Sheldon Lord

A Strange Kind of Love

THIS IS FOR CAROLE

and it is not nearly enough

Chapter One

I got off the subway at 86th and Broadway and clawed my way through the usual mob of people, hauling myself up the stairwell to the street. The air smelled good — even the soot and sweat and all the stinks of New York were good all of a sudden.

I felt at home, and I hadn’t felt like that since I left New York.

It’s a funny thing and it’s a thing that never fails. If you start in New York you’ll never have another home, no matter how long you’re away or how many other burgs you hit. The subway was crowded and the air outside was stale and musty, but that didn’t make a hell of a lot of difference.

Dan Larkin was home.

There were no brass bands. There was no ticker tape parade with Grover Whelan sitting up there next to me, nothing like that. Dan Larkin was home — and nobody in the world gave a good goddamn.

I shook my head, realizing that I’d been standing on the street corner like a lost sheep for about five minutes. The light turned and I crossed Broadway, then headed south and east again on 85th Street. Walking was easier; walking gave me something to do so I wouldn’t have to bother thinking.

But you can’t shut thoughts out. East of Broadway the neighborhood was a collection of run-down red brick tenements with kids playing stickball in the street and obscene scrawlings on the red brick walls. I started to remember. I saw how far up I had gone and how far down I had come.

I didn’t start on 85th Street, but I started on a street just like it or worse, an ugly little street in East Harlem.

I went up fast and I came down faster.

My suitcase felt heavy and I looked down at it. It was covered with scratches but it was still good leather — the only decent thing I still owned. There was a sort of poetic beauty in it, because when I bought that suitcase I didn’t have a pot to piss in. I bought it the first time I moved out of Harlem and into the Village, and I had cockeyed ideas about impressing my landlady with a decent show of luggage. The clothes I stuffed into the suitcase were pretty bad but the landlady never got much of a look at them.

Later I realized that I made a mistake — the damned landlady figured my rent on the basis of the suitcase. But in those days I was just twenty and on the way up and it was something else to laugh about. Everything was a load of laughs then.

Well, I still had the suitcase.

But the laughs were gone.

It all started in that room in Greenwich Village — the whole uphill climb and the rolling tumble back down the hill. I locked myself in that room for a twelve-hour stretch every day, seven days a week, banging the Great American Novel out on a broken-down Royal portable. By the time I finished it I had run through three reams of typewriter paper and the portable was ready for the junkman. I boxed the book and hauled it uptown to a publisher, and I came back to the Village and had a few beers in a cellar club to celebrate.

The first publisher bounced the book with a form slip. So did the second, and the third, and the fourth. The fifth publisher sent along a nice note saying that the occasional drive and brilliance couldn’t begin to compensate for the length and lack of organization and total absence of commercial appeal. Then there were more form rejections — from a total of twenty publishers.

It’s funny — I can’t remember what the deuce that book was about, but I know it must have been a dog. In those days I thought the book was the greatest thing since Hamlet and the publishers were just a bunch of illiterate jackals. I remained convinced until the twentieth rejection.

After number twenty I lugged the script home and set it down on the floor. I stared at it for almost half an hour. Then I carried it back outside and left it for the garbagemen. I never saw it again.

I walked back up the stairs determined to show everybody. If they wanted garbage I’d write them garbage. I could turn out junk as well as the next guy. I sat down and knocked out a western and mailed it off, waiting for the check to come.

The script came back by return mail with a printed form.

I tried it again, and I tried another western, and then I tore them both up and chucked them in the ashcan.

So I decided to learn. I hocked the suitcase for ten bucks and bought up every pulp magazine I could get my hands on. That was the heyday of the pulps — there were millions of them, and I had enough sense not to buyout the newsstands. I found a back-magazine store on 42nd Street that sold pornography under the counter and could afford to make next to nothing on back-magazines. I bought them by the bushel and read them as if they were classics, and when I finished I carted them back to the store and got half back on them.

Two months later I sat down and wrote a detective story. I mailed it off and a check for $17.50 came back three days later, with a request for more material. I got drunk and picked up a prostitute and spent all the money the first night.

That was the start. I reduced everything to a formula and batted out the words — one, two, three stories a day. I kept the typewriter grinding and I kept on turning out stories. A bum knee kept me out of the war, and during the war anybody who could write English could sell to the pulps. I moved out of my hole and into a three-room place in the West Village.

I kept on typing.

When the war ended the price of paper went sky-high and the pulps folded sickly. All of a sudden I didn’t have a market any more. I had to forget everything I ever learned and I had to learn a dozen new things in-between. I wasn’t the kind of guy who saved money — when it came in I spent it.

One by one the pulps dropped dead and my markets were gone. I kept having the same expenses but I didn’t have the same money any more. I picked up a quick hundred now and then with a book for the pornographers on 42nd Street, but it wasn’t the same thing. It wasn’t big money, and I was used to big money.

I tried the slicks, but slick writing never turned out to be my meat. There was a kind of polish and phoniness to Saturday Evening Post stories that I never did manage to catch. But I caught on to the paperback book bit and ground out three chapters and an outline. One of them picked it up for an advance of $500 and I was in business again.

I wrote everything. I wrote under a dozen different pen names, all in all, and I was writing for half-a-dozen different paperback publishers. I picked up an agent and he got me more work than I could handle. I picked up a mistress and leased a fancy layout in the East Fifties and the money went out as fast as it came in.

Everything came easy — maybe that was the trouble. From the time I figured out how to start being a writer I never wrote a thing that didn’t sell. It was just a simple formula — I saturated myself in the stuff until I was sick to my stomach, and I figured out just how the writers managed to get the effect they were looking for. And then I sat down at the typewriter and turned out more of the same old thing.

The editors ate it up every time, and so did the readers.

It was the same with women. I had my first piece when I was fifteen. Sex is something you grow up with in East Harlem. Half the girls in school were knocked up before they graduated and the other half never graduated.

I still remember the first girl. Maybe it’s because she was the first — there was a hell of a lot I don’t remember. Her name was Sally and she was two years older than I was. Her hair was the color of copper and her skin was soft and smooth all over.

She copped my cherry on a pile of leaves in the school playground one night in the late spring. Her breasts were firm as melons and her hips worked like twin triphammers and she moaned at the right time.

There were lots more like Sally. I never kept tabs on her any more than I kept tabs on any of the rest of them, but her name popped up in the papers a few years ago. Somebody shot her and she died on the way to the hospital with a bullet in her right lung.

Nobody expects to get murdered. I don’t think Sally expected to get murdered, but then I don’t think that she had expected to wind up whoring for a living that night when I banged her in the playground. But Sally was dead with a bullet in her lung — and I remember wondering how the damned bullet ever managed to get through her breast — and in a sense she was the start of it all.

While I was knocking them out for the paperbacks I used to get drunk regularly with a fellow named Dick Travis who wrote science-fiction. He sold his first yarn when he was still in high school and went straight to the top of the field. One time he told me that anything that comes easy isn’t worth having, that as soon as you get successful at something you have to be careful as all Hell.

He was right.

Dick Travis had everything easy, and nothing ever made any difference to him. He didn’t get a kick out of anything he did. He dropped dead of a heart attack before he was forty, doing that too early just the way he did everything.

I stopped under a lamp-post and rested my suitcase on the sidewalk. The walking was getting me down. Hell, how long was my heart going to last? I was 39 — the drinking certainly hadn’t done me a hell of a lot of good. I was lucky in that I hadn’t put on any weight in the good years to load me down, but I was still burning my way to Hell in a bucket. How long was I going to keep on? And, for that matter, what the hell difference did it make?

The long way up and the long drop back down. Everything had happened so quickly. I had six books on the stands at once and I was between women, and Lou Harris phoned me that he had set me up for a stand in Hollywood. Lou’s a good agent, one of the best. And the deal he got me looked equally good.

Nothing looks quite as good as a stand in Hollywood. Hollywood is the one place in the country where everything that glitters is very probably gold. All the women are beautiful and all the writers make money, and those were the two most important things in the world. Hell, even the carhops in the beaneries were beautiful. Every other girl in the world wants to be in the movies, and they come to Hollywood by the carload. Ninety-nine out of a hundred wind up going home or working at some two-bit job waiting for a break. The scenery is pretty fine.

The money is better. I made two thousand a week writing movie scripts, and that’s pretty big dough. That was the first stretch — then they found out I wasn’t the best movie writer in the world and it dropped to a grand a week.

That was still pretty nice money. That was better than fifty gees a year, and even if I spent every penny of it it was a good life.

I spent every penny of it. And it was a good life.

And then I did a very stupid thing. It was something I had never done before and something I didn’t plan on doing, and something I sure as hell never should have done. It was the dumbest, wrongest, silliest thing I ever did in my life.

I fell in love.

With all the women I padded down with there was never one I fell in love with. Like every other Joe I occasionally made the mistake of confusing love with an erection, but that always ended in short order. But with Allison King the love bit came long before the erection. It came, just like in the goddamn movies, the first time I saw her.

Sure, it doesn’t make sense. I was 35; I should have known better. This was the one woman in the world I could never have and it was the only one I really wanted,wanted enough to get married and settle down, wanted enough to live in the trite little white house with green shutters. Maybe I wanted her because I couldn’t have her. That’s probably the way the psychologists would explain it. But it doesn’t make a whole lot of difference why I wanted her.

I just wanted her.

She was a starlet doing walk-ons and bit parts in B movies when I met her. She’s doing a little better now, and one of these days she’s going to make it big. She’s good.

I’m a little over six feet tall and she’s just tall enough so that her forehead touches my chin and I can smell the fresh smell of her hair when she leans a little against me. Her eyes are a strange color that looks green one moment and gray the next. Her hair is blonde — real blonde, not like most of the phony peroxide playmates that cover Hollywood like yellow measles. Her body is just like every body in the world ought to be — firm and full with large rounded breasts and thighs like a Greek goddess.

She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.

Hell, how do you describe a beautiful woman? All the descriptions sound the same — you can’t convey the special feeling of a beautiful woman with some words written on a piece of paper. Words aren’t enough.

She’s a statue, a painting, a symphony. She’s beauty, pure and perfect.

And, inevitably, I fell in love with her.

I leaned against the lamp-post, aching to sink down to the sidewalk and stay there. I stared at the suitcase and started to think about the flat pint bottle of rye in it. I could taste that rye in my mind. I could imagine the way it would burn its way down my throat and nestle warm and cozy in my stomach. I wanted to open the suitcase and drain the bottle right there in the street. It was the only way to blur the memory of her, and if I didn’t get her off my mind it would be impossible for me to make a comeback. She dragged me down, and I had to forget her or I’d wind up on the Bowery mumbling Allison until cirrhosis of the liver popped me into a wooden box and a grave on Riker’s Island.

You see, she didn’t fall in love with me. She didn’t fall in love with anybody else, either, but she didn’t fall in love with me and that was the big thing. She loved Allison King and nobody else, and nothing in the world could make her open up and love me.

When I first started to date her she was as cold as ice. I tried every trick in the book — and there are plenty of them. I worshipped her one day, I ignored her the next, I took her to the fancy places and to the dives, I went a week without calling her and the next week I kept her line humming twenty-four hours a day.

Kissing her was like pressing your lips against a frozen watermelon. Holding her was like caressing a lump of clay. And wanting her was like wanting a shot of heroin.

Then one night she explained it to me. Allison was the one girl in I-don’t-know-how-many-hundred who simply could not enjoy sex. It was something rooted so deeply in her that it was a part of her own personality. She wasn’t afraid of it — not on the surface, at least. It just left her totally unaffected.

She was no virgin. Five or six men had made love to her with equal and complete failure. I was the sixth or seventh, and my failure was just as complete. The whole thing was less than nothing to her.

I went into a slump — the worst thing that can happen to a writer. When I was supposed to be writing I was either drinking or staring moodily at the typewriter.Most of the time ideas failed to come to me; when I got an idea it either seemed too trivial to work on or I just couldn’t manage to get started. When I got words on paper they looked wrong and the paper wound up in the wastebasket.

I broke up with her a hundred times and started in with her a hundred times more. Then one night I brought her to my apartment and took her clothes off of that beautiful body while she stood motionless on the rug in the middle of the living-room. I stripped and took her into my arms and she came suddenly to life, melting against me like liquid fire. Her mouth pressed against mine and her whole body vibrated against me. I ran my hands over her skin and she seemed to burn bright with passion, all of her alive and hungry and yearning.

I was too shocked to think. I carried her to the studio couch and I made love to her harshly, violently, with her nails raking into my back and my body pressing hers and hurting her. At the climax she let out a little cry deep in the bottom of her throat and it seemed as if everything was as perfect as it could ever possibly be.

We lay there a long time without speaking, holding close to each other. Then suddenly she drew away from me and sat upright on the couch, resting her chin in her hand. There was a deep, far-away look on her face and her eyes were as deep a green as I had ever seen them.

“Hello,” I whispered.

She didn’t answer.

“It happened,” I said. “I told you it would happen if you just let it. I told you—”

I stopped short. She seemed to be in a different world, but at the same time it looked as though my words were hurting her in some way. I waited, and it was very silent in the room for a few long seconds.

When she spoke her voice seemed to be coming through the type of filter they use when they want to make it seem as though a voice is coming over a telephone. She talked very slowly and there was something ghostly and supernatural about the quiet whispery tone of her voice.

“Nothing happened,” she said. “Nothing at all. I wanted it to happen so I acted it out. I acted every bit of it.”

I couldn’t say anything. I just shook my head back and forth like a robot.

“Nothing,” she went on in that same tone of voice. “It was like a part in a movie. My body was doing things and I was somewhere else watching and seeing it and not feeling a damned thing. I—”

She left it at that. I got dressed and made us a pair of drinks, but she didn’t want one and I had them both. She sat there like a statue for a little while longer, finally dressing and walking out of the apartment like a sleepwalker.

I watched her leave. After she was gone I stared at the closed door like a schizo staring at a wall.

Then I reached for the bottle.

I don’t know exactly what happened after that. I have vague memories of stumbling over most of Los Angeles, of spending part of one night with a prostitute who was old enough to be my mother and about as drunk as I was, of slugging somebody and of getting slugged myself a few times. But it’s all a blur. I woke up five days later with my head aching viciously and my money gone, and when I stood up the sidewalk was rocking back and forth crazily.

Then the slide downhill started. It was easier than you can imagine — drinking the money away, not writing a line, getting my option dropped when my contract ran out with the studio, drinking and drinking and borrowing money when the money ran out and drinking and drinking and drinking.

And now I was back in New York and thinking about making a comeback. For a minute there didn’t seem to be any point, any point at all in the whole deal. Why bother? I had managed to find something out, and that something said to chuck it all and hit the skids for keeps.

Because everything comes easy except what matters.

Because when you get something you find out you never really wanted it in the first place.

Because the things you really want are the things you can never get.

I picked up the suitcase and started walking, crossing Amsterdam and heading toward Columbus. It was autumn in New York — like the song — and the air was getting cool. Autumn’s the best time in New York, but this was going to be a miserable autumn.

For a change.

Chapter Two

104 West 85th street was another red-brick building like all the rest. I set my suitcase on the steps and checked the address against the piece of paper I clipped out of the Classifieds, then rolled the paper into a ball and flipped it at the gutter.

I gave the bell a ring and waited. For a long moment nothing happened; then I heard footsteps and waited for the door to open. When the door opened I smiled automatically.

I always smile at a good-looking woman.

And the woman was more than good-looking. She was tiny — maybe five feet tall and, at the moment, barefoot. Her hair was chocolate brown and cut short in one of those Italian haircuts, and the haircut fit the pixieish quality of her face. Her eyes were brown and alert-looking.

She was dressed simply but neatly. A tight brown skirt encased trim hips and legs and an equally tight yellow sweater held her firm small breasts. She smiled back — a short, quiet smile that fitted in with the petite body and the pixieish face.

I asked her if I could see the landlady.

“I’m the landlady,” she told me.

I almost told her that she didn’t look like a landlady, but it was corny and I managed to catch it before it came out.

“My name’s Dan Larkin,” I said. “About that room—”

“Come this way.”

I turned and followed her down the hall. The place wasn’t bad on the inside — for that neighborhood it was unbelievably clean. There was a carpet on the hall floor and the stairwell was shipshape and the stairs didn’t creak under my feet. I followed her up the stairs, my eyes glued to her neat bottom, and we stopped on the second floor. She turned a key in the lock and led me into a room.

It looked like the room in Greenwich Village a long time ago. My eyes took it all in, thinking of it as a place to live and as a place to write in.

The bed looked good, and I never could bring myself to bounce up and down on a bed before renting a room. There’s something mildly obscene about it.

There was a table by the window and I went over and leaned on it a little. It was sturdy and wouldn’t wobble when I had a typewriter rattling away on top of it. There was an old roll-top desk in one corner that would do for whatever papers had to be filed away. In front of the desk was a chair that looked properly uncomfortable, and next to the desk was a chest of drawers that would more than hold what wardrobe I had left.

“The rent’s eight dollars a week,” she was saying.

“Six,” I said automatically.

We played games for awhile and settled on seven and I gave her two weeks’ in advance. The fourteen bucks made a sizable dent in my capital — I had enough for a second-hand typewriter and food for a few weeks, but not a hell of a lot more. Putting my wallet back into my pocket I thought about the money I had run through in the past few years. It wouldn’t have been so hard to put some of it away for a rainy day, and here I was in the middle of a deluge without the proverbial pot.

It was a shame.

She took my dough and wrote out a receipt for it. I folded the receipt and started to look for a place to put it and she drifted off out of the room, letting me follow her pretty little tail until she was gone and the door was closed behind her. She was nice to watch — damned nice.

I settled on the desk as a resting place for the receipt and solemnly filed it away in one of the tiny compartments. Then I set my suitcase on the bed and started unpacking. The clothes — two pairs of pants, half-a-dozen shirts and the usual assortment of socks and underwear — went in the dresser. The pint of rye remained in my hand for a few minutes while I tried to convince myself not to open it. It was a struggle but I won and the rye wound up in the desk.

I kicked off my shoes and stretched out on the bed. My eyes closed by themselves and my head sank into the pillow. It was tough staying awake — I didn’t sleep much on the train for the past few days, and I wasn’t in the best condition of my life.

But it was no time to sleep. There were too many things that had to get done — and soon. I had to get started on something — a story, a book, it didn’t make much difference what. The big thing was to get words on paper, and unless I did that and got those papers in an envelope and those envelopes on editors’ desks, the money was going to run out.

I could call Lou in the morning. Lou needed me right now like he needed a hole in his head, but I needed him and I needed him bad. A writer without an agent is like a fisherman without bait. Whatever you catch is an accident.

An agent makes all the difference in the world. An agent can find you work and tell you what not to write. He can make sure your scripts get to the right place at the right time, and when he finds a buyer he can get the last lousy nickel out of him for you. A writer’s in no position to bargain by himself, especially when the refrigerator’s empty and he’s hungry.

I was pretty sure Lou would take me on again. Sure, I let him down the way I balled things up on the coast, but I also made a hell of a lot of money for him in the past. And I had the stuff to do it again, if only I could get the damned words on the damned paper.

If...

The paperbacks were buying; that much I knew. People stopped buying hardcover books in quantity a few years back and the paperback houses did better every year. It was good writing and writing I knew and writing that paid off. I could do it.

If I could get started.

If...

I hauled myself off the bed and headed almost instinctively for the pint of rye in the desk. There was nothing more to do now — not until morning when I could pick up a typewriter and get to a phone to call Lou. There was nothing to do but take in a movie or pick up a woman or swallow some rye, and there were no women or movies that I felt like seeing. I got the desk open and my hand around the neck of the bottle when I changed my mind for no reason at all and instead opened the compartment with the rent receipt.

The signature read Marcia Banks. It was signed with a ball-point pen, the loops of the letters neatly rounded and the writing small and precise. I slipped the rye back where it belonged and studied the rent receipt thoughtfully for a moment, remembering the face and body of my luscious little landlady.

She was a nice one, all right. I guessed her age at between 28 and 32 — somewhere in there. I walked back to the bed, still thinking about her and wanting her. I hadn’t wanted a woman since Allison. I’d had women since then — too many of them, maybe — but Marcia Banks was the first one I could recall wanting.

I stretched out on the bed again, enjoying the feel of the foam-rubber pillow beneath my head. My eyes dropped shut again and my mind filled with the mental picture of her, of her small breasts in the yellow sweater and of her rear end wiggling its way up the staircase ahead of me.

She would be nice. She would be nice, and with my eyes shut tightly I imagined just how nice she would be. I thought about her, remembering that quick smile in the doorway, and I also thought just how nice it would be if she would open the door and come into my room then and there.

She opened the door and came into my room.

It wasn’t quite that brazen; she knocked, and she announced herself, but she did come into my room and walk over to the side of the bed and look down at me with a half-smile on her face.

The look was the sort of look you have to recognize intuitively. There’s no describing it. It’s not hunger and it’s certainly not love and it’s not quite a combination of the two. It’s a look that says this gal is ready for action, and if you’ve seen it once you’ll know it every time. That was the look on her face, and I reacted to it without thinking.

I stood up from the bed and reached out for her and she came to me at once, her face nestling close to my chest and her lips pressing little kisses through my shirt. My arms went around her and held her and I tilted her head back with one hand, fastening my mouth on hers and forcing her lips open. Her mouth opened under mine and there was a sort of electric shock as our tongues came together.

I led her to the bed and lay down beside her. My hands lifted the yellow sweater over her head and her bare skin was smooth and cool to my touch. She propped herself up on her elbows so that I could reach the hooks on her bra and remove that as well.

My hands found her breasts and held them. She may have been around thirty but she had the breasts of a schoolgirl — young and fresh and firm and rounded. I kissed them and ran my tongue over them and the nipples turned to hard red dots.

I fumbled with the buttons on my shirt and reached for her skirt with the other hand.

“Wait,” she said. That was the first word she had spoken.

She stood up, gathering her sweater and bra up and carrying them to the uncomfortable chair. She removed her skirt, slipping it slowly to the floor.

There was nothing under the skirt.

Her calves were gently rounded and her thighs were like a white mare running. She stood there motionless for a moment seemingly unconscious of her nudity; then she came back to me.

It was perfect. The whole performance was perfect, from the moment she came into the room through the undressing routine all the way to the moment when we lay spent with our heads on the foam-rubber pillow and our bodies pressed together like sheep hovering together for warmth.

It was perfect — from the gradual crescendo through the racing, pounding fury to the completely simultaneous climax. I felt like a man again.

“This may never happen again,” she said.

I almost fell off the bed. For a second I thought I had heard her wrong, but a second later I was sure that I hadn’t. Then there was another second or more when I thought I had found another actress like the one I left in Hollywood.

“What are you talking about?”

She reached out with one hand and traced little circles on my chest with her index finger. “I just want you to understand,” she said. “I want you to know where I stand in... this. It’s better that way, don’t you think?”

I waited for her to go on.

“I wanted you,” she said. “I was sitting alone in my room and all of a sudden I wanted you. So I came in.”

