Strange Are the Ways of Love

by Lawrence Block

  In twenty-one years Philip Dresser had slept with three tramps, seven prostitutes and one girl who had been in love with him. He was very rarely sexually successful with the girls he dated, and this lack of success made him care too much, try too hard, and expect failure before it came.

  He looked at Jan, small and pretty in her sweater and skirt. He remembered how the skirt clung to her rounded hips as she walked, how the sweater hugged the upper half of her body. He wanted very much to sleep with her; he intended to try very hard.

  And he fully expected to fail.

  He wanted to touch her. He wanted to let his arm slip around her and to cup her shoulder with his hand, he wanted to take her hand in his, to move her head to his shoulder, he wanted to do these things, but at the same time he wanted to do them without being overly obvious about it, without setting her on edge in any way. He didn’t know how to do this, so he waited trying to turn his attention to the picture but unable to think of anything but Jan.

  But he didn’t have to take her hand, for she took his, and she put her head on his shoulder without any provocation on his part, squeezing his hand as she did so. Her hand was soft, soft and small in his, and her head felt as though it belonged right where it was on his shoulder. And when his arm went around her all of its own accord, his fingers closing lightly around her shoulder, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  The balcony of the theater did not seem quite so public any more. It was as though they were somewhere else by themselves, and they remained like that for several minutes. It was good, very good, and he decided that he liked Jan Marlowe very much, that he liked having her close to him like this, and that he ought to kiss her.

  But the moment passed.

  He had turned his head slightly to look at her when she turned her head also and raised it from his shoulder and looked up into his eyes, her own eyes clear and unblinking.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  He didn’t answer. He stood up and helped her to her feet and they walked up the aisle to the exit. She leaned against him as they walked, not sensually but comfortably, almost tenderly, and he put: his arm around her waist, his hand sensing the smoothness and firmness of the flesh beneath her skirt.

  The air outside was warm and the sky clear. There was no moon, but the stars were bright, and they walked a block to his car without speaking at all. He wondered just what was coming next. Maybe he could drive for awhile and park without being too obvious about it, and could kiss her and hold her close for a few minutes. And then he could go out with her again in the middle of the week, and again the next weekend, and eventually they could go to a motel and he could sleep with her in a double bed, holding her all night long in his arms.

  He realized with a start that he did not really know her at all, that he was crazy to plan or even think so far in advance. But he remembered the way her hand had slipped into his and his mind kept thinking, kept planning.

  In his Dodge she sat close to him automatically, placing her head once again on his shoulder and letting one hand rest on his thigh, he drove with one arm around her, driving slowly out of town and along the road by the river.

  “Did you like the movie?” he asked, trying to make conversation.

  She didn’t answer, and he didn’t repeat the question or ask another. He kept driving, and soon she snuggled her head tighter against his shoulder, making little kisses against his shirt.

  He knew that he ought to park the car. He knew this, just as he had known that he should kiss her in the movie, but he seemed unable to ease the car off the road, unwilling to spoil things by hurrying them.

  “Find a place to park,” she said, suddenly.

  He was surprised. Then, gratefully, he pulled the Dodge off the road and turned off the ignition. Almost as an afterthought, he switched off the headlights.

  They turned at once and looked at each other. He saw something in her eyes which he couldn’t quite make out, some message that was going over his head. He was forced to play everything by ear, and while he didn’t like doing things that way, he couldn’t think of any other. There was a disturbingly unreal aspect about the whole scene—all he knew for certain was that she was waiting to he kissed, so he took her in his arms and kissed her.

  She trembled. She pressed her lips against his and he kissed her again, amazed at the warmth and softness of her lips. She smelled very clean and very fresh.

  When he kissed her again her lips opened beneath his. He felt her arms tighten around him and noticed that she was breathing faster and clinging closer to him, all warm and soft and sweet-smelling.

  His hands moved with a will of their own and he didn’t have to think any longer about what he was doing. He lifted her sweater and slipped a hand beneath it, touching her skin, stroking her back, marvelling at the softness of her under his hand.

  He touched her breast once, and then he cupped it with his hand when she did not draw away. He felt her breast, felt how firm it was, and he squeezed it gently, very gently, loving her, wanting her, wanting her with an intensity that was new to him and unable to fully understand his own feelings.

  I love you, he thought, but he didn’t say anything.

  He kissed her again, his lips pressing lightly against hers, and he held her breast while he kissed her. He breathed heavily, saying “Jan,” half moaning the name. She drew away from him, and there was a pause.

  And then she said, “Let’s go in the back seat.”

  It was extremely awkward for him, releasing her and opening the door, helping her from the car and closing the door, opening the back door and helping her inside, sitting down on the seat beside her and closing the door again. And then when they were inside with their arms around each other, the kiss was something false and contrived, something more necessary than natural. The second time he kissed her was a little better.

