Sneaky People: A Novel (22 page)

Month after month Buddy ate her meals and took her body, then dressed and went home. She had turned out to be a good cook who from the beginning could follow any recipe and soon began to invent dishes of her own, like chopped onions in mashed Idaho potatoes, which she would then stuff back into their skins and top with Parmesan cheese and brown under the broiler. Buddy could wolf down four of these at one sitting. His little potbelly grew ever plumper, and beneath it his dick was always hard, and he took her with so much appreciation that occasionally, with an exquisitely sweet sense of his never-surfeited hunger for all that she provided, she would almost reach the threshold of a genuine climax of her own but of course always restrained herself so as not to defile the purity of her part in what they had together and so pollute their home.

Nevertheless he would always dress and go to the other one, and it couldn’t be because of his wife, who he assured her mocked and reviled him incessantly. It was his son who brought him home, and therefore Laverne, who loved Buddy and was really indifferent to Naomi, with a corrosive passion hated Ralph, or rather the idea of Ralph, whom she had never seen even in a snapshot.

This little punk was the only enemy she had in the world, and sometimes when paring apples to go in her own version of chicken à la king, for which Buddy was crazy, she entertained herself with a fantasy in which she had the knife at Ralph’s neck. At times the intensity of her hatred caused Laverne to collapse in tears, because for all the violence of her language to strangers who acted badly, she couldn’t bear even to kill a mouse she once found in her bathtub: she filled the tub with lukewarm water, in which the tiny beast swam until the level reached the rim and he scrambled out, going down the pipe and into the floor.

And she no longer could relieve herself at the confessional, to which she no longer went, having at last become an adulteress because she did it, or let Buddy do it, for love, which constituted a sin that, being mortal, must be reported.

In the beginning Buddy talked of leaving home when the time was ripe. He gave no details, and Laverne would be the last to ask for them. But he had himself announced the general aim: he wanted to marry her. This had at first taken Laverne by surprise. She had never associated the fact of marriage with the idea of love: her old man had regularly beat up her mother, and if a client spoke of his wife it was usually to snarl or whine or, sometimes, in a self-hating way, to boast that she was too fine to go down on him, which was why he had to buy this service.

“But, Buddy,” she had said at the outset, “I’ll be your girl for always and cook for you and take care of you whenever you want. You got your obligations. Families make the world go round.”

“But it don’t make sense, Laverne,” said he, pounding on the mattress, “with you here and me there and both of us dying to be together. It ain’t right.”

“You said that about me working in the drive-in.” She smiled at him and put a loving hand on the bulge of the tum-tum she loved to fill.

“I sure did, and I got you out of there, right? Now I got to get
me
out of slavery.”

Trouble was, Buddy had talked too much and too well, and soon he introduced the grand slam: he not only wanted her to be his wife, but he wanted a kid. Laverne was devastated by this information.

“I’m Catholic, Buddy,” said she. “I might not work at it, but I am. So if you talk like that, you got to be serious. If I start to bring a life in the world, I’m gonna go all the way. I ain’t going to have it scraped out. I won’t be a murderess.”

“Baby, I’m dying of sincerity.” To prove this Buddy did the unprecedented: he took her hand, which he had previously moved down from his belly, off his throbbing dong. Then he put the fingers to his lips. “I swear by God almighty.” This brought tears to her eyes. She knew he was the soul of virtue, but had not been aware of this deep religious feeling at his core. “When you love somebody—” Then he broke down and they clutched each other and wept before heaven, and Laverne had a shuddering climax in the realm of pure spirit.

So this seemed to be settled, but then for more than a month Buddy never mentioned the subject, which was peculiar in that it had been his idea, and Laverne, though thinking of nothing else since, did not feel it was her place to take the initiative, being no ballbreaker. And it was Buddy, not she, who was scrupulous about contraception; he bought rubbers by the dozen and then switched to fishskins, which allowed more sensitivity but still not enough to appease his hunger for intimacy, and finally he suggested she go and get herself a diaphragm.

