Strange Are the Ways of Love

by Lawrence Block

  “I’m busy tonight.” The minute the words were out of her mouth she realized how phony they sounded. “I—”

  “See? It’s impossible to get to know anybody in this damned town. They always think—”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then why don’t you come?”

  Why not? And she said, “All right. I’d like to come, then.”

  He smiled.

  “You see,” she went on, “it’s not easy for a girl either. A guy could think she’s . . . on the make.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “I know.”

  For a moment neither of them said anything. Then he said, “I’ve got to cut out now.” He stood up and started to the door, and she noticed that his eyes did not look as tired as they had before.

  “Eight-thirty or nine will be about right,” he said. “Want me to pick you up?”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I’ll be going out for dinner anyway.”

  “Okay. My pad’s on Cornelia Street north of Bleecker. Know where that is?”

  She nodded. She had passed that street last night on the way to Macdougal Street.

  “Twenty-four Cornelia Street. It’s on the third floor.”

  “I’ll remember it.”

  He stood with his hand on the door knob looking down at her and she realized how tall he was, how he towered over her. He seemed to be searching for something more to say.

  “Well,” he said at length, “I’ll see you then.”

  He opened the door and walked down the hall and she stepped to the doorway to watch him leave, following him with her eyes until he was out of the building and gone. Then she closed the door, slowly and almost absently, and went to the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette, watching the smoke rise to the network of cracks in the ceiling.

  She liked him; he was handsome and honest and interesting and perceptive. Not entirely honest, of course—he was on the make, but on the make in a nice way.

  He could be a friend.

  He could introduce her to New York and to some of the people in it, and he could teach her things and take her places.

  And, if she let him, he could make love to her. And, afterwards, she could lie back on the bed, alone and empty and sick. Then she would be a virgin twice removed, a little girl from Indiana who tried it once and didn’t like it and didn’t have the brains to quit.

  She was afraid of him.

  6

  HIS NAME WAS Michael Hawkins. He was the oldest of five children of an English father and an Irish mother in Marionsburg, a town of 2,500 people in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

  In Marionsburg his father ran a drugstore and his mother worked behind the counter. Jed Hawkins was a good businessman—not too clever, hardly imaginative, but willing to put in the long hours necessary to earn enough money to support a wife and five children. His mother was a good woman, but he never knew her at all. It took all her time to work in the store and to bring up the children. He was the oldest; he learned to get along by himself. Afternoons he ran errands for his father at the drugstore and swept the floor and dusted the bottles on the shelves. The rest of the time he was alone.

  He was a good student and a natural athlete, but he spent little time with school books and less with the boys in his classes. They always seemed so young to him, and they walked around with their eyes closed, hardly realizing that there was a world outside of Marionsburg.

  Instead he preferred the company of the lonely old men who sat on the wooden benches in the square and talked with him by the hour. He got along well with them—they had things to tell him that he was hungry to hear, and they in turn were glad to find such a willing listener. Nobody else seemed to listen to them any more.

  When he began reading he by-passed the juvenile fiction that others his age were reading. He discovered Steinbeck at fourteen, Wolfe and Dos Passos a year later. The books only drew him farther away from his friends and farther in spirit from Marionsburg. He walked by himself, walked far into the woods at the edge of town singing lonely songs to himself and growing hungry for the world. He listened to the trains rushing by, heard their whistles and watched the smoke trail off in the distance as they left him behind, and he wondered how long it would be before he was riding one of them.

  He learned songs constantly. When he heard a song once, it was his and he never forgot it. His family was too tired to sing and his friends were wrapped up in the monotony of popular music, but the old men in the square taught him the old songs, songs of the road and the songs the wobblies used to sing. The Negroes on the south side of town taught him blues, and he would sit on a stump in the woods by the hour, singing blues in his husky, throaty voice, making up new verses and twisting the old ones around.

  He was sixteen when he made love to the Negro woman who had taught him John Hardy. He was unsure of himself at first, but she held him gently in her warm arms and helped him, moving expertly beneath him. Afterwards, when she had kissed him and told him to go, he had walked for hours in the woods. It was autumn, and the leaves crunched beneath his feet as he walked, but he was not conscious of the leaves, or of the chill in the air.

  He knew that he could not remain in Marionsburg any longer. He had crossed some sort of bridge; remaining at home would be a waste of time, a waste of himself. He wanted to tell his parents, but he knew that he could not make them understand why he had to go.

  “I’m leaving town,” he told his father after supper. “Going tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “Knocked up a girl,” he said. And his father nodded his head slowly; this was the kind of reason he could understand.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “South, I figure.”

  His father told his mother. Then Mike kissed them both good-by and took the twenty dollars that his father slipped him. He walked to the railroad siding and waited in the brush, and when the freight pulled out of town he was on it, snug in an empty boxcar. He lay down in one corner of the car and slept all the way to Pennsylvania.

  He never went back to Marionsburg.

