Lawrence Block: No Score

“Chip—”

“What?”

She sighed a couple of times. Her eyes stole a look at me, moving over my body to the part of me she wanted me to pull a sheet over. She withdrew them, but they came back again of their own accord.

She said, “If you would just be a gentleman, and if you would tell me the things you said before, you know, about thinking I’m really pretty and that you like me as a person and you respect me, then everything could be the way it was before.”

I made her say it again. And she said it again in just about the same words.

“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Say, do you suppose we should put our clothes on first so that we can start over from the beginning?”

“That would be best, Chip.”

“That sure is a great idea,” I said.

“I’m glad you — Chip, what are you doing? ”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Chip, now stop that!”

“It’s my thing,” I said, “If I want to play with it, I’ve got every right in the world.”

“If you think I’m going to sit here and watch you, you’re out of your mind!”

“Would you like to do it for me?”

“Chip, I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

“Go home.”

“But I thought—”

“Go home.”

“Chip?”

“Go home.”

When she went home, I stopped playing with myself. I was only doing it to annoy her. I mean, I wouldn’t want you thinking that I got any kick out of it, at least in a sexual sense. But it sure got old Francine’s teeth on edge, and that was the general idea.

After she left I sat around for a while. I got dressed again and had a look at the door. If the barber saw it he was going to have a fit and if he didn’t see it I didn’t want him cutting my hair, because he would be likely to lop off an ear. I mean it was smashed beyond recognition. You couldn’t make it look like a door again. The only way to hide it was to hang a picture over it, and I didn’t know where to get one at that hour.

What I did was take the door right off its hinges and carry the whole mess downstairs. I put all the pieces back with the garbage from the drugstore two doors down. The next time Mr. Bruno asked for the rent, I asked him when he was going to bring my door back.

“Door? What door? I never tooka your door.”

“Then where did it go?”

“Jeez,” he said, and added something in Italian. The next day two of his sons came and hung a new door for me. The next time I saw old Bruno he said he was sorry they had taken the door off without telling me, but it needed painting. I got so I had trouble knowing whether that guy kicked my door in or not.

But all this is off the subject. I guess I’m trying to duck the obvious question, which is was I losing my mind or what?

Because Francine would have let me do it. She just about came right out and said she would let me do it if only I would play up to her the way she wanted. She spelled it out for me, just about, and I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t get the message, and what did I do? I sent her home, for Pete’s sake. I sat there, pulling my pud like a total dip and told her to take her whatchamacallit and go home, and kept telling her until she went.

I sat around for hours trying to figure it out. And the best I could come up with was that I had just been trying to get laid for so long that finally something snapped inside me and I just wasn’t going to go through all that goddamn nonsense again. If you stop to think, ever since I left Upper Valley I had been planning on working hard and applying myself and being straightforward and open and honest and sensible, all in a heroic All American effort to Get Ahead. And time after time I wound up being dishonest and sneaky and conniving, and floated around aimlessly and didn’t save money and wasn’t getting ahead, and all because the only thing I really gave a damn about was getting laid. And it might have made sense if I was making out like a maniac, but I wasn’t getting anyplace at all, and the whole thing just wasn’t worth the trouble.

And Francine wasn’t worth the trouble, for Pete’s sake. No matter how nice her body was, there was too thick a layer of stupidity and selfishness hovering over it. And no matter what terrific secrets she had hidden between her legs, they just couldn’t be worth all the games and crap you had to go through to get to her.

I just wasn’t interested.

You may have trouble believing it. I don’t blame you for a minute. This is I, Chip Harrison, talking, after all, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t believe it all myself. But it was true.

I went outside and walked around until I found a place to have a cup of coffee. I just walked right in and sat down at the counter without giving the place the usual carefully casual are-there-any-girls-here glance. I didn’t even care. I sat at the counter, and the waitress who always served me came over and gave me the usual big phony smile and leaned forward to give me the usual cheap thrill, and I talked to her the same way I always did but without even pausing to think for a moment that I would like to bang her. I drank my coffee and ordered another cup. I told myself I might be a virgin for the rest of my life, and if that was the way it was going to be, I would just have to learn to live with it, because no matter how great Doing It felt (and I don’t suppose it would really feel a whole hell of a lot different from some of the things I had done with Aileen, as far as that goes), it still couldn’t be worth making a horse’s ass of yourself or building your whole life around. It just wasn’t worth it.

I was having a third cup of coffee, which I don’t usually do, but this wasn’t my usual kind of evening, either. A voice said, “Say, is anybody sitting here?”

I turned around. It was a girl about my age, with long brown hair and, very wide brown eyes. She was wearing a pair of those granny glasses and if anything they made her eyes look bigger.

“No one at all,” I said.

“What I meant was, do you feel like company or are you involved with your own private thoughts?”

“Company’s fine.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to come on heavy or anything.”

“I’m sure. I ran out of thoughts, anyway.”

She parked herself on the stool next to mine. The waitress came over and showed off her breasts. The girl ordered coffee, and I said I didn’t want anything, thanks just the same. The waitress gave me one of those tentative dirty looks, as though she didn’t know whether to take that the wrong way or not. She brought the girl’s coffee and went away.

“I think I’ve seen you around,” the girl said.

“I’ve been around.”

“Are you living in town?”

“For the time being. Just passing through, actually.”

“I’ve been living here for years, but I’m on my way out now. I’m going to college tomorrow morning.”

“Oh.”

She stirred her coffee. “My first year. I guess I must be a little nervous about it because I couldn’t sleep. I had to get out of the house. I didn’t think I was nervous but I must be.”

“Maybe you’re just excited. That can happen.”

“I guess so. Do you go to school now or did you finish?”

“I sort of dropped out.”

“That’s groovy. I guess I’ll probably drop out. Most of the kids I know who went already, the more interesting ones, all dropped out after a year or two. But I wanted to see what it was like first.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“That’s what I figured.” She drummed the countertop with her fingers. Her fingernails were chewed ragged and the backs of her hands were brown from the sun. “I’m a Capricorn. Open to new ideas. I believe in that, I think, but I don’t know much about it. Astrology, I mean. What are you?”