A Diet of Treacle

by Lawrence Block

“I do.”

  “Because he supports you?”

  Joe grinned. “Hey,” he said. “Like let’s not go moralistic, huh? I like Shank. We swing together. I don’t want to throw stones at him, Anita. I’m not entirely without sin, you know, and I don’t want to cast the first one. Or the second. We get along. We share a pad, talk, hit the same sets.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He led her over to the bed and they sat down together. He tried to figure out what he should do next. The pad was a mess—dirty clothes on the floor, a layer of dirt covering everything. Not romantic, but he didn’t suppose that made much difference. It was not the setting itself but the prevailing mood that unnerved him. He and the girl were together in a room she had never been in before to do something she had never done before.

  Shank had left, sneering, aware of the agenda. Now Joe was scheduled to make some sort of pass at her, at which she ought to respond avidly. Thereupon they were supposed to make mad and passionate love among the dirt and debris of the apartment.

  Then he would go to sleep, or turn on, or go for a walk, or see some people, or do something. And she would board the train for Harlem and say hello to grandma and fall asleep in her own little bed.

  It wasn’t going to work, Joe thought.

  “Look,” he said, feeling terribly awkward. “Look, you can call this off. We can stop here and say good-bye. Or we can sit around and talk.”

  She started. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “No,” he said. “But—”

  “If I did it was an accident. I…I want you to make love to me. That’s all.”

  “We could wait until tomorrow. You could relax a little and then—”

  “Tonight.”

  He digested that. He still did not know where to begin, but he decided that there had to be a way, that all girls were built the same, that somehow they would wind up making their own kind of love. Then, he felt certain, she would go back to Harlem never to return. Sex was one thing. Commitment to an emptiness far greater than the one she spoke of was another. So Joe put his arm around Anita again and this time he kissed her, quietly. Her mouth stayed closed, but after a moment of the gentle pressure of one pair of lips upon another, her young arms curled around him and held him very close. He liked the taste of her lips, their coolness, and he imagined the sweetness of her young body.

  He kissed her again and her lips opened, his tongue turning up between them. Without trying as yet to arouse her, he wanted to know her, to understand her body with his, to touch her in some way not strictly sexual. He kissed her again and he felt the vague foreshadowings of response—the indrawn breath, the muscular tension and faint quiverings.

  “Scared?” Joe said.

  Startled, she looked up at him, as if he had been reading her mind.

  “This is your ball game,” he assured her. “You can call the shots. So there’s nothing to be scared of.”

  And, because there was nothing in the world to say after that, he kissed the girl. He leaned against her a little and they rolled back on the bed. They were lying on their sides, facing one another. He kissed her closed eyes, and kissed her nose. He pressed his lips to her throat, the softness there surprising him. He kissed her again and again.

  Then his hand finger-tipped her breast, pliant through the clothing. She stiffened a little. He remembered that this had been as much as the square cat, the engineer, had accomplished in many months of dating. So he held her breast very gently and kissed her again. He released her. “The light,” he explained, and he crossed the room to kill the lamp. The room was plunged into a kind of charcoal gray. He walked back and stretched out next to the girl curled up on the bed like a sleepy kitten in front of a fire, her eyes still closed. Joe could dimly feel the outline of the white bra through Anita’s white sweater. For a time he stroked and fondled. Then, slowly, he pulled the sweater free from the skirt and slipped his hand beneath to rub her back, the small of her back and her shoulders. He found the bra clasp and mastered it.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh—”

  He kissed her lips. He used both hands to draw the sweater over her head. He could feel the tension in her body. He knew that nobody, no man, at least, had ever seen her breasts before. He knew that exposure scared her, and that he would have to be gentle. When he had removed the white sweater, he folded it carefully on a chair. He gazed at her bare and lovely breasts, large and firm, crisscrossed by light blue veins, and the nipples miniature red puffs newly wrinkled. Joe stroked her cool breasts gently, thoughtfully; he was happily aware of her sensual response, but he was sensitive at the same time to a reluctance in that very response that might be welling out of fear. He felt both desire and restraint increasing in Anita and struggling for supremacy and he wondered which would triumph.

