Getting Off: A Novel of Sex & Violence (Hard Case Crime)

by Lawrence Block

  “That really did it for you,” she said. “What, is it your lucky number?”

  “Actually,” he said, “my lucky number is six.”

  “I see.”

  “You were never married.”

  “No.”

  “Never lived with anybody.”

  “Only my parents.”

  “You don’t still live with them?”

  “No.”

  “You live alone?”

  “I have a roommate.”

  “A woman, you mean.”

  “Right.”

  “Uh, the two of you aren’t...”

  “We have separate beds,” she said, “in separate rooms, and we live separate lives.”

  “Right. Were you ever, uh, in a convent or anything?”

  She gave him a look.

  “Because you’re remarkably attractive, you walk into a room and you light it up, and I can imagine the number of guys who must hit on you on a daily basis. And you’re how old? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “And you’ve only been with five guys? What, were you a late bloomer?”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m pressing and I shouldn’t. It’s just that, well, I can’t help being fascinated. But the last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable.”

  The conversation wasn’t making her uncomfortable. It was merely boring her. Was there any reason to prolong it? Was there any reason not to cut to the chase?

  She’d already slipped one foot out of its shoe, and now she raised it and rested it on his lap, massaging his groin with the ball of her foot. The expression on his face was reward enough all by itself.

  “My turn to ask questions,” she said. “Do you live with your parents?”

  “You’re kidding, right? Of course not.”

  “Do you have a roommate?”

  “Not since college, and that was a while ago.”

  “So” she said. “What are we waiting for?”

  SIX

  The restaurant Doug had chosen was on Detroit Avenue, just north of I-75. Walking across the parking lot, she noted a motel two doors down and another across the street.

  Inside, it was dark and quiet, and the décor reminded her of the cocktail lounge where Lucas had taken her. She had a sudden memory of her foot in his lap, and the expression on his face. Further memories followed, but she let them glide on by. The present moment was a nice one, and she wanted to live in it while it was at hand.

  She asked for a dry Rob Roy, and Doug hesitated, then ordered the same for himself. The cuisine on offer was Italian, and he started to order the scampi, then caught himself and selected a small steak instead. Scampi, she thought, was full of garlic, and he wanted to make sure he didn’t have it on his breath.

  The conversation started in the present, but she quickly steered it back to the past, where it properly belonged. “You always wanted to be a lawyer,” she remembered.

  “Right, I was going to be a criminal lawyer, a courtroom whiz. The defender of the innocent. So here I am doing corporate work, and if I ever see the inside of a courtroom, that means I’ve done something wrong.”

  “I guess it’s hard to make a living with a criminal practice.”

  “You can do okay,” he said, “but you spend your life with the scum of the earth, and you do everything you can to keep them from getting what they damn well deserve. Of course I didn’t know any of that when I was seventeen and starry-eyed over To Kill a Mockingbird.”

  “You were my first boyfriend.”

  “You were my first real girlfriend.”

  She thought, Oh? And how many unreal ones were there? And what made her real by comparison? Because she’d slept with him?

  Had he been a virgin the first time they had sex? She hadn’t given the matter much thought at the time, and had been too intent upon her own role in the proceedings to be aware of his experience or lack thereof. It hadn’t really mattered then, and she couldn’t see that it mattered now.

  And, she’d just told him, he’d been her first boyfriend. No need to qualify that; he’d truly been her first boyfriend, real or otherwise.

  But she hadn’t been a virgin. She’d crossed that barrier two years earlier, a month or so after her thirteenth birthday, and had had sex in one form or another perhaps a hundred times before she hooked up with Doug.

  Not with a boyfriend, however. I mean, your father couldn’t be your boyfriend, could he?

  Lucas lived alone in a large L-shaped studio apartment on the top floor of a new building. “I’m the first tenant the place has ever had,” he told her. “I’ve never lived in something brand spanking new before. It’s like I’ve taken the apartment’s virginity.”

  “Now you can take mine.”

  “Not quite. But this is better. Remember, I told you my lucky number.”

  “Six.”

  “There you go.”

  And just when, she wondered, had six become his lucky number? When she’d acknowledged five partners? Probably, but never mind. It was a good enough line, and one he was no doubt feeling proud of right about now, because it had worked, hadn’t it?

  As if he’d had any chance of failing...

  He made drinks, and they kissed, and she was pleased but not surprised to note that the requisite chemistry was there. And, keeping it company, there was that delicious surge of anticipatory excitement that was always present on such occasions. It was at once sexual and non-sexual, and she felt it even when the chemistry was not present, even when the sexual act was destined to be perfunctory at best, and at worst distasteful. Even then she’d feel that rush, that urgent excitement, but it was greatly increased when she knew the sex was going to be good.

  He excused himself and went to the bathroom, and she opened her purse and found the little unlabeled vial she kept in the change compartment. She looked at it and at the drink he’d left on the table, but in the end she left the vial in her purse, left his drink untouched.

