them or lock them up. No therapy will unkink the brain once it has kinked.
So, all things considered, being turned on by black stockings wasn't such a bad sexual card to have been dealt. I laid this all out to Virginia during the trip home. I was surprised by how calmly she accepted it. I was too big of a jerk to realize that she was thinking about how it all applied to her.
After we got back home, she gamely went out and bought some stockings and tried to wear them on occasion. This was not easy. Stockings imply a whole lifestyle. They look stupid with jeans and sneakers. A woman in stockings has to wear a dress or a skirt, and not just a blue denim skirt but something nicer, more formal. She also has to wear the type of shoes that Virginia didn't own and didn't like to wear. Stockings are not really compatible with riding a bicycle to work. They were not even really compatible with our house. During our frugal grad-student days we had accumulated a lot of furniture from Goodwill, or I had hammered it together myself out of two-by-fours. This furniture turned out to be riddled with hidden snags that a person in blue jeans would never notice but that would destroy a pair of stockings in a moment. Likewise, our half-finished house and our old junker cars had many small sharp edges that were death to stockings. On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.
So, much money was spent on stockings in a fit of good intentions. Some good sex was had, though I seemed to enjoy it much more than Virginia did. She never achieved the shocking, animal intensity she had shown at Granny's house after the funeral . Attrition reduced her supply of stockings very quickly, sheer inconvenience prevented her from renewing it, and within a year after the funeral we were back to square one.
Other things were changing, though. I made a lot of money by cashing in some stock options, and we bought a new house up in the hills. We hired some movers to come pick up all of our junky furniture and move it into that house, where it looked much shabbier. Virginia's new job forced her to commute in a car. I didn't think our old junker was safe, and so I bought her a nice little Lexus with leather seats and wool carpet, all of it nicely snag- free. Soon, kids came along and I traded in my old beater pickup truck for a minivan.
Still, I couldn't bring myself to begin spending money on furniture until my back started going bad on me, and I realized it was because of the slack, twenty-year-old Goodwill mattress that Virginia and I were sleeping on. We had to buy a new bed. Since it was my back at stake, I went out and did the shopping.
I 'd rather stub out cigarettes on my tongue than go shopping. The idea of hitting every big furniture store in the area, comparing beds, made me want to die. All I wanted was to go to one place and buy a bed and have done with it. But I didn't want a shitty bed that I'd be sick of in a year, or a cheap mattress that would mess up my back again in five years.
So I went straight down to my local Gomer Bolstrood Home Gallery. I had heard people talk about Gomer Bolstrood furniture. Women, in particular, seemed to speak of it in hushed, religious tones. Their factory was said to be up in some New England town where they had been based for the last three hundred years. It was said that loose curls of walnut and oak from Gomer Bolstroods block plane had been used as tinder beneath the pyres of convicted witches. Gomer Bolstrood was the answer to a question I'd been ruminating over ever since Granny's funeral, namely: where does all of this high-quality grandma furniture come from? In every family, young people go to grandma's house for Thanksgiving, or other obligatory visits, and lust over the nice antique furniture, wondering which pieces they will take home when the old lady kicks the bucket. Some people lose patience and go to estate sales or antique stores and buy the stuff.
But if the supply of old, high-grade, heirloom-quality furniture is fixed, then where will the grannys of the future come from? I could see a situation, half a century in the future, when Virginia's and my descendants would all be squabbling over that one black walnut dresser, while bringing in Ryder trucks to haul the rest of our stuff straight to the dump. As the population grows, and the supply of old furniture remains constant, this kind of thing is inevitable. There must be a source for new granny-grade furniture, or else the Americans of tomorrow will all end up sitting in vinyl beanbag chairs, leaking little foam beads all over the floor.
The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high. Each Gomer Bolstrood chair and table really ought to come in a little felt-lined box, like a piece of jewelry. But at the time, I was rich and impatient. So I drove to Gomer Bolstrood and stormed through the door, only to be brought up short by a
My erotic feelings for Margaret made me uncomfortable. For a while, I had to restrain the impulse to say 'just sell me the biggest, most expensive bed you have.' Margaret showed me beds in different styles. The names of the styles meant nothing to me. Some looked modern and some looked old-fashioned. I pointed to a very large, high four-poster that looked like granny furniture and said. 'I'll take one of those.'
There was a three-month delay while the bed was hand-carved by New England craftsmen working at the same wage as plumbers or psychotherapists. Then it showed up at our house and was assembled by technicians in white coveralls, like the guys who work in semiconductor chip fabrication plants. Virginia came home from work. She was wearing a denim skirt, heavy wool socks, and Birkenstocks. The kids were still at school. We had sex on the bed. I performed dutifully enough, I suppose. I could not really sustain an erection and ended up with my head stuck between her bristly thighs. Even with my ears blocked by her quadriceps. I could hear her moaning and screaming. She went into erotic convulsions near the end, and almost snapped my neck. Her climax must have lasted for two or three full minutes. This was the moment when I first came to terms with the fact that Virginia could not achieve orgasm unless she was in close proximity to-preferably on top of-a piece of heirloom-grade furniture that she owned.
The window containing the image of Tom Howard's desktop vanishes. Pekka has clicked it into oblivion.
'I could not stand it any more,' he says, in his electronically generated deadpan.
'I predict a
'Is it Tom? Or a fictional character of Tom's?' Pekka asks.
'Does this mean you win the bet?' Randy asks.
'If only I can figure out how to collect on it,' Cantrell says.
Chapter 42 AFLOAT
A brown miasma has settled across the Bismarck Sea, smelling of oil and barbecue. American torpedo boats hurtle out of this reeking fog, their fat hulls barely touching the water, their giant motors curving white scars into the sea as they line up their targets: the few remaining ships in Goto Dengo's troop convoy, whose decks are now covered with a dark mat of soldiers, like moss on an old rock. The torpedos spring into the air like crossbow bolts, driven by compressed gas from tubes on the boats' decks. They belly-flop into the water, settle to a comfortable depth where the water is always calm, and draw bubble trails across the sea, heading directly for the ships. The crowds on the ships' decks fluidize and gush over the edges. Goto Dengo turns away and hears but doesn't see the explosions. Hardly any of the Nipponese troops know how to swim.
Later, the airplanes come back to strafe them some more. Swimmers who have the wit and the ability to dive are invulnerable. Those who don't are dead very soon. The airplanes leave. Goto Dengo strips a life preserver off a shattered corpse. He has the worst sunburn of his life and it is only midafternoon, so he pilfers a uniform blouse, too, and ties it around his head like a burnoose.
The ones who are still alive, and who can swim, try to converge on each other. They are in a complicated strait between New Guinea and New Britain, and tidal currents rushing through it tend to pull them apart. Some