  After he had undressed, he kissed her breast again, and then linked a chain of light muzzlings around her. She smiled sleepily and he was glad, feeling you had to keep your sense of humor to enjoy sex; humorless, it could drag you, slow you up.

  “Joe…” she whispered. “No more.”

  “You’re very pretty, Anita. Very lovely.”

  “Do you like my breasts?”

  “Very much.”

  “I like it when you kiss them. It makes me feel…funny. I don’t know. Funny and good.”

  “I like to kiss them.”

  “Do it some more.”

  He complied, and as he did so he hurried a hand beneath the folds of her skirt, touching the inevitable roughness of a knee and passing upward to the incredibly fantastic softness of a thigh. She gasped.

  Now came the really critical part, for Joe to undress her.

  He unhooked and unbelted her skirt and he took it off, his eyes dwelling on the dimly discernible wonder of her beautifully slender legs. He paused for a moment, and then he kissed her belly and thighs. She again quivered and again Joe felt from the girl the same contradictory pairing of passion and fear. Now she was nude and utterly defenseless; and, before he could touch her, her fear moved to the foreground and made her body rigid with shame. Joe understood, and became motionless.

  “You can go home now,” he said. “If you want to. We don’t have to go through with it, not now, not if you’re afraid of it. We can make it some other time, there’s lots of time, you can go home now and rest and relax and think about it and then you can come back tomorrow or the next day or not at all, whatever way you want it. But we don’t have to make it now, not when you’re afraid.”

  Her eyes opened.

  She looked at him, at his nakedness, and her eyes held neither shame nor fear. Then she stared down at herself, at her own nakedness, and she smiled a soft and personal smile.

  “I want to, Joe.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I want to,” Anita said. “Of course I’m scared, any girl would be, it’s natural, I can’t help it. But I want to make love, I want to—even if I can’t get as excited as I’d like to. I want to, I want you to do it to me, please do it, please—”

  Joe touched her breasts, then, sleeping things awakening the instant he found them; and his hand trailed to find the softest warmth of her, bringing her to an apex of life.

  Like creatures in the oldest of dreams, they moved bodies toward one another, and they flowed together into one, the girl’s pain at first so agonizing that Joe himself ached from it, his head spinning, his eyes balls of lead. But gradually pain subsided and silken, throbbing pleasure claimed her so magically that, when Anita opened her eyes momentarily to scan the great power of her lover, she could have sworn the charcoal gray of the room had become quilted with rosy fire.

  Roaches scurried across the wooden floor, ignoring two warm bodies locked in sorcery and sweetness but not quite love.

  Andy’s Castle, a cubbyhole bar on Houston Street, was close enough to the mainstream of the Village to be a meeting-place, and far enough away to escape the stream of tourists and Village habitués. A jukebox behind the bar blared the pop tunes of the day. If
the place had an Andy, he failed to be in evidence. A woman barkeep, a blowsy female whose dyed red hair tumbled over burly shoulders, was drawing a stein of draft beer for a rheumy-eyed man.

  A boy in the booth at the back very nearly jumped when Shank pushed in through the heavy brown door. The boy forced himself to be calm while Shank ordered a glass of draft.

  “Man,” the boy said. “Man.”

  Shank looked at him.

  “I been waiting an hour,” the boy said. “An hour in this hole. A fucking hour, you dig?”

  “Shut up.”

  “An hour. And—” Shank started to stand up. The alarm in the boy’s face was so great Shank wanted to laugh. Instead, he leaned over and placed his hands on the table in the booth, peering down at the boy.

  “You want to play? You want to talk? Or maybe you want to deal,” Shank said.

  “All right. Cool. Sit down,” the boy said.

  Shank sat down. “An hour is an hour,” he told him. “I’m the one who holds. I’m the one with the world looking at him hard. You can sit in this hole till you rot and you won’t get busted for it. Perfectly legal. You’re hardly even drinking.”

