Lawrence Block - Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

Just kidding, as I’m sure you know.

But what I’m getting at, Larry, in my usual roundabout way, is that I hope you won’t write any letters of that sort to us again. I don’t mean that we are not interested in you and don’t want to know how things are going with you, because we are and we do.

That letter, though, was very upsetting to Fran, and to me too. The remarks you made about your private life with Fran and other things like that are not the sort of thing that belong in a letter, and if the purpose was to drive a wedge between the two of us, although I don’t honestly think you had that idea in mind, to give you the benefit of the doubt, well, if that was your purpose I have to tell you it pretty much fell flat on its face.

I’m a pretty straightforward guy, as you well know, and I prefer to take your whole letter and everything else pretty much at face value as an honest attempt to let me know, and Fran in the bargain, that you’re not holding a grudge. So I’ll think of the letter that way whether that’s what you had in mind or not.

Anyway, please, no more letters like that. And if you do write, don’t refer to this letter, as I don’t intend to tell Fran I wrote to you.

Mrs. Laurence Clarke

c/o American Express

Cuernavaca, Mexico

Dear Fran:

I have a lot of things to tell you, but perhaps the first and most important is what great good fortune you’ve had to run off with a man who really loves you. I know Steve has always had a problem in communicating, although God knows he’s not as hopeless in conversation as he is when he takes pen in hand and tries to write something. But I have a feeling that he may not have let you know fully how he feels about you, and communication is such a problem among lovers, as you can certainly appreciate.

So for that reason I’m taking the liberty of enclosing herewith (if you’ll pardon the formal language) a Xerox copy of a letter I received from him. It’s handwritten, but I’m happy to say the writing reproduced nicely. That Xerox machine is a really wonderful thing. I’ve had some correspondence which indicates I may find it increasingly difficult to gain access to it. I hope this will all work out, however.

To return to Steve’s letter, you’ll notice that it doesn’t bear any date. I doubt this will make much difference to you, but at the moment I’m rather involved with correspondence in general, rather compulsive about the whole subject, as it happens, and it would make my record-keeping more complete if you could find out just when it was written and relay the information to me.

It should be easy for you to work it out, actually. As you’ll note from an examination of its contents, Steve’s letter was written while you were out shopping for something to cook for dinner. Since cooking dinner has never been something you do more than once or twice a week, I’m sure you can narrow things down and work out the timing for me. God knows I would appreciate it.

I want you to really read Steve’s letter, Fran. And try not to be put off by the man’s relative clumsiness with the English language. After all, he’s a photographer and not a writer, and you don’t expect photographers to be up to their asses in verbal facility. They’re far more apt to be up to their asses in darkroom chemicals, aren’t they? Besides, as everyone learns at a tender age, a picture is worth a thousand words. You might say that Steve sent me a picture, as his letter runs quite close to a thousand words. Do you suppose it’s just coincidence?

You can tell from a glance at this primitive word-picture of Steve’s that he really loves you, Fran. (Somehow I can’t bring myself to call you Frances, although Steve seems to refer to you that way a lot. Is it his idea of a pet name?) His love for you is evident in every split infinitive, in every mawkish turn of phrase. In fact I would go so far as to say that his letter to me was in fact a letter to you, a letter he lacked the self-confidence and, oh, the slick glibness to deliver to you in person. And so he writes his letter to you but addresses and mails it to me.

I can understand this, actually. I’ve been writing all these letters to various people lately and can’t entirely dismiss the nagging suspicion that I’m really writing them to myself. Or that my typewriter is writing them to me. I’ve tended to anthropomorphize my typewriter lately. This may be bad, but I feel it’s better than ignoring it.

Thus my passing this letter on to you is in a sense my method of playing the John Alden part, but this is one John Alden who will respectfully decline to speak for himself.

One interesting reason for assuming Steve’s letter was written for your benefit, Fran, is his stubborn insistence upon going to such great lengths to suggest that the whole bit with the convent girls never happened. That it was all some fantasy of mine, which I wrote to him for some nefarious purpose. Steve has known me a long time, longer than almost anyone, and he can certainly tell when I’m telling the truth, so he knows dammed well that this happened. I may have had to reconstruct some of the conversation slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came within a couple of words of being a verbatim transcript of what actually went down that night. I guess he must feel that my boasting — and let’s admit it, I was boasting — reflected somehow on your femininity, as if I were not only doing a rooster strut but also comparing you adversely to the six girls.

A strut, yes; an adverse comparison, surely not. Of course we both know, we all three know, that you are a few years more than sixteen, Fran(ces), and that you will not be sixteen again unless science does something phenomenal. And while twenty-nine is also a hell of a good age, asserted by most authorities to be a woman’s sexual peak, there’s no gainsaying the fact that after a certain point in life the bloom begins to leave the rose, as the poets say. But question your femininity? Christ, I would never dream of doing that. Quite the opposite. Why, if memory serves, in that very letter I devoted quite a bit of space to unequivocal praise of your oral abilities.

But just to make things as clear as possible, to make things Presidentially clear, as it were, perhaps I’d better tell you a little bit more about the Darien business.

First off, when we got to Darien, nothing happened. (Now if this were a fantasy, something damn well would have happened. To put it another way, if I were allowed to write the script for my life, I’d smooth out a lot of the wrinkles.) But by the time the station wagon got us where we were going, it was somewhere around five or five-thirty and I had a headache and the girls were exhausted. Besides, they had to be in bed so that the nun who was in charge of their dormitory could wake them at seven-thirty. They had managed to sneak out after bed check, and now they had to sneak in before reveille.

I wasn’t too thrilled about this, actually. They took me to a squat red-brick building in town and led me up a flight of stairs to a faintly furnished room and told me I could sleep there.

“Who lives here?” I wondered.

“No one.”

“It’s only eight dollars a week, Larry, and we six chip in to pay the rent. It’s secret, you might say.”

“It’s refuge from the storm, you might say.”

“It’s a safe place to fuck, you might even say.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding thoughtfully. I walked over to the bed and bounced on it. “A good bed,” I said. “Well used.”

“And there’s just room for the seven of us,” I said.

“Oh, we can’t stay.”

“Can a couple of you stay?”