A Strange Kind of Love

by Lawrence Block

She looked at me.

  “You make the difference,” I told her. “You make all the difference in the world, baby. You make winning worthwhile and you make losing bearable. I think I sort of love you.”

  “Mmmmmmm,” she said after I kissed her again.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I’m marrying you tomorrow, you know. And I’m never letting you get away from me. We’ll leave this damned apartment house and get us a house up in Westchester or somewhere. Okay?”

  “Mmmmmmmm.”

  “How’d you ever get this damned place anyway?”

  “I sort of own it. But I can let somebody else manage it and all that.”

  “Fine,” I said. “I want you in our own house with nobody around to bother us. And with our own kids playing with their own toys on the floor. On our own floor, for that matter. Got that?”

  “Got it.”

  “It’s nice to have money,” I said. “It’s nice to get whatever you want. But it’s only because I have you to share everything with. Without you all this would be nothing, Marcia. Without you there wouldn’t be anything at all at the end of the long road.”

  I stopped and looked at her. Her eyes were getting misty, with a faraway look in them.

  “I love you,” I said. “Hell, I have to love you. You’re my whole life.”

  “Dan,” she said. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “No, I guess not. I guess I know it.”

  And then we were both silent.

  “Dan?”

  “What, honey?”

  “Do I honestly make you happy?”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Has anybody made you happy before?”

  “Never.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’ve never been happy like this before. I’ve never felt so good before.”

  “I think it would be enough for me to spend my whole life trying to make you happy, Dan.”

  And we were silent again.

  Then, “Dan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Dan, I’m glad Allison got the part. Because I got you, Darling—and that’s so much more than she got that I feel sorry for her.”

  The next afternoon the Cadillac ate up miles like a anteater gobbles up ants. It was a beautiful car—long and low and powerful. It handled perfectly, too. The road stretched out before me and my hands were relaxed on the wheel as I watched the Cad move in perfect rhythm, obeying the commands my hands made.

  We were on our way to Maryland. It would have been easy enough to get a license in New York, but we wanted a honeymoon anyhow and there’s no waiting period for marriage licenses in Maryland.

  Marcia was sitting beside me; our luggage was in the back seat. We were travelling light, which was something that I had insisted on. I told her that if she decided that she needed anything I would buy it for her. If she wanted a dress I would buy it for her, and if she wanted a hat I would buy it for her, and so on.

  She was sitting very close beside me. I liked it that way.

  I was as nervous as every bridegroom is supposed to be. I was nervous, thinking of standing before a justice of the peace and taking those proverbially solemn vows. Some people nowadays think of marriage as an easy thing, but I had decided long ago that if I ever did get married it would be for keeps. Divorce wasn’t part of my idea of the way to spend your life.

  And I got nervous thinking of the wedding night, which when you come right down to it is pretty ridiculous. I felt as though I had never so much as kissed Marcia, much less made love to her.

  I felt as though I had never made love to any girl in my whole life.

  Perhaps it was because I had never before slept with awoman who was my wife. Somehow it would be different, better, more wonderful than before. I wasn’t quite sure just how that would come about, but it was something I was very certain of. It couldn’t help happening that way. When Marcia Banks was magically transformed in Marcia Larkin, some sort of miracle would take place.

  And everything would be even better.

  “How do you feel?” I asked her.

  In answer she cuddled closer to me and let her head rest against my shoulder. I liked the way she nestled against me like that. It was very comfortable with her next to me, very comfortable and easy and relaxed.

  “Want to stop for a bite or something?”

  “If you do.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “If you’re hungry, or if you’re tired of riding so far—”

  “It hasn’t been that far.

  “Want to keep going then?”

  She giggled. “You might stop at the nearest motel, Dan. We might find something to do.”

  “Dammit,” I laughed, “you’ll have to wait until we’re married. I’m not going to seduce a bride on her wedding day.”

  “What’s the matter—getting tired of me already?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Well,” she said, slipping her little hand into mine, “you don’t seem interested in making love to me at all. I guess you’re just tired of it. I don’t suppose I stimulate you at all any more.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said in mock seriousness. “This is the way it starts, with you more interested in hurrying off to Maryland than in making love to me. That’s only the beginning of it. Pretty soon we’ll be an old married couple and you’ll just make love to me on certain nightsof the week. Then it will be every other night, and then every third night, and then twice a week, and then once a week, and pretty soon we won’t do it at all.”

  “Do you really think that’ll happen?”

  “Of course it will. And when you do make love to me, I won’t be a woman any more. I’ll just be another piece of property, like a car or a house or anything else you own. I can see it coming, all right.”

  I grinned.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Isn’t that what’s happening?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  I shook my head.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Marcia,” I said, “I firmly intend to make love to you every night until I am ninety at the very least. I’ll try to make love to you at least twice a night, although that may become a chore after a few years. But I’ll do my best.”

  “That’s no good,” she said. “Not if you’re just doing it as part of a bargain.”