“I’m beginning to hate all kinds of cundrums,” he said.

“Bud, I thought,” Laverne said reluctantly, her eyes watering, “what I thought was we wouldn’t be needing protection the rest of our life, you know.”

“Let’s hope not,” Buddy said, looking between his legs, and then he got the point and leaned over and gently kissed her eyes and nose. “I’m trying to work it out, see, but I tell you it ain’t easy. I ought to stay in this town. Maybe I could sell my business, but then even if I got a nice price I would have to pay off the bank loan and then go someplace else and get started all over, and have to borrow money again, which would be tough in a place I ain’t known. Besides, you build up what they call good will when you stay in one spot for years. True, you make a few enemies with deals that go sour, but even some of them come back again in a few years. Thing is, they
know
you, which makes people feel comfortable even when they hate your guts.”

One of the reasons Laverne loved Buddy was for his professional know-how. He really knew what he was doing, like Ken Canning with the sax and clarinet, and it was her assumption that most men did not, this bias based on her experience as waitress, witnessing the rotten food forked up with relish, and as prostitute dealing with clients who took off pressed pants over polished shoes to expose yellowed underwear.

“But say I get divorced,” he went on, “Naomi’s going to stay where she is. She’ll get the house and custody of Ralph, and this is a small town: I’d be running into both of them all the time, which I wouldn’t mind that much with her, but it’d be tough with the boy. He looks up to me.”

“Sure,” Laverne said sadly.

“See,” said Buddy, “
she’d
have to divorce
me
. I ain’t got no grounds against her. Christ, she’s home all the time except maybe once a week she rides the bus downtown to the department stores, where she usually don’t buy anything even. And she’s always in a good mood, does anything I tell her to.”

Laverne thought of something important: “But you said she hates your guts, Bud.”

Buddy nodded vigorously. “Damn right. But it’s hard to put in words, Laverne. Maybe it ain’t hate. She just don’t care, which is worse than hate. She don’t really listen when you talk. She don’t notice what matters to you. She will serve food you always despised and call it your favorite.” He winced and rubbed his forehead. “I know it don’t sound that bad, but all things that matter can’t be explained, like why you like some smells and can’t stand others and why women are scared of mice and why you get a funny chill up your back if a piece of metal squeaks across concrete, see?” He peered at her with mean eyes. “One man’s meat can be another man’s poison like the fella says, and you can’t make sense out of it…. She won’t argue, you can’t get a rise outa her. Now you and me haven’t come to words, but I figure one could get under the skin of the other pretty easy if you wanted to, and I know I wouldn’t wanna tangle with you, Laverne.”

“Aw, Buddy,” she chided him lovingly.

“No, we could, I figure, and that’s the way it oughta be. But she’s weird. She gives me the creeps, if you want to know. I got the definite feeling she could catch us in bed together and would apologize and leave the room.”

“If that’s right,” said Laverne, “it’s weird all right.” She said that to be in sympathy with Buddy, who obviously regarded sexual infidelity as a maximum crime, straitlaced as he was. Speaking for herself, loving him madly, she might be happy to know he was getting outside nookie and thus giving her a rest. For the moment, however, she had to put up with him in bed so that he would be with her for the important things like eating her meals and judging her home-decorating ideas and talking about his business, and just
being
there, relaxing with his shoes off, naked under the bathrobe she bought him, belching after a good feed, there on her couch with the new flowered slipcover he thought was real good taste, laughing like a kid at radio comedy, Rochester giving the works to Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Professor Colonna, and the rest.

But he had a problem. “Gee, Bud, it’s tough, but you’ll work it out. Far be it from me to put pressure on you.”

He would cheer up. “You’re a sweet patootie. Hey, you know what, I’m hot for your body.”

