69 Barrow Street

by Lawrence Block

  He thought for a minute. “Okay. I’ll tell Maria to move out. I was getting tired of her anyway.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “We’re pretty good together,” he said. “Maybe it’ll work out okay.”

  Elaine Jordan seemed to be in a trance. Ralph held her still, his mind wandering into another world. The pot had hit him harder than he had expected and he wanted nothing more than what he had—his hands on Elaine’s lovely breasts and his mind floating through space and time.

  Slowly he began to come back to reality. His hands continued their play with her breasts but now the process was beginning to excite him.

  He wanted her.

  Gently he slipped his hands around her waist and unbuckled her skirt. It dropped to the floor. Then he hooked his fingers under the elastic band of her pink silk panties and pushed them down over her hips and thighs. They dropped to the floor also.

  He ran his hands the full length of her body, realizing for the first time what a truly beautiful woman she was. His fingers explored every area of her.

  He wanted her. He couldn’t wait.

  “Elaine,” he said. “Elaine.”

  She was still in a trance.

  “Elaine.”

  She mumbled something unintelligible.

  “Elaine,” he said. “Bend over, Elaine.”

  Maria was crying.

  Jimmy sat down beside her, slipped an arm over her shoulder. “Hey,” he said. “Why the waterworks?”

  She looked up. “I want to make it and nobody wants to make it with me.”

  “You shoulda asked me.”

  Her eyes brightened. “You wanta make it?”

  “Why not?”

  “Greek style?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  They walked toward the bedroom.

  “Only one thing,” he said. “Why Greek style? Isn’t that pretty painful for a woman?”

  “Of course,” she said, puzzled. “Why else do you think I want to do it that way?”

  The party didn’t break up until 5:30 in the morning.

  Chapter Five

  IT WAS WELL PAST NOON when Ralph awoke and climbed out of bed over the still-asleep form of Stella. He yawned and stretched and reached for a cigarette. After the cigarette was lit and the first puff of smoke taken deep into his lungs he was able to think clearly.

  But he didn’t want to think clearly. He didn’t want to think at all. He wanted to crawl back into the bed and pull the covers over his head and never come out. He didn’t want to see anybody or do anything.

  He felt sick inside, sick and weak and tormented. He closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to look at Stella, but with his eyes closed other images, worse pictures, flooded his mind.

  He opened his eyes again.

  There are no physical after-effects from smoking marijuana. There is no hangover, no physical craving for the drug, no boggy feeling in the limbs or fuzziness in the brain such as frequently follows a good drinking bout. When the drug wears off, the user is right where he was when he started, right where he would have been if he had never smoked the stuff in the first place.

  So he couldn’t blame the way he felt on the marijuana. Ralph felt sick, physically sick, but not due to any physical causes. The memories of the party churned in his stomach and rose up in his throat and for a moment he thought he was going to be sick.

  The moment passed.

  Calmly he gazed around the small bedroom. Everything was in a frightening state of disarray. Feminine undergarments, some forgotten in the excitement of the evening and others torn to ribbons by the haste of the participants, covered the floor.

  Ralph stooped over and picked up a tattered pair of lacy black panties. He stood up and held them in his hand, studying them. Vaguely he wondered whose they might have been and how they might have been reduced to their present torn state.

  Well, it hardly mattered. Nothing mattered. Nothing could possibly matter, not when everything was so horribly sick and rotten inside.

  Again his eyes scanned the room. Used contraceptives littered the floor, the castaways of those few couples who had cared enough to take precautions. Feeling his stomach beginning to turn over again, Ralph dressed in a hurry and left the room.

  The front room was even worse. He sat down weakly on the couch and surveyed the damage. Most of the furniture was scarred with cigarettes that had been forgotten to burn themselves out on table-tops. There was a large burn in the center of the oriental rug.

  But worst of all was the memories that the room held.

  How could he banish those memories from his mind? It would be hard enough to attempt to forget what he had seen, the dissipation and perversion and decadence, the switching of partners back and forth, over and over until at last the sun streamed through the window and the party came to a grinding halt.

  But how could he forget what he had done?

  How?

  He made room for himself on the couch by pushing aside some of the debris of the party and sat down heavily. His mind refused to focus properly and he lit a second cigarette from the butt of the first, chain-smoking in an effort to bring himself back to something with a vague resemblance to life.

  To hell with it, he thought. To hell with trying anymore and to hell with pretending. He was no better than the rest of them, no better than Stella even. He was a sick, twisted little man and there was no point in pretending to be anything else. An artist? Sure, sure he was an artist. A pervert was more like it.

  Now it would be very simple. He would stick to his life with Stella and he wouldn’t complain anymore. He would let himself enjoy it. It could be an enjoyable life—if you threw morality and human decency to the winds and let yourself be led around by the sheer pursuit of pure physical pleasure and gratification.

