CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  But she was only like this for a second, and then the sweater was off and the arms were extended and the lips parted and the eyes glazed, and it was at that very moment that I knew for certain that I could forget about bases and goal lines and all, that I could stop crawling around inside my own head and giving myself halftime pep talks, because it was all set and all arranged and all decided and it was all in the bag and Chip Harrison was going to stop being a virgin and start being a man.

  I kissed her.

  And we stretched out on the bed together.

  Her skin was so soft. It’s unbelievable how soft girls are. I got my hands around her and unhooked her bra, and although I am not the deftest person on earth it went well enough, and I eased it off over her shoulders and bared her breasts. And just as I was doing this our eyes caught, and I looked at her eyes and her mouth, the whole expression on her face, and she was pleased and amused and calm, and her eyes said that she knew what was happening and liked what was happening and that everything would work out just fine.

  She was so beautiful.

  I got completely involved in those breasts. I couldn’t stop touching and kissing them. It wasn’t a question of trying to do one thing and then another, of trying to get further and further with her, because it had already been established that we were going to do the whole thing and all that mattered now was to do it as well as possible. So instead of trying to put something over on her, I was trying to excite her as much as possible and to do things that I enjoyed, and it sure worked.

  “Oh, Chip. That feels so nice—”

  Her skin tasted of sugar and spice and secret girl smells. I liked her breasts like a little kid with an ice cream cone, wanting to take a big bite but wanting to make it last as long as I could. I nibbled and gobbled and she made these wonderful heavy breathing sounds and started squirming on the bed underneath me.

  “Take off your shirt, Chip. I want to feel you against me.”

  When I take off my shirt, you don’t get reminded at once of Greek sculpture. I’m not a ninety-seven pound weakling, but I’m not exactly Charles Atlas either. I’m sort of bony and undernourished in appearance. But I took the shirt off, and when I glanced at Francine’s eyes, she didn’t seem that disappointed with what I was unveiling. As a matter of fact, she looked hungry.

  “Oh, Chip—”

  I kissed her, and our tongues renewed their old friendship, and our chests pressed together. Mine got the better of the deal. Her nipples were as hard as little rosebuds and I brushed my upper body back and forth over them and she moaned and wiggled in response.

  After a long time of kissing and touching and feeling, after I had told her how beautiful her breasts were and how delicious her flesh tasted and felt, and after she had told me how wonderful I made her feel and how sweet I was and how much she cared for me, after all of that, she lay down and closed her eyes and raised her hips a little so that I could take her skirt off. It wasn’t hard at all. I just opened the button and unzipped the zipper and pulled the skirt down and off—it was a green plaid skirt, for those of you who don’t have color sets. And then it was off, and she was lying there in her panties, and I discovered the half-inch crescent-shaped scar on the inside of her thigh, and I didn’t think of it as a fault at all. In fact, I didn’t think that Francine had any faults. Only good points, and an abundance of them.

  I ran my hands over her legs. Until that moment I don’t think I ever realized just how important legs are. Girls’ legs, I mean. How important it is that they be great-looking. I had always paid a lot of attention to faces and breasts and behinds, and I knew the difference between great-looking legs and lousy-looking legs, but I was never that excited about legs.

  You live and you learn. Francine had great-looking legs, and all spread out like that, naked except for the panties, I was really able to see the whole girl. As an entity, I mean. And I realized the importance of the legs.

  (I don’t know if this is coming through very well. Call it an intuitive flash, a sudden burst of insight, which after all is how most great discoveries come about. The major breakthroughs never occur because someone sat down and thought things out. They come in flashes. Newton and the apple, for instance. Paul on the road to Damascus. Archimedes in the bathtub. Chip Harrison in bed with Francine.)

  “Chip?”

  Her eyes were closed, and if there was any expression on her face, I couldn’t read it. She seemed very calm, completely relaxed, but I could see she was trembling inside.

  “You can take them off.”

  I put my hands on her shoulders. I ran them very slowly down over her breasts and stomach and grazed her panties and went on all the way down those legs to her feet.

  “My panties. You can take them off.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can…do anything.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything you want to.”

  Her voice was different than it had ever been before, older and younger, both at once. Softer, mostly. And as if for the first time, I was hearing Francine speak without any phoniness in the way.

  I wanted to say something but I couldn’t. My throat was blocked, knotted up.

  I took off her pants. I took off her wispy nylon pants and squeezed them in a ball and held on to them with both hands. I wanted to nail them to the wall over the bed as a trophy. I wanted to sleep with them under my pillow. I wanted to chew them up and swallow them.

  “Chip—”

  I put the panties aside.

  I put my hands on her thighs and she opened them, parted her thighs, and I looked at her.

  I could smell her.

  I put out a hand, touched her. She was moist. I put my finger into her just a little ways and I felt her. She was all wet and hot and sticky.

  And it came to me, all at once, that this was not just a dumb girl with a great body that I was going to ball. It came to me that she was far more than this. It came to me, as I crouched over her with my finger inside her, that I loved this girl. And that she was what I had been looking for, a beautiful, passionate woman whom I could love and honor and cherish forever.

  But first, by God, I was going to ball her.

  I played with her with both hands. I played with her, absolutely delighted with the way she was built and the way she felt and the effect it was all having on her. And she lay there, hips rolling so nicely, so sweetly, so gracefully, and she kept her eyes closed and her hands at her sides, and the words flowed in a stream.

  “Oh Chip, it’s so good, it’s so good, I like it, I love it, it’s so good. I’m so hot, I like it, I love it, Chip, it’s so good—”

  I fingered her with one hand and attacked my own clothes with the other. To do this properly probably takes great skill and coordination, like rubbing your tummy while you pat your head. I tugged on my belt to unhook it and I pulled so hard I very nearly strangled myself at the waist. But I did get my pants down, and wriggled until they were off, and my shorts as well. I had kicked off my shoes some time ago. I never did get my socks off. I might have taken the trouble, but while I was getting the shorts off my other hand slipped a little, and without really planning it that way I discovered Francine’s clitoris.

  (I hadn’t planned on mentioning that. After all, it’s pretty clinical, and maybe not in the best of taste to come right out and talk about something like a clitoris. Not that there’s anything wrong with a clitoris, for Pete’s sake. But that there might be something wrong with mentioning it. But the thing of it is, I had known about this part of a girl from my reading, and knew of the great importance of it, but had somehow not gotten around to looking for it, being so preoccupied with other goodies. But now just by accident I had found it, and a good thing it was.)

  “Oh, wow! Oh, God, yes! Oh, Jesus Christ, do it! Oh, do it forever!”

  I got on top of her. I kept touching her, and I got on top of her, and I thought that this was it, this was really it. I was still seventeen and in a second I would stop being a virgin, which was a
damned good thing, because if you were old enough to fight for your country you were certainly old enough to have sex, and with a sexual revolution going on, the idea of an eighteen-year-old male virgin was pretty ridiculous, and here I was, getting ready not to be one anymore, and here Francine was, all wet and open and ready, and I loved her, by God, and I would love her forever, and wasn’t I the lucky son of a gun?

  I said, “I love you, Francine.”

  “Do it!”

  “I love you.”

  “God, God, stick it in!”

  And it occurred to me, albeit briefly, that this might be a kind of graphic thing for a girl to say, and maybe not in the best of taste, but then I decided that it was all to the good, that Francine was, after all, carried away in the throes of passion, and that it was a fine sign that a girl like Francine, so demure on the outside, could be so carried away by passion, and then I stopped thinking entirely, and readied myself for the move that would change my life once and forever, and stabbed blindly ahead, and missed, and took aim again, and—

  And paused, because it seemed that a herd of elephants was stampeding up the staircase and down the hall, and voices were shouting, and Francine was roaring at me, begging me to do it, to stick it in, and I lay there, paralyzed, and the door to my room exploded inward, and a man the size of a mountain charged inside. He had a hand the size of a leg of lamb, and in that hand he had a gun the size of a cannon.

  “You son of a bitch!” he bellowed.

  And pointed the gun at me, and pulled the trigger.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I SUPPOSE YOU’RE wondering just who I am, anyway, and how I got myself into this particular mess. At least I hope you’re wondering something along those lines, because if you’re not, it means that you aren’t interested, which in turn would mean that I have failed to hook your interest and rivet your attention in the preceding pages. And if I fail to get high marks in hooking and riveting, I probably won’t be able to sell this book when I’m done writing it, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. For the past two weeks I’ve been living in a room about the size of a midget’s foot locker and eating Maine sardines and stale bread. The sardines are seventeen cents a can and the bread is free, but even if they were both free they would not be all that much of a bargain, because a sardine sandwich, even when you haven’t had one in a while, is not exactly a dish to set before a king, and when the sardines are the cheapest ones available and the bread is stale and the menu never changes, well, I’m not fussy about food, but I can think of things I’d rather have.

  I’m sorry. I’m getting completely off the track. The point is that the last chapter was supposed to hook and rivet you. And now that I’ve got your attention (if I haven’t lost it already by wandering off the subject), I really ought to tell you who I am and how all this happened.

  My name is Chip Harrison. It wasn’t always, although I was always called Chip, as what you might call a nickname, because when I was a little tyke my first word was something that sounded like Tsib. (God only knows what I was trying to say. Mama, probably.) Anyway, Tsib wasn’t anybody’s idea of a terrific name for a kid, but Chip was pretty good, as in Chip Off The Old Block. So I got called that a lot.

  Then in late 1963 I started getting called that exclusively, and my actual name began not being entered on school records and things like that. Because my name, you see, was a combination of family names. Leigh, which was my mother’s maiden name, and Harvey, which was my father’s mother’s maiden name. So that my name started out as Leigh Harvey Harrison, and ever since late 1963 people named Leigh Harvey Anything have been very willing to be called something else.

  “The sheerest coincidence,” my father told my mother. “The sheerest possible coincidence. But when there are enough people in the world, coincidences have to happen now and again. I went to school with a Jewish lad named Adolph Gittler. His parents named him this in all innocence, you know, never dreaming—well, the point is clear. The boy changed his name to Arnold Gidding. Didn’t do him all that much good. The teachers called him Arnold, but we all called him Adolph. Or Der Fuehrer. Or Sieg Heil.”

  “Boys are so cruel,” my mother said.

  “Leigh Harvey,” my father said. “A perfectly sound name turned frightful overnight. We’ll change it to Chip. That’s what everyone calls him anyway. Chances are no one really knows his full name. When he gets older, why, if he wants something more distinguished, he can select it himself.”

  If I ever do, I suppose I will.

  I wasted all of yesterday writing out the story of my childhood, and where I was born and where we lived while I was growing up and the schools I went to and things like that, and I used up a whole lot of time and paper, and I just got through tearing it all up. Because in the first place I can’t imagine anyone being very interested in all of that, since there was nothing the least bit unusual or attention-grabbing about it. And in the second place I’m not one of these people who can practically remember emerging from the womb. I have partial recall, and it’s vague at best.

  So why don’t I just say that I came of rich but dishonest parents, and went to a couple of different private boarding schools, until that one jarring day when my father shot my mother in the back of the head and shot himself in the front of the head and made me, in the wink of an eye, an orphan.

  I was playing basketball when I learned this. I’m fairly tall, which always leads people to think that I ought to be good at basketball, until they come to the realization that my lack of coordination offsets my height, since I’m not Gulliver or anything, just fairly tall for my age. This particular coach hadn’t caught on yet, it being my first year at this particular prep school, so I was out there on the court missing lay-ups and muffing rebounds when some kid came down with a note asking me to report to the Head’s office.

  The Head—he was always called this, and while this is true of a lot of headmasters, it really fit in his case, because he had a head the approximate size of a basketball, perched on a skinny neck above an insignificant body, the head itself as hairy as a doorknob, with vague indentations and protrusions here and there to indicate eyes and nose and mouth and all that. Anyway, the Head did a lot of pacing around his office that day, and told me what had happened, more or less, and then went on to tell me more or less why my father had done this unprecedented thing.

  What it amounted to, without the hemming and hawing that the Head put in, was that Chip Harrison’s parents had spent their lives as con men (well, con man and con wife) and had made a good if shaky living for many years, working one swindle or another, and had been in the process recently of pulling off a remarkable stock swindle, until suddenly the roof had fallen in, leaving my unpoor but unhonest parents (a) stone broke and (b) jailable. Evidently my father decided that there was No Way Out, whereupon he did what he did.

  I can’t understand why. I mean, it seems to me that there must have been something he could have done. Gone to Brazil or joined the Foreign Legion or something. But I guess he just had the feeling that all the walls and the ceiling were coming in on him, and it seemed simpler to go bang bang and end it.

  “I never knew him,” I said, dazed. “I was never around much, and then when I wasn’t at some school or other, well, I was usually off at summer camp, or else I was with them and we were traveling. They always seemed to be moving to one place or another.”

  “One step ahead of the law,” the Head said darkly.

  “Uh, I suppose. I guess I never really knew what he did for a living. When kids would ask, I would say he was in investments. I thought he probably was, but I didn’t have any clear idea of how.”

  “Rather shady investments,” said the Head.

  “I don’t suppose I thought about it too much. I took it for granted, ever since I was old enough to think about it, because little kids don’t think about the subject, or at least I didn’t until recently—”

  “Would you like a glass of water, Harrison?”

  “I don’t thin
k so. What I mean is, I took it for granted we were rich. We always had everything, and then being at schools like this one, I just thought we were rich.”

  “Ah, yes, errmphhh,” the Head said. “That does, errmphhh, bring up a painful subject, Harrison.”

  “It does?”

  It did. The subject was money, and the pain lay in the fact that I didn’t have any. I wasn’t just an orphan. I was a penniless orphan, a seventeen-year-old Oliver Twist. If my parents had seemed to be rich, they had managed this illusion by spending every ill-gotten penny as soon as they ill-got their hands on it. And over the past months they had been spending a great deal of money that they didn’t have yet, all of this snowballing up to the point when everything went blooey, so that not only did I have an inheritance of absolutely nothing coming to me, but I was in hock to the Upper Valley Preparatory Academy for a couple thousand dollars’ worth of tuition and room and board.

  “I’m sure you understand the problem, Harrison,” the Head said. The light glinted off the shiny top of the Head’s head. He picked up one object after another from his desktop—a pipe, a pipe cleaner, a pencil, an ashtray, a file folder, you name it. He played with each of these things, and he watched himself do this, and I watched him, and it went on like this for a while.

  Then he told me I would have to make arrangements, find relatives who would take me in and help me carve out a fresh start in life for myself. Perhaps, he suggested, someone might come to my financial assistance. I told him that as far as I knew, I didn’t have any relatives. He acknowledged that he had rather thought this might be the case.

  “I really don’t know what I’ll do after graduation,” I said. “I guess college is out, at least for the time being, not that any of them have been in what you might call a rush to accept me, but—”

  I got a look at his face and it put me off stride. I let the sentence die and waited.