Lawrence Block - Chip Harrison Scores Again

But if I stayed in Bordentown, that meant I would eventually marry Lucille.

In that kind of situation, she would be perfect, actually. It was her home town and she belonged there. The idea of the preacher’s daughter marrying the keeper of the cathouse sounds pretty ridiculous, but I can’t think of anybody who would have gotten really uptight about it. Except maybe her father, but who was going to tell him? And why should he pay attention?

It would be perfect for Lucille, and in that situation she would be the perfect wife for me. And what I always wanted was a job with a future and a girl who loved to have me make love to her. Which meant I would be getting everything I always wanted.

That was the whole trouble.

I once read a book by Fredric Brown called The Screaming Mimi. (I also read about twenty other books by Fredric Brown, and there wasn’t one I didn’t like. I like lots of books, but I don’t always finish one feeling that I’d really like to meet the author sometime. I always feel that way about Fredric Brown.)

Anyway, this book starts with two drunks sitting on a bench, and one of them says that you can always have what you want as long as you want it badly enough. (The catch is that, when you don’t get it, that just goes to show that you didn’t want it badly enough.) The other guy sees a beautiful girl pass by and says that what he really wants is to spend a night with her, and for her to be stark naked.

Well, this happens at the end, only it isn’t quite the way he hoped. (I don’t want to spoil the book for you.) But the ultimate point, the philosophical point, is that if you want something badly enough you will get it, sooner or later, and then you’ll find out that you don’t want it anymore, and maybe you never really wanted it in the first place.

So this is what kept going through my mind, not steadily but off and on. It was all there, and all I had to do was reach out and take it.

But did I still want it?

I liked Bordentown, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there permanently. I mean, I like swimming, but I’d hate to spend the next fifty years in the middle of the ocean. And more important, there was this major question of identity that was suddenly bothering me. I liked the idea of running the Lighthouse and putting down roots there and all, but I wasn’t convinced that it was me.

Oh, even the way I was talking, the South Carolina accent. I wasn’t consciously putting it on. I talked that way without thinking because everybody else talked that way and I tend to fall into the patterns of wherever I am. But if you woke me up in the middle of the night I wouldn’t sound that way. So it felt natural when I did it but it really wasn’t, not inside.

And the attitudes I had. Like being against long-haired hippies and black people and Yankees and everything else. It didn’t particularly bother me to act that way, or to use the word nigger, for example, because as far as I was concerned it was just part of doing the Bordentown thing for as long as I happened to be there.

But if I was there forever I would be doing all of that business forever, and when you do something long enough either it becomes real for you, which might be bad, or else you spend your whole life living a lie, which might be worse.

If I stayed in Bordentown, it meant I would probably never in my life rap with anybody the way I had rapped with some friends in the East Village, the way I rapped with Hallie the one night I spent with her. I might make a lot of friends, and I might get to know them very well, but they would never really get to know me.

Even Lucille. I could marry her and live with her for the rest of my life, and she would never really know who I was. Even if I didn’t try to keep anything from her, even if I opened up completely. There was no way for me to get through to her that completely.

And sooner or later that part of me that no one knew about wouldn’t even be there any more. Because I would be the only one who knew about it, and I would tend to forget.

This scared the hell out of me.

The trouble with writing all this down is that there’s no real way to get across exactly how I felt from day to day. See, it was never a constant thing. It was a seesaw, really. I would feel very strongly one way on one day, and the next day I would feel very strongly the other way. And after a little while of this I would be aware of the pattern myself, I would know while I was feeling like staying in Bordentown that the next day I would feel like running for my life. When you get like that it’s really terrible because you’re afraid to trust yourself. You don’t dare make a decision because you know that whatever you decide will seem like the wrong choice in a day or two.

If I left, that was the end of it. I could never come back, and I would probably never have a chance like this for the rest of my life. And if I stayed I would gradually get in deeper and deeper, and we would expand the Lighthouse, and I would marry Lucille, and by the time I realized I should have left, I would be too tied down and it would be too late, and I would spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t get out while I had the chance.

What I wanted to do was keep my options open as long as possible, but you can’t, really, not for very long.

Lucille helped keep me sane, or as close to sane as I was. My moods kept switching and she was vaguely aware of this but she had her own moods to contend with. And no matter what mood either of us was in, those lunch hours in her bedroom helped. I always wanted to make love to her, and she always wanted me to, and it always worked. Sex isn’t the only thing in the world, despite what you might read in The Swinging Swappers. But when it’s good it can do a lot to take your mind off the other things.

Until finally one afternoon I got so groovily lost in her warm body, so completely out of myself and away from myself, that when the world settled together again all I could think of was how much I owed her. Not what I felt for her, or what future I wanted with her or without her, but how much I owed her.

I wanted to give her something, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t giving her enough. I wasn’t even sharing thoughts with her, and I couldn’t do that, not yet, but there was one thing I could give her, one phrase I had been holding back all along for no good reason at all. There were words I could say that she had been waiting to hear, and I could say them whether they were true or not.

I turned and looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine. And I said the three words she had been waiting so long to hear:

“I love you.”

And she looked back at me, drinking the words, her eyes widening as she heard them. And she opened her mouth hesitantly, and I heard the echo of my own words in my head and waited for her to speak.

And she said three words back to me:

“Chip, I’m pregnant. ”

“Geraldine? There was this thing I was sort of wondering about.”

“What we talked about awhile ago? I thought you might have been thinking about it.”

“Well, I was sort of doing some heavy thinking about the business. And then this one little point got stuck in my head, and I thought I would just ask.”

“Be my guest.”

“Well, I was sort of wondering what you would do if one of the girls, if Rita or Claureen, if one of them got pregnant.”

“I’d be powerfully surprised,” she said. “Rita’s step-aunt did a knitting needle abortion on her when she was fourteen, and they had to take out some of the parts you need if you want to have a baby. And Claureen had to go to the hospital for a scraping a year and a half ago and while he was in there the doc tied off her tubes.”