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t have mattered. When he emerged from the bathroom he reached not for his drink but for her instead, and it was as good as she’d known it would be, inventive and eager and passionate, and finally they fell away from each other, spent and sated.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “That’s the right word for it.”

  “You think? It’s the best I can come up with, and yet it somehow seems inadequate. You’re—”

  “What?”

  “Amazing. I have to say this, I can’t help it. It’s almost impossible to believe you’ve had so little experience.”

  “Because I’m clearly jaded?”

  “No, just because you’re so good at it. And in a way that’s the complete opposite of jaded. I swear to God this is the last time I’ll ask you, but were you telling the truth? Have you really only been with five men?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “now it’s six, isn’t it?”

  “Your lucky number, right?”

  “Luckier than ever,” he said.

  “Lucky for me, too.”

  She was glad she hadn’t put anything in his drink, because after a brief rest they made love again, and that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

  “Still six,” he told her afterward, “unless you figure I ought to get extra credit.”

  She said something, her voice soft and soothing, and he said something, and that went on until he stopped responding. She lay beside him, in that familiar but ever-new combination of afterglow and anticipation, and then finally she slipped out of bed, and a little while later she let herself out of his apartment.

  All by herself in the descending elevator, she said out loud, “Five.”

  A second round of Rob Roys arrived before their entrees. Then the waiter brought her fish and his steak, along with a glass of red wine for him and white for her. She’d only had half of her second Rob Roy, and she barely touched her wine.

  “So you’re in N
ew York,” he said. “You went there straight from college?”

  She brought him up to date, keeping the responses vague for fear of contradicting herself. The story she told was all fabrication; she’d never even been to college, and her job résumé was a spotty mélange of waitressing and office temp work. She didn’t have a career, and she worked only when she had to.

  If she needed money—and she didn’t need much, she didn’t live high—well, there were other ways to get it besides work.

  But today she was Connie Corporate, with a job history to match her clothes, and yes, she’d gone to Penn State and then tacked on a Wharton MBA, and ever since she’d been in New York, and she couldn’t really talk about what had brought her to Toledo, or even on whose behalf she was traveling, because it was all hush-hush for the time being, and she was sworn to secrecy.

  “Not that there’s a really big deal to be secretive about,” she said, “but, you know, I try to do what they tell me.”

  “Like a good little soldier.”

  “Exactly,” she said, and beamed across the table at him.

  “You’re my little soldier,” her father had told her. “A trooper, a little warrior.”

  In the accounts she sometimes found herself reading, the father (or the stepfather, or the uncle, or the mother’s boyfriend, or even the next-door neighbor) was a drunk and a brute, a bloody-minded savage, forcing himself upon the child who was his helpless and unwilling partner. She would get angry, reading those case histories. She would hate the male responsible for the incest, would sympathize with the young female victim, and her blood would surge in her veins with the desire to even the score, to exact a cruel but just vengeance. Her mind supplied scenarios—castration, mutilation, disembowelment, all of them brutal and heartless, all richly deserved.

  But her own experience was quite unlike what she read.

  Some of her earliest memories were of sitting on her father’s lap, his hands touching her, patting her, petting her. Sometimes he was with her at bath time, making sure she soaped and rinsed herself thoroughly. Sometimes he tucked her in at night, and sat by the side of the bed stroking her hair until she fell asleep.

  Was his touch ever inappropriate? Looking back, she thought that it probably was, but she’d never been aware of it at the time. She knew that she loved her daddy and he loved her, and that there was a bond between them that excluded her mother. But it never consciously occurred to her that there was anything wrong about it.

  He would put her to bed and tuck her in. One night a dream woke her, and without opening her eyes she realized that he was in bed with her. She felt his hand on her shoulder and slipped back beneath the cover of sleep.

  She’d lie awake, pretending to be asleep, and at last her door would ease open and he’d be in her room, and he’d stand there while she pretended to be asleep, then get into bed with her. He’d hold her and pet her, and his presence would somehow give her permission to fall genuinely asleep.

  Then, when she was thirteen, when her body had begun to change, there was a night when he came to her bed and slipped beneath the covers. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “I know you’re awake.” And he held her and touched her and kissed her.

  The holding and touching and kissing was different that night, and she recognized it as such immediately, and somehow knew that it would be a secret, that she could never tell anybody. And yet no enormous barriers were crossed that night. He was very gentle with her, always gentle, and his seduction of her was infinitely gradual. She had since read how the Plains Indians took wild horses and domesticated them, not by breaking their spirit but by slowly, slowly, winning them over, and the description resonated with her immediately, because that was precisely how her father had turned her from a child who sat so innocently on his lap into an eager and spirited sexual partner.

  He never broke her spirit. What he did was awaken it.

