Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

by Lawrence Block

  I’m a pretty straightforward guy, as you well know, and I prefer to take your whole letter and everything else pretty much at face value as an honest attempt to let me know, and Fran in the bargain, that you’re not holding a grudge. So I’ll think of the letter that way whether that’s what you had in mind or not.

  Anyway, please, no more letters like that. And if you do write, don’t refer to this letter, as I don’t intend to tell Fran I wrote to you.

  Your friend,

  Steve

  9

  74 Bleecker St.

  New York 10012

  June 22

  Mrs. Laurence Clarke

  c/o American Express

  Cuernavaca, Mexico

  Dear Fran:

  I have a lot of things to tell you, but perhaps the first and most important is what great good fortune you’ve had to run off with a man who really loves you. I know Steve has always had a problem in communicating, although God knows he’s not as hopeless in conversation as he is when he takes pen in hand and tries to write something. But I have a feeling that he may not have let you know fully how he feels about you, and communication is such a problem among lovers, as you can certainly appreciate.

  So for that reason I’m taking the liberty of enclosing herewith (if you’ll pardon the formal language) a Xerox copy of a letter I received from him. It’s handwritten, but I’m happy to say the writing reproduced nicely. That Xerox machine is a really wonderful thing. I’ve had some correspondence which indicates I may find it increasingly difficult to gain access to it. I hope this will all work out, however.

  To return to Steve’s letter, you’ll notice that it doesn’t bear any date. I doubt this will make much difference to you, but at the moment I’m rather involved with correspondence in general, rather compulsive about the whole subject, as it happens, and it would make my record-keeping more complete if you could find out just when it was written and relay the information to me.

  It should be easy for you to work it out, actually. As you’ll note from an examination of its contents, Steve’s letter was written while you were out shopping for something to cook for dinner. Since cooking dinner has never been something you do more than once or twice a week, I’m sure you can narrow things down and work out the timing for me. God knows I would appreciate it.

  I want you to really read Steve’s letter, Fran. And try not to be put off by the man’s relative clumsiness with the English language. After all, he’s a photographer and not a writer, and you don’t expect photographers to be up to their asses in verbal facility. They’re far more apt to be up to their asses in darkroom chemicals, aren’t they? Besides, as everyone learns at a tender age, a picture is worth a thousand words. You might say that Steve sent me a picture, as his letter runs quite close to a thousand words. Do you suppose it’s just coincidence?

  You can tell from a glance at this primitive word-picture of Steve’s that he really loves you, Fran. (Somehow I can’t bring myself to call you Frances, although Steve seems to refer to you that way a lot. Is it his idea of a pet name?) His love for you is evident in every split infinitive, in every mawkish turn of phrase. In fact I would go so far as to say that his letter to me was in fact a letter to you, a letter he lacked the self-confidence and, oh, the slick glibness to deliver to you in person. And so he writes his letter to you but addresses and mails it to me.

  I can understand this, actually. I’ve been writing all these letters to various people lately and can’t entirely dismiss the nagging suspicion that I’m really writing them to myself. Or that my typewriter is writing them to me. I’ve tended to anthropomorphize my typewriter lately. This may be bad, but I feel it’s better than ignoring it.

  Thus my passing this letter on to you is in a sense my method of playing the John Alden part, but this is one John Alden who will respectfully decline to speak for himself.

  One interesting reason for assuming Steve’s letter was written for your benefit, Fran, is his stubborn insistence upon going to such great lengths to suggest that the whole bit with the convent girls never happened. That it was all some fantasy of mine, which I wrote to him for some nefarious purpose. Steve has known me a long time, longer than almost anyone, and he can certainly tell when I’m telling the truth, so he knows dammed well that this happened. I may have had to reconstruct some of the conversation slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came within a couple of words of being a verbatim transcript of what actually went down that night. I guess he must feel that my boasting—and let’s admit it, I was boasting—reflected somehow on your femininity, as if I were not only doing a rooster strut but also comparing you adversely to the six girls.

  A strut, yes; an adverse comparison, surely not. Of course we both know, we all three know, that you are a few years more than sixteen, Fran(ces), and that you will not be sixteen again unless science does something phenomenal. And while twenty-nine is also a hell of a good age, asserted by most authorities to be a woman’s sexual peak, there’s no gainsaying the fact that after a certain point in life the bloom begins to leave the rose, as the poets say. But question your femininity? Christ, I would never dream of doing that. Quite the opposite. Why, if memory serves, in that very letter I devoted quite a bit of space to unequivocal praise of your oral abilities.

  But just to make things as clear as possible, to make things Presidentially clear, as it were, perhaps I’d better tell you a little bit more about the Darien business.

  First off, when we got to Darien, nothing happened. (Now if this were a fantasy, something damn well would have happened. To put it another way, if I were allowed to write the script for my life, I’d smooth out a lot of the wrinkles.) But by the time the station wagon got us where we were going, it was somewhere around five or five-thirty and I had a headache and the girls were exhausted. Besides, they had to be in bed so that the nun who was in charge of their dormitory could wake them at seven-thirty. They had managed to sneak out after bed check, and now they had to sneak in before reveille.

