God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater_ Or, Pearls Before Swine - Kurt Vonnegut [39]
Lila and Fred often met between the books and magazines. Fred never asked her what she was reading. And she knew he would do what he always did—would look with sad hunger at the covers of girly magazines, then pick up and open something as fat and domestic as Better Homes and Gardens. This is precisely what he did now.
"I guess my wife is out to lunch with your Mummy again," said Fred.
"I guess she is," said Lila. That ended the conversation, but Lila continued to think about Fred. She was on level with the Rosewater shins. She thought about them. Whenever she saw Fred in shorts or a bathing suit, his shins were covered with scars and scabs, as though he had been kicked and kicked and kicked every day of his life. Lila thought that maybe it was a vitamin deficiency that made Fred's shins look like that, or mange.
Fred's gory shins were victims of his wife's interior decorating scheme, which called for an almost schizophrenic use of little tables, dozens of them all through the house. Each little table had its own ashtray and dish of dusty after-dinner mints, although the Rosewaters never entertained. And Caroline was forever rearranging the tables, as though for this kind of party one day and another the next. So poor Fred was forever barking his shins on the tables.
One time Fred had had a deep cut on his chin that required eleven stitches. That fall hadn't been caused by all the little tables. It had been caused by an object that Caroline never put away. The object was always in evidence, like a pet anteater with a penchant for sleeping in doorways or on the staircase, or on the hearth.
That object, the one Fred had fallen over and cut his chin on, was Caroline Rosewater's Electrolux. Subconsciously, Caroline had sworn to herself that she would never put the vacuum cleaner away until she was rich.
Fred, thinking Lila wasn't paying any attention to him, now put down Better Homes and Gardens, picked up what looked like one hell of a sexy paperback novel, Venus on the Half-shell, by Kilgore Trout. On the back cover was an abridgment of a red-hot scene inside. It went like this:
Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely they might have had a light inside. 'Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,' she whispered, her voice husky with lust. 'Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.'
'It's a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,' the Space Wanderer replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. 'I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I'm going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.'
'But you have found your answer, you have found your answer,' she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.
He said something that she did not hear. She thrust him out at arm's length. 'What was that you said?'
'I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn't happen to be the one I'm primarily looking for.'
There was a photograph of Trout. He was an old man with a full black beard. He looked like a frightened, aging Jesus, whose sentence to crucifix-ion had been commuted to imprisonment for life.
10
LILA BUNTLINE PEDDLED her bicycle through the muffled beauty of Pisquontuit's Utopian lanes. Every house she passed was a very expensive dream come true. The owners of the houses did not have to work at all. Neither would their children have to work, nor want for a thing, unless somebody revolted. Nobody seemed about to.
Lila's handsome house was on the harborfront. It was Georgian. She went inside, put down her new books in the hallway, stole into her father's study to make certain that