Her art tended to make people nervous. Her mother had even speculated that she’d brought the stalker upon herself, that she provoked people into perversity. “You should do more of those pretty shoes,” Viv’s mother had told her. For a time, Viv had made lithos of the designer shoes she’d splurged on one summer to console herself after a wicked breakup—python slingbacks, calf-trimmed pumps, fur clogs, kitten-heeled patent leathers. She’d had prints of a pair of Ferragamos and some Bettye Mullers and some pink leopard-print Claudia Ciutis in shows around town and had shown a few pieces in New York and one in Chicago. But any of her quasi-political work, like her paintings of black icons reconceived as white people—a strawberry-blond Butterfly McQueen in Gone with the Wind, the blue-eyed family from The Cosby Show, a pale, pink-breasted Josephine Baker in banana skirt—seemed only to make her patrons cranky.
Viv poured some Beaujolais into her coffee mug, though it was only eleven in the morning, and contemplated how she might incorporate the stalker’s collages into a dirty pop-up book—turn a page and pop, there’s Viv’s head with her goofy, girly smirk and wink atop a body with a long-stemmed black rose tattooed up one milky thigh; turn another page, and pop, a lady spread-eagled with a bird-feather boa around her arms; then, pop, a woman shaved bald down below; pop, some crotchless panties, pop, bejeweled pasties pasted on gigantically enhanced breasts, pop, a lady with a pet dog, a mottled pear, a box of chocolates, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
Ashley
I don’t know, really, if ‘finger-bang’ is quite the phrase you want to use on page nine,” Ashley said as everyone looked to her for comment on the manuscript up for discussion, a novel excerpt by a sixtysomething eccentric named Mrs. Bloom.
Ashley knew she should tread lightly—Mrs. Bloom owned the Omaha Street, the money-hemorrhaging alternative news weekly for which Ashley’s husband, Troy, worked as an editor and writer, a newspaper campaigned against by zealots offended by its back-page ads for strip clubs and hookers. Mrs. Bloom frequently seemed precipitously close to an emotional edge. “Isn’t finger-banging what high school boys do to high school girls? Shouldn’t it be, y’know, something more sensual, since the story is from the young woman’s point of view?”
“Unless she’s just too young to know what feels good,” said a chubby woman who wrote erotica featuring the celebrities on Match Game from the 1970s—gameshow orgies with Nipsey Russell on Betty White, Orson Bean on Fannie Flagg, Charles Nelson Reilly on Richard Dawson. Ashley smiled at the woman, relieved that a student in the Writing Erotica for Women class had finally stepped up to discuss what was sexy. The characters in her students’ stories seemed graceless in bed, and she suspected that a down-and-dirty back-and-forth on what the students themselves might truly find stimulating would be of the most value to them.
Ashley actually knew nothing about women’s erotica, and she felt she knew even less about what other women found to be at all erotic. She’d published her erotic novel after having had her mainstream literary novel widely rejected. An editor at a commercial publishing house had decided she liked it but found the book’s few timid, peek-a-boo sex scenes to be exactly what it needed more of. She’d recommended Ashley take her tale of the cocktail set and give it a good, dirty kick. The literary world was ready for some respectable porn, the editor had said.
Before that, the only brush Ashley had ever had with fiction intended mainly to titillate had been a story about a lusty ballerina she’d read when babysitting at the age of fourteen. After the McKenzie kids had conked out for the night, she’d snooped through Mr. McKenzie’s vanity, spritzing herself with his eau de cologne, slipping her fingertips through the fly of his Fruit of the Looms. After taking a hair from his comb and twisting it around her pinkie, Ashley had found, tucked in beneath his Izods, an old copy of Oui, a wank mag for gents.
She now remembered little about the ballerina because what had made her feel so dizzy as she thumbed past the photos of a nude blond woman with an afro, of a black woman named Pepsi wearing only an ermine cap, was the fact that she had invaded Mr. McKenzie’s most private world. She’d held in her hands not just a wellworn copy of Oui coming loose at the staples but a raw element of a grown man’s sex life, a grown man who smelled of Brut, who had little razor nicks on his neck from a sloppy shave, who had big hands with hard skin, long lady-like eyelashes, breath fragrant with the lemony scent of a few sips of a Seven-and-Seven.
“Mrs. Bloom,” started another woman, who was writing a novel about two lesbian antiporn activists, “you make mention of something that’s ‘itty-bitty,’ and also something that’s ‘teensy-weensy.’ You have to watch that, I think. It’s too . . . cutesy-wootsy.”
That, to Ashley’s disappointment, was the typical level of discussion in the workshop—the students futzing over the arrangement of adjectives. Ashley had hoped the recent change of venue from the strip-mall community college to her apartment in the Old Market, the overstuffed sofas and throw pillows, the lilies on the windowsill, the midday wine, would give the class a much-needed slap of intimacy.
She emptied the rest of the merlot into her glass, then excused herself to step into the kitchen for another bottle as the class continued to dissect Mrs. Bloom’s soft porn. Ashley was anxious to get started planning the Sugar Shop party she was having that evening—she had sweet red peppers to roast and a roasted-tomato gazpacho to make. She even looked forward to deveining the shrimp (Deveining? she stopped to think. Or do you just vein a shrimp?) and to breaking down in a flood of tears as she chopped a Vidalia onion. That would be Ashley’s notion of the truly erotic: a day devoted entirely to her kitchen.
When Ashley returned to the living room with two freshly uncorked bottles of wine, she found that the workshopping of the story had grown heated. One pursed-lipped woman objected to the fact that the female character was so child-like. But that woman herself wrote about age-indeterminate pixies who spent their days and nights flitting naked from pink poppy to pink poppy, making love on a petal or on a leaf, white pollen snowing down upon them.
But it was Peach, the twin who co-owned Mermaids Singing, Used & Rare, who was making the most noise. Peach had been cross, it seemed, ever since having been featured in “Flirty and Under Forty: Ten Omaha Beauties to Watch” in O! La La, a “fine living” women’s magazine, alongside Ashley’s friend Viv and a gaggle of other pretty businesswomen and artists, many of whom Ashley knew one way or another, given the basic small-towniness of the metro area. In addition to her work at the bookshop, Peach belonged to an experimental performance troupe that put on productions at midnight at the Rubberneck Theatre, a black box around the corner from the bookstore. Peach had looked stunning in the magazine’s glossy pages, posing on the stage in a Louis Quatorze—looking chaise, dressed to the nines beneath a painting of a pudgy odalisque naked but for a peacock feather. Now her elegant blond upsweep kept showing up in the mail, pasted by the stalker onto pages torn from pornographic magazines.
“Shouldn’t I find the guy in the story sexy, at least?” Peach asked Mrs. Bloom. “I hate the things he says to her.” Peach’s erotica seemed to have an autobiographical bent, explicitly detailing an affair between a late-twentysomething actress and a married ad exec. In the section she’d turned in to the workshop the week before, the actress started receiving pornographic collages from a stalker.
“But that’s the point!” Mrs. Bloom said, raising her hands folded prayer-like, the shiny fabric of her caftan rippling with her movement. She then grabbed fistfuls of her