  The boy started to say something, but Shank motioned him to shut up.

  “You wait for me,” Shank went on, “and everything’s fine. Everything stays fine. I ever have to wait for you and it’s bad. Very ugly. So you do the waiting and you keep cool about it. You dig?”

  The boy nodded.

  “How much?” Shank asked.

  “Twenty cents,” the boy said.

  Shank nodded. He took out a manila envelope containing two-thirds of an ounce of marijuana and one-third of an ounce of catnip. The boy was a steady customer and bought an average of an ounce a week. It wouldn’t do, Shank thought, to put him on a Bull Durham mix. But cutting it slightly with catnip hurt nobody, Shank judged, confident that neither the boy nor the boy’s customers, whoever they might be, could tell catnip from marijuana.

  “The bread,” he said.

  A hand reached under the table. Shank took four bills from the hand. He glanced at them. Four fives. Twenty cents, in his parlance. Twenty dollars to the square world. He folded the money and pocketed it. Then he passed the envelope back the same way. The boy took it and found a pocket for it. Shank noticed the automatic and unconscious change in the boy’s expression. He was holding now, violating the law, and a mask of wariness jelled on his face. The boy was the hunted one now.

  He made as if to rise.

  “Sit down,” Shank said. “You waited an hour. Another minute won’t hurt.”

  The boy looked uncomfortable.

  “It’s good stuff,” Shank assured him. “The Mau-Mau’s final batch. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Solid.”

  “About selling it, I mean. Your customers will dig it. You never get beat stuff from the Mau-Mau.”

  The boy flushed. “I don’t sell, Shank.”

  “Sure, I’m hip. You smoke an ounce a week all by yourself. Solid.”

  “Shank—”

  “You want to lie, it’s your business. But don’t expect me to believe you.”

  The boy had a red face now. “Just to come out even,” he said. “So my own stuff doesn’t cost me anything. That’s all.”

  “I’m hip.”

  “I don’t make a profit. I’m not a…pusher, for Christ’s sake.”

  Shank smiled, happy. “Nobody’s a pusher,” he said. “We’re all connections. Just a big string of connections from the top to the bottom. You’re part of a system, my man. That’s all. How does it feel to be a little cog in the world’s roundest wheel?”

  Shank walked out first, letting the kid worry about it. He felt good getting outside. It was the second sale of the night and also the last. He was not holding and he was not hustling anything. Just relaxing. Just walking around and having his own private laughs.

  Like the chick. Anita. That was a laugh, a big round one. The two of them balling now, with the chick scared out of her bra and Joe looking like Papa Professor with phallic overtones. Oh, that was a gas.

  But the chick was nice. Fine stuff. Choice. He liked the type—the face, the whole flip structure. And he liked the fear. The scared ones were the most fun. Pretty soon, he thought, he would have to try his luck with her. And he laughed a loud laugh echoing in an alleyway and bouncing back and forth between the empty storefronts of Houston Street. Because it would be very funny. Very funny.

  She was on the train heading for home, by herself, naturally. But she had been somewhat astonished that Joe had walked her to the subway. Someone like Ray, naturally, would have escorted her home as a matter of course. But Joe was not Ray, and as a result she had been a little amazed that he had taken the time and trouble to walk her to the Lexington IRT stop at Astor Place.

  Now the train rolled north, grinding down the tracks toward Harlem, and she had only her thoughts and memories. It was close to midnight, late for a night before a school day, but she felt no anxiety. Her grandmother would be asleep and probably without worry. Her grandmother seemed to be losing a little more contact with reality every day.

  Tomorrow, when Anita would inform the old woman she would be moving out, the girl would scarcely encounter an argument.

  Leaving Harlem. Moving in on Saint Marks Place. And where, little girl, are we headed? Where will we wind up, and why?

  You are no longer a virgin, little girl, and that, if nothing else, would shock the daylights out of your grandmother. It has even shocked you a bit, little girl, much as you would like to hide the fact. Shocked you to the very core.

