A Strange Kind of Love

Chapter Eleven

She was right, of course. I would finish the book.

Not that I really wanted to finish the book. Not that writing gave me the slightest degree of pleasure, not that the idea of the money mattered too much any more, not that I thought I was writing a great book or anything resembling a great book or even a good book.

I hated the book and I hated the typewriter and I hated myself. The minute I got home I threw my belt down the incinerator and kept my pants up with a piece of binders twine. It was silly; the belt didn’t have anything to do with it. But it was as if just wearing the damned thing would remind me of the welts I raised on Madge’s body and of the way I let myself turn into an animal.

But I would finish the book. I couldn’t help finishing the book, couldn’t help trying as hard as I knew how to make it the best book possible. It’s a disease with writers, just as an actor has to do his best in a play even if he knows it’s going to be a flop. The book was sold, the book was supposed to be a good book, and so I had to finish it. And that was all there was to it.

So I got to work on it, and I got to work on it in the only way I knew how. There’s one way to get a book finished that’s never yet failed me, no matter how I hate the thought of putting paper in the typewriter and filling the paper with words.

There’s one way and it’s a simple way. It didn’t matter that all I could think about was Marcia. It didn’t matter that every time I closed my eyes all I could see was two female bodies on linen sheets.

That didn’t matter in the least.

The formula is a simple one. All you need is a case of Scotch and a bathtub. You don’t pour the Scotch in the bathtub and soak it up through your skin — that would be an intriguing trick and it might be a good deal of fun, but the formula involves something a lot simpler.

Instead you sit down at your typewriter and put a full glass of straight Scotch at your elbow. You put paper and carbon paper and copy paper in your typewriter and you start writing. And all along you keep drinking the Scotch, just a little at a time. Just enough to keep you perpetually blotto but never unconscious, never uncoordinated, never tired and never off your nut.

A non-drinker can’t do this; the Scotch will either wear off or knock him on his ear. A man who’s used to drinking can. You learn to get to that perfect balance and stay right there, never drunk and never sober.

That’s where the case of Scotch comes in.

The bathtub is also essential. When you drink like this and write like this you sweat like a pig, and when you get started you can’t go to sleep much or you lose the whole edge you’ve carefully built up and come out of it hung-over and 90 % dead.

So you don’t sleep — for however long it takes you to finish what you’re writing. Instead you take baths.

Hot baths.

As hot as you can stand it.

Then you wind up with a cool shower and you’re ready to roll again.

I had a case of Scotch sent up to the room and went to work the day I left Madge in her plush little apartment in the Fifties. It was dinnertime when I got home and I had a quick meal at the greasy spoon so that I would go into the routine with something in my stomach. Once I was finished I could eat again, but while I was drinking and writing the Scotch would be my only nourishment.

It was seven o’clock by the time I got started. I filled a glass and started going, and at first the going was very slow. The first tumbler full of liquor lasted only four pages. But it also gave me a little bit of the edge, and from there on I got faster and faster.

I took my first bath at 11:15. Then I put on a clean set of clothes and went back to work.

Clothing can be a problem. When you’re taking baths once every four or five hours, and changing clothes every time, it doesn’t take any sort of a mathematical genius to figure out that you’re going to run out of clothes in a little while.

When you run out you put the first set back on again. By that time, hopefully, you’ve been drunk long enough not to give much of a damn.

The pages just kept rolling along, page after page, chapter after chapter. I finished the first bottle and went on to the second, glad that I had the money to buy Scotch. One time I was working to beat a deadline on a pulp serial in the old days and I couldn’t go for Scotch — it had to be cheap rye that time, and I couldn’t stand the taste of the garbage. But when you drink Scotch there’s a big difference.

It almost makes the whole deal pleasant.

But not quite.

The second bottle didn’t last too long, and neither did the third, and neither did the fourth. It’s hard to picture a man staying awake and working for five days and five nights, but that is precisely what I did.

There was a medical book I glanced through once that said that a human being can live no more than five days and five nights without sleep. At the end of that time he either passes out or drops dead.

I didn’t pass out or drop dead.

Instead, I drank.

And I bathed.

And I wrote.

I didn’t see the sun come up the morning of the second day. I didn’t see it go down that night. I looked at my watch every once in a while to make sure it was still running and two or three times a day I would look out the window to make sure everything was still there.

It always was.

