A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

  “Wasn’t it?”

  I could picture him shaking his head. “That was quality,” he said. “A good novel. Maybe even a great novel, whatever that means. Solid, hard-cover stuff, great stuff, salable stuff. Good.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up,” he said. “But me no buts, like it says in that play. I read it at one setting and shot it straight to Lincoln House for a fast reading, and I got the fast reading. They like it. Madge Clyber read it, and Madge Clyber liked it, and when Madge Clyber likes a book you have it made. Understand?”

  I gulped.

  “Look,” he said, “there’s no contract yet. There will be, and there could be right now if you hadn’t been banging Miss Connecticut for the past eight days. Clyber wants you to have lunch with her, and that means you go have lunch on Lincoln House at some Madison Avenue eatery. Eat as much as you like because Lincoln House picks up the tab and they have more money than God. And you sit over lunch for three hours talking abouteverything but the book, and as you get ready to leave she hauls out a contract and you sign it.”

  “How do I know what I’m signing?”

  “Because it’s all prepared. Baby, I got them hung up for a twenty thousand advance with foreign rights and movie rights on our side of the line. It’s a beautiful contract. And you’ll know it’s the contract I set up because it’s got my initials on it. All you have to do is sign and get her to sign and we’re in.”

  “Twenty thousand?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Sure, but—Why the lunch deal, Lou?”

  “Danny boy.” He sounded hurt. “Danny, you never sold a big book to a big house before, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Of course not. These boys play different from the paperbacks. They take a nice personal interest in their writers. They want to know who you are and size you up so they can play the publicity campaigns just right. They want to get an idea how to shoot your mug shot for the picture on the dust jacket, and they want to make sure they like you enough to buy your book. Don’t try to make sense out of it. Lincoln House doesn’t make much sense. Lincoln House makes dollars. And when Lincoln House makes dollars you make dollars, and when you make dollars I make dollars. Is that good enough for you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “It should be. Now for God’s sake wear a shirt and tie and smile pretty at Madge Clyber and be nice to her and laugh when she laughs, because if she decides she doesn’t like you the whole thing can go out of the window.”

  “She can decide that?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “When do I see the gal?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Christ, for all I knew you were dead. I got her on the phone an hour or so ago and made an appointment with her myself. I fed her some lie about how you took a night boat to Saudi Arabia or something. I can’t even remember what I told her. That’s when it gets bad, Danny boy. When you forget what lies you tell, then you’re in deep. When you say something and can’t figure out whether or not it’s a lie, then it’s really bad. You know, I had myself believing you were in Saudi Arabia?”

  “What’s she like?”

  “What’s who like?”

  “Madge Clyber.”

  “Oh.” He paused for a breath. “She’s a bitch,” he said solemnly. “She’s a fourteen-carat, diamond-dotted bitch with no heart and too many brains. She can half kill you by looking at you hard. I had lunch with her once and I couldn’t eat it, and when I can’t get food down it’s bad. She’s a complete bitch, and you’ll wind up hating her before you finish your tomato juice and you’ll want to kill her halfway through the mashed potatoes.

  “She’s a publishing bitch, and that’s the worst kind. They’re worse than Public relations bitches or advertising bitches or any other kind of New York business babe bitches. She’s spending her whole life showing that she can do anything a man can do, and that’s made one hell of a bitch out of her. Because there’s one thing a man can do that she can’t do, Danny boy.”

  I felt like telling him about Marcia but I didn’t bother.

  “Be nice to her,” he said. “Think about your twenty grand. Think about my two grand. Think about how my little kids need new shoes. Okay?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You keep my appointment,” he said. “You meet her at La Merover on 49th near Fifth at one o’clock tomorrow. Just ask the maitre d’ to point her out—he’ll know who she is. And you damn well better be nice to her.”

  “I’ll be sweet as saccharin.”

  He laughed. “You think you can be sweet, Danny boy? You think so?”

  “For twenty thousand dollars,” I said levelly, “I can be sweet to absolutely anybody.”

  The phone clicked in my ear. There was no topping the son of a bitch.

  Chapter Ten

  THE MINUTE I SAW La Mer I was glad Lincoln House was picking up the tab. It was the kind of restaurant that made you instinctively reach for your collar to make sure your tie was on straight. The waiters looked as though bending over would kill them, and the air smelled of money.

  You could smell the money in the air. Honest.

  I approached the headwaiter cautiously and revealed who I was and who I wanted.

  “Ah!” he said. “This way, please.”

  I followed like an obedient puppy and wound up at a postage stamp table across from one of the most beautiful and frightening women I have ever seen in my life.

  Beautiful and frightening—that was Madge Clyber. That was the immediate description that popped into my head, and it took less than seven seconds to figure out why Lou called her a bitch. It was all there.

  She was blonde, with long blonde hair whipped into a tight and almost severe chignon that sat on the back of her head like an egg on a plate. Her eyes were green—a very light green, and most women with eyes that color would seem soft and submissive. Madge Clyber had softgreen eyes that looked straight through a person—hard, almost vicious eyes.

