Enough Rope

by Lawrence Block

And here he was, happily exhausted at her side, breathing her smell, warmed by her body heat. Perhaps this will work, he thought, and closed his eyes, and felt himself drifting.

  Only to snap abruptly awake not ten minutes later. He lay still at first, listening to her measured breathing, and then he slipped slowly out of the bed, careful not to awaken her.

  She lived in one room, an L-shaped studio in a high rise on West Eighty-ninth Street. He gathered his clothes and dressed in darkness, tiptoed across the uncarpeted parquet floor.

  There were five locks on her door. He unfastened them all, and when he tried the door it wouldn’t open. Evidently she’d left one or more of them unlocked; thus, meddling with all five, he’d locked some even as he was unlocking the others. When this sort of dilemma was presented as a logic problem, to be attacked with pencil and paper, he knew better than to attempt its solution. Now, when he had to work upon real locks in darkness and in silence, with a sleeping woman not ten yards away, the whole thing was ridiculous.

  “Paul?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “Where are you going? I was planning to offer you breakfast in the morning. Among other things.”

  “I’ve got work to do first thing in the morning,” he told her. “I’d really better get on home. But these locks—”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a Roach Motel I’m running here. You get in, but you can’t get out.” And, grinning, she slipped past him, turned this lock and that one, and let him out.

  He hailed a taxi on Broadway, rode downtown to the Village. His apartment was a full floor of a brownstone on Bank Street. He had moved into it when he first came to New York and had never left it. It had been his before he was married and remained his after the divorce. “This is the one thing I’ll miss,” Phyllis had said.

  “What about the screenings?”

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve pretty much lost my taste for movies.”

  He occasionally wondered if that would ever happen to him. He contributed a column of film reviews to two monthly magazines; because the publications were mutually noncompetitive, he was able to use his own name on both columns. The columns themselves differed considerably in tone and content. For one magazine he tended to write longer and more thoughtful reviews, and leaned toward films with intellectual content and artistic pretension. His reviews for the other magazine tended to be briefer, chattier, and centered more upon the question of whether a film would be fun to see than if seeing it would make you a more worthwhile human being. In neither column, however, did he ever find himself writing something he did not believe to be the truth.

  Nor had he lost his taste for movies. There were times, surely, when his perception of a movie was colored for the worse by his having seen it on a day when he wasn’t in the mood for it. But this didn’t happen that often, because he was usually in the mood for almost any movie. And screenings, whether in a small upstairs room somewhere in midtown or at a huge Broadway theater, were unquestionably the best way to see a film. The print was always perfect, the projectionist always kept his mind on what he was doing, and the audience, while occasionally jaded, was nevertheless respectful, attentive, and silent. Every now and then Paul took a busman’s holiday and paid his way into a movie house, and the difference was astounding. Sometimes he had to change his seat three or four times to escape from imbeciles explaining the story line to their idiot companions; other times, especially at films with an enthusiastic teenage following, the audience seemed to have more dialogue than the actors.

  Sometimes he thought that he enjoyed his work so much he’d gladly do it for free. Happily, he didn’t have to. His two columns brought him a living, given that his expenses were low. Two years ago his building went co-op and he’d used his savings for the down payment. The mortgage payment and monthly maintenance charges were quite within his means. He didn’t own a car, had no aged or infirm relatives to support, and had been blissfully spared a taste for cocaine, high-stakes gambling, and the high life. He preferred cheap ethnic restaurants, California zinfandel, safari jackets, and blue jeans. His income supported this sort of lifestyle quite admirably.

  And, as the years went by, more opportunities for fame and fortune presented themselves. The New York Times Book Review wanted 750 words from him on a new book on the films of King Vidor. A local cable show had booked him half a dozen times to do capsule reviews, and there was talk of giving him a regular ten-minute slot. Last semester he’d taught a class, “Appreciating the Silent Film,” at the New School for Social Research; this had increased his income by fifteen hundred dollars and he’d slept with two of his students, a thirty-three-year-old restless housewife from Jamaica Heights and a thirty-eight-year-old single mother who lived with her single child in three very small rooms on East Ninth Street.

