Curled in the Bed of Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

a kid or two coming up to touch the car or peer in the windows, but as long as I stay with the car, I don’t generally have to worry about any damage to the vehicle. The quiet on these empty streets is eerie, like the few stunted trees here, shaped like some scrawny struggle that’s gone still, been frozen to silence.
    I sort through the books on the dashboard, trying to see what I feel like. I usually keep half a dozen books with me, because if you’re waiting for a customer who might return any minute, you can’t concentrate on a heavyweight like George Eliot, and youneed a mystery or a biography that you can pickup and put down constantly. When I know I have time, like I do now, I can dig into something solid, unless I’m just too tired to make the effort. I pick out a book of stories by Flannery O’Connor, which I am not having too much fun with, but which I feel I ought to finish, for the sake of my education.
    This Flannery O’Connor is some kind of Catholic all right, and I suspect the brutal way she goes about her business stems from that Irish last name of hers—she and my dad would get along just fine. She makes fun of her characters the whole way through the story, and then she pounds them with something terrible, a mass murderer on the loose, a little boy who hangs himself. The father of this little boy is kind of an ass, a right-thinking liberal who wants to adopt a poor black kid but won’t let his own child believe his dead mommy is in heaven. The guy just doesn’t deserve what happens to him. I’d love a chance to ask old Flannery why she took it so to heart, the mean idea that salvation should cost too much, the eye of the needle and all that.
    I get celebrity authors in the limo sometimes, and if they’re chatty, I’ll ask them that kind of stuff. They would shine me on if I mouthed pablum about how nice their books were, but they’re surprised when I ask specific questions that show I’ve read the book. Like everyone else, they prefer to assume you’re invisible. I’m not the only driver who’s had customers get hot and heavy in the back, even though I might be the only driver who’s doubly tormented by having to pretend I can’t see it or hear it.
    Sometimes the authors get over the initial shock. This one guy who wrote a book on the psychology of shopping gave me a whole song and dance about how Americans are finally working free of their Puritan roots and getting up the courage to be hedonistic. Shopping’s a reward, an intimate pleasure, and the customer can’t feel intimate if the store is too crowded or the merchandise is placed too close to where there’s a lot of traffic. Women in particular,he told me, won’t buy if they’re worried about people bumping into them from behind. I understand that, I guess. The most luxurious thing about a limo is the stillness, the way you can seal yourself off from the rest of the world with the push of a button, settle into a cozy cave with carpeting that runs up the door so that you won’t hear the soles of your own shoes scrape against anything.
    When I told Linnie about this guy, who gets paid to videotape customers in a department store and analyze their behavior, she laughed. She claims all marketing research is hogwash, even though she herself fits this guy’s profile to a T, buys in boutiques because she’s embarrassed to pick through racks of clothes in department stores. Then she’ll correct herself, say no, it isn’t hogwash—“they” work on us every minute to transform all our wants into whims that only their products can satisfy. When she works for a marketing firm herself.
    I’m never too sure about Linnie’s job description—whether she’s a glorified secretary or has really worked her way up into management. One minute she’s showing off about her expense account—we’d never have met if her