CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  Anyway, whatever you want to call it, Lucille came home from school and cooked something. And I introduced myself to her and she introduced herself to me (because her father was already too far gone to introduce us, assuming he remembered my name. Or her name, for that matter.) And I looked at Lucille, and Lucille looked at me, and all of a sudden there was enough electricity in the air to cause a power failure.

  She was the cleanest, healthiest, prettiest little thing I ever saw in my life. She was really a shock after the East Village. See, for the past three months I had gotten used to girls who would live in a pair of dungarees and a surplus navy jacket. I’m not putting that down, because some of the girls I knew in New York were really beautiful, and with some of them you could sit and talk for hours at a time, really rapping on and on about everything. You could really relate to them as people, which is what it’s all about and which makes everything much better.

  But Lucille was something completely different. Short blonde hair all neatly cut and combed, and a short navy blue skirt and a powder blue sweater and blue knee socks and saddle shoes and a touch of lipstick on her mouth and a perfect complexion. One look at her and you knew that (a) she took two baths a day, seven days a week, and (b) she never got dirty in between, never even perspired.

  When I think about it now, I can’t stop thinking that there was nothing on earth a whole lot squarer than Lucille. Knee socks and saddle shoes, for Pete’s sake. One look at her and you could hear Bill Haley and the Comets playing in the background. I mean, she looked like a cheerleader, which as it turned out she was, and in this day and age the idea of a girl hopping around like an idiot and doing the sis-boom-bah number for the basketball team is about as unhip as you can get.

  Even the cleanliness thing, really, is overdoing it. Not that I’m in favor of being dirty, but there’s a point where it gets ridiculous and you wind up with this feminine ideal of a girl who’s been carefully wrapped in plastic wrap and never touched by the world. Girls are people, too, and it’s more fun for everybody if you don’t lose sight of this.

  But I was really ready for Lucille, knee socks and saddle shoes and sis-boom-bah and all. It occurred to me that she looked pretty square, but it didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with this. All I knew was that she looked good enough to eat, and it didn’t matter much whether you called it lunch or dinner or coffee break.

  Even so, it took me close to a week to do anything about it. It wasn’t that she looked too pure to approach, because I could tell right away that she was reacting to me the same way I was reacting to her. But for awhile I had this feeling that if I so much as touched her hand I would be back in jail again, and this time it wouldn’t be anywhere near as easy to get out again. I suppose this was partly because she was a minister’s daughter and partly because I still felt like some sort of fugitive from justice. The trouble with getting by with a lie is that it’s very hard not to go on worrying that the lie will catch up with you. I hadn’t really done anything but change the truth a little in a few unimportant ways. Even so, it took me a while to be comfortable with myself. I felt, oh, as though I was on probation, I guess.

  Another thing was that Lucille and I would spend an hour talking while her father was putting his food away in the back parlor. And the conversation was all things like how much trouble she was having with geometry, and how the basketball team was doing, and how her steady boyfriend was taking her to this dance, and how her friend Jeanie saw this really cool sweater in a department store in Charleston, and how Joan Crawford was her favorite actress, and things like that.

  It’s amazing the conversations didn’t bore the hell out of me. I think if I had tapes of them I could use them to put myself asleep on bad nights.

  I didn’t get bored, though. I probably must have listened with only half of my head. One thing that helped, I think, was that she was younger than I was, and less experienced, and I wasn’t used to this. The girls I knew were generally older and brighter and hipper than I was (which it isn’t all that hard to be, actually).

  I’m sure I would have gotten bored sooner or later. But after about six days of this, with our conversations never getting the least bit personal or intimate and never even beginning to make the transition from talking to rapping, I came up behind her while she was carrying some dishes to the sink, and when she turned around I lowered my mouth to hers and kissed her.

  The first time I took her bra off she made so much noise I thought her father was going to come upstairs. It was only the second time we had gone upstairs. She had a small bedroom furnished largely in stuffed animals and pictures of movie stars. The day before we took her sweater off, and today we had her bra off.

  Her breasts were large, milk-white, creamy pink at their tips. I don’t know why in hell she thought she had to wear a bra. I can’t really understand why any woman would harness herself up that way, and Lucille was so firmly built that she certainly didn’t need the support.

  Of course I suppose a cheerleader without a bra would really bounce all over the place, but what’s wrong with that? It would just increase the crowd at the basketball games.

  “Oh, Chip,” she said. “We shouldn’t be up here.”

  I was too busy kissing her to answer her.

  “You make me feel so funny. I never felt like this before. And you’re so fast!”

  There’s a word you don’t hear much anymore.

  “’Cause I been dating Jimmie Butler for three years and steady dating him for two years in April and in all that time he never got as far with me as you did in a week. I’ll let him take off my sweater and reach in under the bra but not take it off, that’s as much as I’ll let him do, and you went and skipped over that step completely, and how long have we known each other? Two weeks?”