“Did you get what you wanted?”

“Mmmmm.” She smiled again — not the quick smile she had flashed in the doorway but a lingering, satisfied smile.

“Satisfied?”

She went “Mmmmm” again.

“Then what’s the trouble?”

She grinned. “There is no trouble, Dan. It’s just that I may not want you again, or not for a long time. And I want you to understand that.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t you?”

I didn’t, so I shook my head.

“Look, Dan,” she said. “I’m kind of a funny woman. I need men sometimes, and sometimes I can get along without them. And I definitely don’t want any kind of a man or anything remotely resembling a permanent relationship.”

“All right,” I said. “I can understand that.”

“I don’t mean just marriage. I mean anything where a man will start to feel that he owns me, or that I should be responsible to him. Hell, I had that once. I was married to a pretty wonderful guy, but he wanted to have me on a leash like a dog or something. I’m not like a dog.”

I reached out a hand and rested it on the smooth skin on the inside of her thigh, stroking her gently. “You’re more like a cat,” I said.

“That’s right — the cat who walks by herself, like in the story. I need to be independent, Dan. Maybe it’s unfair of me to ask it of you, but I don’t want you to make a play for me or even to throw passes at me. I’ll come to you when I want to, but no more. Is that all right? Because it’s the only way it can be.”

I leaned over and kissed her on her lips. “Marcia,” I said, “it’s a good deal more than all right. I can’t afford to get involved with anybody at this point, but I need women the same as any man does — maybe a little bit more than most.

“So you can call the shots. It’s hard to promise not to try to drag you into bed, but you can come around whenever you’re in the mood. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.” She wiggled around a little on the bed and wound up closer to me — so close that although our bodies weren’t touching I could feel the heat of her.

“You’re beautiful,” I said. It came out in a whisper.

“Do you really think so?”

“Of course.”

She purred like a kitten. “I’m glad,” she said. “I’m glad you like me.”

“Any man would like you.”

“Maybe — but a girl always likes to hear it. Tell me again that you think I’m beautiful.”

I told her.

She looked at me and a light was dancing in the corners of her eyes. “What do you like best about me, Dan?”

“How do you mean?”

“What part of me do you like best? Show me.”

I showed her and she giggled.

“Not there,” she said. “I don’t mean there. What else?”

I kissed her again and took her breasts in my hand, holding them gently and fingering the nipples.

“These,” I said.

“Honestly?”

I nodded and squeezed them again for emphasis.

“Don’t you think they’re small?”

“Not particularly. Hell, anything over a handful is wasted.”

She burst out laughing and even blushed a little. “You’re funny,” she said. “You know, I used to be ashamed of them, the way they were so small. I had hardly anything until I was almost seventeen.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed now.”

“I used to be ashamed of lots of things,” she went on. There was a dreamy look in her eyes and she seemed to be talking half to me and half to herself.

“I was ashamed the first time I let a boy kiss me, and I was ashamed the first time I let a boy do anything more than kiss me. And I was ashamed the first time I let a boy go all the way. It was a bad time, too. It was in the back seat of a car and he didn’t seem to know what he was doing and it hurt like holy hell and...”

She was on the verge of tears and I drew her in to me, snuggling her head up against my chest and running my hands over her back. I just wanted to keep holding her, to keep her warm and safe and quiet.

“But I’m not ashamed any more,” she said fiercely. “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a person and there are things I enjoy doing and things I need.”

“You shouldn’t be. You should be proud.”

“Proud?”

“Certainly. You’re a woman, Marcia. You should be proud to be a woman. Some women can’t, you know. Some women...”

She kissed me. “Tell me about her, Dan.”

“Who?”

“Allison.”

I almost fell off the bed for the second time that evening. “How did you—”

“You called me by her name, Dan. While you were making love to me.”

So I told her. I told her the whole story — the story of the long road up and the long road down, of the books and the stories and the movie scripts and the women and the whiskey. I told her, and it wasn’t easy to tell but it was far easier than it would have been to tell someone else.

She stayed close to me and she didn’t interrupt while I was talking. And when I had brought the story up to date she still didn’t say anything. We lay together with our bodies almost touching and the room dark around us, seeing nothing but each other and hearing nothing but the cars rushing past on West 85th Street.

“You’ll make it,” she whispered.

“Maybe.”

“You will,” she said. “I know you will.”

I laughed. “You have a helluva lot more faith in me than I do.”

She turned to me. “You’ve got to have faith too, Dan. It’s the only way.”

“Yeah.”

“I mean it,” she said.

“I know. But sometimes it’s tough.”

“The best things are usually tough.”

“Sometimes the best things are pretty tender.” I was holding her breast when I said that and she giggled again. Her giggle was nice — not the brittle quality present in some giggles, but a soft and easy sort of a giggle.

“Kiss me,” she said.

“Is that a command?”

“Of course.”

So I kissed her. And I kissed her again. And...

“Here,” she said. “Kiss me here, Dan.”

I did. She made a little sound that was half-purr and half-moan.

“Do you like that?”

“Mmmmm.”

“You like lots of things, don’t you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re a real sexy little thing, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

I closed my eyes and held her close to me. There was something vaguely unreal about the whole scene from the moment she had walked into my room, and at the same time there was something altogether real, desperately real about it. I felt that if I could hold her there, if I could just have something like her to hold onto and be with, then maybe everything would be all right.

It was funny. I needed her and she needed me, and at the same time neither of us wanted to get deeply involved with the other. The future might be messy.

But the past had been pretty messy itself. And the present was quite perfect.

“Dan?”

“What?”

“Kiss me there again, Dan.”

I kissed her there and I felt the passion rising within her. Her body began to move gently in controlled but perfect rhythm. Her breathing became shorter and harder and her shoulders heaved slightly.

“Is it wrong to make love... like this?”

“Making love can’t be wrong, Marcia.”

“Are you sure?”

“As sure as I am of anything. Nothing that two people do together can be wrong if they want each other. You like it when I do this, don’t you?”

“God, yes!”

“Then it’s good, Marcia.” I stopped talking and began kissing her again and neither of us said anything for a few minutes.

Then, “Dan?”

“Yes, darling?”

She was breathing faster and her thighs were churning and her lips were parted and moving with no words coming out. I kissed her all over that beautiful little body, kissed every square inch of her, and her flesh literally throbbed with animal heat and passion.

“Now!” she said suddenly. The word seemed to explode from her lips.

I took her in my arms and her legs wound around me like twin serpents. Then there was no one in the whole world but the two of us, no one but Marcia and I making love beautifully and violently and completely.

And the world moved.

Chapter Three

It wasn’t awfully hard getting to sleep that night. It wasn’t hard at all, as a matter of fact and it wasn’t particularly hard getting up the next morning either. I was so used to being hungover that I felt damn near lightheaded when my eyes fell open all by themselves and there was no ridge of purple fuzz between my scalp and my skull.

I put on a clean shirt and an almost-clean pair of pants and had burnt toast and lukewarm coffee at a greasy spoon on Columbus Avenue. I must have looked happy — the counterman threw me a dirty look and the counterman’s dog tried to take a bite out of my leg. I felt so good I threw the guy a quarter tip and patted the mutt on his mangy head.

Marcia Banks.

A woman can make all the difference in the world. I stopped dreaming of Allison and didn’t dream at all, or if I did I forgot the dreams before morning. The New York air still tasted good — even the smoke and sweat.

I hopped on the IRT to Times Square and rode the BMT down to Astor Place. The El was gone from Third Avenue and the strip looked better, but down below was still the Bowery and hockshops still lined both sides of Third Avenue.

Each hockshop looked like each other hockshop. They all had the same assortment of knives and guitars and cameras and jewelry in the windows and the same short men in suspenders behind the counter. The third place had a desk model in decent shape — I can’t stand a portable — and he was ready to take my money.

Not right away, of course. He started at forty bucks and I told him it was a stinking machine. He came down to thirty-five and I stuck a piece of paper in it, typed something, and spat disgustedly on the floor. He said thirty and I started for the door.

I gave him twenty-five and carried off the typewriter.

It’s all part of the ritual. He wouldn’t have had any respect for me if I gave him the forty, and I wouldn’t have had any for him if he started at twenty-five, which was all the machine was worth.

Of course it’s ridiculous. Most things are.

The typewriter was heavy — the only value in portables is that they are portable. I hauled it into a candy store, past a row of incipient juvenile delinquents drinking egg creams, and into a phone booth. I dropped a dime into the slot and listened to the dial tone for fifteen long seconds while Lou Harris’s number came back to me.

Then I dialed it.

The girl who answered the phone had an appropriately brittle voice. Every girl Lou ever had — and he ran through help like I ran through cases of rye — sounded brittle. I think he must have hired them over the phone. Some were ugly and some weren’t but they all sounded alike. It was uncanny.

I gave her my name and she repeated it solemnly and told me to hold the line. A minute later Lou answered.

“Danny?” he half-shouted. “Is it really you?”

My mother was the only other person to get away with calling me Danny. Girls tried it on occasion but I broke them of the habit quickly enough. You didn’t break Lou Harris of habits.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I thought you were dead.”

I grinned involuntarily. “Not yet, Lou.”

“Are you drunk?”

The grin lingered. “Not any more.”

He took a short, quick breath. He breathed as if it cost him money; for that matter, he did most things as if it cost him money. “Going to start typing again?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“I want you to handle my stuff.”

“Yeah? Why?”

I grinned again. “Because you’re the best agent in the world.”

“Yeah.” I could picture him nodding rapidly at the phone. “Yeah, I guess I am. Get the hell down here, will you?”

“Why?”

“I can’t talk business over the phone.”

I laughed out loud. “Like hell you can’t. You wouldn’t go to the John if there weren’t a phone in it.”

“Get the hell down here,” he said again. “I want to see your ugly face, you son of a bitch.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I got the hell down there. His office was on Madison between 45th and 46th, so I took the Lexington train and left the typewriter in a locker. It was getting heavy.

He really did have a phone in the john, believe it or not. He had a phone in even room of his house in Westchester and a phone in his car. I think he made love over the phone, but you can’t be sure of it. If anybody could do it, he could.

I rode to his office in an elevator with about three dozen perfumed secretaries and got off, mildly dizzy, at the sixteenth floor. I pushed open the door of his outer office, walking past the autographed pics of important clients and leaning on the buzzer. Brittle-voice opened the window and asked me who I was. She wasn’t bad. She was wearing one of those suits that pretend the girl wearing it is a guy but she was twisting the poor thing all out of shape.

“Mr. Larkin,” she repeated after me. “Lou’s on the phone right now but I’ll tell him you’re here.”

I nodded. Behind her there were five or six guys in shirtsleeves pounding hell out of typewriters and smoking cigarettes with a vengeance and dark-green metal filing cabinets lined the light-green walls.

I returned my attention to brittle-voice who had been studying me all the while. Her hair was brown and it looked soft — softer than her voice, anyway. She had a suntan — the nice, even tan you get from a sunlamp. I found myself wondering whether she was just as nice and brown under the suit.

“You’re Dan Larkin,” she said.

I nodded.

“I know your books,” she said. “I read most of them.”

“You did?”

This time it was her turn to nod. She did, and her breasts bobbed pleasantly with the motion.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“They’re junk,” I told her. They are.

“They’re good junk,” she said. “I used to want to write a while back.”

“Ever try?”

She nodded. “Pulp. Nothing sold and I gave it up. There are easier ways to make a living.”

“Like answering the phone?”

It didn’t even get a smile out of her. “I figured the job would be glamorous,” she said. “That’s what the son of a bitch at the employment agency said. Low salary, but the glamour of working around writers and agents and publishers.”

I sort of looked at her.

“I like glamour,” she said. She looked right at me and said, “I get a real kick out of some things. Like exciting things.”

I thought about carting her off to a bedroom somewhere and gave up the idea. The body was worth it, but what was inside the body didn’t figure to be worth it at all. She was the type you meet all over the place — the type who sleeps with you because you’re a writer or because you’re an actor or whatever. They’re all over, all over New York and all over Hollywood and all over everyplace I’ve ever been in my life. You don’t have to beat them off with a club but you don’t have to bait your hook too carefully either.

Sometimes they were fun. But after last night I wasn’t having any.

The buzzer rang mercifully while she was still gazing at me with that soulful look in her eyes. She shrugged, picked up the phone and looked up at me.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “The great man will see you now.”

I walked to the door while she pressed another magical buzzer and the door opened before me. I knew the route — the office was the same as the day I last saw it, even if Lou was a few fortunes richer. I walked through the door with his name on it in gold letters and sat down in the leather chair next to his desk.

He was sitting in the other leather chair, the one behind his desk. The desk was massive, and any man as small as Lou would look ridiculous behind a desk like that. Any man but Lou.

Lou looked a little older and smaller than last time I saw him, but otherwise he hadn’t changed a bit. He had all his hair and it crowded over his ears and piled up on top of his head in a sprawling mass. His eyes were small blue dots that looked right through a person. His forearms were heavy and muscular — he had played handball when he was younger and the muscles didn’t go away.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “So you want to be a writer again.”

I nodded. We didn’t shake hands; it wasn’t necessary.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“You son of a bitch,” he said again. “Dan, you’re not the rat race type. That’s why you cracked up before. All along you were a guy looking for a place to crack up and you found it out on the coast.”

“What do you mean?”

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a wooden match. “There’s two kinds of writers,” he said. “One kind has a wife and kids and lives in a small town and saves a little money every year and writes regularly and lives without pressure. The other kind lives in New York or Chicago or Hollywood and writes like a machine and makes lots of money and spends all of it.”

“So? I’m in the second class.”

“Yeah.” He flicked ashes in the brass ashtray and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “You’re in class two, Dan. But you’ve spent all your life trying to get into class one. You’re a guy who wants a home and kids and who can’t stop running.”

I thought for a minute. I tried to imagine myself in a pattern like that — married, kids, a little white house with green shutters. The picture wasn’t bad.

I realized with a start that the gal in the picture was Marcia Banks.

“Why don’t you chuck it, Dan? Why don’t you marry some broad and get a job as a plumber?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s a funny thing,” he went on. “Every field of work has some other field of work that a guy thinks about when he’s walking around in a brown study. Ad men always want to get a farm in New England and get back to nature. The PR boys get a yen for a general store when they want to chuck public relations to the dogs. And writers — God knows why — writers always get the idea of plumbing. A stillson wrench and hunk of pipe. I don’t know.”

“So you think I should be a plumber?”

He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it silly in the ashtray. Then he pulled out another one and stuck it where the first one came from and lit it with another wooden match.

“You don’t want to be a plumber?”

I shook my head.

“Good money in it. Four bucks an hour, work your own hours, good union. You sure?”

“Positive.”

He dragged on the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “You’re a damned fool,” he said cheerfully. “That’s my business — damned fools. What are you going to do now?”

“Write.”

“What?”

“That’s why I came to see you.”

He leaned back and looked at me. You could see the strength in him — the strength that let him start out owing somebody carfare and wind up owning and running the world’s top literary agency. He was the kind of man that nothing could stop. When he wanted something he got it, and he had the guts to want things.

“Write me a book,” he said.

“Paperback?”

“That what you want to write?”

“I want write whatever you want to sell.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and reached for another. “Whatever you want,” he said. “You can write paperbacks, so write paperbacks. Write me a nice solid novel with sex in it and substance to it and blood and guts and women with tits on them and I’ll sell it. You’re a writer, Dan. I don’t have to tell you what to write. I’ve got a whole stable of idiots that I feed plots to, but you’re no idiot. I don’t have to spoon feed you. You’re a writer. So write me a book.”

“Any percentage in writing short stuff?”

He thought for a minute. “There might be, if you could write Saturday Evening Post stuff. But you’re not an SEP writer, Danny boy. You’re too gutsy for that sort of stuff. If you want cigarette money you can knock out slush for the pulps. But write me a book.”

That’s what I wanted to do anyway. The pulps are always a temptation — there aren’t many left, but a fast check and a 5000-word story are incentives. But I wanted a book. Fifty bucks would help, but I needed more than that to get started. And a book would be easy.

“You ought to be a plumber,” he said. “You really should. It’s a better life, Danny boy.”

“Why aren’t you a plumber?”

“I should be,” he said. It would be easier. But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too excited. My wife wants me to quit. My kids want me to quit. My son Billy would like me to have a catch with him in the evenings. It’s nice,having a catch with your kid, tossing a baseball around. Billy could be a good little ballplayer if he had some practice.

“But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too hot and bothered. The pressure is too much in this business, but I can’t live without pressure like this. Can you imagine me without pressure?”

I couldn’t, and I told him so.

“Neither could I. I’ve been living like this too long, Danny. People talk about what a great business I own. Hell, I don’t own the business. The business owns me. But I love it. I suppose I love it. Can a man love a business, Danny?”

“If there’s nothing else to love, I suppose.”

“And what else is there?”

I grinned again. “You could try the girl at the front desk. She looks like the loving type.”

He got a guilty look on his face which anybody else would take to mean that he’d been doing just that. I knew it just meant he would like to. Lou never mixed business with pleasure — it made him reluctant to fire a girl if he was sleeping with her, and Lou liked to be able to fire anybody without thinking twice about it. “Never crap where you eat” was his motto and his last word on the subject.

We talked some more and he said, “Write me a book, Danny. What else can I tell you? Write me a book and I’ll sell you a book and we’ll be in business again. Okay?”

I nodded. I was anxious to go now, anxious to start banging away at the new typewriter. “Lou,” I said, “I’m short right now. If you could let me have a small advance against future sales...”

His expression turned into a frown. “Suddenly this is a bank?”

“Well...”

“Look,” he said, his eyes softening, “it’s something I don’t do. You know that, Danny. Hell, I don’t do it for any of my writers if I can help it. An advance against a pending sale, that’s different. An advance while an author is waiting for the check to come through. But against future sales...”

“You’re afraid I’ll drink up the money?” I could feel my pulse quickening and my blood pressure going up.

“It’s not that, Danny. Hell, you can come back, I know you can. But what’s the sense of making it easy for you to...”

I stood up, aching to take a swing at him and struggling to control myself. A second later the feeling passed and I got control of myself. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. Take it easy.”

I turned and headed for the door.

“Danny!”

I turned around.

“Write me a book,” he said, reaching for another cigarette. “A good one.”

But when I got home I didn’t feel much like writing a book — a good one or a bad one. Hell, Lou was right. In his place I wouldn’t advance a nickel to a bum like me, no matter what my policy was on that kind of thing. It didn’t make sense. No sense at all.

Because the odds were I never would write that book.

Oh, comebacks happen. Scott Fitzgerald did it, for one — and it’s been done by others. Fitzgerald wrote himself out of debt when he was swilling God knows how much Scotch a day, knocking out Post stories one after the other.

There aren’t too many Fitzgeralds.

The typewriter felt like a sack of lead when I got back to my room and I put it down on the table very gratefully. But I didn’t want to look at it, not just then. I had a ream of typing paper and carbon paper and copy paper, but I tossed them on the bed so I wouldn’t have to look at them either.

I wanted to look at Marcia Banks, and I wanted to look at her for a good long time.

She was in her room with the door closed. I called through the door and the first time she didn’t answer, and I called a second time and she asked me what I wanted.

“You,” I said. “I want you.”

“Not today,” she said. “Not today, Dan.”

“I just want to see you,” I said. “Just to talk to you.” It was a lie, but you have to lie some of the time in this world.

“Just to talk?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause. “Not today,” she said finally. “Tomorrow, maybe. But I don’t want to see you today, Danny — not even just to talk.”

“Look...”

“I mean it,” she said, her voice seeming to come from very far away. “I told you how it had to be, Dan.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure — you told me.” I turned around and walked back to the room.

But I didn’t feel like writing. I got as far as the pint bottle in the desk, got the seal off and was ready to twist the cap with my fingers when I realized that I had to write, that I had to get started then and there or chuck the whole thing and head for the Bowery.

I opened the ream of typewriter paper and set it on one side of the typewriter. I put a stack of copy paper on the other side and I stuck a sheet of paper in the machine. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to write, but I had to get words on paper. Once you get words on paper, once the opening sentence is written you have a start. You can find a plot and characters from there. If you’re going good, the rest of the book will work itself out.

I put the paper in the machine and typed at the top:

Dan Larkin

Lou Harris Literary Agency

445 Madison Avenue

New York City

Then I left space for the title and tried to write the first word. And the damnedest thing happened.

I couldn’t think of a word.

That’s how blocked up I was, how knotted up inside. I couldn’t think of a goddamned word!

So I wrote:

The

I sat there looking at it and no word followed it. I ripped the sheet out of the typewriter and put another one in and typed the same four-lined head and solemnly wrote:

The

Again I looked at it and again nothing happened. So I pulled the damned sheet out and crumpled it up into a ball and flipped it in the vague direction of the waste-basket and went through the same ridiculous routine with two more sheets of paper.

On the fifth sheet I typed:

The...

And I looked at it.

And I added:

...hell with it.

And then I reached for the rye.

It was close to midnight when I woke up with my head in a sling again and the familiar purple fuzz between my scalp and my skull. It was almost a welcome sensation — like going home, or having burnt toast and cold coffee or that sort of thing.

But I felt like hell. Not just the hangover — that was bad enough, but the knowledge that I got drunk without writing the first word of the novel was a bit worse. I wanted Marcia, wanted her near me even if I didn’t get to touch her all night. It was crazy, the way I was wanting her. She was just another little piece, just a girl I didn’t know from a hole in the wall who crawled into my bed one night and made me happy.

But I wanted her.

Tomorrow, I thought. Later for you, Marcia. There was still time to start the book, still time to get something written. First of all I had to start feeling human again.

Fortunately there was enough rye in the bottle to unhang the hangover. Next came a bath — I stripped down and wrapped myself up in my one towel and headed for the john.

When I opened the door there was a stark naked blonde in the shower singing Roll Me Over at the top of her lungs. And it wasn’t the hangover — so help me.

Chapter Four

I honestly don’t remember how I got back to my room. I wound up sitting on my bed with the towel modestly covering me and my head in my hands. My fingers were gently massaging my temples and my mind seemed more numb than usual, hangover or no.

Yes, a stark naked blonde in the bathtub.

Yes, singing Roll Me Over. Yes, it goes Roll me over, In the clover, Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.

Yes, I would have loved to.

But don’t ask me how I got from the bathroom to my own room, because that is something I do not remember and probably never will remember. It happened, thank God. It happened, but I was too deeply immersed in a state of shock to take note of the process.

At this point I was ready to give up the idea of writing the novel that night, or for that matter of ever writing a novel or a story or anything for the rest of my life. I was wishing for another pint of rye, or even a pint of Sneaky Pete, or even a good slug of wood alcohol.

Then the door opened and the blonde came in. This time she was wearing a bathrobe, and I grabbed instinctively for the towel and tried to cover myself with it from head to toe.

“That’s not particularly fair,” she said. “After all, you saw just about all there is to see of me and I didn’t even get a peek of you.”

“I... I’m sorry,” I started to stammer. “I mean, I... the door wasn’t locked and I just walked in and...”

