Lawrence Block - Getting Off

By now, she thought, he’d probably crossed another state line.

Would she ever see him again? Jesus, would she even recognize him if she did? She didn’t know what he looked like. Except for his nose she hadn’t seen any portion of him that wasn’t covered by goggles or leather or beard.

She could smell his leather jacket. She could feel the touch of his gloved hand on her shoulder.

She couldn’t keep from having fantasies about him. They were full of the physical presence of him, and yet they weren’t specifically sexual. She envisioned the two of them on the bike, crisscrossing the nation together, stopping for gas, stopping for food, then moving on. They barely spoke, even as they’d barely spoken during their time together. You couldn’t talk over the roar of the engine, and the rest of the time there was no need for talk — as there’d been no need for it earlier.

He’d looked so scary. But the look that she’d feared at first glance had turned out to be a comfort. There was an individual beneath the leather, behind the mirrored lenses. There was a person with a history and an outlook and a world of likes and dislikes. But she didn’t get to see any of that, didn’t need to know any of it. There was safety, somehow, in all that impersonality.

I’m just keeping it real simple these days.

An older brother, she thought. A male cousin. Or, oh, a guardian angel, if you believed in that sort of thing.

She stayed in the Louisville hotel for the four nights she’d paid for. Took long walks, went to the movies, watched TV in her room. Ate three meals a day at the Denny’s on the next block. Took two showers a day, sometimes three.

By the time she left — a cab to the airport, a plane to Memphis— she had let go of the memories. They were still there, but they’d lost their edge. The man who would have killed her, the man who got her out of there, were both now just a part of the past.

Rita said, “Memphis! Did you see Elvis yet?”

“I was in a restaurant,” she said. “Just a diner, really. And there was an Elvis at one end of the counter and another one in a booth. Those were the only two I’ve seen and I saw them both at once.”

“Elvis impersonators.”

“Well, duh, yeah. I mean, if it was just one, I suppose it might have been the King himself, but with two of them—”

“What I meant was have you been to Graceland.”

“Oh. No, not yet.”

“That would have been my first stop. Kimmie, every time you call you’ve got a new phone.”

“Well, they’re disposable,” she said. “So I tend to dispose of them.”

“Kimmie, you kill me.” Oh, don’t say that. “You know, I thought I saw you the other afternoon. In Seattle, in Pike Place Market?”

“It wasn’t me, Rita.”

“Oh, don’t I know that? I took a good look, and she didn’t really look like you at all.”

“She was a lot prettier.”

“Silly! But you know what I went and did?”

“Picked her up and took her home.”

“Kimmie!”

“And ate her pussy.”

“Kimmie, you’re terrible!”

“Am I?”

“You know you are. But what’s really bad—”

“You thought about it.”

“Yes! I went home and jilled about it.”

“And is that what you’re doing now?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh?”

“But I’m sort of in the mood.”

“Oh, are you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well…”

And a little later:

“So I was out walking one night, and this guy gave me a ride on his motorcycle. I never saw his face. He was all in leather, and he had a beard, and he was wearing these mirrored goggles. And I rode a couple of hundred miles on the back of his motorcycle.”

“You’re making this up, right? It’s okay if you are, because I like it just fine, but I was wondering—”

“No, this is real, Rita. Anyway, nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“There was no sex.”

“Why not? I mean, even if you were having your period—”

“Neither of us wanted it.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. We just didn’t. So I’m sitting behind him on the big Harley, and we’re zooming through the night, and there’s nothing in the world but the vibration of the bike and the smell of his beat-up leather jacket, and—”

“And you came in your pants.”

“No.”

“You didn’t? I almost did, just from hearing about it. How come you didn’t?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I could have.”

“What stopped you?”

“I just…let it go. Have you ever been, like, out on a cold day, and you’re not dressed for it, and the wind’s like a knife?”

“And that’s like being on a bike and smelling leather?”

“No, let me finish. When that happens, out in the cold, there’s a thing I’ll do sometimes. I let the cold just blow right through me, and I visualize it passing through without affecting me. Have you ever tried that?”

“No.”

“Well, it sort of works. It’s a mental thing, I guess, but it sort of works.”

“And that’s what you did? You let this biker guy blow through you?”

“The feeling I had,” she said. “I just sort of let it pass on through. It stopped being sexual, and then it just went away.”

“Wow.”

“I know, it’s hard to explain.”

“That woman I saw? In the Pike Place Market?”

“Still thinking about her?”

“I mean, I never could have approached her. It’s one thing to think of it and something else to act on it.”

“I know.”

“I keep thinking I want to try it with a woman. I’m like, Well, if Kim were here, yadda yadda yadda. But you’re not here, and what am I gonna do, walk into a gay bar?”

“You could.”

“I know I could. There’s one I keep driving past. I don’t even slow down, but I keep finding excuses to drive past it. Kimmie, tell me the truth, okay? Have you ever been with a woman?”

“No.”

“And here we are, a couple of phone sex buddies, and we don’t even know what we’re talking about. Except we sort of do, don’t we?”

The place she found was just off Beale Street. The windows were blacked out, and an unobtrusive sign told the establishment’s name: The Daiquiri Dock. There was nothing to suggest that it might be a lesbian bar, but she evidently sensed something, and lingered in a doorway across the street. And, sure enough, the door opened and a pair of visibly gay women left arm in arm. She stayed where she was, and another woman turned up and walked into the bar, and two more followed shortly thereafter.

She could have a glass of white wine. Get a sense of things, then go back to her room alone.

And that’s what happened, except that it was two glasses of red wine, not one glass of white. She bought one, and a woman who said her name was Sandy insisted on buying her the second. Sandy wasn’t very attractive, there was a stolid quality to her that she found unappealing, and anyway Sandy lost interest and went off to study the jukebox selections. A couple of other women glanced her way, but she kept her face unexpressive and let her body language suggest that she just wanted a quiet drink.

Back in her hotel room, she began loading her clothes into her suitcase. She wasn’t quite ready for this, but she was getting there. She’d get a good night’s sleep, leave town in the morning. And in the next city, or the one after that, there’d be a lesbian bar and she’d be ready.

St. Louis, on a quiet street near Carr Square, within sight of the famous Arch. Another city, another lesbian bar, and when she’d scouted it out the previous evening she hadn’t even allowed herself to cross the threshold. Instead she’d spent the better part of an hour in the diner diagonally across the street, nursing a cup of coffee, watching through the fly-specked window as women passed in and out of Eve’s Rib.