  “I’ll want to do it,” I insisted.

  “At the very least.”

  “Until you’re ninety?”

  “Then how come you’re so cold today?”

  “I’m not, really. Why don’t you kiss me a little and test me?”

  She did. She squirmed a little on the seat and pressed her lips against mine. Then she withdrew them and then kissed me again, forcing her tongue between my lips. I could feel a wave of excitement passing through my whole body; it was as if I was a kid again on his first real date.

  Automatically my arm slipped around her and my hand closed around her shoulder. I steered the car with my left hand while she kissed me again, her hot little tongue working furiously against mine.

  She cuddled closer and my hand dropped from her shoulder and onto her breast. My fingers closed around soft flesh and held her gently and I could hear her breathing faster and faster. She placed her hand on mine, over her breast, and stroked my hand gently.

  “Dan,” she said, “never let go of me.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Never,” she said. “God, how I love you!”

  I wanted her at that minute more than I had ever wanted anything. All I was conscious of was the fury of my passion for the woman beside me. Nothing else mattered; nothing else seemed to exist.

  I turned my head over to her and covered her mouth with mine. Her lips parted and our tongues met. Her arms went around me and our bodies pressed together, hungry
, seeking one another.

  And then the Cadillac careened off the road. I jerked away from her suddenly but the car was off the road and on the soft shoulder. I pulled the wheel and slammed my foot down hard on the brakes but the car went into a skid. I fought with the wheel, my mind only half aware that twisting the damned wheel wouldn’t do any good.

  Nothing would do any good.

  My ears filled with the sound of Marcia’s scream. She screamed my name once, loud and shrill. The car kept skidding without a break.

  Then suddenly there was a telephone pole in front of us and there was nothing to keep us from hitting, no way in the whole world to keep the Cadillac from hitting that pole. The pole got bigger and bigger and came closer and closer, and then thefront of the Caddypleated and folded like an accordion and everything went totally black as the car slammed into the pole at full speed.

  You’ve read about guys getting up from an accident and walking away. That’s what happened to me. I pitched clear through the windshield without more than a few surface cuts and I landed without more than knocking the wind out of me. I was conscious again in less than a minute.

  It was one of those miracles that happen every so often. In a crash like that the odds are the driver is going to be killed, and here I was in perfect shape. It was a minor miracle, all right.

  Only I wish to God I had died in that crash.

  Because Marcia wasn’t so lucky as I was. Marcia didn’t make it through that windshield. Part of her did, and the glass chopped her beautiful face into pieces. Her whole lovely body was cut and torn to ribbons.

  Marcia was dead.

  You don’t know how long it took me to realize the truth of that simple little statement. You can’t possibly know how it felt to walk back to the car and stand there looking at her broken and bloody body, dimly coming to the realization that I would never make love to her again or hear her voice again or be with her again. It wasn’t a realization that came to me in a quick, precise flash. It came slowly.

  Marcia was dead.

  The blood on the car and in the road was Marcia’s blood. The dead body half in and half out of the window was her body. The corpse I looked at was the woman I had loved, the only woman I had completely given myself to.

  The woman I was supposed to marry in an hour or two.

  Marcia.

  Marcia was dead.

  What happened after that doesn’t really matter. The police came and ran some kind of a minor investigation and took my statement and all that, and a few hours or days later I was back in New York. There were no relatives to claim Marcia’s body, and I ordered an inexpensive funeral for her.

  I was the only person at that funeral.

  I walked out of the chapel and headed downtown and kept on walking. I was at the end of the road, the long road to the top. I had followed a road that was a lot more rocky than a rainbow, and what I found at the end was just a heap of ashes. I was on the top, but it didn’t seem to make a damn bit of difference.

  I was on top. My book would sell and the movie would bring in money. If I wrote another book that one would sell like hell too. I had it made.

  Yeah, I had it made. But nothing made the slightest bit of difference now that Marcia was gone. She was the only thing I really wanted, wanted deep inside me. She was the only thing I ever wanted in my entire life and now she was gone.

  There was no way to get her back.

  No way at all.

  And I was beginning to wonder why I had started on the long road to begin with. There wasn’t any particular point to it. I should have known at the beginning that it would turn out the way it did, with me having everything and yet somehow having nothing.

  Because in this great big wonderful world you can have anything—anything at all.

  Anything except the one thing you really want.

  “Mac.”

  I looked around. The man next to me was a few inches shorter than I was, and his eyes were red from drinking. His clothes were torn and messy, his breath stank, and there was the familiar defeated look in his eyes.

  He was a bum.

  I looked around. I had walked pretty far downtown: I was on the Bowery already. I looked back at the bum.

  “Mac,” he whined, “could you spare a quarter or so toward a quart of wine? I got to have a drink, Mac.”

  I looked at him.

  “Please,” he said. “Please, Mac. I got to have a drink the way I’m shaking and all. Just a dime, if you can’t spare more than that. Just a dime will be a help.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “Where do you buy your wine?”

