Strange Are the Ways of Love

by Lawrence Block

  “All right,” he said levelly. “What do you want? What are you paying for?”

  “Damn you. Oh, God damn you!”

  “Tell me.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to because he didn’t feel anything, not even anger.

  “You son-of-a-bitch.”

  “It’s your money. What do you want?”

  “What do you want?”

  Silence.

  “What do you want, Laura? Tell me.”

  It was coming. They were naked together on the bed and the room was in darkness except for a single dim lamp that cast their shadows against the wall. Their bodies were almost touching, but she knew that the inch or so that separated them was an illusion. They were actually much farther apart.

  And the break-up was coming. It would be more upsetting than usual because Peggy was small and weak and strangely vulnerable, and while she no longer loved her she did not want to hurt her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I want.”

  “But you don’t want me.”

  Silence.

  “You don’t, do you? You don’t have to say it. I know you don’t and it’s a hell of a thing to know. I still want you, Laura. I want you and you don’t want me and I know you don’t. And it’s a hell of a thing.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t. I saw it coming, Laura. From the minute she walked into that goddamned bar. And when you shouted at me for swearing.”

  “I didn’t mean to shout.”

  “You didn’t exactly shout. But it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot. It’s over now, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She was both glad and sorry when the word left her lips. There was a necessary finality about it, but that finality was so harsh, so cruel.

  Peggy’s eyes closed. She was tense and knotted inside but her facial muscles were relaxed and she looked childlike in her nakedness.

  “It’s funny,” she said. “She wants you, you know, and she’ll be here tomorrow. She’ll be here on this bed right where I am, and you’ll be with her, holding her and touching her. And I’ll be somewhere else.”

  She opened her eyes suddenly and for a moment Laura thought she was going to cry. But she swallowed and went on talking.

  “I’ll leave in the morning. That’s what you want, isn’t it? No, don’t answer. I know it is but I don’t want to hear you say it. She’s lovely, you know. I don’t think she’s been with a girl yet, do you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Probably not. How long do you think you’ll last?”

  “God. I don’t know.”

  “It’s funny.” She closed her eyes again and smiled. “You know, we lasted a little less than a month. And when we started I thought we would go on forever. It’s crazy. Nobody ever lasts, and I knew that, but I couldn’t help—”

  “I felt the same way.”

  “Did you? But you must have known. I knew too but I faked myself out. It was perfect for awhile, wasn’t it?” There was something desperate in her question, as though she had to have the right answer or nothing would be left her.

  “It was good,” Laura said. “It was very good.”

  “Was.” She opened her eyes and there were little tears forming at the corners, but she was fighting not to cry, struggling with herself. “That sums it up, doesn’t it? Was. It’s all over.”

  Silence. She wanted Peggy to cry, knowing how desperately the girl needed to cry. At the same time she hoped selfishly that Peggy would get control of herself because she too would cry and she hated to cry, hated herself for the weakness of it.

  I’m weaker than she is, she thought, and the thought was disturbing.

  “Laura?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m going to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s selfish.”

  “That’s all right:”

  “I. . .I still love you, Laura.”

  No, she thought. And she said, “It will be over soon, darling. It hurts like hell but it ends, and that’s the compensation for the shortness of the love. The pain doesn’t last so long.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it. It can be over in a day, Peggy. You have to learn that. You have to grab on to that and never let go because you’ll hurt and be hurt over and over and it never stops.”

  “I know. But I’m still going to be selfish.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s only one thing I want from you and it’s the one thing I have no right to ask. But if I have it I’ll be able to leave tomorrow morning without crying, and it’s very important to me not to cry. I’ll cry later, but I don’t want you to see me crying. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  She paused, choking back tears and breathing hard, and finally she said, “I want to make love to you.”

  “Oh!”

  “If you don’t want to—”

  “Oh, Peggy!”

  She felt like crying but she didn’t want to cry or to let Peggy cry. She knew how Peggy loved her and she remembered how she had loved her and now she wanted so little, so very little.

  Twice she opened her mouth to speak and twice she closed it because she was afraid to speak, afraid she would cry instead. She didn’t have to say anything.

  She moved toward Peggy until their bodies were touching, put her arms around her and held her close. She I pressed her lips against Peggy’s and kissed her.

  And Peggy’s mouth opened under hers, and Peggy’s hands began to move over her body, gently and then more insistently.

  And Peggy moaned.

  For the first time in his life he felt like a male whore. He stood up from the bed and turned away from her, not wanting to look at her, not wanting to see her or think of her. As he pulled on his clothes his skin felt sweaty and grimy.

  “Mike?”

  He began tying his shoes, fumbling with the laces. It was over now. He had given her just what she paid for and no more, and now he could leave and never come back and not see her again, not ever.

  “I’m a bitch.”

  For some reason he found it impossible to walk out without looking at her. He turned and saw her lying face down on the bed, stretched out full length, and foolishly naked.

