Ray Bradbury: "A Bed for Maria" and "The Long After Midnight Girl"

At Beaver Creek Antiques in Hagerstown I spotted a quite damaged copy of the fourth and final issue of Eros with a price tag of $2.00.  Eros, I later learned online, was a hardcover periodical published from Spring to Winter of 1962, a sort of literary (you might say pretentious) sex magazine offering such hi-brow erotic material as a translation of Lysistrata with charming illustrations by Australian artist Norman Lindsay, a photo essay about the erotic sculptures at the Konark Sun Temple, and a condensation of Fanny Hill along with such sensational and up-to-date fare as a pictorial of Marilyn Monroe and an essay by Dr. Albert Ellis urging people to enter into plural marriages.

Safe-for-work details of representative images from Eros

You can check out all four issues of Eros at this page of a website dedicated to its short-lived publisher; at the same website are scans of another of that publisher's magazines, Avant Garde, which also serves up healthy doses of more or less high-minded sex-themed art, though Avant Garde's main purpose seems to be to run down American society.  Even if you aren't all that interested in sex and don't think America is all that bad, you may find Avant Garde worth a look because of its modern design aesthetic; also, the issue dated Summer 1971(the summer I was born!) features an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club I haven't seen before.  

I bring Eros up not only to alert you to a source of artistically credible depictions of young women's bodies, but because within Eros's pages are to be found two stories by the universally beloved Ray Bradbury.  Eros is not listed at isfdb, so these appearances may have escaped the notice of some SF fans.  Let's read the Eros printings of these tales and talk about them below.

"A Bed for Maria"

"A Bed for Maria" appears in the second issue of Eros, along with the photo essay "We All Love Jack," which consists of like two dozen pictures of women making googly eyes at John F. Kennedy, and an article by Arthur Herzog which is apparently about how Native Americans of the Southwest are less uptight about sex than white people.  (I assume this is the same Arthur Herzog who penned Make Us Happy, a SF novel that I read as a teenager and which features, if memory serves, a Sex Olympics in which competitors wrestle, each trying to make the other orgasm first.) 

Promoted as a "short, short story," "A Bed for Maria" takes up one page in Eros.  A guy owns a bed that has been in his family for centuries, an elaborately decorated thing with a headboard covered in carved musical instruments and beasts.  The springs are creaky and the mattress lumpy, but he claims that the bed is molded to his own form and thus supremely comfortable.  His wife of two years disagrees; she even seems to blame the bed for their childlessness!  On the very same day that he orders a new bed, his wife finds out she is pregnant, and everybody is happy and the wife begins to fall in love with the bed herself.

A sweet little trifle, perhaps a romanticization of family traditions.  "A Bed for Maria" apparently first appeared in the 1959 collection A Medicine for Melancholy under the title "The Marriage Mender."  The people at Eros seem to have introduced some typos to the text.  Tsk, tsk. 

"The Long After Midnight Girl" 

Among the features of the the final issue of Eros are an article on the topic of whether Shakespeare was gay, a "photographic tone poem on the subject of interracial love," and Ray Bradbury's "The Long After Midnight Girl," which, if isfdb is to be believed, was not reprinted until 1976 when there appeared a collection named after the story's new title, "Long After Midnight."

Three employees of the police department collect the body of a suicide hanging from a tree over the ocean.  The three men are saddened by this tragedy, and speculate on why this teenaged girl killed herself, theorizing that some callous man broke her heart and this triggered her self-destruction.  On closer examination, they realize that the dead body in their ambulance is not that of a young woman, but of a skinny man disguised as a woman.  The guy most upset over the death, the rookie, wonders aloud if this revelation should make them feel better or worse.

An interesting little story about what you might call sexism, the way people respond differently to events depending on the sex of those involved and have different expectations of the behavior of the different sexes.  I like it.

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Minor stories, but good; Bradbury delivers again.