“Did you like my singing?” she interrupted.

“Why...”

“I sing best in the shower,” she said. “Maybe everybody sings best in the shower. That’s what they say. It’s the resonance or something, with the water pouring down on you and all. Whenever I take a shower with somebody they sound good too, so I guess that must be it. But did you like my singing?”

“Look,” I said. “I mean...”

“I’ll admit it’s not an especially good tune,” she went on lazily. “The words are trite and the melody lacks harmonic complexity, but I thought you might like it. It isn’t every day...”

“I’m sorry,” I broke in. “If I had known you were in there— I mean, how was I to— The door was open and I—”

“Walked in,” she finished for me. “Of course you did. Did I blame you? Goodness, I didn’t mean to blame you. By the way, don’t you ever finish a sentence?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “I mean— What do you—”

“I guess you don’t,” she said. “That’s too bad. What on earth do you do for a living?”

“I— Well—”

“Come on,” she said, shaking her head provocatively. Her hair was long and swung like a pendulum with the motion. “Let me guess — you’re a stuttering comedian?”

“I— Look—” It was getting silly.

“A radio announcer?”

“I’m a writer,” I finally managed to say. It sounded soridiculous that I wasn’t surprised when she started laughing.

It was a good laugh, a laugh damned few women have. It was a head-back-and-shoulders-shaking kind of laugh, a throaty, hearty laugh that a person can enjoy laughing.

While she laughed I could see her big breasts moving within her bathrobe. That might have had something to do with my appreciation of the laugh.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, you’re a writer and I believe you and you don’t have to explain it. If you weren’t a writer you never would have said it, not the way I had you all balled up. You were all balled up, you know. Confused, bewildered, like that. I like to ball men up.”

I said, “I’ll bet you do.” It wasn’t an especially brilliant remark. But then I wasn’t feeling particularly brilliant at the moment.

“I do,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s not that I don’t like men. I love them, sometimes. But they’re so funny when they’re confused.”

“I’ll bet they are,” I said. Honestly, I was actually talking like that. If I wrote dialogue like that in a book I’d throw the typewriter out of the window, but I was honest-to-God saying those stupid words.

She took a step back and looked at me for a long moment without saying anything. “Goodness,” she said at last, “you’re rather good-looking. I noticed that when you walked into the bathroom, sort of. But I wasn’t sure. It’s not easy to be sure under conditions like that. But you are good-looking, don’t you think?”

I shrugged and struggled to keep the towel in place.

“Big,” she said positively. “I like big men. Muscles and bones and all that. And I like black hair that goes every which way, I really do. How did you break your nose?”

My hand went instinctively to the place where my nose bent a little to the left. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I—”

Her eyebrows shot up a notch and I started again. “I really don’t know. It wasn’t very romantic — I woke up one morning in an alley and my nose was broken.”

“Maybe you were in a fight,” she suggested. “A barroom brawl with chairs flying and things like in the movies.”

“Probably I just fell into a wall.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “But you really are good-looking, you know. Do you think I’m pretty?”

I nodded stupidly. It was precisely what I had been thinking.

“You have a slight advantage,” she said. “You’ve seen more of me than I have of you, so I guess you’re in a better position to judge. My name’s Carol Harrison. Do you have a name or do you just go around barging in on nude girls anonymously?”

“Dan,” I said. “Dan Larkin.”

“That’s a good name,” she agreed. “You’re good-looking and you have a nice name. Would you like to lay me, Dan Larkin?”

Again the girl had managed to take the thought right out of my mind. I started stammering but I couldn’t even get a coherent word out.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “Most men would like to lay me. I’m supposed to be an excellent lay. Men have told me repeatedly just how good I am in bed and things like that. I’m used to it.”

“I—”

“If you don’t want to, just say so.” She wiggled her hips gently. “I won’t get mad. I won’t be angry, just because you burst in on me in the shower and don’t even like my song and then stammer at me and don’t even want to lay me. Do you want to?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Honestly?”

I nodded.

“Well,” she said. “Well, that’s good. That’s very good.” And in one motion she pulled off the bathrobe and hurled it across the room.

Her body was beautiful in the all-American tradition of beauty, the Hollywood style of loveliness, the blonde-bombshell stereotype of what the girl next door ought to look like but never does. Her breasts were high and large and firm and she needed a bra like Adam needed apples. Her stomach was flat and her legs looked like the legs in the subway stocking ads, except that the thighs were meatier and rounder.

She wasn’t at all tanned. Instead her body was an incredibly perfect shade of pink all over.

I stared.

“You like me,” she said happily.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“You like my breasts,” she said. “Almost everyone does. Men say the nicest things about them. Luscious breasts, proud breasts, womanly breasts, soft breasts, firm breasts, smooth breasts — men say the nicest things about them. One man called them thrusting hillocks — would you believe it? But that’s what he said.”

I believed it.

She walked over to me like the mountain walking to Mohammed. Every bit of her moved with every step she took, and I followed her every step of the way.

“You look sort of silly,” she said. “You’re good-looking and all, especially with that busted nose which looks good even if you fell into a wall to get it, but right now you look ridiculous. Did you know that?”

I didn’t feel ridiculous. I felt quite thoroughly aroused.

“Ridiculous,” she repeated. “Men are so ridiculously bashful. Men hate to be looked at naked, for some reason which I am afraid I will never understand. You and that silly towel!”

For a moment my eyes dropped to the silly towel. Then they returned to her. She was standing close enough to me that I could feel the warmth of her thigh against my knee and could smell the clean fresh after-bath smell of her pink skin.

“Well,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Well,” she repeated.

“Well,” I echoed. It seemed to be the only thing to say.

“Well,” she said again. She picked up the towel and tossed it across the room after the bathrobe. She leaped onto the bed and put her lips as close to mine as they could get without touching.

“I don’t think you’ll need that towel any longer,” she murmured.

She was absolutely right.

When it was over all I could think of was that it had been quite perfect. Everything, from the first kiss to the final beautiful moan was far better than I could have written, far better than I could even have imagined it. The lips pressing gently and then more insistently, the tongue between the lips and the gentle motion of her body so that the nipples of the “thrusting hillocks” played games with the hair on my chest.

Carol Harrison knew more tricks than Houdini and she had an imagination that was remarkable. There had been days when I wrote pornography for the boys on 42nd Street, but she had ideas that never occurred to me.

Like I said, it was perfect. All the way it was perfect,from the kiss to the moan, from Alpha to Omega, from the beginning to the end.

But there was something missing.

It bothered me. It bothered me because there shouldn’t have been something missing, because a girl like Carol had never seemed to be missing anything before. It bothered me that suddenly a good performance wasn’t enough, that feeling was necessary.

It bothered me that when I closed my eyes I kept seeing Marcia’s face. That bothered the hell out of me, if you want to know the truth.

“Well?” she demanded when it was over and when I was breathing normally again. It seemed to be her favorite word.

“Well what?”

“Well, was I a good lay?”

I let my arm drape around her and cup one of her breasts. My fingers found the nipple and stroked it tenderly and it hardened beneath my touch like a little rosebud.

“You were one hell of a lay.”

“That’s what everyone says,” she bubbled. “Everybody likes me in bed. I’m glad you liked me, Dan Larkin.”

“You were perfect.” I felt nothing for her right then, nothing more than the empathy and closeness that almost any healthy man inevitably feels for a woman he has made love to. But telling her that she was perfect was hardly a lie; it wasn’t even a compliment. It was the simple truth.

“Perfect,” she repeated. She rolled the word around on her tongue as though she were saying it for the first time. “I’m glad. You really ought to like me, Dan Larkin. You really ought to, you know. You just got a hundred-dollar lay, believe it or not.”

For a minute I didn’t understand what the hell she was talking about.

“A hundred-dollar lay,” she repeated. “That’s what I am, Dan Larkin. I’m as high-class a whore as you can hope to find. A call-girl, like.

“It’s really more than a hundred dollars,” she went on pleasantly. “I mean, a man pays a hundred dollars but he winds up spending more than that. First he usually takes me out to dinner and drops at least twenty-five dollars for the two of us, and then sometimes he takes me to a plush sort of a nightclub, and then he takes me home to bed. And if he’s a spending type he slips me an extra twenty on the way out, or if he thinks you get just what you pay for and no more he slips me the extra twenty before. And sometimes he sends a present or something — sometimes flowers, or candy which I don’t eat anyway because it would make me fat.

“But it’s nice. I mean, a girl appreciates it when she’s a good lay and a man thinks so. And the kids on the street go wild over a big box of candy, especially when it comes all wrapped up with that funny brown paper on each piece of the candy.”

She was miles ahead of me. Her breast was warm and soft in my hand but my mind wasn’t even on the warm soft breast — it was way out in left field.

“Figure two hundred dollars then,” she said. “You got a lot for nothing, didn’t you?”

“Mmmmm,” I said. “You’re worth more than that.”

“Ooooooh!” she gasped. “Ooooh, you’re nice, Dan Larkin. I think I like you, I really do. Now you have to ask me how in the world I got into such a bizarre business.”

It was my turn to raise eyebrows.

“You can ask,” she said. “It’s a corny question and I’ve heard it so many times I don’t even mind it any more,and besides you’re a writer so it would be different telling you. I’d even tell you the truth, even though it’s so much more fun to lie about it.”

“Okay — I’ll bite.”

“You’ve got to ask me,” she said. “The whole corny phrase. I want to hear you say it.”

I said, “How did you get into this business?”

She put her hand on mine and pressed it against her breast. Her other hand settled on my thigh and moved up and down slowly, gingerly. She smiled.

“Simple,” she said. “Most whores, the high-class type, come to New York to be models or showgirls or actresses or something. They don’t make it so they wind up on their backs. They’re unhappy, and it’s a sin to be unhappy. It’s the only sin there is, you know.

“But with me it was different. I came to New York to be a whore, and that made it much simpler and much happier. It was the only thing I enjoyed doing and the only thing I ever did well in my life, so it seemed the sensible business.”

It was a brand-new twist and I wondered whether she was feeding me a line a mile long. The disbelief must have showed on my face.

“Honest,” she said. “I always liked it, you see. It didn’t even hurt the first time the way it’s supposed to in books and things. And when I heard you could get lots of money for doing it — why, it was the only thing I wanted to do!”

In her own cockeyed way Carol made sense. I tried to imagine her as a girl, probably having more character and sense in her head than the rest of the girls in her school but with a completely different way of looking at things. I could picture her telling the truth most of the time, telling the boys that she liked it so why shouldn’t she do it and having the boys pretend to understand.

I could imagine the girls hating her and the boys laughing at her and saying cruel things behind her back, taking her whenever they could and even lining up on her and not one of them ever loving her or even liking her a little. I could imagine all this and I tried to picture her doing anything else but what she was doing or living anywhere else but in New York where people kept their noses out of other people’s business.

I decided she made the right choice.

“Why me for free?” I asked suddenly.

“I like you,” she said. “But that isn’t it, not exactly. It’s just that the man I was with tonight was an old man and nothing happened with him, and I wanted a man and there you were in your silly towel. I liked you but then I like all men. It works for me all the time.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “I’m not a nymphomaniac,” she said proudly. “I used to think I was until this doctor who made love to me explained that a nymphomaniac never had an orgasm and that’s why she ran from man to man. I’m not like that, not at all. It happens for me every single time.”

“Every time?”

She nodded emphatically. “It never fails. The doctor said he never heard of anyone quite like me, and that made me very happy. He’s a good doctor, too.”

“God,” I said. “Every time.”

“Of course it has to be with a man I like,” she went on. “But I’m like that Will Rogers — I never met a man I didn’t like.”

She left and I stretched out on the bed like a racehorse after a hard day at stud. I felt drained, but my emotions were untouched and for the first time that really bothered me. I started thinking about Marcia Banks and wondered how much she had to do with it.

Was I falling in love with her?

If I did I was one damned stupid fool. For one thing, she wanted a permanent deal with me like I wanted bubonic plague. She didn’t even want a real love affair, not that gal. The set-up she wanted was ideal — no strings, and nothing doing unless we were both in the mood and no hard feelings on either side.

That would be perfect — it was the type of relationship I had always craved in the past. But now I wanted more than that for some nutty reason.

The book had to wait — I was too tired to start worrying about a novel and too mixed up to dream up a plot.

The bed was soft and the pillow even softer. It still smelled of Carol and the clean, fresh bath-smell of her pink skin.

I fell right asleep.

I slept like a log.

But I dreamed about Marcia.

Chapter Five

The next morning I woke up, showered, shaved, and dressed. I found the same lunch counter on Columbus Avenue for another round of burnt toast and cold coffee, but this time the counterman was almost pleasant and the mangy dog was nowhere to be seen. This didn’t make the toast and coffee taste any better but it did get the day off to a better start.

I had a second cup, not out of any overwhelming desire of the coffee but because I just didn’t much feel like looking at the typewriter until I ran out of excuses.

The second cup of coffee was worse than the first. It ran into my stomach, tepid and bitter and I was suddenly out of excuses. I paid the check and headed back to the room.

It was the same room. And, of course, the novel was in the same condition as when I had left it. Totally unplanned and totally unwritten — that was my book.

I didn’t put a sheet of paper into the machine this time. I didn’t have the strength to go through the motions, not now. I sat on the bed and looked at the typewriter and the typewriter sat on the table and looked back at me.

We stayed that way for thirty-six minutes.

Nothing seemed to work. I went over old formulas trying to get an idea to jell. I let my mind ramble all over the place, trying to fix on a theme or an idea that might get me rolling. I thought about all the crap I had written and all the crap I had read but nothing added up to a story.

I was in a rut, and the rut kept getting deeper, and there didn’t seem to be much chance of getting out of it.

So I did the only sensible thing under those circumstances. I got up from the bed and got the hell out of the place.

I went for a long walk. It’s a funny thing about walking — I never walked much in Hollywood or for that matter in any place but New York. New York is different. It’s a city where walking is a pleasure, where there’s always something new and something to see, where you can walk forever and never get lost and never walk past the same place twice.

And everything’s close to the street, which is a help. With the price of real estate the way it is nobody can afford wide, wide sidewalks or lawns or anything like that. Everything there is to see is right next to you if you open your eyes. When you’re in the mood, even the store window signs make good reading.

So I wandered. I wandered over to the park and down Central Park West about six blocks, but I don’t like to look at parks and I like hotels less. I cut back to Columbus Avenue and passed Puerto Rican slums and grocery stores with Spanish signs in the window and candy-stores with side-burned kids sitting on tall stools and sipping cokes with bored expressions on their faces.

I passed hustlers getting in some noon-time hustling and cops getting in some noon-time handouts. I watched a husky bouncer flip a drunk out of a bar on his ear and remembered getting bounced a couple times myself — and wondered if that was how I broke my nose. I fingered the nose gently — maybe it was attractive, in a strange sort of a way.

I can be an obnoxious drunk. I have a vague memory of a time in Hollywood in a high-tone bar on the Strip, arguing with everybody and shouting for the bartender at the top of my lungs. I got tossed out of there, too — but not with a bouncer giving me a heave into the gutter. There was a man on either side of me, holding my arms in a grip that looked gentle but hurt like hell even if I was drunk as a skunk, and left my arms aching when I woke up the next morning.

As I remember it, they flipped me out because I told one young “actor” that he was a pimp and his girl was a whore. It was the truth — maybe that’s why I got booted. You can say just about anything in Hollywood, as long as it’s not true. Hollywood is scared of the truth. It’s a great town — golden and beautiful on the outside, with about as much depth as a stage set. You know the ones — the storefronts with no stores behind them. That’s the town; that’s the people in it. A big front and no depth, no guts at all.

I kept on walking. I’m no athlete, and I get tired if I so much as look at a tennis racket or a set of barbells. But I can walk forever or damned close to it. Walking is easier than stopping.

I stayed on Columbus. It’s a nice street, if you like streets with lots of little things happening. I started to stop in a luncheonette for a malted and decided suddenly that the least thing I could possibly want was a malted. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted one. My stomach started to turn over at the very thought of letting a sugary, gloppy malted slide down my gullet.

So I had a beer.

I didn’t really drink that day, not exactly. I kept walking and each drink got almost walked off by the time I stopped for another. There was no real cumulative effect, When you’re drinking seriously, drinking to forget something or just trying to get good and blotto, then you have to stay in one place for at least five or six stiff ones. After that it doesn’t much matter what you do. Then you’re on the way to oblivion and every little slug helps you along.

I started on beer and gave that up after awhile, switching to bar whiskey. Bar whiskey can’t compare to Scotch or even to rye, but the price makes a good deal of difference when you’re broke.

So I drank bar whiskey and I kept walking like a foot-soldier. I got as far as Times Square without thinking about turning back. Times Square was fun for a change — lights blinking and people walking everywhere at once and men around ready to sell you anything from a woman to a book about somebody else and a woman. I took two turns around the Square — Eighth Avenue to 42nd Street, down the street to Seventh, back on the other side, and around again.

In that time I managed to get propositioned by two hustlers — a skinny crone older than I was and a girl who should have been back in high school. Three little men knew girls who could show me a good time, but the odds were they were all working the 42nd Street con. This is a neat little gambit — they take you to one of the fleabag hotels on Times Square — take you up two flights of stairs, take your money, go up another flight of stairs without you and make off down the back exit. You wait around like a moron until you figure you’ve been had and leave.

It’s a clever bit.

And then there were the gay set — the flits looking for a man to carry off to their apartments. They stick to innuendo and subtlety as far as possible because the vice-squad boys give them a rough time — especially toward the end of the month when the bulls have a quota to make.

It’s a wonderful place, Times Square. There’s no place in the world quite like it.

It has bars, too. And I hit most of them.

The day passed pleasantly. I burned up a dollar’s worth of quarters in a shooting gallery trying to knock over a row of ducks and sank another buck into ten games of Fascination — a silly habit-forming deal in which you roll a ball at a patch of holes and try to fill up a row before anybody else does. I lost, of course. I’ve never seen anyone win, although there’s a winner every time. It’s always some son of a bitch on the other side of the room.

It was eight o’clock when I got hungry and grabbed a couple of franks and a cup of coffee at a corner stand. I wasn’t drunk, wasn’t tired — and I still didn’t much feel like writing.

But it was time to go home.

It’s funny — I’ll walk all over the place, but I never walk home if I can avoid it. If I have nothing to do I’ll walk ten miles and take the subway home, but there’s something about walking five miles and five miles back that doesn’t appeal to me.

I went home on the D train. I walked into the house feeling good, but still not feeling like writing. I walked up the steps and through the door and into my room.

I kissed Marcia hello. Then I unbuttoned my shirt and flipped it on the chair and turned on the overhead light and...

And then I realized I had kissed Marcia hello.

“Hello, Dan,” she said. She smiled at me.

“Hello,” I said. “You look beautiful.”

And she did. She was wearing toreador pants, black toreador pants that were good and snug on those sweet little hips and thighs and calves. Her blouse was dark green and cut simply, with a deep V in the neck that let me peek at the cleft between her breasts.

“It’s a good night for me, Dan. How about you?”

I nodded. I wanted to tell her that it was always a good night for me, that I was in love with her and that maybe it would always be a good night for us. That we should spend all our nights together. And our days, too.

I wanted to tell her that I was in love with her, because I was drunk enough to realize it for certain and sober enough to know it wasn’t a delusion brought on by the alcohol.

But I had the sense to keep my mouth shut.

I reached for her and she melted into me. I could feel the heat in her, feel the blood pulsing through her little body and aching for me. Her clothes came off by themselves practically and we let them drop on the floor and stay there.

Her mouth came against mine hungrily, greedily. Her hands moved up and down my back and her body gave a twist against mine.

I wanted her and I needed her and I loved her. I loved her while we were standing there and I loved her when I pushed her down onto the bed, loved her so much it hurt with the sort of pain you don’t mind in the least.

But I didn’t tell her.

Not just then.

I told her when it happened. It happened so beautifully and she moaned my name in a long, beautiful “Daaaan” that hit me in the belly and made everything even better.

When the Dan died out I said, “I love you.”

Then neither of us said anything. Not for a long time while we lay there with the light on and our eyes drinking each other in.

Then I said, “We’re a good thing, the two of us.”

“Wonderful.”

“Really good.”

“Mmmmmmm.” She took my arm in her two little hands and was running her lips up and down it, planting tiny kisses as she went. They weren’t sexy kisses at all. They were quiet, peaceful kisses, and they were nice.

She was nice.

“You’re nice,” I said.

“So are you.”

I closed my eyes for a minute. “Why does it just have to be some of the time? Why can’t it be every night? It would be good to wake up with you next to me in the morning.”

“Dan.” There was a slight edge to her voice.

“I mean it, Marcia. We’re good — you know damned well we’re good.”

“Dan.”

I waited.

“Dan,” she said, “I don’t want it to be like that. I don’t want to care about anybody — can’t you understand that? You should, especially after what you went through with Allison.”

“We’re different.”

“Everybody’s always different. It always seems different when it’s going smoothly and nothing gets in the way. But something always gets in the way. It never fails.”

I waited for a minute. “Look,” I said. “Look, baby, I could get corny. I could feed you the bit about it being bigger than both of us and it would sound pretty terrible,but that’s part of it. It really is. It’s not something you can turn off and on like an electric light. It’s more than that.

“I can’t love you one night and not the next.”

Her eyes had a sad, worried look in them. “I don’t want you to love me, Dan. I don’t want you to care about me at all.”

“Don’t you care about me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then—”

“But I’m not possessive about you,” she cut in. “And I don’t want you to be possessive about me. Damn it, I won’t let you.”

We talked some more, but it was just more of the same. Then she got up and dressed and I watched her dress, watched her cover the beautiful body with the black pants and the dark green blouse, watched her while she bent over and kissed me, watched her walk out of the room with her little behind wiggling so slightly.

Then I closed my eyes.

It was only about ten minutes later when I woke up. I didn’t wake up when you come right down to it because I didn’t really fall asleep. I went into what was almost a trance — the kind of state where your mind wanders all over the place and you don’t really think. Your mind sort of feels things and everything gets very loose, very easy.

I got up from the bed and walked across the room to the table. I sat down at the table, stuck paper in the typewriter, typed the regular heading in the corner and started to write a book.

That’s exactly how it happened. One moment there was nothing; ten minutes later there was a book in my head ready to put itself on paper. It was that simple.

The book was going to be about me, about my life from the time of the crack-up to Hollywood to a time in the future when everything would be good again and I would be on top where I belonged. But it wasn’t until I had page 1 finished and page 2 in the typewriter that I realized that the book was about me. It hadn’t come to me that way.

The lead was me, but nobody would be able to tell that. The lead was a gangster, a tough slum brat who worked his way into the rackets and climbed the ladder to the top. He got there by guts and brains — by being smarter than the others and by having the nerve to take chances and the stomach to kill anybody in his way. He started in the numbers game as a runner and went all the way up — straight to the top.

Then he fell on his face — because of a woman. The woman would be Allison, in a way — but not in a recognizable way. The woman would mess up his life and the organization would slip away from him until he was facing a prison rap and out of control of his own mob.

