Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

He got undressed and went to bed. He lay there, waiting for sleep to come, and what came instead was the thought that he was, all things considered, the loneliest and most miserable son of a bitch he knew.

He sat up, astonished. The thought was manifestly untrue. He liked his life, he had plenty of companionship whenever he wanted it, and he could name any number of sons of bitches who were ever so much lonelier and more miserable than he. A wine thought, he told himself. In vino stupiditas. He dismissed the thought, but sleep remained elusive. He tossed around until something sent him to the closet. And there, waiting patiently after all these months, was the bear.

“Hey, there,” he said. “Time to round up the usual suspects. Can’t sleep either, can you, big fellow?”

He took the bear and got back into bed with it. He felt a little foolish, but he also felt oddly comforted. And he felt a little foolish about feeling comforted, but that didn’t banish the comfort.

With his eyes closed, he saw Bogart clap Claude Rains on the back. “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship,” Bogart said.

And, before he could begin to figure it all out, Paul fell asleep.

Every night since,with only a handful of exceptions, he had slept with the bear.

Otherwise he slept poorly. On a couple of occasions he had stayed overnight with a woman, and he had learned not to do this. He had explained to one woman (the single mother on East Ninth Street, as a matter of fact) that he had this quirk, that he couldn’t fall fully asleep if another person was present.

“That’s more than a quirk,” she’d told him. “Not to be obnoxious about it, but that sounds pretty neurotic, Paul.”

“I know,” he’d said. “I’m working on it in therapy.”

Which was quite untrue. He wasn’t in therapy. He had indeed thought of checking in with his old therapist and examining the whole question of the bear, but he couldn’t see the point. It was like the old Smith-and-Dale routine: “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “So don’t do that!” If it meant a sleepless night to go to bed without the bear, then don’t go to bed without the bear!

A year ago he’d gone up to Albany to participate in an Orson Welles symposium. They put him up at the Ramada for two nights, and after the first sleepless night he actually thought of running out to a store and buying another bear. Of course he didn’t, but after the second night he wished he had. There was, thank God, no third night; as soon as the program ended he glanced at the honorarium check to make sure the amount was right, grabbed his suitcase, and caught the Amtrak train back to the city, where he slept for twelve solid hours with the bear in his arms.

And, several months later when he flew out to the Palo Alto Film Festival, the bear rode along at the bottom of his duffel bag. He felt ridiculous about it, and every morning he stowed the bear in his luggage, afraid that the chambermaids might catch on otherwise. But he slept nights.

The morning after the night with Karin, he got up, made the bed, and returned the bear to the closet. As he did so, for the first time he felt a distinct if momentary pang. He closed the door, hesitated, then opened it. The bear sat uncomplaining on its shelf. He closed the door again.

This was not, he told himself, some Stephen King movie, with the bear possessed of some diabolical soul, screaming to be let out of the closet. He could imagine such a film, he could just about sit down and write it. The bear would see itself as a rival for Paul’s affections, it would be jealous of the women in his life, and it would find some bearish way to kill them off. Hugging them to death, say. And in the end Paul would go to jail for the murders, and his chief concern would be the prospect of spending life in prison without the possibility of either parole or a good night’s sleep. And the cop, or perhaps the prosecuting attorney, would take the bear and toss it in the closet, and then one night, purely on a whim, would take it to bed.

And the last shot would be an ECU of the bear, and you’d swear it was smiling.

No, scratch that. Neither he nor the bear inhabited a Stephen King universe, for which he gave thanks. The bear was not alive. He could not even delude himself that it had been made by some craftsman whose subtle energies were locked in the bear, turning it into more than the inanimate object it appeared to be. It had been made, according to its tag, in Korea, at a factory, by workers who couldn’t have cared less whether they were knocking out bears or bow ties or badminton sets. If he happened to sleep better with it in his bed, if he indeed took comfort in its presence, that was his eccentricity, and a remarkably harmless one at that. The bear was no more than an inanimate participant in it all.

Two days later he made the bed and tucked the bear under the covers, its head on a pillow, its arms outside the blankets.

Not, he told himself, because he fancied that the bear didn’t like it in the closet. But because it seemed somehow inappropriate to banish the thing with daylight. It was more than inappropriate. It was dishonest. Why, when people all over America were emerging from their closets, should the bear be tucked into one?

He had breakfast, watched Donahue, went to work. Paid some bills, replied to some correspondence, labored over some revisions on an essay requested by an academic quarterly. He made another pot of coffee, and while it was brewing he went into the bedroom to get something, and there was the bear.

“Hang in there,” he said.

He found hewas dating less.

This was not strictly true. He no less frequently took a companion to a screening, but more and more of these companions tended to be platonic. Former lovers with whom he’d remained friendly. Women to whom he was not attracted physically. Male friends, colleagues.

He wondered if he was losing interest in sex. This didn’t seem to be the case. When he was with a woman, his lovemaking was as ardent as ever. Of course, he never spent the night, and he had ceased to bring women back to his own apartment, but it seemed to him that he took as much pleasure as ever in the physical embrace. He didn’t seek it as often, wasn’t as obsessed with it, but couldn’t that just represent the belated onset of maturity? If he was at last placing sex in its proper proportion, surely that was not cause for alarm, was it?

In February, anotherfilm festival.

This one was in Burkina Faso. He received the invitation in early December. He was to be a judge, and would receive a decent honorarium and all expenses, including first-class travel on Air Afrique. This last gave him his first clue as to where Burkina Faso was. He had never previously heard of it, but now guessed it was in Africa.

A phone call unearthed more information. Burkina Faso had earlier been Upper Volta. Its postage stamps, of which his childhood collection had held a handful, bore the name Haute-Volta; the place had been a French colony, and French remained the prevailing language, along with various tribal dialects. The country was in West Africa, north of the Equator but south of the Sahel. The annual film festival, of which this year’s would be the third, had not yet established itself as terribly important cinematically, but the Burkina Fasians (or whatever you called them) had already proved to be extremely gracious hosts, and the climate in February was ever more hospitable than New York’s. “Marisa went last year,” a friend told him, “and she hasn’t left off talking about it yet. Not to be missed. Emphatically not to be missed.”

But how to bring the bear?

He obtained a visa, he got a shot for yellow fever (providing ten years of immunity; he could go to no end of horrid places before the shot need be renewed) and began taking chloroquine as a malaria preventative. He went to Banana Republic and bought clothing he was assured would be appropriate. He made a couple of phone calls and landed a sweet assignment, thirty-five hundred words plus photos for an airline in-flight magazine. The airline in question didn’t fly to Burkina Faso, or anywhere near it, but they wanted the story all the same.