Strange Are the Ways of Love

by Lawrence Block

  Tomorrow or the day after. Always another girl, always someone else to fill part of the emptiness.

  Musical Beds.

  The game had to go on because you could never get away from it. If you lived in the shadows you had to be a shadow and play shadowy games. You had to run from the sunshine or be dissolved by it. When you were a shadow, the shadows were all you ever knew.

  So long.

  The magic word in the shadow world. You said it over and over until you died, but you could never say “so long” to the shadows.

  And yet, for the first time, she felt as though she had caught one brief glimpse of the sun.

  17

  SHE WAS JUST BARELY AWARE of the rain. The water poured down on her as she walked, plastering her clothes to her skin and soaking her hair, but she remained only vaguely conscious of it. She noted the rain, accepted it and forgot it. There were too many other things to be aware of, too much to think about and try to understand. The rain was the least of her worries.

  Everything was happening so quickly. It seemed as though that was the story of her life: things always happened before she was ready for them and ended before she had quite begun. Everything happened so quickly, so suddenly, and she was always just a little bit behind; just a little too slow to catch on, just a little too young and a little too frightened for each successive event.

  But she was beginning to catch up. Finally she could feel herself growing older and moving faster, and everything was slowing down to wait for her. That was the way it had to be and the way it would be from now on.

  She was going home. She had been trying for so many years to go home but there had never been a home for her, not since her mother died.

  Home with Mike.

  She started walking faster, thinking that Mike might not be at the apartment, that he might have left after what happened, that he hadn’t slept in days and that it was cold and raining outside and that he had to be there, had to be asleep in her bed and waiting for her.

  She had to get home to him.

  And he had to be there. He couldn’t be out walking tonight, not on a night like this, not when he was so tired and so worn out and when she needed him so much because she loved him. Now, finally, unalterably, she knew that she loved him.

  And suddenly she thought of Laura.

  Laura had told her to forget her. Now, yes—but later she would be able to remember her, to remember all that was good about her, to remember her as someone who had taught her who she was and where she was going.

  All at once she was standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Barrow Street with home only a few doors away, only a few seconds from where she stood. She began walking faster and faster, then breaking into a run, running all the way to her building with the pavement wet and slippery under her feet and the rain pouring down on her.

  She opened first the outer door and then the door to her apartment. Mike had to be there. She tiptoed inside, water dripping from her clothes to the kitchen floor, thinking that Mike had to be sleeping in her bed. She walked softly to the bedroom door, too frightened to open it for a moment. Then slowly she turned the knob and opened the door.

  He was asleep in her bed with his face pressed into the pillow. His clothes were folded on the chair in the corner and he looked so peaceful in bed that it seemed almost a shame to wake him.

  Soundlessly she left the room and closed the door. In the bathroom she removed her clothes and dried herself with a towel, went back into the bedroom.

  He was still asleep. She slipped under the covers very slowly, very careful not to wake him, not yet. She drew the covers up over her and moved close to him so that she could feel his warmth without actually touching him. And then she moved her head near his and put her mouth very close to his ear.

  “Mike?”

  Then, a little louder, “Mike?”

  He turned and opened his eyes. At first he didn’t seem to believe she was really there, and then his eyes opened wider and he started to say something.

  With a little cry she went to him.

  A New Afterword by the Author

  While I was a student at Antioch College, someone posted a cartoon on the English department bulletin board. It showed a school official telling a very small boy, “But it’s not enough to be a genius, Arnold. You have to be a genius at something.”

  Some years earlier, in Miss May Jepson’s third-year English class at Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York, I’d realized that I wanted to be a writer. Although I’d always been a reader, I’d lately become a reader of modern American fiction—books for grown-ups, if you will, since the term adult fiction has come to mean something manifestly different and not for grown-ups at all.

  I was reading James T. Farrell and John Steinbeck and Thomas Wolfe, and I was writing poems and brief sketches, and I had the insight that writing for a living was at once something I would enjoy and something I might be able to do. From then on I never seriously considered doing anything else.

  I won the office of Senior Class Poet. (I’d submitted two entries, one in Imagist-style free verse, the other in orotund iambic pentameter. Entries were anonymous, but Miss Jepson later confided that she’d recognized both as my work. They placed first and second, with orotundity carrying the day.) I graduated high school and went off to Antioch, where I wrote more poetry and some faltering short stories. The summer after my second year I spent a couple of weeks on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, living in an honest-to-God garret and writing a story every day. One of them became my first sale.

  From the Cape I went to New York, where I got a job at a literary agency telling wannabes what was wrong with their stories, and why they should try again and pay another reading fee. I spent evenings writing and sold a batch of stories and fielded assignments that came my way, articles for male-interest magazines (“Reinhard Heydrich, Blond Beast of the SS!”), and medical confession mags (“My name is Brad Haviland. I’m forty-two years old, and I’m the best bowel surgeon in the state.”)

  But what I really wanted to do was write a novel.

