“I can’t marry you, darling,” she said.
“Why not? Do you want a younger man?”
“Yes, darling, but not one. I want seven, one right after the other.”
“Oh,” he said.
“I must tell you. I’ve done it. This was before I met you. I asked seven of the best-looking men around to come for dinner. None of them were married. Two of them were divorced. I cooked veal scaloppine. There was a lot to drink and then we all got undressed. It was what I wanted. When they were finished, I didn’t feel dirty or depraved or shameful. I didn’t feel anything bad at all. Does that disgust you?”
“Not really. You’re one of the cleanest people I’ve ever known. That’s the way I think of you.”
“You’re crazy, darling,” she said.
He got up and dressed and kissed her good night, but that was about it. He went on seeing her for a while, but her period of faithfulness seemed to have passed and he guessed that she was seeing other men. He went on looking for a girl as pure and fresh as the girl on the oleomargarine package.
This was in the early fall and he was digging a well for an old house on Olmstead Road. The first well was running dry. The people were named Filler and they were paying him thirty dollars a foot, which was the rate at that time. He was confident of finding water from what he knew of the lay of the land. When he got the rig going, he settled down in the cab of his truck to read a book. Mrs. Filler came out to the truck and asked if he didn’t want a cup of coffee. He refused as politely as he could. She wasn’t bad-looking at all, but he had decided, early in the game, to keep his hands off the housewives. He wanted to marry the girl on the oleomargarine package. At noon he opened his lunch pail and was halfway through a sandwich when Mrs. Filler came back to the cab. “I’ve just cooked a nice hamburger for you,” she said.
“Oh, no, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve got three sandwiches here.” He actually said “ma’am” and he sometimes said “shucks,” although the book he was reading, and reading with interest, was by Aldous Huxley.
“You’ve got to come in now,” she said. “I won’t take no for an answer.” She opened the cab door and he climbed down and followed at her side to the back door.
She had a big butt and a big front and a jolly face and hair that must have been dyed, because it was a mixture of grays and blues. She had set a place for him at the kitchen table and she sat opposite him while he ate his hamburger. She told him directly the story of her life, as was the custom in the United States at that time. She was born in Evansville, Indiana, had graduated from the Evansville North High School, and had been elected apple-blossom queen in her senior year. She then went on to the university in Bloomington, where Mr. Filler, who was older than she, had been a professor. They moved from Bloomington to Syracuse and then to Paris, where he became famous.
“What’s he famous for?” asked Artemis.
“You mean you’ve never heard of my husband?” she said. “J. P. Filler. He’s a famous author.”
“What did he write?” asked Artemis.
“Well, he wrote a lot of things,” she said, “but he’s best known for Shit.”
Artemis laughed, Artemis blushed. “What’s the name of the book?” he asked.
“Shit,” she said. “That’s the name of it, I’m surprised you never heard of it. It sold about half a million copies.”
“You’re kidding,” Artemis said.
“No I’m not,” she said. “Come with me. I’ll show you.”
He followed her out of the kitchen through several rooms, much richer and more comfortable than anything he was familiar with. She took from a shelf a book whose title was Shit. “My God,” said Artemis, “how did he come to write a book like that?”
“Well,” she said, “when he was at Syracuse, he got a foundation grant to investigate literary anarchy. He took a year off. That’s when we went to Paris. He wanted to write a book about something that concerned everybody, like sex, only by the time he got his grant, everything you could write about sex had been written. Then he got this other idea. After all, it was universal. That’s what he said. It concerned everybody. Kings and Presidents and sailors at sea. It was just as important as fire, water, earth, and air. Some people might think it was not a very delicate subject to write about, but he hates delicacy, and anyhow, considering the books you can buy these days, Shit is practically pure. I’m surprised you never heard about it. It was translated into twelve languages. See.” She gestured toward a bookcase, where Artemis read Merde, Kaka, 
and говно. “I can give you a paperback, if you’d like.”
“I’d like to read it,” said Artemis.
She got a paperback from a closet. “It’s too bad he isn’t here. He would be glad to autograph it for you, but he’s in England. He travels a lot.”
“Well, thank you, ma’am,” said Artemis. “Thank you for the lunch and the book. I have to get back to work.”
He checked the rig, climbed into the cab, and put down Huxley for J. P. Filler. He read the book with a certain amount of interest, but his incredulity was stubborn. Except to go to and from college, Artemis had never traveled, and yet he often felt himself to be a traveler, to be among strangers. Walking down a street in China, he would have felt no more alien than he felt at that moment, trying to comprehend the fact that he lived in a world where a man was wealthy and esteemed for having written a book about turds.
That’s what it was about: turds. There were all shapes, sizes, and colors, along with a great many descriptions of toilets. Filler had traveled widely. There were the toilets of New Delhi and the toilets of Cairo and he had either imagined or visited the Pope’s chambers in the Vatican and the facilities of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. There were quite a few lyrical descriptions of nature—loose bowels in a lemon grove in Spain, constipation in a mountain pass in Nepal, dysentery on the Greek islands. It was not really a dull book and it had, as she had said, a distinct universality, although Artemis continued to feel that he had strayed into some country like China. He was not a prude, but he used a prudent vocabulary. When a well came too close to a septic tank, he referred to the danger as “fecal matter.” He had been “down on” (his vocabulary) Maria many times, but to count these performances and to recall in detail the techniques seemed to diminish the experience. There was, he thought, a height of sexual ecstasy that by its immensity and profoundness seemed to transcend observation. He finished the book a little after five. It looked like rain. He killed the rig, covered it with a tarpaulin, and drove home. Passing a bog, he tossed away his copy of Shit. He didn’t want to hide it and he would have had trouble describing it to his mother and, anyhow, he didn’t want to read it again.