CH01 - No Score

by Lawrence Block

  When I think back on it, sometimes it seems as though it couldn’t possibly have been that long, and other times it seems as though it must have been closer to six months. They were six fantastic weeks no matter how you look at it. In all that time we never once crossed any of the cruddy lines she had drawn, and Gregor never got any idea of what was going on, and I don’t think we once went as much as thirty hours in a row without having a shot at it. It wasn’t always a five hour stretch on the couch (although that happened plenty of the time) and sometimes it was just a fast fingering at the kitchen sink or a quick hand job at the breakfast table. But it was as steady as a pension from the Federal Government.

  I remember one night when she slipped out of the bedroom after Gregor had zonked out. She did this quite a few times, and since she and Gregor generally knocked one off before going to sleep, the goods I was getting weren’t exactly untouched by human hands. Sloppy seconds, I think they call it. (Not really sloppy, because she would wash up first, but even so it used to bother me. At first, that is. You might be amazed the way a person can get used to things, and can stop being bothered by things that used to bother him.)

  This one particular night a couple of winks and hand signals during the late movie had given me the message that I could expect company. So I was waiting for her from the minute she and Gregor closed their bedroom door, and the sound of their bedsprings was background music while I thought of all the things I wanted to do to Aileen. I was developing a pretty wicked imagination along those lines.

  Then the door finally opened, and she tiptoed across to the bathroom, and I heard water running. And then she tiptoed some more, from the bathroom across the floor to the couch.

  I pretended to be sleeping. We both knew it was a pretty transparent act, but she liked to find ways to wake me up. She kept finding ways, and they always worked. I’ll bet she could do the Indian rope trick just by touching the rope with those hands of hers.

  Well, not to go off on tangents, I woke up, and she got on the couch with me, and we did things. Between her thighs, or under her arm, or in her hands, or between her breasts, or in the cleft of her buttocks, or—well, you name it. We made it, and I stretched out, and she curled up in my arms, and I felt like the King of the World.

  “Oh, baby,” she said. “You’re so good for me.”

  I said, “Purr.” Or something along those lines.

  “You know what? I feel like a girl.”

  “You sure do.”

  “I’m serious.”

  I ran a hand over her. “You feel like a girl, all right. I’m glad, too, you know. I don’t think I’d get as much of a kick out of all of this if you felt like a boy. I like these, see, and this, and—”

  And a little later, when we came up for a breath of fresh air:

  “Hey, I meant it before, clown. You make me feel like a girl again.”

  “You’re not so old.”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “You’re not that much older than I am, for Pete’s sake. You do this mother bit all the time, but you’re not exactly in the category of an antique.”

  “Keep saying it, baby.”

  “How old are you, anyway?”

  “A hundred and ten.”

  “Shit.”

  “You know why you make me feel so young? Hey, that’s a song. No, it’s because of what we do. Necking and petting and fooling around like a couple of kids. It takes me back to when I was, you know, younger. And a virgin.”

  “I didn’t know you ever were.”

  “Don’t be a sharp-tongued son of a bitch, Chip. Your boyish charm is your biggest asset. Don’t piss it away.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “Please do.” She put her hand between my legs and gave me a reassuring pat. “Yeah, I was a virgin once upon a time. Isn’t that remarkable? And when I’m with you I’m a virgin all over again, and the whole sex business is, I don’t know, cleaner and hungrier and hornier and everything rolled into one. It takes me back, it really does.”

  “Being in bed with me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sort of like hearing an old song on the radio that was popular when you were a kid. An oldie but goodie.”

  I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I guess she raised her eyebrows at that one. She had that tone in her voice, saying, “You making fun of me, Chip?”

  “No.”

  “I think you were, at least a little, maybe. Yeah, like hearing an old song, in a kind of way. The way a song or anything like that makes you feel the way you used to. Sometimes I’ll walk outside during the late summer when there’s a wet wind blowing off the lake, on like a really warm lazy night, and I’ll walk around the block or something and the air will be the way it is in Florida. Just the right temperature and humidity, I suppose. What’s the word? Sultry? But before this can even go through my mind, I’ll get this feeling of being seventeen years old again, because I spent a summer in Florida when I was seventeen.”

  “You were in Florida? I thought you were always in Chicago.”

  “Oh, I would travel from time to time.”

  “What were you doing in Florida?”

  “Fucking.”

  “That was a straight question.”

  “Well, it was a straight answer, honey bunch.”

  “At seventeen? I guess I’m retarded.”

  “Worry about it, why don’t you?”

  “I do, I do. When did you start?”

  “Huh?”

  “When did you start making love?”

  “What are you, Mr. District Attorney? I never started. I’m a virgin, baby doll. Handle me with care.” And, huskily, “If we keep on talking we’ll wake Greg, and he might take a dim view of this. So let’s not talk anymore. Why don’t I just lie here and you can lick different parts of me and see whether or not I like it? Sort of what you might call a scientific experiment.”

