Lawrence Block - Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man

Mrs. Lisa Clarke

219 Maple Rd.

Richmond, VA.

Dear Lisa:

I trust you’ve already established that there’s no check in this envelope. No matter how long this letter turns out to be, no matter how many sheets of paper wind up folded together and stuffed into this envelope, the first thing you’ll do is shake everything out looking for a check, and there won’t be one. So you’ve done that by now, and you said, “The dirty rat bastard said he’d send a check and there’s no check here and this better be good.”

I’ll make it as good as I can, Lisa.

But where to start? Why, at the beginning of this beautiful day, dear Lisa, when Laurence Clarke sprang out of bed with a smile on his lips and a glint in his eye and—

Oh, hell.

Rome must have fallen on just this sort of day. A bright sun shining, a ghost of a breeze toying with the garbage in the gutters and plucking the hems of the mini-skirts, even the air pollution in the acceptable range. I actually hummed on the way to the office. Hummed! And some of the people I passed in the streets were smiling. Genuine New Yorkers with discernible smiles on their faces. I know it sounds impossible, but they couldn’t all have been tourists. Some of them must have been natives, and here they were smiling at one another.

Extraordinary.

I picked up a Times in the lobby, let the elevator levitate me to the twelfth floor, helloed and nodded and — yes — smiled my way through the outer office, and was at my own desk with my own door snugly closed by five after nine. I spent half an hour reading the paper. There was nothing particularly ominous in it, for a change. I finished it and chucked it into the wastebasket, opened a desk drawer and got out my current book, a first novel by a young person who had distinguished himself in several student riots before entering the world of letters. The publisher and a variety of critics were spread all over the dust jacket, applauding the author for telling it like it is.

Yecchhh. The book was a 300-page refutation of the Winston commercial — it proved you could sacrifice good grammar without even approaching good taste. The person (the author’s name was sexless, and the dust-jacket photograph sexually ambivalent) threw words about like paving stones, and all he told me was that verbal communication may well be obsolete after all.

(But not for us, Lisa the formerly-mine. By God, woman, I’m enjoying this! Do you know I haven’t written this much in a couple of years? All these words winding up on all these pages, and all with no discernible effort on my part. I just sit here at this typewriter and let it all hang out, as the children say. Are you my Muse, Lisa? And are you amused, Lisa? I know you’d rather have the check—)

Ah, well. I went on slogging my way through muddy prose until ten-thirty, slipped downstairs for coffee and prune Danish, came upstairs again and read some more until lunchtime.

I lunched with a friend who has an expense account. Do you remember Bill Adams? He’s over at Ogilvy now, doing something that sounds boring enough. Got married about two years ago, I think it was, and just last month bought a home on the Island. We went to an Italian place on Second Avenue and ate cannelloni and killed a liter of red while I listened to him talk about how great it was to be out of the city and how his job seemed secure although half the advertising business was on the beach and how much he loved his wife and what a good marriage they had going. He talked and I listened and he paid and I burped and we left, and it was still the same beautiful day outside.

Then he said, “Listen, you don’t have to go back to that office, do you? I mean, not right now. Because there are these two chicks with an apartment just around the corner, and it’s a shame to be in the neighborhood without dropping in on them. What do you say?”

“Hookers?”

“Well, they get twenty, so you couldn’t call them virgins. But nice girls. One of them used to be a stewardess.”

“What did the other one used to be?”

“A virgin, I guess. I used to be a virgin, come to think of it. You game, Larry?”

I said I couldn’t afford it.

“Oh, shit,” he said. “You’re making good dough.”

“I have two wives to support,” I said. “One current and one former.”

“I have one wife and one house. Believe me, a house is worse than a wife in that respect, past or present. I have crabgrass to kill. Come on, I hate to sin alone.”

“You’re happily married,” I said.

“What the hell does that have to do with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t fuck around.”

“So?”

“Christ, I’ll loan you the twenty.”

I thought about it. “I just don’t really feel like it,” I said. “Look, it’s not as though you can’t go alone. What’s the problem?”

“I’ll tell you, I get very awkward going there alone. Because there’s the two of them.”

“So?”

“So I hate to choose between them. It’s like rejecting one of them. It’s like picking one and telling the other ’You’re a nice kid but I’d rather fuck your roommate.’ So she’s rejected, and she sits in the other room watching the fucking television set, and the whole thing puts me off stride.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“I just don’t like to reject people.”

He was serious. I looked at him thoughtfully. “Go to bed with both of them,” I said.

“Huh?”

“No rejection. Take them both to bed, lie there in the middle and ball them both. So it costs you forty instead of twenty and you kill a little less crabgrass next week.”

“Jesus,” he said. “You ever do that?”

“Kill crab grass?”

“Two girls at once.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Not hookers, and not recently, but yeah.”

“Is it great?”

“The only problem is that it can sometimes get hard to keep your mind on both of them at the same time. For me, anyway. I’m generally better on one-to-one relationships. But with paid talent I don’t think it would matter that much.”

His jaw set and he gripped my arm. “You’re a brother,” he said. “I’m gonna do it.”

“Hang loose.”

“I will. You’re a prince, Larry, I mean it. We’ll have lunch again soon. Call me.”

“I will.”

“My love to Fran.”

“And my love to Paula.”

He looked at me. “Their names are Bunny and Aileen,” he said. “Aileen was the stewardess.”

“And Bunny was the virgin, I know. Paula’s your wife, schmuck.”

“She’s a wonderful girl,” he said automatically. “She really is, Larry. She’s good for me.”

I went back to the office and tried reading some more, but I kept imagining myself lying between a former stewardess and a former virgin, one of them asking me to be gentle and the other offering me coffee, tea or milk. As I pictured them, the stew looked a lot like Fran and the virgin looked a lot like Jennifer. (I never told you about Jennifer, did I?) I’m sorry to say that neither of them looked like you, Lisa. You do worm your way into my fantasies from time to time, but you weren’t in this one. Sorry about that.

Then my phone rang.

This wasn’t alarming. I have this phone on my desk, and now and then it rings. Sometimes it’s Fran asking me to pick up something on my way home. Sometimes it’s Jennie wondering if I can duck out on Fran for a couple of hours that evening. Sometimes, God help us, it’s you, wanting to know why the alimony check hasn’t turned up yet.