Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“He wanted to stop.”

“They can’t stop, Tildie. No, not that way. To your left.”

“Aren’t we going to bury him alongside Grandma Yount?”

“No,” she said. “That’s too near the house. We’ll dig his grave across the stream, where the walnut grove is.”

“It’s beautiful there.”

“You always liked it.”

“So did Dan,” I said. I felt so funny, so light-headed. My world was turned upside down and yet it felt safe, it felt solid. I thought how Dan had itched to cut down those walnut trees. Now he’d lie forever at their feet, and I could come back here whenever I wanted to feel close to him.

“But he’ll be lonely here,” I said. “Won’t he? Mama, won’t he?”

The walnut treeslose their leaves early in the fall, and they put on less of a color show than the other hardwoods. But I like to come to the grove even when the trees are bare. Sometimes I bring Livia. More often I come by myself.

I always liked it here. I love our whole 220 acres, every square foot of it, but this is my favorite place, among these trees. I like it even better than the graveyard over by the pear and apple orchard. Where the graves have stones, and where the women and children of our family are buried.

Beside him, thegirl issued a soft grunt of contentment and burrowed closer under the covers. Her name was Karin, with the accent on the second syllable, and she worked for a manufacturer of floor coverings, doing something unfathomable with a computer. They’d had three dates, each consisting of dinner and a screening. On their first two dates he’d left her at her door and gone home to write his review of the film they’d just seen. Tonight she’d invited him in.

And here he was, happily exhausted at her side, breathing her smell, warmed by her body heat. Perhaps this will work, he thought, and closed his eyes, and felt himself drifting.

Only to snap abruptly awake not ten minutes later. He lay still at first, listening to her measured breathing, and then he slipped slowly out of the bed, careful not to awaken her.

She lived in one room, an L-shaped studio in a high rise on West Eighty-ninth Street. He gathered his clothes and dressed in darkness, tiptoed across the uncarpeted parquet floor.

There were five locks on her door. He unfastened them all, and when he tried the door it wouldn’t open. Evidently she’d left one or more of them unlocked; thus, meddling with all five, he’d locked some even as he was unlocking the others. When this sort of dilemma was presented as a logic problem, to be attacked with pencil and paper, he knew better than to attempt its solution. Now, when he had to work upon real locks in darkness and in silence, with a sleeping woman not ten yards away, the whole thing was ridiculous.

“Paul?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Where are you going? I was planning to offer you breakfast in the morning. Among other things.”

“I’ve got work to do first thing in the morning,” he told her. “I’d really better get on home. But these locks—”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a Roach Motel I’m running here. You get in, but you can’t get out.” And, grinning, she slipped past him, turned this lock and that one, and let him out.

He hailed ataxi on Broadway, rode downtown to the Village. His apartment was a full floor of a brownstone on Bank Street. He had moved into it when he first came to New York and had never left it. It had been his before he was married and remained his after the divorce. “This is the one thing I’ll miss,” Phyllis had said.

“What about the screenings?”

“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’ve pretty much lost my taste for movies.”

He occasionally wondered if that would ever happen to him. He contributed a column of film reviews to two monthly magazines; because the publications were mutually noncompetitive, he was able to use his own name on both columns. The columns themselves differed considerably in tone and content. For one magazine he tended to write longer and more thoughtful reviews, and leaned toward films with intellectual content and artistic pretension. His reviews for the other magazine tended to be briefer, chattier, and centered more upon the question of whether a film would be fun to see than if seeing it would make you a more worthwhile human being. In neither column, however, did he ever find himself writing something he did not believe to be the truth.

Nor had he lost his taste for movies. There were times, surely, when his perception of a movie was colored for the worse by his having seen it on a day when he wasn’t in the mood for it. But this didn’t happen that often, because he was usually in the mood for almost any movie. And screenings, whether in a small upstairs room somewhere in midtown or at a huge Broadway theater, were unquestionably the best way to see a film. The print was always perfect, the projectionist always kept his mind on what he was doing, and the audience, while occasionally jaded, was nevertheless respectful, attentive, and silent. Every now and then Paul took a busman’s holiday and paid his way into a movie house, and the difference was astounding. Sometimes he had to change his seat three or four times to escape from imbeciles explaining the story line to their idiot companions; other times, especially at films with an enthusiastic teenage following, the audience seemed to have more dialogue than the actors.

Sometimes he thought that he enjoyed his work so much he’d gladly do it for free. Happily, he didn’t have to. His two columns brought him a living, given that his expenses were low. Two years ago his building went co-op and he’d used his savings for the down payment. The mortgage payment and monthly maintenance charges were quite within his means. He didn’t own a car, had no aged or infirm relatives to support, and had been blissfully spared a taste for cocaine, high-stakes gambling, and the high life. He preferred cheap ethnic restaurants, California zinfandel, safari jackets, and blue jeans. His income supported this sort of lifestyle quite admirably.

And, as the years went by, more opportunities for fame and fortune presented themselves. The New York Times Book Review wanted 750 words from him on a new book on the films of King Vidor. A local cable show had booked him half a dozen times to do capsule reviews, and there was talk of giving him a regular ten-minute slot. Last semester he’d taught a class, “Appreciating the Silent Film,” at the New School for Social Research; this had increased his income by fifteen hundred dollars and he’d slept with two of his students, a thirty-three-year-old restless housewife from Jamaica Heights and a thirty-eight-year-old single mother who lived with her single child in three very small rooms on East Ninth Street.

Now, home again,he shucked his clothes and showered. He dried off and turned down his bed. It was a queen-size platform bed, with storage drawers underneath it and a bookcase headboard, and he made it every morning. During his marriage he and Phyllis generally left the bed unmade, but the day after she moved out he made the bed, and he’d persisted with this discipline ever since. It was, he’d thought, a way to guard against becoming one of those seedy old bachelors you saw in British spy films, shuffling about in slippers and feeding shillings to the gas heater.

He got into bed, settled his head on the pillow, closed his eyes. He thought about the film he’d seen that night, and about the Ethiopian restaurant at which they’d dined afterward. Whenever a country had a famine, some of its citizenry escaped to the United States and opened a restaurant. First the Bangladeshi, now the Ethiopians. Who, he wondered, was next?