judiciously; I take their measure. I’m stalling because I can’t stand up yet. When finally I can, I sculpt plasters for her. I daub them with Derma-Soft and apply them. When she walks out she is, to all eyes but mine, just another pretty face.
Grateful too — I thank her here — to Mary Odata, a little Japanese girl whose ears filled with wax. I bless her glands, those sweet secretions, her lovely auditory canal. Filled with wax, did I say? She was a candle mine. I saved the detritus from the weekly flushings I administered.
Her father took her to live in Michigan, but before she left she wrote me a note to thank me for all I had done. “Respected R. Ph. Perk,” she wrote, “my father have selectioned to take me to his brother whom has a truck farm in the state of Michigan, but before I am going this is to grateful acknowledgment your thousand kindnesses to my humble ears. In my heart I know will I never to find in Michigan an R. Ph. as tender for my ears as you, sir. Mine is a shameful affliction, but you never amusemented them, and for this as for your other benefits to me I thank. Your friend, M. Odata.”
When I closed the store that night I went into my office and molded a small candle from the cerumen I had collected from her over the months, ran a wick through it, turned off the lights, and reread Mary’s letter by the glow of her wax until it sputtered and went out. Call me a sentimental old fool, but that’s what I did
Not to mention Mrs. Louise Lumen, perpetual wetnurse, whose lacteal glands were an embarrassment to her three or even four years beyond her delivery, or flatulent Cora Moss, a sweet young thing with a sour stomach in the draft of whose farts one could catch cold. There were so many. There was Mrs. Wynona Jost whose unwanted hair no depilatory would ever control. Her back, she gave me to understand, was like an ape’s. Super-follicled Mrs. Jost! And psoriatic Edna Hand. And all the ladies with prescriptions. I knew everybody’s secret, the secret of every body. And yet it was never the worm in the apple I loved but only a further and final nakedness, almost the bacteria itself, the cocci and bacilli and spirilla, the shameful source of their ailment and my privilege. I was deferential to this principle only: that there exists a nudity beyond mere nudity, a covertness which I shielded as any lover husbands his sweet love’s mysteries. I did not kiss and tell; I did not kiss at all. Charged with these women’s cabala I kept my jealous counsel. I saved them, you see. Honored and honed a sort of virginity in them by my silence. Doc and Pop. And knight too in my druggist’s gorget. I could have gone on like this forever, content with my privileged condition, satisfied to administer my drugs and patent medicines and honor all confidences, grateful, as I’ve said, for the impersonal personality of the way I loved, calling them Miss, calling them Missus, protecting them from myself as well as from others, not even masturbating, only looking on from a distance, my desire speculative as an issue of stock.