Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

He thought about Karin — whose name, he suddenly realized, rhymed with Marin County, north of San Francisco. He’d first encountered Marin County in print and had assumed it was pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, and he had accordingly mispronounced it for some time until Phyllis had taken it upon herself to correct him. He’d had no opportunity to make the same mistake with Karin; he had met her in the flesh, so to speak, before he knew how her name was spelled, and thus—

No, he thought. This wasn’t going to work. What was he trying to prove? Who (or, more grammatically, whom) was he kidding?

He got out of bed. He went to the closet and took the bear down from the top shelf. “Well, what the hell,” he said to the bear. (If you could sleep with a bear, you could scarcely draw the line at talking to it.) “Here we go again, fella,” he said.

He got into bed again and took the bear in his arms. He closed his eyes. He slept.

The whole thinghad taken him by surprise. It was not as though he had intentionally set out one day to buy himself a stuffed animal as a nocturnal companion. He supposed there were grown men who did this, and he supposed there was nothing necessarily wrong with their so doing, but that was not what had happened. Not at all.

He had bought the bear for a girl. Sibbie was her name, short for Sybil, and she was a sweet and fresh young thing just a couple of years out of Skidmore, a junior assistant production person at one of the TV nets. She was probably a little young for him, but not that young, and she seemed to like screenings and ethnic restaurants and guys who favored blue jeans and safari jackets.

For a couple of months they’d been seeing each other once or twice a week. Often, but not always, they went to a screening. Sometimes he stayed over at her place just off Gramercy Park. Now and then she stayed over at his place on Bank Street.

It was at her apartment that she’d talked about her stuffed animals. How she’d slept with a whole menagerie of them as a child, and how she’d continued to do so all through high school. How, when she’d gone off to college, her mother had exhorted her to put away childish things. How she had valiantly and selflessly packed up all her beloved plush pets and donated them to some worthy organization that recycled toys to poor children. How she’d held back only one animal, her beloved bear Bartholomew, intending to take him along to Skidmore. But at the last minute she’d been embarrassed (“Em bear assed?” Paul wondered) to pack him, afraid of how her roommates might react, and when she got home for Thanksgiving break she discovered that her mother had given the bear away, claiming that she’d thought that was what Sibbie had wanted her to do.

“So I started sleeping with boys,” Sibbie explained. “I thought, ‘All right, bitch, I’ll just show you,’ and I became, well, not promiscuous exactly, but not antimiscuous either.”

“All for want of a bear.”

“Exactly,” she’d said. “So do you see what that makes you? You’re just a big old bear substitute.”

The next day, though, he found himself oddly touched by her story. There was hurt there, for all the brittle patter, and when he passed the Gingerbread House the next afternoon and saw the bear in the window he never even hesitated. It cost more than he would have guessed, and more than he really felt inclined to spend on what was a sort of half-joke, but they took credit cards, and they took his.

The next night they spent together he almost gave her the bear, but he didn’t want the gift to follow that quickly upon their conversation. Better to let her think her story had lingered in his consciousness awhile before he’d acted on it. He’d wait another few days and say something like, “You know, that story you told me, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. What I decided, I decided you need a bear.” And so they’d spent that night in his bed, with only each other for company, while the bear spent the night a few yards away on the closet shelf.

He next saw her five days later, and he’d have given her the bear then but they wound up at her apartment, and of course he hadn’t dragged the creature along to the Woody Allen screening, or to the Thai restaurant. A week later, just to set the stage, he’d made his bed that morning with the bear in it, its head resting on the middle pillow, its fat little arms outside the bedcovers.

“Oh, it’s a bear !” she would say. And he would say, “The thing is, I’ve got a no-bears clause in my lease. Do you think you could give it a good home?”

Except it didn’t work that way. They had dinner, they saw a movie, and then when he suggested they repair to his place she said, “Could we go someplace for a drink, Paul? There’s a conversation we really ought to have.”

The conversation was all one-sided. He sat there, holding but not sipping his glass of wine, while she explained that she’d been seeing someone else once or twice a week, since theirs had not been designed to be an exclusive relationship, and that the other person she was seeing, well, it seemed to be getting serious, see, and it had reached the point where she didn’t feel it was appropriate for her to be seeing other people. Such as Paul, for example.

It was, he had to admit, not a bad kissoff, as kissoffs go. And he’d expected the relationship to end sooner or later, and probably sooner.

But he hadn’t expected it to end quite yet. Not with a bear in his bed.

He put her in a cab, and then he put himself in a cab, and he went home and there was the bear. Now what? Send her the bear? No, the hell with that; she’d be convinced he’d bought it after she dumped him, and the last thing he wanted her to think was that he was the kind of dimwit who would do something like that.

The bear went back into the closet.

And stayed there.

It was surprisingly hard to give the bear away. It was not, after all, like a box of candy or a bottle of cologne. You could not give a stuffed bear to just anyone. The recipient had to be the right sort of person, and the gift had to be given at the right stage of the relationship. And many of his relationships, it must be said, did not survive long enough to reach the bear-giving stage.

Once he had almost made a grave mistake. He had been dating a rather abrasive woman named Claudia, a librarian who ran a research facility for a Wall Street firm, and one night she was grousing about her ex-husband. “He didn’t want a wife,” she said. “He wanted a daughter, he wanted a child. And that’s how he treated me. I’m surprised he didn’t buy me Barbie dolls and teddy bears.”

And he’d come within an inch of giving her the bear! That, he realized at once, would have been the worst possible thing he could have done. And he realized, too, that he didn’t really want to spend any more time with Claudia. He couldn’t say exactly why, but he didn’t really feel good about the idea of having a relationship with the sort of woman you couldn’t give a bear to.

There was oneof those cardboard signs over the cash register of a hardware store on Hudson Street. SOME DAYS YOU GET THE BEAR, it said. SOME DAYS THE BEAR GETS YOU.

He discovered an addendum: Sooner or later, you sleep with the bear.

It happened finally on an otherwise unremarkable day. He’d spent the whole day working on a review of a biography ( Sydney Greenstreet: The Untold Story ), having a lot of trouble getting it the way he wanted it. He had dinner alone at the Greek place down the street and rented the video of Casablanca, sipping jug wine and reciting the lines along with the actors. The wine and the film ran out together.