  Then he began to breathe faster and harder, hungry for her, and her sweater came off and her brassiere followed it. Her breasts were soft and smooth and very beautiful, and the nipples hardened under his touch. He kissed them, and when he did this she let out a little moan, and when he heard her he did not want to stop, ever, and he could not have stopped if he had wanted to.

  He was clumsy. He was clumsy, and he knew he was being clumsy, and still there was nothing he could do about it. He was awkward as he removed the last of her clothing, awkward as he pushed her back on the seat. His caresses were hurried and inept and ineffectual. And then he took her.

  She was a virgin.

  She let out a sharp little cry that went through him like a knife. Suddenly, too soon, it was over.

  He moved away from her and looked down at her. Again there was something in her eyes that he could not read, something different this time. She seemed to be waiting, waiting for something that she would never receive. There was a sadness which seemed to say that she had just become aware of a frightening truth.

  He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her. They smoked them there before returning to the front seat. After she finished her cigarette and tossed it out the window she began to dress. She didn’t seem at all embarrassed; on the contrary, she appeared totally unaware of his presence, as if he did not exist at all, or as if it didn’t matter if he did. He turned uncomfortably in his seat and gazed out the window, lighting another cigarette from the butt of the first.

  In the front seat she did not sit next to him but sat as far away as possible, almost cowering against the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  It was a long ride. He drove too fast but it was still a long ride and the silence was unbearable.

  He couldn’t understand it. For the first time in a long while he had been successful, and he felt as though he had failed. For the first time in his life he had made love to a girl whom he really desired, and all that he felt was an emptiness and a vague sense of loss, a loss of something which he had never managed to possess.

  At last they
reached her dormitory. He stopped the car, turned off the ignition and walked her to her door. They did not hold hands as they walked.

  Everything was going wrong. It was not working out properly, and he wanted it to. It could be good, very good.

  She turned to face him at the door, her face very solemn, and he started to kiss her but she dodged ever so slightly so that he missed her lips and just brushed her forehead. He looked at her, wanting to reach out for her and wanting to get back to his own room at the same time.

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.” She started to open the door.

  “When can I see you again?”

  She paused, considering, holding the door half open. Her mouth opened and closed, hesitantly, before any words came.

  Then she said, “I don’t think we ought to see each other again.”

  “Jan—”

  He started to reach for her but she shook her head soundlessly and slipped through the door. She looked at him one last time, sadly, and then she was gone and the door was closing behind her.

  He stood motionless for more than five minutes, staring at the closed door. Then he walked very slowly to his car and drove back to his dormitory.

  He didn’t know how to feel. There was a momentary flush of pride at having seduced his first virgin, but this didn’t last long. It was replaced by a vague sense of wonder, a feeling that perhaps she had in fact seduced him. He forced the idea from his mind.

  He wanted her. He wanted her for a whole night, warm and soft beside him in a double bed at a motel. He wanted to know her—it would be better then, better if there were something deeper and fuller between them, something that could give them a place to start.

  He almost wanted to marry her.

  When he called her on the phone the next day she would not talk to him or see him. She was almost apologetic, as though something were her fault.

  He called again the next day, and the following day and the day after. A few days passed in which he forced himself to stay away from the phone, but finally he called again and got the same response as before.

  Then he spent a night with a young prostitute in town and this helped to get her out of his mind.

  He saw her several times on campus before graduation, walking alone with books under her arm or talking to a group of girls. He never stopped her, never tried to speak to her, and she never spoke to him.

  In June he graduated. He never saw her again.

  3

  SHE WOKE UP suddenly, coming out of a dream, but by the time she had pushed back the covers and sat up in bed, she could not remember what the dream had been about.

  It was dark, darker than when she had gone to sleep. She stood up, savoring the feel of the cool air on her bare skin, and before switching on the light she took several deep breaths at the open window and rubbed the sleep from her eyes.

  She put on her watch before anything else. It was ten-thirty. Then she dressed rapidly in a cool green blouse and black skirt.

  She was hungry, and a little sleepy because of the lack of a transitional period between sleeping and waking. Outside, the moon was full and there was a light breeze scattering the pages of a discarded copy of the New York Post along the Barrow Street gutter. A few people were walking by, some in a great hurry and others very slowly, almost aimlessly.

  She found the diner Ruthie had mentioned around the corner on Seventh Avenue. When she had finished her cheeseburger and swallowed half her coffee, she took a cigarette from her purse and lit it. I like this, she thought, blowing the smoke at the ceiling. I like this place. And I like getting up at 10:30 at night and getting dressed and going out.

  She looked around at the people. They were a strange crowd—high school kids and truck drivers and old women and serious-looking girls with too much eye make-up and tired-looking Negroes with a vacant stare in their eyes. So many people, and no one that she knew.

  She wasn’t used to this. She was used to knowing people, even if she didn’t speak to them, even if she knew no more about them than their names. She was used to familiar faces, and all of the faces in the diner were strange ones.

