They killed their babies so they could go on fucking.
He sat back and watched the parade of whores.
He ran the slide show on a continuous loop. Occasionally he drifted off to sleep. The late-afternoon nap was a pleasure he’d rediscovered in his sixties. Like a reversion to earliest childhood, this slow toddle into drooling old age.
His dreams were unnaturally vivid. Victor blamed the pills. The VA doc had prescribed them for his prostate, which still did whatever a prostate was supposed to but was so swollen that pissing took ten minutes.
He dreamed he saw his mother outside the clinic. He called her name—Audrey!—but she didn’t hear him. She walked purposefully toward the clinic like a runway model, her long hair lifted by the breeze. In the dream he ran after her, his heart pounding. If Audrey went inside the clinic, he himself would be aborted. He was running for his life.
THE DAY, LIKE ALL DAYS, BEGAN STRATEGICALLY. HE ROSE AT first light and drank his coffee at the computer, sorting through a new batch of photos. In Boston the snow was still flying. Anthony had sent three dozen photos of women in winter coats.
The coats depressed him. It had been shortsighted to launch the Hall of Shame in winter. The women’s bodies, if they had bodies, were impossible to discern. Victor thought of women in Arab countries, swathed head to toe in fabric. Say what you want about Muslims; they were realistic about human nature in a way regular people weren’t. Male urges—Victor knew this from long experience—were not to be trifled with. If you didn’t want your wife or daughter to become stroke material for some horny male stranger, measures had to be taken. An extreme but highly effective precaution was to swaddle her in cloth.
Say what you want about Muslims, they knew how to manage their women.
He respected the Muslim discipline. And yet, if Muslims ran the world, there would be nothing to look at. Single men like Victor would die alone, of unrequited horniness, without ever seeing another ass or breast or thigh.
He respected the discipline, no question. But he wouldn’t want to live in such a world.
A knock at the door. “I’m going to Costco,” said Randy. “Where’s my list?” He was dressed for town, in what Victor thought of as his Daniel Boone outfit: a fringed buckskin jacket that had cost him six hundred dollars—for a cheapskate like Randy, a stupefying sum. He was still a runt—five-three on tiptoe—but over the years had made peace with his stature. On his whoring trips to Pittsburgh he’d dressed flamboyantly, in a long trench coat and leather ranchero hat. He was a crackerjack mechanic, a competent electrician, a better carpenter than Victor, skills acquired through a lifetime of overcompensating. Randy was so good at so many things that it was easy to forget he was short.
“On the fridge,” said Victor.
His computer pinged loudly.
Randy leered. “Is that one of your lady friends?” Impressed by the number of hours Victor spent at the computer, Randy was convinced he had a wild sex life, with dozens of virtual floozies on the hook. That a computer had other uses besides the viewing of pornography was a rumor he didn’t quite believe.
Victor ignored the question. “I’m going to the show later. Leave your license on the kitchen table.”
“Roger that. Put some ice on your face, will you?” said Randy. “It’s swole up like a basketball.”
Victor returned his attention to the screen. One girl had real potential—long curly hair, soulful brown eyes—but the effect was ruined by the puffy down jacket she wore, a ridiculous garment for women. For Victor, a pretty face wasn’t enough. He needed at the least the suggestion of a body.
He reviewed the photos in reverse order, trying to imagine these same women in sundresses, in bikinis, in virginal white underwear, and found it impossible to do.
He should have waited until summer.