Gigolo Johnny Wells

by Lawrence Block

  “You better believe it.”

  “Johnny, what are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to make love.”

  “I mean after that.”

  “First things, first,” he said, taking her in his arms. He kissed her, a long deep kiss.

  Then she didn’t ask any more questions.

  She had better things to do.

  The man was named Arthur Taggert. He was seated in a swivel chair behind a sixty-inch oak executive desk. He was between thirty-five and forty years old, and he wore a gray sharkskin suit something like Johnny’s, a white-on-white shirt, a patterned gray tie and heavy horn-rimmed glasses. He had a tan which had been acquired via the sunlamp route and good muscle tan picked up through weekly trips to a gymnasium.

  “John Wells,” he read aloud. “Age 25. Born March 10, 1936, in Cleveland. Graduate of Clifton College in Clifton, Ohio. M. A. from Western Reserve University. No previous business experience. That sums it up?”

  “That’s about it,” Johnny said.

  “Well, you haven’t had a hell of a lot of experience,” Taggert said. “Just college, and that doesn’t really let you know what the real world’s like. Sort of an academic fishbowl, so to speak. Too many graduates come to us still so wet behind the ears that all the towels in Manhattan wouldn’t get ’em dry. Generally I’ll take hard business experience any day of the week. But I just might make an exception in your case.”

  Johnny didn’t say anything. Taggert was head of personnel at Craig, Harry and Bourke, a small but dynamic advertising agency with offices, inevitably, on Madison Avenue. Johnny was applying for a job. He didn’t want to get stuck running copy for six months to see if he could make the grade. He wanted to fall right into a copywriting job.

  “These samples of yours,” Taggert went on. “Now most college boys just don’t see what advertising is supposed to do. They use their words right and their grammar is flawless but the end-product is rotten. You can’t teach someone to be an ad man. They can learn, but you can’t teach ’em. Too much of advertising is intuitive. You have a feeling for it or you don’t. I think you’ve got the feeling. Your copy isn’t professional or even close to it, but it’s got punch; you’re writing an ad, not a goddamn poem for One Magazine or something. You’d be surprised how few college types can figure that out.”

  “I’m glad you like my copy,” Johnny said.

  “I like it enough to give you a job.”

  “That’s what I want. A place to start.”

  “Well, all it is is a start. A hundred a week is all I can offer you, but the job’ll be writing copy, not carrying it around from one room to the next. You’ll get a chance to learn the business. And this is a business where the possibilities are limited only by the capacity of the individual. A man with drive and talent can make more money than he could possibly spend. The industry automatically tailors the job and the reward to fit the man. You can stay at five thou a year for life or go up to fifty in a few years. It’s up to you.”

  “I understand.”

  “You start Monday,” Taggert said. “Report to Bill McClintock. He’ll show you what you’re supposed to do. It may not be too exciting. Fill-in work — words to go with pictures, printed copy in teevee commercials, the hack work that has to round out the whole picture. It may look too easy. Don’t be faked out. It’s not as easy as it looks. If you’re any good, we’ll be able to tell it from how you handle this stuff.”

  He stood up. The interview was over.

  Johnny walked over 48th Street to Fifth Avenue, then caught a downtown-bound Fifth Avenue bus to Washington Square. He walked through the park and down Sullivan Street to a neat unprepossessing four story brick building. He climbed the stairs to the third floor, fitted a key in the lock and opened the door. He walked into the apartment.

  “I got the job,” he said.

  She came into his arms squealing jubilantly like the little girl which, in point of fact, she was. He picked her up off the floor and hugged her and kissed her and laughed. “Take it easy,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, it’s all of a yard a week. I used to make more than that in a night.”

  “But it’s a job!”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s also a pretty good starting place. I was kind of certain they weren’t going to bother checking me out. They fell for the college stuff all the way. And the age. Not even a question.”

  Her eyes were shining. “They just picked the best man,” she said. “That’s all. They read the copy you wrote and realized they couldn’t get anybody like you in a million years.”

  “Well — ”

  “What do you do, exactly?”

  “Filler copy. I write around things. I guess. It’s hard to say — I don’t start until Monday. You know when they have a commercial on television and there are some words you read while the announcer shouts at you? I’ll be writing those words to fit. Things like that. Somebody else supplies the idea and somebody else tells me what to write and I grind out the garbage. That’s all there is to it.”

  “It sounds wonderful!”

  “It does?”

  “Uh-huh. Oh, it may not be the exciting stuff in the world, but when they see how good you are they’ll give you something better. See?”

  He grinned at her.

  The apartment was pleasant and roomy, on a fairly good street in Greenwich Village. They’d moved in just a week ago, two days after their mutual discovery that they were in love. It had been an interesting week.

  One thing was obvious to both of them. They couldn’t go on as part-time whore and full-time gigolo and expect to get anywhere worthwhile. From where they sat, that road could lead only downhill. Before long they would either fall out of love or just quit because the situation was impossible. And neither of them wanted that. They both felt that what they had was far too valuable to be given up for that.

