Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

We made love.

She had her eyes closed. I put my hand on her stomach. She was shiny with sweat.

After a while I said, “Tell me about it.”

“Huh?”

“What went wrong?”

“Huh?” Her eyes opened. “Nothing went wrong. I had an orgasm.”

“I know.”

“So?”

“So you weren’t really there. You were somewhere else and it wasn’t right.”

“Oh, wow.”

“Or else I’m a little flaky, which is possible.”

“No.”

“I’m right, then.”

“Yeah. Shit.”

“What’s the matter?”

She turned away. “I didn’t think you would be able to tell. I guess that was pretty stupid, thinking that. I’m sorry, Chip.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“Yes there is. The thing is, oh, I don’t know—”

I waited.

“The only way is to say it. I have an old man.”

For a minute I thought she meant her father. I had spent the past nine months with people who were several years behind on their slang. Then I realized what she meant and I said, “Oh. A guy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I figured you would be seeing guys. And the rest of it, as far as that goes.”

(This was a lie. Not that I had ever expected that Hallie would be sitting up in Wisconsin saving herself for me. But I just managed never to think about her with anybody else. I don’t much like to think about it now, if you want to know.)

“I’m sort of involved with him.”

“In a heavy way?”

“Kind of heavy, yeah.”

“Oh.”

“Like we’re living together.”

“Oh.” Why did I suddenly feel as though I was dying? “For very long?”

“Well, we were sort of together starting in April, but not actually living together. And he was in New York for the summer, he lives out on the Island, and we saw each other a few times during the summer, and when we came back to campus we started, uh, living together.”

“In your room?”

“No. He has this apartment off campus. I keep some of my clothes and things at my room because there isn’t much space at his place. But I sleep there, and cook meals and like that.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t think it’s a forever thing or anything, but, oh, I dig him, you know, and it’s very much what I’m into right now.”

“Sure.”

She turned to me. There were tears running out of her eyes but she wasn’t really crying, and the tears never got anywhere near her voice.

She said, “I’m really a bitch. I should have told you out in front and we never should have balled. Maybe all I really am is a cunt.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“I just don’t want you to hate me and you’ve got every right in the world.”

“Why should I hate you? I love you, why the hell should I hate you?”

“Oh, shit ,” she said, and this time she let go and cried.

October 17, 1970

Miss Geraldine Simms c/o The Lighthouse Bordentown, South Carolina

Dear Geraldine:

Awhile ago I sent you a copy of a book I wrote called No Score. I hope you got it, because otherwise this won’t make too much sense. Or maybe it will — it seems to me I told you most of what happened in No Score at one time or another.

Anyway, along with this letter I’m sending you the carbon copy of another book I wrote.

I just finished it. In fact I haven’t finished it yet, I’m finishing it right now.

If you read No Score , you may remember that there was an Epilogue at the end that told what happened to me after the actual story of the book ended. I decided the other day that this book ought to have an Epilogue also and I couldn’t decide exactly how to do it. While I was trying to work it out in my head I also decided I wanted to write you a letter, and I thought about it some more and decided that, in a sense, this whole book was a letter to you. So I’m killing two stones with one bird.

What I hope you’ll do now, Geraldine, is read the carbon of the book all the way through and then come back to the letter.

Did you go back and read the carbon copy? Thanks. And if you didn’t, I forgive you. I never heard of a letter with an intermission before.

After Hallie said Oh, shit and started crying, that was about it. Of course in books it can just end like that (which is why I ended it like that) and in life it can’t, because the two people are stuck there in the room and, unless the boiler blows up and kills them all, they still have certain dumb unimportant things they have to say to each other, like while they’re putting on their clothes.

Just as an example:

“You know, Chip, you would really like him. I mean it, you ought to meet him sometime.”

“No way.”

“No way you could like him or no way you could meet him?”

“Right both times.”

“Yeah.”

That kind of dialogue, Geraldine. It was tons of fun, believe me. I had a wonderful time.

Then I drove her back to her dormitory, and then she insisted that I wait while she got the copy of my book so I could autograph it for her. I wanted to drive away but I also wanted to see her again.

I won’t tell you what I wrote in the book. I wrote something, and closed the book, and told her not to read it until later. She nodded.

“Well,” I said.

“Chip.”

“What?”

“Write to me.”

“Should I?”

“And this time put a return address.”

“Really? All right, sure.”

“Chip? It was the timing, I think. I mean, oh, you know what I mean.”

“Sure.”

“I mean, people like us, we’ll probably run into each other again.”

“We probably will.”

There was more but that’s enough. I went back to the motel and packed because all I wanted to do was drive away from there, though I was afraid to trust myself on the road. But I couldn’t sleep either.

I thought about getting drunk but if you were between eighteen and twenty-one all they would serve you was beer. I was a couple of days short of nineteen but my ID said I was a couple of days short of eighteen. Maybe they would have served me beer anyway. I didn’t really care because I didn’t think I could get drunk enough on beer, not the way I felt.

Do you remember the glass of corn whiskey you gave me that last night? That’s what I really wanted.

I sat around there for a while feeling numb and empty and lost and alone. I had never felt this alone before because there had always been Hallie somewhere in the distance, and now there wasn’t. It didn’t feel good.

Then I remembered my book. No Score. I had hardly looked at the copy I signed for Hallie. I left the motel and went to drugstores and bookstores looking for it. It was really weird seeing it on the stands. My name all over the place, on the spine and the cover and at the top of every even-numbered page. I wanted to buy all the copies they had, but who was I going to give them to? I bought one copy and took it back to my room and read it.

What a strange feeling. Here was this kid talking, and he was me, except he wasn’t, because when I talk to myself it’s something that happens inside of my head, and this kid was talking on a page. Well, quite a few pages, actually.

And he sounded so young. It was just impossible to believe that this punk was me. And just a year ago.

Poor Hallie. It must have been really traumatic to read all that, especially when she had no idea it was coming. I guess on all those postcards I never mentioned anything about writing a book, or that somebody was going to publish it.

I guess the book settled me the way liquor might have. I read it all the way through and then I got undressed again and went right to sleep.