Thirty

by Lawrence Block

  “But tell me what you’re doing, Jan.”

  “Oh, nothing very much.”

  “Do you think—I mean, is there any chance you and Howie might get back together again?”

  “No, I really don’t think so.”

  “You know, that’s a shame. But I guess everybody at one time or another feels the need to kick over the traces. To get away, to have a shot at some new kind of life. I’ll tell you something, you were lucky that you didn’t have any kids at the time. If you had had children it might have been a great deal different.”

  “Yes, it would have made a difference.”

  “Of course it would. If it weren’t for my own kids—”

  “Yes, Edgar?”

  “Oh, what am I talking about? Marcie and I have a good thing going. We’re really very happy together.”

  “I know you are.”

  He ordered us another round of drinks, our third, I think it was. I was drinking Scotch sours, he was drinking vodka martinis. I think they were beginning to get to him. I think that was what he had in mind when he ordered them. Nobody drinks vodka martinis because he likes the taste. They don’t have any taste. They just do the job.

  Vodka, the housewife’s friend.

  How long ago was that?

  “Jan.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know, I can see just looking at you that you’ve got your life pretty much under control. I can see that, and you know something? I’m damned glad.”

  “Why, that’s nice of you, Edgar.”

  “I never did believe the things I heard about you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not for a minute.”

  “Just what sort of things did you hear?”

  “Oh, nothing important.”

  “No, I’d like to know.”

  “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  “I’d be very interested.”

  “Oh, the usual thing. Sex stories, to be quite blunt about it, that you were raising all kinds of hell here in New York, you know, sleeping around.”

  “But you don’t believe that.”

  “I believe that what everybody does is their own goddam business and nobody else’s goddam business.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Damn right.”

  “You know, the closest I came in Eastchester—”

  “Yes?”

  “Was with you.”

  “That so?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s this story, something about a kid who came to mow the grass or something—”

  “Shovel the snow.”

  “I guess that’s what it was.”

  “There’s not that much grass that needs mowing in the middle of the winter.”

  “Stands to reason.”

  “But that was something else. On the way out the door, so to speak. Before I left Howard.”

  “Damn right.” His eyes focused owlishly upon me, and he smiled suddenly. Well, I thought, why not? When you start something, sooner or later you ought to finish it. A dry hump at a party is nice, but one ought to do things properly.

  “Edgar?”

  “Huh?”

  “All those stories about the life I lead.”

  “I never paid any attention to them.”

  “You should have. See, they happen to be true.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you’ve got an hour to spare—”

  “You have a place?”

  “Well, not exactly. See, I’m living with these two colored fellows, and if I brought you there they’d have a fit. They’re junked up all the time and anything could happen. You know, they have knives, and when they get some cocaine in their systems anything can happen. And the one thing they don’t want is for me to bring any white men home.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “But they never come up north of Fourteenth Street, so if you know a place uptown, there’s no problem.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “You live with a couple of niggers?”

  The Eastchester liberal. Sad, sad. I looked skyward and waxed rhapsodic, saying things like Skin like black velvet and like that. I thought Edgar was going to have cardiac arrest. His face got slightly purple.

  I thought, too, that this would turn him off. Not that that was my intention, but once I got into the spirit of the game I stayed with it, and judging by his reactions he wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. Not quite the truth of the matter, however.

  “Listen, I know a hotel.”

  Are there any men who don’t know a hotel? I’m sure Howard knows a hotel. It occurred to me at the time that perhaps, as we stroll through the lobby, we will meet Howard and the girl with the plastic nose-cone tits.

  By the time we got to the hotel I was sort of hoping this would happen. There has always been about Edgar Hillman and the idea of balling Edgar Hillman something that appeals to my sense of the ridiculous. And it was odd, all of this, because here I was going to get fucked for the first time in quite a while, not counting that Italian kid the night before last, because that didn’t really count, it was just a quick thing for both of us because we were both lonely, and I’ll never see him again and probably wouldn’t recognize him if I did, just a quick tumble in the last row of the theater that meant no more to me than it did to him, and I didn’t even come or get especially hot, so in a sense—

  There is just no way out of that sentence. It’s one of those sentences that keeps coming to new commas and never has its period. A pregnant sentence, that’s what it is.

