accompanied Hutchmeyer everywhere. Hutchmeyer selected the lowest chair in the room.
'You don't say. A novel?'
Sonia cycled busily and nodded.
'What's it called?' asked Hutchmeyer for whom first things came first.
'Pause O Men for the Virgin.'
'Pause O Men for the what?'
'Virgin,' said Sonia and cycled more vigorously than ever. Hutchmeyer glimpsed a thigh. 'Virgin? You mean you've got a religious novel that's hot?'
'Hot as Hades.'
'Sounds good, a time like this. It fits with the Jesus freaks and Superstar and Zen and how to mend automobiles. And it's women's year so we got The Virgin.'
Sonia stopped peddling. 'Now don't get carried away, Hutch. It's not that kind of virgin.'
'It's not?'
'No way.'
'So there's different kinds of virgin. Sounds interesting. Tell me.' And Sonia Futtle, seated on the bicycle machine, told him while her legs moved up and down with a delicious lethargy that lulled his critical faculties. Hutchmeyer made only token resistance. 'Forget it,' he said when she had finished. 'You can deepsix that crap. Eighty years old and still fucking. That I don't need.'
Sonia climbed off the exerciser and stood in front of him. 'Don't be a dumbcluck, Hutch. Now you listen to me. You're not going to throw this one out. Over my dead body. This book's got class.'
Hutchmeyer smiled happily. This was Fuller Brush talking. The sales pitch. No soft sell. 'Convince me.'
'Right,' said Sonia. 'Who reads? Don't answer. I'll tell you. The kids. Fifteen to twenty-one. They read. They got the time. They got the education. Literacy rate peak is sixteen to twenty. Right?'
'Right,' said Hutchmeyer.
'Right, so we've got a seventeen-year-old boy in the book with an identity crisis.'
'Identity crises is out. That stuff went the way of all Freud.'
'Sure, but this is different. This boy isn't sick or something.'
'You kidding? Fucking his own grandmother isn't sick?'
'She isn't his grandmother. She's a woman a '
'Listen baby, I'll tell you something. She's eighty, she's no goddam woman no more. I should know. My wife, Baby, is fifty-eight and she's drybones. What the beauty surgeons have left of her. That woman has had more taken out of her than you'd believe possible. She's got silicon boobs and degreased thighs. She's had four new maidenheads to my knowledge and her face lifted so often I've lost count.'
'And why?' said Sonia. 'Because she wants to stay all woman.'
'All woman she ain't. More spare parts than woman.'
'But she reads. Am I right?'
'Reads? She reads more books than I sell in a month.'
'And that's my point. The young read and the old read. You can kiss the in-betweens goodbye.'
'You tell Baby she's old and you can kiss yourself goodbye. She'd have your fanny for a dishcloth. I mean it.'
'What I'm saying is that you've got literacy peak sixteen to twenty, then a gap and another LP sixty on out. Tell me I'm lying.'
Hutchmeyer shrugged. 'So you're right.'
