Lawrence Block - No Score

She kissed it, and her hands did things, and the camera made stupid clicking noises, and the hard core was harder than ever. I could feel the blood in my head and I thought I was going to have a brain hemorrhage and die.

She did a million teasing things with her mouth. But there wasn’t any contact to speak of. Just her warm breath.

Click !

Breathing in and out, in and out.

Moistly.

Oh God, I thought, oh God, don’t stop, for Christ’s sake don’t stop, whatever you do, don’t stop, just another minute, just another second, God, don’t stop—

Click !

And she stopped.

Since then I must have tried a thousand times to figure out why she bothered getting started if she wasn’t going to finish it. I mean, face it, it’s not as though she was some drippy virgin who didn’t realize that a man had to finish what he started or get horribly frustrated. Everybody knows this; anybody old enough to read Ann Landers’ column can figure it out. And Aileen was a long ways from a virgin. She may not have slept with anybody but Gregor since they were married, but I’m sure she must have had a few hundred men before he came around.

So she obviously knew what she was doing, but then why do it? She wasn’t a cruel person. She was nice, really, and she seemed to like me.

I mean, I could understand why she felt compelled to perform the act without any actual contact. That is, I could understand it about as well as I could understand why it was all right for us to pet like crazy but not all right for me to get into her. Which is to say that I didn’t understand and it didn’t make any sense but at least I knew the basic rules of the game.

But if she was going to leave me high and dry, why start anything in the first place? What was the point? Gregor had been ready to pack up and go. So had I. And she hadn’t wanted to have anything done to her. I was just supposed to lie there and leave everything to her, and I did, and it hadn’t ended quite the way I had hoped.

I lay there like an overwound watch, going ping ping ping inside and staying drawn hellishly tight. I couldn’t talk or think or breathe or see. I didn’t know where she was, but I knew where she belonged. In Hell, with a hot poker rammed up her behind.

And then I heard her voice, talking, not to me, but beyond me, to Gregor:

“Honey, baby, I have to give him some relief. He’s a kid, you know, and I guess it was all too much for him. The excitement. Being with me, and in front of the camera and all, and going through the motions, and the different positions, and then this last thing. I think it stopped being just an act for him, and he got very excited, and if you look at him now, you can see how tense he is.”

“So?”

“I have to do something.”

“Well, I don’t—”

“I wouldn’t be unfaithful.”

“Because I wouldn’t like that, keed.”

“And I wouldn’t do it.”

“I should hope not. I should just sonofabitching hope you wouldn’t.”

Her hand on my leg.

“But this would be just like a massage. I knew a girl who was a nurse in a hospital—”

“That’s the best place to be a nurse.”

“—and she told me how they used to give the patients rubdowns all the time, and if they got excited they would give that a rubdown, too, and that isn’t wrong, do you think?”

“I suppose not.”

Her hand gripped me.

“Of course it isn’t,” she said, her voice softer than ever now, and now she was talking less to him than to me, and her words moved in a jerky rhythm as her soft sure hand moved up and down, up and down, pumping up and down.

“Of course... it isn’t... wrong... baby... baby... it’s all right... all right...”

Not like this, I thought. Not with your hand, and not in the middle of the air, not like this.

“It’s all right ... it’s all right ... it’s all right... it’s all right... ”

Oh, yeah, I thought. Okay. Sure, sure, oh.

“It’s all RIGHT! ”

It was all right, all right.

The next day Gregor didn’t bother doing his sidewalk photographer number. He went off to see Mark Somebody to turn a suitcase full of dirty pictures into as much money as possible.

“Soon as I get back, keed,” he said, “you get your twenty-five smackers.”

“Fifty,” I reminded him.

“Oh, sure. My mistake.”

“Sure.”

As soon as he was out the door, I went into the kitchen and cornered Aileen. She asked me how come I wasn’t working that morning. I said that a photographer’s assistant didn’t have much to do when the photographer wasn’t on the job. There wasn’t much point in me handing out the little yellow cards if there was nobody on hand to take the pictures.

“I meant one of your other jobs,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t think I’d bother today. I earned fifty bucks last night.”

“You make sure Greg gives you the whole fifty, Chip. Sometimes he tries to chisel people.”

“He already tried.”

“Well, you get the whole fifty. You worked for it.”

“Yeah.”

I wanted to reach for her but I didn’t quite know how to go about it. You can’t imagine how goddamned awkward the whole thing was. I mean, here we had gotten in this wild tangle the night before, with results that I told you about in probably too much detail already, so we won’t go into that all over again, and now here it was morning and she was in the kitchen, wearing an apron and rinsing out coffee cups, and her whole attitude left me feeling that last night had never happened, that it was another dream of mine and when I woke up I would have a damp sticky sock in the bed with me. I mean, I knew it wasn’t a dream, but it might as well have been.

“Chip?”

“What?”

“Are you angry with me?”

I looked at her. “Why should I be?”

“Because I teased you last night.”

“Well, I knew what I was getting into.”

“What you weren’t getting into, you mean.”

“Well.”

“You’re not angry?”

“No.”

“I’m glad.” She grinned quickly. “Because I like you a lot, Chip.”

This time I did reach for her, and she moved her head aside, and I missed. I suppose practically any woman can make practically any man feel like an idiot, but it seemed to me that either she was particularly good at it or that I was particularly inept.

She said, “Last night was business, Chip.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’m not going to say I didn’t enjoy it.”

“You enjoyed it, huh?”

“Why, of course I did. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying your work, do you?”

“I guess not.”

“I should certainly hope not.” She put the dish towel on the drainboard and walked past me to the living room. There wasn’t an abundance of room in the kitchen, and she managed to brush against me pretty good on the way, giving me the full treatment with that round rear end of hers. She got to me, all right. I suppose I’m pretty easy to get to, generally speaking, but old Aileen had a real knack for it as far as I was concerned.

I followed her into the living room. She went around straightening things up and emptying ashtrays, talking as she went. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying any kind of work,” she went on. “I wouldn’t pose for those pictures if I didn’t get a certain amount of kick out of it. I like to think of all those people looking at pictures of me and getting excited. Sometimes I stop and think that there are men all over the country looking at naked pictures of me and playing with themselves. Having sex with me in their minds. And couples looking at different pictures of me, either alone or with someone, and getting so hot and bothered that they want to make love. When I think about that sort of thing I get a very strange feeling.”