  The next day she made the old man’s dinner in five minutes flat and went upstairs without being asked. I paid a few minutes’ attention to her breasts and then put a hand under her skirt.

  She pushed my hand away, snapped her legs together, sat bolt upright and crossed her arms over her breasts. She looked so frightened that at first I thought her old man had walked into the room or something.

  She said, “Chip, I never should have let you kiss me. At first I thought you were never going to get around to trying, and then you did, and right then I should have known what was going to happen.”

  “Nothing happened, Lucille.”

  “What you just tried to do.”

  “I wanted to touch you. That’s all.”

  “You wanted to touch me under my skirt.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “Hey,” I said. I put a hand on her bare shoulder and she jumped. “Hey, calm down,” I said. “Take it easy.”

  “Jimmie Butler doesn’t even try touching me there. He knows if he tries that I just won’t let him touch me at all. We’ll go out every Friday and Saturday and park in his car for hours and he never so much as tries to do that.”

  The past Saturday, Jimmie Butler had been a customer at the Lighthouse. He had three quick beers for courage and went upstairs and spent ten dollars with Jo Lee. That worked out to about five dollars a minute. “All the rabbits ain’t out in the fields,” Jo Lee said afterward.

  “Because he knows I won’t let him do anything if he tries to touch me there,” Lucille was saying.

  “Why?”

  She looked at me, wide-eyed.

  “Why won’t you let him?”

  “I won’t let anybody.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want to be pure, Chip.”

  I looked into those wide blue eyes, and then I closed my own, and when I opened them she was still there.

  “I want to be pure on my wedding night,” she said. “The way you look at me —”

  I said, “What does a hand up your skirt have to do with being pure?”

  “Chip!”

  “Because it doesn’t make sense to me, Lucille.”

 
“One thing can lead to another.”

  “One thing’s supposed to lead to another. That’s what life is all about. Life is just one damn thing leading to another.”

  “Chip, nobody ever touched me there.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Don’t you ever touch yourself there, Lucille?”

  Her face had gotten gradually whiter during the course of the conversation. Now all the color that had drained out came back in a rush, until most of the blood in her body must have been in her head. She looked like a sunburn ad.

  She hugged her breasts. There were tears in her eyes, and I felt awful.

  “Hey,” I said. “Easy, honey.”

  “Oh, Chip,” she said, and buried her face in my chest. I put my arms around her and rocked her gently. She was sobbing her heart out.

  “Easy,” I said. “Baby, it’s completely normal. Everybody does it.”

  “It’s a sin.”

  “Lots of things are, if you believe everything they tell you. But the thing is that it feels good.”

  “I—”

  “And makes a person more relaxed.”

  She drew back, looked at me with pain in her eyes. “I hardly ever used to do it,” she said. “Just a little once in a while before I went to bed, if I was feeling dreamy. And I would stop before anything happened. But these past few days—”

  “Take it easy, honey.”

  “—I’m just so terrible! And I’m so ashamed of myself. I go back to school and I can’t sit in my seat, and I go to the bathroom, and I, I, I, oh, Chip!”

  “It makes you feel better, doesn’t it?” She hesitated, then nodded miserably. “It feels good, doesn’t it? And then it relaxes you.”

  Another nod.

  “But you feel bad about it because you think it’s a sin.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “Then everybody’s a sinner,” I said. And I told her that everybody did it except for people who were too stupid to figure out how, and that people scratched other parts of their bodies when they itched, and rubbed their muscles when they hurt, and what was the difference? By the time I was finished I sounded like a commercial for self-abuse, but she was sort of nodding along with me towards the end, and the panic scene was over.

  So I just held onto her and kissed her a little in a friendly and nonsexual way, and then she remembered that it was time to go back to school, she would be late. She put her clothes back on and brushed her hair and lipsticked her mouth and went on her way, and I went downstairs and did the dinner dishes.

  The next day I stayed above the waist and didn’t say anything about yesterday’s conversation. And out of the blue she said, “I did it again yesterday. Went to the bathroom and touched myself.”

  “So did I.”

  “You did?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Do you always?”

  “Sometimes.”

  (Actually that was the first time I had followed a session with Lucille with a session with myself. I had never really felt the need— our petting hadn’t been all that frustrating, really. But after the conversation we had had and the little speech I gave her, it seemed to me it would be almost a matter of copping out if I didn’t.)

  “I never thought about that.”

  “I thought about you,” I said. I petted her breast absently. “As a matter of fact, while I was doing it I pictured you in my mind. Doing it.”

  “Oh, that’s just awful!”

  “Actually it was kind of nice.” I propped myself up on an elbow and looked down at her. “You know,” I said, “since we’re both going to do it, why should we hide out in separate bathrooms? We could just do it here in your room before you go back to school.”

  She stared.

  “It would be fun,” I said. “We could watch each other.”

  “Chip, you are the most terrible boy I ever met.”

