Lawrence Block - No Score

As it was, maybe I should have gone out and spent my fifty dollars (Gregor paid off in full, although he did make a halfhearted effort to make me settle for forty) on some professional prostitute. If I just could have crossed that barrier I would have stopped brooding about it. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I guess not, really. I guess it would be impossible for anyone in his right or wrong mind not to want to ball that woman in every way there was.

I got to Chicago in late February, I was at the Eagle Hotel for about two weeks, I moved in with Gregor and Aileen about three weeks before we had the picture-taking session, and it was Memorial Day weekend when I got out of there. I just worked it all out with paper and pencil to save you the trouble, assuming you’re interested, and the way I figure it there was a stretch of about six weeks between the night we took the pictures and the morning I left Chicago.

When I think back on it, sometimes it seems as though it couldn’t possibly have been that long, and other times it seems as though it must have been closer to six months. They were six fantastic weeks no matter how you look at it. In all that time we never once crossed any of the cruddy lines she had drawn, and Gregor never got any idea of what was going on, and I don’t think we once went as much as thirty hours in a row without having a shot at it. It wasn’t always a five hour stretch on the couch (although that happened plenty of the time) and sometimes it was just a fast fingering at the kitchen sink or a quick hand job at the breakfast table. But it was as steady as a pension from the Federal Government.

I remember one night when she slipped out of the bedroom after Gregor had zonked out. She did this quite a few times, and since she and Gregor generally knocked one off before going to sleep, the goods I was getting weren’t exactly untouched by human hands. Sloppy seconds, I think they call it. (Not really sloppy, because she would wash up first, but even so it used to bother me. At first, that is. You might be amazed the way a person can get used to things, and can stop being bothered by things that used to bother him.)

This one particular night a couple of winks and hand signals during the late movie had given me the message that I could expect company. So I was waiting for her from the minute she and Gregor closed their bedroom door, and the sound of their bedsprings was background music while I thought of all the things I wanted to do to Aileen. I was developing a pretty wicked imagination along those lines.

Then the door finally opened, and she tiptoed across to the bathroom, and I heard water running. And then she tiptoed some more, from the bathroom across the floor to the couch.

I pretended to be sleeping. We both knew it was a pretty transparent act, but she liked to find ways to wake me up. She kept finding ways, and they always worked. I’ll bet she could do the Indian rope trick just by touching the rope with those hands of hers.

Well, not to go off on tangents, I woke up, and she got on the couch with me, and we did things. Between her thighs, or under her arm, or in her hands, or between her breasts, or in the cleft of her buttocks, or — well, you name it. We made it, and I stretched out, and she curled up in my arms, and I felt like the King of the World.

“Oh, baby,” she said. “You’re so good for me.”

I said, “Purr.” Or something along those lines.

“You know what? I feel like a girl.”

“You sure do.”

“I’m serious.”

I ran a hand over her. “You feel like a girl, all right. I’m glad, too, you know. I don’t think I’d get as much of a kick out of all of this if you felt like a boy. I like these, see, and this, and—”

And a little later, when we came up for a breath of fresh air:

“Hey, I meant it before, clown. You make me feel like a girl again.”

“You’re not so old.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“You’re not that much older than I am, for Pete’s sake. You do this mother bit all the time, but you’re not exactly in the category of an antique.”

“Keep saying it, baby.”

“How old are you, anyway?”

“A hundred and ten.”

“Shit.”

“You know why you make me feel so young? Hey, that’s a song. No, it’s because of what we do. Necking and petting and fooling around like a couple of kids. It takes me back to when I was, you know, younger. And a virgin.”

“I didn’t know you ever were.”

“Don’t be a sharp-tongued son of a bitch, Chip. Your boyish charm is your biggest asset. Don’t piss it away.”

“I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Please do.” She put her hand between my legs and gave me a reassuring pat. “Yeah, I was a virgin once upon a time. Isn’t that remarkable? And when I’m with you I’m a virgin all over again, and the whole sex business is, I don’t know, cleaner and hungrier and hornier and everything rolled into one. It takes me back, it really does.”

“Being in bed with me.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sort of like hearing an old song on the radio that was popular when you were a kid. An oldie but goodie.”

I couldn’t see her face in the dark, but I guess she raised her eyebrows at that one. She had that tone in her voice, saying, “You making fun of me, Chip?”

“No.”

“I think you were, at least a little, maybe. Yeah, like hearing an old song, in a kind of way. The way a song or anything like that makes you feel the way you used to. Sometimes I’ll walk outside during the late summer when there’s a wet wind blowing off the lake, on like a really warm lazy night, and I’ll walk around the block or something and the air will be the way it is in Florida. Just the right temperature and humidity, I suppose. What’s the word? Sultry? But before this can even go through my mind, I’ll get this feeling of being seventeen years old again, because I spent a summer in Florida when I was seventeen.”

“You were in Florida? I thought you were always in Chicago.”

“Oh, I would travel from time to time.”

“What were you doing in Florida?”

“Fucking.”

“That was a straight question.”

“Well, it was a straight answer, honey bunch.”

“At seventeen? I guess I’m retarded.”

“Worry about it, why don’t you?”

“I do, I do. When did you start?”

“Huh?”

“When did you start making love?”

“What are you, Mr. District Attorney? I never started. I’m a virgin, baby doll. Handle me with care.” And, huskily, “If we keep on talking we’ll wake Greg, and he might take a dim view of this. So let’s not talk anymore. Why don’t I just lie here and you can lick different parts of me and see whether or not I like it? Sort of what you might call a scientific experiment.”

(I was just thinking, looking at the last part, that I’ll bet it’s word for word the way that conversation actually went. Obviously, since I’m putting all of this on paper after it happened, I’m just getting the dialogue as close as possible to the way it happened. I didn’t wander through life with a tape recorder hanging around my neck, and I’m not the total recall type. I’m not absolutely convinced anybody is, and there are times when I think people who pretend to be are full of crap. But this one conversation stuck in my mind very vividly. I can hear her speaking the words even now, as if I were playing myself a record of the conversation.

(I guess that’s because I thought about it so many times since then. And it struck me, and strikes me now, that it was a strange combination of games that Aileen was playing. First there was the bit about feeling like a girl, a virgin. And at the same time she kept coming on with the older but wiser routine and a heavy dose of the mother image. I couldn’t understand how she could be a virgin and a mother at the same time. As far as I know, that only happened once.)