Free Girl on the Best Seller List by Vin Packer

of uncanny creativity possessed by Milo. Once, last week, he had dreamed that Gloria was Saint Febronia. He had seen the angry mobs pull seventeen teeth from her mouth, tear her breasts off, and ultimately burn her. Another time, Milo had dreamed he was bent over a proud bi-colored narcissus in some dream garden, when he noticed that the tissues of the plant seemed soft and rotted. At the moment in the dream when he said, “This plant will die. It has Bortrytis Bulb Rot!” the yellow and the white of the flower faded together and became skin and the skin became Gloria’s face.
    • • •
    At the same time that Milo felt the gratification he felt sick in his heart. It was the same sickness that overtook him whenever he was reminded, in his gardening, or in his study of the saints’ lives, that the whole living world constituted a colossal cannibalism, a holocaust in which life continues only at the cost of death. Man lives because of the sacrifice of plants and animals, and in his own turn is a sacrifice to the birds and the worms, or to the bacilli which effect his death. Gloria, in his dreams, was sacrificed to his inmost hostile fantasies, just as he had been to hers in her novel. He smiled forlornly at the thought, and then found himself in his front hall, facing an even more forlorn fellow.
    Unlatching the screen door, Milo said: “Come on in, Stanley. She isn’t home yet. I suspect she’ll be along in a while.”
    “I thought you’d be at the track meet,” said Stanley, as he waddled past Milo. He was perspiring, and his glasses were steamed. Under his arm he carried two boxes; one small, like a jewelers box, the other with SPHINX TYPEWRITER PAPER, ESQUIRE BOND printed across it. He followed Milo into the living room, bumping into a chair en route. His face turned a brilliant red as he mumbled an inane apology to the furniture.
    “I’m going to the meet in a very short while,” Milo told him.
    About the only way Milo could communicate with Stanley Secora was to demonstrate his own ineptness. Milo himself stumbled as he bent over to pick up his sport coat from the couch. He said something equally inane: “Whoops-a-crazy-daisy.”
    Both men laughed, and blushed, fidgeting nervously.
    Milo remembered how he had quite inadvertently sculptured Saint Felix of Cantalice in a way which bore a very good likeness to Stanley. Even Gloria, who commented less and less on Milo’s sculptures, noticed the resemblance. She had said, “Migod, this one looks like Stanley Secora. Some saint he’d make, the blundering ox!”
    “In a sense,” Milo had explained, “St. Felix
was
an oaf, but I really hadn’t intended to draw a parallel.”
    “You talk about them as if they were people you knew. How do you know St. Felix was like Secora?”
    “I don’t. I never said they were alike. It was just an impression I wasn’t even aware of…. But it’s not too far wrong.”
    “Well, you better get Saint Felix on the phone; the windows in the front need cleaning.”
    “Saint Felix,” said Milo, “was always apologizing for himself — the way Stanley does. You know, as though he’s in the way. Felix wore a shirt studded with iron spikes, and he never wore shoes, and if anyone did something mean to him, he always said, ‘I pray God that you may become a saint.’ “
    “Some kind of masochist, if you ask me,” said Gloria.
    “Most of the saints were, when you think about it.”
    “I’d rather think about the Marquis de Sade,” said Gloria. “That’s what makes horse races, ah, Milo?”
    At those times, Milo Wealdon felt no streak of hatred in him toward her. He was
all
hatred, with a streak of forgiveness in him toward Gloria, so tiny that it was like a sliver in the backside of a rhinoceros. Still, his hatred was impotent. He was left quaking with it, helpless. It was like a migraine. He just had to wait until it went away.
    Stanley Secora’s voice cut into his reverie.
    “Yes,” Stanley repeated, “I thought