  Anyway, the point was that I had not done much lately sexually, and here I was with Edgar, and I was driven not by the desire for sexual pleasure or by any deep compulsion but merely because I thought it would all be ridiculous and funny and all, which, come to think of it, is a better reason for balling someone than a good many.

  We took a cab to this hotel that he knew, which was silly because we could have walked there in less time. The cab ride did give us a chance to sit in silence. Otherwise we would have had to talk to each other, which right then would have been more than difficult.

  It occurred to me that it would really be a scream if the cabdriver was the same one I had gone down on. I snuck a look at him, and Guess What?

  It wasn’t him.

  At the hotel, Edgar was a little less smooth about things than he might have been. I was supposed to wait in the lobby while he handled things at the desk. I’m sure the desk didn’t care, but maybe he didn’t want me to see what name he used, or something like that. And then there was a lot of business with hand movements and head nods designed to clue me in that I should get on the elevator ahead of him. For a guy who had done this before, he was acting like a guy who hadn’t done this before.

  In the room, he gave me this long look. I prepared myself for the news that Marcie didn’t understand him. I had news for him. Marcie understood him.

  Instead he said, “You know, I always liked you, Jan.”

  “We always liked each other.”

  “Yes. Whenever the gang got together—”

  “We responded to each other.”

  “Exactly.”

  Poor little Beady Eyes, I thought, and closed my own eyes and waited for him to kiss me. Which he proceeded to do. Ah, Marcie, I thought, savoring the kiss, rubbing my body against him, ah, Marcie, I wish you were here to watch.

  Who would have guessed that he would turn out to be so oral? Kissing everywhere, hungry, desperate to kiss and lick. Not very good at it, and a rank idiot at missing the clitoris, but ravenously eager to please. And who would have guessed that, after he heaved himself out of the crouch and onto me, after he plunged squishily into me, after he gave the requisite number of thrusts and splashed my insides with his seed, he would pass out on me and give every evidence of having succumbed to a massive coronary?

  I went through this whole trip about what to do next. Call the desk? Call a doctor? Ca
ll the police? Hello, I was fucking this fellow, the husband of a girl who used to be a very close friend of mine, when all of a sudden he happened to have a heart attack and die, and if you could just send up a couple of male nurses to sort of roll him off me, I’d be very grateful.

  I could just sneak out, I decided. And leave him like that? And then what would happen?

  God only knows what I might have done, but of course he opened his eyes and told me I was fantastic, the best there ever was. How would he know? All I’d had a chance to do was open my legs and lie there for a while.

  We sat up in bed smoking cigarettes. “I’ll bet you’ve made some crazy scenes, Jan.”

  “Oh, you could call it that.”

  “I don’t blame you a bit. Same thing everybody would do if they had the guts. Who wants to spend the rest of your life with a millstone around your neck, right?”

  “Right, Edgar.”

  “Crazy scenes. Down in the Village, I know about the Village, you don’t have to tell me about the Village. Before I married Marcie I used to go down there all the time. I moved around, you know. I kept in motion.”

  “I’m sure you did.”

  “That was a lot of shit about living with a couple of shfoogs, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You had me going for a few minutes. You live alone?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I have a roommate.”

  “Oh, a roommate.”

  “You’d like her.”

  “Her.”

  “A Chinese girl a couple years younger than I am. Really beautiful.”

  “Is that right.”

  “And if you think I’m wild, you should see her. I could tell you stories.”

  “Really?”

  So I made up some stories. I knew it would get him excited. What he really wanted was to screw my Oriental roommate, but she wasn’t available, so he settled for taking it all in and then screwing me while he pictured her. It was sort of fun.

  There was one more pretty good moment, after we were dressed again, after he had taken down my address and phone number (the wrong address, and the wrong phone number). He asked if there was anything I needed, anything he could do for me, anything at all, just ask, anything.

  “Well, now that you mention it—”

  “You’re a little short?”

  “Well, if you could spare a few dollars.”

  “Jan, you should have said something. Whatever you want, whatever you need. Just pick a number.”

  “Well—” trying it on “—well, see, I generally get twenty-five dollars.”

  I wish I had a picture of his face to paste here. Out of sight. He was really a study.

