69 Barrow Street

by Lawrence Block

  Stella had developed early. Her breasts began to grow when she was only eleven years old and reached their full size by the time she was fourteen. She was never physically awkward the way so many adolescent girls are. She grew from a pretty child to a beautiful woman with no unpleasant period of transition.

  And since she was eleven she would spend time before the mirror, looking at her reflection and admiring it. She would cup her breasts and squeeze them gently, telling herself that they were beautiful. She would strike poses before the mirror and study the effect at great length.

  Both her early development and her strong basic sex drives had a good deal to do with the course of her life. Stella’s father had been a doctor in Bay Shore and he had made a good deal of money. Her mother, who was a few years older than her husband, died of throat cancer while Stella was still in grade school. Her parents had been very close to one another and the shock ruined her father. He tended to blame himself for it. Since he was a doctor himself, he argued that he should have made certain his wife had periodic physical examinations which might have caught the disease in time, before it was too late.

  And so he began to drink. His practice went quietly to hell and he spent all his time by himself in the room where he and Stella’s mother had lived, drinking bonded bourbon from an Old Fashioned glass and talking softly to himself. Stella was on her own by the time she was twelve—not on her own like a slum child, for she had plenty of money and a good home. On her own in that there was no one to take care of her, no one to talk to her, no one to love her.

  And she needed love, needed it desperately. She sought love wherever it was available, but the empty, vacant atmosphere that was her home turned love to sex and emotion to passion. Love fell by the wayside; Stella never did find out what it really meant.

  But she slept with a lot of people.

  She approached sex the way that she approached life in general—bluntly, directly, and solely in her own self-interest. She took whatever she wanted and she wanted nearly everything.

  Her father died shortly after she entered high school. Both high school and the three years she spent in college were a chore for her. She already knew precisely how she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and she didn’t need a college diploma in order to carry through with her plans.

  The income from her father’s estate came to a little over twelve thousand dollars a year. While this didn’t make her really wealthy, it meant that she could lead a life of complete and total leisure, never working and never doing anything other than what she wanted to do. And this was fine with Stella James.

  She moved to the Village, the one place where she was sure she could live as she pleased with no outside interference. She took lovers when she wanted them. That was her life and she enjoyed it.

  Sometimes—but not very often—a vague feeling would pass through her mind that she was missing something, that her life was a waste and that the world she lived in was an empty one. The thought was essentially disturbing, and she fought that thought as she fought anything which threatened to disturb the relative security of her existence.

  She found a new person to make love to or a new way to make love.

  The thought was passing through her mind then as she looked at her body in the mirror. She remembered the previous night and something about it bothered her. It seemed as though every sexual encounter of late was getting just so much more depraved and twisted. Ordinarily this didn’t bother her; she looked upon perversion and depravity as the natural outgrowth of sex.

  But something seemed wrong. She had to do something to make herself feel better.

  She knew what to do.

  Humming softly to herself she went to the bedroom and dressed quickly. Then she returned to the living room and picked up the receiver of the phone. She made herself comfortable on the couch and dialed a number.

  After several rings a man’s voice said: “Hello.”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Stella James, Jimmy.”

  “Hi, honey. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m having a party,” she said. “Tonight. I wondered if you’d like to come.”

  “Love to. I’ve never missed a party of yours yet, have I?”

  “Swell. Drop up about nine.”

  “Will do.”

  “And Jimmy—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bring some stuff,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Gotcha. How much?”

  “Enough for about a dozen people,” she said. “We’ll have a real blast.”

  She hung up and relaxed on the couch, smiling happily to herself. Then she lifted the receiver again and dialed another number.

  “I’d like to paint you some time,” Ralph said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe sometime.”

  “I mean it, Susan. You’re a very lovely girl.” She looked away.

  “This isn’t a line,” he went on. “And I enjoy being with you. Hell, you’ve broken down my painter’s block. This is the first time I’ve felt like painting anything in a long while.”

  “I’ve never posed before, Ralph.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “I probably wouldn’t be a very good model.”

  “You’ll be all right.”

  She thought for a moment. “Where would you do it? Your apartment?”

  “If there’s no place better. The lighting’s kind of weak. What floor are you on?”

  “Fourth floor front. Why?”

  “You get a good north light there,” he explained. “I could paint there, if you’d let me. It would be a lot better than my place.”

  She nodded absently. Then she took a puff of her cigarette and studied the glowing tip of it for a moment before she spoke.

  “Ralph,” she said, “how would you paint me?”

  “In oils.”

  “I know that. I mean…nude?”

  “Not if you’d rather not, if you prefer I’ll do a head and shoulders study of you. But I’d rather do you full figure, with or without clothes. Your head and your body go very well together.”

  “They’ve been together a long time.”

  He laughed. “That’s not what I meant. An artist looks at everything a little bit differently, especially people. Sometimes the various parts of a person complement each other more than other times. Your particular head looks better attached to your particular body, and vice-versa.”

