A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

  That made me feel good.

  The picture was one of those sickly-sweet bits with the hero and the gal wanting each other from the beginning to the end and finally getting each other and happiness and hearts and flowers and all that. I could see every twist and turn in the plot coming—hell, I wrote ones just like that when I was out on the coast. I left before it was over, partly because my eyes were starting to burn from all the movies and partly because looking at Allison King was my idea of nothing to do. The experiment was a success.

  But it wasn’t all that wonderful. Because Allison King wasn’t dead and buried—she was replaced by somebody else, somebody I wanted much more deeply then I had ever wanted Allison.

  With Allison I was in love with an idea, with a picture of a woman created half in my own mind and half by the actress she was. But Marcia Banks was no actress and my mind was done making pretty pictures.

  This was something a lot more real.

  That much was good. It’s better to be in love with real people than with celluloid images, just the way it’s better to slay dragons than to tilt at windmills. There’s more of a feeling of purpose and reality present.

  But in a way it was bad.

  Because if anything went completely wrong with Marcia I knew I would snap and nothing would put the pieces back together again. If you tilt at windmills and miss, the worst thing that can happen is you fall on your stupid face.

  If you miss a dragon, the dragon bites your fool head off.

  I took the subway back and sang all the way. I walked the few blocks from the station to the room and put my money in the drawer. I tossed my jacket at a chair and hung up my pants.

  My dragon wasn’t ready to play ball, so there was nothing to do but go to sleep.

  So I did.

  Chapter Eight

  THE NEXT NIGHT I was sitting in my chair looking out at the window. Sometimes you can sit in one position for hours, looking at everything and at nothing at all. With a fire in the fireplace it’s easy—you watch the flames flicker and dance around and your back gets cold and your face gets warm and your mind wanders all over the place.

  It’s not as easy with a window overlooking 85th Street, but it’s better than nothing. There are stickball games in the street with the kids knocking spaldeens around with broomsticks and re-routing the cars around the other streets. Sometimes the game gets rough and the kids use the broomsticks on each other’s heads. It’s all something to look at.

  I started staring around four in the afternoon and stayed in the same position except for a cigarette break and a cup of coffee at the greasy spoon a little later on. I watched when the streetlights went on all by themselves and all at once, and I watched the stickball game break up when the kids went home for supper. Or maybe they went out mugging people; I didn’t really care.

  And then all by itself it got to be eight o’clock and the book still wasn’t getting much of any place and Ididn’t feel like staring out the window any more. Besides, it was getting to be the time when people undressed in the building across the way. The idea of getting nabbed as a peeping Tom didn’t appeal to me.

  The idea of seeing Marcia did.

  So I stood up and listened to my bones crack a little the way they do when you’ve been sitting long enough in one position.

  And I stalked slowly out of my room, turning out the light behind me.

  And I closed the door after me.

  And I walked down the hallway.

  I even started to whistle as I went. I don’t remember the tune, and that’s funny because I should have remembered it. But I didn’t, and after a bar or so I stopped whistling and stood in front of her door.

  The door wasn’t closed. It wasn’t wide open; it was maybe a foot or so ajar and the lights were on inside.

  I heard enough noise inside to know she was in there, and it was at this point that I did the wrong thing. I should have knocked. As a matter of complete fact, it would have been a much more intelligent thing to knock.

  I thought of this. I thought that she might be undressed or something of the sort, but I figured that I had seen her undressed often enough so that she wouldn’t blow her top over the idea.

  So I didn’t knock.

  I was very coy about the whole thing. Oh, I was as cute as a goddamned bedbug. Cunning. Clever.

  I gently—very gently—shoved the door open about six inches. It was a good door and it didn’t let out the tiniest creak. Then I leaned forward and stuck my stupid head out and peaked around the door and into the room.

  Then I didn’t do anything.

  I started to fall on the floor, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.

  Marcia had a very nice room. I was seeing it for the first time, and it was an especially nice room. The closet was by the side of the door to the right and it was open, and there was a very nice collection of clothing hanging from the various hooks and wire coat-hangers.

  The dresser was good, too. Mahogany, I would guess, and artistically designed. There was an oriental rug on the floor. There was a table with a bowl of fresh flowers and a box of note-paper.

  There was a bed—a good wide bed with clean, smooth linen sheets.

  There was a pillow on the bed.

  There were two heads on the pillow. They both had long hair.

  There was Marcia’s head and there was Carol’s head. Each head was attached to a body, and the bodies were lying very close together on the bed. Marcia’s mouth seemed to be glued to Carol’s mouth, and Carol’s hands had encircled Marcia’s little breasts and were squeezing them gently.

  Of course I can’t be sure the hands were squeezing the breasts gently. But Marcia didn’t scream, so I suppose Carol’s hands were gentle.

  Then Carol’s mouth carefully disengaged itself from Marcia’s mouth and travelled slowly down Marcia’s body. I watched the mouth kiss the soft skin, travelling slowly down the throat to the firm little breasts, down to the gently rounded stomach.

