A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

  I watched her leave. After she was gone I stared at the closed door like a schizo staring at a wall.

  Then I reached for the bottle.

  I don’t know exactly what happened after that. I have vague memories of stumbling over most of Los Angeles, of spending part of one night with a prostitute who was old enough to be my mother and about as drunk as I was, of slugging somebody and of getting slugged myself a few times. But it’s all a blur. I woke up five days later with my head aching viciously and my money gone, and when I stood up the sidewalk was rocking back and forth crazily.

  Then the slide downhill started. It was easier than you can imagine—drinking the money away, not writing a line, getting my option dropped when my contract ran out with the studio, drinking and drinking and borrowing money when the money ran out and drinking and drinking and drinking.

  And now I was back in New York and thinking about making a comeback. For a minute there didn’t seem to be any point, any point at all in the whole deal. Why bother? I had managed to find something out, and that something said to chuck it all and hit the skids for keeps.

  Because everything comes easy except what matters.

  Because when you get something you find out you never really wanted it in the first place.

  Because the things you really want are the things you can never get.

  I picked up the suitcase and started walking, crossing Amsterdam and heading toward Columbus. It was autumn in New York—like the song—and the air was getting cool. Autumn’s the best time in New York, but this was going to be a miserable autumn.

  For a change.

  Chapter Two

  104 WEST 85TH STREET was another red-brickbuilding like all the rest. I set my suitcase on the steps and checked the address against the piece of paper I clipped out of the Classifieds, then rolled the paper into a ball and flipped it at the gutter.

  I gave the bell a ring and waited. For a long moment nothing happened; then I heard footsteps and waited for the door to open. When the door opened I smiled automatically.

  I always smile at a good-looking woman.

  And the woman was more than good-looking. She was tiny—maybe five feet tall and, at the moment, barefoot. Her hair was chocolate brown and cut short in one of those Italian haircuts, and the haircut fit the pixieish quality of her face. Her eyes were brown and alert-looking.

  She was dressed simply but neatly. A tight brown skirt encased trim hips and legs and an equally tight yellow sweater held her firm small breasts. She smiled back—a short, quiet smile that fitted in with the petite body and the pixieish face.

  I asked her if I could see the landlady.

  “I’m the landlady,” she told me.

  I almost told her that she didn’t look like a landlady, but it was corny and I managed to catch it before it came out.

  “My name’s Dan Larkin,” I said. “About that room—”

  “Come this way.”

  I turned and followed her down the hall. The place wasn’t bad on the inside—for that neighborhood it was unbelievably clean. There was a carpet on the hall floor and the stairwell was shipshape and the stairs didn’t creak under my feet. I followed her up the stairs, my eyes glued to her neat bottom, and we stopped on the second floor. She turned a key in the lock and led me into a room.

  It looked like the room in Greenwich Village a long time ago. My eyes took it all in, thinking of it as a place to live and as a place to write in.

  The bed looked good, and I never could bring myself to bounce up and down on a bed before renting a room. There’s something mildly obscene about it.

  There was a table by the window and I went over and leaned on it a little. It was sturdy and wouldn’t wobble when I had a typewriter rattling away on top of it. There was an old roll-top desk in one corner that would do for whatever papers had to be filed away. In front of the desk was a chair that looked properly uncomfortable, and next to the desk was a chest of drawers that would more than hold what wardrobe I had left.

  “The rent’s eight dollars a week,” she was saying.

  “Six,” I said automatically.

  We played games for awhile and settled on seven and I gave her two weeks’ in advance. The fourteen bucks made a sizable dent in my capital—I had enough for a second-hand typewriter and food for a few weeks, but not a hell of a lot more. Putting my wallet back into my pocket I thought about the money I had run through inthe past few years. It wouldn’t have been so hard to put some of it away for a rainy day, and here I was in the middle of a deluge without the proverbial pot.

  It was a shame.

  She took my dough and wrote out a receipt for it. I folded the receipt and started to look for a place to put it and she drifted off out of the room, letting me follow her pretty little tail until she was gone and the door was closed behind her. She was nice to watch—damned nice.

  I settled on the desk as a resting place for the receipt and solemnly filed it away in one of the tiny compartments. Then I set my suitcase on the bed and started unpacking. The clothes—two pairs of pants, half-a-dozen shirts and the usual assortment of socks and underwear—went in the dresser. The pint of rye remained in my hand for a few minutes while I tried to convince myself not to open it. It was a struggle but I won and the rye wound up in the desk.

  I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the bed. My eyes closed by themselves and my head sank into the pillow. It was tough staying awake—I didn’t sleep much on the train for the past few days, and I wasn’t in the best condition of my life.

  But it was no time to sleep. There were too many things that had to get done—and soon. I had to get started on something—a story, a book, it didn’t make much difference what. The big thing was to get words on paper, and unless I did that and got those papers in an envelope and those envelopes on editors’ desks, the money was going to run out.

