Sneaky People: A Novel (26 page)

Naomi had had only one man in her life. If, when she was a girl, a tramp exposed himself, she calmly looked the other way. If, when dancing, in her high school years, a boy pressed his ridiculous bulge against her abdomen, she backed off. If a tongue was intruded into a polite goodnight kiss, she bit it; if a hand got fresh, she slapped the attendant face. Though a virgin she was well aware of vulnerability of testicles and was not hesitant to cock a knee.

Even with Buddy, to whom she had given her heart immediately because that was all he had requested in his shy courtship, she had been none too keen to share a bed. But when he appeared, that first night of the honeymoon they took at home in the little flat, because he had just been hired by the local Essex agency, after he had pulled the Murphy bed from the wall and gone discreetly into the kitchen while she used the bathroom and pulled on the same flannel nightgown she had worn for some years as a maiden (it was January and the coal-oil heater exuded more stink than warmth), after she had climbed in and covered up with the gray U.S. Army surplus blankets, Buddy came out, attired—well, she could not resist him in brown derby, a huge red bow tie with white polka dots, a suit of long underwear, and rubber knee boots. He carried a ukulele, which he strummed to no tune, and was singing, abominably, “The Yanks are coming…”

Naomi’s was not a sheltered imagination: it was afforded great range by the restrictions of her life, which were happily self-imposed. She had always been notorious for her modest wardrobe and her disinterest in cosmetics. The mirror-sight of herself wearing jewelry caused her to smirk. What moved her was written language. Among the furniture of her memory were the names “Chesebrough,” the company that made Vaseline, and “Burroughs Wellcome,” who produced Empirin Compound. She read every label, whether that cemented to the Castoria bottle or that, forbidding its removal under pain of law, which dangled from anything stuffed with Kapok.

If while walking on the pavement she stepped first in chewing gum and then on a detached page of a magazine, she peeled off the latter and read it while awaiting the bus. One such fragment comprised pp. 29-30 of a publication entitled, according to the running head on one side,
Hotdog
. Much of page 29 was occupied by the photograph of a young woman with tremendous bare breasts. On page 30 was a column of jokes, concluding with a special notice, in a printed box, to the effect that the editors of
Hotdog
, in charity to victims of the Depression, would be happy to give a free goose to any girl who called in at their offices.

The column was flanked on either side by a number of advertisements: the “draw-me” darky of the correspondence art school, the taxidermy institute’s stuffed-squirrel-holding-ashtray, the novelty company’s exhortation to “fool friends and policemen” by purchasing a device with which to throw your voice inside locked trunks and closets, and an offer of ten of the “kind of books men like” for one dollar, postage paid by the seller, Continental Products.

Naomi had been a wife for almost a decade and a half, and a mother for almost as long, and yet had no sense of the kind of book men liked. In Buddy’s grasp she had never seen any volume but the telephone directory. Her father had been a plumber and though deft with his hands when they manipulated a wrench, with a pen he was at a loss, hardly able to scratch his signature, and when holding a newspaper he was generally asleep behind it.

Her own addiction to the printed word had been acquired on the model of her mother, who went regularly to the public library and also belonged to a little group of like-minded women who would get together over coffee and cake once a month and discuss the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox (“Laugh and the world laughs with you”) and Felicia D. Hemans, authoress of “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.”

In school Naomi’s peculiar strength was in English. Her composition on
Black Beauty
was read aloud by the teacher; she could recite from memory twice as much of
Evangeline
as was required; and at quite an early age she began to read adult books such as the novels of Gene Stratton Porter.

Many diaristic episodes were suggested by memories of the favorite books of her childhood,
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
and
Girl of the Limberlost
(relations with animals), and, in honor of the taste of her young-womanhood, the romances of Maysie Grieg and Ruby M. Ayres (gentlemen suitors with whips and manacles). Perversions and corruptions, that is, of what Naomi found good and true. Because, except for Buddy, that was what men liked—the realization of which confirmed what she had believed her life long, but with the difference that she had never before seen the utility in it.

And had not yet with the arrival of the first plain-wrapped parcel from Continental Products, addressed to “Mr. N. Sandifer,” which when opened yielded ten “books” that were really little pamphlets filled with the kind of jokes printed in
Hotdog
, most of them mildly scatological, concerning flatulent fat ladies or the preacher’s wife seen dusting her aspidistra in the window of the manse.

But included in the packet was an announcement of yet another series for those readers who craved “spicier” fare, and the quoted price implied as much: a dollar each, two-fifty for any three. Never profligate with the household money Buddy gave her, Naomi was wont to accumulate quite a little fund by the end of each month, enough usually so that she could refuse one week’s allowance in four, and with pride accept Buddy’s affectionate reproof. As to her personal consumption, two housedresses, bought on sale, lasted her a year, and Twenty Grands, at ten cents a pack, were inferior to fifteen-cent Lucky Strikes only on the gauge of snobbery.

