I Know How to Pick 'Em

by Lawrence Block

Her hands moved, and the fingers of her right hand fastened on the base of her ring finger, assuring themselves there was no ring there.

  “Not the ring,” I said. “The mark of the ring. A depression in the skin, because you must have taken it off just before you came into the roadhouse. And the thin white line, showing where the sun don’t shine.”

  “Sherlock Holmes,” she said.

  She paused so that I could say something, but why help her out? I waited, and she said, “You’re not married.”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been?”

  “Same answer.”

  She held her hand up, palm out, as if to examine her ring. I guess she was studying the mark where it had been.

  She said, “I thought I’d get married right after high school. Where I grew up, if you were pretty, that’s what happened. Or if you weren’t pretty, but if somebody got you pregnant anyway.”

  “You were pretty.”

  She nodded. Why pretend she didn’t know it? “But I wasn’t pregnant, and this girlfriend got this idea, let’s get out of this town, let’s go to Chicago and see what happens. So just like that I packed a bag and we went, and it took her three weeks to get homesick and go right back.”

  “But not you.”

  “No, I liked Chicago. Or I thought I did. What I liked was the person I got to be in Chicago, not because it was Chicago but because it wasn’t home.”

  “So you stayed.”

  “Until I went someplace else. Another city. And I had jobs, and I had boyfriends, and I spent some time between boyfriends, and it was all fine. And I thought, well, some women have husbands and children, and some don’t, and it looks like I’ll be one of the ones who don’t.”

  I let her talk but didn’t listen too closely. She met this man, he wanted to marry her, she thought it was her last chance, she knew it was a mistake, she went ahead and did it anyway. It was her story, but hardly hers alone. I’d heard it often enough before.

  Sometimes I suppose it was true. Maybe it was true this time, far as that goes.

  Maybe not.

  When I got tired of hearing her I put a hand on her belly and stroked her. Her sudden intake of breath showed she wasn’t expecting it. I ran my hand down, and her legs parted in anticipation, and I put my hand on her and fingered her. Just that, just lay beside her and worked her with my fingers. She’d closed her eyes, and I watched her face while my fingers did what they did.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  I got hard doing this, but didn’t feel the need to do anything about it. After she came I just lay where I was. I closed my eyes and got soft again and lay there listening to all the silence in the room.

  My father moved away when I was still in diapers. At least that was what I was told. I don’t remember him, and I’m not convinced he was there. Somebody got her pregnant, it wasn’t the Holy Ghost, but did he ever know it? Did she even know his last name?

  So I was raised by a single mother, though I don’t recall hearing the term back then. Early on she brought men home, and then she stopped doing that. She might come home smelling of where she’d been and what she’d been doing, but she’d come home alone.

  Then she stopped that, too, and spent her evenings in front of the TV.

  One night we were watching some program, I forget what, and she said, “You’re old enough now. I suppose you touch yourself.”

  I knew what she meant. What I didn’t know was how to respond.

  She said, “Don’t be ashamed. Everybody does it, it’s part of growing up. Let me see it.” And, when confusion paralyzed me, “Take off your pajama bottoms and show me your dick.”

  I didn’t want to. I did want to. I was embarrassed, I was excited, I was. . .

  “It’s getting bigger,” she said. “You’ll be a man soon. Show me how you touch yourself. Look how it grows! This is better than television. What do you think about when you touch it?”

  Did I say anything? I don’t believe I did.

  “Titties?” She opened her robe. “You sucked on them when you were a baby. Do you remember?”

  Wanting to look away. Wanting to stop touching myself.

  “I’ll tell you a secret. Touching your dick is nice but it’s nicer when someone else touches it for you. See? You can touch my titties while I do this for you. Doesn’t that feel good? Doesn’t it?”

  I shot all over her hand. Thought she’d be angry. She put her hand to her face, licked it clean. Smiled at me.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Claudia, my blonde. I’d wondered, without much caring, just how natural that blondeness might be. Still an open question, because the hair on her head was the only hair she had.

  Had to wonder what my mother would have made of that. Shaving her legs was her concession to femininity, and one she accepted grudgingly.

  Got so she’d have me do it. Come out of the bath, all warm from the tub, and I’d spread lather and wield the safety razor. I’d be growing whiskers in a couple of years, she told me. Might as well get in some practice for a lifetime of shaving.

  I asked Claudia what she didn’t know.

  “I just wanted an adventure,” she said.

  “Shut the world out. Keep it on the other side of that door.”

  “But you’ve got a power,” she said. “The same thing that drew me to you, pulled me right across the room to where you were standing, it scares me.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She closed her eyes, chose her words carefully. “’What happens here, stays here.’ Isn’t that how it works?”

  “Like Las Vegas?”

  She opened her eyes, looked into mine. “I’ve done this sort of thing before,” she said.

  “I’m shocked.”

  “Not as often as you might think, but now and then.”

  “When the moon’s full?”

  “And left it behind me when I drove away. Like a massage, like a spa treatment.”

  “Then home to hubby.”

