A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

  “You have a beautiful body,” she said.

  I suppose I blushed or something.

  “I mean it. Don’t you think a man’s body can be beautiful? Of course it can. You’re hard and tough and wiry, and you look beautiful.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What in hell are you waiting for?” She demanded suddenly. I knew what she meant and I half-knew what she wanted me to do, but it hadn’t entirely penetrated to me yet.

  “Hit me,” she said levelly. “Hit me, Dan.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Look, Madge—”

  “Hit me, damn you! Take that belt and beat the living crap out of me!”

  “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Do you think I give a damn what you want? I don’t care! I just want you to hit me, damn it!”

  “Are you going out of your mind?” I was shouting, too. All I wanted was to be someplace else. I wanted to get away from her.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t you hate me, Dan? Don’t you want to hurt me?”

  “No.”

  “You should. You should want to rip me to ribbons.You should want to turn my skin red and make a bloody mess out of me.”

  “But I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I—”

  “Don’t say you like me,” she cut in. “You don’t like me any more than I like you. I don’t want you to like me. I want you to hate my guts. I want you to hate me inside and out, and I want you to beat me silly.”

  “I don’t understand.” I looked at her, all nude and beautiful and at the same time indescribably ugly, stretched out on the white sheets with the pillow under her head and her whole body golden and perfect. Her breasts were large and pink at the tips and her thighs tapered to rounded calves and slim ankles.

  “Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Don’t you? Why the hell do you think I asked you up here.”

  “I thought you wanted me to make love to you.”

  “To make love? Love? What the hell is love? How could you possibly love me or even put on a good act?”

  I looked at the floor, at the carpet on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the belt hanging limp in my right hand.

  For a moment I tried to picture myself raising the belt and bringing it down on all that golden flesh.

  “Don’t you hate me, Dan?”

  “No.”

  “Think about it,” she ordered. “Close your eyes.”

  I closed them.

  “Now think,” she said. “Think about all the bastards who balled you up. Think about everything that’s gone wrong. Think about all of it.”

  I tried to. I tried very hard and I got mad—but I didn’t get mad at her and the thought of beating her couldn’t seem right or natural to me.

  “Think about me,” she commanded. “Think about how much you want to sell the book and how I’m standing right in your way. Hate me.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I understand how you feel.”

  “Maybe,” she said, seeming to calm down for a moment. “Try thinking about the women, Dan. Think about the bad ones, the rotten ones, the ones who loused you up. There must have been one, Dan.”

  I opened my eyes and looked at her. And suddenly it didn’t seem to be her on the bed, not any more. She was suddenly younger and smaller and browner, and her hair was dark and it was Marcia on the bed, Marcia with her body beautiful against the white linen sheets, Marcia lying on the linen sheets where she had been lying in Carol’s arms.

  I raised the belt.

  “Hate me.”

  “And it was Marcia’s voice, and I hated and loved the woman on that bed all at once.

  And I swung the belt.

  I brought the belt down hard across her golden thighs, and when I took the belt away there was a thin red line across her thighs where I struck her. Her face was contorted in a weird expression that was half pleasure and half pain. Her hands were balled up into little fists and there was hate and love in her little green eyes.

  “Again,” she said, speaking through tightly clenched teeth. “Harder.”

  I lashed her again, across the thighs once more but lower this time and harder. The streak of red where I hit her was darker than before and she moaned in a strange sort of agony under the lash.

  “More,” she moaned. “Harder!”

  But I didn’t have to be told any more. Everything waspouring out of me now, all the pent up hate and anger and torment and everything, all the agony over Allison and Marcia, all the fury and all the days of pounding a typewriter and the drinking and the puking and the waking up in too many alleys too many times.

  I hated her. I hated the whole world, and I was pouring the hate out of me and onto her. I raised the belt time after time, and time after time I brought it down on that cowering flesh.

  I whipped her breasts and her belly and her thighs. She rolled over finally and I began lashing her back and her buttocks, swinging the belt harder with each stroke, hurting her more and more with every swing of the heavy Mexican leather.

  The moans she made grew to whimpers and finally to soft, animal-like screams. I felt the fury growing in me and I let it all go from me to the belt, from the belt to her, hating myself for what I was doing but unable to stop, not wanting to stop.

  She rolled over a second time and stared at me. The expression in her eyes was one I had never encountered before, a brand-new and terrifying expression that combined hate and love and pleasure and pain and fear and admiration and total revulsion.

  “You bastard,” she whispered. “God, you bastard!”

  The belt fell from my hand and dropped to the rug. My eyes followed it to the floor and watched it silently for several seconds. Then they returned to her, to the soft green eyes and the tight little fists and the beautiful golden body that was covered with red streaks.

  “You bastard,” she repeated.

  “Bitch,” I said. I hardly recognized my own voice.

  “Bitch,” I repeated. “Christ, what a bitch you are!”