  Now, home again, he shucked his clothes and showered. He dried off and turned down his bed. It was a queen-size platform bed, with storage drawers underneath it and a bookcase headboard, and he made it every morning. During his marriage he and Phyllis generally left the bed unmade, but the day after she moved out he made the bed, and he’d persisted with this discipline ever since. It was, he’d thought, a way to guard against becoming one of those seedy old bachelors you saw in British spy films, shuffling about in slippers and feeding shillings to the gas heater.

  He got into bed, settled his head on the pillow, closed his eyes. He thought about the film he’d seen that night, and about the Ethiopian restaurant at which they’d dined afterward. Whenever a country had a famine, some of its citizenry escaped to the United States and opened a restaurant. First the Bangladeshi, now the Ethiopians. Who, he wondered, was next?

  He thought about Karin—whose name, he suddenly realized, rhymed with Marin County, north of San Francisco. He’d first encountered Marin County in print and had assumed it was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, and he had accordingly mispronounced it for some time until Phyllis had taken it upon herself to correct him. He’d had no opportunity to make the same mistake with Karin; he had met her in the flesh, so to speak, before he knew how her name was spelled, and thus—

  No, he thought. This wasn’t going to work. What was he trying to prove? Who (or, more grammatically, whom) was he kidding?

  He got out of bed. He went to the closet and took the bear down from the top shelf. “Well, what the hell,” he said to the bear. (If you could sleep with a bear, you could scarcely draw the line at talking to it.) “Here we go again, fella,” he said.

  He got into bed again and took the bear in his arms. He closed his eyes. He slept.

  The whole thing had taken him by surprise. It was not as though he had intentionally set out one day to buy himself a stuffed animal as a nocturnal companion. He supposed there were grown men who did this, and he supposed there was nothing necessarily wrong with their so doing, but that was not what had happened. Not at all.

  He had bought the bear for a girl. Sibbie was her name, short for Sybil, and she was a sweet and fresh young thing just a couple of years out of Skidmore, a junior assistant production person at one of the TV nets. She was probably a little young for him, but not that young, and she seemed to like screenings and ethnic restaurants and guys who favored blue jeans and safari jackets.

  For a couple of months they’d been seeing each other once or twice a week. Often, but not always, they went to a screening. Sometimes he stayed over at her place just off Gramercy Park. Now and then she stayed over at his place on Bank Street.

  It was at her apartment that she’d talked about her stuffed animals. How she’d slept with a whole menagerie of them as a child, and how she’d continued to do so all through high school. How, when she’d gone off to college, her mother had exhorted her to put away childish things. How she had valiantly and selflessly packed up all her beloved plush pets and donated them to some worthy organization that recycled toys to poor children. How she’d held back only one animal, her belov
ed bear Bartholomew, intending to take him along to Skidmore. But at the last minute she’d been embarrassed (“Embearassed?” Paul wondered) to pack him, afraid of how her roommates might react, and when she got home for Thanksgiving break she discovered that her mother had given the bear away, claiming that she’d thought that was what Sibbie had wanted her to do.

  “So I started sleeping with boys,” Sibbie explained. “I thought, ‘All right, bitch, I’ll just show you,’ and I became, well, not promiscuous exactly, but not antimiscuous either.”

  “All for want of a bear.”

  “Exactly,” she’d said. “So do you see what that makes you? You’re just a big old bear substitute.”

  The next day, though, he found himself oddly touched by her story. There was hurt there, for all the brittle patter, and when he passed the Gingerbread House the next afternoon and saw the bear in the window he never even hesitated. It cost more than he would have guessed, and more than he really felt inclined to spend on what was a sort of half-joke, but they took credit cards, and they took his.