  At first Johnny had wanted her to marry him. It hadn’t taken her long to talk him out of that. She was all of fourteen working on fifteen and you had to be eighteen to get married. She couldn’t fake the age requirement.

  The next best thing, she explained, was to fake being married. People might ask to see a birth certificate, but no one ever asked to see a marriage license. All they had to do was take an apartment as man and wife and live there.

  Which is what they did.

  They settled on Greenwich Village — they wanted a nice neighborhood at a rental they could afford, and the Village seemed to be the answer. People were pleasant and interesting, the apartment they found was cheap and relatively clean, and transportation to any part of the city was easy.

  And they set up shop.

  It wasn’t all that easy, Johnny knew. For one thing, he had busted his hump to get a job that paid him what he said — less than he earned in a good night. He had seven thou put away and he had clothes bought, but until he proved himself at Craig, Harry and Bourke he would be lucky if they lived on his salary, much less saved a penny. And no matter how much you told yourself that love was the only thing that mattered, it was going to be tough living on a yard a week when you were accustomed to luxury.

  It would be tough to eat home or grab hamburgers when you were accustomed to eating in a good restaurant seven nights a week. It would be tough to start counting your change when you were used to letting the pennies go to hell. It was tough to take buses instead of cabs and to walk instead of taking a bus.

  Tougher for him than for her. He was used to luxury and she was not. For her, their family income was a high one. For him it was low and he knew it would take him some time to get used to it.

  He wouldn’t even have looked for the job if it hadn’t been for her. From where he sat, it seemed as though any job that was any good at all would be closed to him. But she kept after him, kept telling him how bright he was and how much he knew and how well polished he was in speech and appearance, until she finally made him believe he could pass for a college man on the move.

  It took him a day o
r two to figure out what career would be best. He picked advertising because it was a field where brains and talent were more important than preparation. He had a feeling he might be good in that area, and also it appealed to him in a way. It was salesmanship on a higher level. You took a product and stuck it down the nation’s throat, and you did your damnedest to make every man and woman buy the rotten thing whether it was any good or not, whether he or she needed it or not. He thought it might even be fun.

  Now he was ready to go.

  “I’ve got dinner ready,” Linda said. “You like fish?”

  “Sure.”

  “I made these swordfish steaks. You just fry them in butter and serve them. Wash up and come on in.”

  He put down the paper and went into the bathroom, washed up quickly and went to the table for dinner. The food was good — Linda cooked well for a girl with no previous experience. But it galled him that she had to cook. A girl with breasts like those shouldn’t be frying them over a hot stove. She should have somebody to do the cooking for her. She should eat out at steak houses. She should —

  Some day, he told himself. Some day we’ll have the whole bit, from a stone house on the Hudson to a Cadillac three blocks long. The whole routine, one of these days.

  In the meantime, they had a goal. That was the important thing. When you had nothing to work for, either because you were on the bottom with no drive or on the top with no feeling of satisfaction for what you were doing, then it was bad. But when you were going places you could put up with a lot of crap in order to get where you were going.

  They had a goal and they had each other. They were working together, working for something which was important to both of them.

  That was plenty.

  “Hey, Mr. Phony Husband, was the meal okay?”

  “Delicious.”

  “Did your little old wife do a good job?”

  “A great job,” he assured her. “Best meal I ever ate. A magnificent meal.”

  “Do I get a reward?”

  “Sure. What do you want?”

  She frowned. “I get my choice?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well,” she said, “how about a little old toss in the little old hay?”

  “You’re beginning to sound like a little bit of a tramp, Mrs. Phony Wife.”

  “If you give me half a chance I’ll act like one. Mr. Phony Husband.”

  He laughed aloud. Then he picked her up in his arms, feeling the familiar surge of excitement that never failed to course through him when he got near her.

  He carried her to the bedroom.

  “Put me down, you!”

  He put her down.

  On the bed.

  And undressed her.

  And undressed himself.

  And lay down beside her.

  And —

  “God,” she moaned. “When you do that to me it’s like the world is going to end. Being kissed like that drives me out of my mind!”

  “I can’t help it if your breasts are extraordinarily sensitive, can I?”

  “Just shut up and kiss them some more.”

  He shut up and kissed them some more.

  “Johnny,” she moaned.

  He moved now, ready for her. And she was ready for him, and it was the way it always was with them, the way it had been with them every time they were together, the way it always was and the way it always would be.

  It was perfect.

  He worked at advertising with the same tenacity and perseverance with which he had attacked the business of being a gigolo. He followed a routine not too dissimilar from the routine he had followed during the days when he lived at the Ruskin and spent every morning at the 42nd Street Library.

  They awoke together at eight — or earlier if they intended to spend part of the morning making love. Linda cooked breakfast, while he read the Times. Then they ate and he took the bus to the office where he worked like a dog. Then he came home, did some special studying, and they went to a coffee house in the Village to relax or stayed at home and listened to records.