  (I was just thinking, looking at the last part, that I’ll bet it’s word for word the way that conversation actually went. Obviously, since I’m putting all of this on paper after it happened, I’m just getting the dialogue as close as possible to the way it happened. I didn’t wander through life with a tape recorder hanging around my neck, and I’m not the total recall type. I’m not absolutely convinced anybody is, and there are times when I think people who pretend to be are full of crap. But this one conversation stuck in my mind very vividly. I can hear her speaking the words even now, as if I were playing myself a record of the conversation.

  (I guess that’s because I thought about it so many times since then. And it struck me, and strikes me now, that it was a strange combination of games that Aileen was playing. First there was the bit about feeling like a girl, a virgin. And at the same time she kept coming on with the older but wiser routine and a heavy dose of the mother image. I couldn’t understand how she could be a virgin and a mother at the same time. As far as I know, that only happened once.)

  During the six weeks of trading orgasms with Aileen, her genius of a husband never suspected a thing. I’m just about a hundred percent certain of that. I went on working with him, and I saw him at meals and during the evening, and neither of us acted any differently toward one another than we did before. I had thought for a while that I would be eaten up with guilt over what I was doing with Aileen. No such thing. It may be that I’m just not the type for guilt, that I’m of such low moral character that I can live under a man’s roof and take his money and share his bread and not feel bad about taking his beloved wife to bed. I think, though, that there’s more to it than that.

  After all, I wasn’t doing a thing to Aileen behind his back that I hadn’t done to her right in front of him, with his approval. (Well, that’s pushing it, I guess; we did enlarge our bag of tricks, after all, and we went at them with a hell of a lot more enthusiasm. But you get the idea.) And she was still being faithful to him as far as their joint idea of fidelity was concerned. And, more than anything else, I knew damned well that I
wasn’t taking anything away from Gregor. Just by listening to the creak of his bedsprings I could tell he was getting all the use he wanted out of Aileen.

  I was like a conscientious kid with the family car. I never used it when the old man wanted it, and I always brought it home in as good condition as I took it out, with gas in the tank and air in the tires.

  I suppose it must go without saying that I stopped picking up odd jobs on the days when Gregor didn’t need me. When it came to a choice between slipping cents-off coupons under doors or slipping fingers into Aileen, it was the world’s easiest decision for me to make.

  I also stopped helping out in the darkroom. I think Gregor was surprised, but I let him get the impression that I was losing interest in photography as a lifetime career. Since he didn’t pay me for help, he couldn’t really bitch about it very strenuously.

  I had never gotten around to finding out about getting my diploma by going to night school, and of course I couldn’t really do anything about it at that time of the year, it being the middle of the term, but I had planned to find out what I had to find out and write away to Upper Valley for transcripts of my record so that I could start taking courses during the summer session. I didn’t bother doing any of this, and when I thought about night school at all, I more or less thought in terms of starting in the fall instead of rushing things.

  And I stopped going to the library as often as I had, and I stopped wandering around Chicago looking for women, and what it came down to, really, is that if I wasn’t working or sleeping or sitting around with Gregor and Aileen, then I was in bed with her. Those were just about the only four choices during that period of time.

  I spent some money on clothes, and I bought things like new shoelaces and a nail file and like that, but even without working the other jobs I was saving money. I would earn between forty and fifty a week helping Gregor, and my room and board cost me twenty, and I still didn’t eat lunch, and it wasn’t at all hard to save fifteen or twenty dollars out of each week’s earnings, especially because I never left the house unless I had to. There was really no way for me to spend money, so I saved it.

  This meant that by the end of May I had almost two hundred dollars, including the fifty for the modeling session. And because the money was accumulating with no strain at all I had the feeling that I was really getting somewhere and really making the kind of progress I had sworn I would make that first night at the Eagle Hotel.

  When I think back on it now I wonder if maybe all of that sex was rotting my brain, because if there was one thing I wasn’t doing, it was getting ahead in the world. Not in any way at all. I mean, a good long look at the pattern my life had taken would make Horatio Alger throw up.

  Instead of a job with a future, I was, let’s face it, working as sidekick to the world’s most pathetic photographer. That’s what he was, really. Taking candid pictures of morons on State Street and every few months making a big score by selling dirty pictures of his wife. And the dumbest part of it was that he worked harder for less money than if he’d been swinging a pick on a road gang, for Pete’s sake. He took risks and put in long hours on his feet and just took nickels and dimes out of the street photography business. The dirty pictures made his real income, and he would have to space out the cash over a period of several months until Mark called him up and asked for more.

  Now and then I wondered why he didn’t go into the dirty picture business in a bigger way, hiring a variety of models and finding a way to distribute the pictures and making some real money. Not that I think being a pornographer is the best way to sail through life, but if you’re going to be one anyway, why not be a successful one? It seems to me that if a girl is going to be a whore, she might as well be an expensive one. Right? So if Gregor had been the Kingpin of Filth in Chicago, or if he at least tried to be the Kingpin, I would have respected him. Or if he was a complete bum who just tried to coast along on the least possible amount of work, that would have at least made sense. But he wasn’t lazy and he wasn’t ambitious either, and this was the guy I was working for, this was the man teaching me his trade.