  He blinked. “Package store around the corner. Why?”

  “Take me there.”

  He hesitated. Then he led the way and I followed. He waited outside while I walked to the counter, took out my wallet, and paid 98c for a quart of muscatel. I took the quart outside and joined the bum.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I—”

  “Where do you go to drink the stuff?”

  He led the way around another corner to an alleyway. We stood side by side against the brick wall of a factory and I ripped off the plastic seal and unscrewed the cap of the bottle. I flipped the cap to the sidewalk and watched it bounce around crazily.

  Then I raised the bottle to my lips and took a long pull of the cheap wine.

  It was terrible.

  I wiped off the mouth of the bottle with my shirt-tail and passed it to the bum. He took a long drink and passed it back without speaking.

  We stayed there, our backs resting against the brick wall. We passed the bottle of muscatel back and forth and took long drinks from it.

  After the bottle was about half gone we sat down and went on passing the bottle and drinking.

  A little while later a second bum stumbled into the alleyway. He sat down with us and we let him have a share of the wine. First he took a sip; then the first bum took a sip. Then the first bum passed the bottle to me.

  I put it to my lips and got ready to take a drink. But first I studied the faces of the two bums. There was something vaguely familiar about them.

  Somehow it seemed as though I ought to be right where I was, drinking Sneaky Pete in a Bowery alley with these two men. There seemed to be something extremely fitting about the whole thing.

  I raised the bottle and drank deeply. I swallowed and passed the bottle.

  I was home at last, home for good.

  THE END

  A New Afterword by the Author

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1958 I came home from an aborted Mexican holiday. Waiting for me, in my parents’ house in Buffalo, New York, was a letter from my agent. It contained an assignment and led to my writing an erotic novel that took a James M. Cain situation, left out the menace and violence (along with the gritty realism and literary merit), and included a memorable scene in which the titular heroine—and I use the adjective advisedly—copulated with a gas pump jockey in the grease pit of his service station.

  Eat your heart out, Jimmy Cain.

  I called the book Carla and sent it to my agent, who sent it to Harry Shorten at Midwood Tower. Harry liked it, and flat-out loved the grease pit scene. He published it and asked for more.

  But by then I was back at school.

  I’d spent two years at Antioch College, during which I’d neither covered myself with glory nor gotten myself expelled. In the summer after my second year I got a job at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where I read amateur work and told the fee-paying writers what was wrong with it. (Every report I wrote, I should say, was a work of fiction, because my job was to tell them they were fine writers—they were not—and that it was a failure of plot that kept their story from working. It wasn’t the plot, it was that they were talentless saps who couldn’t write their name in the dirt with a stick. But if I told them that they wouldn’t send in more stories, with more fees, and Scott never met a dollar he could bring himself to turn down.)

  Irrespective of what it did for such moral character as I possess
ed, the job was the best possible training ground for a writer. You learn more reading bad work than good work, because it’s so much easier to see what’s wrong with something than what’s right with it. Long story short, I knew the first week that this was too good a job to leave after two months. I dropped out of college and stayed in New York for the better part of the year. I left in May, and by autumn I was back at school, wondering what I was doing there.

  Then I got a letter and learned that Harry Shorten would love for me to do another book for him. Ah, that was the answer. I now knew what I was doing in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I was writing a second book for Harry Shorten.

  A defining component of the program at Antioch College is its co-op program; students spend half the year on campus and the other half in jobs designed to provide life and vocational experience. One of my own co-op jobs, for example, had been in the mail room at Pines Publications. That job had been obtained through the school’s co-op department, while I’d found the one at Scott Meredith on my own.

  Now I was back at school after a year away. I was scheduled to spend January through March as the full-time editor of The Record, Antioch’s college paper; that would be my co-op job for that period. Prior to that I’d be a full-time student for three months, taking a couple of English courses and something called Workshop in Small-Group Functioning, which had looked interesting, but wasn’t. In addition to my courses, I’d be assisting Record editor Bob Zevin, and thus learning what I had to know to take over in January.

  I did put in a lot of time at the Record. And it was in the Record office, on the second floor of the Student Union, that I wrote A Strange Kind of Love.

  I don’t know how long it took, or how often I worked on it. I remember sitting alone in the Record office, after everyone else had gone home. Most of the work at the paper seemed to get done at night, so it was generally quite late when I put in my time at the typewriter, telling the story of a broken-down writer who gets himself together, all for the love of a good woman, and then returns almost gratefully to the gutter when his romance lands in the crapper.

  Now and then a fee-paying writer had submitted a story to Scott Meredith with a writer or some other artist as a lead character, and that always gave me an opening to reject it. The average reader, I knew enough to say, has trouble identifying with artistic types or relating to their problems. (Was that ever true? Maybe, but it seems way off the mark nowadays. If, as Napoleon had it, every French soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of a Marshal of France, so does virtually every reader of novels imagine himself as an author, and a successful one at that.)