There were the bad moments. There was the time the damned water tank managed to run out of water, and I took a lukewarm shower that didn’t do a hell of a lot of good. There was the time I drank too much Scotch at once and felt slightly dizzy and very tired. It was a tremendous temptation to lean back and close my eyes, but I had the good sense to keep typing away. I made a few mistakes typing but in a few minutes I had worked off the liquor and I was back to normal — or as close to normal as it’s possible for a man to be when he’s drunk.

There’s one thing wrong with the method, and if you’ve been in the writing game a short time it can be fatal. It’s a cute bit — you never have the slightest notion whether the words you’re putting down on paper are good words or bad words, whether the story is moving or standing still, whether the dialogue is ridiculous or perfect. If you’re new at the game, this can be bad. If you’re an old hack you just keep pounding away, knowing that you won’t do any worse or too much better than you always do.

So I kept typing.

And I kept typing.

And I kept typing.

The first day went by and the second day went by and the third day went by.

And the fourth day went by and the fifth day went by.

And, happily, I was still alive.

It was five minutes to ten the night of the fifth day when I was one chapter from the end. I finished the last word of the last line of that second-last chapter and separated the copy pages from the other pages and put the chapter under the rest of what I had finished. Just one chapter to go, just one more chapter, just twenty or twenty-five more pages and it would all be over.

I sat back in my chair and relaxed — which was something of a mistake.

Because at that point I realized how damnably tired I was.

Not just worn out. Not just fatigued, but completely and totally exhausted. Maybe another bath would revive me, but I didn’t feel up to walking down the hall for another bath. I didn’t feel like moving from the chair. I didn’t feel like keeping my eyes open.

I felt like pulling a Rip Van Winkle bit and sleeping a neat twenty years — maybe more. A hundred years. Six hundred years.

Or just closing my eyes for a minute or two, just half an hour, say.

I pulled that once and slept in a chair for six hours, and when I woke up I couldn’t move. You’d be amazed how hard it is to wake up in a half hour after five days without sleep.

Very hard indeed.

I pulled my chair over to the window and took a few deep breaths of air — good, cold, night air.

It didn’t work. My lungs felt as though they might collapse any minute like a flat tire.

Something made me look across the street. 85th Street isn’t wide, and the buildings on both sides are close to the street. I could see perfectly into the windows on the other side of the street.

There was a girl in the room directly across from mine, and I could see her perfectly.

That, needless to say, was the time I should have gone into the bathroom, taken a real honey of a steaming bath, and gone back to my typewriter. But I didn’t.

She was, you see, a very young girl.

She was probably about seventeen. She was Puertorican, with coppery skin and jet-black hair. Her eyes were very large and I could see them all the way across the street. They were either very dark brown or black, and they looked extremely lovely in her very lovely face.

She had high cheekbones, a very full and sensual mouth and gleaming white teeth. She wore blue jeans and a simple white blouse, and I could tell that her hips were trim and gently rounded and that her breasts were full and ripe.

She was good to look at.

She was standing in front of her mirror, looking at her reflection and smiling at it. Then she picked up a brush and began stroking her long hair, wielding the brush rhythmically and giving her hair a thorough brushing. I took in the remainder of her room out of the corners of my eyes. It was sparsely furnished, with a broken-down bed in the background and a wooden chest of drawers with the paint half peeled off of it on the far side. The mirror she was using seemed to be the one extravagance in the room — perhaps a holdover from the days when the neighborhood had been a better one. It was a full-length mirror on the back of what must have been a closet door.

This might be a good time to explain that Peeping Tomish is a little out of my line. I don’t even go to burlesque shows — I went twice, two times in the same week, but that was only because I was in the process of writing a yarn about a burlesque dancer who gets murdered by a fan of hers and I wanted to get the background material down pat. I didn’t even get any kind of a kick out of the whole deal either time.

And there was one time in Mexico when my buddy and I watched a different sort of a show — a backroom affair with no holds barred. That had been interesting, but even that wasn’t my idea of the ideal way to spend an evening. I always like to get my sex first-hand — not with my eyes.

But this was different, and I couldn’t take my eyes off that little Puertorican gal across the street. Maybe part of the charm was bound up in the fact that she didn’t have the slightest idea that I was watching her. That may have been part of it — that element of secrecy and stealth about the process.

And I suppose you could chalk part of it up to the Scotch, and another part to how tired I was.

And a good share to how much I wanted Marcia deep down inside, no matter how much I stifled that desire with Scotch and drowned it with hot baths. I still wanted her, and watching the gal across the street made me want her more and more.