  “How was it hurting him? He never knew. And I was a better wife to him for having an outlet.”

  Taking her time getting to it. It was like watching a baseball pitcher going through an elaborate windup. Kind of interesting when you already knew what kind of curveball to expect.

  “But this feels like more than that, doesn’t it?”

  She gave me a long look, like she wanted to say yes but was reluctant to speak the words.

  Oh, she was good.

  “You’ve thought of leaving him.”

  “Of course. But I have . . . oh, how to say this? He gives me a very comfortable life.”

  “That generally means money.”

  “His parents were wealthy,” she said, “and he was an only child, and they’re gone, and it’s all come to him.”

  “I guess the Ford’s a rental.”

  “The Ford? Oh, the car I’m driving. Yes, I picked it up at the airport. Why would you—oh, because I probably have a nicer car than that. Is that what you meant?”

  “Something like that.”

  “We have several cars. There’s a Lexus that I usually drive, and he bought me a vintage sports car as a present. An Aston Martin.”

  “Very nice.”

  “I suppose. I enjoyed driving it at first, the power, the responsiveness. Now I rarely take it out of the garage. It’s an expensive toy. As am I.”

  “His toy. Does he take you out and play with you much?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I put my hand where she didn’t have any hair. Not stroking her, just resting it there. Staking a claim.

  I said, “If you divorced him—”

  “I signed one of those things.”

  “A pre-nup.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d probably get to keep the toys.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But the lush life would be over.”

  A nod.

  “I suppose he’s a lot older than you.”

  “Just a few y
ears. He seems older, he’s one of those men who act older than their years, but he’s not that old.”

  “How’s his health?”

  “It’s good. He doesn’t exercise, he’s substantially overweight, but he gets excellent reports at his annual physical.”

  “Still, anybody can stroke out or have a heart attack. Or a drunk driver runs a red light, hits him broadside.”

  “I don’t even like to talk about something like that.”

  “Because it’s almost like wishing for it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Still,” I said, “it’d be convenient, wouldn’t it?”

  It wasn’t like that with my mother. A stroke, a heart attack, a drunk driver. There one day and gone the next.

  Not like that at all.

  Two, three years after she showed me how much nicer it was to have someone else touch me. Two, three years when I went to school in the morning and came straight home in the afternoon and closed the door on the whole world.

  She showed me all the things she knew. Plus things she’d heard or read about, but never done.

  And told me how to be with girls. “Like it’s a sport and I’m your coach,” she said. What to say, how to act, and how to get them to do things, or let me do things.

  Then I’d come home and tell her about it. In bed, acting it out, fooling around.

  Two, three years. And she started losing weight, and lost color in her face, and I must have noticed but it was day by day, and I was never conscious of it. And then I came home one day and she wasn’t there, but there was a note, she’d be home soon. And an hour later she came in and I saw something in her face and I knew, but I didn’t know what until she told me.

  Ovarian cancer, and it had spread all through her, and they couldn’t do anything. Nothing that would work.

  Because of where it started, she wondered if it was punishment. For what we did.

  “Except that’s crap and I know it’s crap. I was brought up believing in God, but I grew out of it, and I never raised you that way. And even if there was a God he wouldn’t work it that way. And what’s wrong with what we did? Did it hurt anybody?”

  And a little later, “All they can give me is chemo and all it’ll do is hurt like fury and make my hair fall out and maybe stretch my life a few months longer. My sweet baby boy, I don’t want you remembering a jaundiced old lady dying by inches and going crazy with the pain. I don’t want to hang around that long, and you have to help me get out.”

  School. I didn’t play sports, I didn’t join clubs, I didn’t have friends. But I knew who sold drugs, everybody knew that much. Anything you wanted, and what I wanted was downs, and that was easy.

  She wanted to take them when I left for school, so that I’d be gone when it happened, but I talked her out of that. She took them at night, and I lay beside her and held her hand while sleep took her. And I stayed there, so I could tell when her breathing stopped, but I couldn’t stay awake, I fell asleep myself, and when I woke up around dawn she was gone.

  I straightened the house, went into my room and made the bed look as though it had been slept in. Went to school and kept myself from thinking about anything. Went home, and turning my key in the lock I had this flash, expecting her to be walking around when I opened the door.

  Yeah, right. I found her where I’d left her, and I called the doctor, said I’d left in the morning without wanting to disturb her. He could tell it was pills, I could tell he could tell, but he wanted to spare me, said it was her heart giving out suddenly, said it happened a lot in cases like hers.

  If she was alive, if she’d never gotten sick, I’d still be living there. With the two of us in that house, and the whole rest of the world locked out of it.

  She said, “I can’t pretend I never thought about it. But I never wished for it. He’s not a bad man. He’s been good to me.”

  “Takes good care of you.”

  “He cleans his golf clubs after he plays a round. Has this piece of flannel he uses to wipe the faces of the irons. Takes the cars in for their scheduled maintenance. And yes, he takes good care of me.”

  “Maybe that’s all you want.”

  “I was willing to settle for it,” she said.