  Part of her liked it. She could be alone, she could have as much privacy as she wanted, she could live by herself and for herself.

  But I may be lonely, she thought. I may be very lonely.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and finished her coffee. It was cold by this time, but she drained the cup anyway and paid her check, leaving a dime for the counterman. People tipped for counter service in New York, she knew, and that was another small thing that was different. Everything seemed to be different.

  Back on the street she looked at everything. She walked north on Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square, passing a theater and bookstores and restaurants and bars and a small nightclub. The whole city had a beat, a pulsing rhythm to it, and she was in time with the rhythm. She could hear it in all the noises and she could feel it in the air.

  At Sheridan Square she turned east and continued along Fourth Street. The Village looked more and more the way she had guessed it would look from the books and articles she had read about it. There was a cellar bar cluttered with beer-drinkers, a coffee house with operatic arias on the jukebox.

  And all over were the people. There were people and more people, people being moved along by a policeman, people entering and leaving the coffee house and the bar and all the little shops.

  “Don’t buy clothes in the Village shops,” Ruthie had warned. “The prices are half for the clothes and half for the labels.”

  Dear Ruthie, she thought. Dear Ruthie, who doesn’t really know me from third base, but who has a mad, wonderful apartment that will be mine for the whole damn summer.

  She smiled and kept on walking.

  The streets had names instead of numbers, and she decided that this was better and much more interesting. She passed Jones Street and Cornelia Street, crossed Sixth Avenue and walked for one more block, until she came to a sign that said Macdougal Street.

  I am here, she thought.

  She was at the center of the Village, if the Village really had a center. She looked at Washington Square Park, a block of grass and trees that didn’t seem to belong in New York at all, with benches by the hundred and stone tables where old men played chess. There were pigeons strutting and bums sitting on the benches and people walking all around, back and forth.

  Washington Square. She saw the NYU dorms across the way, and the Circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue where the folksingers gathered on Sundays, and she was seeing it for the first time but she felt almost as though she were returning to it. It was all new; at the same time it was all very familiar.

  She started to walk through the park, then changed her mind. Instead she turned south on Macdougal, the street Ruthie called “the Village’s most Village-y street.”

  She saw at once what Ruthie meant. Macdougal Street was a commercial enterprise and it didn’t attempt to conceal the fact. It was evident in the little shops that tried to attract by their novelty, in the way that every store front was groomed to draw in the passer-by and the tourist. It was artificial and unreal; it was also quite likable.

  Macdougal Street looked alive. It was joyously, vibrantly phony, as though claiming that everything could and did happen there, and she liked it. She walked up and down the street, hardly conscious of the fact that she was walking, looking at everything, staring into the windows of the little shops with the jewelry that was too “modern” and the dresses that were too extreme and the decor which would look ridiculous anywhere else, but which somehow seemed to belong here.

  She passed all the stores and bars and coffee houses, and the stores selling musical instruments and the stores selling books and records, and the men with beards and bare feet and the men who minced and glided by, and everywhere the tourists, men and women from somewhere else who walked arm in arm and stared at everything.

  Finally she entered one of the coffee shops, wondering vaguely how she had manag
ed to select it from all the others. It was called Renascence, for some reason which escaped her completely, and it seemed a good deal more relaxed and natural than the other coffee houses on the block. The men and women at the tables looked and acted as though they all came to the place several times a week; while they were not dressed strangely in any way, they were obviously Villagers and they were obviously at ease in the cavernous candle-lit room.

  There was a piece of doggerel in the window by a man who had been hailed as a great poet in the 20’s and had drunk in the 30’s and 40’s and was finally murdered in the 50’s by his wife’s lover. There were four muddy oil paintings on the wall. Heavy oak tables and benches and chairs made dark islands on the cold cement floor.

  When she walked inside everyone looked up for a moment. Then, not recognizing her, they ignored her and returned to their chess games or cards. There was a bridge game in progress at the front table and several pairs of men were playing gin rummy.

  Jan heard music coming from the back room behind the small kitchen. She walked in the direction of the music, finding a very small room containing one huge table surrounded by benches. Feeling a little like an intruder, she took a seat on one of the benches and sat without moving, listening to the music.

  A tall, rangy boy with light brown hair that fell into his eyes was sitting with his back against the wall and one foot up on the bench. He was strumming a guitar, playing sad and driving blues chords and humming along with the music. There was a girl sitting next to him, and Jan thought that she might be pretty if she wore a little lipstick and less eye make-up. There were two others, another boy and girl, but Jan hardly noticed them.

  The boy stopped playing the guitar and took a sip of his coffee. “Mike,” the other boy suggested, “play Danville Girl.”

  The boy called Mike nodded shortly, took another sip of coffee and set the cup down on the table. He played softly and slowly, and when he sang his voice was husky and sad, almost mournful. Jan had never heard the song before.