  He was young and the world was huge. There were places to see and he saw them—Virginia and Delaware and the Kentucky hills. There were songs to learn, and he learned them wherever he went.

  And there were women, too. There were the wives and daughters of men who never travelled, and their lips were soft against his and their bodies warm and alive. There was a spinster librarian in Broken Ridge, a waitress in Oak Valley.

  He worked when he could, begged or stole when there was no work. Less than a year after he left home someone showed him how to play the guitar. He learned quickly, almost instinctively, and now that he could sing for his supper he didn’t steal as frequently.

  From time to time he mailed postcards to his parents. There was never room on the cards for him to say those things that he had trouble expressing and there was never any mail for him. He never stayed in one place long enough to have an address of his own until he reached New York.

  There the wanderlust left him. By that time every small town was the same to him, but New York excited him and gave him something altogether new to absorb. He took a room on Henry Street on the lower East Side and wrote a note to his parents with his address. His sister Claire wrote a short note back, telling him that his mother and father were dead, killed four months before in an auto accident.

  He never wrote again.

  He was walking aimlessly now, half heading for the apartment on Cornelia Street and half killing time. New York had been good to him, he reflected. New York had given him a home and helped him to learn things he needed to know. He met other folksingers—banjo pickers and guitarists and others who strummed mandolins and dulcimers. He met blues singers and ballad singers and greensleevers and bluegrassers. He listened to them and he sang with them.

  Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Folksinger.

  It wasn’t enough. The parties
weren’t enough, nor were the folksingers or the back rooms of the coffee houses. Greenwich Village was certainly not enough.

  And the women were not enough either.

  Women like Sandy. Saundra Kane, nee Sandra Cohen. The liberated ones. The exchange students from Kew Gardens, the little girls from the provinces who came to the Village in droves.

  How did the song go again?

  I’ve turned my blue jeans

  On Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens

  And the Village is my home . . .

  Sandy, who played at being a Bohemian on an allowance from her father, an allowance that paid for food and rent for both of them. Sandy, who was on stage twenty-four hours a day, even in bed. Who thought there was poetry in filth. Who kept him.

  Michael Hawkins, he thought. Boy Gigolo.

  As long as he stayed with her he would stay right where he was.

  Which was nowhere.

  He would go on singing in coffee houses and at parties and once a week in Washington Square. He might even cut a record some day. But he would never really make it, never get to the top, never even start for the top. He wouldn’t care enough to try hard enough.

  He had the talent. He knew himself, and he knew that he was good enough to make it. While his voice wasn’t perfect, his style was distinctive, and it suited his voice and the way he played the guitar. He played with simple chords and a compelling beat, and he sang with the beat, strong and cleanly.

  But lots of people had talent. Some of them made it and others didn’t. Some of them lost and others won. The whole world was divided into winners and losers, and it was hard to tell what was the dividing line.

  Maybe someone like Jan could make the difference . . .

  Turning the corner of Cornelia Street he laughed to himself. In the first place he wouldn’t get Jan; in the second place if he did she would turn into another Saundra, a phony from Indiana instead of a phony from the Bronx. And that was something he needed like he needed cholera.

  Twenty-four Cornelia Street, third floor. My pad, he had told Jan, but it wasn’t his pad. He didn’t have a pad. It was Saundra’s.

  It even looked like Saundra. There was the same contrived sloppiness about the place, the bed that looked as though it had been left unmade for effect, the prints purposely hung at a tilt on the walls. The floor was dirty, and he grinned as he remembered watching her going through a small hell one afternoon. She had wanted to sweep the floor, wanted it to be clean. But she thought it looked better dirty.

  Two years, he thought. Two years at the most and she’ll do a Marjorie Morningstar and marry some doctor and move to Connecticut. She’ll laugh when she thinks of this hole and the guy she used to live with.

  She came out of the bathroom, her hair messy and her eyes made up too heavily, smiling.

  “Party tonight,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She walked across the room, leaning back on the messy bed uncomfortably, then stretching out on the bed with a pillow under her head and her shoes off.

  “Where were you?”

  He shrugged. “Out for a walk. I called Henry.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He’ll call me. He may be able to set up an audition for next week.”

  “That’s good.”

  She sounded as concerned as if he had said that the sun was shining. It could be big, an audition with Comet.

  He hadn’t told Jan about it and hardly wanted to think about it himself, but he could tell Saundra easily enough. It didn’t count with her. She wouldn’t remember. She wouldn’t mention it again, and if he got the audition and left the pad that day she would ask him where he was going. And when he told her, she would say, “That’s good,” in the same tone of voice.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” she said suddenly, holding out her arms for him.

  This isn’t home, he thought.

  But he went to her.

  7

  THE PARTY WAS IN FULL SWING when she arrived at nine-fifteen. She walked in timidly, unsure of herself in a roomful of strangers, her eyes scanning the room, looking for Mike. All she could see was a group of people her own age sitting on the floor and on the bed on the other side of the room. For a moment she wanted to turn around and leave without speaking to anyone.