  I could call Lou in the morning. Lou needed me right now like he needed a hole in his head, but I needed him and I needed him bad. A writer without an agent is like a fisherman without bait. Whatever you catch is an accident.

  An agent makes all the difference in the world. An agent can find you work and tell you what not to write. He can make sure your scripts get to the right place at the right time, and when he finds a buyer he can get the last lousy nickel out of him for you. A writer’s in no position to bargain by himself, especially when the refrigerator’s empty and he’s hungry.

  I was pretty sure Lou would take me on again. Sure, I let him down the way I balled things up on the coast, but I also made a hell of a lot of money for him in the past. And I had the stuff to do it again, if only I could get the damned words on the damned paper.

  If …

  The paperbacks were buying; that much I knew. People stopped buying hardcover books in quantity a few years back and the paperback houses did better every year. It was good writing and writing I knew and writing that paid off. I could do it.

  If I could get started.

  If …

  I hauled myself off the bed and headed almost instinctively for the pint of rye in the desk. There was nothing more to do now—not until morning when I could pick up a typewriter and get to a phone to call Lou. There was nothing to do but take in a movie or pick up a woman or swallow some rye, and there were no women or movies that I felt like seeing. I got the desk open and my hand around the neck of the bottle when I changed my mind for no reason at all and instead opened the compartment with the rent receipt.

  The signature read Marcia Banks. It was signed with a ball-point pen, the loops of the letters neatly rounded and the writing small and precise. I slipped the rye back where it belonged and studied the rent receipt thoughtfully for a moment, remembering the face and body of my luscious little landlady.

  She was a nice one, all right. I guessed her age at between 28 and 32—somewhere in there. I walked back to the bed, still thinking about her and wanting her. I hadn’t wanted a woman since Allison. I’d had women since then—too many of them,
maybe—but Marcia Banks was the first one I could recall wanting.

  I stretched out on the bed again, enjoying the feel of the foam-rubber pillow beneath my head. My eyes dropped shut again and my mind filled with the mental picture of her, of her small breasts in the yellow sweater and of her rear end wiggling its way up the staircase ahead of me.

  She would be nice. She would be nice, and with my eyes shut tightly I imagined just how nice she would be. I thought about her, remembering that quick smile in the doorway, and I also thought just how nice it would be if she would open the door and come into my room then and there.

  She opened the door and came into my room.

  It wasn’t quite that brazen; she knocked, and she announced herself, but she did come into my room and walk over to the side of the bed and look down at me with a half-smile on her face.

  The look was the sort of look you have to recognize intuitively. There’s no describing it. It’s not hunger and it’s certainly not love and it’s not quite a combination of the two. It’s a look that says this gal is ready for action, and if you’ve seen it once you’ll know it every time. That was the look on her face, and I reacted to it without thinking.

  I stood up from the bed and reached out for her and she came to me at once, her face nestling close to mychest and her lips pressing little kisses through my shirt. My arms went around her and held her and I tilted her head back with one hand, fastening my mouth on hers and forcing her lips open. Her mouth opened under mine and there was a sort of electric shock as our tongues came together.

  I led her to the bed and lay down beside her. My hands lifted the yellow sweater over her head and her bare skin was smooth and cool to my touch. She propped herself up on her elbows so that I could reach the hooks on her bra and remove that as well.

  My hands found her breasts and held them. She may have been around thirty but she had the breasts of a schoolgirl—young and fresh and firm and rounded. I kissed them and ran my tongue over them and the nipples turned to hard red dots.

  I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt and reached for her skirt with the other hand.

  “Wait,” she said. That was the first word she had spoken.

  She stood up, gathering her sweater and bra up and carrying them to the uncomfortable chair. She removed her skirt, slipping it slowly to the floor.

  There was nothing under the skirt.

  Her calves were gently rounded and her thighs were like a white mare running. She stood there motionless for a moment seemingly unconscious of her nudity; then she came back to me.

  It was perfect. The whole performance was perfect, from the moment she came into the room through the undressing routine all the way to the moment when we lay spent with our heads on the foam-rubber pillow and our bodies pressed together like sheep hovering together for warmth.

  It was perfect—from the gradual crescendo throughthe racing, pounding fury to the completely simultaneous climax. I felt like a man again.

  “This may never happen again,” she said.

  I almost fell off the bed. For a second I thought I had heard her wrong, but a second later I was sure that I hadn’t. Then there was another second or more when I thought I had found another actress like the one I left in Hollywood.

  “What are you talking about?”

  She reached out with one hand and traced little circles on my chest with her index finger. “I just want you to understand,” she said. “I want you to know where I stand in … this. It’s better that way, don’t you think?”

  I waited for her to go on.

  “I wanted you,” she said. “I was sitting alone in my room and all of a sudden I wanted you. So I came in.”

  “Did you get what you wanted?”

  “Mmmmm.” She smiled again—not the quick smile she had flashed in the doorway but a lingering, satisfied smile.

