Lawrence Block: No Score

“I shouldn’t even be here,” she said.

“Oh, you should,” I said. I looked at her, and I got this very sudden, very tight feeling in my throat, as though I had done a very ungood job of swallowing something large. I swallowed again, and the tight feeling moved downward through my chest and stomach and down to the very pit of my stomach, where it settled and put down roots and applied for citizenship papers.

Now, you really must be cool, I told myself. Because she’s here and so are you, and if you just Stay Cool and Play Your Cards Right everything will work out.

But the trouble with telling yourself things, I’ve discovered, is that the part of you that’s being told is always dimly aware that the other part, the part that’s doing the telling, is trying to con you, for Pete’s sake. I mean, it’s like staging a wrestling match between your two hands or trying to commit suicide by holding your breath. (If you try that, you eventually pass out and start right in breathing again. So I understand. I experimented once when I was about thirteen, but I got to thinking that maybe this was just a big story and you really could kill yourself that way if you were very strong-willed. And I decided that I was a pretty strong-willed person and was thus running a real risk, so what I did was go into this fake swoon and collapse gracefully on my bedroom rug. I was in my bedroom at the time, and all alone, so you might wonder why I didn’t just start breathing more or less naturally instead of putting on an act. That would be a tough one to answer actually, but anyway none of this has very much to do with what was going on between me and Francine.)

What was going on between me and Francine was that we were in my room, not the bedroom where I held my breath and swooned but the room I was renting now, which was in an attic upstairs over a barbershop. Francine thought she shouldn’t even be here, and I thought she should.

And I had this lump, or tightness really, in the pit of my stomach. Or, not to mince words, in my, well, groin.

“I should go home now,” she said.

“You just got here.”

“As soon as I finish this cigarette.”

She took a puff on her cigarette and just let the smoke find its own way out of her mouth. She sat there on my bed with one hand on her lap and the other behind her on the bed and she let the smoke trickle out from between her lips, which were parted just enough to let this happen. The general effect was as though something was burning inside her. I could believe this.

I was on the bed next to her. That sounds sexier than it was. Because we were both sitting side by side on the edge of the bed, and we might as well have been sitting side by side on a bench, watching a basketball game, for Pete’s sake. All it really was was uncomfortable.

Come on, I told myself. (Remember what I said about telling yourself things, about all the good it does.) Come on, do something. At least say something. Be masculine. Take the initiative. Act.

“You’re beautiful,” I said.

“Oh, come on.”

“No, I really mean it. You are.”

“Oh, sure,” she said, but there was something going on in her eyes and around her mouth. She fluffed her hair with one hand. Her hair was the soft reddish brown of oak leaves just before they fall off the tree. I reached to touch her hair and she shook her head and I took my hand away. I did touch her hair more or less in passing. It was as soft as it looked.

She drew on the cigarette and let the smoke find its way to the ceiling again.

“That’s easy to say, Chip,” she said.

“No, I mean it.”

“I’m sure you tell every girl.”

“No.”

“Well, how do you mean it?”

“Huh?”

She turned a little toward me, crossed one leg over the other (or perhaps it was the other way around). “Why do you say I’m beautiful?” she demanded. “I mean, what about me is that way?”

“Oh, well—”

“Just for the sake of conversation.”

I gave a quick nod then, a reflexive gesture indicating that I had Gotten The Message. I remember reading somewhere that beautiful women are inclined to be very narcissistic, meaning that they are in love with themselves, and that the best way to have success with them is to let them know that you think they’re every bit as great as they think they are. I read this in a book that told how to succeed with women, and that even gave little poetic lines to say to them at tender moments, but I had never bothered to commit any of the lines to memory because they struck me as fairly corny. Besides, it seemed to me that if the author was really such an expert at making out with women he would be too busy doing just that to waste his time writing books. Like the books that tell you how to make money at the racetrack, or how to turn a shoestring into a million dollars. If anybody could do those things, why bother writing a book? Why not just go ahead and do it?

“Your eyes,” I said. Another book had suggested that every woman thinks her eyes are beautiful. “Brown eyes flecked with green, and so large, and so deep.”

“Deep?”

“You think about things, Francine. You have deep and profound thoughts.”

“That’s very true.”

“And it shows in your eyes.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

“So you like my eyes,” she said, prompting.

And smiled a smile to let me know I was on the right track.

“And you have beautiful hands,” I said.

“Do you think so?”

I reached out, trying not to let my own hand tremble, and I took hold of hers. She didn’t draw away. This wasn’t a pass, after all. It was part of the project of cataloguing Francine’s charms. She made things easier by transferring her cigarette to her other hand, and I moved closer on the bed until I could feel the warmth of her body next to mine. We weren’t exactly touching, but I could feel the warmth of her body.

I held her hand and told her how beautiful it was. As a matter of fact, it was a very fine hand, with just the right softness to it. The fingers were long and sensitive. There was just the finest tracing of soft downy hair on the back of the hand. And it had none of the faults that so many hands will have. It wasn’t cold, it wasn’t sweaty, it wasn’t clammy. Of course, I didn’t put things that way. I firmly believe in stressing the positive side of things. For the same reason I didn’t mention the hand’s one flaw, which was the nicotine stain between the first two fingers. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded this if I smoked myself, but I didn’t. I think it’s a bad habit and I don’t see any point in having bad habits. As a matter of fact, I do have one bad habit myself, but that stuff about it making you insane or blind is really a lot of nonsense, and anyway I’ve been doing my best to keep it to a rock-bottom minimum. And, of course, I intend to give it up as soon as I have a satisfactory substitute for it, which is what bringing Francine to my room was all about, actually, although from the way she had been acting you would have thought it was the furthest thing from her mind.

“And your hair,” I said, reaching out to touch it. “And your tiny feminine feet, and your shapely legs—”

I went on like this. It was really pretty disgusting, when you come right down to it, but at the same time you have to realize that everything I said was the truth. Francine was so beautiful it could make your heart stop to look at her. A soft, beautiful, innocent face, and these gentle shoulders and slender arms, and her breasts — I still get weak in the knees just thinking about her breasts. You would think that breasts like those would be more at home on a heavier girl, but when your eyes moved down from those breasts (if in fact they did; mine often didn’t, remaining there like two bees at two blossoms), you saw that the waist was very slim, and the hips just wide enough to be interesting, and the buttocks nicely rounded, and the legs as if they had stepped out of stocking ads. I could go on this way, but what’s the point? Even if I pasted a photo of her right here, it wouldn’t do it right, because all of us see things differently. So do this: Imagine an absolutely perfect girl (except for a nicotine stain between the first two fingers of the right hand, and a half-inch-long crescent-shaped scar on the inside of the left thigh) and you’ve imagined Francine.