Lawrence Block - No Score

“Sure,” I said.

She put an ashtray back on a tabletop and turned to look at me. “Just think of all the people who will look at those pictures of the two of us,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you like the idea?”

“I don’t know. I got bothered by that before. I mean, I thought somebody might recognize me, but then I thought that I didn’t have anybody to care one way or the other. If some jerk I went to some school with saw it, well, what do I care? You know, let him envy me, let him eat his heart out. If I had any family it might be different, I guess.”

“Poor baby. All alone in the world.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I called you that last night.”

“I know.”

She crossed to the television set, switched it on, collapsed neatly on the couch. My couch. She patted the cushion next to her, and I remembered how she had given the same invitational pat to the green couch in the studio last night. I felt lightheaded and shaky.

I pretended not to notice the invitation. “I think I’ll have another cup of coffee,” I told her. “You want one?”

“I’ll make them.”

“No, stay there,” I said. “I, uh, I need the exercise.”

She was still sitting in the same spot when I brought back the two cups of coffee. She said, “You know, Chip, that was fun last night.”

“Here’s your coffee.”

“For you, too.” She put the cup down next to mine on the coffee table. “We could have a lot of fun, you know. There are lots of times like this morning when Gregor is out and I’m home all alone. If you didn’t try to force things, we could have a real good time.”

“What kind of a real good time?”

“Like last night. Except without anybody watching or snapping pictures.”

“And without finishing what we started.”

She raised her eyebrows. “You finished, didn’t you? I spent half an hour wiping the floor. If that wasn’t what you would call finishing—”

“You know what I mean.”

She put her hand on my cheek. “Didn’t you get your kicks last night, baby?”

“I wanted to do it the right way.”

“There’s no right way, honey. Sex may be a game but there’s no yo-yo keeping score. Whatever turns you on, that’s the right way.”

“I never got laid in my life, Aileen.”

I turned away as I said this. I felt excited and happy and miserable all at the same time, and all tied in knots. She had my hand in both of hers and was petting it.

“I know that, Chip.”

“It’s pretty obvious, huh?”

“Well, reading between the lines of what you said. It’s a big thing for you, huh? Being all hung up about being a virgin.” I nodded.

“Being a virgin, you know, is something everybody is and something everybody gets over sooner or later. Even I was a virgin once. You may find that hard to believe—”

“Cut it out, will you?”

“Hey.” I turned and looked at her. She gave me the wise grin, and some of the tension went out of me. “Now listen a minute, baby,” she said. “We can have a little fun, if you want, or we can just let it stay nice and loose between us, if you’d rather have it that way, but one thing not to do is be so serious about everything, because that’s nothing but a big bring-down.”

I nodded again. “But why can’t we—”

“Because we can’t. Because that’s where I draw the line. That’s for Greg and nobody else. Look, if all you want to do is stick it in, you can go out and find a pro. You’re getting fifty dollars from Greg. You’re a rich man. If you want to just get on top of some syphilitic pig and get rid of your precious cherry, all you have to do—”

“You know what I want.”

“Uh-huh, baby, but I also know what I want. And that’s some nice tender sweetness from my baby, and you don’t have to worry, I won’t tease, I won’t leave you frustrated. You’ll come, honey, and so will I, and it’ll be very nice, just leave everything to me.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“What’s to say?” She laughed deep in her throat. “Come here,” she said. “Do something brilliant, like kissing me.”

Do you have any idea how many ways there are to do it without really doing it?

Neither did I.

There’s just no end to the possibilities. There were just three rules to the game — or one rule, actually, that closed three doors to me. What it boiled down to, really, was that I couldn’t enter her. (With what she still liked to call my hard core, that is. Other things, yes.) I guess there’s precedent for this. In the legal definitions of rape and sodomy and other nice things like that, the dividing line is that same line Aileen used. Penetration. If you don’t get in, the argument goes, then you haven’t really Done Anything Wrong.

We didn’t Do Anything Wrong.

But we did just about everything else.

You know something? I’ve thought about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that if only I hadn’t been a virgin at the time, I would have been the happiest man on earth. Because from a physical standpoint there was nothing frustrating about the relationship we had. I was getting there, and not in the therapeutic massage way I had made it in the photo studio, either. We weren’t playing that little game at all. It had been strictly for Gregor’s benefit, and now that we were on our own, we didn’t try to hide the fact that the name of the game was Getting Kicks.

Sometimes we spent five or six hours in a row on that couch, and by the time we stopped I had made it so many times that I didn’t have the strength to lift a finger, let alone my unhard core. So in simple terms of the amount of sex I was getting I was in the class of a man on a honeymoon with a nymphomaniac, for Pete’s sake.

So in that sense it was really great. The more I got the more I wanted, and the more I wanted the more I got, and it looked as though it could just go on that way forever and it would keep getting better all the time.

Here’s a comparison that you might want to pass up if you’re very heavy on religion. Not to offend anybody, but I think it fits. It was like being Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, with Paradise there, just everything you could want all spread out for you, except for these two trees that you couldn’t go near. You could eat anything else in the world but the fruit of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, so naturally what did you want? Right the first time. Well, so did I. The fruit was a cherry instead of an apple, and I wanted to get rid of it, not take a bite out of it, but otherwise it added up to about the same thing.

(Incidentally, suppose Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Life instead of the Tree of Knowledge. Or from both of them. They’d still be alive, and the earth would be up to its neck in people. That doesn’t have anything to do with anything else, but it’s been bothering me ever since I was a little kid so I thought I would put it in. I’m supposed to be writing this straightforward, keeping to the subject and everything, but I was also told that the book ought to let the reader know how I feel about things and the kind of person I am, and frankly I think if I have to just tell everything absolutely cold and straight without putting down other things that come into my head while I’m sitting here, then the book might as well have been written by a machine. When I read a book, I like to have the feeling that a real human being actually sat down and wrote it, and that reading it will let me know something about him. Some books give you the feeling that the sheets of paper came out of the paper mill with the words already on them, for Pete’s sake. Untouched by human hands, like the plastic food in turnpike restaurants.)

Well, to get back to what I was saying, if you’re still with me, I sort of wish I could have rearranged my schedule so that I could have met Aileen five years later in life. That would have been perfect, I think. By then I would be twenty-two and years past being a virgin, but still young enough so that she would be the older woman showing me new ways to be the happiest kid on the block.