  The next night they spent together he almost gave her the bear, but he didn’t want the gift to follow that quickly upon their conversation. Better to let her think her story had lingered in his consciousness awhile before he’d acted on it. He’d wait another few days and say something like, “You know, that story you told me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What I decided, I decided you need a bear.” And so they’d spent that night in his bed, with only each other for company, while the bear spent the night a few yards away on the closet shelf.

  He next saw her five days later, and he’d have given her the bear then but they wound up at her apartment, and of course he hadn’t dragged the creature along to the Woody Allen screening, or to the Thai restaurant. A week later, just to set the stage, he’d made his bed that morning with the bear in it, its head resting on the middle pillow, its fat little arms outside the bedcovers.

  “Oh, it’s a bear!” she would say. And he would say, “The thing is, I’ve got a no-bears clause in my lease. Do you think you could give it a good home?”

  Except it didn’t work that way. They had dinner, they saw a movie, and then when he suggested they repair to his place she said, “Could we go someplace for a drink, Paul? There’s a conversation we really ought to have.”

  The conversation was all one-sided. He sat there, holding but not sipping his glass of wine, while she explained that she’d been seeing someone else once or twice a week, since theirs had not been designed to be an exclusive relationship, and that the other person she was seeing, well, it seemed to be getting serious, see, and it had reached the point where she didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to be seeing other people. Such as Paul, for example.

  It was, he had to admit, not a bad kissoff, as kissoffs go. And he’d expected the relationship to end sooner or later, and probably sooner.

  But he hadn’t expected it to end quite yet. Not with a bear in his bed.

  He put her in a cab, and then he put himself in a cab, and he went home and there was the bear. Now what? Send her the bear? No, the hell with that; she’d be convinced he’d bought it after she dumped him, and the last thing he wanted her to think was that he was the kind of dimwit who would do something like that.

  The bear went back into the closet.

  And stayed there.

  It was surprisingly hard to give the bear away. It was not, after all, like a box of candy or a bottle of cologne. You could not give a stuffed bear to just anyone. The recipient had to be the right sort of person, and the gift had to be given at the right stage of the relationship. And many of his relationships, it must be said, did not survive long enough to reach the bear-giving stage.

  Once he had almost made a grave mistake. He had been dating a rather abrasive woman named Claudia, a librarian who ran a research facility for a Wall Street firm, and one night she was grousing about her ex-husband. “He didn’t want a wife,” she said. “He wanted a daughter, he wanted a child. And that’s how he treated me. I’m surprised he didn’t buy me Barbie dolls and teddy bears.”

  And he’d come within an inch of giving her the bear! That, he realized at once, would have been the worst possible thing he could have done. And he realized, too, that he didn’t really want to spend any more time with Claudia. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he didn’t really feel good about the idea of having a relationship with the sort of woman you couldn’t give a bear to.

  There was one of those cardboard signs over the cash register of a hardware store on Hudson Street. SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR, it said. SOME DAYS THE BEAR GETS YOU.

  He discovered an addendum: Sooner or later, you sleep with the bear.

  It happened finally on an otherwise unremarkable day. He’d spent the whole day working on a review of a biography (Sydney Greenstreet: The Untold Story), having a lot of trouble getting it the way he wanted it. He had dinner alone at the Greek place down the street and rented the video of Casablanca, sipping jug wine and reciting the lines along with the actors. The wine and the film ran out together.

  He got undressed and went to bed. He lay there, waiting for sleep to come, and what came instead was the thought that he was, all things considered, the loneliest and most miserable son of a bitch he knew.

  He sat up, astonished. The thought was manifestly untrue. He liked his life, he had plenty of companionship whenever he wanted it, and he could name any number of sons of bitches who were ever so much lonelier and more miserable than he. A wine thought, he told himself. In vino stupiditas. He dismissed the thought, but sleep remained elusive. He tossed around until something sent him to the closet. And there, waiting patiently after all these months, was the bear.