  “Satisfied?”

  She went “Mmmmm” again.

  “Then what’s the trouble?”

  She grinned. “There is no trouble, Dan. It’s just that I may not want you again, or not for a long time. And I want you to understand that.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t you?”

  I didn’t, so I shook my head.

  “Look, Dan,” she said. “I’m kind of a funny woman. I need men sometimes, and sometimes I can get along without them. And I definitely don’t want any kind of a man or anything remotely resembling a permanent relationship.”

  “All right,” I said. “I can understand that.”

  “I don’t mean just marriage. I mean anything where a man will start to feel that he owns me, or that I should be responsible to him. Hell, I had that once. I was married to a pretty wonderful guy, but he wanted to have me on a leash like a dog or something. I’m not like a dog.”

  I reached out a hand and rested it on the smooth skin on the inside of her thigh, stroking her gently. “You’re more like a cat,” I said.

  “That’s right—the cat who walks by herself, like in the story. I need to be independent, Dan. Maybe it’s unfair of me to ask it of you, but I don’t want you to make a play for me or even to throw passes at me. I’ll come to you when I want to, but no more. Is that all right? Because it’s the only way it can be.”

  I leaned over and kissed her on her lips. “Marcia,” I said, “it’s a good deal more than all right. I can’t afford to get involved with anybody at this point, but I need women the same as any man does—maybe a little bit more than most.

  “So you can call the shots. It’s hard to promise not to try to drag you into bed, but you can come around whenever you’re in the mood. Okay?”

  “Uh-huh.” She wiggled around a little on the bed and wound up closer to me—so close that although our bodies weren’t touching I could feel the heat of her.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said. It came out in a whisper.

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course.”

  She purred like a kitten. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you like me.”

  “Any man would like you.”

  “Maybe—but a girl always likes to hear it. Tell me again that you think I’m beautiful.”

  I told her.

  She looked at me and a light was dancing in the corners of her eyes. “What do you like best about me, Dan?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “What part of me do you like best? Show me.”

  I showed her and she giggled.

  “Not there,” she said. “I don’t mean there. What else?”

  I kissed her again and took her breasts in my hand, holding them gently and fingering the nipples.

  “These,” I said.

  “Honestly?”

  I nodded and squeezed them again for emphasis.

  “Don’t you think they’re small?”

  “Not particularly. Hell, anything over a handful is wasted.”

  She burst out laughing and even blushed a little. “You’re funny,” she said. “You know, I used to be ashamed of them, the way they were so small. I had hardly anything until I was almost seventeen.”

  “You don’t have to be ashamed now.”

  “I used to be ashamed of lots of things,” she went on. There was a dreamy look in her eyes and she seemed to be talking half to me and half to herself.

  “I was ashamed the first time I let a boy kiss me, and I was ashamed the first time I let a boy do anything more than kiss me. And I was ashamed the first time I let a boy go all the way. It was a bad time, too. It was in the back seat of a car and he didn’t seem to know what he was doing and it hurt like holy hell and …”

  She was on the verge of tears and I drew her in to me, snuggling her head up against my chest and running my hands over her back. I just wanted to keep holding her, to keep her warm and safe and quiet.

  “But I’m not ashamed any more,” she said fiercely. “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a person and there are things I enjoy doing and things I need.”

  “You
shouldn’t be. You should be proud.”

  “Proud?”

  “Certainly. You’re a woman, Marcia. You should be proud to be a woman. Some women can’t, you know. Some women …”

  She kissed me. “Tell me about her, Dan.”

  “Who?”

  “Allison.”

  I almost fell off the bed for the second time that evening. “How did you—”

  “You called me by her name, Dan. While you were making love to me.”

  So I told her. I told her the whole story—the story of the long road up and the long road down, of the books and the stories and the movie scripts and the women and the whiskey. I told her, and it wasn’t easy to tell but it was far easier than it would have been to tell someone else.

  She stayed close to me and she didn’t interrupt while I was talking. And when I had brought the story up to date she still didn’t say anything. We lay together with our bodies almost touching and the room dark around us, seeing nothing but each other and hearing nothing but the cars rushing past on West 85th Street.

  “You’ll make it,” she whispered.

  “Maybe.”

  “You will,” she said. “I know you will.”

  I laughed. “You have a helluva lot more faith in me than I do.”

  She turned to me. “You’ve got to have faith too, Dan. It’s the only way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean it,” she said.

  “I know. But sometimes it’s tough.”

  “The best things are usually tough.”

  “Sometimes the best things are pretty tender.” I was holding her breast when I said that and she giggled again. Her giggle was nice—not the brittle quality present in some giggles, but a soft and easy sort of a giggle.

  “Kiss me,” she said.

  “Is that a command?”

  “Of course.”

  So I kissed her. And I kissed her again. And …

  “Here,” she said. “Kiss me here, Dan.”

  I did. She made a little sound that was half-purr and half-moan.

  “Do you like that?”