  It was almost like a painting. Think of the color combination; picture it in your mind. There was the linen sheet, clean and white. There was the mahogany dresser in the corner. There was Marcia’s body, all soft and brown, and Carol’s body all pink.

  Oh, it was lovely, all right.

  I kept watching. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t move from the spot. As I said, I almost fell on the floor—but I didn’t, and I went right on watching.

  I listened, too. I listened to the smooth, almost tender flow of soft words from Carol’slips when they weren’t busy making kisses against Marcia’s flesh.

  I listened to the little moans that came from deep in the back of Carol’s throat. They were the same moans that she made when she was with me, soft and husky and unbelievably beautiful.

  They sounded so familiar that it was uncanny.

  I watched and I listened, and neither of them saw me. I watched for a length of time that felt like an hour but was probably closer to ten or twelve minutes—and that’s a lot of time to watch two women sexing around on a linen sheet. It’s even longer when you’re in love with one of the gals and you’ve sacked out with both of them—although not both at the same time.

  It was a long time.

  It was one hell of a long time, and at first I started to fall on the floor like I said, and then I wanted to scream and throw things, and then the cold sweat started to mat the hair in my armpits and I just wanted to go someplace and hide. I wanted to crawl in a hole and pull the hole in. I wanted to take a nitric acid shower. I wanted to get drunk on wood alcohol. I wanted to try out razor blades on my wrists. I wanted to find a nice warm bathtub and open my veins.

  But I was very good about the whole thing. I took a finger and closed my eyelids one at a time, and then I pulled my neck back from the doorway and turned myself around. Then I lifted my right foot and drew it back, and then I lifted my left foot and took a veryhesitant step, and then I walked quite quickly toward the front door.

  I didn’t even bang the door on m
y way out.

  You see, I remember all that. I remember it so vividly that it’s surprising that I can’t remember the tune I was starting to whistle on my way to the room, because the scene on the linen sheet is one that I’ll never forget. It’s as clear as it was when I stood there like a dummy watching and listening. I could go over every caress, every kiss, every word and every moan as if it were happening right now.

  But I don’t remember much of what happened after that, and quite a lot did happen. It’s all blurred and mixed up and it stinks of alcohol and sweat and drugstore perfume and other smells that were even less pleasant.

  There was the subway. That was the beginning, and that’s strange in a way because it might have been more natural for me to head for the nearest bottle—a liquor store on Amsterdam or a bar on Columbus Avenue. Instead I got on a train and got off somewhere in the Village.

  But it probably makes more sense that way. I was going back to the beginning, the place where it all started. Maybe my life started in East Harlem, but the Harlem days were gone and almost forgotten, back in the same closed book with stickball and swiping hubcaps and all that.

  But the Village was where everything seemed to start, and that was where I headed. The subway ride there is one of the blurred things—I remember staring at the ads and picking up a day-old copy of the New York Post and glaring at the advice to the lovelorn column, but that’s about all.

  I had most of the fifty bucks from the crime yarn sale,and I started in on it in the first village bar I spotted, a joint on Bleecker Street with good Scotch. All I remember about it was that the Scotch was good and that the bartender kept wiping the bar-top with a white towel that remained miraculously clean no matter how many drinks he wiped up.

  I poured down a lot of Scotch and took a walk.

  People go on drunks in one of two ways, if they hit the bars. One kind drinks at one bar until they throw him out or he quits, and the other tries to reach every bar in town. I’m the travelling type; maybe it’s tied up with the way I live my whole life, never staying anywhere long enough, never keeping a real solid friendship and never growing roots. I tried to hit all the bars in the Village that night, and I probably almost made it.

  I remember flashes—little isolated patches that come back from time to time. I remember playing games with the knee of a doll who must have been seventy if she was a day, and I don’t remember what happened after that. She had a gleam in her eye as if I was the first man who ever looked at her since the end of the Spanish-American War, and her one tooth wiggled back and forth when she smiled.

  I got in a minor fight in a neighborhood bar on Seventh Avenue but I can’t remember how it started. I think I did pretty well—I have a vague memory of chopping somebody in the throat just when he was getting ready to snap off the neck of a beer bottle and put the sharp glass through my windpipe. I must have come out all right, because there are no scars on my neck right now.

  It would be better if I could give a straight record of what happened, but things don’t come to you that way. It’s all in snatches, all blurred with smoke and stinking with liquor and beer.

  I managed to wander into one place that turned out tobe a Macdougal Street lesbian hole with boy-girls all over the place—dancing cheek-to-cheek and holding hands. Normally I don’t mind that sort of bit. I figure everybody has a right to his own taste, and like an actor on the Coast put it, “If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”

  But this wasn’t the night for it. Not the right night at all, not after the little show on 85th Street. I made myself pretty obnoxious between drinks as I remember, and that’s something I don’t do as a rule. It’s not a particularly cute trick to begin with, because the lesbo boy-girls are frequently built like breasted truckdrivers and can throw an elephant two out of three falls.

  I cornered one of them and started yammering like an idiot about how does a girl get that way, and I was too dumb to figure out that she wanted to talk to me about as much as she wanted to sleep with me. The manager saved my life and steered me to the door before she got the notion to break my head for me, which would have been one hell of a way to die.

