Лоуренс Блок - A Time to Scatter Stones

“Probably.”

“You’re right about Rumpelstiltskin,” she said. “It’s empowering, knowing his name. You didn’t leave him there, did you? In my apartment?”

“No. I took off the ski mask, because I’d stopped caring if he saw my face. Then I took the tape off his mouth and got him up on his feet. He couldn’t really walk, he could barely stand up, but I put an arm around his waist and walked him down the stairs.”

Elaine said that must have been tricky.

“The Mahaffey method would have been a lot easier,” I said. “I had trouble keeping my balance, so a couple of times we both came close to taking a tumble. And it was a little dicey when we ran into somebody on the stairs. I said my friend had a little too much to drink.”

“And he believed it?”

“She,” I said. “Five-seven or eight, slender build, late twenties. Dark hair, eyeglasses—”

Ellen thought she knew who I meant, but not her name. “She usually has her earbuds in,” she said, “so she probably didn’t hear a word you said.”

“I got him downstairs,” I went on, “and I walked him to the corner and put him in a taxi. I told the driver a similar story, that my friend wasn’t feeling too well. His main concern was that the son of a bitch would puke in his cab, but I assured him that wouldn’t be a problem, my friend wasn’t drunk, he had this condition from injuries sustained in the service of his country. He’d have spells like this periodically, and the only thing that helped was quiet and rest.”

“So don’t ask him questions,” Elaine said.

“I gave the driver Paulsen’s address in Teaneck and a hundred bucks to cover his fare. And off they went.”

“And you came home.”

“Not right away. First I went down to the basement to let Henry know everything was settled, and he wouldn’t be seeing any more of your brother.”

“Her faux brother,” Elaine said. “Didn’t Henry see you schlepping Paulsen down the stairs?”

“I think he made a point of staying in his apartment. He was relieved to have it all over with, and happy to lend me the key rather than go upstairs with me.”

“You went back upstairs?”

“To straighten up, and to retrieve what I’d brought with me. Oh, that reminds me.”

I went to the other room and returned with the backpack. I had dropped a like-new kitchen mallet in one trashcan and a worn-once ski mask in another, so there was only one item in the backpack, and I took it out and handed it to her.

“My alligator bag,” she said.

“I didn’t know what else you might need or want,” I said, “and when I started looking around, it felt like an invasion of privacy.”

“You might have found panties,” Elaine said. “Can I see? Oh, it’s a beauty. You wouldn’t want to leave this behind.”

“I thought I would never want to look at it again,” she said, and clutched the handbag to her chest. “Because he touched it.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Elaine said. “He had his hands all over your pussy, too, and you’re not gonna get rid of that, are you? This is a gorgeous bag. You hang on to it.”

The pasta was the sort that looks like little bedsprings. Fusilli, I think it’s called. It was topped with Paul Newman’s marinara, which Elaine had pepped up a little with Dave’s Insanity hot sauce. She’d thrown together a salad, too.

“My default setting,” she said. “Pasta and a salad. It’s a good thing everybody likes it, because it’s the only thing I ever seem to cook.”

No one complained. Hunger’s the best sauce, even better than Paul’s and Dave’s, and we all brought good appetites to the table.

Afterward we had our tea in the living room. Ellen talked about her apartment, and tried to figure out if she wanted to return to it. “Just in case he’s crazier than we think,” she said, “maybe I shouldn’t be too easy to find.”

“On the other hand,” Elaine pointed out, “it’s rent-stabilized, isn’t it?”

“For the next eight months. Then the built-in increase takes it over the edge, and the landlord can ask full market value for it.”

‘Then the hell with it,” Elaine said. “You can live anywhere.”

“I can, can’t I? I like where I am now, on the Upper West Side. I’ll stay there for the full period of the sublet, and by then I might be able to find something in the neighborhood. Or Brooklyn, which seems to be where everybody is moving these days.”

“Except for the ones moving to Harlem, or the South Bronx.”

“I really could go anywhere, couldn’t I? Figuring out where I want to live is the least of it. What I really have to figure out is who I want to be.”

“No rush on that one,” Elaine said.

“No. That woman this evening, the one who’s going back to school? I could do that.”

“I wouldn’t make her a role model just yet.” They both laughed, and to me Elaine said, “She told us how she blew her professor to get her grade changed.”

“But it wasn’t really prostitution,” Ellen said, “because she didn’t take any money for it.”

“And besides she really deserved an A.”

“Plus he was sweet, and she might have done him anyway.”

“Speaking of money,” Ellen said, “you spent a lot of it. I want to pay you back.”

I told her not to worry about it.

“But that’s not right,” she said. “A hundred dollars to the cab driver, and I don’t know how many hundreds you gave my super. Plus the mallet and the mask and the backpack, and why should you be out of pocket for all that?”

“I’m not out of pocket,” I told her. “Quite the reverse. I came out ahead.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Our friend had more in his wallet than ID and credit cards. He had over eighteen hundred dollars, most of it in hundreds and fifties.”

“And you took it.”

“Just the large bills.”

“Good for you,” Elaine said. “What do we need with chump change?”

She refilled our teacups, and then the two of them got to talking about other things various Tarts had said. In AA this would have been considered breaking a person’s anonymity, but Tarts didn’t have AA’s formal traditions, and anyway I didn’t know the people they were talking about.

“I don’t know why men want to see two women together,” Ellen said. “Would you get off on watching two guys?”

Elaine said she wouldn’t, but she’d read that a fair number of straight women enjoyed watching gay male porn. But she couldn’t believe it was anywhere near the proportion of men who were turned on by lesbians.

“No, I’m sure it’s not.” To me she said, “Is it a turn-on for you? Two women?”

“It doesn’t make me want to run out of the room,” I said.

“A lot of clients wanted it,” Elaine said. “What they wanted was a date with me and a friend of mine, but they always wanted us to fool around a little before they joined in.”

“Did you like dates like that?”

“They were okay,” she said. “I never felt romantic about a girl, but I didn’t mind the sex part.”

“That’s what I was thinking of, when it’s romantic. What that one woman said.”

The woman in question, I learned, was a lesbian. Her girlfriend was also in the game, so when a client wanted a threesome that was who she recruited, and they put on a show and did each other, and then they both did the guy.

“Like you do,” Ellen said.

“And it ruined her relationship,” Elaine said. “Once they’d turned their lovemaking into a performance, it wasn’t fulfilling anymore. It made them self-conscious, as if someone was watching them.”

“With his dick in his hand,” Ellen said. “They broke up not long after that. And the ironic thing is that the main reason she picked her girlfriend for the date was because she thought it would be cheating if she brought in another girl.”