Love Ain't Nothing but Sex Misspelled

by Harlan Ellison

  So he started working again, drilling and moving as he was expected to do—according to Van de Velde in IDEAL MARRIAGE, which Sally had brought him from her father’s library—with too much frenzy and not enough skill. And still he did not finish. On and on he went, in a seemingly endless repetition of the same movements, until Terry slapped him across the backside. “C’mon, sweet baby, do it already!”

  And he remembered the screwing scene from James Jones’s FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, and the endless conversation the hero had with the whore; and he burst out laughing, falling across her so his face was buried in her deep, rich black hair. “What the hell’s so funny?” she demanded. Obviously, she didn’t think there was so much funny going on here.

  “Nothing. Nothing. Not a single solitary thing.” And he continued laughing till she slapped him on the backside again and urged him, “Pleeeese, sweet baby, she’s gonna raise holy hell with me,” so he tried very hard, and she did weird things with herself, moving tightly against him, and in a moment it was over.

  Then she was up off the bed like a shot, and at the sink performing her rituals with the tubes of rubber. He got dressed quickly, feeling a great affection for her, and said, “Are you coming back to the bar? I’d like to buy you that beer now.”

  “In a bit, in a bit,” she said, without turning.

  So he left the room, buttoning his shirt.

  In the bar, George and Cole and Teddy Bear were already waiting. “Man, did you get your money’s worth from that sweet piece!” George caroled. “Or couldn’t you get it up, Tiger?” They all three laughed.

  “How did you guys do with the tattooed ladies?” Robert sneered at them. They shut up. And turned back to their beers. At a dollar a split, they were leaving no dregs. The hogs with the tattoos were elsewhere. Robert decided to take a walk. There were other men in the barroom.

  He walked outside and up toward the car, and received a half-dozen offers from the windows across the way. He waved at them in a friendly, magnanimous way. He was truly a man now. He had the secret. It was all warm and delightful, that’s what it was. It was serene and lovely, with a lovely girl really. And then the idea hit him. He would ask her if she wanted to come with him to San Francisco.

  She had to accept. A girl like that, with a sense of humor, couldn’t really enjoy this life. He would tell her how he was writing a fine novel, and that he was twenty-four years old. No, better make that twenty-seven. Yes, he was Robert Hirschhorn, age twenty-seven, and he would marry her.

  All that black hair.

  West Texas.

  Lovely. Really.

  He sprinted back to the street and to The Combination Bar. He was inside and running through the barroom and down the short hall before the three minstrels realized he was back. He opened the door and stepped through and said, “Hey, listen, Terry, I have a wild ideeeee—”

  The word shrieked off thinly, as he watched them and he realized how foolish he must have looked doing the same thing. She looked out at him from around the huge, tanned shoulders, and her eyes grew wide.

  “Oh, shit!” she exclaimed.

  The man’s head twisted on the thick red neck, and he yelled, “Say what the fuggin’ hell you mean doin’ there, boy!” And Robert’s tongue balled in his mouth and he felt as though it were full of dust again. And he felt very gone, like the jack rabbit that had crossed his path. Had it been a black jack rabbit? And was that bad luck as well?

  He turned and ran from the room, through the bar and out into the chill Nevada night. He kept running till he came out on the main street of Winnemucca, and didn’t stop till he had found a phone booth.

  Collect. Station. Starkey, Ohio.

  “Mom, Mother, hey listen, Mom, let me speak to Dad, will you. It’s terribly important, it’s awfully important, I have to talk to him…”

  The sound of his mother’s voice was clogged with trembling. “Your father died last night, Bobby.”

  He wouldn’t listen to the words. He wouldn’t.

  It was foolish. “No, listen, Mom, let me talk to him…”

  “Our daddy died last night, Bobby. He was sitting right there in his red chair, he was smoking his cigar, and he died, Bobby. He just died.”

  He would not listen! He wouldn’t! Screw it NO!

  “—thrombosis, that’s what Doctor Fisher said. A coronary throm—Bobby, are you there? Bobby darling, are you coming home now, please come home…”

  “No! No, I’m not coming home now, not now…” he cried helplessly, and hung up the receiver. He laid his face up alongside the cool glass of the phone booth and he cried a very private cry for a while.

