CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again

by Lawrence Block

  I would see a pretty girl on the street, say, and I would tell myself, There’s a pretty girl. I still had the brains to realize this. But what I wouldn’t tell myself was, Man, would I ever like to ball that chick until her eyes fall out of her head. And that sort of thing had always been my normal response to a pretty girl, and now it didn’t happen, and I was beginning to worry.

  For months I had been with Lucille five days a week. The same girl, lunch hour after lunch hour, and I never once got tired of it. I was always ready and willing and able, and it was always good, and I always enjoyed it. And now it began to seem possible to me that (a) I was never going to want it again with anybody or (b) I was only going to want it with Lucille. And both of these things amounted to the same thing, because I was never going to be able to see Lucille again.

  And if (b) was true (and it might have been, I couldn’t tell, because I wasn’t sure I still wanted to make love to Lucille but I couldn’t prove that I didn’t, either) then it stood to reason that leaving Bordentown had been a mistake. But not one of those mistakes you can do anything about, except maybe cut your throat, which still seemed a little too extreme.

  So it reassured me when it finally happened. And it’s reassuring me right now, because I can write about it, and if I didn’t have some sex in this book pretty soon I suppose Mr. Fultz would give it back to me and tell me to use it to line a birdcage or something. He may anyway.

  I hope not.

  It was in Iowa. I don’t remember the name of the town. (There’s another lie for you. I remember it perfectly well, but I’m not putting it in.) The house I was staying at this time was like most of the others, a sprawling old place in the middle of town with bay windows and gables and extra rooms that were nicely furnished and everything, but nothing happened in them and nobody ever went in there. This house had two widows instead of one. One of them was about sixty, a plump little old lady with cataracts and hardly any chin, so that her face just curved back from her mouth to her neck. This took a little getting used to.

  The other widow was her daughter. Her name was Mrs. Cooper, and her mother’s name was Mrs. Wollsacket. Mrs. Cooper was about thirty-five and she had a perfectly good chin and no cataracts. She also had a son, who was about seven years old and retarded. Very retarded. They had to feed him with a spoon and he would drool most of it out, and his eyes never seemed to focus on anything.

  Between the kid and his grandmother’s nonchin, I had more or less decided not to look for anything that needed fixing. After breakfast Mrs. Cooper left for work and I got ready to go, and when I went to pay Mrs. Wollsacket she started talking about all the things that needed doing, and how difficult it was to make do without a man around the place, and how here it was June and the second-floor storms were still on the windows. (Incidentally, somebody is missing a good bet; if someone would only sell combination aluminum storm windows to all those lonely old ladies, half their worries would be over.)

  Well, I couldn’t just leave. It wouldn’t fit the Lone Ranger image at all to run off yelling “Hi-yo, Silver!” without changing those storm windows for her. I offered to do the job for her in exchange for the two-fifty I owed her and another day’s room and board. She said, “Oh, I wasn’t asking you to do it, Mr. Harrison,” and I started to say, well, then, I guessed I’d be on my way, and she said, “but I’m surely glad to take you up on your generous offer,” and I was locked in.

  It didn’t take long. I took care of the storm windows and took apart a lamp with a broken switch and put it back together again so that it worked, which completely amazed her. Then I ate a sandwich for lunch and walked around town until I found the library.

  The librarian looked vaguely familiar, and when she gave me a tentative smile I realized it was Mrs. Cooper. We had a dumb conversation, and then I looked around until I found a couple of early Nero Wolfe mysteries that I couldn’t remember if I had read or not. Mrs. Cooper told me I could take them back to the house even though I didn’t have a card. I read them in my room.

  One of them, anyway; it turned out I had read the other one.

  They fed the kid early, thank God. Then the three of us had dinner and I talked about how I was a student at the University of Wisconsin on summer vacation, and trying to see something of the country and possibly earn a little money toward next year’s tuition. (I had been saying this since the term ended. Before that I was the same student at Wisconsin but had dropped out in January for lack of funds and hoped to go back in the fall.) I couldn’t tell you very much about the dinner conversation because it was basically the same as all my dinner conversations, and I had learned to handle my end of it without paying much attention to anything but the food.

  Afterward I took a loose leg off one of the dining room chairs and glued it back on. This went over well. Then I went up to my room and read the other Nero Wolfe, the one I had already read once before. I had forgotten how it came out and was willing to find out all over again.

  Around ten there was a timid knock on the door. I opened it, and it was Mrs. Cooper. She was a little bird of a woman, as thin as her mother was fat, with a slightly pinched look around her eyes and nose. She was prettier than that sentence makes her sound, and would have looked very nice, I think, if she had done something intelligent with her hair. It was the color of a field mouse and she had it pulled back into a bun.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “and I thought you might like a nice cup of tea, Mr. Harrison.”

  We had tea in one of the living rooms. Mrs. Cooper talked about how nice it was to work at the library, except that so few people actually read books anymore, with so many of them wasting their time in front of television sets. And she talked about how lonely it was in that town, and how she had wanted to leave, but she couldn’t leave her mother all alone and besides there was the boy to consider, and she guessed she would just stay there while life passed her by.

