God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [38]
She was humiliated to discover that it was not true. She honestly believed that she was an intellectual, but she knew almost nothing, and every problem she ever considered could be solved by just one thing: money, and lots of it. She was a frightful housekeeper. She cried when she did housework, because she was convinced that she was cut out for better things.
As for the Lesbian business, it wasn't particularly deep on Caroline's part. She was simply a female chameleon trying to get ahead in the world.
"Lunch with Amanita again?" Fred whinnied.
"Why not?"
"This gets to be damn expensive, fancy lunches every day."
"It isn't every day. It's twice a week at the very most." She was brittle and cold.
"It's still a hell of an expense, Caroline."
Caroline held out a white-gloved hand for money. "It's worth it to your wife."
Fred gave her money.
Caroline did not thank Fred. She left, took her place on a fawn-colored cushion of glove leather, next to the fragrant Amanita Buntline in Amanita's powder-blue Mercedes 300-SL.
Harry Pena looked at Fred's chalky face appraisingly. He made no comment. He lit a cigar, departed—went fishing for real fish with his two real sons—in a real boat on a salty sea.
Lila, the daughter of Amanita Buntline, sat on the cold floor of the news store, reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which, along with William Bur-rough's Naked Lunch, she had taken from the Lazy Susan book rack. Lila's interest in the books was commercial. At thirteen, she was Pisquontuit's leading dealer in smut.
She was a dealer in fireworks, too, for the same reason she was a dealer in smut, which was: Profit. Her playmates at the Pisquontuit Yacht Club and Pisquontuit Country Day School were so rich and foolish that they would pay her almost anything for almost anything. In a routine business day, she might sell a seventy-five-cent copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover for ten dollars and a fifteen-cent cherry bomb for five.
She bought her fireworks during family vacations in Canada and Florida and Hong Kong. Most of her smut came from the open stock of the news store. The thing was, Lila knew which titles were red hot, which was more than her playmates or the employees of the news store knew. And Lila bought the hot ones as fast as they were tucked into the Lazy Susan. All her transactions were with the idiot behind the lunch counter, who forgot everything faster than it could happen.
The relationship between Lila and the news store was wonderfully symbiotic, for hanging in the store's front window was a large medallion of gilded polystyrene, awarded by the Rhode Island Mothers to Save Children from Filth. Representatives of that group inspected the store's paperback selection regularly. The polystyrene medallion was their admission that they had not found one filthy thing.
They thought that their children were safe, but the truth was that Lila had cornered the market.
There was one sort of smut that Lila could not buy at the news store—dirty pictures. She got them by doing what Fred Rosewater had so often lusted weakly to do—by answering raunchy ads in The American Investigator.
Large feet now intruded into her childish world on the news store floor. They were the feet of Fred Rosewater.
Lila did not conceal her red-hot books. She went on reading, as though The Tropic of Cancer were Heidi:
The trunk is open and her things are lying around everywhere just as before. She lies down on the bed with her clothes on. Once, twice, three