  “I’m a bitch and I’m sorry. But it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. I guess we’ve had it. I suppose you’re leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” she said. “I guess I didn’t have to ask.”

  Her voice sounded very tired, flat and exhausted. “I’ll miss you,” she went on. “It sounds silly but I think I really will. Can you believe me?”

  “Yes,” he said, not really meaning it, not really caring one way or the other.

  “And I’m going back home,” she said. “I think I should.”

  “Home?”

  “To the Bronx. I guess that’s my home. It’s not that horrible a place, Mike. It’s like any other place. I suppose people always hate the place they come from.

  “But it will be good to get back to Parkchester. I don’t really belong here, and my folks are good people. Oh, they’re middle-class and all that, but I’m middle-class too. This is just a game, this Village scene. I guess it’s time to give it up.”

  She broke off suddenly and turned on the bed, raising herself on one elbow to stare at him. “I sound like Marjorie Morningstar,” she said. “And I don’t want to. But I can’t help it.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I won’t miss this place,” she said. “I never really lived here. The girl who lives here isn’t really me, Mike. I wish you had had a chance to get to know the real Sandra Cohen. You might have liked her. She’s dull but she’s fairly nice.”

  She sat up suddenly. “Don’t go yet,” she said. “Sleep awhile first. Wait until morning.”

  “It’s morning already.”

  “Sleep an
yway. You’re tired, aren’t you? You might as well sleep here.”

  He didn’t want to. He wanted to leave, and he took a breath and started for the door.

  “Mike—”

  He stopped and she said, “Please stay with me. You don’t have to touch me and I’ll sleep on the floor if you want but I don’t want you to leave yet. This is the last night I’ll be staying here, Mike. I don’t want to stay all by myself.”

  It wasn’t that much. It was very little to give her, very little indeed, and besides he was tired and there was no place else to go.

  “All right, Sandy.”

  She smiled, and he saw that her eye-shadow was smeared from crying. He hadn’t heard her cry.

  “Good,” she said. “But first let’s clean up the apartment a little. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  He was fully dressed and she was stark naked as the sun began to stream through the windows and they bent over to pick up bottles and beer cans and discarded clothing, working to clean up an apartment that would never be clean.

  It was over.

  She didn’t feel anything but emptiness. They had made love and nothing had happened for her, and now it was surely over and nothing remained of it. For a week the bed had been their only real meeting-place; now it too was gone and nothing remained.

  Musical Beds.

  And some joker had stopped the music.

  She lay on the bed, not wanting to touch Peggy any more and yet not wanting to withdraw from her, not yet, not until they both got up and Peggy packed up her things and disappeared. Then for a few hours she could be alone until she heard the music start and took another partner.

  She couldn’t sleep. Even with the shade drawn the daylight filtered into the room; besides, she was too tense and mixed-up inside to relax.

  Her eyes closed. She thought of Jan and tried to erase the thought, feeling guilty for it, feeling that it was wrong now and unfair to Peggy to think of another girl. There would be time enough later.

  In a minute there is time.

  There would always be time. Time was cheap. Everything happened in very little time, quickly, abruptly, and the edges were always jagged when the break came.

  Decisions and revisions that a minute can reverse. Back and forth, up and down, in and out, over and over. There was always time and there was never time enough, and the decisions were always both right and wrong and never in-between. And never permanent.

  Do I dare to eat a peach?

  Oh, yes. Oh, definitely, to eat a peach, to gobble down a million peaches and each time to spit out the pit. A million peach-pits.

  Tomorrow.

  And Peggy began to cry softly into her pillow.

  9

  Sunday. That was the first thing that she was aware of, even before she knew quite where she was or even who she was. When she awoke in the morning she often lost herself completely, lost all awareness of time and place. One morning in Indiana she had managed to dress herself completely without quite remembering her own name.

  Now when she realized it was Sunday, the second thing that occurred to her was the significance of the day. The Sabbath was not going to be a day of rest, not this week.

  Sunday.

  It wasn’t morning, she realized. It was past noon, one o’clock at least, and she crawled out of bed and hunted for her watch on the dresser. It was one-thirty.

  She dressed in dungarees and a blouse and headed for the bathroom, yawning on the way. The reflection in the mirror didn’t even look like Jan Marlowe at first glance—her eyes were slightly bloodshot and her face drawn and tired and pale.

  She was incredibly thirsty. She rarely had a hangover, but fairly heavy drinking left her thirsty enough to empty a bathtub. She filled and drained the plastic bathroom glass four times without ever really quenching her thirst.

  In the kitchen she broke an egg into the stainless aluminum frying pan and spent several minutes fishing for pieces of the shell. She hardly ever managed to break an egg properly. Once years ago she had tapped one too hard on the stove and smashed it. The egg had dripped into obscurity within one of the burners, but had immortalized itself for weeks by giving off a burnt smell each time the stove was used.