  Anita smiled that same private and personal smile she had smiled once before that evening. And she remembered the magic of making love, of taking pleasure, giving pleasure and straining for happiness. She had not quite reached the peak, but she had found pleasure enough without it.

  And Joe had assured her that she would eventually reach the peak. Not that that as yet made much difference to her; the physical pleasure remaining secondary. Her joy at the total experience was the important matter.

  Now she and Joe would live together. So many things would go to hell, she mused—school and home and Ray and that split-level in suburbia. But so much would be left. A new world. Maybe the right one. Because somewhere there had to be the right one, the best of all the possible ones. Somewhere.

  After the love-making Joe had offered her a marijuana cigarette that she had declined. And he had shrugged, to show it had not mattered, and had put the cigarette away. She wondered which parts of the life she would take and which to reject. There must be that level to attain on which you could freely search and think without dissipating yourself into the void. She would find that balance and so would Joe.

  The train rushed on, from stop to stop, and she rushed along with it. Her thoughts and memories caught her up and whirled her around and she forgot the train and her destination. She all but missed her stop. But as the train pulled into 116th Street, she remembered who she was and where she was and where she was going.

  She stepped out of the train and walked up to the night and headed quickly home.

  6

  A Sunday, and a bad one…rain lashing against the windows…no sun…the air warm in spite of the rain…muggy.

  The three people at the makeshift table in the small apartment on Saint Marks Place made a unique family group. They were finishing breakfast. A cigarette burned to ashes between Anita Carbone’s fingers. Another dropped from the corner of Joe Milani’s mouth. And Shank swallowed the last of his coffee. The three had been living together in a strange act of communal living for little more than a week. Anita shared Joe’s bed. For several days the presence of another man in the room had been disconcerting to Anita. It had been incredibly difficult for her to relax in love when another heart had been beating across the room, another ear possibly listening to the rhythm of love-making. But she had at last grown accustomed to Shank’s presence; and when he slept she and Joe made love.
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br />   Shank put down his coffee. “Got to move,” he said. “Got to see a man.”

  Joe looked up. “Who?”

  Shank shrugged. “A man. Short or tall, fat or thin. I don’t know who he is or what he looks like. All I got is a name-Basil. You know, I don’t believe there’s anybody named Basil. It’s impossible.”

  “A connection?”

  “Call it a possibility. Call it a notion. I don’t know. They busted Mau-Mau and they put the lid on as tight as it gets around here. It gets hot and it gets cool. Cycles. Junk has as many cycles as sunspots. It gets hot and it gets cool and I wish to hell it would come on a little cooler.”

  Joe put out his cigarette. “Basil,” he said.

  “Basil. A name with no face. I don’t know. He hangs out in the Kitchen. Hell’s Kitchen. Midtown West Side. I go over there and I connect with him, I guess. Nobody knows who he is. He buys and sells. That’s all I know.”

  “When do you find him?”

  “Today,” Shank said. “Today, unless the bastard closes on Sundays. He shouldn’t. Business as usual seven days a week in the junk business. He hangs in a coffee pot on West Thirty-ninth. Maybe.”

  “There’s always tomorrow.”

  Shank shook his head. “I ran into Judy,” he said. “I got a set to supply tomorrow night. So I have to meet Basil today. Life is filled with responsibilities.” He smiled, more to himself than to Joe and Anita. He was beginning to enjoy coming on with philosophical phrases. You sounded deep and people put you up for it, Shank thought.

  “A set?” Anita asked.

  “A party,” Joe answered Anita. “At Judy Obershain’s. She’s a good little chick. Sick, but a good chick. Her parties move nicely.”

  “Are we going,” Anita wanted to know.

  “Might as well,” Joe said. “Be some good people there. Be best if Shank scores with this Basil cat. Judy’s parties can be a bring-down if there’s nothing to ease the pain.”

  Shank stood up slowly. He wandered around the room, found a leather jacket and put it on. “Rain,” he said. “God, I hate rain. One thing about the coast, you didn’t get rain like this. If it rained it did it and got done. None of this slow rain that stays around all day.”