Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

Afterward I took a loose leg off one of the dining room chairs and glued it back on. This went over well. Then I went up to my room and read the other Nero Wolfe, the one I had already read once before. I had forgotten how it came out and was willing to find out all over again.

Around ten there was a timid knock on the door. I opened it, and it was Mrs. Cooper. She was a little bird of a woman, as thin as her mother was fat, with a slightly pinched look around her eyes and nose. She was prettier than that sentence makes her sound, and would have looked very nice, I think, if she had done something intelligent with her hair. It was the color of a field mouse and she had it pulled back into a bun.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “and I thought you might like a nice cup of tea, Mr. Harrison.”

We had tea in one of the living rooms. Mrs. Cooper talked about how nice it was to work at the library, except that so few people actually read books anymore, with so many of them wasting their time in front of television sets. And she talked about how lonely it was in that town, and how she had wanted to leave, but she couldn’t leave her mother all alone and besides there was the boy to consider, and she guessed she would just stay there while life passed her by.

“This must be a lonely summer for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said.

“It is,” I said. “But I do meet a lot of people.”

“I’m sure you must.”

“Yes, I do.” Brilliant, Chip. If you’re supposed to be the Lone Ranger, why do you talk like Tonto?

“I suppose you meet a great many lonely women.”

“Uh,” Tonto said.

She folded her little hands under her little breasts. “You must bring them a great deal of excitement, Mr. Harrison. Excitement that is sorely missing in their wretched and cloistered lives.”

Her eyes were shining weirdly, and she moistened her thin lips with her tongue.

I said, “Well, I guess I change a lot of storm windows, if you can call that excitement.”

She leaned forward and put her teacup on the coffee table. She did this very deliberately, as if it would slide off the table unless she placed it in just the right spot. I realized suddenly that she was not wearing the same dress she had had on at dinner. And she was wearing lipstick, and hadn’t been wearing any at dinner.

She stood up and crossed the room and sat on the couch beside me. She folded her hands and rested them in her lap.

“My husband died eight years ago,” she said.

“I’m very sorry.”

“But there is still a fire in me,” she said. “My fire has never been quenched.”

She put her hand on the front of my pants.

I tried out a lot of lines in my head, like asking her how her husband died, or how long she had been working at the library, or if she thought it would rain tomorrow. Somehow none of them seemed like the right thing to say. I considered telling her that I was a fairy or had been wounded in a campus riot or that I had syphilis. It was like having absolutely no appetite and then having somebody put a plate of boiled turnips in front of you.

“My fire burns for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said. She really said that. “Oh, Chip, darling!”

And her hand did things, and of course nothing happened, and I thought, well, maybe I can sort of move the turnips around on my plate. Because while I was sure I would never be able to rise to the occasion, so to speak, I also figured there was more than one way to skin a cat, or quench a fire, and if she had gone eight years without it she could probably get off without too much trouble if I just went through the motions.

So I kissed her.

The way it started out, I was like a Boy Scout helping her across the street. But somewhere along the way everything changed. It really surprised me. I opened her dress and touched her and kissed her, and in the course of it all I began to groove on her body.

It was a much better body than you would have expected. It didn’t look that great — she was much too thin and didn’t have much of a waist, so that she was almost a straight line from her shoulders to her feet. Her skin was very soft and smooth, though, and there was no fat on her, and, well, her body just felt nice. Some do and some don’t, and hers did.

Maybe what I got was a contact arousal from her, because she was certainly excited and she certainly made it obvious. Anyway, I was on the couch with her, just going through the motions, when all of a sudden I realized that I had an erection.

And I thought, Hey, where did that come from?

God knows where it came from. But even I knew where it was supposed to go, and it suddenly seemed absolutely essential that I put it there as soon as I possibly could. It didn’t seem to matter if she was ready or not, although I guess she must have been ready for the past eight years. All that mattered to me was to get into her, and I shucked my pants and rolled on top of her and jabbed at her with all the subtlety of a tomcat.

It went straight in on the first shot as if she had a magnet in her cervix. She wrapped her arms and legs around me as if she was scared I would take it away. She had nothing to worry about. I kept taking it a little ways away and then putting it back, as fast and as hard and as deep as I could.

Throughout all of this, there was something slightly schizophrenic about the whole thing. Because it was as though there were two Chip Harrisons. One of them was banging away at the poor woman as if he was trying to splinter her pelvic bone, and the other was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, watching the whole thing and not quite believing what he was seeing.

It went on for a long time, this totally unsubtle relentless sledgehammer screwing, and she came about half a dozen times, and then so did I.

“We’ll go to your room now,” she said. There was a little puddle on the couch. She put a doily over it, put her dress and my pants over her arm, and took my arm with her free hand. “We’ll go to your room,” she said, “and do it some more.”

“Uh—”

“We’ll fuck,” she said. “We can try different positions. I would like to try it with me on top, if that’s all right with you. That way you can pinch my breasts while we do it. You may pinch them as hard as you like. I won’t mind.”

“Uh—”

“You may even bite them if you like.”

“Your mother,” I said.

“She sleeps very soundly.”

“Well, uh, I’m not sure I can do it again. It took a lot out of me.”

“I know. Most of it is running down my leg.”

“Uh.”

“You’ll be able to,” she said confidently, giving my arm a happy like squeeze. “I just know you will.”

She was right.

Afterward, it seemed as if there ought to be something to say. I asked her about her husband, and if he died before the kid was born. Seven months before the kid was born, she told me.

And how long had her mother been a widow?

“Eight years also.”

“That’s really terrible,” I said. “You must have lost them both about the same time.”

“Exactly the same time.”

“Gee,” I said. “An automobile accident, I suppose.”

“They committed suicide.” She was lying on her back. She had taken her hair down and it looked much better. The pinched-in expression was gone from her face. Sex certainly does wonders for a woman’s appearance.

“You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured me. “It happened the very day I told them that I was pregnant. That very day, I told them, my husband and my father, and they went downstairs to the basement and into the tool room, and they got the shotgun, and they put the barrel in their mouth and pulled the trigger and blew off the top of their head.”