  She started talking the minute I sat down. “You’re Dan Larkin,” she said. Her voice was hard, but not brittle the way Lou’s girl’s was. It was precise and very cold.

  “That’s right. And you’re—”

  “Madge Clyber. But I’m going to call you Dan and you can call me Madge, if it’s all right with you. I hate to eat with someone and call him by his last name. It screws up my digestion.”

  I thought that nothing in the world could foul up her digestion. She could probably swallow a cannonball and the acid in her throat would soften it up before it got to her stomach.

  But I kept my thoughts to myself.

  She turned to the waiter who had magically appeared next to the table, looking at him as though he didn’t really exist. “Martini,” she said. “Very dry, kill the olive.”

  “Same,” I said softly. I hate Martinis, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was as though ordering anything else would be insulting.

  There’s no way to describe the conversation that went on over the drinks. Both of us studiously avoided mentioning the book, or even that I had written a book, or that she worked for Lincoln House, or anything that had anything at all to do with why we were sitting across the table in La Merin the first place. She looked at me with her little green eyes and babbled trivia about everything from women’s fashions to who should have won the last election, while I looked back with my own eyes and smiled when she smiled and frowned when she frowned and babbled trivia about everything from the ideal odds on the world series to the value of the martini as opposed to the old fashioned.

  It was a ridiculous conversation, and it is precisely the sort of conversation authors always have with publishers. It is also the sort of conversation that agents have with movie producers; I remember Lou telling me about one marvelous time when he argued baseball for three solid hours with some minor mogul from Hollywood. Then, when they got their hats from the hatcheck chick, the minor mogul said, “$115,000,” and Lou without batting an
eyelash said, “$125,000,” and the mogul said, “Fine.”

  And that was that.

  The drinks disappeared without my realizing that I had even sipped at mine and the waiter was back with a pad of paper in his hand.

  “Lobster salad, coq au vin, stringbeans and coffee,” Madge snapped.

  I almost said “Same” but caught myself in time, and when Madge recommended the roast beef I took it as a command and ordered that. The waiter disappeared as silently as he had come.

  The meal was excellent, although what it was costing Lincoln House would have fed me quite comfortably for a good ten days. When we finished we had another cup of coffee and lit up cigarettes. It looked like the time for a more serious discussion.

  “You’re just the way I pictured you,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve met a lot of authors,” she said. “I’ve read a lot of books. It’s not hard to get a fair picture of an author after you read his book, unless the book is a hunk of trash. Trash can be phony. An old drunk can reel off touching reams of crap for the lovepulps. But with a good book you can figure the novelist.”

  “How?” I asked. “His personality or his looks or where he was born or what?”

  “Everything,” she said. “I knew who you were the minute you walked in the door.”

  “I didn’t know I was that true to type.”

  “It’s not a matter of typing you. I could tell you were somewhere between thirty-five and forty, and I could tell you were a New Yorker, and I could tell you were as tough as nails.”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Christ, it’s in your book and it’s in your face. It’s in the chin and the eyes and the crooked nose, and in the way you carry yourself when you walk. You never bend over for anybody, do you?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “But not often. You don’t have money, do you?”

  “No.”

  “But you did,” she went on. “You were born without it and you got it and you lost it. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “And now you’re trying to get it back.”

  It wasn’t even a question, but I nodded automatically.

  “You don’t like women much.” I started to say something but she said, “Hell, I don’t mean you’re a fag. Not that, for Christ’s sake. You’re probably good in bed. But you don’t like women much as people, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t. You’re Tony—you and your lead character are the same person, and I’ll give odds you grew up in a New York slum. Am I right?”

  “East Harlem.”

  “Sure. Sure, it had to be East Harlem or Hell’s Kitchen or maybe the Lower East Side. But you don’t like women, do you? You need them, and you must go through them pretty fast, but do you like them?”

  “I guess not.” It was something I hadn’t thought of before, but it started to make sense. It made a lot of sense,and it began to explain why I reacted the way I did to gals like Allison and Marcia.

  For a moment neither of us said anything, and when Madge spoke her voice was different—a little softer and a little more personal.

  “You’re like me,” she said. “Dammit, you’re too much like me. I came out of Beacon Hill instead of East Harlem, and I went to Radcliffe instead of quitting school and going to work, but that’s just surface difference. We’re a lot alike inside, aren’t we?

  “I’ve had to fight for everything I ever got, Dan. I’ve had to kick people in the face and sometimes I kicked a few between the legs. I’ve stepped on everybody in my way and now I’m right where I belong.

  “I’ve got a place in the East Fifties with an expensive Modigliani on the wall and a carpet as thick as the floor underneath it. I’ve got a liquor cabinet with everything in it that the bar at this damned hole has and more. I’ve got a bank account that’ll buy me anything I want, and my boss knows that there’s not a man in the world who can fill my job as well as I can.”

  She stopped and sipped at her coffee, but I kept quiet waiting for her to go on.