  And then I fell upon her, fell upon the bed with the white linen sheets, pressing my hard body against hersoft and injured body. My arms went around her hard, hurting her, and her arms went around me and I ground my mouth down on hers hard.

  I took her, fiercely, angrily, and all I could hear in the world was the sound of her voice screaming in my ears.

  Dressing, I couldn’t even look at her. I put on my clothes in a rush, anxious only to get away from her and never come back. I was anxious too to get away from myself, to get away forever from the person I had suddenly discovered myself to be. I winced at the memory of the animal I had become when I swung the belt at her.

  When I was finished dressing I turned and looked at her. She was back in her clothes, and she looked just as she looked in the restaurant except that her hair was still down.

  And her eyes were different, too. There was no hardness in them any more, nothing at all but relaxation and satisfaction.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Like a bastard.”

  “Why?”

  “I—I never did anything like that before,” I said. “I know that sounds like a line from a virgin in a backseat of a parked car, but—”

  “I know,” she said. “But you shouldn’t feel bad at all. It’s nothing to feel bad about.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You wanted to do it,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Not at first.”

  “But you did afterwards.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  “And you liked it. Didn’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “And you feel better now. I know—you feel as thoughthere was something wrong in doing it and in wanting to do it. But outside of that you feel better.”

  “That’s right,” I admitted. “But why?”

  “Sit down.” I sat down next to her on the bed. “Dan, we’re not normal people. It’
s all mixed up in what I told you before. We’re people who get places without really getting anywhere, people who are always unsatisfied. And we build up hate, Dan. We hate and we get bitter inside. We have to get rid of that hate.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s the reason,” she went on. She reached for my hand and took it in hers, and her hand was very cool and soft.

  “Dan,” she said, “do you remember in your book when Tony beat up the girl?”

  “Sure,” I answered her. “But it wasn’t like this.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  I thought for a minute.

  “It was,” she said. “It wasn’t her he was beating up—not entirely. It was everything he hated, everything he was mad at. See?”

  I nodded.

  “And you’re like Tony, Dan. You are Tony.”

  I nodded again.

  We sat there holding hands like teenagers for another five minutes or so. Then she stood up and walked to the bureau. She picked up a piece of paper.

  “Here’s the contract,” she said. “In duplicate. Sign them both and keep the top copy.”

  I looked for Lou’s initials, saw them, and signed the two contract copies on the dotted lines.

  “You got what you came for,” she said. “I knew you would.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I knew it too, I suppose.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Rotten.”

  “Feel like finishing the book?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t feel like writing another thing again. Ever. I feel like tossing my typewriter out of the window.”

  “Of course. But you’ll finish it.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes—I’ll finish it.”

  We walked toward the door. “I know you will,” she said. “You’ll hate it and you’ll hate it when you’re done with it, but you’ll do it. It’s the kind of person you are, Dan.”

  I nodded. For the first time I was beginning to get a good idea what kind of person I was, and I wasn’t liking that person very much.

  “We won’t see each other again,” she said at the doorway. “This was good, but we won’t want each other again. This was a sort of therapy for both of us, but I won’t ever want to see you again. And you won’t want to see me either, will you?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I won’t.”

  I walked out the door and down the hallway to the elevator. I didn’t kiss her or tell her good-bye.

  I never saw her again.

  Chapter Eleven

  SHE WAS RIGHT, of course. I would finish the book.

  Not that I really wanted to finish the book. Not that writing gave me the slightest degree of pleasure, not that the idea of the money mattered too much any more, not that I thought I was writing a great book or anything resembling a great book or even a good book.

  I hated the book and I hated the typewriter and I hated myself. The minute I got home I threw my belt down the incinerator and kept my pants up with a piece of binders twine. It was silly; the belt didn’t have anything to do with it. But it was as if just wearing the damned thing would remind me of the welts I raised on Madge’s body and of the way I let myself turn into an animal.

  But I would finish the book. I couldn’t help finishing the book, couldn’t help trying as hard as I knew how to make it the best book possible. It’s a disease with writers, just as an actor has to do his best in a play even if he knows it’s going to be a flop. The book was sold, the book was supposed to be a good book, and so I had to finish it. And that was all there was to it.

  So I got to work on it, and I got to work on it in the only way I knew how. There’s one way to get a book finished that’s never yet failed me, no matter how I hatethe thought of putting paper in the typewriter and filling the paper with words.

  There’s one way and it’s a simple way. It didn’t matter that all I could think about was Marcia. It didn’t matter that every time I closed my eyes all I could see was two female bodies on linen sheets.

  That didn’t matter in the least.

  The formula is a simple one. All you need is a case of Scotch and a bathtub. You don’t pour the Scotch in the bathtub and soak it up through your skin—that would be an intriguing trick and it might be a good deal of fun, but the formula involves something a lot simpler.