And then the book would begin — with the hero on the bottom, crawling his way up to the top. It would end with him on top and satisfied, with everything under control.

It all fell into place, every last drop of it. I could feel it, could feel the pace and drive and force of it. When a book is going well it works that way. Everything unfolds itself and you can plan the whole thing in your head while you’re doing a crossword puzzle or watching the blonde across the street combing her hair. You can even see how the chapters will break and how long the book will run and how the ending is going to come.

I even had the last line of the book in my head before I wrote the first one.

The writing wasn’t that easy. I write fast — grinding out pulp teaches you to write fast or else you look for another way to make a living. But sometimes you have to spend half an hour staring at the typewriter in order to get a scene exactly right. Sometimes one word can stop you, and you have to let your mind spin around until the right word comes up. Sometimes you make so many typographical errors on a page that it’s easier to throw out the page then to go on.

It must have been close to midnight when I started typing. I lost all track of the time. I just kept typing, and I didn’t give a whoop in hell if some other poor slob had to work the next morning and was having trouble sleeping.

To hell with the other poor slobs. I was a poor slob and I had my own end to look out for.

I typed until the sun came out and then I stood by the window and watched New York come back to life. New York never quite goes to sleep, but when the sun comes up over the Hudson the city gets an extra burst of vitality, even if you can’t see the Hudson with all the buildings in the way and even if you can’t see the sun most of the time with all the smoke and smog in the air.

I drank that air. It’s cleaner in the morning than any other time, and I flung the window open and breathed as deeply as I could, and expelled all the air from my lungs and breathed in again. It felt good. I took half-a-dozen deep breaths like that and went back to work.

It wasn’t the way it was when I was a kid in the Village. Once I could write twenty-four hours straight without a break for anything but a cup of coffee and a hunk of apple pie. I was dog-tired by 6:30 now, too tired to look at the typewriter without flinching. I straightened out the pages and cleared off the table — twenty pages written, and the book well under way. The first chapter was out of the way and there was no reason why the book shouldn’t sail smoothly the rest of the way.

I fell on the bed and slept for ten hours straight.

The next day — or the same day; when you stay up nights it’s hard to keep them straight — the next day I didn’t see Marcia. She wouldn’t talk to me.

And I lay around all day and night without writing a word.

The same thing happened the day after that. Then the next day we made love in my room more perfectly than ever and I knocked off another chapter, and the day after that we made love again and I wrote a chapter and a five-thousand-word crime yarn that went right into a mailbox.

It went on like that. When she was in the mood for love, I was in the mood for words and the pages piled up beautifully.

When she wasn’t in the mood, I lay around the room reading. I couldn’t even keep my mind on the book those days, and there were too many days like that. The money was running low and there were no two ways about it — the book had to get finished. I wondered vaguely whether Lou would manage to sell the pulp yarn or not. He might; he might not. But the book mattered.

One time I told her. She laughed and said I was crazy; then she said I would have to do a lot of writing on certain days, that she just couldn’t help the way she felt.

And the rotten thing was that none of it made sense. I’m not the kind of guy who believes in this write-when-the-mood-strikes-you stuff. You have to be able to knock it out whether you’re hungry or tired or whatever. It’s the only way to get books finished.

But I couldn’t do it. I loved her too much, loved her in a way I never had loved anyone before. She made the routine with Allison seem empty and even a little bit silly. She made everything I ever did seem silly and hollow inside, everything but her.

Without her the words barely got on the page, and what words did get written weren’t worth the effort. It was like pulling teeth to write them and I tore up those pages — they were terrible. The dialogue was empty and unreal and the prose looked like it had been translated from Persian to English by somebody who couldn’t speak either language.

After awhile I gave up. I waited for the good days, and the good days were heaven.

Usually I try a book with the publishers when there are three chapters done. This book didn’t go that way. For some reason I didn’t want to stop writing and finish up an outline of the remainder. It was a different book from all the others, even though I was just trying to write another hunk of garbage and grab off a nice chunk of gold.

I kept at it. What I did seemed better than anything I had written before, even though I’m a pretty bad judge of my own stuff. I went on for a week, and at the end of the week I had about sixty-five pages of manuscript typed. Two more chapters would do it — one hundred pages and an outline.

I wasn’t going to re-write it. Somebody asked me once how many times I re-wrote things, how much polishing I gave them, and was shocked when I said everything went out straight from the typewriter. Oh, a publisher will ask for revision once in awhile and sometimes Lou would send a script back, but I don’t see any reason not to do a thing right the first time.

So the book was getting done, but I couldn’t manage to drag myself out of the dumps on the bad days. It was a very straight way to write a book, and I wondered what other guys went through the same sort of thing.

At the end of a week Marcia came in and read the first sixty-five pages. I watched her while she read and for some reason I was nervous, my eyes on her while she turned the pages and read the words that I had written. I even noted each change of expression on her face and tried to guess what made her smile or frown or raise an eyebrow.

When she finished it she gave me a long look and I returned the look. Then she said, “It’s awfully good, Dan.”

“It’s just a book.”

“No, I think it’s more.”

I never gave a damn what anybody thought about a book of mine except Lou — who always judged my stuff perfectly — or a publisher — who decided whether or not to buy it. But it made me happy that she liked it. Hell, I was in love with her. Love explains a lot of damned fool things.

“Your hero,” she said. “Tony. He’s not a bad man, is he?”

“He’s not supposed to be.”

“I know. But he’s a gangster. It must be hard not to make him seem... bad, rotten.”

I shrugged. “Gangsters have to be people, too.”

“That’s right. But it’s good that you can do it. What happens to Tony next?”

“You’ll find out.”

She smiled. “Won’t you give me a hint?”

“Nope. Come back tomorrow and you’ll see.”

She smiled again, wider this time. “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe.”

I wanted to slap her. I wanted to tell her that I needed her, that I could never make it without her. I wanted to take her clothes off and push her down on the bed and beat her, wanted to raise bruises on the tan skin and make her scream her little lungs out.

That’s what I wanted to do.

So I took her clothes off and pushed her down on the bed.

But I didn’t slap her. There were other things to do.

Chapter Six

She was gone when I opened my eyes in the morning. I couldn’t remember her leaving. The last thing I remembered was her head against my chest and her hair touching my skin with the smell of her hair in my nostrils.

I yanked myself out of bed, showered, cut myself shaving, and marched out the door for breakfast. It was raining outside — a thin, lazy drizzle that made you uncomfortable without actually getting soaked. There wasn’t much point in running through it, so I walked slowly to my favorite Columbus Avenue greasy spoon and gobbled toast and swilled coffee and thought about the book.

When I got back to my room and sat behind the typewriter, the words came easier than ever before. There was something almost mechanical about it, as if the typewriter and I formed a single unit, as if thoughts worked their way from my brain down through my shoulders and arms into my fingers, and from the tips of my fingers to the keys of the typewriter. The thoughts seemed to go directly to the page in front of me, and the typewriter was no more or less than an extension of my own body, just like a third arm or a second head.

I knocked out five pages one after the other that way,almost without thinking what I was doing. It should have been a ticklish situation — a confrontation between Tony and a man he had ruined long ago when he was on the way up and the man stood between him and the top spot. It was a spot in the book where everything had to be just right or the book would fall on its face.

If the reader didn’t believe it, if it didn’t seem real and if every word and gesture wasn’t natural and authentic, my characterization wouldn’t come across properly. Pretty soon no one would give much of a damn what happened to Tony.

Every book has a spot like that, a crucial point where the book stands or falls. And usually writing that scene is pure murder. But today it was the easiest writing I had ever done.

I’ve felt almost like a machine in the past. I’ve had that feeling grinding out garbage when I didn’t care at all about what I was doing and when I was just slamming more of the same old formula on paper. But this was different, because I did care and it wasn’t easy, formularized writing.

After five pages I stopped, separated the first copy from the carbon sheets and held the pages in my hand. I glanced out the window — it was still raining, and a little harder than before. I watched the rain and I watched the people running through the streets, and then I picked up the five pages I had written and began reading through them. I didn’t trust myself — it had been too easy writing them, and I was pretty sure they must have turned out lousy.

I was wrong. God, I was wrong. I read through the five pages and I realized that this was the best stuff I had ever written in my life — that if I was ever going to write anything good, anything really worthwhile, now was the time.

I picked up the manuscript and started in on it, wanting to see if the rest of the book was as good. It read like a dream. It was good, really good — and there was a reason for it.

The book meant something.

I remembered the first book — the heavy manuscript that I worked so hard on in my room in Greenwich Village, the script that everybody in the world bounced back at me. That one had meant something too, but there was one hell of a difference. That first book meant something to me, but it was a poorly-written piece of garbage, a hunk of crap that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else in the world.

But the book I was working on now — it was good. It was a book that was coming from within me, a book about me but not fouled up by being a whole lot of obviously autobiographical mouthwash.

To tell you the truth, I was scared. Petrified.

You see, since that first book I hadn’t written a thing that was real, a thing that was trying to be more than just a salable piece of merchandise. And even though this book started out to be a salable hunk of junk, it was turning out to be a lot more.

If I was ever going to write a good book, now was the time.

I went at it again with the rain tapping on the window and my fingers keeping time on the typewriter keys. I felt good and the typewriter seemed to be singing a song while I beat out the pages on it.

Marcia was right — it was a good book. I finished the chapter in a blaze of white heat and read it, and it was holding up. I had almost one hundred pages done — plenty for Lou to get me an advance.

So I sat down and typed up an outline of the remainder. The outline was no sweat — I knew what was going to happen from there on in, so I just put down the details carefully enough so the publisher would know what the hell was happening.

I didn’t feel like writing any more of the book, but the writing was coming too easily for me to stop there. I sat down at the typewriter again and put the paper in the roller, waiting for something to happen. And something happened.

Inside of an hour I had finished a five-thousand-word crime yarn — a lousy little thing, but one that ought to sell right off the bat for a fast fifty bucks. I hadn’t even stopped to think about it. It rolled right out, and I had the pages clipped together and in an envelope in no time. I’d mail it in; the novel was too bulky to mail, and I could wait and take it down to Lou in a day or so.

I mailed the script at a post office on Amsterdam and came back through the rain to my place. I wanted to see Marcia, wanted to tell her about the pulp yarn and what I had discovered about the book. And I needed her, if only to have her sit by me and talk to me.

I needed her if I wanted to get the book done, for that matter.

When I knocked on her door there was no answer. I knocked again and tried the knob, but it was locked.

“Marcia?”

There was silence, and I started to call again when her voice said, “Not today, Dan. Today is one of the days I don’t want to see you.”

My heart fell halfway through my stomach.

“Look,” I said. “Look, I just want you to read what I’ve got done. That’s all.”

There was a pause. “No,” she said. “No, not today.”

I felt myself getting mad. “Just read it,” I said. “You don’t even have to see me. I’ll shove the damn thing under the door if you want!”

“But I don’t want to read it. Don’t you understand?”

“Aren’t you interested in the book?”

“Of course I am. Don’t shout, Dan.”

I lowered my voice. “Then—”

“Your book’s too real,” she said. “It’s you in it, and I don’t want to know you. Not today, I mean. And reading your book would bring me close to you, and that’s something I don’t want,”

“You were pretty goddamn close to me last night.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s part of the reason. Dan, maybe I’m not right for you. Maybe you need somebody different, somebody who can love you and be with you all the time. I’m not that kind of person. I—”

“Marcia.”

“Let me finish. I’m not, Dan. I don’t want to be dependent on anyone — not you or anybody else. I don’t want to be close to people.”

“You want to live in a little shell,” I said savagely. “You’re afraid—”

“That’s it. I’m afraid, Dan. And I’m going to stay afraid. Dan, maybe you should find somebody else. Maybe you should stay away from me.”

I almost told her that I didn’t want anyone else, that I never really wanted anyone else and that I sure as hell never would want anyone else. But that would have been a mistake, so I went to my room without saying anything more.

A mistake. The whole damned thing was a mistake, the whole stupid bit from the minute I walked into my room that first day.

I was in love with her.

Hopelessly, thoroughly in love, like it says in the lousy books I used to write.

I read for a few hours in my room but my mind wouldn’t stay on what I was reading. I found myself reading the same paragraph five times over, and at that point I tossed the book against the wall and slipped on a beat-up sport jacket.

It was still raining outside. It was drizzly and damp, and after I walked a few blocks I realized that my feet were wet and I was damned uncomfortable.

For a minute I wondered why in hell I was wandering around in the rain like an idiot. Didn’t I have enough sense to come in out of the rain?

Of course I did.

Then what did I want?

I knew what I wanted. I wanted Marcia with her head on my pillow and her body naked and twisting under me.

But I couldn’t get that. So what else did I want? What did I want that I could find out in the rainy streets? What was I looking for?

I found what I was looking for on the corner of Broadway and 103rd Street. She was leaning in a doorway and she went “Sssss!” when I walked past her.

She was about as subtle as a Sherman tank.

She was built a good deal better than a Sherman tank, however. She wasn’t beautiful, and her face was no better than passable. But this is something that has never mattered with me when it comes to whores. A whore is a means to an end. A whore is a woman who takes another woman’s place when the other woman isn’t around. A whore — sometimes — is a vaguely refined and extremely expensive masturbatory device.

A whore doesn’t have to be beautiful.

I stopped in the doorway and smiled at her — the strange and totally insincere sort of smile that a man flashes at a whore. She smiled back and it was the same kind of smile.

“Hi,” she said. “You want to come with me?”

I nodded.

“Ten dollars,” she said.

I could have argued her down to eight, maybe to seven. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You can bargain with hustlers the same way you can bargain with landladies and pawnbrokers. But I’ve never been able to talk down a whore. There’s something of an insult in the idea — as if you’re telling a girl her body isn’t worth ten dollars or whatever she’s charging. You can tell a guy his watch is lousy, but you can’t tell a girl she’s not put together properly.

At least I can’t. I went down to Tiajuana with another screenwriter a few years back and we wound up on crib row — a street just like all the Mexican streets described in all the sin city articles in the magazines.

There was a girl who wanted two dollars and my buddy talked her down to a buck. But I gave her three.

So I didn’t hassel. I followed her instead into the hotel on the corner, past the desk and into the elevator. On the way the room clerk flashed me a sleepy smile, but I didn’t bother smiling back at him.

We were the only passengers in the elevator. The car stopped on the sixth floor and I followed her down the hallway to a room. She opened the door and we stepped inside.

She turned on the light and I got a better look at her. She wasn’t really bad-looking — a few years younger than I am, with faded yellow hair and a decent build. Her teeth were a little crooked and there were crowfeet around her eyes and lines around the corners of her mouth.

She might have been quite attractive once.

“Ten dollars,” she said. I took out my wallet and gave her the money. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of money left.

“You aren’t the law, are you?” She didn’t seem particularly worried.

“If I were, you’d be arrested by now.”

She shook her head. “Not without exposing my privates,” she said. “That’s the first a cop can pull out his badge.”

“Would I tell you if I were a cop?”

She shrugged. “No,” she said. “But you aren’t. I can usually tell. Not every time, but most times.”

I nodded. I tried to think of something bright and clever to say but I couldn’t think of anything. I started to wish the whole routine were over and done with.

“The hell,” she said. “You ain’t a cop. If you are, the hell with it.”

She tossed her raincoat on a chair and pulled her dress over her head. There was nothing underneath the dress. Then she walked over to the bed and lay down on it.

I undressed quickly, placing my clothes on the chair on top of hers. I didn’t particularly feel like looking at her and for some reason I didn’t want her to look at me. For a second I thought about the possibility of picking up a dose of clap. There was a good chance of it.

But I didn’t much care. Two shots of penicillin clears up a dose these days.

So who cared?

I walked over to the bed and lay down next to her. She put her arms around me and I held her awkwardly while she kissed my throat and chest. She gave a practised squirm against me and made a little moaning sound in her throat.

Her body felt like a hunk of ice. It wasn’t her — it was a passable body and I’m sure she could use it in a more than passable manner. But I just didn’t care.

I touched her and let my hands linger on her smooth skin. She kissed me again and pulled my head down to her full breasts and I kissed them, biting the nipples gently.

Nothing was happening.

We stayed like that for another five minutes or so but there wasn’t much point in the whole deal. I touched her and she touched me and the whole performance was pretty touching, but nothing was happening.

She stopped suddenly and leaned up on an elbow.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“This happen a lot of the time?”

I shook my head.

“Were you drinking or something? A lot of the time when a guy gets to drinking—”

I shook my head again.

“You don’t know what’s the matter?”

I did, but I didn’t want to tell her. She might have understood; whores are supposed to be very understanding, or at least it says so in the book.

“Maybe it’s something I ate.”

She started to laugh and I looked at her. “It’s a joke,” she said. “I mean, it’s the punchline to a joke. Maybe you heard it.” Whereupon she proceded to tell me the most obscene joke I had heard in the last ten-odd years, and it alone was worth the price of the evening.

But nothing was happening.

“Is there any special way?” she wanted to know. “I mean anything I can do for you that’ll—”

I shook my head again. I was about as talkative as a corpse. And about as potent as one.

“It happens,” she said. “It happens to everybody. It’s nothing to worry about or anything, I mean.”

“I know,” I said. I stood up from the bed and groped my way across toward the chair. I felt ridiculously naked.

“Wait.”

I turned around and walked back toward her. I sat down on the edge of the bed and she rested her head in my lap and looked up at me.

“Is it me?” she asked. “Is there something wrong?”

“No — what do you mean?”

She turned her head away from me. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought maybe you didn’t like me or I was too old or something. I—”

“No,” I told her. “No, it’s just the way I feel.”

I started to say something else but suddenly I noticed that she was almost ready to cry, that the tears were starting to well up in the corners of her eyes. And at that minute she stopped being a whore and became a person. I saw how afraid she was that men wouldn’t want her any more, that she was growing old and losing what beauty she had had. I looked at her breasts and hips and thighs and ran my hand over all of her gently as if to reassure her that this was not the case.

There was nothing the matter with her.

There was one thing, but it wasn’t her fault. She wasn’t Marcia, and that was the trouble.

She didn’t move while I dressed. I pulled my clothes on in a hurry, and I stood there beside her while she lay there naked on the bed. I was trying to think of something to say.

“You’re very pretty,” I said.

It was a stab in the right direction. “I’m not,” she said, but I could tell she was glad to hear it. “I used to be a few years ago.”

She stood up then and put on her dress and her shoes and her coat. “Do you want your money back?” she asked. “I didn’t do much to earn it.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Here—” I reached for my wallet and handed her an extra five-spot. “It wasn’t your fault.”

The money was something she could understand. She beamed solemnly and put in the pocket of her dress and we went down the elevator and out of the hotel.

She stood in the doorway where I had found her and I walked past her and down Broadway toward my room. It was still raining — a hard rain, driving and wetting and making the streets slippery.

The rain soaked my hair and went through my jacket and shirt to my skin. I stepped in puddles as I walked and my feet were sopping.

My pant legs were tight against my legs; my shirt was cold and wet. The rain lashed against my face and dripped down my forehead into my eyes.

It was a hell of a night. It was wet and cold and uncomfortable.

I kept on walking. I almost forgot to turn east on 85th Street — I got halfway to 84th Street before I remembered, and I turned into the rain and walked back and across Broadway and along toward my place.

The rain seemed to be coming down wholesale. It was raining cats, dogs, buckets, pitchforks, and all the other reliable clichés.

It was raining like hell.

But I hardly noticed it.

Chapter Seven

Three days later I had a hundred pages and an outline ready to take to Lou. Everything was stacked neatly on my desk and it looked very impressive — a pile of manuscript with a neat cover sheet on it, a pile of copy paper and a few sheets with the rest of the book in outline form.

It was damned impressive, but it was the same thing I had three days ago. No more and no less.

Marcia was avoiding me. She was staying away from me, and without her around I couldn’t get anything written; I could always trot down to Lou’s with the script, but I didn’t even feel like doing that. I couldn’t get up a hell of a lot of enthusiasm for the whole routine.

So I wasted the time proofreading the script, cutting my toenails and reading paperbacks. The money was sadly dwindling down to nothing — I paid my rent by shoving an envelope under Marcia’s door, and after that my wallet was flatter than the envelope.

Maybe it was a good thing I was broke. I would have bought a case of Scotch if I had the money, but the way it was I stayed away from the liquor stores and kept the purple fuzz from climbing in between my scalp and my skull.

That was something.

I kept running into Carol in the hallway but I didn’t want her any more than I had wanted the whore on 103rd Street. There was a world of difference and about $90 bucks between Carol and Miss 103rd Street, but they had one vital quality in common.

Neither of them was Marcia.

The outcome of it was that I avoided Carol as much as I possibly could. I didn’t have delusions of grandeur; I knew there was very little danger that she would try to rape me. But seeing her, seeing any attractive woman, only made me want Marcia more than ever. And that was something to avoid.

When the knock came at the door I was engaged in ripping a page out of a book. When I’m reading a real stinking one I rip the pages out as I go along. That does two things — it makes it easier to keep my place, and it makes sure that no other poor idiot will get trapped into reading the thing when I’m through with it.

So I crumpled the page into a little ball and flipped it at the wastebasket. Then I went for the door. I had a half-hearted hope that it would be Marcia, because I knew that any day she’d walk in wanting me. She would do it just that way, and I was damn well going to be ready for her when she came.

But it wasn’t Marcia. It was Carol.

“Phone call,” she said. “For you.”

I was surprised, because the last thing I expected was a telephone call and I couldn’t figure out who would be calling me. Who knew where I was?

For that matter, who knew I was alive?

“Don’t just stand there,” Carol was saying. “It could be important or something.”

I nodded stupidly.

“C’mon,” she coaxed. “Right down the hall. You can make it. I know you can.”

I nodded again and started down the hallway. I picked up the phone and said “Hello” in an expectant tone of voice.

“Danny boy?”

“Lou!”

He chuckled. “Who the hell did you think it was? Some bim of yours?”

“How did you know where to call me?”

“I just picked a number at random. I’m a good guesser, Danny boy.”

“What—”

“Hold on,” he said. “You didn’t give me your number when you were in here. You were too dumb to think of anything that clever. But you left your return address on the envelope. Get it?”

“Oh.”

“Look,” he said, “I got money for you. That crime short you mailed in, I sold it to Killer. Can you use some dough?”

“You expect me to tell you I can’t?”

He chuckled again. “A hundred bucks,” he said. “They were stuck with a hole in the issue a few hours before press time, so I held them up for 2c a word. It’ll be in the mail tonight.”

“Wait a minute.” I hauled out my wallet and looked at two crumpled singles sitting all by themselves in a corner and looking very lonely. “Can I come down and pick up the dough, Lou?”

“Sure — you broke?”

“You could call it that.”

“Right,” he said. “Come on down.”

The phone clicked in my ear. He always hung up first, no matter who he was talking to. I never called him or had him call me without hearing the phone click in my ear. One time I tried an experiment: I started to hang up in the middle of a sentence. But the son of a bitch beat me to it.