  Now on the face of it I didn’t have the same problem as Arnold, the little boy in the cartoon. If it wasn’t enough to be a writer, if you actually had to write something, well, I was doing that—and selling most of what I wrote, albeit to low-paying markets. But if I wanted to be a novelist I had to write a novel, and I didn’t have a novel to write.

  Some writers seem to be born with particular stories to tell. Whether it’s their own life or their fantasy world that provides them with source material, they know what they want to write almost before they know they want to write anything.

  Not so with me. What I knew was I wanted to be a writer, and I’d have written just about anything toward that end. The first thing I sold was a crime story, published by Manhunt magazine, and once they bought it I found myself coming up with other stories in that vein. But I’d tried other kinds of stories, too, and if one of them had sold I’d have found myself veering off in another direction altogether.

  A senior editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency suggested I try a nurse novel. A publisher named Thomas Bouregy had an imprint called Avalon Books, with a line of hardcover nurse novels that were a staple of rental library fiction. The books ran around forty-five thousand words, and while they weren’t terribly lucrative—I think the writers got something like four hundred dollars a book—it was a fairly easy place to break in. And I sensed that I’d learn something by writing forty-five thousand words of continuous narrative. My stories tended to be short, and I was inclined to wrap things up in two thousand words even though the market preferred them two or three times that long.

  I read a couple of nurse novels, but I couldn’t begin to think of how I could write one. Instead I tried a crime novel, a first-person effort that owed a lot to Fredric Brown’s first novel, The Fabulous Clipjoint. It was hopeless, not least because I couldn’t think of anything for my characters to do. I gave up forty or fifty pages into it, and not a m
oment too soon.

  Then one night I went bar-hopping in the Village, and for no particular reason I got very drunk that night. I was living at the Hotel Alexandria, at Broadway and 103rd, and somebody poured me into a cab and sent me home. I woke up the next morning with an absolutely murderous hangover.

  And it was an unusual hangover at that, because I awoke full of creative energy, awoke with an idea for a novel. It was just there. I don’t know where it came from, but there it was, and I wasn’t inclined to let it get away.

  Now I didn’t have to go into the office, because I’d received a sort of promotion; I now brought home a sackful of fee manuscripts, read them on my own time, wrote the requisite reports, and turned up once a week to hand in my work and replenish my supply.

  So I didn’t have to go anywhere while my hangover burned so brightly, nor did I have to do anything.

  I sat down and wrote a two-page chapter-by-chapter outline of a novel. I had the whole thing there—the setting, the plot, the characters. All I had to do was write it, and I somehow knew that wouldn’t be a problem.

  Nor was it. I’d dropped out of Antioch for a year to get what I could out of the job at Scott Meredith. After the better part of a year I figured it was time to drop back in again before the draft got me. I’d start in the fall, after spending the summer in Mexico with my friend Steve Schwerner. So sometime in May I wrapped things up at Scott Meredith, checked out of the Alexandria, and took the train back home to Buffalo to spend some time with my folks before Steve and I headed south.

  While I was home, I wrote Strange Are the Ways of Love.

  The idea may have come in a burst of post-alcoholic energy, but I’d already thought of writing a lesbian novel. I read a great deal of lesbian fiction and nonfiction, some by Marijane Meaker under one name or another. I’m sure I read them in part out of prurient interest, but that’s why I initially read John O’Hara, James T. Farrell, and no end of fine writers. And it was more than the hope of titillation that brought me back to the lesbian novels. Somehow or other I identified with the characters. And, somehow or other, I identified with the authors; I knew I could write this sort of book.

  Well, I was right about that. I sat down at my desk in my bedroom on Starin Avenue, outline at hand, and each day I wrote a chapter. In two weeks I was done. I called the book Shadows—that’s the name of the bar where much of the story’s action takes place, loosely modeled on a MacDougal Street establishment called Swing Rendezvous. I wrapped up the manuscript and sent it off to Henry Morrison at Scott Meredith. Steve showed up in Buffalo, and the two of us went to Mexico.

  Henry read the manuscript and submitted it to the premier market for lesbian novels, the Crest Books imprint at Fawcett Publications. In the fall I was back at Antioch, writing books for Harry Shorten at Midwood Tower, editing the college newspaper, and neglecting my schoolwork, when Henry wrote to tell me that Crest wanted to publish the book. And they were going to pay me two thousand dollars, which was more than three times what I was getting from Midwood.

  I went to New York over Christmas break, and met with the folks at Crest. I remember I met with Bill Lengel and Leona Nevler and with the young woman who would be my editor, and whose name I recall as Nancy Holley. She was a tall blonde, a fairly recent graduate of one of the Seven Sisters colleges, and they’d given her my book to practice on.

  Back at Antioch, I worked on the revisions. I don’t think they could have amounted to much, but whatever she asked me to do, I went and did. I was new enough at this to think that’s what you had to do. Years later I would read John O’Hara’s pronunciamento that, once he’d finished a story, the only way he improved it was by telling an editor to go to hell. Who knew you could do that?