But after months of this Laverne’s personality began to darken around the edges like a head of lettuce kept too long in the hydrator. Physically she was putting on weight, her bazooms and behind sagging with it, and in a brassiere and girdle her flesh puffed over straps and waistband. She got no exercise, and being around the flat all day she tended to eat a lot of candy. Unless Buddy showed up for a meal she ate no real food at all, just nibbled on cheese crackers, Hostess devil’s-food cupcakes, salted peanuts, and nickel blueberry pies, washing them down with Orange Crush or heavily sugared iced tea when summer came.

The top-floor flat was like a Tappan oven when the sun baked the roof all day, and she cooked within, along with the tuna-and-noodle casseroles she made for Buddy in the smaller model. She took to going about in her kimono, bare-ass underneath, which made him all the hornier on his visits and also sparkled the eyes of the little piss-willie who delivered groceries and whom she was idly amused to heat up, because already at fourteen or fifteen he was the characterless sort of jerk that some men took a couple more years to become, thinking only of dumping their loads.

Having so much time on her hands, Laverne thought about the entire male race and believed she would have had a lot more respect for them if they stayed permanently hard and did not after such a temporary friction spill and go limp.

They came and went, is what they did, all of them, and Buddy began to seem, as Ken Canning had in his time, no exception to the rule. There was one universal standard of prostitution: for the stated fee, you got the customer off, by whatever means. If he shot his wad while putting on the rubber, as some did, you had no further responsibility without further negotiation.

Laverne had wanted to be Buddy’s slave and not another master like Naomi. She despised men she could dominate, but began to think there was no other kind. There might even be something radically wrong with males, with sex organs hanging out where they could be hurt accidentally. Buddy once crossed his legs while sitting on her couch and yelped in pain: his Jockey shorts had entangled his balls. Sometimes he went at it so ardently in bed that, despite the rubber, the head of his little dummy was chafed and the roll of his foreskin stayed purple for hours and if unfurled was striped in pink, orange, and ruby red, and had to be doused with Mexican Heat Powder.

Laverne began to count how long he would go without mentioning his hopeless marriage unless reminded. She always gave up before he did. The one thing in which a man had more endurance than a woman was in not defining himself. By August she had heard the same statements so often that they could have switched roles in the dialogue, with her doing his lines to a T. Her own were no longer so tolerant, so agreeable, as of yore, and what she began to resent most about him was not his doing nothing about a divorce, but rather his causing her to turn bitchy; as with Ken Canning, she despised not his lying but his assumption that she could not bear the truth.

Why were men such cowards? The only exception she knew was Jesus Christ, who never had sex and stuck by his principles and was nailed to the Cross for it. In August she began to go to Mass and take communion again for the first time in years, but it seemed the first time ever, because she had had to live a lot to taste the Flesh and Blood in the bread and wine, to accept a lot of dicks and serve a lot of hamburgers before seeing the Light in which human weakness cast no shadow.

Yet she continued, for old times’ sake, in compassion and without hope, to give Buddy a chance to be more than a man. She still loved him, though gradually this love had turned from the particular, earthly sort to that with which he was regarded by his heavenly Father. By September she would not have married him had he been free, but being human she was not above the claims of spite, which alone had delayed for some days the realization of her intent to go downtown to the old red-brick convent near the railroad station and find out whether it was too late to become a novice in the Sisters of Charity.

The new delivery boy’s identification of himself as Buddy’s son was both a shock and a sign. It was as if God had Himself got fed up with the suspense. Laverne took a long bubble bath and then put on her best outfit: the green satin dress and the white picture hat. Going out into the yard, she saw the stout couple on the porch. They peered disapprovingly at her. They had seen Buddy come and go for half a year.

She sniffed at the piggish pair and said: “Anybody comes looking for me, tell ’em I have went downtown on the bus, willya?”

The old battleax smirked silently, but the man said: “Yes, ma’am.” If he had been there alone he would have been eying her jugs in that uplift that was fastened on the last hook and yet still cut her back. But it was essential that neither those nor her behind encased in the armor of two-way stretch would wobble. She would look like a lady when she went to marry Christ.