  He came to her every night for months, and by the time he took her virginity she had long since lost her innocence, because he had schooled her quite thoroughly in the sexual arts. There was no pain on the night he led her across the last divide. She had been well prepared, and was entirely ready.

  Away from her bed, they were the same as they’d always been.

  “Nothing can show,” he’d explained. “No one would understand the way you and I love each other. So we must not let them know. If your mother knew—”

  He hadn’t needed to finish that sentence.

  “Someday,” he’d told her, “you and I will get in the car, and we’ll drive to some city where no one knows us. We’ll both be older then, and the difference in our ages won’t be that remarkable, especially when we’ve tacked on a few years to you and shaved them off of me. And we’ll live together, and we’ll get married, and no one will be the wiser.”

  She tried to imagine that. Sometimes it seemed like something that could actually happen, something that would indeed come about in the course of time. And other times it seemed like a story an adult might tell a child, right up there with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

  “But for now,” he’d said more than once, “for now we have to be soldiers. You’re my little soldier, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  “I get to New York now and then,” Doug Pratter said.

  “I suppose you and your wife fly in,” she said. “Stay at a nice hotel, see a couple of shows.”

  “She doesn’t like to fly.”

  “Well, who does? What they make you go through these days, all in the name of security. And it just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it? First they started giving you plastic utensils with your in-flight meal, because there’s nothing as dangerous as a terrorist with a metal fork. Then they stopped giving you a meal altogether, so you couldn’t complain about the plastic utensils.”

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? But it’s a short flight. I don’t mind it that much. I just open up a book, and the next thing I know I’m in New York.”

  “By yourself.”

  “On business,” he said. “Not that frequently, but every once in a while. Actually, I could get there more often, if I had a reason to go.”

  “Oh?”

  “But lately I’ve been turning down chances,” he said, his eyes avoiding hers now. “Because, see, when my business is done for the day I don’t know what to do with myself. It would be different if I knew anybody there, but I don’t.”

  “You know me,” she said.

  “That’s right,” he agreed, his eyes finding hers again. “That’s right. I do, don’t I?”

  Over the years, she’d read a lot about incest. She didn’t think her interest was compulsive, or morbidly obsessive, and in fact it seemed to her as if it would be more pathological if she were not interested in reading about it.

  One case imprinted itself strongly upon her. A man had three daughters, and he had sexual relations with two of them. He was not the artful Daughter Whisperer that her own father had been, but a good deal closer to the Drunken Brute end of the spectrum. A widower, he told the two older daughters that it was their duty to take their mother’s place. They felt it was wrong, but they also felt it was something they had to do, and so they did it.

  And, predictably enough, they were both psychologically scarred by the experience. Almost every incest victim seemed to be, one way or the other.

  But it was their younger sister who wound up being the most damaged of the three. Because Daddy never touched her, she figured there was something wrong with her. Was she ugly? Was she insufficiently feminine? Was there something disgusting about her?

  Jeepers, what was the matter with her, anyway? Why didn’t he want her?

  After the dishes were cleared, Doug suggested a brandy. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t usually drink this much early in the day.”

  “Actually, neither do I. I guess there’s something about the occasion that feels like a celebration.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Some coffee? B
ecause I’m in no hurry for this to end.”

  She agreed that coffee sounded like a good idea. And it was pretty good coffee, and a fitting conclusion to a pretty good meal. Better than a person might expect to find on the outskirts of Toledo.

  How did he know the place? Did he come here with his wife? She somehow doubted it. Had he brought other women here? She doubted that as well. Maybe it was something he’d picked up at the office water cooler. “So I took her to this Eye-tie place on Detroit Avenue, and then we just popped into the Comfort Inn down the block, and I mean to tell you that girl was good to go.”

  Something like that.

  “I don’t want to go back to the office,” he was saying. “All these years, and then you walk back into my life, and I’m not ready for you to walk out of it again.”

  You were the one who walked, she thought. Clear to Bowling Green.

  But what she said was, “We could go to my hotel room, but a downtown hotel right in the middle of the city—”

  “Actually,” he said, “there’s a nice place right across the street.”

  “Oh?”

  “A Holiday Inn, actually.”

  “Do you think they’d have a room at this hour?”

  He managed to look embarrassed and pleased with himself, all at the same time. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I have a reservation.”

  SEVEN

  She was four months shy of her eighteenth birthday when everything changed.

  What she came to realize, although she hadn’t been consciously aware of it at the time, was that things had already been changing for some time. Her father came a little less frequently to her bed, sometimes telling her he was tired from a hard day’s work, sometimes explaining that he had to stay up late with work he’d brought home, sometimes not bothering with an explanation of any sort.

  Then one afternoon he invited her to come for a ride. Sometimes rides in the family car would end at a motel, and she thought that was what he planned on this occasion. In anticipation, no sooner had he backed the car out of the driveway than she’d dropped her hand into his lap, stroking him, awaiting his response.