  “This must be a lonely summer for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said.

  “It is,” I said. “But I do meet a lot of people.”

  “I’m sure you must.”

  “Yes, I do.” Brilliant, Chip. If you’re supposed to be the Lone Ranger, why do you talk like Tonto?

  “I suppose you meet a great many lonely women.”

  “Uh,” Tonto said.

  She folded her little hands under her little breasts. “You must bring them a great deal of excitement, Mr. Harrison. Excitement that is sorely missing in their wretched and cloistered lives.”

  Her eyes were shining weirdly, and she moistened her thin lips with her tongue.

  I said, “Well, I guess I change a lot of storm windows, if you can call that excitement.”

  She leaned forward and put her teacup on the coffee table. She did this very deliberately, as if it would slide off the table unless she placed it in just the right spot. I realized suddenly that she was not wearing the same dress she had had on at dinner. And she was wearing lipstick, and hadn’t been wearing any at dinner.

  She stood up and crossed the room and sat on the couch beside me. She folded her hands and rested them in her lap.

  “My husband died eight years ago,” she said.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “But there is still a fire in me,” she said. “My fire has never been quenched.”

  She put her hand on the front of my pants.

  I tried out a lot of lines in my head, like asking her how her husband died, or how long she had been working at the library, or if she thought it would rain tomorrow. Somehow none of them seemed like the right thing to say. I considered telling her that I was a fairy or had been wounded in a campus riot or that I had syphilis. It was like having absolutely no appetite and then having somebody put a plate of boiled turnips in front of you.

  “My fire burns for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said. She really said that. “Oh, Chip, darling!”

  And her hand did things, and of course nothing happened, and I thought, well, maybe I can sort of move the turnips around on
my plate. Because while I was sure I would never be able to rise to the occasion, so to speak, I also figured there was more than one way to skin a cat, or quench a fire, and if she had gone eight years without it she could probably get off without too much trouble if I just went through the motions.

  So I kissed her.

  The way it started out, I was like a Boy Scout helping her across the street. But somewhere along the way everything changed. It really surprised me. I opened her dress and touched her and kissed her, and in the course of it all I began to groove on her body.

  It was a much better body than you would have expected. It didn’t look that great—she was much too thin and didn’t have much of a waist, so that she was almost a straight line from her shoulders to her feet. Her skin was very soft and smooth, though, and there was no fat on her, and, well, her body just felt nice. Some do and some don’t, and hers did.

  Maybe what I got was a contact arousal from her, because she was certainly excited and she certainly made it obvious. Anyway, I was on the couch with her, just going through the motions, when all of a sudden I realized that I had an erection.

  And I thought, Hey, where did that come from?

  God knows where it came from. But even I knew where it was supposed to go, and it suddenly seemed absolutely essential that I put it there as soon as I possibly could. It didn’t seem to matter if she was ready or not, although I guess she must have been ready for the past eight years. All that mattered to me was to get into her, and I shucked my pants and rolled on top of her and jabbed at her with all the subtlety of a tomcat.

  It went straight in on the first shot as if she had a magnet in her cervix. She wrapped her arms and legs around me as if she was scared I would take it away. She had nothing to worry about. I kept taking it a little ways away and then putting it back, as fast and as hard and as deep as I could.

  Throughout all of this, there was something slightly schizophrenic about the whole thing. Because it was as though there were two Chip Harrisons. One of them was banging away at the poor woman as if he was trying to splinter her pelvic bone, and the other was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, watching the whole thing and not quite believing what he was seeing.

  It went on for a long time, this totally unsubtle relentless sledgehammer screwing, and she came about half a dozen times, and then so did I.

  “We’ll go to your room now,” she said. There was a little puddle on the couch. She put a doily over it, put her dress and my pants over her arm, and took my arm with her free hand. “We’ll go to your room,” she said, “and do it some more.”

  “Uh—”

  “We’ll fuck,” she said. “We can try different positions. I would like to try it with me on top, if that’s all right with you. That way you can pinch my breasts while we do it. You may pinch them as hard as you like. I won’t mind.”

  “Uh—”

  “You may even bite them if you like.”

  “Your mother,” I said.

  “She sleeps very soundly.”

  “Well, uh, I’m not sure I can do it again. It took a lot out of me.”

  “I know. Most of it is running down my leg.”

  “Uh.”

  “You’ll be able to,” she said confidently, giving my arm a happy like squeeze. “I just know you will.”

  She was right.

  Afterward, it seemed as if there ought to be something to say. I asked her about her husband, and if he died before the kid was born. Seven months before the kid was born, she told me.

  And how long had her mother been a widow?

  “Eight years also.”

  “That’s really terrible,” I said. “You must have lost them both about the same time.”

  “Exactly the same time.”

  “Gee,” I said. “An automobile accident, I suppose.”

  “They committed suicide.” She was lying on her back. She had taken her hair down and it looked much better. The pinched-in expression was gone from her face. Sex certainly does wonders for a woman’s appearance.

