A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

But I didn’t much care. Two shots of penicillin clears up a dose these days.

  So who cared?

  I walked over to the bed and lay down next to her. She put her arms around me and I held her awkwardly while she kissed my throat and chest. She gave a practised squirm against me and made a little moaning sound in her throat.

  Her body felt like a hunk of ice. It wasn’t her—it was a passable body and I’m sure she could use it in a more than passable manner. But I just didn’t care.

  I touched her and let my hands linger on her smooth skin. She kissed me again and pulled my head down to her full breasts and I kissed them, biting the nipples gently.

  Nothing was happening.

  We stayed like that for another five minutes or so but there wasn’t much point in the whole deal. I touched her and she touched me and the whole performance was pretty touching, but nothing was happening.

  She stopped suddenly and leaned up on an elbow.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “This happen a lot of the time?”

  I shook my head.

  “Were you drinking or something? A lot of the time when a guy gets to drinking—”

  I shook my head again.

  “You don’t know what’s the matter?”

  I did, but I didn’t want to tell her. She might have understood; whores are supposed to be very understanding, or at least it says so in the book.

  “Maybe it’s something I ate.”

  She started to laugh and I looked at her. “It’s a joke,” she said. “I mean, it’s the punchline to a joke. Maybe you heard it.” Whereupon she proceded to tell me the most obscene joke I had heard in the last ten-odd years, and it alone was worth the price of the evening.

  But nothing was happening.

  “Is there any special way?” she wanted to know. “I mean anything I can do for you that’ll—”

  I shook my head again. I was about as talkative as a corpse. And about as potent as one.

  “It happens,” she said. “It happens to everybody. It’s nothing to worry about or anything, I mean.”

  “I know,” I said. I stood up from the bed and gropedmy way across toward the chair. I felt ridiculously naked.

  “Wait.”

  I turned around and walked back toward her. I sat down on the edge of the bed and she rested her head in my lap and looked up at me.

  “Is it me?” she asked. “Is there something wrong?”

  “No—what do you mean?”

  She turned her head away from me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought maybe you didn’t like me or I was too old or something. I—”

  “No,” I told her. “No, it’s just the way I feel.”

  I started to say something else but suddenly I noticed that she was almost ready to cry, that the tears were starting to well up in the corners of her eyes. And at that minute she stopped being a whore and became a person. I saw how afraid she was that men wouldn’t want her any more, that she was growing old and losing what beauty she had had. I looked at her breasts and hips and thighs and ran my hand over all of her gently as if to reassure her that this was not the case.

  There was nothing the matter with her.

  There was one thing, but it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t Marcia, and that was the trouble.

  She didn’t move while I dressed. I pulled my clothes on in a hurry, and I stood there beside her while she lay there naked on the bed. I was trying to think of something to say.

  “You’re very pretty,” I said.

  It was a stab in the right direction. “I’m not,” she said, but I could tell she was glad to hear it. “I used to be a few years ago.”

  She stood up then and put on her dress and her shoes and her coat. “Do you want your money back?” she asked. “I didn’t do much to earn it.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Here—” I reached for my wallet and handed her an extra five-spot. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  The money was something she could understand. She beamed solemnly and put in the pocket of her dress and we went down the elevator and out of the hotel.

  She stood in the doorway where I had found her and I walked past her and down Broadway toward my room. It was still raining—a hard rain, driving and wetting and making the streets slippery.

  The rain soaked my hair and went through my jacket and shirt to my skin. I stepped in puddles as I walked and my feet were sopping.

  My pantlegs were tight against my legs; my shirt was cold and wet. The rain lashed against my face and dripped down my forehead into my eyes.

  It was a hell of a night. It was wet and cold and uncomfortable.

  I kept on walking. I almost forgot to turn east on 85th Street—I got halfway to 84th Street before I remembered, and I turned into the rain and walked back and across Broadway and along toward my place.

  The rain seemed to be coming down wholesale. It was raining cats, dogs, buckets, pitchforks, and all the other reliable cliches.

  It was raining like hell.

  But I hardly noticed it.

  Chapter Seven

  THREE DAYS LATER I had a hundred pages and an outline ready to take to Lou. Everything was stacked neatly on my desk and it looked very impressive—a pile of manuscript with a neat cover sheet on it, a pile of copy paper and a few sheets with the rest of the book in outline form.

  It was damned impressive, but it was the same thing I had three days ago. No more and no less.

  Marcia was avoiding me. She was staying away from me, and without her around I couldn’t get anything written; I could always trot down to Lou’s with the script, but I didn’t even feel like doing that. I couldn’t get up a hell of a lot of enthusiasm for the whole routine.

  So I wasted the time proofreading the script, cutting my toenails and reading paperbacks. The money was sadly dwindling down to nothing—I paid my rent by shoving an envelope under Marcia’s door, and after that my wallet was flatter than the envelope.

  Maybe it was a good thing I was broke. I would have bought a case of Scotch if I had the money, but the way it was I stayed away from the liquor stores and kept the purple fuzz from climbing in between my scalp and my skull.