  “And now you’re not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and put her hand on me. For just a moment it was another hand, a firm but gentle hand, and I was a boy again. Just for an instant, and then that passed.

  And she went on holding me, and she didn’t say anything but I could hear her voice in my head as clearly as if she’d spoken. Willing to settle? Not anymore, my darling, because I’ve met you, and my world has changed forever. If only something could happen to him and we could be together forever. If only—

  “You want me to kill him,” I said.

  “Oh my God!”

  “Isn’t that where you were headed?”

  She didn’t answer, breathed deeply in and out, in and out. Then she said, “Have you ever—”

  “Government puts you in a uniform, gives you a rifle, sends you halfway around the world. Man winds up doing a whole lot of things he might never do otherwise.”

  All of which was true, I suppose, but it had nothing much to do with me. I was never in the service.

  Went to sign up once. You drift around, different things start looking good to you. Army shrink asked me a batch of questions, heard something he didn’t like in my answers, and they thanked me for my time and sent me on my way.

  Have to say that man was good at his job. I wouldn’t have liked it there, and they wouldn’t have liked me much, either.

  She found something else to talk about, some rambling story about some neighbor of hers. I lay there and watched her lips move without taking in what she was saying.

  Why bother? What she wasn’t saying was more to the point.

  Pleased with herself, I had to figure. Because she’d managed to get where she wanted to go without saying the words herself. Played it so neatly that I brought it up for her.

  Like, I’m two steps ahead of you, Missy. Knew where you were going, saw what a roundabout route you had mapped out for yourself, figured I’d save us some time.

  Better now, looking without listening. And it was like I couldn’t hear her if I wanted to, all I could hear was her voice speaking in my head, telling me what I knew she was thinking. How we could be together for the rest of our lives, how I was all she wanted and all she needed, how we’d have a life of luxury and glamour and travel. Her voice in my head, drawing pictures of her idea of my idea of paradise.

  Voices.

  She moved, lay on her side. Stopped talking, and I stopped hearing that other voice, and she ran a hand the length of my body. And kissed my face and my neck, and worked her way south.

  Yeah, right. To give me a hint of the crazy pleasures on offer once her husband was dead and buried. Because every man loves that, right?

  Thing is, I don’t. Not since another woman took the pills I’d bought her and didn’t wake up.

  One time, I had this date with a girl in my class. And she’s coaching me.

  You can get her to suck it. She’ll still be a virgin, she can’t get pregnant from it, and she’ll be making you happy. Plus deep down she’s plain dying to do it. But what you want to do is help her out, tell her when she’s doing something wrong. Like you’ll be her coach, you know?

  Then she was gone, and since then I don’t like having anybody doing that to me.

  That army shrink? I guess he knew his business.

  Still, she got it hard.

  It plays by its own rules, doesn’t it? The blood flows there or it doesn’t, and you can’t make it happen or keep it from happening. Didn’t mean I enjoyed it, didn’t mean I wanted her to keep it up. More she did it, less I liked it.

  Took hold of her head, moved her away.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “My turn,” I said, and spread her out on the bed, and tucked a pillow under her ass, and stuck a finger in to make
sure she was wet. Stuck the finger in her mouth, gave her a taste of herself.

  Got on her, rode her long and hard, long and hard. She had one of those rolling orgasms that won’t quit, on and on and on, the gift that keeps on giving.

  I don’t know where my mind was while this was going on. Off somewhere, tuned in to something else. Watching HBO while she was getting fucked on Showtime.

  When she was done I just stayed where I was, on her and in her. Looked down at her face, jaw slack, eyes shut, and saw what I hadn’t seen earlier.

  That she looked like a pig. Just had a real piggish quality to her features. Never saw it before.

  Funny.

  Her eyes opened. And her mouth started running, telling me it had never been like this before.

  “Did you—”

  “Not yet.”

  “My God, you’re still hard! Is there anything—”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “Something I’d like to know first. When you walked into the bar?”

  “A lifetime ago,” she said. And relaxed into what she thought was going to be a stroll down Memory Lane. How we met, how we fell in love without a word being spoken.

  I said, “What I wondered. How did you know?”

  “How did I—”

  “How’d you know I was the one man in there who’d be willing to kill your husband for you?”

  Eyes wide. Speechless.

  “What did you see? What did you think you saw?”

  And my hips started working, slowly, short strokes.

  “Had it all worked out in your mind,” I said. I moved my elbows so they were on her shoulders, pinning her to the bed, and my hands found her neck, circled it.

  “So you’d be out of town, maybe pick up some other lucky guy to make sure you’d have an alibi. Get off good with him, because all the while you’re thinking about how I’m doing it, killing your husband. Wondering exactly how I’m doing it, am I using a gun, a knife, a club? And you think of me doing him with my bare hands and that’s what really gets you off, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t have heard a thunderclap, couldn’t have heard the world ending.

  “Filling my head with happily ever after, but once he’s gone you don’t need me anymore, do you? Maybe you’d find another sucker, get him to take me off the board.”