The Dick Gibson Show (32 page)

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.

But something human happens.

One day … Where’s my
son
going? Why’s he leaving? Edward? Connie,
don’t
go. Youth should have a perspective on its parents … Well, they’ve gone. I must have shamed them. Isn’t that the way with the young? They think the older generation is stodgy and then they’ve no patience with confession. Oh well, let them go. Where was I?

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: “One day—”

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: Yes, that’s right. One day a woman came into my drugstore I’d never seen before. She was pretty, in her early or middle twenties perhaps, but very small. Not just short—though she was, extremely short; she couldn’t have been much more than five feet—but
small.
Dainty, you know? Maybe she wore a size six dress. I don’t know sizes. She could probably buy her clothes in the same department school girls do. What do they call that? Junior Miss? Anyway, she was very delicate. Tinier than Mary Odata. A nice face, sweet, a little old-fashioned perhaps, the sort of face you see in an old sepia photograph of your grandmother’s sister that died. A
very
pretty little woman.

I saw her looking around, going up and down the aisles. Every once in a while she would stoop down to peer in a low shelf. I have these big round mirrors in the corners to spy on shoplifters. I watched her in the mirrors. If I lost her in one mirror I picked her up again in another. A little doll going up and down the aisles in the convex glass.

I knew what was up. A woman knows where things are. It’s an instinct. Have you ever seen them in a supermarket? They understand how it’s organized. It has nothing to do with the fact that they shop more than men. A man goes into a grocery, he has to ask where the bread is. Not a woman: she knows where it’s
supposed
to be. Well, this woman is obviously confused. She’s looking for something which she knows is always in one place, whatever store she goes into. So I
knew
what was up: she was looking for the sanitary napkins.

Most places they keep them on the open shelves to spare the ladies embarrassment. I don’t spare anyone anything. I keep them behind the counter with me. I want to know what’s going on with their periods. They have to ask.

Finally she came over to me. “I don’t see the Kotex,” she says.

“This is the Kotex department,” I say, and reach under the counter for a box. “Will there be anything else? We have a terrific buy on Midol this week. Or some girls prefer the formula in this. I’ve been getting good reports; they tell me it’s very effective against cramps.” I hand her a tin of Monthleaze. “How are you fixed for breath sweetener?” I push a tube of Sour-Off across the counter to her.

She ignores my suggestions but picks up the box of Kotex and looks at it. “This is Junior,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I give her Regular.

“Don’t you have Super?”

“I thought this was for you,” I tell her, and give her the size she asks for.

A month later she came in again. “Super Kotex,” she said. I give her the box and don’t see her again for another month. This time when she comes in I hand her the Super and start to ring up the sale.

“I’d better take the tampon kind too,” she says. She examines the box I give her. “Is there anything larger than this?”

“This is the biggest,” I say, swallowing hard.

“All right.”

“Tell me,” I say, “are these for you?”

She blushes and doesn’t answer.

I hadn’t dared to think about it, though it had crossed my mind. Now I could think of nothing else. I forgot about the others. This girl inflamed me. Bernie burns. It was astonishing—a girl so small. My life centered on
her
center, on the prodigious size of her female parts.

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: Say “cunt.”

D
ICK
G
IBSON
: Wait a minute—

B
EHR
-B
LEIBTREAU
: It’s all right. Say “cunt.”

B
ERNIE
P
ERK
: …
Cunt.
The size of her cunt. The disproportion was astonishing to me. Kotex
and
Tampax. For all I knew, she used the Kotex
inside.
I
did
know it. I conceived of her smallness now as the result of her largeness. It was as if her largeness
there
sapped size from the rest of her body, or that by some incredible compensation her petiteness lent dimension elsewhere. I don’t know. It was all I could think of. Bernie burns.

I had to know about her, at least find out who she was, whether she was married. I tried to recall if I had seen a wedding band, but who could think of fingers, who could think of hands? Bernie burns. Perk percolates.

That night I counted ahead twenty-eight days to figure when I might expect her again. The date fell on September 9, 1956.

She didn’t come—not then, not the next month.

Then, one afternoon, I saw her in the street. It was just after Thanksgiving, four or five days before her next period. I raised my hat. “Did you have a pleasant holiday?” I asked. My face was familiar to her but she couldn’t place me. I counted on this.

“So so.” The little darling didn’t want to embarrass me.

“I thought you might be going away for Thanksgiving,” I said.

She looked puzzled but still wanted to be polite. “My roommate went home but I stayed on in Hartford,” she said. “Actually she invited me to go with her but my boss wouldn’t give me Friday off.”

Ah. I thought, she has a roommate, she’s a working girl. Good.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, “but I find myself in a very embarrassing position. I don’t seem to be able to remember your name.”

“Oh,” she said, and laughed, “I can’t remember yours either. I know we’ve seen each other.”

“I’m Bernie Perk.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m Bea Dellaspero. I still don’t—”

“I don’t either. You see what happens? Here we are, two old friends and neither of us can—
Wait
a minute. I think I’ve got it. I’ve seen you in my store. I’m the druggist—Perk’s Drugs on Mutual.”

“Oh.” She must have remembered our last conversation for she became very quiet. We were standing outside a coffee shop, and when I invited her to have a cup with me she said she had to be going and hurried off.

Her number was in the phone book, and I called right from the coffee shop. If only her roommate’s in, I thought, crossing my fingers for luck.

“Where’s Bea? Is Bea there?”