They didn’t have to become wives and mothers. Their desires might take them someplace else entirely.
One of the prostitutes had a sister who worked at the factory. She told Sadie there were girls at the factory who passed the book from one to the other. One girl began to hide a portion of her earnings in her boot. One girl refused to let her brother abuse her anymore. One girl ran away from home and no one knew where she went. It was said she had joined a traveling circus. Something inside her told her she would look good on the back of a horse after reading the book. One girl decided to go to college to be a doctor.
They often went back for second copies of the book to buy for friends so they, too, could experience this weird transformation. Others had seen the effects of the book on friends and came to get a copy of it for themselves, hoping it would also give them the courage to enact unique transgressions.
Other girls bought the book because they were simply horny and had no idea of the book’s possibilities. It turned out that sexual awareness did not lead women to iniquity but toward empowerment.
* * *
Sadie was now truly a writer. Her original manuscript could not be taken away from her. It lived in the minds of others. The books would no doubt be decimated all over the city. But even if there was an attempt to burn them, there would always be one or two that survived. Books were very much like rats. They went into the walls and hiding places. They proliferated in a secret way that was invisible. A single book could be passed around to twenty people. And when those people read the book, a copy existed in their head. And once a book is in someone’s head, it has a way of spreading through ideas and conversation. And when someone who has read your book speaks to someone who hasn’t, they transmit the world of the book without even knowing it.
As a runaway and then prostitute, Sadie had existed very much on the fringes, her name spoken in whispers in respectable company. But now she would be public again. Her name was all over the city. She felt a life change coming on, in the way a person feels an inevitable storm approaching.
Names often became common nouns instead of proper ones. The name Arnett was recognizable because of her father and brother’s continuous involvement in city politics. She would change that. The name would belong to her. And when people heard the name, they would think of all her proclivities and inclinations and thoughts.
Although the name Arnett had connoted opposing decadence in art, now it would come to be that which it opposed. Thus the name would doubly be associated with naughtiness in art and the secret delight of perversion. Every family has a seed of its own destruction in it.
Anything Mr. Arnett proposed at public meetings would be met with snickers and derision. What in the world was weaker than not being able to control your own daughter? Fathers not being able to control their daughters was a much greater sign the moral fabric of society was slipping than the ribaldry of the theater. Her brother would be considered to be cut from the same cloth. And her mother, Sadie thought with delight, would no longer be able to pretend she didn’t exist. In fact, her mother would be thinking about Sadie’s existence every moment of her now wretched day.
* * *
Despite being published under the name Sadie Arnett, George felt very much ownership toward the book. She and Sadie began to make love more frequently. When they were spent, they liked to lie next to each other and spend hours describing what they had achieved. They were pleased with themselves. But the rush and pleasure of it was so great, it immediately made them terrified of it slipping through their fingers and them losing it. They needed more of this feeling. Suddenly all other epicurean delights paled in comparison to this one. Nothing tasted as sweet, music didn’t move them in the same way. They were ready to start working on another novel.
Sadie stuck her quill into the inkpot. It drew up the ink like a feasting mosquito. She began scratching on her blank paper.
George liked that Sadie was writing books that shocked and provoked. But the tone was so aristocratic. The meanings were lost because of all the smut in the pages. She knew people read them to be titillated. And because they were filled with aspects of the taboo, they gave whoever owned them a thrill because they were carrying around a secret. Because they were filling their brains with things they shouldn’t be filling them with.
But at the same time, George didn’t believe they addressed the inequalities that women faced, and they didn’t show them practical ways they could pursue the desire and joie de vivre the books had evoked in them. She wished there was a book everyone would read that delved into the way ordinary women lived. And how they were mistreated by everyone. How they were having their right to be happy exploited by the rich. A book about how women were exploited by their husbands. And their families. And society at large. How all girls were preyed upon, how a girl’s talents were so unfulfilled and undermined in society.
CHAPTER 36
Read This Novel Naked
One afternoon, Marie looked out the window of her office into the backyard. It was the first day in spring that was warm enough for people to linger outside comfortably. She saw a maid sitting on an upside-down mop bucket. She was reading a book and was utterly transfixed. The wind kept trying to turn the page of her book, as though it were reading ahead of her and was eager to get to the next page. Another maid carried a mop bucket over to her, turned it upside down, and sat on it. And began to read over the other maid’s shoulder.
Marie didn’t read novels herself. Neither did she keep up to date on what was being published or causing a wave. She did, however, read the newspapers. She had every one of them delivered to her home in the morning. She read the pile with her coffee and her egg. She needed to keep abreast of everything happening in the city and country. She read with a large pair of scissors at her side. When she came across an article of interest to her or her business, she snipped it out.
But she was curious about the book the maids were reading. She kept watching them read. They were reading it with a fervid devotion, as though it were a romance novel. But at the same time there was a look of bemused intelligence to their expressions. They were engaging with the book in a way that was unusual in its intensity.
She called the first maid in later in the day. The maid stood in front of Marie’s desk. She was a beautiful mixed-race girl.
“What was that book you were reading earlier?” Marie asked.
“What book is that, ma’am?” the maid asked, looking flustered.
“You were reading a book while sitting outside. I saw you from my window.”
“I was on my break.”