I cashed one of the dollars getting on a subway and got to his office as quickly as I could. The air was cool, and I found myself wishing the check were big enough so that I could pick up an overcoat. I was almost into the elevator before I realized the script to my novel was back in the room.

For a minute I thought the hell with it. Then I figured I might as well get the thing on the way to market. I got back on the damned subway and rode back uptown and walked to my room. The subway was stuffy and stank to the heavens, and I pretty much felt like staying out of it as much as possible. So I bummed two bucks from Carol and took a cab back to Lou’s place with the script in tow.

Brittle-voice was waiting for me. “Mr. Larkin?”

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “You remembered the name.”

She smiled at me. She showed so many teeth with the smile I was afraid she was going to bite me, and then she wiggled a little so that her big breasts could raise hell with my blood pressure.

“Of course,” she said. “I wouldn’t forget you, Mr. Larkin.”

“How come?”

“You’re the glamour,” she said. “The glamour they promised me at the employment agency. Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

It made a hell of a lot of sense to me even if I felt about as glamorous as a pot-bellied stove. But her name didn’t happen to be Marcia Banks, and talking to her and watching her breasts bob up and down did nothing to me.

“Can I see Lou?”

She nodded and I watched fascinated as the breasts rose and fell gaily. Then she fiddled with a buzzer, snapped some words into a mouthpiece and grinned idiotically at me. “Go on,” she said. “But come back.”

I had to come back; it was the only way out of the office. But I didn’t bother to tell her that. I walked into Lou’s office and tossed the script on his desk.

“Pay me,” I said.

He stubbed out a cigarette and reached for another. “What’s this?” he asked. “You doing that book?”

“What did you think? I’d be drinking?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I did.”

I shrugged. “I couldn’t afford to.”

His hand toyed with the pages of the script. “What’s it about?”

“Pay me,” I said.

“The book — what’s this one about? Is it any good?”

“My money.”

“Let’s talk about the book,” he said. “Here we got a book to talk about and you want to talk about money. Money isn’t so important. The question is Is it art? To hell with money.”

“To hell with you,” I said. “You’d peddle your wife for ten percent.”

He pursed his lips. “Yeah? You got a buyer lined up?”

I laughed and he handed me an envelope. “Ninety bucks,” he said. “A C-note less ten for me. I figured you wouldn’t want to run around cashing a check.”

I stuffed the money in my pocket. “You figured right,” I said. “Now if you feel like talking about the book—”

He ran a hand through his messy hair and flashed me a mock frown. “Danny boy,” he said. “Danny, you got here — if I can tell how high a stack this is — about half a book. Is it any good or should we chuck it in the ash-can?”

“You’re the agent.”

“What do you think of it?”

“I think it’s good, Lou. I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever written.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “We have here half a book,” he said. “You say it’s good. It better be good.”

I sat back in the chair and tried to relax. He stubbed out the new cigarette, reached for another one, and started thumbing through the script. He went through it like a satyr through a harem and it looked as though he was just checking the numbers at the top of the pages, but I knew that when he got through he would be able to tell me the names of the characters and every detail of the plot, in addition to knowing just where he would sell the thing, for how much and when. He could do that. He could look at the middle of each page for maybe three seconds and have the page read and filed away in his memory.

He was going fast, but it didn’t make it any easier for me to relax. There are two times when it is totally impossible to relax. One is when your girl friend thinks she is going to have a baby and the other is when your agent is reading something you wrote. One’s as bad as the next.

He finished and looked up at me. “You’re right,” he said softly. “It’s the best thing you ever wrote.”

I let out my breath. “You can sell it?”

“I’ve sold worse.”

“Then you can sell it?”

“I can sell damn near anything,” he said cheerfully. “This I can sell with one eye shut. Can you stay sober long enough to finish it?”

“I can try.”

He shook his head. “Danny boy,” he said. “Danny,you’re a son of a bitch. I think that’s the only reason I put up with you.”

“There’s another reason,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Ten percent,” I said.

He closed one eye. “You could be right,” he said. “Now will you get the hell out of here and finish your book? I got work to do.”

I got out. I felt good — if Lou said something was good, it was good. Sales take time — you don’t start worrying about a book until it’s been out a year, so there was a good chance I wouldn’t see money for awhile. But the book was good. I still knew how to write, and I had ninety iron men in my pocket that meant I could still write things that editors would buy.

I felt so good I smiled to brittle-voice on my way out.

I floated down the elevator and I floated out to the street. I floated into a taxicab and the hack floated uptown to my dump, and I floated a heavy tip into the cabby’s hot little fist and floated up to my room.

Like I said, I was feeling happy. It was better than alcohol, better than a pleasant evening with a warm woman. It was a very nice feeling.

I felt so good, as a matter of complete fact, that I took it for granted I would sleep with Marcia that night. This was something of an error in judgment. Marcia wasn’t having any, to reduce things to their lowest common denominator.

And I was feeling so good I didn’t much give a damn.

I took the night off. I went to a movie on 42nd Street and remembered in the middle of the picture that I had seen it before. A little further along it came to me that I wrote the damned thing, and this made me feel better than ever. The picture was a dog-and-a-half — I wrote some real garbage out in Hollywood. But I waited around just to see my name on the screen. Sure enough, it was listed way down on the bottom of the last shot of credit lines, under the wardrobe attendant and the tenth set designer.

But it looked good.

I played marksman at the shooting gallery and hung around on the corner listening to a Save-Your-Soul boy giving a crowd holy hell. I tossed a dime to a blind beggar and spent half an hour listening to an auctioneer’s spiel in a Broadway sucker-trap.

It didn’t much matter where I went. I was feeling so great that I just wanted to be around people. It didn’t matter who they were. I got into a long involved discussion with a lieutenant in the Lithuanian Army in Exile, and I helped an old lady break up a loaf of bread for the pigeons in Bryant Park behind the public library.

I didn’t stop for a single drink. Not a celebration drink or a pick-up drink or any kind of a drink — not even a beer.

I didn’t need it.

I stopped dead in front of one of the first-run movie houses on Broadway near 45th Street. There was a person on one of the stills who looked too goddam familiar, and when I took another look I saw that she was very familiar indeed.

It was Allison.

I couldn’t believe it at first. I hadn’t looked at a newspaper for weeks, and I didn’t keep up with the trade news those last few months in Hollywood. The last I remembered Allison King was a good little starlet — a gal who would get someplace someday but who was far away from the place now.

But suddenly she was a star.

It was too much to miss. I bought a ticket and found myself a seat in the balcony between a necking couple and a pair of old ladies and I watched the picture. I needed another picture like I needed eleven toes, but I wanted to see how I would react to Allison. Hell, the woman had thrown me for enough of a loop so that I was just beginning to get back. She had me drinking rivers and waking up in gutters.

I wondered if I was really over her yet.

It turned out that I was. When I saw her moving around on the screen like a goddess it didn’t do a thing to me. All I felt was a vague sensation of recognition — I knew that this was a woman that I had known and known intimately, but I couldn’t conceive ever having been in love with her.

That made me feel good.

The picture was one of those sickly-sweet bits with the hero and the gal wanting each other from the beginning to the end and finally getting each other and happiness and hearts and flowers and all that. I could see every twist and turn in the plot coming — hell, I wrote ones just like that when I was out on the coast. I left before it was over, partly because my eyes were starting to burn from all the movies and partly because looking at Allison King was my idea of nothing to do. The experiment was a success.

But it wasn’t all that wonderful. Because Allison King wasn’t dead and buried — she was replaced by somebody else, somebody I wanted much more deeply then I had ever wanted Allison.

With Allison I was in love with an idea, with a picture of a woman created half in my own mind and half by the actress she was. But Marcia Banks was no actress and my mind was done making pretty pictures.

This was something a lot more real.

That much was good. It’s better to be in love with real people than with celluloid images, just the way it’s better to slay dragons than to tilt at windmills. There’s more of a feeling of purpose and reality present.

But in a way it was bad.

Because if anything went completely wrong with Marcia I knew I would snap and nothing would put the pieces back together again. If you tilt at windmills and miss, the worst thing that can happen is you fall on your stupid face.

If you miss a dragon, the dragon bites your fool head off.

I took the subway back and sang all the way. I walked the few blocks from the station to the room and put my money in the drawer. I tossed my jacket at a chair and hung up my pants.

My dragon wasn’t ready to play ball, so there was nothing to do but go to sleep.

So I did.

Chapter Eight

The next night I was sitting in my chair looking out at the window. Sometimes you can sit in one position for hours, looking at everything and at nothing at all. With a fire in the fireplace it’s easy — you watch the flames flicker and dance around and your back gets cold and your face gets warm and your mind wanders all over the place.

It’s not as easy with a window overlooking 85th Street, but it’s better than nothing. There are stickball games in the street with the kids knocking spaldeens around with broomsticks and re-routing the cars around the other streets. Sometimes the game gets rough and the kids use the broomsticks on each other’s heads. It’s all something to look at.

I started staring around four in the afternoon and stayed in the same position except for a cigarette break and a cup of coffee at the greasy spoon a little later on. I watched when the streetlights went on all by themselves and all at once, and I watched the stickball game break up when the kids went home for supper. Or maybe they went out mugging people; I didn’t really care.

And then all by itself it got to be eight o’clock and the book still wasn’t getting much of any place and I didn’t feel like staring out the window any more. Besides, it was getting to be the time when people undressed in the building across the way. The idea of getting nabbed as a peeping Tom didn’t appeal to me.

The idea of seeing Marcia did.

So I stood up and listened to my bones crack a little the way they do when you’ve been sitting long enough in one position.

And I stalked slowly out of my room, turning out the light behind me.

And I closed the door after me.

And I walked down the hallway.

I even started to whistle as I went. I don’t remember the tune, and that’s funny because I should have remembered it. But I didn’t, and after a bar or so I stopped whistling and stood in front of her door.

The door wasn’t closed. It wasn’t wide open; it was maybe a foot or so ajar and the lights were on inside.

I heard enough noise inside to know she was in there, and it was at this point that I did the wrong thing. I should have knocked. As a matter of complete fact, it would have been a much more intelligent thing to knock.

I thought of this. I thought that she might be undressed or something of the sort, but I figured that I had seen her undressed often enough so that she wouldn’t blow her top over the idea.

So I didn’t knock.

I was very coy about the whole thing. Oh, I was as cute as a goddamned bedbug. Cunning. Clever.

I gently — very gently — shoved the door open about six inches. It was a good door and it didn’t let out the tiniest creak. Then I leaned forward and stuck my stupid head out and peaked around the door and into the room.

Then I didn’t do anything.

I started to fall on the floor, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything.

Marcia had a very nice room. I was seeing it for the first time, and it was an especially nice room. The closet was by the side of the door to the right and it was open, and there was a very nice collection of clothing hanging from the various hooks and wire coat-hangers.

The dresser was good, too. Mahogany, I would guess, and artistically designed. There was an oriental rug on the floor. There was a table with a bowl of fresh flowers and a box of note-paper.

There was a bed — a good wide bed with clean, smooth linen sheets.

There was a pillow on the bed.

There were two heads on the pillow. They both had long hair.

There was Marcia’s head and there was Carol’s head. Each head was attached to a body, and the bodies were lying very close together on the bed. Marcia’s mouth seemed to be glued to Carol’s mouth, and Carol’s hands had encircled Marcia’s little breasts and were squeezing them gently.

Of course I can’t be sure the hands were squeezing the breasts gently. But Marcia didn’t scream, so I suppose Carol’s hands were gentle.

Then Carol’s mouth carefully disengaged itself from Marcia’s mouth and travelled slowly down Marcia’s body. I watched the mouth kiss the soft skin, travelling slowly down the throat to the firm little breasts, down to the gently rounded stomach.

It was almost like a painting. Think of the color combination; picture it in your mind. There was the linen sheet, clean and white. There was the mahogany dresser in the corner. There was Marcia’s body, all soft and brown, and Carol’s body all pink.

Oh, it was lovely, all right.

I kept watching. I couldn’t help myself, couldn’t move from the spot. As I said, I almost fell on the floor — but I didn’t, and I went right on watching.

I listened, too. I listened to the smooth, almost tender flow of soft words from Carol’s lips when they weren’t busy making kisses against Marcia’s flesh.

I listened to the little moans that came from deep in the back of Carol’s throat. They were the same moans that she made when she was with me, soft and husky and unbelievably beautiful.

They sounded so familiar that it was uncanny.

I watched and I listened, and neither of them saw me. I watched for a length of time that felt like an hour but was probably closer to ten or twelve minutes — and that’s a lot of time to watch two women sexing around on a linen sheet. It’s even longer when you’re in love with one of the gals and you’ve sacked out with both of them — although not both at the same time.

It was a long time.

It was one hell of a long time, and at first I started to fall on the floor like I said, and then I wanted to scream and throw things, and then the cold sweat started to mat the hair in my armpits and I just wanted to go someplace and hide. I wanted to crawl in a hole and pull the hole in. I wanted to take a nitric acid shower. I wanted to get drunk on wood alcohol. I wanted to try out razor blades on my wrists. I wanted to find a nice warm bathtub and open my veins.

But I was very good about the whole thing. I took a finger and closed my eyelids one at a time, and then I pulled my neck back from the doorway and turned myself around. Then I lifted my right foot and drew it back, and then I lifted my left foot and took a very hesitant step, and then I walked quite quickly toward the front door.

I didn’t even bang the door on my way out.

You see, I remember all that. I remember it so vividly that it’s surprising that I can’t remember the tune I was starting to whistle on my way to the room, because the scene on the linen sheet is one that I’ll never forget. It’s as clear as it was when I stood there like a dummy watching and listening. I could go over every caress, every kiss, every word and every moan as if it were happening right now.

But I don’t remember much of what happened after that, and quite a lot did happen. It’s all blurred and mixed up and it stinks of alcohol and sweat and drugstore perfume and other smells that were even less pleasant.

There was the subway. That was the beginning, and that’s strange in a way because it might have been more natural for me to head for the nearest bottle — a liquor store on Amsterdam or a bar on Columbus Avenue. Instead I got on a train and got off somewhere in the Village.

But it probably makes more sense that way. I was going back to the beginning, the place where it all started. Maybe my life started in East Harlem, but the Harlem days were gone and almost forgotten, back in the same closed book with stickball and swiping hubcaps and all that.

But the Village was where everything seemed to start, and that was where I headed. The subway ride there is one of the blurred things — I remember staring at the ads and picking up a day-old copy of the New York Post and glaring at the advice to the lovelorn column, but that’s about all.

I had most of the fifty bucks from the crime yarn sale,and I started in on it in the first village bar I spotted, a joint on Bleecker Street with good Scotch. All I remember about it was that the Scotch was good and that the bartender kept wiping the bar-top with a white towel that remained miraculously clean no matter how many drinks he wiped up.

I poured down a lot of Scotch and took a walk.

People go on drunks in one of two ways, if they hit the bars. One kind drinks at one bar until they throw him out or he quits, and the other tries to reach every bar in town. I’m the travelling type; maybe it’s tied up with the way I live my whole life, never staying anywhere long enough, never keeping a real solid friendship and never growing roots. I tried to hit all the bars in the Village that night, and I probably almost made it.

I remember flashes — little isolated patches that come back from time to time. I remember playing games with the knee of a doll who must have been seventy if she was a day, and I don’t remember what happened after that. She had a gleam in her eye as if I was the first man who ever looked at her since the end of the Spanish-American War, and her one tooth wiggled back and forth when she smiled.

I got in a minor fight in a neighborhood bar on Seventh Avenue but I can’t remember how it started. I think I did pretty well — I have a vague memory of chopping somebody in the throat just when he was getting ready to snap off the neck of a beer bottle and put the sharp glass through my windpipe. I must have come out all right, because there are no scars on my neck right now.

It would be better if I could give a straight record of what happened, but things don’t come to you that way. It’s all in snatches, all blurred with smoke and stinking with liquor and beer.

I managed to wander into one place that turned out to be a Macdougal Street lesbian hole with boy-girls all over the place — dancing cheek-to-cheek and holding hands. Normally I don’t mind that sort of bit. I figure everybody has a right to his own taste, and like an actor on the Coast put it, “If you haven’t tried it, don’t knock it.”

But this wasn’t the night for it. Not the right night at all, not after the little show on 85th Street. I made myself pretty obnoxious between drinks as I remember, and that’s something I don’t do as a rule. It’s not a particularly cute trick to begin with, because the lesbo boy-girls are frequently built like breasted truck drivers and can throw an elephant two out of three falls.

I cornered one of them and started yammering like an idiot about how does a girl get that way, and I was too dumb to figure out that she wanted to talk to me about as much as she wanted to sleep with me. The manager saved my life and steered me to the door before she got the notion to break my head for me, which would have been one hell of a way to die.

I can see the headlines now: DYKE DENTS HACK’S HEAD.

On the street I latched onto another gay gal and talked her ear off, and I got involved in something which would have been more than worth remembering if I could only remember it. She came up with a long, heartbreaking story about how she became a practising lesbian when she was still in high school and never could stop. She would have been pretty, except that she had her hair cut in a man’s crew and was wearing a pair of slacks and a black leather jacket. Her nose was short and stubby, and her features and body added up to the type of gal the copywriters call boyish — freckles on the little nose, bright eyes, and so on. The adjective would have applied to her all across the board.

She went on to say that she had tried to get back to normal and had picked up a man in a bar. The results were weak. She still liked girls and didn’t like men at all, but she had managed to get herself pregnant.

I don’t remember whether I laughed or not. I hope I didn’t laugh, because if you think about it there is absolutely nothing funny about a pregnant lesbian, nothing in the world. There is, when you come right down to it, something pretty pathetic about the whole notion.

I wound up sitting on a bar stool in some other bar with the pregnant lesbian on the stool next to me, and I told her my story and she told me hers. I wound up with the clever idea that the two of us get married so that the child would be legitimate.

“Why not?” she said.

“Why not, indeed?” I echoed.

“You wouldn’t want sex?”

I frowned and explained I was off sex for life.

Now I don’t know precisely what happened after that. I don’t know, and I honestly wish I did know, because the idea of walking around engaged to be married to a drunken lesbian who is also pregnant holds a certain amount of poetic beauty. I have found myself wondering just what happened to the girl and how in the world I ever managed to get rid of her or how, for that matter, she managed to ditch me.

It’s something I’ll never know. One moment I was sitting on the bar stool with the girl looking at me earnestly and the overhead lights glinting off the shininess of her little nose, and the air smelling slightly sour and a glass of scotch by my elbow, and the next minute I was somewhere else.

The somewhere else was another bar. I remember the bar, a moderately classy place off Sheridan Square. It was where I picked up the girl whose name was probably Elsa.

Probably, because from this place on there’s very little I’m sure of. Elsa, or whatever-the-hell her name was, was built like the Great Wall of China. She was a Bohemian type with black hair hanging down to her navel and big hoopy gold earrings hanging almost as far. She was built so that the front of her walked into a room a good ten seconds before the rear.

She was true to type — the little doll who goes to a “progressive” high school and moves from the Bronx to the Village three days after she graduates, rents a dump for a tremendous rental that Papa pays for, and bit by bit begins to sleep with half the male population of New York.

If you’re sad enough, she’ll drag you off to bed. If you need understanding, she’s ready and willing to help. If you’re a writer or an actor or a painter or a sculptor or some kind of phony, you have to struggle to get away from her.

I was in no mood to struggle.

“You’ve got problems,” Elsa was saying. “Like, you’re disturbed. Upset, I mean.”

I finished the Scotch.

She reached out a hand and made little circles on the back of my hand and gave me a long, direct look. There was heavy pancake makeup under her eyes that made them look impossibly big, and her look seemed to be the stare of a psychotic heroin addict.

“Upset,” she said. “Something has to happen, you know? You’re down, and you got to shake this bit or you’ll stay down. Right?”

I sort of smiled.

“Upset,” she repeated firmly.

I managed to let the guy behind the bar know I wanted another drink, and I managed to drink what he poured,and by this time Elsa had a hand on my knee and was squeezing it gently. Subtle, she was.

“I’m just drunk,” I said.

“I’m hip.”

“Yeah. Look, I’m just drunk. Besides, your name isn’t Marcia.”

“Marcia?”

I nodded slowly. “The one I told you about.”

“Dig,” she said, “if what’s bugging you is my name isn’t Marcia, call me Marcia. Call me Heloise, if it makes you happy. Pretend I’m your mother if that’s how you get your kicks.”

“It’s not,” I said.

She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. There was one cat liked me to play Mama, you know. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

I swallowed what was left of the Scotch. I was almost sober again; when you drink seriously, you can reach a stage like that — what an alcoholic calls drinking yourself straight. Everything becomes crystal clear suddenly. The only trouble is that it doesn’t last too long.

“C’mon,” she said. She stood up and tugged at my arm.

“Whereto?”

“My pad,” she said. And out the door we went.

Her pad turned out to be even phonier than she was, which was going some. It had the conventional chianti bottles with the conventional candles in them and the conventional low narrow beds — three of them, one to a wall — and the conventional modern mobile hung from the ceiling and was conventional sloppy, with the conventional garbage on the conventionally carpeted floor.

I’m pretty glad I don’t remember much of what happened after Elsa and I settled on the bed by the window and threw our clothes in a tired heap on the floor. I’m sure Elsa was about as inspired as a dishrag, and my performance must have left a good deal to be desired. However, my mind is happily blank until the point where I woke up and it was morning and my head was splitting and Elsa was sound asleep.

And there were nude couples sexing on the two other beds, and the lights were still on.

At first I thought it was all part of a terrible hangover — the hangover that was currently making little pieces out of my poor head. But they were real, and watching them sexing merrily and occasionally shouting words of jolly encouragement to one another only made me more conscious of how much I needed a hair of the dog that bit me. I wormed my way back into my clothes, waved to Elsa and to the other two couples, and groped out the doorway. Nobody even bothered to say good-bye to me.

The bars were open, and I found a cozy one and went to it with a vengeance. Solid food seemed like a horrible thought the way I felt, and after awhile the hangover evaporated and everything was good again. I drank all day, wandering from bar to bar and drink to drink, losing my jacket somewhere and vomiting neatly in the circle in Washington Square.

That’s all I remember. It undoubtedly went much further than that, and for all I know there might have been another run-in with Elsa or with my pregnant lesbian friend. Anything could have happened, and several things obviously happened, including a lot more liquor.

But the last thing I remember was the scene in Washington Square. There’s a big circle at the foot of Fifth Avenue, there and in the center of the circle is a fountain which is turned off most of the time. Where the fountain is, and when the fountain isn’t turned on, the neighborhood brats gather to play a strange variety of handball and otherwise pass the time.

They were doing that just then, and I waded into the area to join them. The thought of a rousing game of handball seemed incredibly appealing.

There was a little kid with dirt on his face looking at me as though I was completely out of my mind, and there was another kid who seemed to be wondering just what I intended to prove by planting myself in the midst of their game, and there was another kid bouncing the ball off the base of the fountain.

