Back Street [antikvár]

BOOK ONE PART IChapter iOne evening, in one of those Over-the-Rhine cafés which were plentiful along the left bank of the Cincinnati canal during the nineties, a travelling salesman leaned across his glass of Moerlein's Extra Light and openly accused Ray Schmidt of being innocent.'I know! You're one of those ^heating girls who act fly, but aren't. You'll lead a man on, but you won't go all the way.'At the/implication and all that went with it, Ray's hand flew to her /tippet, colour ran beneath her tan pallor, and as usual, when under/stress, she rolled her eyes and became/flippant.'Try me,' was what she said, with little sense of the outrageous-ness of such a remark,'That's exactly what I have been trying to do all evening,' said the travelling salesman who, having exhibited what was for him an unprecedented astuteness in his summary of Ray Schmidt, now leaned to pinch her knee softly underneath the table.Ray was for ever being pinched underneath tables. As far back as she could remember, as a child and then as a girl growing up on Baymiller Street, boys had been fond of pinching and pulling her towards them for kisses.iSpooning' was not unpleasant, particularly in the evening, when somehow the boys' faces !receded out of a/pimply reality into the velvet tunnels of Cincinnati's low kind of darkness. With the boys whose faces/persisted in/jutting lumpily, even out of cover of nighttime, Ray simply had not the heart to follow the slightly disgustéd impulse to push them away.One 'spooned' to be kind. It gave you the reputation of being 'fly,' no doubt of that, particularly if, like Ray, you were/ endowed with that subtle womanish dimension known as 'style.' Ray had that. When she so much as walked past the Stag Hotel, skirts held up off the sidewalk with that jineffable turn of wrist which again (denoted 'style,' there was that in heridemeanour which caused each male head and eye to turn.7