  I wasn’t too thrilled about this, actually. They took me to a squat red-brick building in town and led me up a flight of stairs to a faintly furnished room and told me I could sleep there.

  “Who lives here?” I wondered.

  “No one.”

  “It’s only eight dollars a week, Larry, and we six chip in to pay the rent. It’s secret, you might say.”

  “It’s refuge from the storm, you might say.”

  “It’s a safe place to fuck, you might even say.”

  “Ah,” I said, nodding thoughtfully. I walked over to the bed and bounced on it. “A good bed,” I said. “Well used.”

  “And there’s just room for the seven of us,” I said.

  “Oh, we can’t stay.”

  “Can a couple of you stay?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “God on a pogo stick, can at least one of you stay?”

  “No way.”

  “It hardly seems fair,” said Mad Poet.

  They explained the situation, and fair or not it seemed to be The Way Things Were. They all assured me of their undying love and lust, and I necked them each goodbye in turn, and they went away and I went to sleep.

  Passed out, actually. But neatly, after having first removed my clothes and hung them ever so neatly in a corner of the floor. And then I popped into that snug double bed and pulled up the covers and slept.

  I hadn’t really thought I would be able to manage this last. I don’t honestly think I would have had the strength to fuck anybody just then, but the last thing I wanted was to have to sleep alone. I never much liked sleeping alone, and I particularly dreaded it that night. Exhaustion and India Pale Ale have a way of conquering that form of dread, though, and I went out like a burned-out bulb.

  I awoke very abruptly. There was this shadowy dream that I do not remember, and then I was completely awake and completely aware of a presence curled up behind me. I was sleeping on my side, body curled in a semifetal posture, and a body was
similarly curled behind me. A very soft and warm body. I felt soft thighs cushioning my buttocks and firm breasts pressing into my back, and while I was trying to decide whether or not to let on that I was awake, a small hand came around my shoulder and fastened itself over my eyes.

  “Guess who,” a voice demanded.

  “Victor McLaglen. Do another.”

  A giggle. “Do you even know where you are?”

  “I seem to have gone to heaven,” I said. “The funny thing is that I don’t remember dying.”

  “Aren’t you going to guess? Or don’t you honestly remember?”

  “Ah, I remember. I remember everything. I have to guess which one you are, eh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What happens if I guess right?”

  “Then we can make love.”

  “What if I guess wrong?”

  “We still make love but I won’t enjoy it as much. And I’m sure you want me to enjoy it.”

  “Merry Cat,” I said.

  She squealed and took her hand away, and I turned around and looked into her cat’s eyes and kissed her little mouth. Her face was flushed.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh, you’re ready, Oh, how nice. Don’t wait, don’t even touch me, just get in me. I want you inside me, I can’t wait.”

  She wasn’t exaggerating. She got off the minute I was inside her, coming in a sweet soft pink dissolve. She came twice more and then it was my turn, and then we clung to each other while I waited for the earth tremors to quit shaking hell out of the room.

  Ultimately she said, “How on earth did you guess right? Just a shot in the dark?”

  “Not exactly that.”

  “An intuitive flash? You just felt it suddenly in your heart and soul?”

  “I felt things in quite a few places, but that’s not it.”

  “You recognized my voice, then.”

  “Well, no.”

  “No? Hmmm. Uh, let’s see, uh, you could feel my breasts against you and you figured it was me by process of elimination because they were the only ones you weren’t familiar with.”

  “Wrong again.”

  “I think I give up.”

  “Just logic,” I said. “You had to drive last night and you didn’t have a chance to come in back, so for the sake of fairness they let you come over this morning. That’s how I figured it out, and it looks as though I was right.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, nothing, actually. And, see, that was exactly what I told them this morning, the five of them. Just that very line of reasoning. ’You five had Mad Poet all to yourselves last night and now it should be my turn.’ ”

  “That’s just what I just said.”

  “Right, and it’s what I said, and I thought it was totally brittle, and they wouldn’t buy it. Instead we all cut cards and I won.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s really weird, working it all out logically like that and being wrong and coming up with the right answer. It’s pretty far out.”

  “Well, even on a straight guess I had one chance in six.”

  “True.”

  I started saying something, God knows what, and she reached out her little hand again, only this time instead of putting it over my eyes, she wrapped it around my cock. Whatever I was saying seemed no longer relevant. I reached out with both hands and began playing with her.

  “They’ll be coming over fairly soon.”

  “Here?”

  She nodded, started to say something, then gasped when I touched one of the right buttons. I slipped a finger inside her. She was sopping wet and hot enough to cook an egg on and unbelievably tight.

  (That’s another advantage in being sixteen, Fran, and if Steve thinks that my mentioning it is any sort of implicit criticism of you, he’s out of his skull. It’s a simple biological fact. Certain organs do lose a certain portion of their elasticity over the years. But that’s not to suggest that you have to start worrying about men falling out of you, or about your being unable to tell for sure whether they’re in there or not. You’ve got quite a few years to go before that’ll become a problem for you, and by then sex will be so much less frequent an indulgence, and so less important to you, that you won’t really be giving up all that much.)