I went for the ball. I leaped for the ball, to be perfectly accurate, and I missed the ball by at least ten feet, and my stomach turned over twice and then proceeded to turn itself completely inside-out at the precise middle of the circle.

I was a great social success. I lost contact with the earth and watched the pavement spin around for a moment or two. Then the pavement rushed up at me at top speed, and then I knocked hell out of the pavement with my face.

And then, like it says in the books, everything turned a beautiful shade of black.

Chapter Nine

Light.

That was the first sensation, just as the last sensation had been one of overwhelming blackness. The light came on slowly, steadily, until everything was far too bright and I had to shut my eyes against it.

Then my name — Dan Larkin.

Then sensation returning to my body.Awareness, first of all. The discovery that I was lying down, and that I was lying on pavement. And that I was lying in my own vomit.

More sensations. An impossible emptiness in my stomach. Every muscle strained and cramped, every nerve twitching. A headache that was too big for my head and spread over the rest of my body. Dampness — in my clothing, my hair, my whole body.

I poked my tongue around my mouth in a hesitant search for teeth and they all seemed to be present. I counted ribs and they were all there too.

No bones broken.

There were two possibilities. One: I was still alive.

Two: I was dead and this was Hell.

I felt like hell but a glance around revealed that I was in New York. I stood up and took several gentle steps without falling on my face. I seemed to be in an alley, and I wondered vaguely had I landed there.

I walked around. I left the alley and found out that I had managed somehow to leave the Village and to wind up over on the East Side.

Then I began remembering.

The first thing I remembered was my magnificent exit in Washington Square. Then the other little gems came back to me, helping the headache I had achieve frightening proportions.

Well, I thought. Well, jerk, you tied one on, didn’t you?

Yes, I answered myself solemnly.

Idiot, I castigated myself. Why?

Yes — why? Why the hell had I gone out and knocked myself for a loop? And, for that matter, what day was it? What month?

But, above all, why?

I got all the way to a subway before I remembered why, and then I felt like going back to the alley again. Ah, yes. Ah, ah, ah. Marcia.

The little hermaphrodite I was in love with.

Yeah.

By this time my hangover had become a contender for an award of some sort or another. My head had bells ringing in it. My stomach had holes in it and my guts were leaking over the subway stairs with every halting step I took.

I felt horrible.

It wasn’t until I dug into my pocket for money to buy a token that it came to me that I didn’t have any money. I reached for my wallet and wasn’t particularly astounded to discover that someone else was now its owner. Nor was I especially amazed to note that my watch was also on the missing list. It was all part of the pattern.

It’s strange to discover how much easier it is to get by on a lie than on the truth. Fifteen persons glared at my growth of beard and sloppy clothing and passed by in a rush when I asked for subway fare. Finally I changed my approach and asked for fifteen cents toward a bottle of sneaky Pete. In no time at all I had enough for the subway and for a hangover antidote as well.

The hangover remedy came first. I left the subway in a staggery rush and hurried into a grimy restaurant. The waitress looked as bad as I felt.

“A glass of Worcestershire sauce,” I grunted. “With a dash of tomato juice.”

She laughed haggishly and brought me tomato juice with Worcester sauce in it, which was better than nothing. It tasted terrible but I got it down and my stomach felt a little better. A cup of black coffee followed. It tasted terrible, too — mainly because they weren’t putting nearly enough coffee in their coffee and my cup must have been the ninth pressing of the grapes.

But I got it down and my head stopped spinning around. I bought my token, boarded the subway, and rested my chin in one hand. I felt rotten — too rotten at first to do much of anything but think about how rotten I felt.

I changed to a west side train at Times Square and my head began to clear up. Physically I was a mess inside and out. My stomach was bubbling and my mouth tasted as though someone had been using it for a garbage can. My clothes were ripped in spots and practically glued to my body. I needed a shave badly.

I rubbed at my beard, trying to figure out what day it might be. After four days it’s hard to guess by the growth of beard how long you’ve gone without a shave.

But it was more than four days.

The simple thing would have been to buy a paper, but I didn’t have the necessary nickel left after the breakfast and the subway fare. I thought of picking up a cast-off newspaper from a trashcan but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort, and when I got off the train at the 86th Street station I walked straight home without bothering to look around and find out what the hell day it was.

I didn’t particularly care.

I walked up the steps and into the hallway and almost bumped into Carol on the way into my room. She looked at me as if I had just crawled out of a sewer.

“My goodness,” she said.

I didn’t say anything; I just looked at her. She looked good — she was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that was almost off-the-breasts as well as off-the-shoulder, and I was enough taller than her to see halfway down her navel. It was a nice view.

I should have hated her. That occurred to me immediately, and I was surprised to discover that I didn’t feel anything toward her, least of all hate. Snappy phrases popped into my head, about how she liked men and everything else and all that, but they all rolled right back out of my head just as easily. She was just another girl, and the fact that she had fallen into bed with a woman I was in love with didn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of difference. She was a woman — a woman I had slept with, a woman I was on speaking terms with, and that was absolutely all there was to it.

“Hello,” she said. “Remember me?”

I looked up suddenly, realizing that I had been standing still and staring at her breasts without uttering a word.

“Oh,” I said stupidly. “Hello.”

She giggled. “You really lost a weekend.”

“I guess so.”

“You look like hell.”

I grinned. “It figures — I feel like hell. I feel like the inside of a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap.”

“That’s bad. I don’t think I ever felt that bad. I felt like the inside of a football player’s sweat sock once, but never like the inside of a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap. How does it feel?”

You ought to hate her, I thought. You don’t have to stand around making jokes.

But I said, “I’d like to take off my skin. It’d be a lot better without it.”

“You might leak.”

“Leak?”

She nodded. “Without a skin, I mean. How in the world would everything stay together?”

“I’d grow a new skin.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure. Hell, lobsters and things like that do it all the time.”

“Lobsters have skins now?”

“No — they grow things back. Like a tail, for instance. If you chop off a lobster’s tail—”

“Why chop off a lobster’s tail?”

“To see if it would grow back.”

“Would it?”

I nodded. “Every time. Damned clever, these lobsters.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “You know, I think there’s money in it. All you have to do is buy one lobster, you see, and you chop off his tail, and he grows another one, and you chop that off, and he grows another one. And if you keep on like that—”

“You have a lot of lobster tails,” I finished for her.

“That’s right.”

“You mean there’s money in lobster tails?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a wonder I never thought of it,” I said. “A real wonder. Hardly any capital investment needed, since all you have to do is buy a lobster and a bowl for it to swim around in. It makes sense.”

“You have to feed him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I forgot that.”

“And you have to spend time changing the water and all that. And don’t forget you need a hatchet or something for chopping the tails.”

“That’s right. But it’s still a cheap operation. You could start on a shoestring.”

“Of course.”

“Funny,” I went on, “that I never thought of it before. Are you sure there’s that much money in it?”

“Of course,” she said. “Dan Larkin, you would be surprised how much money some people will pay for a piece of tail.”

When we both finished laughing over that one she said, “Oh, there was a phonecall for you, Dan Larkin. A good many phonecalls, as a matter of fact. All from the same person.”

“Who?”

“Lou somebody. I have the name written down, if you want me to—”

“Never mind; I know who it is.”

“He said it’s important,” she said. “He said that each time he called, and he called two or three times a day, so it must be important.”

“Was there any message beside that?”

She shook her head. “No — he just said it’s important and you should call him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

She smiled and went out the door — probably to provide some happy businessman from Connecticut with some matinee action — and I smiled and went into my room.

My room was the same, except that the bed was made. Marcia made the bed every Friday, so evidently it was after Friday. But that wasn’t too hard to figure out; the whole bit started on a Tuesday, and I already knew it was a good four days since I made like a Peeping Tom.

What could Lou want? Maybe an assignment, maybe something fairly important, or maybe he just wanted to talk to me. With Lou everything was important, and he could keep your phone ringing ten times a day on a good day.

Well, he would have to wait. First things came first, and the first thing was a bath and some clean clothes. I stripped down and wrapped myself up in a towel, more than a little ashamed of the griminess of the clothes and the layer of dirt that covered my body.

I was a mess, when you came right down to it.

I ran the bath water as hot as I could stand it and let myself soak. I washed my hair and worked the soap into my scalp, washing and rinsing a half-a-dozen times. I spent a good hour in the tub and when I got out of it I felt as clean outside as it is possible for a human being to feel.

I also felt almost as exhausted as it is possible for a human being to feel — exhausted and physically depleted the way you feel after a really hot bath. So I took a lukewarm shower for five minutes to start the blood circulating at the proper speed, and followed it with a quick cold shower to pep me up a little.

Then I shaved and brushed my teeth. That’s the magic combination; if you’re too far gone to be brought back to life by the taste of toothpaste and the tingle of aftershave lotion, there’s not much hope for you. It’s a good indication that you’re dead.

I wasn’t dead. I still didn’t feel perfect because of the general state of my guts, but I felt a whole lot more like playing ball with the outside world. I wasn’t in condition to beat up wildcats, but before a pair of mice could have laid me out. Now they couldn’t. I stood stark naked in the bathroom, silently daring any mice to come out of their holes and try some funny business. But not a single mouse came. They knew I was nobody to fool with.

I padded back to my room and gathered up the clothes I had come in. They weren’t really worth saving, so I rolled them up into a reeking little ball and deposited them gently in the wastebasket. I pushed the wastebasket into the far corner of the room and stretched out on the bed.

Lying down felt good. There was a lot of beauty in the idea of sacking out for a few hours, but there were too many things that had to be done. For one thing, I had to eat. When you’re young you can forget your stomach without doing too much damage to yourself, but I already had a head start on an ulcer with the alcohol and the binge.

I dressed quickly, and the combination of clean clothes and clean skin felt great. It occurred to me suddenly that the greasy spoon on Columbus Avenue was never going to give me credit, and eating money was somewhat essential. Carol was gone, and the idea of borrowing from Marcia had its limitations.

Strangely enough, the name Marcia didn’t give me goose-pimples or anything of the sort. This was a surprise, and I said it twice to myself and once out loud to test myself. No reaction.

Was it possible I was over her? I didn’t think so but the binge had done one thing. It had taken some of the hunger out of my system. I was relaxed.

But I was also certain that the next time I saw her I’d be twice as hungry as ever.

At the moment my main hunger was for food. I rummaged around the room long enough to be overjoyed at finding a misplaced five-spot in the desk, and I kept rummaging for the hell of it and turned up about two bucks more, all in small change.

I felt as though I had struck oil in my back yard.

Seven dollars put a new light on things. I gave up the greasy spoon and treated myself to a steak dinner in a plush chophouse on Broadway near 90th Street — a joint that had been one of the best in town twenty years ago when the neighborhood was a lot ritzier than it was now. But the food was still excellent even though the prices were lower, and to me it tasted unbelievably good.

I did it up brown. I had a whiskey sour first and a top sirloin with baked potato and Caesar salad and a slab of French chocolate cake for dessert with a pony of Drambuie along with it.

I spent a lot of time at that table, and I spent a good share of my seven buck legacy. But it was worth it, and when I walked out of there with a full belly and a clear head I was ready for the wildcats.

I was also ready for Lou Harris. I called from the phone in the hallway, dropping two nickels into the slot, dialing the number almost mechanically, and cooing my name to brittle-voice.

“You,” she snapped.

“Me,” I admitted.

“He’s been trying to get you,” she said. “Christ, has he been trying to get you. Twice a day he’s been trying to get you, and you are never in.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” she said. “Jesus. You got any idea how often I’ve been dialing your damned number for him?”

“Twice a day,” I guessed.

There was a sudden click and a few seconds of delightful silence and suddenly Lou’s voice was saying, “Is that you, you son of a bitch?”

“It’s me.”

“It’s about time. Where the hell are you? It’s Thursday and I been trying to reach you for the past eight days. You out on a drunk?”

Thursday — that meant I’d been whooping it up for a happy ten days.

“Well?”

“No,” I said. “I was up in Connecticut for a weekend that stretched to a little over a week. Why?”

“A weekend?”

“With a friend of mine.”

He laughed. “She must have been one hell of a good friend. Was it nice?”

“Wonderful,” I said, beginning to get into the script of the lie.

“That’s great, Danny boy. Sexing when you should have been working on the book that’s practically sold. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I— What!”

“Huh?”

“Did you say something about the book being—”

“Sold,” he put in. “To Lincoln House. But I said practically.”

“Lincoln House!”

“What’s the matter? Not good enough for you?”

“They’re the top house in the country! How in hell did you manage that?”

“Who’s the best agent in the world?”

“You are. But—”

“So?”

I didn’t say anything for a minute and he said, “You damned fool, did you think that book was just another piece of junk?”

“Wasn’t it?”

I could picture him shaking his head. “That was quality,” he said. “A good novel. Maybe even a great novel, whatever that means. Solid, hard-cover stuff, great stuff, salable stuff. Good.”

“But—”

“Shut up,” he said. “But me no buts, like it says in that play. I read it at one setting and shot it straight to Lincoln House for a fast reading, and I got the fast reading. They like it. Madge Clyber read it, and Madge Clyber liked it, and when Madge Clyber likes a book you have it made. Understand?”

I gulped.

“Look,” he said, “there’s no contract yet. There will be, and there could be right now if you hadn’t been banging Miss Connecticut for the past eight days. Clyber wants you to have lunch with her, and that means you go have lunch on Lincoln House at some Madison Avenue eatery. Eat as much as you like because Lincoln House picks up the tab and they have more money than God. And you sit over lunch for three hours talking about everything but the book, and as you get ready to leave she hauls out a contract and you sign it.”

“How do I know what I’m signing?”

“Because it’s all prepared. Baby, I got them hung up for a twenty thousand advance with foreign rights and movie rights on our side of the line. It’s a beautiful contract. And you’ll know it’s the contract I set up because it’s got my initials on it. All you have to do is sign and get her to sign and we’re in.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Sure, but— Why the lunch deal, Lou?”

“Danny boy.” He sounded hurt. “Danny, you never sold a big book to a big house before, did you?”

“No.”

“Of course not. These boys play different from the paperbacks. They take a nice personal interest in their writers. They want to know who you are and size you up so they can play the publicity campaigns just right. They want to get an idea how to shoot your mug shot for the picture on the dust jacket, and they want to make sure they like you enough to buy your book. Don’t try to make sense out of it. Lincoln House doesn’t make much sense. Lincoln House makes dollars. And when Lincoln House makes dollars you make dollars, and when you make dollars I make dollars. Is that good enough for you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It should be. Now for God’s sake wear a shirt and tie and smile pretty at Madge Clyber and be nice to her and laugh when she laughs, because if she decides she doesn’t like you the whole thing can go out of the window.”

“She can decide that?”

“Uh-huh.”

I shook my head to clear it. “When do I see the gal?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Christ, for all I knew you were dead. I got her on the phone an hour or so ago and made an appointment with her myself. I fed her some lie about how you took a night boat to Saudi Arabia or something. I can’t even remember what I told her. That’s when it gets bad, Danny boy. When you forget what lies you tell, then you’re in deep. When you say something and can’t figure out whether or not it’s a lie, then it’s really bad. You know, I had myself believing you were in Saudi Arabia?”

“What’s she like?”

“What’s who like?”

“Madge Clyber.”

“Oh.” He paused for a breath. “She’s a bitch,” he said solemnly. “She’s a fourteen-carat, diamond-dotted bitch with no heart and too many brains. She can half kill you by looking at you hard. I had lunch with her once and I couldn’t eat it, and when I can’t get food down it’s bad. She’s a complete bitch, and you’ll wind up hating her before you finish your tomato juice and you’ll want to kill her halfway through the mashed potatoes.

“She’s a publishing bitch, and that’s the worst kind. They’re worse than Public relations bitches or advertising bitches or any other kind of New York business babe bitches. She’s spending her whole life showing that she can do anything a man can do, and that’s made one hell of a bitch out of her. Because there’s one thing a man can do that she can’t do, Danny boy.”

I felt like telling him about Marcia but I didn’t bother.

“Be nice to her,” he said. “Think about your twenty grand. Think about my two grand. Think about how my little kids need new shoes. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You keep my appointment,” he said. “You meet her at La Merover on 49th near Fifth at one o’clock tomorrow. Just ask the maitre d’ to point her out — he’ll know who she is. And you damn well better be nice to her.”

“I’ll be sweet as saccharin.”

He laughed. “You think you can be sweet, Danny boy? You think so?”

“For twenty thousand dollars,” I said levelly, “I can be sweet to absolutely anybody.”

The phone clicked in my ear. There was no topping the son of a bitch.

Chapter Ten

The minute I saw La Mer I was glad Lincoln House was picking up the tab. It was the kind of restaurant that made you instinctively reach for your collar to make sure your tie was on straight. The waiters looked as though bending over would kill them, and the air smelled of money.

You could smell the money in the air. Honest.

I approached the headwaiter cautiously and revealed who I was and who I wanted.

“Ah!” he said. “This way, please.”

I followed like an obedient puppy and wound up at a postage stamp table across from one of the most beautiful and frightening women I have ever seen in my life.

Beautiful and frightening — that was Madge Clyber. That was the immediate description that popped into my head, and it took less than seven seconds to figure out why Lou called her a bitch. It was all there.

She was blonde, with long blonde hair whipped into a tight and almost severe chignon that sat on the back of her head like an egg on a plate. Her eyes were green — a very light green, and most women with eyes that color would seem soft and submissive. Madge Clyber had soft green eyes that looked straight through a person — hard, almost vicious eyes.

She started talking the minute I sat down. “You’re Dan Larkin,” she said. Her voice was hard, but not brittle the way Lou’s girl’s was. It was precise and very cold.

“That’s right. And you’re—”

“Madge Clyber. But I’m going to call you Dan and you can call me Madge, if it’s all right with you. I hate to eat with someone and call him by his last name. It screws up my digestion.”

I thought that nothing in the world could foul up her digestion. She could probably swallow a cannonball and the acid in her throat would soften it up before it got to her stomach.

But I kept my thoughts to myself.

She turned to the waiter who had magically appeared next to the table, looking at him as though he didn’t really exist. “Martini,” she said. “Very dry, kill the olive.”

“Same,” I said softly. I hate Martinis, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was as though ordering anything else would be insulting.

There’s no way to describe the conversation that went on over the drinks. Both of us studiously avoided mentioning the book, or even that I had written a book, or that she worked for Lincoln House, or anything that had anything at all to do with why we were sitting across the table in La Merin the first place. She looked at me with her little green eyes and babbled trivia about everything from women’s fashions to who should have won the last election, while I looked back with my own eyes and smiled when she smiled and frowned when she frowned and babbled trivia about everything from the ideal odds on the world series to the value of the martini as opposed to the old fashioned.

It was a ridiculous conversation, and it is precisely the sort of conversation authors always have with publishers. It is also the sort of conversation that agents have with movie producers; I remember Lou telling me about one marvelous time when he argued baseball for three solid hours with some minor mogul from Hollywood. Then, when they got their hats from the hatcheck chick, the minor mogul said, “$115,000,” and Lou without batting an eyelash said, “$125,000,” and the mogul said, “Fine.”

And that was that.

The drinks disappeared without my realizing that I had even sipped at mine and the waiter was back with a pad of paper in his hand.

“Lobster salad, coq au vin, stringbeans and coffee,” Madge snapped.

I almost said “Same” but caught myself in time, and when Madge recommended the roast beef I took it as a command and ordered that. The waiter disappeared as silently as he had come.

The meal was excellent, although what it was costing Lincoln House would have fed me quite comfortably for a good ten days. When we finished we had another cup of coffee and lit up cigarettes. It looked like the time for a more serious discussion.

“You’re just the way I pictured you,” she said.

“How’s that?”

She shrugged. “I’ve met a lot of authors,” she said. “I’ve read a lot of books. It’s not hard to get a fair picture of an author after you read his book, unless the book is a hunk of trash. Trash can be phony. An old drunk can reel off touching reams of crap for the love pulps. But with a good book you can figure the novelist.”

“How?” I asked. “His personality or his looks or where he was born or what?”

“Everything,” she said. “I knew who you were the minute you walked in the door.”

“I didn’t know I was that true to type.”

“It’s not a matter of typing you. I could tell you were somewhere between thirty-five and forty, and I could tell you were a New Yorker, and I could tell you were as tough as nails.”

“Am I?”

“Of course,” she said. “Christ, it’s in your book and it’s in your face. It’s in the chin and the eyes and the crooked nose, and in the way you carry yourself when you walk. You never bend over for anybody, do you?”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“But not often. You don’t have money, do you?”

“No.”

“But you did,” she went on. “You were born without it and you got it and you lost it. Right?”

“Right.”

“And now you’re trying to get it back.”

It wasn’t even a question, but I nodded automatically.

“You don’t like women much.” I started to say something but she said, “Hell, I don’t mean you’re a fag. Not that, for Christ’s sake. You’re probably good in bed. But you don’t like women much as people, do you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t. You’re Tony — you and your lead character are the same person, and I’ll give odds you grew up in a New York slum. Am I right?”

“East Harlem.”

“Sure. Sure, it had to be East Harlem or Hell’s Kitchen or maybe the Lower East Side. But you don’t like women, do you? You need them, and you must go through them pretty fast, but do you like them?”

“I guess not.” It was something I hadn’t thought of before, but it started to make sense. It made a lot of sense,and it began to explain why I reacted the way I did to gals like Allison and Marcia.

For a moment neither of us said anything, and when Madge spoke her voice was different — a little softer and a little more personal.

“You’re like me,” she said. “Dammit, you’re too much like me. I came out of Beacon Hill instead of East Harlem, and I went to Radcliffe instead of quitting school and going to work, but that’s just surface difference. We’re a lot alike inside, aren’t we?

“I’ve had to fight for everything I ever got, Dan. I’ve had to kick people in the face and sometimes I kicked a few between the legs. I’ve stepped on everybody in my way and now I’m right where I belong.

“I’ve got a place in the East Fifties with an expensive Modigliani on the wall and a carpet as thick as the floor underneath it. I’ve got a liquor cabinet with everything in it that the bar at this damned hole has and more. I’ve got a bank account that’ll buy me anything I want, and my boss knows that there’s not a man in the world who can fill my job as well as I can.”

She stopped and sipped at her coffee, but I kept quiet waiting for her to go on.

“And I’m in as lousy shape as you are, Dan. I’m a mess. For a while I went to a psychiatrist five days a week for an hour a day at twenty-five dollars an hour to find out how sick I was. I’m sick, Dan. I’ve got rocks in my head.”

She closed her eyes for a minute. “I hate men,” she said. “The bastards — they’re always in the way, and God I wish I didn’t need them the way I do! I hate them and I use them up the way I use up lipstick and toilet paper and gin. And it’s no damned good.”

“I know,” I said. And I’m not sure why I said it.

“I know you do. You’re the same person I am, Dan. You need women like I need men and you hate them justas much as I do. And you fight like hell to get some place and you can’t help trying to get there, but when you get there it’s not nearly as nice as you thought it would be. Right?”

I nodded.