  Then he went outside and looked up at the clear black Nevada sky, as black as Terry’s hair, and he said to the sky and whoever might be there listening: “We never really we never really talked! Just talked!”

  Then he walked slowly back toward Littletown, his hands in his pockets. He would go down to San Francisco—hell!—to Frisco—with the three minstrels, and he would learn the secret from them, because they knew it and they’d tell him. If he was a good guy.

  And he would wait for another four dollar turn on Terry, because there was no communication, none at all, with anyone, ever, and he was locked-in the same as everyone else, and all that mattered was laughing. So what the hell…he would laugh.

  So, laughing, till his eyes hurt, he went back down the street. The sound of such hilarity did not reach very far in the night.

  —Winnemucca, Nevada 1954

  and Hollywood, 1964

  MONA AT HER WINDOWS

  When Mona was twenty-three, she had pleurisy, and the time in Women’s Hospital had been violently peaceful: so calm and warm and tended that it made her shudder with pleasure to remember it. It was the one happy time—not counting growing up in Minnesota with Buddy and Eenor and the folks—she could remember. It was a period of placid contemplation of the way the world really was, and is.

  It was a time in which the constant growing pressure of her ugliness came to her fully, completely. She had looked at the nurses, even the plain and unattractive ones, and had known they were more appealing than she would ever be. It was the days-long moment through which Mona told herself the truth. I am not just ordinary, I am really quite unappetizing. And she recognized the inevitable end result of having been born with the face she wore: she would never marry, she would perhaps never have a man (unless he was somehow deficient, for otherwise, why should he want her?) and she might never even experience the strange mystery of having a man enter her body. It was, at first, a realization so monstrous, so terrible in its ultimate thoroughness of destruction, that she cried. Not simple uncomplicated tears of sorrow, but a soulful emptying of her body that dried her, leaving her hacking, dry-sobbing, flushed and even sicker than she had been when admitted to the hospital. It was not a sorrow born of having been ill-treated, of being in pain, or of having lost something. It was that unnameable sorrow mixed with passionate fear at never having had anything to lose.

  When she was released, she felt she must break away from the past, that she must begin a new existence, at the age of twenty-three, based upon the new truth she had discovered. This resolve was reinforced by the pitying stares of the homely nurses who said good-bye to her; women and girls who had hushed and soothed her during the nights of wretched crying. If these drabs could feel superior to her…then finally she knew her place, and her fate.

  So Mona moved out of her apartment and quit her job. She closed her checking account and paid off her charges at the market and Macy’s. She left the tag-ends of hopes and desires she had known till then, and went to find a new subsistence, in the realm of realization of futility.

  Mona took an apartment on a busy corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-third Street, and she decorated it with Spartan efficiency. No television set and no record player; no parti-colored pillows to decorate the daybed; no bookshelves stocked with glossy flashy paperbacks and philosophical tracts from Anchor or Yale University Press; no cl
ever pewter coffee mugs and no Lyonel Feininger prints on the walls. Just the necessities of life that keep a person breathing and free of sickness.

  But the windows…

  Ah, the windows!

  Three seeing-out windows. Three constantly changing landscapes hung in the center of her walls. Three openings to the world. Three panoramic shadow plays, always new, always vivid. Into these three windows she poured all the unquenchable instincts a resigned soul could not damp.

  She planted her flowerpots, and she set up the foam pillows on the floor, and day after day, night after night (when she was not at work in the catalogue section of the New York Public Library), she stared into the world.

  Hidden, recording, devouring and ugly, she stared into other people’s lives as they traversed from one side of her sight to the other, and then gone. She watched them with an intensity a casual observer might call psychotic. She studied the moles on the faces of delivery boys; she studied the rough-knuckled hands of cleaning women on their way home from swabbing office floors at five in the morning; she studied the exotic hatboxes and lustrous hairdos of the models, perhaps prostitutes, swirling and delighting their way away from passion; she learned the names of obscure freight companies and cartage firms from trucks roaring by; she absorbed the air and the beat and the life of the world, by osmosis and by rote.