  That was something.

  I kept running into Carol in the hallway but I didn’t want her any more than I had wanted the whore on 103rd Street. There was a world of difference and about $90 bucks between Carol and Miss 103rd Street, but they had one vital quality in common.

  Neither of them was Marcia.

  The outcome of it was that I avoided Carol as much as I possibly could. I didn’t have delusions of grandeur; I knew there was very little danger that she would try to rape me. But seeing her, seeing any attractive woman, only made me want Marcia more than ever. And that was something to avoid.

  When the knock came at the door I was engaged in ripping a page out of a book. When I’m reading a real stinking one I rip the pages out as I go along. That does two things—it makes it easier to keep my place, and it makes sure that no other poor idiot will get trapped into reading the thing when I’m through with it.

  So I crumpled the page into a little ball and flipped it at the wastebasket. Then I went for the door. I had a half-hearted hope that it would be Marcia, because I knew that any day she’d walk in wanting me. She would do it just that way, and I was damn well going to be ready for her when she came.

  But it wasn’t Marcia. It was Carol.

  “Phone call,” she said. “For you.”

  I was surprised, because the last thing I expected was a telephone call and I couldn’t figure out who would be calling me. Who knew where I was?

  For that matter, who knew I was alive?

  “Don’t just stand there,” Carol was saying. “It could be important or something.”

  I nodded stupidly.

  “C’mon,” she coaxed. “Right down the hall. You can make it. I know you can.”

  I nodded again and started down the hallway. I picked
up the phone and said “Hello” in an expectant tone of voice.

  “Danny boy?”

  “Lou!”

  He chuckled. “Who the hell did you think it was? Some bim of yours?”

  “How did you know where to call me?”

  “I just picked a number at random. I’m a good guesser, Danny boy.”

  “What—”

  “Hold on,” he said. “You didn’t give me your number when you were in here. You were too dumb to think of anything that clever. But you left your return address on the envelope. Get it?”

  “Oh.”

  “Look,” he said, “I got money for you. That crime short you mailed in, I sold it toKiller. Can you use some dough?”

  “You expect me to tell you I can’t?”

  He chuckled again. “A hundred bucks,” he said. “They were stuck with a hole in the issue a few hours before presstime, so I held them up for 2c a word. It’ll be in the mail tonight.”

  “Wait a minute.” I hauled out my wallet and looked at two crumpled singles sitting all by themselves in a corner and looking very lonely. “Can I come down and pick up the dough, Lou?”

  “Sure—you broke?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Right,” he said. “Come on down.”

  The phone clicked in my ear. He always hung up first, no matter who he was talking to. I never called him orhad him call me without hearing the phone click in my ear. One time I tried an experiment: I started to hang up in the middle of a sentence. But the son of a bitch beat me to it.

  I cashed one of the dollars getting on a subway and got to his office as quickly as I could. The air was cool, and I found myself wishing the check were big enough so that I could pick up an overcoat. I was almost into the elevator before I realized the script to my novel was back in the room.

  For a minute I thought the hell with it. Then I figured I might as well get the thing on the way to market. I got back on the damned subway and rode back uptown and walked to my room. The subway was stuffy and stank to the heavens, and I pretty much felt like staying out of it as much as possible. So I bummed two bucks from Carol and took a cab back to Lou’s place with the script in tow.

  Brittle-voice was waiting for me. “Mr. Larkin?”

  “I’ll be damned,” I said. “You remembered the name.”

  She smiled at me. She showed so many teeth with the smile I was afraid she was going to bite me, and then she wiggled a little so that her big breasts could raise hell with my blood pressure.

  “Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t forget you, Mr. Larkin.”

  “How come?”

  “You’re the glamour,” she said. “The glamour they promised me at the employment agency. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

  It made a hell of a lot of sense to me even if I felt about as glamorous as a pot-bellied stove. But her name didn’t happen to be Marcia Banks, and talking to her and watching her breasts bob up and down did nothing to me.

  “Can I see Lou?”

  She nodded and I watched fascinated as the breasts rose and fell gaily. Then she fiddled with a buzzer, snapped some words into a mouthpiece and grinned idiotically at me. “Go on,” she said. “But come back.”

  I had to come back; it was the only way out of the office. But I didn’t bother to tell her that. I walked into Lou’s office and tossed the script on his desk.

  “Pay me,” I said.

  He stubbed out a cigarette and reached for another. “What’s this?” he asked. “You doing that book?”

  “What did you think? I’d be drinking?”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”

  I shrugged. “I couldn’t afford to.”

  His hand toyed with the pages of the script. “What’s it about?”

  “Pay me,” I said.

  “The book—what’s this one about? Is it any good?”

  “My money.”

  “Let’s talk about the book,” he said. “Here we got a book to talk about and you want to talk about money. Money isn’t so important. The question isIs it art?To hell with money.”

  “To hell with you,” I said. “You’d peddle your wife for ten percent.”