“All the places are the same,” she said. “None of them are any damned good. We’re the type of people you can’t satisfy, Dan. That’s the reason we get places and that’s the reason why we don’t like them when we get there. We’re the kind of damned fools who keep the world progressing. If it weren’t for us nobody would have invented the wheel — but it doesn’t do us any good. Does it?”

“No,” I said.

“It doesn’t. Dan, what do you want now?”

Automatically I said, “I want to sell a book to Lincoln House.”

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you had the guts to say it. But it won’t make you happy, Dan. Not for more than a day or so.”

“I know that.”

“But you can’t help wanting it, can you?”

“No — I can’t.”

She shook her head as if to clear it. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She signed for the tab and we got her coat from the checkroom and I helped her into it, and out on the street she said, “Let’s go to my place, Dan.”

“I—”

“You don’t want to,” she said. “Hell, I know damn well you don’t want to. You don’t like me, or if you like me you sure as hell don’t want to take me to bed. I know that. You think I’m a bitch and I use tough truck-driver language and I’m not the kind of a woman who’d look good with her hair spread out on a pillow.”

“I think you’re a very beautiful woman,” I said honestly. “But—”

“But you don’t want me. I know all that. If you wanted me I wouldn’t want you, Dan. But you want to sell a book to Lincoln House, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then you better come to my place, Dan. Because if you don’t, you won’t sell a book to Lincoln House or any place else. I’ll knock you down so far you’ll never get up. I’ll louse you up with every publisher from here to Leningrad and you won’t be able to push slush to the pulps when I’m done with you.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“You think not? I could and I would, Dan. I’m a bitch, like I told you. I’m a real bitch from the blonde hair to the little pink toes, and when I want something nobody stops me. Coming?”

I thought about it for ten seconds — no more. I thought about the book and I thought about Madge and I thought about me. I didn’t want to bed down with Madge Clyber any more than I wanted to sack out with a poisonous snake.

But I wanted that book to sell.

“Don’t you like the book, Madge?”

Her lips formed a thin red line as she said, “It’s the best book I’ve read in the last six years. But if you don’t come to my place you can use it to wipe your ass.”

And I looked at her and she looked at me and we got in a cab and rode to her apartment.

Her apartment had a Modigliani on the wall and a carpet on the floor as thick as the floor under it. She wasn’t kidding.

She made us drinks and I swallowed mine right down. I needed more than a drink.

“Come on,” she said. “Damn you, come on.”

I followed her into the bedroom. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled it over her head. She reached her hands behind her and unsnapped her bra and flipped it at the chair in the corner. She stepped out of the panties and left them on the floor, and kicked off her shoes and rolled down her stockings. She stood in front of me with her breasts firm and her thighs golden and every bit of her as beautiful as anything I had ever seen in my life.

“I’m beautiful,” she said. “Tell me how beautiful I am. Tell me I’m the most goddamned beautiful thing you ever saw in your life. Tell me!”

I told her what she wanted to hear.

“Now take off your clothes.”

I did, embarrassed in a strange sort of a way. I undid my necktie and took off my jacket and shirt and stepped out of my pants, hanging them over the back of the chair to keep from losing the crease. It was ridiculous — the whole thing was ridiculous, and when I stood before her I felt more foolish and lost than I had ever felt before.

She was stretched out on the bed now. She had undone her hair and I saw how long it was. It fell almost to her waist, presenting an illusion of femininity that was totally out of place with a woman like her. It was as though she kept her hair long to prevent her from realizing how little of a woman she was.

I wanted to lie down next to her; rather, I felt as though I was supposed to, as though it was part of the routine. But somehow I realized that I wasn’t supposed to do anything just now. The next move was up to her.

My neck itched, but I couldn’t even scratch it. I had to wait for her to tell me what to do.

“Take your belt out of your pants,” she said. Her voice was utterly flat and lacking in any emotion whatsoever. It was as though she was telling me to give her a cigarette or hold her coat for her.

“Wait a minute—”

“Get your belt,” she said. And this time it sounded like a command.

I walked over to the chair and slipped my belt out of my pants. It was heavy, a hunk of hand-tooled leather I picked up in Mexico on one of the side-trips I made when I was working on the coast. I let it swing loosely in my hand and walked back to the bed, and I stood there and let her stare at me.

“You have a beautiful body,” she said.

I suppose I blushed or something.

“I mean it. Don’t you think a man’s body can be beautiful? Of course it can. You’re hard and tough and wiry, and you look beautiful.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What in hell are you waiting for?” She demanded suddenly. I knew what she meant and I half-knew what she wanted me to do, but it hadn’t entirely penetrated to me yet.

“Hit me,” she said levelly. “Hit me, Dan.”

“Wait,” I said. “Look, Madge—”

“Hit me, damn you! Take that belt and beat the living crap out of me!”

“I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Do you think I give a damn what you want? I don’t care! I just want you to hit me, damn it!”

“Are you going out of your mind?” I was shouting, too. All I wanted was to be someplace else. I wanted to get away from her.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t you hate me, Dan? Don’t you want to hurt me?”

“No.”

“You should. You should want to rip me to ribbons.You should want to turn my skin red and make a bloody mess out of me.”

“But I don’t.”

“Why not?”

“I—”

“Don’t say you like me,” she cut in. “You don’t like me any more than I like you. I don’t want you to like me. I want you to hate my guts. I want you to hate me inside and out, and I want you to beat me silly.”

“I don’t understand.” I looked at her, all nude and beautiful and at the same time indescribably ugly, stretched out on the white sheets with the pillow under her head and her whole body golden and perfect. Her breasts were large and pink at the tips and her thighs tapered to rounded calves and slim ankles.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Don’t you? Why the hell do you think I asked you up here.”

“I thought you wanted me to make love to you.”

“To make love? Love? What the hell is love? How could you possibly love me or even put on a good act?”

I looked at the floor, at the carpet on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the belt hanging limp in my right hand.

For a moment I tried to picture myself raising the belt and bringing it down on all that golden flesh.

“Don’t you hate me, Dan?”

“No.”

“Think about it,” she ordered. “Close your eyes.”

I closed them.

“Now think,” she said. “Think about all the bastards who balled you up. Think about everything that’s gone wrong. Think about all of it.”

I tried to. I tried very hard and I got mad — but I didn’t get mad at her and the thought of beating her couldn’t seem right or natural to me.

“Think about me,” she commanded. “Think about how much you want to sell the book and how I’m standing right in your way. Hate me.”

“I can’t,” I said. “Maybe it’s because I understand how you feel.”

“Maybe,” she said, seeming to calm down for a moment. “Try thinking about the women, Dan. Think about the bad ones, the rotten ones, the ones who loused you up. There must have been one, Dan.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her. And suddenly it didn’t seem to be her on the bed, not any more. She was suddenly younger and smaller and browner, and her hair was dark and it was Marcia on the bed, Marcia with her body beautiful against the white linen sheets, Marcia lying on the linen sheets where she had been lying in Carol’s arms.

I raised the belt.

“Hate me.”

“And it was Marcia’s voice, and I hated and loved the woman on that bed all at once.

And I swung the belt.

I brought the belt down hard across her golden thighs, and when I took the belt away there was a thin red line across her thighs where I struck her. Her face was contorted in a weird expression that was half pleasure and half pain. Her hands were balled up into little fists and there was hate and love in her little green eyes.

“Again,” she said, speaking through tightly clenched teeth. “Harder.”

I lashed her again, across the thighs once more but lower this time and harder. The streak of red where I hit her was darker than before and she moaned in a strange sort of agony under the lash.

“More,” she moaned. “Harder!”

But I didn’t have to be told any more. Everything was pouring out of me now, all the pent up hate and anger and torment and everything, all the agony over Allison and Marcia, all the fury and all the days of pounding a typewriter and the drinking and the puking and the waking up in too many alleys too many times.

I hated her. I hated the whole world, and I was pouring the hate out of me and onto her. I raised the belt time after time, and time after time I brought it down on that cowering flesh.

I whipped her breasts and her belly and her thighs. She rolled over finally and I began lashing her back and her buttocks, swinging the belt harder with each stroke, hurting her more and more with every swing of the heavy Mexican leather.

The moans she made grew to whimpers and finally to soft, animal-like screams. I felt the fury growing in me and I let it all go from me to the belt, from the belt to her, hating myself for what I was doing but unable to stop, not wanting to stop.

She rolled over a second time and stared at me. The expression in her eyes was one I had never encountered before, a brand-new and terrifying expression that combined hate and love and pleasure and pain and fear and admiration and total revulsion.

“You bastard,” she whispered. “God, you bastard!”

The belt fell from my hand and dropped to the rug. My eyes followed it to the floor and watched it silently for several seconds. Then they returned to her, to the soft green eyes and the tight little fists and the beautiful golden body that was covered with red streaks.

“You bastard,” she repeated.

“Bitch,” I said. I hardly recognized my own voice.

“Bitch,” I repeated. “Christ, what a bitch you are!”

And then I fell upon her, fell upon the bed with the white linen sheets, pressing my hard body against her soft and injured body. My arms went around her hard, hurting her, and her arms went around me and I ground my mouth down on hers hard.

I took her, fiercely, angrily, and all I could hear in the world was the sound of her voice screaming in my ears.

Dressing, I couldn’t even look at her. I put on my clothes in a rush, anxious only to get away from her and never come back. I was anxious too to get away from myself, to get away forever from the person I had suddenly discovered myself to be. I winced at the memory of the animal I had become when I swung the belt at her.

When I was finished dressing I turned and looked at her. She was back in her clothes, and she looked just as she looked in the restaurant except that her hair was still down.

And her eyes were different, too. There was no hardness in them any more, nothing at all but relaxation and satisfaction.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Like a bastard.”

“Why?”

“I... I never did anything like that before,” I said. “I know that sounds like a line from a virgin in a backseat of a parked car, but—”

“I know,” she said. “But you shouldn’t feel bad at all. It’s nothing to feel bad about.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You wanted to do it,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

“Not at first.”

“But you did afterwards.”

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“And you liked it. Didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“And you feel better now. I know — you feel as thought here was something wrong in doing it and in wanting to do it. But outside of that you feel better.”

“That’s right,” I admitted. “But why?”

“Sit down.” I sat down next to her on the bed. “Dan, we’re not normal people. It’s all mixed up in what I told you before. We’re people who get places without really getting anywhere, people who are always unsatisfied. And we build up hate, Dan. We hate and we get bitter inside. We have to get rid of that hate.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s the reason,” she went on. She reached for my hand and took it in hers, and her hand was very cool and soft.

“Dan,” she said, “do you remember in your book when Tony beat up the girl?”

“Sure,” I answered her. “But it wasn’t like this.”

“Wasn’t it?”

I thought for a minute.

“It was,” she said. “It wasn’t her he was beating up — not entirely. It was everything he hated, everything he was mad at. See?”

I nodded.

“And you’re like Tony, Dan. You are Tony.”

I nodded again.

We sat there holding hands like teenagers for another five minutes or so. Then she stood up and walked to the bureau. She picked up a piece of paper.

“Here’s the contract,” she said. “In duplicate. Sign them both and keep the top copy.”

I looked for Lou’s initials, saw them, and signed the two contract copies on the dotted lines.

“You got what you came for,” she said. “I knew you would.”

“Yes,” I said. “I knew it too, I suppose.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Rotten.”

“Feel like finishing the book?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t feel like writing another thing again. Ever. I feel like tossing my typewriter out of the window.”

“Of course. But you’ll finish it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes — I’ll finish it.”

We walked toward the door. “I know you will,” she said. “You’ll hate it and you’ll hate it when you’re done with it, but you’ll do it. It’s the kind of person you are, Dan.”

I nodded. For the first time I was beginning to get a good idea what kind of person I was, and I wasn’t liking that person very much.

“We won’t see each other again,” she said at the doorway. “This was good, but we won’t want each other again. This was a sort of therapy for both of us, but I won’t ever want to see you again. And you won’t want to see me either, will you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I won’t.”

I walked out the door and down the hallway to the elevator. I didn’t kiss her or tell her good-bye.

I never saw her again.

Chapter Eleven

She was right, of course. I would finish the book.

Not that I really wanted to finish the book. Not that writing gave me the slightest degree of pleasure, not that the idea of the money mattered too much any more, not that I thought I was writing a great book or anything resembling a great book or even a good book.

I hated the book and I hated the typewriter and I hated myself. The minute I got home I threw my belt down the incinerator and kept my pants up with a piece of binders twine. It was silly; the belt didn’t have anything to do with it. But it was as if just wearing the damned thing would remind me of the welts I raised on Madge’s body and of the way I let myself turn into an animal.

But I would finish the book. I couldn’t help finishing the book, couldn’t help trying as hard as I knew how to make it the best book possible. It’s a disease with writers, just as an actor has to do his best in a play even if he knows it’s going to be a flop. The book was sold, the book was supposed to be a good book, and so I had to finish it. And that was all there was to it.

So I got to work on it, and I got to work on it in the only way I knew how. There’s one way to get a book finished that’s never yet failed me, no matter how I hate the thought of putting paper in the typewriter and filling the paper with words.

There’s one way and it’s a simple way. It didn’t matter that all I could think about was Marcia. It didn’t matter that every time I closed my eyes all I could see was two female bodies on linen sheets.

That didn’t matter in the least.

The formula is a simple one. All you need is a case of Scotch and a bathtub. You don’t pour the Scotch in the bathtub and soak it up through your skin — that would be an intriguing trick and it might be a good deal of fun, but the formula involves something a lot simpler.

Instead you sit down at your typewriter and put a full glass of straight Scotch at your elbow. You put paper and carbon paper and copy paper in your typewriter and you start writing. And all along you keep drinking the Scotch, just a little at a time. Just enough to keep you perpetually blotto but never unconscious, never uncoordinated, never tired and never off your nut.

A non-drinker can’t do this; the Scotch will either wear off or knock him on his ear. A man who’s used to drinking can. You learn to get to that perfect balance and stay right there, never drunk and never sober.

That’s where the case of Scotch comes in.

The bathtub is also essential. When you drink like this and write like this you sweat like a pig, and when you get started you can’t go to sleep much or you lose the whole edge you’ve carefully built up and come out of it hung-over and 90 % dead.

So you don’t sleep — for however long it takes you to finish what you’re writing. Instead you take baths.

Hot baths.

As hot as you can stand it.

Then you wind up with a cool shower and you’re ready to roll again.

I had a case of Scotch sent up to the room and went to work the day I left Madge in her plush little apartment in the Fifties. It was dinnertime when I got home and I had a quick meal at the greasy spoon so that I would go into the routine with something in my stomach. Once I was finished I could eat again, but while I was drinking and writing the Scotch would be my only nourishment.

It was seven o’clock by the time I got started. I filled a glass and started going, and at first the going was very slow. The first tumbler full of liquor lasted only four pages. But it also gave me a little bit of the edge, and from there on I got faster and faster.

I took my first bath at 11:15. Then I put on a clean set of clothes and went back to work.

Clothing can be a problem. When you’re taking baths once every four or five hours, and changing clothes every time, it doesn’t take any sort of a mathematical genius to figure out that you’re going to run out of clothes in a little while.

When you run out you put the first set back on again. By that time, hopefully, you’ve been drunk long enough not to give much of a damn.

The pages just kept rolling along, page after page, chapter after chapter. I finished the first bottle and went on to the second, glad that I had the money to buy Scotch. One time I was working to beat a deadline on a pulp serial in the old days and I couldn’t go for Scotch — it had to be cheap rye that time, and I couldn’t stand the taste of the garbage. But when you drink Scotch there’s a big difference.

It almost makes the whole deal pleasant.

But not quite.

The second bottle didn’t last too long, and neither did the third, and neither did the fourth. It’s hard to picture a man staying awake and working for five days and five nights, but that is precisely what I did.

There was a medical book I glanced through once that said that a human being can live no more than five days and five nights without sleep. At the end of that time he either passes out or drops dead.

I didn’t pass out or drop dead.

Instead, I drank.

And I bathed.

And I wrote.

I didn’t see the sun come up the morning of the second day. I didn’t see it go down that night. I looked at my watch every once in a while to make sure it was still running and two or three times a day I would look out the window to make sure everything was still there.

It always was.

There were the bad moments. There was the time the damned water tank managed to run out of water, and I took a lukewarm shower that didn’t do a hell of a lot of good. There was the time I drank too much Scotch at once and felt slightly dizzy and very tired. It was a tremendous temptation to lean back and close my eyes, but I had the good sense to keep typing away. I made a few mistakes typing but in a few minutes I had worked off the liquor and I was back to normal — or as close to normal as it’s possible for a man to be when he’s drunk.

There’s one thing wrong with the method, and if you’ve been in the writing game a short time it can be fatal. It’s a cute bit — you never have the slightest notion whether the words you’re putting down on paper are good words or bad words, whether the story is moving or standing still, whether the dialogue is ridiculous or perfect. If you’re new at the game, this can be bad. If you’re an old hack you just keep pounding away, knowing that you won’t do any worse or too much better than you always do.

So I kept typing.

And I kept typing.

And I kept typing.

The first day went by and the second day went by and the third day went by.

And the fourth day went by and the fifth day went by.

And, happily, I was still alive.

It was five minutes to ten the night of the fifth day when I was one chapter from the end. I finished the last word of the last line of that second-last chapter and separated the copy pages from the other pages and put the chapter under the rest of what I had finished. Just one chapter to go, just one more chapter, just twenty or twenty-five more pages and it would all be over.

I sat back in my chair and relaxed — which was something of a mistake.

Because at that point I realized how damnably tired I was.

Not just worn out. Not just fatigued, but completely and totally exhausted. Maybe another bath would revive me, but I didn’t feel up to walking down the hall for another bath. I didn’t feel like moving from the chair. I didn’t feel like keeping my eyes open.

I felt like pulling a Rip Van Winkle bit and sleeping a neat twenty years — maybe more. A hundred years. Six hundred years.

Or just closing my eyes for a minute or two, just half an hour, say.

I pulled that once and slept in a chair for six hours, and when I woke up I couldn’t move. You’d be amazed how hard it is to wake up in a half hour after five days without sleep.

Very hard indeed.

I pulled my chair over to the window and took a few deep breaths of air — good, cold, night air.

It didn’t work. My lungs felt as though they might collapse any minute like a flat tire.

Something made me look across the street. 85th Street isn’t wide, and the buildings on both sides are close to the street. I could see perfectly into the windows on the other side of the street.

There was a girl in the room directly across from mine, and I could see her perfectly.

That, needless to say, was the time I should have gone into the bathroom, taken a real honey of a steaming bath, and gone back to my typewriter. But I didn’t.

She was, you see, a very young girl.

She was probably about seventeen. She was Puertorican, with coppery skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were very large and I could see them all the way across the street. They were either very dark brown or black, and they looked extremely lovely in her very lovely face.

She had high cheekbones, a very full and sensual mouth and gleaming white teeth. She wore blue jeans and a simple white blouse, and I could tell that her hips were trim and gently rounded and that her breasts were full and ripe.

She was good to look at.

She was standing in front of her mirror, looking at her reflection and smiling at it. Then she picked up a brush and began stroking her long hair, wielding the brush rhythmically and giving her hair a thorough brushing. I took in the remainder of her room out of the corners of my eyes. It was sparsely furnished, with a broken-down bed in the background and a wooden chest of drawers with the paint half peeled off of it on the far side. The mirror she was using seemed to be the one extravagance in the room — perhaps a holdover from the days when the neighborhood had been a better one. It was a full-length mirror on the back of what must have been a closet door.

This might be a good time to explain that Peeping Tomish is a little out of my line. I don’t even go to burlesque shows — I went twice, two times in the same week, but that was only because I was in the process of writing a yarn about a burlesque dancer who gets murdered by a fan of hers and I wanted to get the background material down pat. I didn’t even get any kind of a kick out of the whole deal either time.

And there was one time in Mexico when my buddy and I watched a different sort of a show — a backroom affair with no holds barred. That had been interesting, but even that wasn’t my idea of the ideal way to spend an evening. I always like to get my sex first-hand — not with my eyes.

But this was different, and I couldn’t take my eyes off that little Puertorican gal across the street. Maybe part of the charm was bound up in the fact that she didn’t have the slightest idea that I was watching her. That may have been part of it — that element of secrecy and stealth about the process.

And I suppose you could chalk part of it up to the Scotch, and another part to how tired I was.

And a good share to how much I wanted Marcia deep down inside, no matter how much I stifled that desire with Scotch and drowned it with hot baths. I still wanted her, and watching the gal across the street made me want her more and more.

She finished with the hairbrush and set it on the dresser. Then she stood in front of the full-length mirror again and took a long look at herself.

And then she began to unbutton the blouse.

This was the time for me to get the hell away from the window. There’s nothing particularly vile about a guy watching a gal comb her hair, but it’s a different thing when she starts slipping buttons out of buttonholes.

I went on watching.

The blouse buttoned down the front; there were just five buttons all in all. She took her time, unbuttoning one button after the other very slowly and lazily, and when she had them all undone she jerked the shirt-tail out of her jeans and slipped the blouse over her shoulders.

I thought her brassiere would break. It was so obviously inadequate for the task she had given it. Her breasts were large, very large for a girl her size, and the bra was a thin white affair that looked like a cloth spider web. I kept waiting for the bra to break, but it didn’t.

I looked at her bra and imagined the breasts under the bra. I looked at her flat little stomach and thought that I could probably cover it with one hand. Her waist was very slim — my hands could probably encircle it.

She looked at herself for several seconds more. Then her hands went behind her back and fumbled with the hook-and-eye arrangement on the bra, and the action made her breasts jut out more than ever. A second later the bra was off and she was naked from the waist up, naked and beautiful with her young breasts standing proud and firm and plump and tawny.

The feeling that went through me at the sight of her was not wholly one of desire. When a woman is sufficiently beautiful desire is balanced by another feeling, the sort of feeling a person gets when looking at a work of art that is so perfect it prevents him from speaking. I couldn’t have possibly stopped watching her at that point.

And what made the whole thing even nicer was that she was standing in front of the full-length mirror. I saw her and I saw her reflection simultaneously. It was like a movie in Cinerama.

One hell of a movie.

After she had looked at herself long enough to decide that her breasts were in good shape (which is the understatement of the century) she undid her belt and slowly unzipped her blue jeans. The zipper was on the side and she took her time with it, her eyes on the mirror-image all the while. Then she let go of the jeans and let them slip to the floor.

She didn’t reach down to take them off, but stepped out of them and kicked them out of the way absently. She used the toe of one foot to remove one shoe and then reversed the process. She wasn’t wearing socks.

Her legs were beautiful. Girls that age rarely have good legs — their breasts may be well-formed at a young age, but it takes a long time for legs to either slim down or round out.

Hers were excellent — full and slightly muscular thighs, knees that weren’t knocked or knobby, good calves and ankles and feet.

Then, all in one motion, she tore off her white panties and threw them out of the way. She was naked, totally naked, beautifully naked, and to be perfectly trite about the whole thing, a team of horses couldn’t have dragged me away from the window just then.

