Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

I didn’t leave my heart in San Francisco, but for a while there I guess I left my balls in Bordentown.

I guess I knew all along I was on my way to Wisconsin. In fact the first night out I tried to figure out just how long it would take me to drive there if I drove sixteen hours a day and slept eight. (If I had tried it, I think I would have killed that Cadillac in a matter of days. It was good for another fifteen years if you didn’t push it more than fifty or a hundred miles at a stretch, but it tended to burn oil when it overheated and I would have thrown a rod or burned out a bearing sooner or later.)

But the thing is that I wanted to be going to Wisconsin but I didn’t want to get there. I wanted to see Hallie. I always wanted to see Hallie, ever since that one night in September when she came to my room over the barber shop. The next morning she went to Madison to start college, and ever since then I had been not quite going there to see her.

Because if I went there, and if it turned out that there was nothing there for me, then what would I do? I wouldn’t have Hallie to send postcards to, or to write letters to and not mail. Or to think about the way knights used to think about the Holy Grail.

Once I was out of Bordentown I really didn’t want to see anybody right away, Hallie included. I knew that there had to be some time in between Bordentown and whatever was going to come after it. I don’t mean that I spelled all of this out in my mind, but when I think back on it I can see it was something I must have known.

So I took my time, and took down a lot of storm windows and put up a lot of screens, and touched up woodwork and repaired furniture. And before long it was June and the colleges were out for the summer, so there was no point in rushing up there because she would be away on summer vacation.

Of course I knew where she lived, in the same town where I originally met her, a little town on the Hudson between New York and Albany. It stood to reason that she would go home for the summer, and I suppose I could have gone to see her there, but the way I looked at it was that I was already out in the Midwest and it would make more sense to stay there and see her in Wisconsin when the fall term started.

Which meant that all I had to do was kill a couple of months. I didn’t even have to pretend I was on the way to Wisconsin. All I had to do was kill time, and I was getting pretty good at that.

I think some of the pressure came off about the time that the school year ended in Wisconsin. I don’t know that one thing had much to do with the other. Maybe it did and maybe it didn’t, but within a week after the end of the semester, I did something I hadn’t done since I left Bordentown.

By this time I was starting to worry about it. Not that I wasn’t doing it — because let’s face it, I had gone almost eighteen years without doing it, so a couple of months off wasn’t anything remarkable. But I didn’t even want to do it. I didn’t even particularly think about it, for Pete’s sake, and it’s usually all I do think about.

In fact, I wasn’t even doing what I had told Lucille it was perfectly normal to do.

I would see a pretty girl on the street, say, and I would tell myself, There’s a pretty girl. I still had the brains to realize this. But what I wouldn’t tell myself was , Man, would I ever like to ball that chick until her eyes fall out of her head. And that sort of thing had always been my normal response to a pretty girl, and now it didn’t happen, and I was beginning to worry.

For months I had been with Lucille five days a week. The same girl, lunch hour after lunch hour, and I never once got tired of it. I was always ready and willing and able, and it was always good, and I always enjoyed it. And now it began to seem possible to me that (a) I was never going to want it again with anybody or (b) I was only going to want it with Lucille. And both of these things amounted to the same thing, because I was never going to be able to see Lucille again.

And if (b) was true (and it might have been, I couldn’t tell, because I wasn’t sure I still wanted to make love to Lucille but I couldn’t prove that I didn’t, either) then it stood to reason that leaving Bordentown had been a mistake. But not one of those mistakes you can do anything about, except maybe cut your throat, which still seemed a little too extreme.

So it reassured me when it finally happened. And it’s reassuring me right now, because I can write about it, and if I didn’t have some sex in this book pretty soon I suppose Mr. Fultz would give it back to me and tell me to use it to line a birdcage or something. He may anyway.

I hope not.

It was in Iowa. I don’t remember the name of the town. (There’s another lie for you. I remember it perfectly well, but I’m not putting it in.) The house I was staying at this time was like most of the others, a sprawling old place in the middle of town with bay windows and gables and extra rooms that were nicely furnished and everything, but nothing happened in them and nobody ever went in there. This house had two widows instead of one. One of them was about sixty, a plump little old lady with cataracts and hardly any chin, so that her face just curved back from her mouth to her neck. This took a little getting used to.

The other widow was her daughter. Her name was Mrs. Cooper, and her mother’s name was Mrs. Wollsacket. Mrs. Cooper was about thirty-five and she had a perfectly good chin and no cataracts. She also had a son, who was about seven years old and retarded. Very retarded. They had to feed him with a spoon and he would drool most of it out, and his eyes never seemed to focus on anything.

Between the kid and his grandmother’s nonchin, I had more or less decided not to look for anything that needed fixing. After breakfast Mrs. Cooper left for work and I got ready to go, and when I went to pay Mrs. Wollsacket she started talking about all the things that needed doing, and how difficult it was to make do without a man around the place, and how here it was June and the second-floor storms were still on the windows. (Incidentally, somebody is missing a good bet; if someone would only sell combination aluminum storm windows to all those lonely old ladies, half their worries would be over.)

Well, I couldn’t just leave. It wouldn’t fit the Lone Ranger image at all to run off yelling “Hi-yo, Silver!” without changing those storm windows for her. I offered to do the job for her in exchange for the two-fifty I owed her and another day’s room and board. She said, “Oh, I wasn’t asking you to do it, Mr. Harrison,” and I started to say, well, then, I guessed I’d be on my way, and she said, “but I’m surely glad to take you up on your generous offer,” and I was locked in.

It didn’t take long. I took care of the storm windows and took apart a lamp with a broken switch and put it back together again so that it worked, which completely amazed her. Then I ate a sandwich for lunch and walked around town until I found the library.

The librarian looked vaguely familiar, and when she gave me a tentative smile I realized it was Mrs. Cooper. We had a dumb conversation, and then I looked around until I found a couple of early Nero Wolfe mysteries that I couldn’t remember if I had read or not. Mrs. Cooper told me I could take them back to the house even though I didn’t have a card. I read them in my room.

One of them, anyway; it turned out I had read the other one.

They fed the kid early, thank God. Then the three of us had dinner and I talked about how I was a student at the University of Wisconsin on summer vacation, and trying to see something of the country and possibly earn a little money toward next year’s tuition. (I had been saying this since the term ended. Before that I was the same student at Wisconsin but had dropped out in January for lack of funds and hoped to go back in the fall.) I couldn’t tell you very much about the dinner conversation because it was basically the same as all my dinner conversations, and I had learned to handle my end of it without paying much attention to anything but the food.