  And he could probably learn to appreciate a life like that. He was sick and perverted and twisted enough to begin with…

  Anything would be better than what he had now. And once he relaxed and accepted himself for what he was things would be one hell of a lot easier. Life would be a constant ball with lots of things happening, and so what if he couldn’t look at himself in the mirror without getting sick to his stomach? There were still a hell of a lot of kicks to try, still a countless number of women to make it with and a countless number of ways to make it.

  Marijuana—as much as he wanted as often as he wanted it with no guilt feelings attached. Bennies and Dexies and goof-balls. Cough syrup with a high codeine content. Cocaine to sniff, heroin to sniff and to joy-pop.

  So many ways.

  Coke and snuff and aspirin. You mixed the three ingredients in a bowl and drank what you wound up with and got high on it.

  Nutmeg. You took a spoonful of it and chewed it up and swallowed it and got high.

  Mescalin. You took the peyote buds and cored them and chewed them up and swallowed them. They tasted terrible but after a while you managed to get them down and keep them down. And then for the next twelve hours you were in dreamland, entranced by the beauty in the folds of a piece of cloth, hearing colors and smelling music and seeing perfume, with all your senses joyfully confused and your appreciation of everything intensified beyond description.

  So many kicks.

  Too many kicks.

  Too many kicks spoil the broth, he thought insanely. Too many kicks in the head break a man’s spirit. Too many kicks in the…

  He had to relax. He pitched his cigarette into the fake fireplace and stared at it.

  Too many kicks.

  He stood up. It was tempting, the notion of not pretending anymore, of letting himself go to hell completely. And perhaps it was the right thing to do, the course that was morally right as well as attractive. What did the word perversion mean, anyway? He knew that a good ninety percent of the sexual customs of the average human being were technically abnormal and quite often illegal. In his own home state, for example, almost anything the least bit different was against the law, although
the laws were in fact never enforced. Ohio actually made any sort of intercourse virtually impossible due to a strange law prohibiting any person from touching the genitals of any other person—this law applied to married persons as well, and anybody who observed it would have one hell of a tough time doing much of anything.

  A perversion, he decided, was only something that everybody wanted to do in secret but that very few people ever got around to doing. Almost any individual you could select had within him the basic desire to commit almost any act you could conceive of. If the average spinster schoolteacher got rid of her inhibitions for an hour of two she would be no better and no worse than a twisted, vicious woman like Stella.

  But there had to be a difference. He thought suddenly of Susan Rivers, the girl he had met just yesterday. Was it only a day ago that he and Susan had met for breakfast? It seemed impossible. So much had happened since then, so much…

  Stella had told him that the girl was a lesbian, and it was probably the truth. Stella had a second sense about things like that; she seldom made a mistake.

  So Susan was probably a lesbian.

  And that, of course, was a perversion.

  But there was a difference between Susan and Stella. Christ, there had to be. There had to be some way of distinguishing between a deviation from the sexual norm and cruel, vicious decadence. Common human decency and kindness had to count for something. Anything a person did was all right, but when a person did things that hurt other people it stopped being permissible.

  That had to be it.

  He stood very still, his hands at his side and his mind working double-time. In the bedroom Stella was still asleep; he could hear her slow, rhythmic breathing. Outside on Barrow Street there were more people walking around than usual, but the street was still very quiet.

  Ralph was thinking.

  He couldn’t let himself go to seed, not completely, not yet. There was still a chance that he could find a normal life for himself and he had to follow that chance up. He had to go to Susan, to paint her picture, to use his paints and brushes as the tools to dig his way back to a decent sort of an existence.

  He still had a chance.

  Hell, it wasn’t much of a chance. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to paint worth a damn any more. Maybe whatever talent he once possessed was gone now and he wouldn’t be able to draw a straight line with a ruler. But as long as there was a chance he had to take it. As long as there was a single course open that might lead him out of the pitfall of perversion, that was the course he had to follow.

  He walked to the closet and opened the door. On the top shelf with the painting of Stella was a small flat wooden box that contained his brushes and his tubes of paint. Next to the box was his palette, and beside it was a fresh canvas. He took them all down and laid them out on the couch.

  His easel was standing on the floor of the closet behind several of Stella’s coats. He took it out and shut the closet door again.

  It was hard to carry all his paraphernalia at once but he managed. He loaded himself up and opened the apartment door. Then, not bothering to close the door, he walked to the staircase and began to mount the steps to the fourth floor.

  Ralph didn’t shut the door to his apartment.

  Now normally he did shut the door. On this occasion, however, he was too encumbered with painting equipment to do so without putting all his things down and then picking them up again. This seemed a lot of trouble to go through just to shut a door, especially since Stella was home and since there was nothing much worth stealing in the apartment anyway and since it was mid-afternoon and a rather ridiculous time for a burglary. Perhaps a psychiatrist might argue that Ralph left the door ajar unconsciously because he was hoping that someone would come in and kill Stella in her sleep.

  But this we may leave for the psychiatrists to puzzle out among themselves. What is important is the fact that Ralph left the door open.

  This made it possible for Maria Raines to walk into the apartment while Stella slept.