  As the months passed into a year, and that year gave way to a second, in the windows of her world, Mona found a particular pleasure in imagining herself one with the girls who lived their brief lives on the streets outside. A saucy brunette with a great flat leather portfolio under her arm would cross Mona’s vision and in her window sanctuary Mona would merge with the brunette, knowing her feet were tired from having stood behind a perfume counter for eight hours. She would take heart, however, in the knowledge that now she was on her way to art school, where she would perfect her charcoal technique a little more. And one day I’ll be a very good artist, and work for one of the big women’s slicks, and one of the models will ask me for a date, and I’ll go with him to the Chateaubriand, and then he’ll ask me to…

  As the brunette passed out of sight around the corner.

  With the lights out in the apartment, and darkness providing a mummer’s cloak, Mona picked up a slatternly blonde shuffling up Seventh Avenue, pausing at the light, and empathically she entered the blonde’s head, feeling her hands sinking into the side pockets of the Alligator raincoat, wishing I was home in Cedar Rapids instead of going to meet Arnie, that stupe, that creep. But I suppose I’ll marry him because if I don’t, I’ll never get those bills paid at Saks and Klein’s. He’s not very good-looking, but at least he can make it in the rack, and hell, what am I after, James Garner, or a meal ticket…? If only he didn’t have that ridiculous astigmatism, those dopey glasses with the tortoise-shell frames! Well, hell, I can always make him go in for contact lenses after I get him…

  Into the restaurant and out of sight of Mona.

  It went this way, hour and hour and hour after hour. One girl, two girls, three, four and more, always more, coming down the Avenue, crossing Twenty-third Street, leaving buildings and entering bakeries, pausing at traffic lights and whistling through the twilight mistiness.

  It was a whole new, vicarious, utterly satisfying life. And soon, Mona began to realize that she was better than all of them down there.

  For they only had one life each, but she had thousands. There were worse fates than merely being ugly, and lonely. She knew all of those fates, because she was Everywoman, and experienced their brief walking-past lives more totally than any of them could. She was each happy girl, every sad girl, all the pretty ones, and for change the not-pretty ones. She thought their many thoughts, wore their many expressions, loved their many lovers, lived life to its fullest. She thrived. Yet there came a night…

  In the dark painting that lived in her window, she saw, this night, a cheap-looking but sensuous Puerto Rican girl in a thigh-length black leather coat, beehive hairdo, smoky hose and overpainted face, strolling liquidly, languidly, close to the buildings. A pickup girl, a loose girl, a scarlet Miss looking for a five-dollar John.

  Mona’s pale eyes swooped down and slid inside the girl, knowing her soreness between the legs, knowing her weariness at having to make another ten tonight or they’ll lock my bags in the room, and I’ll have to find a flop somewhere till I can get my clothes out.

  There was a stirring in the shadowed doorway, and the Puerto Rican girl (who was Mona) turned half toward the noise. A hand snaked out of the darkness and physically away! Mona was wrenched, back to her place high in the window, watching, terrified, mute, as the man half-pulled the tramp into the doorway.

  Mona stared disbelieving as the alter ego that had been hers, a moment before, was thrown to the sidewalk. The man descended on the leather car coat, tore it open and, as Mona stared in horror, violated the streetwalker with an animal ferocity that forced Mona to bite her fist, stifle a scream, and finally, as the man arched upward in climax, faint painfully away from her viewport into reality.

  It could only have been a few minutes of unconsciousness, for when she pulled herself to her knees on the foam cushions, the Puerto Rican girl was still sprawled on the sidewalk, half obscured by the doorway, her face hidden, her nyloned legs sticking out, awkwardly spread and limp, into the light from the streetlamps.

  Mona closed the window softly, pulled the shade, and went to bed.

  When day came, it seemed somehow silent in her streets, and though Mona tried to regain a oneness with her women going by, it was useless.

  At eight o’clock that night—finally—she knew she had reached another junction of her existence. There were things worse than being ugly and lonely, and all of them were here, before these windows.

  That night the windows were empty for the first time in years, but the streets had a new walker seeking whatever Fate chanced by first.

  If there was a God for women who lived in windows, He would send an ugly boy with tortoise-shell glasses, rather than a ferocious animal.

  The windows were dead eyes; life meant darkness and the streets of the world. Mona said hello.

  —New York City, 1962

  BLIND BIRD, BLIND BIRD, GO AWAY FROM ME!

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may b

  For my unconquerable soul.

  WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

  “Invictus”

  There is a sound in that darkness. A soft, mewling sound, far out in the black, a small creature in pain, crying; vapors of night and distance obscure it, but that sound is terrible; a child afraid of the dark; yes, that sound no other sound can approach for pain and terror. The child, lost in the forest of the night, blind, hands out before his face, afraid to move, afraid to remain still, trapped, trembling, help me, help me! But if you go toward that pitiful pleading, somehow the voice seems deeper, older, more strangled by a darkness from within than the darkness without.

  There. Up there, look up that flight of basement stairs, barely dimly seen by the crack of light shining under the door. A child crouched against the wooden panels, scratching feebly at the locked door, looking back over his shoulder, down into the basement. Another sound, tinny rasping counterpoint to the child’s pathetic sobbing; a scuttling, furry sound, little claws against concrete, fearful gray creatures with snake tails twitching, wire-thin whiskers moving spastically, bullet bodies moving quickstart and stop in the basement, coming to feed. With each new wave of movement from below, the child plunging deeper into hysteria, the voice rising shrilly, pleading with the mother beyond the locked door…

  “Mommy, pl-please Mommy, let me in, let me in, Mommy, b-be guh-good, beee gooood, Mommmee!” Chittering shriek from below in the absolute darkness, the child flinging himself against the unyielding door, “Mommmmmmee!”

  But the door remains closed, the child flattened against it, a painting on wood, terror contorting the s
mall features into a gargoyle’s insane face, and the blind darkness filling his mind till it bubbles froths churns like molten lava, searing the inside of his skull, running over and destroying all reason, coherence; pathetic infant, condemned to horror in the darkness; capital punishment, living death, entombment in fear; crime now lost in the mist of childhood, forgotten, tiny sin whose punishment razor-slashes the delicate lining of memory. This child will sleep with the lights on for many years.

  Listen. The voice is deeper, down more in the throat, softer, more controlled by time, and the face alters, melts, shifts, runs like hot wax, that face framed by darkness…and comes to focus in time, another face.

  MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US51403352, thirty-one years old, face pressed tightly against the rough plank door of a two-storey residence in the center of Bain-de-Bretagne, midway between Rennes and Nantes on the spearhead salient of General George S. Patton’s 3rd Army. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, US Infantry, July 1944, hurled forward from his own past to press his face against the splintery dun-colored wood of a door in a waystop town midway between somewhere and nowhere. MSgt. Arnott T. Winslow, “Arnie” to his friends, formerly of Willoughby, Iowa, now wishing he were taffy that could slip between the slats of the unyielding barrier to his safety, a middling-warm day in July, in the midwest of lovely France.

  Softly: “Let me in, let me in, let me in…” as a rattle of machine-gun fire preceded, by an instant, the bite of masonry across the back of his neck. The Kraut gunner in the bell-tower was still chipping for an angle at him, but a ricochet might accomplish his mission for him.

  Across the narrow cobblestoned street Arnie Winslow heard a tinkle of breaking window glass, and the muzzle of an M-1 rifle poked out, firing down the passage at the German troops spaced out in alleys, doorways, upstairs windows, rooftops. The rest of the patrol was in that building, cut off from escape on three sides by thick stone walls, and on the fourth by a town full of Elite Corps killers intent on keeping Winslow’s patrol from getting back. With the intelligence that Bain-de-Bretagne was not—as the quisling had reported—empty of the enemy, evacuated in panic two days before. Twelve men were in that warehouse. Twelve of the fifteen who had come out on the patrol. Winslow made thirteen. Fourteen and fifteen lay sprawled in the weak, failing light of a French sundown. He could just see the inward-turned feet of Pfc. Coopersmith around the edge of the doorway, felled without murmur by a burst from a Schmizer burp-gun, loosed from a courtyard down the street. 2nd Lt. Thomas G. Benbow, formerly intercollegiate high-diving champion from the University of Utah, sprawled idiotically half-across a milk cart parked near the side of the warehouse. Idiotically, for the same covey of shots that had taken out Pfc. Coopersmith had done corrective surgery on Benbow’s infectious grin, widening it from ear to ear, from nose to chin, in a bloody mash, leaving him with a Pagliacci resemblance to a circus clown. From where he was flattened against the door, Arnie could not see the bone-shattered cavern that opened the rear of Benbow’s skull to the fresh air.