  I can see the headlines now: DYKE DENTS HACK’S HEAD.

  On the street I latched onto another gay gal and talked her ear off, and I got involved in something which would have been more than worth remembering if I could only remember it. She came up with a long, heartbreaking story about how she became a practising lesbian when she was still in high school and never could stop. She would have been pretty, except that she had her hair cut in a man’s crew and was wearing a pair of slacks and a black leather jacket. Her nose was short and stubby, and her features and body added up to the type of gal the copywriters call boyish—freckles on the little nose, bright eyes, and so on. The adjective would have applied to her all across the board.

  She went on to say that she had tried to get back tonormal and had picked up a man in a bar. The results were weak. She still liked girls and didn’t like men at all, but she had managed to get herself pregnant.

  I don’t remember whether I laughed or not. I hope I didn’t laugh, because if you think about it there is absolutely nothing funny about a pregnant lesbian, nothing in the world. There is, when you come right down to it, something pretty pathetic about the whole notion.

  I wound up sitting on a bar stool in some other bar with the pregnant lesbian on the stool next to me, and I told her my story and she told me hers. I wound up with the clever idea that the two of us get married so that the child would be legitimate.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Why not, indeed?” I echoed.

  “You wouldn’t want sex?”

  I frowned and explained I was off sex for life.

  Now I don’t know precisely what happened after that. I don’t know, and I honestly wish I did know, because the idea of walking around engaged to be married to a drunken lesbian who is also pregnant holds a certain amount of poetic beauty. I have found myself wondering just what happened to the girl and how in the world I ever managed to get rid of her or how, for that matter, she managed to ditch me.

  It’s something I’ll never know. One moment I was sitting on the bar stool with the girl looking at me earnestly and the overhead lights glinting off the shininess of her little nose, and the air smelling slightly sour and a glass of scotch by my elbow, and the next minute I was somewhere else.

  The somewhere else was another bar. I remember the bar, a moderately classy place off Sheridan Square. It was where I picked up the girl whose name was probably Elsa.

  Probably, because from this place on there’s very little I’m sure of. Elsa, or whatever-the-hell her name was, was built like the Great Wall of China. She was a Bohemian type with black hair hanging down to her navel and big hoopy gold earrings hanging almost as far. She was built so that the front of her walked into a room a good ten seconds before the rear.

  She was true to type—the little doll who goes to a “progressive” high school and moves from the Bronx to the Village three days after she graduates, rents a dump for a tremendous rental that Papa pays for, and bit by bit begins to sleep with half the male population of New York.

  If you’re sad enough, she’ll drag you off to bed. If you need understanding, she’s ready and willing to help. If you’re a writer or an actor or a painter or a sculpteror some kind of phony, you have to struggle to get away from her.

  I was in no mood to struggle.

  “You’ve got problems,” Elsa was saying. “Like, you’re disturbed. Upset, I mean.”

  I finished the Scotch.

  She reached out a hand and made little circles on the back of my hand and gave me a long, direct look. There was heavy pancake makeup under her eyes that made them look impossibly big, and her look seemed to be the stare of a psychotic heroin addict.

  “Upset,” she said. “Something has to happen, you know? You’re down, and you got to shake this bit or you’ll stay down. Right?”

  I sort
of smiled.

  “Upset,” she repeated firmly.

  I managed to let the guy behind the bar know I wanted another drink, and I managed to drink what he poured,and by this time Elsa had a hand on my knee and was squeezing it gently. Subtle, she was.

  “I’m just drunk,” I said.

  “I’m hip.”

  “Yeah. Look, I’m just drunk. Besides, your name isn’t Marcia.”

  “Marcia?”

  I nodded slowly. “The one I told you about.”

  “Dig,” she said, “if what’s bugging you is my name isn’t Marcia, call me Marcia. Call me Heloise, if it makes you happy. Pretend I’m your mother if that’s how you get your kicks.”

  “It’s not,” I said.

  She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. There was one cat liked me to play Mama, you know. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  I swallowed what was left of the Scotch. I was almost sober again; when you drink seriously, you can reach a stage like that—what an alcoholic calls drinking yourself straight. Everything becomes crystal clear suddenly. The only trouble is that it doesn’t last too long.

  “C’mon,” she said. She stood up and tugged at my arm.

  “Whereto?”

  “My pad,” she said. And out the door we went.

  Her pad turned out to be even phonier than she was, which was going some. It had the conventional chianti bottles with the conventional candles in them and the conventional low narrow beds—three of them, one to a wall—and the conventional modern mobile hung from the ceiling and was conventional sloppy, with the conventional garbage on the conventionally carpeted floor.

  I’m pretty glad I don’t remember much of what happened after Elsa and I settled on the bed by the window and threw our clothes in a tired heap on the floor. I’msureElsa was about as inspired as a dishrag, and my performance must have left a good deal to be desired. However, my mind is happily blank until the point where I woke up and it was morning and my head was splitting and Elsa was sound asleep.

  And there were nude couples sexing on the two other beds, and the lights were still on.