  “Naturally,” she said. “Either of them would look kind of silly just rolling around by themselves.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  She laughed, delighted. “I know what you meant, silly. I was just teasing you. But I do think it might be nice to pose for you, if you really want me to.”

  “I do.”

  “I will, then—and we can use my apartment if you’d rather. I think I might be embarrassed posing at your place anyway.”

  “Whatever way you want it.”

  “And…Ralph?”

  “What, Susan?”

  She closed her eyes for a minute. Then she opened them and said: “I know you told me before that you weren’t a guy on the make. But I have to make sure, Ralph. I…I’m not looking for anything remotely resembling a sexual relationship. Not for the time being and not for the foreseeable future.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t want to keep harping away at this,” she went on. “It’s just that this is such a standard set-up in the Village. Village artist meets Village girl and asks her to pose for him and they go to an apartment and crawl into a bed. I don’t think that’s what you want but I want to get everything set straight at the beginning so that neither of us will be disappointed.”

  “I understand,” he said again. “Besides, there’s already a girl. I told you.”

  “I know. But down here it’s not too uncommon for a person to be sleeping with more than one person at the same time.”

  Thanks for telling m
e, he thought, thinking of Stella.

  “But I really would like to pose for you,” she said. “I like you, Ralph. As a person, I mean. I like you very much and I think I’d enjoy getting to know you better. But only as a person.”

  “I like you, too, Susan. We hit it off pretty well together. I usually have trouble talking to people.”

  She smiled softly. “So do I. But I want to emphasize that no matter how well I get to know you or how much I get to like you, our relationship will have to stay on a purely platonic level. Just friends.”

  “Okay,” he said. “And I’m just as glad that you put everything out in the open at the start. Down here if a guy doesn’t make a pass at a girl the first day he meets her she feels insulted, or else thinks he’s a fruit or something. If you hadn’t said something I might have had to throw you a pass just to keep up appearances.”

  “Don’t ever do that. Maybe we’ll be very good friends, Ralph. That’s a rare enough thing.”

  “Right,” he said. “Hello, friend.”

  “Hi,” she said. “Hi, friend.”

  She insisted on paying half the check. Then they left the restaurant and walked back to 69 Barrow Street, walking slowly with the sun beating down on them. Ralph glanced at his watch and noted that it was close to noon. Where had the time gone to? Evidently they had been talking for quite a while.

  The traffic was getting heavier and he could hear trucks and buses rolling by on Seventh Avenue. Barrow Street was filled with neighborhood children playing the myriad games that children played in New York, where there was no place to play but the street. Stickball, stoop-ball, chinese handball—the kids never seemed to tire of the street games, never lacked a way to amuse themselves.

  Just like Stella, he thought. She can always find a way to amuse herself. And it’s usually in a horizontal position.

  Not always horizontal, he realized. Stella had a marvelous imagination.

  At 69 Barrow he opened the door for Susan and followed her inside. They said goodbye at the staircase and he returned to the door of his apartment, fitting the key in the lock.

  He listened to Susan’s footsteps on the staircase for several seconds before turning the key and entering his apartment.

  Chapter Three

  STELLA WAS SMILING when he walked into the apartment.

  “Well,” she said. “Two-timing me, huh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just now. With the little brunette.”

  “Oh,” he said. “The two of us had breakfast together. She just moved into the building.”

  “Sort of a long breakfast, wasn’t it?”

  “We were talking for a while,” he said defensively. There was nothing for him to be defensive about, but Stella had the knack of making him feel guilty for no reason whatsoever.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Susan Rivers.”

  “She’s very pretty, Ralph.”

  “I know. I’m thinking of doing a painting of her. That’s what we were talking about.”

  Stella pouted. “You don’t want to paint me anymore?”

  “I just wanted to try something different.”

  “That’s all right,” she said quickly. “I don’t really mind. As a matter of fact, I intend to get to know the girl myself.”

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  “You see,” she went on, “we’ve met before. She’s the one I was telling you about yesterday. The one I intend to take to bed sometime in the very near future. Susan Rivers, you said? I’ll have to remember her name.”

  His mouth dropped open but no words came out. Stella looked at him for a moment and suddenly burst out in harsh, strident laughter.

  “You mean you didn’t know? You couldn’t tell?”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “You couldn’t tell!” Her eyes were laughing at him. “My God, Ralph—why, it stands out all over her. She’s so obviously gay I’m amazed you didn’t spot her right away.”

  “Stella—”

  “You’re a real artist, aren’t you? One look at a person and you can tell things other people wouldn’t notice. But anything that’s perfectly straightforward and obvious sails right past you.”

  “Stella,” he said again. “Stella, I don’t want you to bother that girl.”

  “Bother her?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why don’t you say what you mean? There’s a better word than bother for what I had in mind.”

  “I want you to leave her alone,” he said. “She doesn’t want you.”

