The Adjustment - By Scott Phillips Page 0,11

way to find her wanting. But Barbara wasn’t going to ruin it by talking afterward about baby clothes or what religion to raise the little interloper in.

Fifteen minutes later I was tucking my shirt back into my pants while she tugged her threadbare rayon panties back on, then deftly rehooked her brassiere behind her back. Her armpits were stubbly and dusted with something like talcum.

“In Europe the girls don’t shave under their arms,” I said, rolling the window down to toss the used rubber out onto the gravel.

“That’s disgusting.” She seemed genuinely offended.

“You get used to it. When I first got back my wife’s shaved pits looked odd to me.”

She got quiet for a minute while she pulled her stockings on and attached the garters. “I don’t sleep with married men as a rule,” she said, finally and with undisguised peevishness.

I bristled at the implied slur on my character. In a spiteful moment I pulled a ten from my wallet and put it in her cold, sweaty little hand. “Just a little something to get you by.”

She looked at it for a second like it was a turd some little songbird had laid on her palm, then wadded it up and stuck it in my shirt pocket. “What the hell do you take me for?” she said. “I don’t take money for screwing.”

“Sorry,” I said, unable to suppress a grin. When we were fully dressed I followed her back inside and bought her a drink.

“Here’s to you,” she said, raising her glass.

“Post coitum animal triste, as my grandpa used to say.” Down the hatch, burning all the way.

“What’s that mean? That a toast?”

“Means I ought to think about getting home for dinner.”

“When you coming back next?” she asked.

I didn’t answer, just got up off of the stool and walked away. The bartender on duty, a lanky, hollow-cheeked fellow, watched me go with a look on his face like I’d just shot his mother, and I realized the truth of the old saw that there’s someone for everyone in this world.

FOUR

NYMPHOMANIA: A SEMINAR

A NOTHER ENVELOPE HAD arrived at work from my secret admirer in Salem, Massachusetts, this one addressed to WAYNE ODGON COLLINS AIR WITCHIT KANS. I halfway wondered whether he wasn’t having fun with the spelling of my name on purpose. This time the note inside read:

YOU KILLED HER AND YOUR GOING TO PAY THE PRICE

That evening at home I scanned both afternoon papers. The top of the news on KFH was a stickup at a local restaurant that had happened too late for the papers. The cook was dead and so was the stickup man, shot by the cops, and the news man took pains to point out the fact that the robber was a returning vet. It didn’t mention whether he’d been able to find a job since he got back, or whether his wife had been fucking around in his absence, or whether he’d seen combat.

The crime reporter told the story in a high-pitched nasal voice that was nearly as grating as the sound of the donnybrook the Dunphys’ were having downstairs. I was in my easy chair in the parlor, as close to the radio as possible, weighing the relative merits of going out on the town versus staying in and reading. I was midway through a book from the twenties entitled Sexual History of the World War, a pretty good read that Sally didn’t want in the house. “What if someone comes over and sees it on the shelf?” she’d said when I brought it home from the secondhand book store. It was a pretty good read. I had an idea that America’s sexual habits must have changed some after the boys came back from Europe in 1918, having learned about cuntlapping and blowjobs and various other bits of European business, and similarly in the last few years I’d seen many an Iowa farm boy wake up to the myriad possibilities inherent in human coition. I wanted badly to finish the chapter on the Regulation of Army Brothels, but the Dunphys’ clashes had been running long and loud of late, and I decided to join Herman Park and the boss on their nocturnal rounds.

There was a downside to this, too; the old man was in fine form since the end of his convalescence, nastier than usual and quicker to anger. Those periods of jolly drunkenness between short-tempered hangover and havoc-wreaking, pie-eyed inebriation were shorter and rarer than before.

I caught up with them as we’d tentatively