  “Hey, there,” he said. “Time to round up the usual suspects. Can’t sleep either, can you, big fellow?”

  He took the bear and got back into bed with it. He felt a little foolish, but he also felt oddly comforted. And he felt a little foolish about feeling comforted, but that didn’t banish the comfort.

  With his eyes closed, he saw Bogart clap Claude Rains on the back. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” Bogart said.

  And, before he could begin to figure it all out, Paul fell asleep.

  Every night since, with only a handful of exceptions, he had slept with the bear.

  Otherwise he slept poorly. On a couple of occasions he had stayed overnight with a woman, and he had learned not to do this. He had explained to one woman (the single mother on East Ninth Street, as a matter of fact) that he had this quirk, that he couldn’t fall fully asleep if another person was present.

  “That’s more than a quirk,” she’d told him. “Not to be obnoxious about it, but that sounds pretty neurotic, Paul.”

  “I know,” he’d said. “I’m working on it in therapy.”

  Which was quite untrue. He wasn’t in therapy. He had indeed thought of checking in with his old therapist and examining the whole question of the bear, but he couldn’t see the point. It was like the old Smith-and-Dale routine: “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that!” If it meant a sleepless night to go to bed without the bear, then don’t go to bed without the bear!

  A year ago he’d gone up to Albany to participate in an Orson Welles symposium. They put him up at the Ramada for two nights, and after the first sleepless night he actually thought of running out to a store and buying another bear. Of course he didn’t, but after the second night he wished he had. There was, thank God, no third night; as soon as the program ended he glanced at the honorarium check to make sure the amount was right, grabbed his suitcase, and caught the Amtrak train back to the city, where he slept for twelve solid hours with the bear in his arms.

  And, several months later when he flew out to the Palo Alto Film Festival, the bear rode along at the bottom of his duffel bag. He felt ridiculous about it, and every morning he stowed the bear in his luggage, afraid that the chambermaids might catch on otherwise. But he slept nights.

>   The morning after the night with Karin, he got up, made the bed, and returned the bear to the closet. As he did so, for the first time he felt a distinct if momentary pang. He closed the door, hesitated, then opened it. The bear sat uncomplaining on its shelf. He closed the door again.

  This was not, he told himself, some Stephen King movie, with the bear possessed of some diabolical soul, screaming to be let out of the closet. He could imagine such a film, he could just about sit down and write it. The bear would see itself as a rival for Paul’s affections, it would be jealous of the women in his life, and it would find some bearish way to kill them off. Hugging them to death, say. And in the end Paul would go to jail for the murders, and his chief concern would be the prospect of spending life in prison without the possibility of either parole or a good night’s sleep. And the cop, or perhaps the prosecuting attorney, would take the bear and toss it in the closet, and then one night, purely on a whim, would take it to bed.

  And the last shot would be an ECU of the bear, and you’d swear it was smiling.

  No, scratch that. Neither he nor the bear inhabited a Stephen King universe, for which he gave thanks. The bear was not alive. He could not even delude himself that it had been made by some craftsman whose subtle energies were locked in the bear, turning it into more than the inanimate object it appeared to be. It had been made, according to its tag, in Korea, at a factory, by workers who couldn’t have cared less whether they were knocking out bears or bow ties or badminton sets. If he happened to sleep better with it in his bed, if he indeed took comfort in its presence, that was his eccentricity, and a remarkably harmless one at that. The bear was no more than an inanimate participant in it all.

  Two days later he made the bed and tucked the bear under the covers, its head on a pillow, its arms outside the blankets.

  Not, he told himself, because he fancied that the bear didn’t like it in the closet. But because it seemed somehow inappropriate to banish the thing with daylight. It was more than inappropriate. It was dishonest. Why, when people all over America were emerging from their closets, should the bear be tucked into one?