  I looked at her and her face went through some interesting changes. “Oh,” she said, in a small, desperate voice, and I kissed her. She gave the kiss everything she had.

  “I guess I’m terrible, too,” she said.

  “I’ll tell you something that’s even nicer, Lucille. Let me do it for you.”

  “Chip, don’t talk that way.”

  “If you’re going to do it anyway,” I said reasonably, “it can’t be any more of a sin if you use somebody else’s hand. All you have to do is lie back and close your eyes and let your mind go anywhere it wants to. It’s a lot better when someone else does it for you, you know.”

  “Is it?”

  “And you feel a lot better afterward. You feel together inside instead of feeling all apart by yourself.”

  “That’s how I felt yesterday. I felt tingly and I felt relaxed and I felt I was the only person in the world.”

  I lifted her skirt and put my hand on her thigh. She was so soft there.

  “Chip, I’m afraid.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “But I am, I am. Look how far we’re going already and it’s such a short time and, oh, you’re not even my boy friend. Here I’m going steady with a boy I don’t do half of this with, and I’m doing all this with you.”

  “It’s what we both want, Lucille.”

  “I graduate high school a year from June. And after graduation I’ll marry Jimmie Butler, and I want to be pure for him. I want to be a virgin, Chip.”

  “All I’ll do is touch you.”

  “You promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if I can trust you.”

  “You can trust me, Lucille.”

  “Ohhh,” she said.

  I raised her skirt all the way and took off her panties. She didn’t help and she didn’t struggle either. Her face was so unhappy I almost felt like calling the whole thing off, but that would have been even worse for her.

  I kissed her mouth, then her breasts, and I put my hand on her belly and let it move down to her. She was all soft and moist and warm.

  She didn’t get excited right away. I guess part of her was fighting it, but the other part of her won eventually and she panted and squirmed and made beautiful little sounds. She got almost there and hovered on the edge for a long time, trying to make it and trying not to make it, and I was starting to worry that it wouldn’t work and she would wind up deciding that bathrooms were better than beds.

  But then she got there, got all the way there, and in my mind I was there with her, feeling what she felt. I held her for a long time before I raised myself up and looked at her face.

  She was glowing and she looked impossibly beautiful and I felt a lot like God.

  EIGHT

  THE FUNNY THING is that I kept getting more and more involved with Lucille without really getting involved with her at all. We spent about fifty minutes out of every lunch hour in her bedroom, but outside of that we didn’t see each other at all. I never stayed around after she got home from school, and on Saturdays she would generally manage to spend the day with a girlfriend. We never went to a movie or for a walk or anything.

  My job at the Lighthouse had something to do with this. I was working during dating hours, and the one night she could go out on dates was the one night I really had things to do there. But once I asked her if she’d like to catch a movie during the week and she said she couldn’t.

  “I have to stay with my father,” she said. “You know that, Chip.”

  “He manages well enough Friday and Saturday nights, doesn’t he?”

  “Well, those are the only nights I can go out. I’m not allowed to date during the week.”

  “You could ask permission.”

  “Asking’s not getting. Oh, Chip, I can’t go out with you anyway. I’m going steady with Jimmie Butler, you know that, I told you a thousand times.”

  I said something about going steady being a Mickey Mouse institution.

  She looked at me. “Do you think I ought to break off with Jimmie?”

  “I guess not,” I said.r />
  That was the only time I ever asked her for a date, and I was just as glad she turned me down. I guess I wanted to keep this a lunchtime thing and not let it get very intense.

  There were a couple of reasons for this. One of them makes me look like Mr. Nice Guy, so I’ll throw it in first, and it was just that it wouldn’t have been fair of me to take up all that much of Lucille’s time. Because what Lucille wanted out of life was to get married as soon as she was done with high school and start having babies and spend the rest of her life there. And while that might not sound like something worth wanting, it was what she wanted, and it was probably what would be best for her. (Especially if Jimmie Butler developed a little control by doing the multiplication tables in his head or something.)

  Anyway, Lucille wanted to be Mrs. Somebody. Maybe she would have been just as happy to be Mrs. Harrison as Mrs. Butler, but I really wasn’t ready for that. She just wasn’t that important to me, so I didn’t want to become all that important to her.

  The other reason was more selfish.

  See, I was just having too much fun the way things were going. It was a fantastic ego trip for me, the whole thing, and even knowing something is an ego trip isn’t enough to take the enjoyment out of it. For once in my life I was the teacher and she was the pupil, and I was getting a tremendous charge out of it. Instead of feeling like some utterly hopeless dope of a kid, I was the wise old man and she was the little innocent one. And every time I took her upstairs and let the stuffed animals watch me teach her something new and con her into doing it, well, it made me feel as if I was really somebody sensational.

  (Which was another reason, I guess, that I had no desire to get in bed with Claureen or Rita. There was no way on earth I could feel like the wise old man with either of those two, and I guess I knew it would just bring me down in a bad way.)