She follows him down a stairway to the floor. There’s no way to tell without windows, but since they entered the electronics shop at street level, half the flea market must sit underground.
Propp takes her arm again and they start to stroll down the first aisle they come to.
“I’ll tell you what I feel for the Proppists,” he says, continuing the discussion from the street as if there’d been no interruption and saying the last word with a touch of disgust.
“What’s that?” Sylvia asks, turning to avoid bumping into a woman carrying cardboard cartons upon her shoulder.
“Pity,” Propp says.
“Pity,” she repeats.
He shakes his head yes and says, “Would you like some cotton candy?”
She shakes her head no.
“It’s a shame,” he says, “that they don’t have lives of their own. Because why else would they insist on trying to turn me into something I’m not. Jesus. They run around to their ridiculous little pajama parties. All their semantic bullshit about separating the erotic from the pornographic. That pathetic willed innocence.”
She stops him from walking on.
“First of all, by insisting on being the invisible man, you had a big hand in turning yourself into their legend—”
“I resent that,” he interrupts.
“And second, I met one of the people, and I may not agree with his mythmaking, but it goes way beyond you, Propp. It’s about something they think you represent.”
“Which is?” with this self-indulgent smirk on his lips.
“The erotic impulse.”
“The erotic impulse,” he repeats, about to break into an insulting laugh.
“That’s right,” she says, for some reason wanting to defend Rory Gaston and company.
“That’s catchy,” Propp says.
He turns and releases her arm, reaches down to the table they’re standing next to, picks up a figurine and tosses it into the air in front of her face. He moves off down the aisle and she bucks and catches this little sculpted figure, this little knicknack, and looks at it. It’s made of some kind of black enamel cut into a human shape. It’s male and completely, stunningly, anatomically correct. It’s some kind of fertility totem, like a peasant deity with genitalia whose size is almost equal to the mass of the entire body.
“That’ll be ten ninety-nine,” a woman’s voice sounds from behind her. “Or I can let you have three of them for twenty-five.”
Sylvia turns to her, a big bruiser of a woman, arms like a linebacker, her green baseball cap pulled way down to the line of her eyes, the smoldering stub of a thin cigar dangling at the edge of her mouth, the head of ash bouncing as she speaks. She waves her hand out and Sylvia looks to see an entire table of these figures, a crowded buffet of fertility Hummels stacked side by side like an army of erect soldiers ready to impregnate some huge village.
“If you can pay in yen,” the woman says, leaning across her wares and lowering her voice a bit, “I can work you an even sweeter deal.”
Sylvia puts down the statue and walks away without saying a thing. She studies each booth and table she passes and begins to realize that this entire warehouse, this entire flea market, is exclusively selling items of the sexual variety. This is a clearinghouse for libido tools, a discount department store for all things carnal or erotic. She sees marital aids and lingerie, lotions and balms and ointments, something called the booth of dancing eggs, something called The French Tickler Showroom, a Peg-Board displaying thirty different brands of handcuffs. There are blow-up plastic dolls whose polyurethane skin can be selected in a variety of pigment hues. There are demonstrations for the Waxman Vibrating Bed, available in twin to king sizes. There are brochures for institutes of sensual massage and Kama Sutra academies.
And there are the books. Everything from the pulpiest of magazines that look, even from a distance, as if they’d dissolve in your hands after the first reading, to thick and encyclopedic texts with color Mylar illustrations and cross-referenced indexes. Paperback novels. Coffee table art volumes. Erotic comic books. Works customized for the motorcycle enthusiast and the bank clerk and the S&M housewife. Tomes for the gay and the straight and the confused. Bibles of the sensuous for the timid and for the crazed. And hundreds of self-help manuals. A banner hanging above one book booth seems to say it alclass="underline" There isn’t a variation we don’t carry.
Then, of course, there are the films. Stockpiles of the oldest smokers, grainy black-and-white reels shown at carnivals and men’s clubs decades ago. There are bootleg 16 mm spools that purport to hold lewd images of hundreds of your favorite celebrities. There are homemade efforts, husband and wife teams from the heartland whose crude technical skills are promised to be overshadowed by the genuine depths of their passion. There are expensive laser disc spectacles worthy of some sex-obsessed MGM, with big casts, special effects, lush sound tracks, and state-of-the-art decadence. But most of all there are videocassettes, an endless supply whose diversity seems to surpass even that of the book section. The video hawkers all have TV monitors set up on their counters and tabletops, showing a taste of some of their offerings.
Sylvia stops for a second at a half dozen screens and watches a multiplicity of couplings and gropings and longings, combinations and recombinations that go so far beyond her paltry imagination that she’s forced to wonder if she’s defective in some way, if the world is really just some seething, teeming throng of frenetic and ever sweating partners, engorging and releasing twenty-four hours a day, never tiring, perpetually hungry. And if she’s gone unaware of this dripping world since day one.
She looks up from a flickering screen filled with naked sky divers reaching across blue air for their partners and sees Propp munching on a Sno-Kone in the corner and staring at her. He raises his brows theatrically when their eyes meet and, ridiculously, she’s embarrassed.
Sylvia walks over to him and he extends the Sno-Kone in her direction. The shaved ice is dyed a deep purple color and she shakes him off and says, “You come here a lot?”
He shrugs, swallows some ice and says, “What do you mean by a lot?”
“The police know about this place?”
“He gives an indulgent smile: isn’t this provincial child amusing.”
“And they never bust the place?”
Propp looks out at the room in general and says, “The place is sort of a co-op. Every merchant pays a booth fee. Some percentage of the gross goes in the right pocket every month.” He looks back at her and says, “Besides, Sylvia, fifty percent of what’s in here is legal.”
“And what about the other fifty percent?”
“What about it?” he says. “That’s not my judgment to make.”
She shakes her head, looks at the floor, tries to let him know she expected a better answer from a myth-figure.
“What?” he says. “You want to have the standard debate? You want to take positions here? Spend the night making points? Or do you want to see things you’ve never seen before?”
“Maybe,” she says, looking back up at him, “this subject doesn’t interest me the way it does the rest of this room. Or the way it does you.”
“Could be,” he says, staying loose, possibly trying to bait her. And possibly not. “Interest in sex is a brain function like anything else. Could be some people get too much. And some get too little.”
“And,” she says, “could be that kind of labeling is both useless and insulting.”
“I’m not trying to insult anyone, Sylvia.”
“I don’t get you. Back at the diner you were warning me away from Hugo Schick and the Skin Palace—”