  “And I’m in as lousy shape as you are, Dan. I’m a mess. For a while I went to a psychiatrist five days a week for an hour a day at twenty-five dollars an hour to find out how sick I was. I’m sick, Dan. I’ve got rocks in my head.”

  She closed her eyes for a minute. “I hate men,” she said. “The bastards—they’re always in the way, and God I wish I didn’t need them the way I do! I hate them and I use them up the way I use up lipstick and toilet paper and gin. And it’s no damned good.”

  “I know,” I said. And I’m not sure why I said it.

  “I know you do. You’re the same person I am, Dan. You need women like I need men and you hate them justas much as I do. And you fight like hell to get some place and you can’t help trying to get there, but when you get there it’s not nearly as nice as you thought it would be. Right?”

  I nodded.

  “All the places are the same,” she said. “None of them are any damned good. We’re the type of people you can’t satisfy, Dan. That’s the reason we get places and that’s the reason why we don’t like them when we get there. We’re the kind of damned fools who keep the world progressing. If it weren’t for us nobody would have invented the wheel—but it doesn’t do us any good. Does it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It doesn’t. Dan, what do you want now?”

  Automatically I said, “I want to sell a book to Lincoln House.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’m glad you had the guts to say it. But it won’t make you happy, Dan. Not for more than a day or so.”

  “I know that.”

  “But you can’t help wanting it, can you?”

  “No—I can’t.”

  She shook her head as if to clear it. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  She signed for the tab and we got her coat from the checkroom and I helped her into it, and out on the street she said, “Let’s go to my place, Dan.”

  “I—”

  “You don’t want to,” she said. “Hell, I know damn well you don’t want to. You don’t like me, or if you like me you sure as hell don’t want to take me to bed. I know that. You think I’m a bitch and I use tough truck-driver language and I’m not the kind of a woman who’d look good with her hair spread out on a pillow.”

  “I think you’re a very beautiful woman,” I said honestly. “But—”

  “But you don’t want me. I know all that. If you wanted me I wouldn’t want you, Dan. But you want to sell a book to Lincoln House, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you better come to my place, Dan. Because if you don’t, you won’t sell a book to Lincoln House or any place else. I’ll knock you down so far you’ll never get up. I’ll louse you up with every publisher from here to Leningrad and you won’t be able to push slush to the pulps when I’m done with you.”

  “You wouldn’t do that.”

  “You think not? I could and I would, Dan. I’m a bitch, like I told you. I’m a real bitch from the blonde hair to the little pink toes, and when I want something nobody stops me. Coming?”

  I thought about it for ten seconds—no more. I thought about the book and I thought about Madge and I thought about me. I didn’t want to bed down with Madge Clyber any more than I wanted to sack out with a poisonous snake.

  But I wanted that book to sell.

  “Don’t you like the book, Madge?”

  Her lips formed a thin red line as she said, “It’s the best book I’ve read in the last six years. But if you don’t come to my place you can use it to wipe your ass.”

  And I looked at her and she looked at me and we got in a cab and rode to her apartment.

  Her apartment had a Modigliani on the wall and a carpet on the floor as thick as the floor under it. She wasn’t kidding.

  She made us drinks and I swallowed mine right down. I needed more than a drink.

&nbs
p; “Come on,” she said. “Damn you, come on.”

  I followed her into the bedroom. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head. She reached her hands behind her and unsnapped her bra and flipped it at the chair in the corner. She stepped out of the panties and left them on the floor, and kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings. She stood in front of me with her breasts firm and her thighs golden and every bit of her as beautiful as anything I had ever seen in my life.

  “I’m beautiful,” she said. “Tell me how beautiful I am. Tell me I’m the most goddamned beautiful thing you ever saw in your life. Tell me!”

  I told her what she wanted to hear.

  “Now take off your clothes.”

  I did, embarrassed in a strange sort of a way. I undid my necktie and took off my jacket and shirt and stepped out of my pants, hanging them over the back of the chair to keep from losing the crease. It was ridiculous—the whole thing was ridiculous, and when I stood before her I felt more foolish and lost than I had ever felt before.

  She was stretched out on the bed now. She had undone her hair and I saw how long it was. It fell almost to her waist, presenting an illusion of femininity that was totally out of place with a woman like her. It was as though she kept her hair long to prevent her from realizing how little of a woman she was.

  I wanted to lie down next to her; rather, I felt as though I was supposed to, as though it was part of the routine. But somehow I realized that I wasn’t supposed to do anything just now. The next move was up to her.

  My neck itched, but I couldn’t even scratch it. I had to wait for her to tell me what to do.

  “Take your belt out of your pants,” she said. Her voice was utterly flat and lacking in any emotion whatsoever. It was as though she was telling me to give her a cigarette or hold her coat for her.

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Get your belt,” she said. And this time it sounded like a command.

  I walked over to the chair and slipped my belt out of my pants. It was heavy, a hunk of handtooled leather I picked up in Mexico on one of the side-trips I made when I was working on the coast. I let it swing loosely in my hand and walked back to the bed, and I stood there and let her stare at me.