However, a motive that she neither questioned nor explored caused her to invest still another precious dollar in Continental’s latest offer. This arrived as a thirty-two-page booklet entitled
Clothed in Innocence
, with no explanation as to why it had replaced her choice,
What the Butler Saw through the Keyhole
.

The slender paperbound volume proved to be a singular work concerned primarily with the wardrobes of its characters and only as an afterthought with anatomy.

After announcing himself as her master, the hawk-nosed gent demanded the removal of her wretched underwear before his eyes and the resumption of the transparent jacket, directed her to replace the boots according to a complex scheme, strolled around her, lifting the ballet skirt here and there with the tip of his gold-headed walking stick to pluck at the “suspenders,” which from their location seemed to be garters, discoursed on fabrics, buttons, buckles, and the like, and only several pages farther on drew from his pocket a tin of shoe wax, fell to his knees, and polished her boots to a mirror gloss.

Subsequent chapters struck the same note with various other members of the manorial household, both family and servants, and the narrative culminated in an orgy of costume in which the classes, and sexes as well, were extravagantly confused, cook wearing the master’s shooting suit, groom donning the nanny’s uniform, and the mistress dressed as a male Highlander, her kilt cut away in front to display her natural sporran, a rare display of genitals in this company.

“By Lady Penelope Clavering” appeared on the title page. Whether or not this was a pen name, Naomi did not question that the style and the theme treated were those natural to a woman: the gracious language, with its limpid rhythms, the displacement of focus from vile anatomy, willy-nilly common to all, to its coverings, which could be regulated by taste, reflected much the same sensibility and cultivation as that of her favorite respectable authoresses.

Was it sacrilegious to suppose that were Mary Elizabeth Braddon to try her hand, in mischievous caprice, at erotica, the product might resemble
Clothed in Innocence
?

Naomi had written nothing but letters since her last high school book report, on
The Four Million
, by O. Henry. At the Christmas prior to her discovery of the fragment of
Hotdog
three months later, Gladys had given her a blank diary, the first she had ever owned, though when they were girls Gladys had kept one for a while and in it recorded crushes, invariably unrequited, on successive boys. To hear such passages read aloud was unbearable.

At the time she found the ad placed by Continental Products, Naomi had yet to inscribe a word in the blank journal. It would have been nonsensical to enter the events of her typical day, which though never boring her while in progress would, abstracted and falsified in language, look otherwise to the reader, who in utter philosophical absurdity, must by definition be only the writer thereof, namely herself—else it were no diary. Naomi always had a firm command of identity. “Nay knows her own mind” had long been heard throughout the family.

In possession of
Clothed in Innocence
, however, she was caused to believe, as she had never been by the work of Ruby M. Ayres,
et al.
, with its realistic delineation of romantic love, that when it came to lust, a totally fictitious subject, she herself could do as well as Lady Penelope Clavering, what was required being merely the unleashing of fancy. The result brought a dollar for each thirty-two pages. Naomi had married Buddy the day after graduating from high school. She had saved but never earned. All her life such money as she received had been given her by men, merely, as it were, for existing as daughter and wife.

It amused her to think of serving as noncorporeal prostitute to anonymous and undifferentiated hordes of men; to be paid and not to be touched; to infect them like a succubus. In this spirit she began the fluent account of Mary Joy’s assault on the virilities of half the world. For it was indeed Mary who, beginning at age eight with the seduction of the huge Negro, set her partners in motion, including even those, like the whip-wielding Chinaman, to whom she might for her own ends temporarily relinquish physical command but over whom at all times she retained moral authority.

The composition went as fast as Naomi could move her fountain pen, requiring little deliberation and no pretext; her imagination proved to be a miraculous pitcher always brimful of slime. Having backtracked to January 1, she came forward to March 15 in a week’s writing, alternating between reminiscences of earlier times and current adventures.

At the accumulation of seventy-four pages she halted and wrote a letter to Continental Products, giving as return address the postal box she took downtown.

Naomi had not intended to inscribe another word in the private volume until Continental responded, but to her amazement she found that the day on which she did not write was emotionally barren and physically attended by headaches, indigestion, and muscular cramps, from none of which she had ever suffered before and from all of which she got relief almost as soon as she lifted her pen. Therefore she proceeded with Mary, and by the time the answer came, three weeks later, her heroine had sailed around the calendar on an ocean of semen and was currently in port for Christmas, having a go at her long-lost father, who was dressed as Santa Claus.