I didn’t even worry about her seeing me. I didn’t worry about anything, couldn’t worry, couldn’t think about anything but the girl across the street. My eyes were like hands touching her all over her body all at once, like a million mouths kissing every square inch of her.

And then she began to dance.

It wasn’t exactly a dance. It was a writhing, twisting sort of a motion. She was making love to the reflection in the mirror and the mirror-image was returning her love, and I was lucky enough to watch both halves of the performance.

She moved her hips to and fro in a circular motion — not the cheap, tawdry grind of the burlesque dancer but something that was pure and primitive, the apex of sensuality. She raised her arms languorously above her head and moved the upper half of her body so that her breasts did things, magical things.

She stretched and she twisted. Her hair tossed with the motions in an orgy of black beauty. She flashed a smile at the mirror and her white teeth gleamed. She danced... and I watched her.

The tempo increased. She was no longer a girl; she was a girl in continuous motion and continuous rhythm, gyrating and writhing, twisting and turning and moving her magnificent body closer to the mirror and faster and faster every minute. She started panting, and it seemed to me as if I could hear her breathing clear across the street.

Then, at the peak of the dance, she seemed unable to contain herself any longer. She hurled her body against the mirror and rubbed herself against it like a kitten in heat, pressing herself against the glass, pressing herself against her reflection, making love to herself wildly and furiously and torridly.

She trembled violently. Then she threw herself away from the mirror, worn out and physically exhausted. Then, in an instant, the lights were out, the room was in darkness, and the show was over.

I was depleted. Physically and emotionally depleted, empty and exhausted. I could no more write that last chapter than I could climb Mount Everest in a bathing suit.

I was almost dead.

I emptied the current bottle into a glass and drained it. My brain went dumb and I tore off my clothes and fell on the bed in a tired heap.

A second later I was unconscious.

Chapter Twelve

I WAS IN THE jungle and the drums were beating. I was tied to a stake and the drums were going full blast while the natives danced furiously around me. They piled wood around the stake and a hideous native was reaching out to light the fire with a flaming bamboo rod.

At that point I woke up.

But the drums went on beating.

I closed my eyes again, deciding that the drums were not drums at all, but hangover demons playing games with my skull. Sometimes there is an overwhelming sensation in the notion of only being hungover.

But I didn’t seem to be hungover. My mouth wasn’t dry, I wasn’t thirsty, and my scalp fitted snugly over my skull. I felt good — miraculously good for all the drinking I had done.

So what the hell was all the banging about?

When my eyes opened a second time I realized it was somebody knocking at the door. I wanted very much to ignore whoever it was entirely and go on sleeping, but the idea came to me that it might be Lou calling about the book, in which case I really ought to talk to him.

Still, I did want very much to go on sleeping.

I fought a losing fight with my conscience — a losing one because I couldn’t quite manage to drift back to sleep with the damned pounding on the door never letting up. I fought my way out of bed and into a bathrobe and hobbled barefoot to the door.

It was Marcia. And strangely enough the sight of that sweet little body in my doorway put me right back where I had been, wanting her and loving her and hating her for that night she spent with Carol.

“What do you want?” I meant it to sound like a snap, sharp and nasty, but it didn’t come out that way.

She smiled. “You sleep like a log.”

“Yeah. And I smell like a distillery — right?”

“Right. Like six distilleries.”

I nodded painfully and she looked slightly hurt, which was precisely the way I wanted her to look. “What is it? Telephone?”

“No.”

“Telegram or something?”

She shook her head.

“Then what the hell did you wake me up for?”

This time she looked very hurt and almost ready to start whimpering. “I’m sorry,” I said in spite of myself. “I’m always grumpy when I wake up.”

“I just wanted to see you.”

My stomach quietly turned over. “What for?”

“Guess.”

“It’s too damned early to play guessing games.”

She pursed her lips. “Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“All right,” she said softly. “I want to go to bed with you.”

And as soon as she said that, as soon as the words were out of her mouth, I wanted to crawl in the sack with her about as much as I would have if she were seven weeks dead. All I could think of was the way the little tramp twisted around under Carol’s caresses, and I couldn’t stomach the idea of another round with her.

I just wanted her to go away. I just wanted her to get the hell out of my room and leave me alone and let me go back to bed all alone, all alone by myself in my nice warm bed.

“Dan?”

“No,” I said.

Her eyes went as wide as the screen for a 3-D movie.

“I don’t want to now,” I explained. “I don’t feel like it, and I’m tired and groggy and...”

“I bet I could wake you up a little.”

“I just don’t—”

Her little hand reached out and slipped inside my bathrobe and her fingers toyed with the hairs on my chest. I wanted to spank her.

“I bet I could make you feel like it,” she said. “Why not let me try a little?”

I pushed her hand away and shook my head. “Not today,” I said. “Later, Marcia. But not now.”

She wrinkled up her forehead and studied me for a moment. I couldn’t take my eyes away from hers and at the same time I couldn’t stand to look at her.

“I get it,” she said finally. “You’re trying to give me a lesson.”

“A lesson?”

She nodded. “You’re mad at me for playing independent and now you’re trying to give me a taste of my own medicine. Isn’t that it, Dan?”

“No,” I said. “I just don’t want you today.”

“Come off it,” she snapped impatiently. “I don’t believe you.”

I was getting mad as hell. “Look,” I said, “I frankly don’t give a damn whether you believe me or not. I couldn’t care less, if you want to know the truth. I just wish you would get out of here and close the door.”

She looked as though someone had just told her there was no Santa Claus. “What’s the matter?” she asked very softly. “What did I do?”

“Forget it.”

“I don’t want to forget it. What did I do?”

“Damn you!” I exploded. “You slept with a woman — that’s what you did! You’re a rotten little lesbian, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with you than is absolutely necessary, so will you kindly get the hell out of here and leave me alone?”

Watching her back up a step, I could feel the blood pounding in my temples and the nails digging into the palms of my clenched fists. It was hard to breathe all of a sudden. My eyes were on hers and I couldn’t begin to think about tearing them away. I was aching for her to get away from me before I went and killed her.

“Oh,” she said. That was all she said for awhile and we stood there staring at each other.

Then she said, “Let me explain, Dan.”

“Don’t bother.”

“Please—”

I closed my eyes.

“I’m going to explain, Dan. I want you to listen. I want very much for you to listen because it’s important to me. I think you can understand me better than anybody else I know.

“I have to be independent, Dan. That was the first thing I told you about me, the first thing I said after we made love the very first time. It’s something that’s vital to me, and if I can’t become independent and stay independent I can never be genuinely happy.”

“So what?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said. “Being independent is why I won’t let you be the only man in my life, why I won’t let myself care too much about you. It’s why I’ll never let myself get serious about any one man. I told you all that.”

I didn’t answer.

“Dan?”

“Why with her?” I asked. It came out like a croak. “Why in the name of God did you have to go to bed with her?”

“How did you find out, Dan?”

“I saw it,” I said, spacing my words far apart and pronouncing them carefully. “You left the door open and I watched the whole damned thing. Why, Marcia?”

She breathed deeply several times before answering. “The same reason, Dan. The same reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I had to be independent,” she said. “Not just independent of you. Independent of all men.”

“That’s the reason?” My voice was almost a scream. “That’s the whole damn reason? Just to prove something to yourself?”

“Dan, sometimes it’s important to prove something to yourself. It’s—”

I hit her as hard as I possibly could.

I hit her right in the stomach, bringing my fist forward in a short, swift arc that caught her in the center of her little stomach and doubled her up in pain. The expression in her eyes was a mixture of agony and sheer surprise; she hadn’t been expecting that.

But she didn’t cry. She didn’t let a single tear come from her eyes or make the tiniest noise. And suddenly it became very necessary to me to make the little bitch cry. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to make her give in to me.

So I hit her again.

She sagged and almost fell to the floor. I caught her with one hand and pulled the door shut with the other. Then I dragged her to her feet and hauled her into the center of the room.

She didn’t say a word.

I slapped her twice across the face — wide sweeping blows with my open hand across her mouth. Then I hit her in the side of her face with the back of my hand and she fell to the floor.

I picked her up and stood her against the wall. She sort of hung against the walk limp as a rag doll, while I tore her clothes off her. I ripped her blouse to shreds and I tore the shreds into tinier shreds. I got her bra off, breaking the hook-and-eye attachment in the process. Then I tore the brassiere in half and tossed it into the wastebasket. All the while she stood there looking at me with her eyes glazed and absolutely no expression on her face.

I made ribbons out of her skirt. I tore it up like an angel of destruction, and then I pulled off her slip and panties and did the same to them. Then she was naked, and I hit her again harder than before.

She still didn’t cry.

I began slapping her methodically all over her body, my hand swinging like a machine. Her brown skin was suffused with red where I had struck her.

Finally she moaned — a tiny little sound of pain.

It seemed like a signal.

I picked her up and carried her to the bed, and I placed her very gently on top of the bed sheet. Then I stood back and looked at her, just for a moment.

I took off my bathrobe. I was very careful to fold it perfectly and place it on the chair. I kicked off my slippers and set them by the foot of the bed.

Then I lay down next to Marcia.

She was trembling — not crying, because she hadn’t made a single sound since that initial moan. She was trembling, and when I took her in my arms she clung to me like a lost little child. I kissed her and she gave me her lips hungrily, her tongue reaching out for mine.

Her breasts were warm under my touch, warm and firm. Her whole little body was warm and eager and excited. I could still feel the blood pounding in my temples as the wave of passion caught up with the two of us.

Faster.

Faster... and more intense.

Then peace.

And then she cried. Everything came out in a rush, all the things she had been bottling up inside her for so long, and her tears soaked into the pillow.

I let her cry, and finally she was through.

“Dan,” she said, looking up at me. “Dan, I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that. I don’t know what got into me.”

“I’m glad you did. Dan, I’ve been terrible.”

“You don’t have to talk about it.”

At that point she didn’t have to do anything so far as I was concerned. Just looking at her with her body so beautiful and her face streaked with tears was enough. Just the memory of the way her body had moved beneath mine, just the taste of her mouth on my mouth — that was more than enough. And I knew then that no matter what she did, no matter what she ever did from there on in, I would never be able to stop loving her. It was something that would go on forever.

“I want to talk about it. It’s something I have to talk about. And it’s something you have to hear. You’ll listen to me, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Good. I... I’m not really a tramp, Dan. I never did anything like I did with Carol before, not until I met you. I’ve already told you how I had to prove I was independent, but I never forced myself to prove it to myself before I met you.

“You see, I fell in love with you that first time. It was something I couldn’t for the life of me help, and it was something that terrified me. I didn’t want to love you. I knew that if I let myself care about you, someday you would leave me and I’d be all alone and it would hurt. I hate being hurt, Dan. I was afraid to let you hurt me.”

“You don’t have to be afraid of that. I could never leave you, baby.”

“Maybe not — but I couldn’t be sure of that. And I was so afraid, Dan. So terribly afraid.”

She closed her eyes and I waited for her to go on.

“Dan,” she said, “I was afraid to love you. I wouldn’t let you make love to me because of that. Because it was so perfect with us. Each time it was perfect, and I knew that if I went on like that and let it happen every day I wouldn’t be able to give you up.”

“You wouldn’t even talk to me.”

“It was the same thing, Dan. Talking or making love or just seeing each other. Either way I was so happy with you — sitting here in this room and reading your novel and making love with you and everything.

“It had me scared. God, you don’t know what I used to go through when you would pound on my door and argue with me to let you in! I was going crazy, Dan. Half of me wanted you so much it was killing me, and the other half kept saying be careful, be careful. It was impossible.”

“I was in love with you from the beginning. I couldn’t help it and I didn’t try to.”

She nodded. “I tried,” she said. “God, how I tried! And when I let Carol... let her do what she did, it was a way of trying. I didn’t want it but I had to convince myself that I did. I had to prove that I didn’t need you or any other man. I had to, Dan.”

“How was it?”

She took a deep breath. “It was nice... nice, in a way. But when it was over there was nothing. Nothing at all, Dan. And when it’s over with you and me it’s different. It’s beautiful with us.”

“I know.”

“Really beautiful,” she said. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever experienced. There was nothing resembling that with Carol and there never could be. There never could be with anybody else, not for me. I guess I’m in love with you, Dan. There doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it.”

I thought about the time I had slept with Carol; in a way, it was the same thing for me that it had been for Marcia. It was a sexual release, pleasing in that Carol herself was a proficient performer. But there was nothing afterward, nothing at all.

“I’m glad you’re in love with me,” I said. “I guess I’m in love with you myself.”

“Good.”

“I am,” I went on. “Do you know what I did after I saw you in bed with Carol?”

“What, Dan?”

I told her. I told her the whole thing from the subway ride to waking up in the alley. I left out the gorier details, but outside of that I gave her the whole bit.

“That’s terrible,” she said when I was finished. “Dan, I’m so sorry!”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Of course it was. Are you sure you’re in good physical condition now? Dan, you have to start taking care of yourself. All that drinking isn’t good for you.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I am.” Her eyes were very serious. “Dan, will you stop drinking? Not entirely, but no more drinking just to get drunk?”

“Why?”

“Because I love you,” she said. “Because I don’t want you to do anything that’s bad for you.”

“Honestly?” I grinned at her.

“Honestly, you big dope.”

I reached out and took her chin in my hand and blew a kiss at her. “I’ll stop then,” I said. “It’s just a question of substituting one habit for another. And I have an idea you’ll make a better habit than whiskey.”

Her eyes shined when I told her about the book — how the thing had sold to Lincoln House and how I only had a chapter to go with it. And, telling her, I was really beginning to get a kick out of the whole thing. I thought of the book getting advertised all over the place, selling a bushel full of copies, selling to Hollywood—

It was beginning to look pretty good.

And for the first time it all mattered.

“I’m so happy,” she said. “Dan, I’m so happy for you.”

I kissed her.

“I mean it,” she said fiercely. “I believe in you. When something good happens for you, it makes me happy.”

I kissed her again. “You’re something good. I’m glad you happened to me.”

She smiled, her teeth flashing. I knew that I could never let her go. She wasn’t going to get away from me any more, not ever. I needed her, and with her at my side it was going to be easy.

Because I was beginning to make it. It was a long road and an uphill road from the gutter to the top, but it was no longer an impossible road. I could do it. I knew I could, and it was almost finished.

There had been some backsliding. There had been the drunkenness and the times that I almost gave up and threw in the towel.

But those times were over.

“Look,” I said to her, “no more of this independence nonsense. Understand?”

She nodded solemnly.

“You’re a big girl now,” I went on. “You don’t have to play games like a teen-ager. Okay?”

She stuck out her tongue at me.

“I mean it,” I said. “No more games. No more independence. You belong to me from now on and I’m not going to let go of you. I like what I’ve got. I’m holding on to it. And any time you start fooling around I’ll club you over the head and drag you back into the cave.”

“Pooh,” she said.

“No pooh about it. I mean it.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“We’re getting married,” I said. “Whether you like it or not.”

“I like it,” she said. “I like it a good deal.”

“You better.”

She moved her lips close to mine. “Dan,” she said, “what’ll we do when we’re married?”

“Huh?”

“I said what’ll we do when we’re married?”

“Why... I guess we’ll get a house and have some kids and—”

“Will we do what we just got finished doing?”

“Oh,” I said. “Of course we will.”

“Maybe we should practise now. Just so we’ll be in good shape for it.”

We did.

Chapter Thirteen

The receptionist looked up and said, “You again!”

“Me again.”

“You’re all he ever talks about,” she said. “How does it feel to hit the big time?”

I wanted to tell her to relax and let the edge drop out of her voice, but I didn’t bother. It would only have gotten her fired. Her voice must have been the only thing that let her hold the job.

“You go right in,” the girl said, pushing the little black button. “He’s been ringing all day long to see if you got here yet.”

She pressed another button and I walked through the door and on into Lou’s office. He had a phone to his ear and snapped at somebody while he motioned at me to sit down.

I sat down.

“A story by Huby Randolph and you’re offering me $250?” he was saying. “250 I should take for a Randolph yarn? Maybe I should give it to you for nothing?”

The voice on the other end of the phone stammered something.

“A cent less than five yards,” Lou said, “is robbery.”

The voice stammered again.

“Good enough,” Lou said. “I’ll send a kid over for the check in a minute.”

He hung up and turned to me. “I feel good,” he said. “I just squeezed a bastard from $250 to $400 for one of the worst goddam stories I’ve ever read in my life. Sit down.”

I was already sitting down.

“Danny boy,” he said, “you are about to become famous.”

“Yeah?”

He reached for a cigarette. “Yeah. And yeah again. Lincoln House is putting everything into this one, kid. They’ll start off with a half-page in the Times and run it to a page the day before publication. By the time they’re done the name Dan Larkin will be a household word.”

I grinned. “You sure about that?”

“A household word,” he repeated. “Something you use around the house every day.”

“Like a condom?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

I handed him the corrected galley-proofs for the book. “Here,” I said. “I read them and Marcia read them.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s very good. Clyber’s been on my ear for two days to get the galleys back already. And who the hell is Marcia?”

“Huh?”

“You said Marcia read the galleys. Or didn’t you?”

“Oh. Yeah, that’s right. I’m getting married, Lou.”

He put out his cigarette and lit another. “Tell me another.”

“Honest. I’m getting married.”

“Say it again.”

“I’m getting married.”

“To this Marcia?”

“To Marcia.”

For about five minutes he didn’t say anything. Then he said, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard in the last ten years, Danny Boy. That’s good news.”

“Isn’t it great?”

“It is indeed. Who the hell is Marcia, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“She’s my landlady.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded.

“Hell of a smart way to save on rent.”

I grinned.

“When’s it happening? I’ll have to send a present or something. Of course, if you happen to need a best man, I might be able to dig one up. I might be able to be one. I haven’t been anybody’s best man in a long time.”

I smiled. “It’s happening tomorrow,” I said. “But I don’t need a best man because Marcia and I are going to be the only two people at the wedding. She doesn’t want anything special. We’re going to drive down to Maryland for the wedding and keep going for the honeymoon.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“You got a car all of a sudden?”

“Just got it yesterday,” I said. “Brand-new Cadillac.”

“A Cad. How does it feel to have money?”

“It feels wonderful.”

“Sit back,” he said. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out in the ashtray and shook another one out of the pack. “Danny Boy,” he said, “you got money I haven’t even told you about yet. You’re going to have more money than God before this is done.”

I waited.

“You’re not the only one who’s been reading galleys this week-end. MGM’s been reading galleys too. MGM’s been reading the galleys for your book, Danny boy.”

“And—”

“And MGM bought the movie rights over the phone for a cool quarter of a million a little over an hour ago. I thought it might sort of interest you.”

It interested me. It interested me very much, and after Lou brought me back to consciousness by sprinkling a little water in my face I had a chance to tell him just how much it interested me.

Hell, it interested him too. 10 % of it was $25,000, and that would buy a lot of toys and food for the Harris family.

It was very interesting, all things considered.

“You’ll make a goddamn fortune,” he went on. “The advance orders on the book have been pouring in over at Lincoln House, and once the ads hit the Time sand once the reviews start coming out all over the place the book’ll sell ten thousand copies a week.

“We got a bestseller on our hands, Danny Boy. It’s going to be a runaway bestseller — one that gets up near the top of the list and stays there.”

“Why?” It didn’t seem fair even to ask — it was like wondering why the sky was blue or why you were happy or something like that. Maybe I should just sit back and be glad about it.

“Because it’s a good book, Danny.”

“Is that the only reason?”

He thought for half a second, which was a long time for him. “No,” he said. “No, that’s not all. There’s also the fact that you’ve already sold the thing to Hollywood. They want to be damn sure the book sells so that the movie will have a good publicity deal behind it. You’ll get mentions in Hollywood columns and all the rest of that junk.

“And Lincoln House is a big house — they can lean on some of the reviewers and make sure the book gets a big play. The reviewers might pan it, but that doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference. They’ll talk about it, and if they spend their time saying how lousy it is you’ll still sell one hell of a lot of books.”

He stopped and I let my eyes drop shut for a minute. It was almost too much to believe, to be perfectly corny about it. It wasn’t just the money any more. It was being in first place, with all the fame and prestige that goes with it.

Hell, there’s no sense lying about it. The notion of fame was a very appealing one. I wrote stories at the beginning to get checks, but I still got one hell of a kick out of seeing my name in print. I have a hunch that every writer who writes much of anything gets that kind of a kick when he hears people talking about his book or sees his name on the cover.

There’s the oldie about the author who manages to get introduced to some biddy at a cocktail party. “Did you read such-and-such?” asks the biddy. “Read it?” he answers. “Madame, I wrote it.”

It’s an old gag, but I might even get a chance to pull it now.

“Hey!”

I looked up. Lou was still sitting at his desk with a cigarette in his mouth. “What’s a matter? Daydreaming?”

“I guess so.”

“Hell,” he said. “What do think this is — the corner saloon? This is a business office. Get the hell out of here so I can get some work done!”

As I went through the door he called after me, “Happy Wedding — I’ll send a present one of these days.”

I found out later that afternoon that the female lead in the movie — the role of Tony’s girl — was tentatively earmarked for Allison King. When Lou let me know I almost dropped the phone. There was something cockeyed about it — something that served to make the whole thing develop into a completed circle with the ends properly closed. I didn’t know whether or not to be pleased by the news.

So I told Marcia.

She thought for a long minute and then turned her eyes to me. “That’s good,” she said. “That’s very good.”

“It is?”

“Don’t you think so?”

We were sitting on the edge of my bed looking across the room to the window and I slipped my arm around her and caressed her back through her sweater. Her skin was warm and smooth.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I wanted to know how you would feel about it.”

“I think it’s good, Dan. You see, she’ll do a good job with the part.”

“I hadn’t thought of it that way. Of course she’s a good actress, but why should she be particularly good at this role?Because she used to know me? I suppose that might give her more insight into the way I conceived the character, but—”

“Not just that. She is the girl in the book. Isn’t she, Dan?”

I pulled up her sweater and slipped my hand under it. Her skin felt much better without the sweater in the way and I wanted to pull her to me and make love to her then and there. Just looking at her made me want her. This was something new; before whenever I got to the point where a woman really wanted me I stopped wanting her. It was very nice for a change to have the desire completely mutual and more intense than ever before.

So thinking, I kissed her on the cheek. Then she turned and kissed me. Then we kissed each other a few times.

And that was nice, too.

“I suppose she is Tony’s girlfriend,” I said when we put a temporary halt to the kissing. “The similarities are there, all right.”

“She is.”

“And Tony is me?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Tony used to be you, Dan. Or maybe it’s that you used to be Tony. But you’re different now, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“You changed,” she went on. “You’re a better person than Tony was. Tony was good deep inside, but you’re a very good person all the way through. You always were good, but I think there was a time when you weren’t quite as good a person as you are now.”

“I think you’re right. Marcia, do you know what makes the difference?”

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 a woman 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 nights of 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 the front of the Caddy pleated 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.

Content

Sheldon Lord
A Strange Kind of Love

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen