CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  I wasted a lot of time and mental energy trying to figure out how to turn that couch into a bed. It wasn’t designed to make the switch. It was just a couch, and by the time I figured this out for myself I was tired enough to sleep standing up in a closet.

  I spread the sheet on the couch and got undressed and rolled up in the sheet. I wondered if I ought to buy a pair of pajamas or something. Then I wondered about Aileen, and if maybe she would come out and kiss me good-night or something.

  She was pretty spectacular. Longish light blond hair and oval cat’s eyes and high Slavic cheekbones and a full wet red mouth. She had the most goddamned suggestive mouth I have ever seen in my life. Her body reinforced the Lustful Peasant image in a big way. Large heavy pointed breasts, a hint of a belly, wide hips, large rounded bottom, big well-muscled thighs. The dress she wore was supposed to be a shapeless style. Only when she wore it, it took on a shape. It was really something amazing to watch her walk around in that thing, with all that flesh making interesting movements against the cloth of the dress.

  I kept thinking about her, and imagining things. She was about the most sexual person I had ever met in my life. She just exuded this constant aura. It wasn’t that she put out feelers or gave the impression that she was hot for me or anything, but even if she decked herself out in a nun’s habit and cut her hair in a crew cut it would still be hard to spend ten seconds with her without imagining what she was like in bed.

  I imagined she was fantastic. I imagined that she would make love like crazy, and that she would take a man and screw him absolutely blind (I now knew why Gregor’s eyes seemed to be falling back into his head) and then, when she was done with you and you were deliciously half dead, she would wrap you up in her arms and legs and breasts and keep you warm as toast all through the night.

  I kept on with this imagining, and you know how it is, what with one thing leading to another, well. There was a point when I realized that no one was going to break the mood by doing something creative with the plumbing, and I also realized that she was going to change my sheet in the morning, and maybe you can think of more embarrassing things to have happen, and maybe I can now, but I certainly couldn’t then, and didn’t even want to try.

  The next afternoon I bought myself a second pair of socks.

  “Now was I right or was I right?” Gregor said every now and then. “Here you’re saving all kinds of money and living like a human being. Was I right?”

  He was right, all right. Each morning I got up bright and early and had a glass of unfrozen orange juice and a cup of instant coffee and a bowl of cornflakes or rice toasties or something like that. There was one of those undairy creamers to put on the cereal. The list of ingredients sounded like the secret formula for the hydrogen bomb, for Pete’s sake. Well, there’s nothing like home cooking.

  Then, about five days out of eight, I would go to work for Gregor, putting in an average of six hours’ work. When he had some developing and printing to do, I generally kept him company in the darkroom. He wanted to charge me for photography lessons. I got out of that one by offering to help him in the darkroom for a dollar an hour instead of a dollar and a half. We compromised; he didn’t charge me, and he didn’t pay me. It was fairly interesting, and I learned what the different chemicals were and what they did. I also learned that one place I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life was in a darkroom.

  On my days off, I sometimes picked up day work handing out passes for television shows or going door to door in some place like Oak Park, taking sample bars of a combination soap and cleansing cream (Neither soap nor cleansing cream, but new improved Urglegurgleblech) and rubber banding them to people’s doorknobs. It’s against the law to put anything that’s not mail into a mailbox, and they wouldn’t fit under the door the way handbills do, so you had to loop them on the doorknob, which was very time consuming.

  I took a few home for Aileen. You were expected to—what the hell, a sample was so people could sample it, no? But I didn’t do what I really wanted to do, which was to stuff the whole batch of them down a sewer and go to the movies. For one thing, I had come to see that a man gets ahead in this world by doing his job to the best of his ability and playing fair with his employers. For another thing, a kid from Missouri dumped his soap and the crew chief caught him and beat the living shit out of him.

  The rest of the time, when I wasn’t working or helping in the darkroom, I divided between the apartment and the rest of Chicago. I would go out at night with no particular goal in mind, maybe stopping at the library for a while and then roaming around the city. The idea of meeting a girl of some sort or another was always in my mind, but then it always had been, and it had never done me any particular good before, and it didn’t now, either. Most of the time, as a matter of fact, I never even saw a girl, or if I did she was with somebody.

  There are supposed to be slightly more women than men in the country, but if you’ve ever wandered around a big city after dark you couldn’t help becoming convinced that there are maybe twenty or thirty men on the open market for every woman. I don’t know where the girls go at night, or what they do, but they aren’t where the men are.

  Once, in a sort of middleclass hippie place on Rush Street, I seemed to be doing pretty well with this girl with long hair and sunglasses. She was from some college. I told her I was a dropout, which wasn’t all a lie. We were getting along fairly well, but then her date came back and that was the end of that. And another time a woman got interested in me at a diner. I was having coffee to keep warm and she was having coffee to sober up, I suppose, but it wasn’t working. She had a puffy look, as if someone had taken a bicycle pump and put a little air in all the cells of her body. At first I thought she was about thirty-five, and the closer I looked the older she got. It was like watching the aging process through the modern miracle of time-lapse photography, as they say in the commercials.

  We went and sat together in a booth in the back, and she kept breathing on me and dropping single entendres. She put her hand on my leg. Then she put her hand a little higher and gave me a friendly squeeze. By this time she looked about a hundred and eight and I got this all-embracing wave of nausea. I said I had to go to the toilet. I was half afraid she would follow me. I wouldn’t really put it past her. I went to the john, and then I went to the back entrance and slipped out, leaving her to pay for my coffee and find some other boy to molest. I went out of my way to avoid that particular diner ever after.

  And you know something, by the time I was a couple of blocks away from that woman, I called myself every name I could think of. I mean I really felt stupid. Obviously she was nothing spectacular, but the thing of it was that she was there, for Pete’s sake, and she was willing. And it wasn’t exactly as though I had to beat women off with a club. I was, let’s face it, a very horny kid with a desperate desire to stop being a there’s-that-dumb-word-again virgin. She could at least have served that purpose. I didn’t have to love her to ball her. I didn’t even have to like her.

  That was as close as I came to scoring in the streets of Chicago, that and a couple of others and come-hither glances from faggots, with one of them going so far as to make a tentative grab for me while I was making use of an industrial bathroom fixture. I told them all no, and they all took no for an answer. I guess nobody found me exactly irresistible.

  You might think, after all that, that I would have spent all my time around the apartment. I did spend a lot of it there, as a matter of fact, but what drove me out of there from time to time was the fact that Aileen was driving me right out of my mind.

  It wasn’t just what she looked like, which I told you about. It wasn’t just that their bedroom door was not very substantial, and that I could hear them whenever they made love, which they did almost every night. (If they hadn’t, I would have worried about Gregor. Really.) And it wasn’t just that she was so sane and healthy about her physical self that she was completely casual about walking around half naked in front of me, giving me
groin-grabbing glimpses of one part of her after another until I literally ached.

  It was that, on top of all of this, I was really digging her and Gregor as human beings. And it was a strange relationship, see, because I really didn’t know what sort of relationship it was supposed to be. They were both a lot older than me. I think Gregor was in his forties, and I suppose she must have been close to thirty. So some of the time they were something like replacement parents, and since they had come into my life so shortly after my own parents left it, this did seem a logical role for them to play.

  But I had never felt about my own mother as I felt constantly about Aileen. (Or if I did, I wasn’t aware of it, and I’d just as soon not find out about it now, either, Dr. F.) If Aileen was my mother, then I was King Whatsisname with the broken ankles. And proud of it.

  They were also like an older brother and older sister, and they were also like my boss and his wife, and they were also like my landlady and her husband, and, oh, it was too involved to keep straight. So the outcome was that I felt very comfortable and secure hanging around the apartment, reading a book or watching television or playing knock rummy with Gregor or helping Aileen with the dishes. I felt very comfortable almost all of the time, and then all at once, I would just have to get out of there before I started running around on all fours and chewing at the carpet.

  I mean linoleum.

  It was on a Friday night when Gregor got a phone call and said he had to go out. The first time this sort of thing had happened I got very ginchy about being left alone with Aileen, very hopeful and very anxious both at once, but nothing happened then, and after that I got accustomed to it and thought nothing of it. If anything, I found it very relaxing to be alone with her. I could talk to her when there were just the two of us in a way I couldn’t with Gregor around. About my folks, for instance, and what I wanted out of life, and various heavy things it would have embarrassed me to talk about in front of Gregor. Aileen hardly ever said much, but she had a way of listening that went down very smoothly.

  Gregor went out around eight-thirty, and Aileen and I talked and watched television for about an hour and a half. Then he came back looking happy.

  “We’re in business,” he told her. “Mark can use as much as five hundred or a thou’s worth of the right stuff.” He turned to me. “A photography assignment, keed. You thought I made the whole nut snapping dummies in the street, didn’t you? But sometimes something good comes up.” To Aileen he said, “I’ve got the studio from now until four in the morning if I want it.”

  “You want to go there?”

  “Right. And use the darkroom right there, and deliver the goods in the morning. And have the money in my pocket before that kike changes his sonofabitching mind. You want to get ready, keed?”

  “Me?”

  “He means me,” Aileen said.

  “My prize model.”

  I said, “No kidding? You do the modeling?”

  “That’s how I found her, keed. My best and sweetest model. You ever look at the fashion magazines? Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar”

  “Greg, put a sock in it, damn it.”

  He smiled at her. “Sure, they’re all dying to give her a spread, aren’t they, keed? And she’d give them a spread in return.”

  “Greg, in one minute you can go take pictures of soup cans.”

  “Just kidding.”

  “I mean with photographic artistry like yours, Greg, the subject’s not really important, is it? You could go take artsy-craftsy shots of sewer gratings and the museums would stand in line for them.”

  “Baby, all I said—”

  “I mean let’s keep track of just who we all are, why don’t we?”

  This went on awhile. I had the feeling that I’d walked in on the last reel of a movie that only made sense if you’d seen the first part. I was still thinking it over while Gregor packed his gear and Aileen went off to change her clothes and make herself up. When they were ready, Greg started picking up his equipment, and I offered to help him carry it.

  He said, “Well, sure, I suppose—” and she cut in to suggest that I come along and watch a photographic session.

  “You futz around in the darkroom all the time, you might as well get acquainted with all sides of the photography business. Isn’t that right, Greg?”

  “You really think so?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s fine with me, keed.”

  “It’s certainly fine with me.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Because this would be a dumb time for modesty, I certainly think.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And Chip’s practically one of the family, aren’t you, honey?”

  I listened to all of this without saying anything. I suppose you figured it out a long time ago, but then you’re sitting down somewhere reading it all at once, while I was living it a little at a time. I knew there was a lot going on that I wasn’t getting, but that was as far as I could go with it. I was lost, and waiting for someone to find me.

  So we walked the couple of blocks to the office suite. It was empty except for a little guy at one of the desks who was catching up with his bookkeeping. He looked up when we came in and then looked down again. We ignored him and went into the studio. Gregor locked the door.

  He set up his equipment and arranged various lights and things, explaining it all to me as he did it. I didn’t catch much of what he was saying because I was too busy trying to figure out what I was missing.

  Then he was ready, and Aileen gave an odd little smile and got up on top of this dark green velvet couch. She gave a tug and lifted her dress up over her head and tossed it across the room out of camera range.

  There was nothing under it but Aileen.

  Oh, I thought. Nude pictures. Cheesecake, so to speak. Now I understood.

  But not entirely.

  “It’s a mutual thing we’ve got going.” Aileen said, spreading her legs. “It’s actually a beautiful relationship, Chip. See, Greg takes my picture, and in return I take his.”

  I looked at Greg. He was buried under the black cloth and looked as though he was part of the camera apparatus. I looked at Aileen again. She had her hands between her legs, one on each side of what I was looking at.

  “Only I have a built-in camera,” she was saying, “and I don’t have to futz around with floodlights or exposure settings. I just take aim and snap away. Say cheese, Greg.”

  Greg didn’t say anything. I suppose he was still under the hood.

  I wasn’t looking at him, actually.

  My mouth was as dry as a sand sandwich and I had this weird chilly sweat all over my hands and feet and under my arms. And I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and I couldn’t stop shaking all over, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the most fantastic thing I had ever seen in my life.

  The shutter worked.

  “Click!” Aileen said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOR A LITTLE over an hour I stood there with my eyes falling out of my head while Gregor took filthy pictures of his wife. After her opening round of flashy repartee, Aileen didn’t have anything to say. Gregor stayed under the black cloth, and stayed quiet. And believe me, I didn’t say word one. A lot of things came to mind, I’ll admit, but I kept them to myself.

  One idea that I couldn’t get out of my head was that this was all a dream, and if that was so, I had to be very careful not to do anything to wake myself up before the dream turned wet. Because dream or no, I was in what you might term a state of advanced physical excitement.

  It was really fantastic.

  I don’t know if I can clue you in as to just what it was like in that little room. (Which is probably a pretty dumb thing for me to say, for Pete’s sake, because I’m supposed to be writing this, and if I can’t handle it, that means I’m wasting both our time, and that it’s going to be a long siege of Maine sardines and day-old bread.) Seriously, I could try to put down all the poses Aileen struck and to say which ones m
ade me the horniest and all, and if I did this, well, you might begin to get your own idea of what it was like in there, but I’m not all that certain it would add up to anything.

  Well, just as an idea of the whole approach the two of them had, this was how Gregor used up one particular roll of film. He did several rolls of individual series work, which came to an even dozen pictures, which would eventually get wrapped up and sold together, and which would tell some vague sort of a story.

  This particular one was the banana series, and it started off with a muffled voice from under the black cloth saying, “The banana, keed.” At which point Aileen got off the couch, went to Gregor’s bag of tricks, found a pair of ripe bananas, and got back on the couch.

  I remember seeing those pictures, the banana set, after they were developed and printed. And if you hit them in order and were in the frame of mind to believe them, it really looked as though old Aileen was getting her cookies that way. It was pretty realistic.

  Only an hour or so had passed when Gregor came up for air. His forehead was dripping with sweat. I guess it was pretty hot under the black cloth. It wasn’t all that cool anywhere else in the room, either.

  “Wraps it up,” he said. He dug his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lit one for himself, and offered the pack to me. I shook my head. Some people are just physically incapable of believing that some other people don’t smoke. He tossed the pack and the matches to Aileen and she lit up and tossed them back. It was all very casual, almost athletic, with all of this underhand lobbing of cigarette packs and matchbooks. You could almost forget that Aileen was stark naked, and that she had spent the past hour holding her labia open and sucking on her own nipples and sticking bananas up herself. (I don’t know if I ought to be quite that graphic about it, but that was what she was doing, and I think it would be worse to try being coy about it, for Pete’s sake. I mean, if you’re going to come right out and say that a woman posed for a batch of dirty pictures while you stood there watching, you might as well call a spade a spade, right?)