  Instead you sit down at your typewriter and put a full glass of straight Scotch at your elbow. You put paper and carbon paper and copy paper in your typewriter and you start writing. And all along you keep drinking the Scotch, just a little at a time. Just enough to keep you perpetually blotto but never unconscious, never uncoordinated, never tired and never off your nut.

  A non-drinker can’t do this; the Scotch will either wear off or knock him on his ear. A man who’s used to drinking can. You learn to get to that perfect balance and stay right there, never drunk and never sober.

  That’s where the case of Scotch comes in.

  The bathtub is also essential. When you drink like this and write like this you sweat like a pig, and when you get started you can’t go to sleep much or you lose the whole edge you’ve carefully built up and come out of it hung-over and 90% dead.

  So you don’t sleep—for however long it takes you to finish what you’re writing. Instead you take baths.

  Hot baths.

  As hot as you can stand it.

  Then you wind up with a cool shower and you’re ready to roll again.

  I had a case of Scotch sent up to the room and went to work the day I left Madge in her plush little apartment in the Fifties. It was dinnertime when I got home and I had a quick meal at the greasy spoon so that I would go into the routine with something in my stomach. Once I was finished I could eat again, but while I was drinking and writing the Scotch would be my only nourishment.

  It was seven o’clock by the time I got started. I filled a glass and started going, and at first the going was very slow. The first tumbler full of liquor lasted only four pages. But it also gave me a little bit of the edge, and from there on I got faster and faster.

  I took my first bath at 11:15. Then I put on a clean set of clothes and went back to work.

  Clothing can be a problem. When you’re taking baths once every four or five hours, and changing clothes every time, it doesn’t take any sort of a mathematical genius to figure out that you’re going to run out of clothes in a little while.

  When you run out you put the first set back on again. By that time, hopefully, you’ve been drunk long enough not to give much of a damn.

  The pages just kept rolling along, page after page, chapter after chapter. I finished the first bottle and went on to the second, glad that I had the money to buy Scotch. One time I was working to beat a deadline on a pulp serial in the old days and I couldn’t go for Scotch—it had to be cheap rye that time, and I couldn’t stand the taste of the garbage. But when you drink Scotch there’s a big difference.

  It almost makes the whole deal pleasant.

  But not quite.

  The second bottle didn’t last too long, and neither did the third, and neither did the fourth. It’s hard to picturea man staying awake and working for five days and five nights, but that is precisely what I did.

  There was a medical book I glanced through once that said that a human being can live no more than five days and five nights without sleep. At the end of that time he either passes out or drops dead.

  I didn’t pass out or drop dead.

  Instead, I drank.

  And I bathed.

  And I wrote.

  I didn’t see the sun come up the morning of the second day. I didn’t see it go down that night. I looked at my watch every once in a while to make sure it was still running and two or three times a day I would look out the window to make sure everything was still there.

  It always was.

  There were the bad moments. There was the time the damned water tank managed to run out of water, and I took a lukewarm shower that didn’t do a hell of a lot of good. There was the time
I drank too much Scotch at once and felt slightly dizzy and very tired. It was a tremendous temptation to lean back and close my eyes, but I had the good sense to keep typing away. I made a few mistakes typing but in a few minutes I had worked off the liquor and I was back to normal—or as close to normal as it’s possible for a man to be when he’s drunk.

  There’s one thing wrong with the method, and if you’ve been in the writing game a short time it can be fatal. It’s a cute bit—you never have the slightest notion whether the words you’re putting down on paper are good words or bad words, whether the story is moving or standing still, whether the dialogue is ridiculous or perfect. If you’re new at the game, this can be bad. If you’re an old hack you just keep pounding away, knowing thatyou won’t do any worse or too much better than you always do.

  So I kept typing.

  And I kept typing.

  And I kept typing.

  The first day went by and the second day went by and the third day went by.

  And the fourth day went by and the fifth day went by.

  And, happily, I was still alive.

  It was five minutes to ten the night of the fifth day when I was one chapter from the end. I finished the last word of the last line of that second-last chapter and separated the copy pages from the other pages and put the chapter under the rest of what I had finished. Just one chapter togo,just one more chapter, just twenty or twenty-five more pages and it would all be over.

  I sat back in my chair and relaxed—which was something of a mistake.

  Because at that point I realized how damnably tired I was.

  Not just worn out. Not just fatigued, but completely and totally exhausted. Maybe another bath would revive me, but I didn’t feel up to walking down the hall for another bath. I didn’t feel like moving from the chair. I didn’t feel like keeping my eyes open.

  I felt like pulling a Rip Van Winkle bit and sleeping a neat twenty years—maybe more. A hundred years. Six hundred years.

  Or just closing my eyes for a minute or two, just half an hour, say.

  I pulled that once and slept in a chair for six hours, and when I woke up I couldn’t move. You’d be amazed how hard it is to wake up in a half hour after five days without sleep.