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welter of lace and satin and elastic, of nylon and patent leather, then he smokes a Lord Salisbury, takes two more, and prepares to spend the balance of the afternoon rowing down the little river to the lake, where he drifts in its center, smoking his stolen cigarettes and listening to the voices and laughter of the young people, whom he does not know and whom he desperately envies, slide out to him in faint timbre from the far-off beach.
    In three years’ time, he will fall in love with one of the girls who sat, that very summer, on that beach with her sister and mother, a girl whom he will meet through, somehow, a casual friend, Perry? He and this girl will often cross the footbridge to the deserted and overgrown island where, their young flesh sweating, they will drive each other mad in the dark. He will not comment to her on the rowboat, nor, of course, on the delirium of his lost afternoons, when, kneeling amid the hardly credible mountains of junk and trash at the Langs’, he showed his complaisant harem what he was made of! And in three years’ time, he will know the words for each item of underwear worn by those women, women who patiently wait for his unlikely return. The girl that he will adore will not, of course, wear the wondrously tawdry garments of his courtesans. Such is life.
    And, in three years’ time, he will occasionally sit, in early twilight, with Orville, and accept a Lord Salisbury, even though he smokes Philip Morris. Jackie will emerge from the disaster of a house in a vast reek of Aqua Velva to climb into his black Chrysler convertible and start up the hill for a night of drinking and dancing with yet another graying widow who can, as Jackie always says, “ball that goddamned jack.” But he will be uncomfortable with Orville, and, soon, will stop passing the occasional hour or so with him altogether.

    The winter before this youth met the girl with the honey-colored hair, there came to him one night a question that he had never before posed himself, one that he had, perhaps consciously, never even formulated, or, to be more precise, refused to formulate: Why did Orville, an old, gray-haired man with brown-stained teeth and yellow fingers, buy and keep every issue of Beauty Parade? As soon as this question “arranged” itself, let’s say, in his head, his face grew hot and red. He and Orville, Orville and he and the women. The women are theirs, they shared them that entire summer of his sixteenth year. He and Orville.
    Orville was a color lithographer and worked for the Journal-American.
    Jackie owned a service station, Jack’s Texaco. His best mechanic, Andy, had a sister who worked as a nurse’s aide in the Caledonia Hospital in Brooklyn.
    Linda! Louise! Candy!
    Linda! Louise! Candy!
    Linda! Louise! Candy!
    Music! Music! Music!
    Again! Again! Again!
    “My devotion, dear ladies, is endless and deep as the ocean.”

The black force of Eros

    B UT WHAT OF THE WOMEN IN BEAUTY PARADE? They have been somewhat carelessly, if rhetorically described as “big luscious women, all rich curves and swelling flesh pushing out of the tight, astonishingly abbreviated costumes” of a kind that no woman, inhabitant of the mundane world, would ever wear or even consider wearing. But the youth whose eyes have been bedazzled by the precise and overt lewdness of these erotic icons will not believe this. Let’s say that he can’t afford to believe it, read that as you will. There, lying on the daybed in the corner of the musty, stiflingly hot Lang porch, is the August 1944 issue, in which six of these stupendously free and arrogantly sexual women pose in quintessential lasciviousness. They are not wholly free, though, for their status as wives, lovers, mothers, daughters, friends, or whores, their very existence, is dependent upon the narrative skills of the foolish adolescent boy who drives them and himself hither and yon in his adoring imagination. His body grows hot and dry as he thinks of them, one at