  “You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured me. “It happened the very day I told them that I was pregnant. That very day, I told them, my husband and my father, and they went downstairs to the basement and into the tool room, and they got the shotgun, and they put the barrel in their mouth and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of their head.”

  “Oh.”

  “I was never married,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “It started when I was twelve. He came to my room and told me I was a big girl and it was time I learned how to fuck. I hope you don’t mind my using that word.”

  “Not at all.”

  “And then he fucked me. I didn’t like it, but my mother said it was my duty because he was my father. She read from the Bible. About Lot and his daughters. I didn’t like it at all for the first few years, but then I got to enjoy it pretty well.”

  “Oh.”

  “What I didn’t like was he would always pull it out just before the end. And when he couldn’t in time I was always lucky, until one time when I was twenty-six years old and I found out I was pregnant and he shot himself.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t see why he shot himself,” she said reasonably. “There was no need.”

  “Oh.”

  “I went to Kansas City, and then mother told everyone that I was married, and I had the baby, and then mother told everyone that Mr. Cooper was killed in an airplane crash and I would be coming back to live with her. But I think everybody knows. Wouldn’t you think so?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I think they must. Especially with the baby being an idiot and all. I wish they had told me right away he was an idiot. I would have drowned him. But by the time I knew about it I was attached to him and I couldn’t do it. That happens, you know. You get attached to them, even if they are.”

  She went silent then. Thank God. After a while I said, “Uh, I’m kind of exhausted. I have to get to sleep, and you probably ought to go to your own room. I mean, you wouldn’t want your mother to find out about this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well,” I said, “I would be embarrassed.”

  “Oh,” she said. She thought about it, then nodded. “All right,” she said, and off she went, her dress over her arm.

  I was just falling asleep when the door opened again. There she was, carrying a cup and saucer. No dress this time. She was still naked.

  “I brought you a surprise,” she said gaily.

  “If that’s my tea, I don’t really want it.”

  “It’s not,” she said.

  “I still don’t want it.”

  “Well, it’s not for you.”

  “Huh?”

  “Lie down and shut up,” she said. “It’s for the surprise.”

  “What surprise?”

  “You’ll see. You’ll like it.”

  “Look, all I really want is to go to sleep.”

  “You can go to sleep in a minute. Lie down.”

  “What’s in the cup?”

  “Just warm water,” she said, and filled her mouth with it, and leaned over me.

  Oh, the hell with it. I wasn’t going to mention it but it’s too perfect, and if it ruins her reputation that’s just the way it goes. I don’t think she’ll mind, anyway.

  It was Waterloo, Iowa. I swear to God.

  SIXTEEN

  THERE WERE SOME other girls during the rest of the summer. Some I got to and some I struck out with. None of them were very important.

  SEVENTEEN

  I DROVE INTO Madison a couple of weeks after the fall term started. I would have gotten there earlier but I kept putting it off until finally I knew it was time. The old Cadillac got me there in good shape. I started looking around for a tourist home like the ones I had been staying in for the past half a year, and I drove around for a long time without seeing any of the usual signs. Then I remembered that Madison wa
s a university town, and that people with rooms to rent would take in college students by the year.

  And I also remembered, just about the same time, that if Hallie was here and stuck in some dormitory it might be pretty stupid to room with some widow. So I got a room at a motel. Sixteen bucks, and payable in advance, and it wasn’t even all that much of a room.

  I didn’t care. I was in pretty good shape financially, with almost two hundred and fifty dollars, which was more than I had had when I left Bordentown. Even with all the gas that the old car burned, I had been earning money faster than I spent it.

  I unpacked in my motel room and put my clothes away. I took a shower and shaved, although I had already shaved and showered in the morning. Then I got dressed and noticed I was sweating, and I took another shower and put on a clean shirt and made myself stretch out on the bed and calm down so I would stop sweating.

  The campus was huge. It sprawled all over the place. There were a lot of kids sitting in groups under trees and other groups of kids hurrying here and there. I couldn’t understand how they could possibly find their way around. It was immense.

  I asked a lot of people various dumb questions until someone told me where you could find out where a student was staying, and somebody there told me what dorm she was in, and various other people pointed me toward it.

  I went and stood in front of it. I didn’t know whether it was all right for me to go in or not. I thought of stopping some girl on the way out and asking her to find Hallie for me, but instead I just waited.

  And then two girls came out, and one of them was Hallie.

  She looked exactly the way she had looked a year ago. Exactly. She was wearing dungarees and a sweatshirt and sandals, and her granny glasses made her brown eyes look even bigger than they were. Her hair, straight and glossy brown, was a year longer than it had been.

  I said, “Hallie?”

  She looked at me, and stared, and said, “Chip?”

  I nodded, waiting for her to run up and throw herself into my arms. (I had rehearsed this scene a lot.) She didn’t exactly do this. What she did was say something to the other girl about seeing her in class, and then she walked slowly toward me, a smile spreading on her lips, and reached out her hands for mine.