  Where was I? Oh, yes. ’She was sopping wet and hot enough to cook an egg on and unbelievably tight.’ That’s where I was.

  I said, “We have time to do it again, don’t we?”

  “Sure.”

  “But let’s not rush this one.”

  “No, let’s not.”

  “Because I’d like to get very well acquainted with your body. So that I won’t have to guess whether or not it’s you I’m in bed with.”

  “Slow is better,” she said.

  “Usually.”

  “Only last time I couldn’t wait.”

  “I understand.”

  “I think you have the most beautiful cock in the world, Larry.”

  The rest of the girls came just after we did, happily enough. (I mean that it was happy they waited until we were through, not that we came happily. Although we did, but it would have been a more awkward construction that way. I’m pointing this out primarily for Steve’s benefit, Fran, so that he can learn to develop more of an ear for narrative. If he’s going to insist on sending me a thousand words when a simple photograph would suffice, it would be best if he learned to arrange them in the proper order.)

  They came like Greeks, bringing me little presents. While none of their gifts matched what Merry Cat had brought me, I was grateful for the two containers of cardboard coffee, the grilled-cheese-and-bacon sandwich, the socks and underwear.

  “I couldn’t remember whether you wore jockey shorts or boxer shorts,” Alison said, blue eyes sparkling and plump cheeks glowing. “But Naughty Nasty Nancy remembered.”

  “Hardly the sort of thing she’d forget,” B.J. said.

  “Meow,” said Nancy Hall. She was still wearing the witch’s hat, and mordant madness danced in her eyes. “Meow, meow, meow. Look at Merry Cat, she’s positively radiant. Orgasm brings the most beatific look to her face. Are you in a state of grace, Marry Katherine?”

  “Sure, and don’t I half feel sinfully saintlike,” Merry Cat said.

  “Sister Theresa talks like that. Do her some more, Merry Cat.”

  “Faith, and am I not a fair candidate for canonization, with the Spirit of the Holy Name running down my leg.”

  “I think that’s blasphemous,” Dawn Redmond said.

  “Sure and you’re nothing but jealous, Dawn me love.”

  “Oh, shut up and kiss me, Merry Cat,” Dawn said.

  They kissed and went into a clinch. Merry Cat and I had our clothes on again. The rest of the girls and I were sitting on the bed or leaning against the wall, and Dawn and Merry Cat were standing up in the middle of the room with their arms around each other and their tongues in each other’s mouth. We all watched for a while, and Naughty Nasty Nancy kissed B.J. on the neck and touched her breasts, and Alison petted Naughty Nasty Nancy gently on the bottom, and Ellen Jamison cuddled beside me on the bed and opened her mouth so wide for my kiss that the braces didn’t get in the way. And eventually Dawn and Merry Cat let go of each other, and they both had a glassy look in their eyes, and Dawn said, “Well, at least Larry hasn’t spoiled you for me, Merry Cat. I guess I still can turn you on.”

  “Till the day I die, Dawn.”

  “Isn’t it nice,” said Ellen to me, “that we all love each other so truly?”

  There’s not really much to add to this. It’s not as if I felt compelled to burden you with a blow-by-blow description of my life without you, anyway. I just wanted to put you in the picture, so to speak, and it seems to have taken me several thousand words to do it.

  That’s a really terrible school, incidentally. They have all of these seventeenth-century rules administered by a batch of desiccated nuns who spend most of their time remembering the good
old days with Torquemada. My six little daughters of Lancaster seem to be the six really fine girls in the school. As B.J. put it, “We’re really alone here. Nobody else drinks and nobody else smokes and nobody else turns on and nobody else fucks. There are some lesbians, but they’re hopeless. All so sickeningly sincere about it. When they’re not eating each other, they’re praying over it. You could really vomit, honestly.”

  Fortunately, these six have parental permission to sign out for overnights with mythical New York aunts and uncles. That afternoon B.J. and Alison signed out, and Merry Cat drove us to the station, and we rode into Grand Central on the New Haven. We just kept talking about things. Total rapport. I can understand how exciting it must be for you and Steve. There was a phrase in his letter about the words in popular songs being endowed with personal meaning when you’re in love. I haven’t put it as well as he did, of course, but I know what he means. I wouldn’t say that I was getting any secret flashes out of the transistor radio a few seats down the aisle, but it was that sort of very vital feeling you get when you interact in utter honest intimacy with another human being, or, in this case, with two other human beings.

  We talked about you, Fran, but I didn’t tell them anything you wouldn’t want them to know. Set your mind at ease.

  There was an odd moment just as the train left Westport when the two girls exchanged a brief but thorough soul-kiss right there in front of everybody. You could hear the jaws fall. But nonembarrassment is as contagious as embarrassment, and the girls were totally cool about it, and so was I. I wish Steve had been around to take pictures of the faces of some of the other passengers.

  Then we got to New York and I took them over to the Feenjon for dinner, and we listened to music for a while, and then we all went back to the apartment and balled.