Lawrence Block - Getting Off

She had no idea what name she might have used when she was with him. She’d become Kim when she moved into Rita’s house, so it was simplest all around to remain Kim with Graham Weider. And it would be an easy name for him to remember. Though not, she trusted, for very long.

“Kim,” he said, as if testing a foreign word on his tongue. He had a gratifying deer-in-the-headlights look.

“I don’t want to take any more of your time,” she said, “but do you have a card? I’d love to call you and catch up.”

She gave each of them a smile, especially the one who’d volunteered to take Weider’s place. He was cute, and he’d be about as hard to get as coffee at Starbucks. How tough would it be to fuck him in the restroom and leave him dead in a stall?

Without returning to her table, she caught up with her waitress and gave her enough money to cover the drink. She’d had a phone call, she explained, and her lunch partner had to cancel, so she was going straight on to her next meeting.

Her bike was right where she’d left it. There was a hardware store right there on the strip mall, and she went in and bought a bicycle lock. Just to be on the safe side.

She didn’t really need his card. She already knew how to reach him at his office. But if she called him without having been given his number, she’d look for all the world like a stalker.

Which, come to think of it, she was.

She called him late that afternoon, caught him before he left for the day. “It’s Kim,” she said, “and I want to apologize. I never should have barged in while you were with other people. But it was such a surprise to run into you after all those years.”

“I’d like to catch up,” he said, “but I’m not sure—”

“That the phone’s the best way to do it? I feel the same way, believe me. Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow?”

“Lunch?”

“My treat,” she said. “You bought me lunch last time. So it’s my turn. But I’m new in the area. Can you suggest a place?”

The restaurant was Italian, its Mulberry Street décor of checkered tablecloths and straw-covered Chianti bottles at odds with its strip mall location. She’d allowed herself half an hour to get there and made it with seven minutes to spare. After she’d stashed Rita’s bike and locked it, she used the restroom at a convenience store, checked her makeup, freshened her lipstick. She entered the restaurant right on time, and he was at one of the three occupied tables, a cup of coffee at his elbow.

He got to his feet when he caught sight of her. He was wearing a jacket and tie, and — no surprise — a wary expression. A handsome man, she noted, and felt a little quiver of anticipatory excitement. This was going to be fun, she thought, and it would end well, too.

He had a hand extended, but instead of shaking it she gripped his forearm with both hands and leaned forward, giving him no real choice but to kiss her cheek and breathe in her scent.

“Well,” she said, and held his eyes for a moment. Then she sat down, and so did he, and he asked her if she’d like a drink. “If you’re having one,” she said.

“Just coffee for me.”

“That sounds good.”

He signaled the waiter, and he asked if she’d had trouble finding the place. She said she hadn’t, but managed to tell him she’d come by bicycle. Isn’t that crazy? Some idiot hit my car and I can’t get a loaner while it’s in the shop, so I’ve been getting around on a bicycle.

Then the waiter brought her coffee and refilled Graham’s cup and left them alone, and after a thoughtful silence he said, “When exactly did we—”

“It was a few years ago. I was living in New York, and you were there on business. You were with Willoughby & Kessel, and you were staying at the Sofitel.”

“That’s where I always stayed.”

“I can see why,” she said. “You had a lovely room.”

“I guess we did more than have lunch.”

“I’ll say.”

He took a sip of coffee. “I won’t pretend I recognized you,” he said, “but when I saw you I had the sense that we’d been, uh, intimate.”

“We had lunch and went back to your room. Then you had to go to a meeting, and we arranged to meet again later that day. But you didn’t show up, and left a note for me at the desk. You had to fly somewhere.”

“Oh, God,” he said. “I remember now.”

“Well, good, Graham. I thought that might trigger your memory. I figured it was either that or show you my tits.”

She thought that would get a smile. Instead his face darkened, and he reached again for his coffee cup, the way a person might reach for a real drink.

And, while she didn’t realize it yet, that pretty much explained everything.

“In those days,” he said, “I was doing a lot of drinking.”

Was he? “I guess you had a drink or two with lunch,” she said. “I don’t think it affected you.”

“Oh, it affected me.”

“Not back at the Sofitel it didn’t. Not in the performance department.”

“Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I guess that must have been a good day.”

“A very good day,” she said.

He colored. “This is hard for me,” he said.

It was certainly hard for me, she thought. But she left the words unvoiced, sensing that double entendre was not what the situation called for.

“I was married then,” he said.

She glanced at his ring. “So? You’re married now.”

“Different lady.”

“Ah.”

“See, I drank my way out of my first marriage.”

“And into a second one?”

He shook his head. He hadn’t even met his second wife until a full year after he’d stopped drinking. First his marriage ended, then his career went into the toilet, and eventually he found his way to rehab.

“To stop drinking,” she said.

“Well, that was the first rehab. For drinking.”

“There was a second?”

He nodded. “It turned out drinking was the symptom. The second rehab addressed the real problem.”

“And what was that?”

“Sexual compulsivity. I was addicted to sex.”

“Maybe that’s why you were so good at it.”

Most men would have taken that as a compliment, but he recoiled from it as if from a blow.

“It almost killed me,” he said. “I was lucky. I went through rehab for it, and I joined SCA, and—”

“SCA?”

“Sexual Compulsives Anonymous.”

After the waiter took their orders — pasta and a salad for both — he told her his story in more detail than she really required, and she found herself boiling it down to a single long sentence: I used to drink and I used to smoke and I used to gamble and I used to fuck around and now I don’t do any of these things but instead lead this glorious rich fulfilling life of fidelity and sobriety and moral decency and utter unremitting stifling boredom.

“I guess that explains the coffee,” she said.

“Uh-huh. But there’s no reason you can’t have a drink if you want one.”

“And risk an arrest for drunken bicycling? No, I’m fine with coffee. SCA, huh? Are their meetings like AA? Do you tell each other all the things you used to do in the good old days?”

“We tell our stories,” he said, “but it’s a little different, because we have to guard against getting off on what we tell, or what we hear. So the stories are intentionally vague. ‘I acted out with a partner, I acted out alone, I acted out with a group—’ ”

“ ‘I acted out with two nuns and a sheep.’ I was thinking that the meetings might be fun, but you nipped that little fantasy in the bud. So you used to act out and now you don’t, and I gather you’re happily married, and did you say you’ve got a kid?”