Vacation, part 2: Reading rainbow

In among the light motifs of island sunrises and sunsets, night skies and fireflies, there was a literary leit motif to my vacation this summer. B Island is a buttoned-up kind of place where bad language and PDAs are frowned upon and fretted over, and the island library is reliably staid. But even in this conservative outpost, as in the adulteriferous conservative movement at large, racy currents rage beneath still waters.

It all started at JFK. With seven hours in a dreary airline terminal waiting for my one-hour flight to Maine, I clearly wasn't going to survive on a skimpy Monday New York Times with its too-easy-even-for-me crossword puzzle. Airport book kiosks are a stunning case study of catering to the lowest common denominator, so when I saw a paperback by Armistead Maupin, I grabbed it, thinking it would be a quaint sequel to his charming '70s San Francisco Chronicle serial, Tales of the City.

It wasn't. Or rather, it was a sequel, but it was hardly quaint. It had, among many other points of interest, graphic descriptions of three-way ass-fucking in the Viagra-popping viral-loaded Baghdad by the Bay.

So when I finished it on B Island, I was consterned that someone might pick it up and start browsing and freak out. I asked Other if we should burn it. He was worried that it wouldn't burn completely in the wood stove, and our landlady would find it among the ashes. He suggested we discreetly slip it onto the paperback rack of the library. I was scared we'd get caught, though I toyed with the idea of inscribing it with the name of the primmest islander or the most vicious gossip and leaving it on a roadside bench. In the end we decided to carry it off the island when I took Other to the airport (he was leaving a couple days before me), and he would dispose of it. But alas, he accidentally left it at the counter of the parking-lot office when we picked up our car. I was embarrassed to go back to retrieve it, especially since the parking-lot operators are hand-in-glove with the gossipers of the island, but Other had also left a serious read, Elizabeth Costello, that he wanted to finish. So I nipped in and as unobtrusively as possible removed the two books from the counter, where they had remained all day, and put them at the bottom of my suitcase when I got back to the island.

Islanders might be shocked by graphic gay sex. But I in turn was shocked by a hetero sex book I found in the cottage. It was raining, and I had read everything I'd checked out of the island library, and I was bored. I spotted on my landlady's shelves a Judy Blume book for adults. I read very few best sellers, so perhaps I'm a little naive about what popular fiction consists of these days. I remember the Judy Blumes I read to C in elementary school. Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing and Freckle Juice were pleasantly down to earth. Summer Sisters was downright earthy. All sex all the time, coy euphemisms for body parts, only the thinnest veneer of a plot, not much else.

Is this what ordinary people read?