  I mean, how stupid can you be?

  I had wanted to save money, and I was saving it, but I was making, say, fifty dollars a week and saving twenty, and at the rate I was going, in twenty years I would still be making fifty a week and still saving twenty, and if you save twenty dollars a week, it will take you approximately a thousand years of steady work to save a million dollars.

  (This is figured without what the savings bank ads call The Miracle Of Compound Interest. According to them, if you put your money in a savings account you can’t help winding up rich. I remember seeing a billboard telling what Washington’s silver dollar would be worth today if he had put it in the bank. The figure was something ridiculously high, so I got a book from the library on coin collecting to find out what the same dollar would have been worth if Washington had kept it, and it turned out he would have been better off. But for all the good it did Washington he was even better off throwing it across the river. Or in it. So much for The Miracle Of Compound Interest.)

  The thing is, I wasn’t making real progress, and I wasn’t looking for a real opportunity. And it was the same with my sex life, if you stopped to think about it, which most of the time I didn’t. Because while I was having all this pleasure I was still as much a virgin as ever, and I wasn’t coming any closer to not being a virgin. In fact I was actually locking myself out of any chance of losing my virginity, the same way I was keeping myself from any chance of getting a job with a future. See, I was getting satisfied with what I had with Aileen, and in the same way I was getting satisfied with that stupid job and everything else.

  That was one thing about the kids in the Horatio Alger books. They were never satisfied. No matter how well things started shaping up, they had the decency to go on wanting more and more and more. So they kept pushing, and whenever opportunity knocked they ran to the door and answered it. If opportunity knocked on my door I never would have heard it because I would have been too busy putting blurry yellow cards in people’s hands or putting my own blurry little hands on Aileen.

  Not that I had these thoughts all the time. That was the worst of it—that I didn’t. That I was content with the way things were going. Take a man who is content with what he does and the way he lives and what have you got?

  A happy man, obviously.

  But that’s not exactly right, either, because I wasn’t really contented, because I didn’t have what I wanted. I was settling for less, that’s what I was doing. I was having little off-in-left-field climaxes with Aileen when what I really wanted to do was slide into home plate. I was getting by in a dumb job when I really wanted to get ahead. And no matter how comfortable that couch was when Aileen was on it with me, and no matter how often that happened, sooner or later I would have to be bothered by the way things were going.

  On Memorial Day, a veteran sold me a poppy. He stuck that poppy into my hand just as neatly as I had learned to stick the yellow cards into the jerks’ hands, and I took it like any other jerk, only I couldn’t just drop it on the ground and keep walking. Or maybe I could have done this, but then he would have been within his rights if he brained me with his crutch. I gave him a quarter and he said something about the Last Of The Big Spenders. I stuck the stupid poppy in my buttonhole. That way at least I didn’t have to buy another one.

  But when I walked another block, it hit me that I was more a cripple than the guy who sold me the poppy. I don’t know how I made the connection. It came in one quick flash and once I had it I couldn’t let go of it. I kept seeing myself with a leg missing, lurching through life like that.

  And I couldn’t stick around with an image like that in my mind.

  I waited until the weekend was over. The Sunday paper was filled with want ads, and I bought it and sat in a diner and went through it, and I found what I wanted. It wasn’t a job with a future, either, but it was one that would take me out of Chicago, and I had enou
gh sense to know that I couldn’t stay in Chicago if I wanted to get out of the tender trap I was in. I had to travel, and then I could concentrate on Getting Ahead and all the rest of it.

  Monday was a work day, but I took a long lunch hour, and during that lunch hour I went over and applied for the job. And got it. (No big deal—you had to have two heads or something for them to turn you down. They were easier to get into than the Army. More later.)

  And Monday night, after old Gregor went night-night, I did everything possible to score with Aileen. I tried to break those silly rules of hers and get something straight between us once and for all, and as usual it didn’t work. I had more or less fixed up a game in my mind, making a bargain with myself that if I laid her I would stay in Chicago but if I didn’t I would go. I gave it the old Upper Valley try and when it didn’t work I took Aileen’s motherly advice to behave myself and be a good boy and make sweet love with her. I got on top of her and rubbed the two of us together in a way we had both grown to enjoy no end. I made sweet love all over her stomach and she danced off to wash away the sweet love I had made, and she pecked my cheek and told me I was her sweet baby and to sleep tight, and she went into her bedroom and got back in bed with the State Street Shutterbug.

  I got dressed in the dark and put my extra clothes and stuff in a paper bag. I thought about leaving a note, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either hopelessly corny or slightly nasty, and I didn’t want to be either. I told myself I would write her a letter someday. You can tell yourself things like that as often as you want and it doesn’t cost you a thing.

  I sat up all night in different crummy diners, drinking so much coffee that I kept shaking and peeing and shaking and peeing. I was downtown in plenty of time to catch my ride in the morning, and when our car left the city limits of Chicago it wasn’t even noon yet.