  “You’re wrong, Ralph.”

  “She doesn’t. And I want you to leave her be. Do you understand me?”

  “Of course I understand. That doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to the nonsense you’re spouting. What in the world’s got into you, anyway? Have you fallen for our little Miss Rivers? That won’t matter. You can have a crack at her when I’m done—”

  “Shut up!”

  She grinned. “You know, I think that’s it. You’re in love with her!”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “You must be. You’re a real nut, Ralph—falling in love with a dyke.”

  “You’re being ridiculous,” he said, frowning. “I like her, that’s all. Even if she is a lesbian, she’s one hell of a nice person—which is something you’d never understand. And I don’t want you to get your hooks into her, Stella. You ruin people. You turn them all rotten inside.”

  She crossed her legs and reached for a cigarette. “Aren’t you being a little too dramatic, dear? Whom did I ever ruin?”

  He stared at her.

  “Tell me. I’d like to know.”

  “Leave me alone, will you?”

  She stood up and walked to him, pressing up against him and putting her arms around his neck. He tried to brush her away but she clung to him.

  “Come on,” she said. “Tell me who I’ve been ruining.”

  “Me,” he said brokenly. “You’ve made a mess out of me. How’s that for a starter?”

  He expected her to laugh but this time she didn’t. Instead she released him and took a step backwards. There was a new expression in her eyes, a mixture of pity and contempt.

  “You really think I ruined you?”

  He nodded, not looking at her.

  “No,” she said. “Not me, Ralph. You were a wreck before I ever laid eyes on you.”

  Susan Rivers read the same paragraph three times in succession.

  The third time around she realized that the paragraph seemed familiar. She closed her eyes for a second and came to the realization that it had taken her twenty minutes to read five pages of the book she held in her hand. And on top of that she could no longer remember anything that had been on any of the five pages.

  Disgusted, she closed the book and returned it to the bookshelf. She curled up in the mammoth armchair, the only really nice piece of furniture in the apartment, and tried to force herself to relax.

  It didn’t work. It never worked. There were some things you couldn’t force on yourself, and relaxation happened to be one of them.

  She closed her eyes once again and thought about Ralph Lambert. It was, all things considered, quite pleasant to think about Ralph Lambert. He was nice company. And she didn’t seem to feel afraid of him.

  With most men she was afraid, almost petrified. Not with gay men, of course, and she had been quite friendly with one or two of them from time to time. But a friendship with a male homosexual was never particularly satisfying. It seemed forced, as if the two of them were friends primarily because homosexuality served as a common bond.

  Men who were straight generally frightened her. The thought of a man touching her with his coarse hands, forcing her and hurting her, bending her down onto a bed and kissing her, touching all the private parts of her body and then…then…

  When she opened her eyes she realized that she had been shivering with fear and disgust.

  But with Ralph she felt comfortable, and s
he hoped that he wouldn’t try to change their friendship into anything sexual. Not only was he a man, but she was fairly certain that the woman he was living with was the woman she had passed the day before on the stoop, the woman she had found so damnably attractive.

  Would anything come of her attraction for the woman? Half of her being hoped the two of them would have an affair, if only a brief one. The other half prayed that they would live their separate lives and that their paths would never cross in any manner more intense than an occasional meeting in the hallway. While she wanted the woman, sexual involvement of any sort was one thing she desired desperately to avoid for the time being.

  Susan had been a lesbian for almost two years, a relatively short time. In the course of those two years she had made love with six women. The six affairs ranged in duration from five months with Gloria to one night with a girl named Alicia whom she had met in a Village bar. She remembered the first time—it seemed so long ago, and yet it all happened less than two years ago, just a month before her twenty-second birthday. Perhaps she had been a lesbian before that without knowing it; the fact that she had avoided any sexual relationship with men on a deep level suggested that to her. But the first real affair began in September, several months after her graduation from art school.

  She had spent the summer as arts and crafts counselor at a summer camp in the Catskills, and when she hit the city she had nothing to do and no place to go. She wanted to get some sort of job that would let her continue with her work in ceramics, but jobs of that type didn’t grow on trees. So she lived with her parents in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, read the Help Wanted ads every morning in the Times, and spent her evenings strolling around Greenwich Village, drinking cafe espresso in the little coffee houses, listening to modern jazz in a dimly lit bar and watching people feeding pigeons in Washington Square.

  It was on one of those evenings that she met Sharon. She and Sharon had been in art school together. Sharon was a year or so older and the two of them had never been very friendly, knowing each other well enough to exchange nods in the hallway but not much more than that. But when she met the older girl in the Village, Sharon gave her a heavy welcome and Susan was lonely enough to be grateful.

  They went out drinking in a quiet bar; she couldn’t remember anymore which bar it had been. It was a warm evening and they drank dry martinis on the rocks. The drinks were very refreshing and very cool and very effective, and Susan had never been much of a drinker to begin with.