  Then she heard the guitar and saw Mike in the middle of the crowd, sitting on the floor with a girl beside him. She walked in slowly, wondering whether she ought to say hello to him first or if she should just make herself at home.

  He was playing the guitar—not singing, but banging out a hard blues chorus and drinking periodically from a bottle of chianti. Once while she was standing by the door he looked up at her, but he didn’t seem to see her. There was a glaze in his eyes, and she guessed that he had been drinking fairly steadily since the party began.

  She decided to wait. If anyone bothered her, she could say that Mike had invited her, but in the meanwhile she just wanted to sit and listen and watch. She looked around briefly for a chair; finding none, she sat down on the floor. She was wearing blue jeans and a light blue blouse, and she saw that she had selected the right outfit.

  The other girls were dressed more or less the same. Some of them—the girl with Mike, for example—seemed to her to be deliberately trying to look sloppy. Jan remembered the story of the Communist girls during the 30’s who used to look in the mirror to make sure their stocking-seams were crooked. That was the impression these girls gave her. If they wore lipstick it was too thick and applied lopsidedly. More often they left off the lipstick entirely and plastered on purple eye-shadow with a trowel.

  The boys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be putting on as much of an act. Their dress was less stylized and they seemed more at home in the general messiness of the apartment. The girls were obviously pretending that they didn’t notice any disorder; the boys acted as though they were genuinely accustomed to it.

  Impressions.

  LIFE Goes to a Village Party, she thought. I should have brought my camera. A camera and a notebook.

  “Have a beer,” someone said. Janet started. She turned around and took a can of beer from a short boy with red hair and a slight growth of red beard, who disappeared again as soon as she had the can in her hand. The beer was good and cold and she took a deep drink of it, spilling a little down her chin.

  The night was still warm although the sun had set a while ago. Thirty-odd people in one room made the night even warmer and beer taste even better. She sat back and drank again, no longer caring that she didn’t know anyone. It was a nice party.

  What’s that smells like fish, Mama?

  Tell you if you really want to know.

  Yeah, what’s that smells like fish, Mama?

  I’ll tell you if you really want to know. . . .

  She didn’t have to look up to know that it was Mike singing. There was something very distinctive about his voice, about the way he picked the strings of the guitar and sang with it. And there was an intangible quality, too—someone else could play the same chords and sing the same notes and it would come out weak and pale by comparison.

  She liked the way he sang.

  She liked his name, too. Mike was blunt and strong and honest and rugged, and Michael was music and poetry and something tranquil. It suited him, matched the odd and intense combination of tough and tender which she could feel in him.

  Well, it smells like fish and it tastes like fish

  But you better not serve it in a chafing dish

  Keep on trucking, Mama, trucking my blues away. . . .

  The beer was gone suddenly and she was drinking wine from a bottle and passing the bottle to a thin young man with a shock of black hair that hung limp over his forehead. The young man looked a little like Hitler, and he was trying to talk to her but she liked being all alone in the group, all alone with herself, and she didn’t answer him.

  There were more people in the room. There were at least fifty by now, and others kept arriving. Everybody who came
seemed to have a bottle, and the bottles kept passing back and forth around the room. And she kept sampling them.

  Smoking a cigarette, she realized abruptly that she was drunk. It was nice. It was very nice being drunk, especially when it didn’t cost anything. She felt the side of her face and it was numb to her touch, her skin feeling even cooler and smoother than usual. She was a little bit dizzy, and she drew more deeply on the cigarette as if that would stop the dizziness. She smiled quickly at no one in particular and her face felt funny. She let the muscles in her face relax slowly.

  There were more guitars going now and she didn’t hear Mike singing any more, but heard instead a deep-voiced boy singing about a bad man named Stackolee. Another boy passed her another bottle and she put it to her mouth and drank. It was wine, but she couldn’t tell what kind of wine it was or even whether it was good or bad. It was wet and her mouth was dry so she kept on drinking until the young man shook his head strangely and took the bottle away from her.

  You’re drunk, she whispered to herself. LIFE Goes to a Village Party and Gets Smashed. Poor little Life gets tight as a kite. Or was it high as a kite? Tight as something, but she couldn’t remember.

  A hand touched her shoulder and she turned, ready to take another drink from another nice young man’s bottle. Mike was standing beside her.

  She saw that he was sober, and that was funny because she was drunk now, and when she had come in he had been drunk and she had been sober. It was funny.

  She started to giggle.

  “How long have you been here?”

  It was a silly question, because she had been there so long. It was so silly that she started to giggle again.

  “I guess you’ve been here awhile, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  He smiled. “Why didn’t you say hello? I didn’t even see you come in. I just got up to take a break and saw you sitting here, so I came over. Having fun?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She thought that he was nice, very nice, and very funny because she was drunk and he wasn’t.