  Maria was a mess. Her beautiful black hair was tangled and snarled; her clothes looked as though they had been slept in. In a manner of speaking, this was not far from the truth. What sleep Maria had had, she had in her clothes.

  Larry and Sally had gone home together. They didn’t even tell Maria they were leaving and when she looked around for Larry he had already gone. She had to walk all the way home to their apartment by herself. When she arrived there Larry told her she couldn’t live with him anymore.

  The rest of what had happened was a large blur in her mind. She wandered all over the Village, her head in a whirl and tears pouring periodically from her eyes and running down her cheeks. She was very tired but there was no one for her to go to, no place for her to sleep. She didn’t even have enough money for a room at a cheap hotel.

  Finally she managed to find her way onto the subway and collapse into a seat. She couldn’t really sleep, but every once in a while her mind would wander and her eyes would close for five or ten or fifteen minutes. It wasn’t very satisfactory but it was better than no sleep at all.

  After a time she tired of the subway. She got off in the Village and wandered some more. After a good bit of walking she ran into a man with whom she had spent the night once and talked him into buying her some breakfast.

  The food stuck in her throat. She couldn’t eat at all at first, but she knew it was important for her to eat something and she managed to bolt the food down and keep it down.

  When her feet led her to 69 Barrow Street she hesitated outside in the vestibule. She didn’t want to ring Stella’s bell. She waited instead until somebody else left the building and caught the door before it slammed shut. Then, once inside, she was relieved to find Stella’s door ajar.

  She entered the apartment. The sight of it sent her head reeling as she remembered what a bad girl she had been the night before. She was always such a bad little girl, such a horrid child. That was why Larry had thrown her out, and that was why nobody ever loved her, not even her own mother. Why, she must have been bad all her life. Why else would her mother hate her so much?

  She paused at the door of Stella’s bedroom. She knew how bad it was to walk into someone’s bedroom without knocking. Why, she could remember so very clearly the time she was a very little girl and she walked into her mother’s bedroom without knocking and her mother was with her father and they were…

  Well, at the time she hadn’t the slightest idea what they were doing. But she was being very bad and her mother punished her for that. She could remember it all very clearly, every bit of it.

  But what if she knocked and Stella was sleeping? Then Stella would be very angry with her, and she didn’t want that to happen.

  She compromised with herself by knocking three times, very gently so as not to disturb Stella if she was asleep. There was no answer, so she turned the doorknob carefully and pushed the door open and walked in.

  Stella was asleep.

  Maria looked down at her, looked at her superb naked body and her full rich mouth. She remembered the first time, with all the men taking her and then with Stella holding her and petting her like a little puppy dog and telling her that everything would be all right.

  She loved Stella.

  And at the same time she hated Stella.

  It was all very confusing.

  Moments after Ralph knocked, the door opened and Susan motioned for him to come into the room. He followed her inside and glanced around her apartment, mentally contrasting the quiet nearness of it with the filth and disorder of the apartment he had just left. The furniture in Susan’s apartment was all freshly dusted and nothing was out of place.

  As an artist, Ralph naturally was convinced that an apartment, like clothing and grooming, reflected a certain facet of a person’s personality. The impression he got walking into Susan’s living room tended to reinforce this opinion.

  So did Susan.

  She had obviously been up for only a short while. Her breakfast dishe
s were still on the table in the kitchenette and the coffee cup was only half empty. But she was already wide awake, neatly dressed and perfectly self-possessed. Her eyes were shining and her hair was combed.

  “I’m glad to see you,” she said, helping him set up his easel and unload the rest of his equipment.

  “For a while I thought you weren’t coming,” she continued. “You had me worried.”

  “I was up late last night. Just got up.”

  “Well, I’m glad you came. You know, I’ve been pretty excited since yesterday.”

  “About what?”

  “About getting my picture done.”

  “Oh, it’s hardly anything to get excited about.”

  She sat down at the dinner table and he took a seat across from her. “I think it might be,” she said. “You’ve got to remember that this is something completely new to me. I’ll probably do everything all wrong.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Will you let me know when I goof?”

  “I’ll probably yell at you.”

  “I wish you would,” she said, grinning. “I can take it, and I want to know what I’m doing wrong.”

  She finished her coffee and carried her dishes to the sink. Automatically he joined her and picked up a dish towel, drying the dishes as she washed them.

  “Let’s get started,” she said as soon as the dishes were all put away in the cabinet. “I’m ready whenever you are.”

  “Fine.”

  “How do you want me to pose?”

  “First you better pick out some clothes that you like. This may take a lot of sittings and it’s easy to get tired of putting on the same clothing all the time.”

  She thought for a minute. “Would you rather I posed nude?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  “Tell me,” she persisted.

  “Well,” he said, “I’d rather do you nude. Otherwise the clothes sort of get in the way. The artist spends as much time getting the folds right in a skirt as he does on the person he’s painting. It’s a pain in the neck.

  “Besides,” he added, “I’ve always been able to get more of the subject across with nudes. But it’s entirely up to you, Susan.”