  That was in Indiana, the summer she had spent with her mother on the lake shore. She remembered it now, how they had gone swimming and slept on the beach in the sun, and how they laughed at the egg smell in the cottage.

  While the egg was bubbling in the pan, she boiled water and made coffee and poured orange juice. She ate her breakfast at the kitchen table, thinking once again that she really had to get another table cloth soon.

  Sunday.

  She would meet Laura that night. Meanwhile there was time, time to do almost anything, and there was certainly plenty to do, plenty of things to see. But for some reason she didn’t want to do anything, and most of all she didn’t want to leave the apartment. The thought of meeting anyone, even a total stranger, was repelling.

  But I have time to kill, she thought. How do I kill it?

  As she washed the breakfast dishes in the sink she went over the previous night in her mind. It had been a good night, until all at once it went wrong and became a very bad night. Then, suddenly, it was good again, better than ever. It had been free and easy with every problem solving itself.

  Now she knew what she was, and now that she knew it for a fact it seemed a good deal less frightening.

  Be the best of whatever you are. That was the punch line of one of those insipid poems they taught you back in grammar school, something about being a shrub if you couldn’t make it as a pine on the top of the hill. But the line was beginning to make a little sense.

  Okay, she thought. I’ll be the greatest dike in the Western world.

  She dried the dishes and put them away, thinking that now the problem was solved and the course was clear enough. She wanted Laura and Laura wanted her and there was nothing in the way. The little blonde didn’t matter, Mike didn’t matter, nothing mattered. Mike wanted her, but that was immaterial now. He might even love her, but he would be able to get over it.

  She poured another cup of coffee and carried it into the living room. The sun was streaming into the open window and she felt slightly exposed there, her apartment open to the eyes of any tourist who happened to be passing by. Curtains would end that, but at the same time she liked the view open as it was. She could sit alone in her own living room and still be a part of the city outside.

  The apartment was stuffy now and she walked to the window and opened it. The weather was nearly perfect—sunny and cloudless but not too hot. Outside it was peaceful, with less of the continual traffic and noise that had been present during the past two days.

  She pulled a chair over to the window and sat down in it. The sun came just a little way into the room, warming her legs pleasantly so that she wiggled her toes.

  The coffee tasted good. Actually, she thought, it’s lousy coffee. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, and if I want good coffee I ought to learn how to make it. This is instant coffee and it tastes like instant coffee, and if it weren’t such a wonderful day it would taste like iodine.

  But it didn’t. It tasted good, even if it didn’t taste particularly like coffee, and she knew that this was a sign that the day was going to be a good one.

  She lit a cigarette, dropping the match out of the window to the pavement below. The cigarette and coffee went together perfectly. Like beer and pizza. Like coke and aspirin. Like love and marriage.

  Like love and marriage. But love and marriage didn’t go together, not at all. Not for her, at least. Marriage? Marriage was something that would never happen, an experience she would have to pass up, a set of emotions she would not feel, not ever.

  Love and marriage and children.

  And that of course was another item to be passed up.

  She was going to miss a good deal. No husband, no kids—

  She dragged on the cigarette and inhaled deeply, trying to punish herself
by drawing too much smoke into her lungs. Bad girl, she thought, coughing. It’s a beautiful day and you’ll think yourself into a headache if you don’t come off it. Give it up, kiddo.

  Besides, wasn’t it better? She could have marriage and children, sure. But she wanted love and she was lucky enough to see a way to get it. And if she settled for marriage and kids she would lose the love, and didn’t love come first? Without it, weren’t the others a lie?

  Yes.

  Yes, and she was right and the day was beautiful. The day was beautiful and Laura was beautiful and the apartment was beautiful and she was in love. Jan Marlowe was in love. Miss Janet Marlowe of Barrow Street, formerly of Indiana.

  Across the street a pair of small boys were playing handball against the brick front of a building. Two doors down the block an old woman with grey hair sat alone on the front steps. The woman wore a faded print dress and brown loafers, and Jan could see her stockings—thick, dark brown stockings that covered her heavy legs. The woman wasn’t doing any of the things old women usually did. Her hands were empty. And she didn’t seem to be looking at anything, either: her eyes stared blankly ahead.

  A couple passed arm in arm, talking in whispers and pointing at things. Jan guessed that they were tourists. Strangely, she didn’t consider herself a tourist although she had been in New York only since Friday. She felt so completely at home that she thought of herself as a New Yorker, a Villager, and was aware of a vague resentment toward the tourists who were walking on her street and pointing at things.

  Was Laura a New Yorker? She decided that she must be, and then she realized that all the people she had met seemed to be native to the city. She couldn’t imagine them in any other surroundings. Even the artificial ones so completely fitted into the pattern of the city that she hadn’t thought of the possibility that some of them might come from Chicago or California or New England.

  Or even the Midwest, even Indiana for that matter.

  Laura could be from Indiana. Jan started to laugh, amused at the notion of two little hicks rushing to New York to crawl into bed together.