As Mrs. Bloom, drinking alone only a few tables away, clawed around for her pill box, Peach Mobley’s head slipped from her purse and gently back-and-forthed, autumn-leaf-like, as it fell to the floor of the wine bar. Mrs. Bloom glanced around to see if anyone had noticed, then plucked Peach’s paper noggin from the tile and returned it to a baggie with all the other heads and the hands and feet recently clipped from her stockpiled collection of the “Flirty and Under Forty” issue of O! La La magazine. With her purse in her lap, her hands sunk into it, she compulsively touched at all the pieces of the women precisely cut out with an X-Acto knife. It had gotten so that, by simply blindly running her finger along the edge of a cheek or the heel of a shoe or the sweep of a curl, she could identify who was who.
Mrs. Bloom took the hand of Viv, Omaha Beauty No. 4 in the magazine spread, from the baggie in her purse and wantonly leaned it against the stem of her glass.
You were expecting a woman-hating man? Mrs. Bloom rehearsed in her head, tempted to stand atop Ashley Allyson’s coffee table during the Sugar Shop party and confess to her stalking. Would it be better if I told you I’m not entirely what I seem to be? Maybe I’m a twisty little pre-post-op transsexual on my way to Trinidad, Colorado, the American home of state-of-the-art genital-snipping and trench-digging machinery, or whatever the hell they use to stick a permanent hitch in your giddyup. Would you be happier with that sad little portrait? Are you more comfortable with yet another druggy gender freak, a lost boy leaking testosterone from his nips and tucks? Maybe in the horror movie of your mind, I don’t just stalk these women, but I bugger them too, strapping on some phallic gizmo with hellish bells and whistles to stand in for the poor cooked sausage in my panties. Mrs. Bloom pictured herself a character in an Almodovar movie, a lethal half-man, half-woman played by a stately Spanish actress in sunglasses and slinky floral dresses, a pearl-handled pistol stuck in her garter.
Mrs. Bloom planned to take her Folger’s can of illgot cash across the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the Triple X Carnivale, a porn shop chock-full of full-color photos of all the various varieties of rape. She was running out of compromising positions, and adult stores were illegal in Omaha.
It was a shame, Mrs. Bloom thought, that she must cheat and thieve with her coffee-can donations in order to afford the stalking. For years now, Mrs. Bloom had struggled to put together the Omaha Street, a real sacred-cow tipper, a rag of integrity that spat and vinegared on every dropping of injustice she got wind of. But keeping honest and keeping advertisers were often contradictory tasks. Even the fluff could prove incendiary—a restaurant reviewer declares somebody’s duck à l’orange to be a touch gamy, and the next thing you know, you’re offering free ad contracts to the restaurateur to make amends. Meanwhile, O! La La, a breezy blowjob-of-a-thing, skips along empty-headed and inoffensive, pissing daisies and shitting lollipops, and it manages to staff twelve adequately paid hacks and to afford its publisher a house on a lake and a downtown condo down the street from the Performing Arts Center.
So it was a pretty serendipity that had reared its ugly head one day a few months before. The Omaha Street and O! La La shared the same printer, see, and one day the printer’s truck accidentally dropped off at the Street one palette of publications too many—on Mrs. Bloom’s dock had been left one thousand copies of the “Flirty and Under Forty” issue of O! La La, one thousand glossy images of each lucky bitch tastefully profiled and dressed up in fine linen and silk, ripe for the plucking. Though the truck driver realized his mistake and returned an hour or so later, it was by then already too late. Mrs. Bloom had devised a plan that would turn O! La La’s pandering into an embarrassment for all concerned, and she’d hidden the magazines away. Mrs. Bloom could make those women regret ever having sought out special attention for their beauty and youth and success, and the publisher of O! La La would get a nifty black eye.
At first, Mrs. Bloom thought the most she would do would be to print some porn off some of the more guileless sites in the recesses of the Internet, glue on some of the women’s characteristics, and send these shockers out for a week or two, just enough to knock that queeny, mewling, pompous publication down a notch. She wasn’t even sure if her tactic was original—it had sprung to mind so quickly, so fully formed, it seemed she’d read about such a thing before, this mixing up of body parts.
But soon enough, the magazines in the basement began to breathe. The Omaha beauties, their telltale hearts a-beat, lay there pressed within the pages, immobile but alive, like bludgeoned victims left for dead. Mrs. Bloom’s scheme began to blossom with potential and sublimity. She would seek out quality printed porn, new and vintage, and her every gesture of harassment would be a piece of outsider art, a carefully articulated sexual quip. It would be a performance in collage, and when she felt she’d said all she’d wanted, only then would she confess. After her admission, which would be on the cover of the Omaha Street, and after serving her eighteen days or whatever paltry sentence you might get slapped with for bugging dames, she’d publish a tell-all. The book would be issued by a radical press, but not too radical—sometimes those presses that were beyond-the-pale were too pallid, their books full of typos and wrapped in brown paper. The Paper-Doll Diatribe: Art, Journalism, and Whores on Parade needed a cover and a marketing campaign that was hip and that swung with more than a speck of sexiness. Mrs. Bloom’s book needed the French tickle of a Maurice Girodias—it could be another Lolita, a SCUM Manifesto, with proper manipulation.
Mrs. Bloom counted the money in the Folger’s can. It was rumored that the proprietor of the Triple X Carnivale in Council Bluffs kept in a back room a porn so divine and esoteric that you had to pay $100 just to gaze upon it. You could turn its pristine pages only when wearing white gloves, and the lights were kept dim so as not to risk yellowing all the bright pinkness of the ladies in the centerfolds. These magazines were the pinnacle of filth, the women the crème de la crème of the unspeakably nasty. Mrs. Bloom longed to collect them all.