  Progress was slow at first, inevitably enough. There were days when he felt he was making no headway at all, days when he was sure everybody else in the business was doing much better than he was. On those days he got tough to live with. He hit moods of depression that were almost unbearable, as much so for Linda as for him.

  He wasn’t used to failure. Thus far he had succeeded at everything he had tried. In addition, he was fundamentally an eighteen-year-old in a field of grown men. They didn’t know how young he was, and he tried not to think about it, but it was inevitable that he would lack the maturity of his co-workers in some areas. And this hurt him, and he knew it.

  But, although progress was slow, it came to him. McClintock couldn’t help notice that he did his jobs well, displaying a rare combination of imagination and technical competence. He got no promotions and no raises, but he had the feeling that he was first in line when a vacancy opened up. And in the ad game vacancies could open with tremendous speed. He hung on, waiting for the break, and the time passed easily enough.

  He worried about Linda. With him working she was left alone eight hours a day, five days a week; left completely alone in a neighborhood where she was a stranger. She knew a few people, friends they had met at one coffee house or another, but they were not that close to her and she spent most of her afternoons sitting in Washington Square or hanging around the apartment. He wasn’t worried that she would start an affair with anybody, since he was firmly convinced that she could no more be interested in another man than he could be interested in another woman. It was out of the question.

  He only worried that she would be bored stiff, or that things would get on her nerves. But this didn’t seem to happen. She was satisfied to share his life and she did this tremendously well. He couldn’t complain.

  So he worked and he kept going. Whenever things got tough the vision would come back into his mind — the vision of himself and Linda in that big old stone house overlooking the Hudson, with the long Caddy in the garage and maybe a little sports job for her, say a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, parked next to it. And children, he thought. A houseful of kids for her to take care of. It made a pretty picture.

  A hell of a picture.

  With that picture in his head they could shovel all the mud in the world at him and he could take it. With that picture he had enough drive to push all of them into the background. They couldn’t stop him.

  Then the picture disappeared.

  It happened all at once.

  It was a Thursday, and he was on his way home from work, done with the bus ride and heading through the park. He crossed the park and started down Sullivan Street and then he saw the cops standing in front of his building. There were two of them and they were waiting for him.

  His first reaction reflected his early years. He thought that he had done something illegal and that they were waiting to arrest him for it. He wanted to turn and run from them but he knew better. But what had he done? Who had complained about what? Would they be able to make it stick?

  Relax, he told himself. He hadn’t done a thing, he was a solid citizen now, a copywriter with Craig, Harry and Bourke with money in the bank. Nothing was wrong, it was something else, they probably weren’t even waiting for him.

  “You Mr. Wells?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Something I can do for you?”

  “Mr. John Wells?”

  Something was wrong. He could see it in the face of the older cop. Something was very wrong.”

  “Tell me,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

  “You have a wife named Linda?”

  “That’s right.”

  Not really my wife, he almost added. We’re in love. We live together. We love each other. You can call it a common-law marriage if you want. You can call it —

  The older cop was now looking at his feet. Johnny turned to the younger cop. He, too, was looking at his feet.

  “Go ahead
,” Johnny said. “Tell me.”

  “It’s bad news.”

  “Tell me!”

  “Your wife went to a hospital today,” the older cop said. “She had had an abortion. God knows where she got it. Some chiropractor or something. It was a bad one.”

  “She … she wasn’t pregnant.”

  “I guess she didn’t tell you, Mr. Wells. Sometimes it happens that way. A wife gets pregnant and she doesn’t want to let her husband know about it. Probably figures you can’t afford the kid and the best out is to get rid of it.”

  “How … how is she?”

  The cop looked away.

  “She isn’t dead,” Johnny said. “You’re not going to stand there and tell me she’s dead. You can’t tell me that. You just can’t tell me that.”

  The cop didn’t look at him.

  “All right,” Johnny said. “She’s … dead. Now tell me about it, damn you. Tell me!”

  The cop took a long breath. “I don’t guess there’s a lot to tell,” he said. “She reported into St. Luke’s hospital the middle of the afternoon. Reported to emergency. They rushed to take care of her but she was hemorrhaging and they couldn’t stop … couldn’t stop the blood. She kept losing blood until she died.”

  How had she gotten pregnant? They’d taken precautions constantly except for a few times when it was supposed to be safe. When had it happened?

  Oh, who cared? Who cared about anything?

  Linda was dead.

  “Who did it? Did you catch the guy?”

  “We don’t know who did it. Even if we did we couldn’t prove it, couldn’t make it stick. But one of these days we’ll get the bastard. They make a slip and it catches them.”

  Did that bring back Linda?

  “Mr. Wells — ”

  “How pregnant was she?”

  The cop looked at him.

  “How long?”

  “The doc said three to four months. Anywhere between. It’s hard to tell to the day, but — ”

  He didn’t hear the rest. He didn’t hear anything, wasn’t aware of the formal police interrogation or anything else, because as soon as that single fact registered on his mind the rest of the screen went blank.