She finished with the hairbrush and set it on the dresser. Then she stood in front of the full-length mirror again and took a long look at herself.

And then she began to unbutton the blouse.

This was the time for me to get the hell away from the window. There’s nothing particularly vile about a guy watching a gal comb her hair, but it’s a different thing when she starts slipping buttons out of buttonholes.

I went on watching.

The blouse buttoned down the front; there were just five buttons all in all. She took her time, unbuttoning one button after the other very slowly and lazily, and when she had them all undone she jerked the shirt-tail out of her jeans and slipped the blouse over her shoulders.

I thought her brassiere would break. It was so obviously inadequate for the task she had given it. Her breasts were large, very large for a girl her size, and the bra was a thin white affair that looked like a cloth spider web. I kept waiting for the bra to break, but it didn’t.

I looked at her bra and imagined the breasts under the bra. I looked at her flat little stomach and thought that I could probably cover it with one hand. Her waist was very slim — my hands could probably encircle it.

She looked at herself for several seconds more. Then her hands went behind her back and fumbled with the hook-and-eye arrangement on the bra, and the action made her breasts jut out more than ever. A second later the bra was off and she was naked from the waist up, naked and beautiful with her young breasts standing proud and firm and plump and tawny.

The feeling that went through me at the sight of her was not wholly one of desire. When a woman is sufficiently beautiful desire is balanced by another feeling, the sort of feeling a person gets when looking at a work of art that is so perfect it prevents him from speaking. I couldn’t have possibly stopped watching her at that point.

And what made the whole thing even nicer was that she was standing in front of the full-length mirror. I saw her and I saw her reflection simultaneously. It was like a movie in Cinerama.

One hell of a movie.

After she had looked at herself long enough to decide that her breasts were in good shape (which is the understatement of the century) she undid her belt and slowly unzipped her blue jeans. The zipper was on the side and she took her time with it, her eyes on the mirror-image all the while. Then she let go of the jeans and let them slip to the floor.

She didn’t reach down to take them off, but stepped out of them and kicked them out of the way absently. She used the toe of one foot to remove one shoe and then reversed the process. She wasn’t wearing socks.

Her legs were beautiful. Girls that age rarely have good legs — their breasts may be well-formed at a young age, but it takes a long time for legs to either slim down or round out.

Hers were excellent — full and slightly muscular thighs, knees that weren’t knocked or knobby, good calves and ankles and feet.

Then, all in one motion, she tore off her white panties and threw them out of the way. She was naked, totally naked, beautifully naked, and to be perfectly trite about the whole thing, a team of horses couldn’t have dragged me away from the window just then.

I didn’t even worry about her seeing me. I didn’t worry about anything, couldn’t worry, couldn’t think about anything but the girl across the street. My eyes were like hands touching her all over her body all at once, like a million mouths kissing every square inch of her.

And then she began to dance.

It wasn’t exactly a dance. It was a writhing, twisting sort of a motion. She was making love to the reflection in the mirror and the mirror-image was returning her love, and I was lucky enough to watch both halves of the performance.

She moved her hips to and fro in a circular motion — not the cheap, tawdry grind of the burlesque dancer but something that was pure and primitive, the apex of sensuality. She raised her arms languorously above her head and moved the upper half of her body so that her breasts did things, magical things.

She stretched and she twisted. Her hair tossed with the motions in an orgy of black beauty. She flashed a smile at the mirror and her white teeth gleamed. She danced... and I watched her.

The tempo increased. She was no longer a girl; she was a girl in continuous motion and continuous rhythm, gyrating and writhing, twisting and turning and moving her magnificent body closer to the mirror and faster and faster every minute. She started panting, and it seemed to me as if I could hear her breathing clear across the street.

Then, at the peak of the dance, she seemed unable to contain herself any longer. She hurled her body against the mirror and rubbed herself against it like a kitten in heat, pressing herself against the glass, pressing herself against her reflection, making love to herself wildly and furiously and torridly.

She trembled violently. Then she threw herself away from the mirror, worn out and physically exhausted. Then, in an instant, the lights were out, the room was in darkness, and the show was over.

I was depleted. Physically and emotionally depleted, empty and exhausted. I could no more write that last chapter than I could climb Mount Everest in a bathing suit.

I was almost dead.

I emptied the current bottle into a glass and drained it. My brain went dumb and I tore off my clothes and fell on the bed in a tired heap.

A second later I was unconscious.