bottoms… for him! And that was obviously what they wanted! He could feel the tumescence men live for welling up beneath his Jockey tighty-whiteys! Oh, ineffable dirty girls!
As Mac trolled past them, one of the dirty girls pointed at the Green Elf, and both started laughing. Laughing, eh? Apparently they had no appreciation of how upscale Green was… or how hip the Elf was, or how cool. Even less could they conceive of the Elf, fully loaded, as it was, with Green accessories and various esoteric environmental meters, plus ProtexDeer radar—they couldn’t conceive of this little elf of a car costing $135,000. He’d give anything to know what they were saying. But here within the Elf’s cocoon of Thermo-insulated Lexan glass windows, Fibreglas doors and panels, and evaporation-ambient recyclical air-conditioning, one couldn’t begin to hear anything outside. Were they even speaking English? Their lips weren’t moving the way lips move when people are speaking English, the great audiovisionary linguist decided. They had to be Latin. Oh, ineffable Latin dirty girls!
“Dear God,” said Mac. “Where on earth do you suppose they get those heels that light up like that?” An ordinary conversational voice! No longer put out. The spell was broken! “I saw these weird sticks of light all over the place when we drove by Mary Brickell Village,” she went on. “I had no idea what they were. The place looked like a carnival, all those garish lights in the background and all the little half-naked party girls teetering around on their heels… Do you suppose it’s a Cuban thing?”
“I don’t know,” said Ed. Only that—because he had his head twisted around as far as it would go, so he could get one last look at them from behind. Perfect little cupcakes! He could just see the lubricants and spirochetes oozing into the crotches of their short short-shorts! Short short short-shorts! Sex! Sex! Sex! Sex! There it was, sex in Miami, up on golden Lucite thrones!
“Well,” said Mac, “all I can say is that Mary Brickell must be writing a letter to the editor in her grave.”
“Hey, I like that, Mac. Did I ever tell you you’re pretty witty when you feel like it?”
“No. Probably just slipped your mind.”
“Well, you are! ‘Writing a letter to the editor in her grave’! I’m telling you. I’d hell of a lot rather get a letter from Mary Brickell from six feet under than from those maniacs I get letters from… walking around foaming at the mouth.” He manufactured a laugh. “That’s very funny, Mac.” Wit. Good subject! Excellent. Or hey, let’s talk about Mary Brickell, Mary Brickell Village, letters to the editor, little sluts on Lucite, any damn thing, so long as it’s not I’m fed up.
As if reading his mind, Mac twisted one side of her mouth into a dubious smile—but a smile, nevertheless, thank God—and said, “But really, Ed, being this late, making them all wait, it’s really so-o-o-o bad. It’s not nice and it’s not right. It’s so trifling. It’s—” she paused, “it’s—it’s—it’s downright shiftless.”
Oh ho! Trifling, is it? Godalmighty, and shiftless, too! For the first time on this whole gloomy excursion Ed felt like laughing. These were two of Mac’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestant words. In all of Miami-Dade County, all of Greater Miami, very much including Miami Beach, only members of the shrinking and endangered little tribe they both belonged to, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, used the terms trifling and shiftless or had a clue what they actually meant. Yes, he, too, was a member of that dying genus, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but it was Mac who truly embraced the faith. Not the Protestant religious faith, needless to say. Nobody on the East or the West Coast of the United States who aspired to even entry-level sophistication was any longer religious, certainly not anyone who had graduated from Yale, the way he and Mac had. No, Mac was an exemplar of the genus WASP in a moral and cultural sense. She was the WASP purist who couldn’t abide idleness and indolence, which were stage one of trifling and shiftless. Idleness and indolence didn’t represent mere wastefulness or poor judgment. They were immoral. They were sloth. They were a sin against the self. She couldn’t stand just lolling about in the sun, for example. At the beach, if there was nothing better to do, she would organize speed walks. Everybody! Get up! Let’s go! We’re going to walk five miles in one hour on the beach, on the sand!