  “A joke,” I said, cutting it off, taking his arm, laughing so that he could gratefully join in my laughter. “But I had you for a minute, didn’t I?”

  I wonder if I’ll ever see him again. The only pleasure I got out of balling him was the humor of it. The sex wasn’t good or bad. It was—how to put it? I was not taking part in it. It was going on, and there was certainly nothing about it that I didn’t like, but neither was there anything the least bit involving about it.

  July 7

  Twice today I thought I saw Eric on the street.

  I went to a lesbian bar last night. I don’t think I’m ready for that scene just yet. Girls dancing with girls, some of them in very butchy drag. Maybe I could have enjoyed it if I had been high at the time. I wasn’t, and I got lower hanging around there.

  One girl gave me the eye rather obviously, but I didn’t respond. Maybe if she had pushed it, if she had come over and started a conversation. But she didn’t, so I finished my two-and-a-half-dollar drink and went home.

  July 8

  Jesus, what do I do now?

  At least the book is still here. But what do I do? Nobody’s around and the rent is due in a couple of weeks and for God’s sake what do I do?

  July 9

  The entry for yesterday looks inane. I wish it didn’t mean anything. I keep looking at the words like an inside-out cryptographer, hoping that if I study them long enough they will cease to mean anything to me.

  Doesn’t work.

  Yesterday evening when I got home after a sort of combination of lunch and dinner I found out I had been robbed. Burglarized, I guess I mean. You have to be home to be robbed. I think. Not that it matters.

  They got all my money. I had my purse with me. Twenty dollars in it—I never carry a lot for fear of having my purse snatched, which is laughable, now. I left the rest at home, all carefully stashed in my dresser at the bottom of a pile of sweaters, because after all who would think of looking under a pile of sweaters, right?

  Wrong.

  They got over a thousand dollars from me. I don’t know how much it was because I don’t know how much I had exactly. Between a thousand and fifteen hundred. I think.

  Leaving me with between twenty and twenty-five.

  When I came home I almost had a stroke. I’m still someone who belongs in intensive care, no question. Funny things dept.— Before I ran to the sweater drawer, I first made sure that they hadn’t found this book. Over a thousand dollars up for grabs and some fucking junkie bastard is going to waste his time reading my diary, right?

  Why do I keep thinking that this is funny? The one thing it’s not is funny. But this nervous giggle keeps wanting to develop somewhere in the back of my head, somewhere in those sinus cavities they show you in the Dristan commercials.

  They didn’t wreck the place. That was one thing, I suppose, to be thankful for. My clothes got sort of thrown around a lot, because I guess you can’t expect burglars to put everything back neatly. But there was no tremendous damage done, like pillows and mattresses cut open and all that.

  I suppose they stopped knocking their brains out when they hit the cash.

  You know, I can’t get away from it, but I keep thinking he had something to do with it. Eric. I can’t think of any logical reason why he should waste his time burglarizing my apartment. It doesn’t make any particular sense. If he wanted money from me, which he wouldn’t, he could simply ask for it the way he can ask anything else from me.

  I keep thinking about the time he burned up my credit cards. Cutting a link to Howard, he said. But maybe it was a way to make me dependent upon him instead, and maybe this was another part of that process. No credit, no money, no friends, nothing—not even Eric, because I still haven’t heard a word from him.

  People keep floating in and out of my life. I got bored once because of the sameness, and now nothing’s the same from one day to the next. Not that things are that interesting, but the whole shape of my world keeps changing.

  Fancy talk. What it comes down to is I’m broke, and what do I do now, Mother?

  I am honestly damned if I know.

  The jobs I checked out, the jobs I looked at but did not touch, were all pretty much the same thing. Nine-to-five crap for a hundred and ten dollars a week. It didn’t seem worth the trouble when I had money and now it just isn’t enough. What am I going to do on a hundred and ten a week? That comes to about eighty-five a week after taxes, and I pay more than that right now for rent alone. I pay three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month rent, and there is no kind of job I can get that will give me that kind of bread.

  I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.

  There are these jobs they advertise in the East Village Other. Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a
photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.

  (What sort of men actually go to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)

  They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.

  Faces?

  Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.

  That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?

  Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)

  God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.