  There was at least one time when I should have told Nancy Holley to go to hell, and that was when she told me to cut a chapter. As you’ll have noted, each subordinate character has a chapter from his or her point of view, and the one who doesn’t—but did—is Peggy, the girl whom Jan replaces in Laura’s affections. Peggy’s chapter began “Her name was Peggy Corcoran and she was drunk.” And indeed she was, and she managed to get cornered by a pack of street toughs, who beat her up and raped her. It was a perfectly good chapter, and it provided a glimpse of some of the dangers inherent in the life, and the only reason it’s not in the book is that Nancy Holley thought it should come out.

  Nancy wherever you are, go to hell, will you?

  The title, I was informed, would be Strange Are the Ways of Love.

  OK, I said.

  And I would need a female pen name. It seems to me I came up with one, although I can’t recall it, but someone at Crest decided to improve on it. The name they gave me was Leslie Evans. That way, see, the name was gender-ambiguous. Leslie could be a man or a woman. Like, whatever.

  OK, I said.

  Then they changed the spelling. They picked the name for its ambiguity and then spelled it Lesley, so it could only be a woman’s name.

  OK, I said.

  Strange Are the Ways of Love should have launched me as a lesbian novelist. But it took a while. I kept going for the sure money, writing soft-core erotica for Midwood and Nightstand Books. I never managed to come up with an idea for Lesley Evans’s second book. When I did, Lesley Evans was long forgotten, and the book—Warm and Willing—was a first book for Jill Emerson.

  Many years later I was on Terry Gross’s NPR show, Fresh Air, to talk about my lesbian body of work. During one off-mike moment, Terry said, “But Larry, you’re not a lesbian.”

  “Terry,” I said, “that’s technically true. But it’s only an accident of birth.”

  —Lawrence Block

  Greenwich Village

  Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.

  A Biography of Lawrence Block

  Lawrence Block (b. 1938) is the recipient of a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and an internationally renowned bestselling author. His prolific career spans over one hundred books, including four bestselling series as well as dozens of short stories, articles, and books on writing. He has won four Edgar and Shamus Awards, two Falcon Awards from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan, the Nero and Philip Marlowe Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of the United Kingdom. In France, he has been awarded the title Grand Maitre du Roman Noir and has twice received the Societe 813 trophy.

  Born in Buffalo, New York, Block attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Leaving school before graduation, he moved to New York City, a locale that features prominently in most of his works. His earliest published writing appeared in the 1950s, frequently under pseudonyms, and many of these novels are now considered classics of the pulp fiction genre. During his early writing years, Block also worked in the mailroom of a publishing house and reviewed the submission slush pile for a literary agency. He has cited the latter experience as a valuable lesson for a beginning writer.

  Block’s first short story, “You Can’t Lose,” was published in 1957 in Manhunt, the first of dozens of short stories and articles that he would publish over the years in publications including American Heritage, Redbook, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, GQ, and the New York Times. His short fiction has been featured and reprinted in over eleven collections including Enough Rope (2002), which is comprised of eighty-four of his short stories.

  In 1966, Block introduced the insomniac protagonist Evan Tanner in the novel The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep. Block’s diverse heroes also include the urbane and witty bookseller—and thief-on-the-side—Bernie Rhodenbarr; the gritty recovering alcoholic and private investigator Matthew Scudder; and Chip Harrison, the comical assistant to a private investigator with a Nero Wolfe fixation who appears in No Score, Chip Harrison Scores Again, Make Out with Murder, and The Topless Tulip Caper. Block has also written several short stories and novels featuring Keller, a professional hit
man. Block’s work is praised for his richly imagined and varied characters and frequent use of humor.

  A father of three daughters, Block lives in New York City with his second wife, Lynne. When he isn’t touring or attending mystery conventions, he and Lynne are frequent travelers, as members of the Travelers’ Century Club for nearly a decade now, and have visited about 150 countries.

  A four-year-old Block in 1942.

  Block during the summer of 1944, with his baby sister, Betsy.

  Block’s 1955 yearbook picture from Bennett High School in Buffalo, New York.

  Block in 1983, in a cap and leather jacket. Block says that he “later lost the cap, and some son of a bitch stole the jacket. Don’t even ask about the hair.”

  Block with his eldest daughter, Amy, at her wedding in October 1984.

  Seen here around 1990, Block works in his office on New York’s West 13th Street with, he says, “a bad haircut, an ugly shirt, and a few extra pounds.”

  Block at a bookstore appearance in support of A Walk Among the Tombstones, his tenth Matthew Scudder novel, on Veterans Day, 1992.

  Block and his wife, Lynne.

  Block and Lynne on vacation “someplace exotic.”

  Block race walking in an international marathon in Niagara Falls in 2005. He got the John Deere cap at the John Deere Museum in Grand Detour, Illinois, and still has it today.

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