  He pursed his lips. “Yeah? You got a buyer lined up?”

  I laughed and he handed me an envelope. “Ninety bucks,” he said. “A C-note less ten for me. I figured you wouldn’t want to run around cashing a check.”

  I stuffed the money in my pocket. “You figured right,” I said. “Now if you feel like talking about the book—”

  He ran a hand through his messy hair and flashed me a mock frown. “Danny boy,” he said. “Danny, you got here—if I can tell how high a stack this is—about half a book. Is it any good or should we chuck it in the ash-can?”

  “You’re the agent.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “I think it’s good, Lou. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “We have here half a book,” he said. “You say it’s good. It better be good.”

  I sat back in the chair and tried to relax. He stubbed out the new cigarette, reached for another one, and started thumbing through the script. He went through it like a satyr through a harem and it looked as though he was just checking the numbers at the top of the pages, but I knew that when he got through he would be able to tell me the names of the characters and every detail of the plot, in addition to knowing just where he would sell the thing, for how much and when. He could do that. He could look at the middle of each page for maybe three seconds and have the page read and filed away in his memory.

  He was going fast, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to relax. There are two times when it is totally impossible to relax. One is when your girl friend thinks she is going to have a baby and the other is when your agent is reading something you wrote. One’s as bad as the next.

  He finished and looked up at me. “You’re right,” he said softly. “It’s the best thing you ever wrote.”

  I let out my breath. “You can sell it?”

  “I’ve sold worse.”

  “Then you can sell it?”

  “Ican sell damn near anything,” he said cheerfully. “This I can sell with one eye shut. Can you stay sober long enough to finish it?”

  “I can try.”

  He shook his head. “Danny boy,” he said. “Danny,you’re a son of a bitch. I think that’s the only reason I put up with you.”

  “There’s another reason,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Ten percent,” I said.

  He closed one eye. “You could be right,” he said. “Now will you get the hell out of here and finish your book? I got work to do.”

  I got out. I felt good—if Lou said something was good, it was good. Sales take time—you don’t start worrying about a book until it’s been out a year, so there was a good chance I wouldn’t see money for awhile. But the book was good. I still knew how to write, and I had ninety iron men in my pocket that meant I could still write things that editors would buy.

  I felt so good I smiled to brittle-voice on my way out.

  I floated down the elevator and I floated out to the street. I floated into a taxicab and the hack floated uptown to my dump, and I floated a heavy tip into the cabby’s hot little fist and floated up to my room.

  Like I said, I was feeling happy. It was better than alcohol, better than a pleasant evening with a warm woman. It was a very nice feeling.

  I felt so good, as a matter of complete fact, that I took it for granted I would sleep with Marcia that night. This was something of an error in judgment. Marcia wasn’t having any, to reduce things to their lowest common denominator.

  And I was feeling so good I didn’t much give a damn.

  I took the night off. I went to a movie on 42nd Street and remembered in the middle of the picture that I had seen it before. A little further along it came to me that I wrote the damned thing, and this made me feel b
etter than ever. The picture was a dog-and-a-half—I wrotesome real garbage out in Hollywood. But I waited around just to see my name on the screen. Sure enough, it was listed way down on the bottom of the last shot of credit lines, under the wardrobe attendant and the tenth set designer.

  But it looked good.

  I played marksman at the shooting gallery and hung around on the corner listening to a Save-Your-Soul boy giving a crowd holy hell. I tossed a dime to a blind beggar and spent half an hour listening to an auctioneer’s spiel in a Broadway sucker-trap.

  It didn’t much matter where I went. I was feeling so great that I just wanted to be around people. It didn’t matter who they were. I got into a long involved discussion with a lieutenant in the Lithuanian Army in Exile, and I helped an old lady break up a loaf of bread for the pigeons in Bryant Park behind the public library.

  I didn’t stop for a single drink. Not a celebration drink or a pick-up drink or any kind of a drink—not even a beer.

  I didn’t need it.

  I stopped dead in front of one of the first-run movie houses on Broadway near 45th Street. There was a person on one of the stills who looked too goddam familiar, and when I took another look I saw that she was very familiar indeed.

  It was Allison.

  I couldn’t believe it at first. I hadn’t looked at a newspaper for weeks, and I didn’t keep up with the trade news those last few months in Hollywood. The last I remembered Allison King was a good little starlet—a gal who would get someplace someday but who was far away from the place now.

  But suddenly she was a star.

  It was too much to miss. I bought a ticket and found myself a seat in the balcony between a necking couple and a pair of old ladies and I watched the picture. I needed another picture like I needed eleven toes, but I wanted to see how I would react to Allison. Hell, the woman had thrown me for enough of a loop so that I was just beginning to get back. She had me drinking rivers and waking up in gutters.

  I wondered if I was really over her yet.

  It turned out that I was. When I saw her moving around on the screen like a goddess it didn’t do a thing to me. All I felt was a vague sensation of recognition—I knew that this was a woman that I had known and known intimately, but I couldn’t conceive ever having been in love with her.