A Strange Kind of Love

Chapter Three

It wasn’t awfully hard getting to sleep that night. It wasn’t hard at all, as a matter of fact and it wasn’t particularly hard getting up the next morning either. I was so used to being hungover that I felt damn near lightheaded when my eyes fell open all by themselves and there was no ridge of purple fuzz between my scalp and my skull.

I put on a clean shirt and an almost-clean pair of pants and had burnt toast and lukewarm coffee at a greasy spoon on Columbus Avenue. I must have looked happy — the counterman threw me a dirty look and the counterman’s dog tried to take a bite out of my leg. I felt so good I threw the guy a quarter tip and patted the mutt on his mangy head.

Marcia Banks.

A woman can make all the difference in the world. I stopped dreaming of Allison and didn’t dream at all, or if I did I forgot the dreams before morning. The New York air still tasted good — even the smoke and sweat.

I hopped on the IRT to Times Square and rode the BMT down to Astor Place. The El was gone from Third Avenue and the strip looked better, but down below was still the Bowery and hockshops still lined both sides of Third Avenue.

Each hockshop looked like each other hockshop. They all had the same assortment of knives and guitars and cameras and jewelry in the windows and the same short men in suspenders behind the counter. The third place had a desk model in decent shape — I can’t stand a portable — and he was ready to take my money.

Not right away, of course. He started at forty bucks and I told him it was a stinking machine. He came down to thirty-five and I stuck a piece of paper in it, typed something, and spat disgustedly on the floor. He said thirty and I started for the door.

I gave him twenty-five and carried off the typewriter.

It’s all part of the ritual. He wouldn’t have had any respect for me if I gave him the forty, and I wouldn’t have had any for him if he started at twenty-five, which was all the machine was worth.

Of course it’s ridiculous. Most things are.

The typewriter was heavy — the only value in portables is that they are portable. I hauled it into a candy store, past a row of incipient juvenile delinquents drinking egg creams, and into a phone booth. I dropped a dime into the slot and listened to the dial tone for fifteen long seconds while Lou Harris’s number came back to me.

Then I dialed it.

The girl who answered the phone had an appropriately brittle voice. Every girl Lou ever had — and he ran through help like I ran through cases of rye — sounded brittle. I think he must have hired them over the phone. Some were ugly and some weren’t but they all sounded alike. It was uncanny.

I gave her my name and she repeated it solemnly and told me to hold the line. A minute later Lou answered.

“Danny?” he half-shouted. “Is it really you?”

My mother was the only other person to get away with calling me Danny. Girls tried it on occasion but I broke them of the habit quickly enough. You didn’t break Lou Harris of habits.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I thought you were dead.”

I grinned involuntarily. “Not yet, Lou.”

“Are you drunk?”

The grin lingered. “Not any more.”

He took a short, quick breath. He breathed as if it cost him money; for that matter, he did most things as if it cost him money. “Going to start typing again?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“I want you to handle my stuff.”

“Yeah? Why?”

I grinned again. “Because you’re the best agent in the world.”

“Yeah.” I could picture him nodding rapidly at the phone. “Yeah, I guess I am. Get the hell down here, will you?”

“Why?”

“I can’t talk business over the phone.”

I laughed out loud. “Like hell you can’t. You wouldn’t go to the John if there weren’t a phone in it.”

“Get the hell down here,” he said again. “I want to see your ugly face, you son of a bitch.”

The phone clicked in my ear.

I got the hell down there. His office was on Madison between 45th and 46th, so I took the Lexington train and left the typewriter in a locker. It was getting heavy.

He really did have a phone in the john, believe it or not. He had a phone in even room of his house in Westchester and a phone in his car. I think he made love over the phone, but you can’t be sure of it. If anybody could do it, he could.

I rode to his office in an elevator with about three dozen perfumed secretaries and got off, mildly dizzy, at the sixteenth floor. I pushed open the door of his outer office, walking past the autographed pics of important clients and leaning on the buzzer. Brittle-voice opened the window and asked me who I was. She wasn’t bad. She was wearing one of those suits that pretend the girl wearing it is a guy but she was twisting the poor thing all out of shape.

“Mr. Larkin,” she repeated after me. “Lou’s on the phone right now but I’ll tell him you’re here.”

I nodded. Behind her there were five or six guys in shirtsleeves pounding hell out of typewriters and smoking cigarettes with a vengeance and dark-green metal filing cabinets lined the light-green walls.

I returned my attention to brittle-voice who had been studying me all the while. Her hair was brown and it looked soft — softer than her voice, anyway. She had a suntan — the nice, even tan you get from a sunlamp. I found myself wondering whether she was just as nice and brown under the suit.

“You’re Dan Larkin,” she said.

I nodded.

“I know your books,” she said. “I read most of them.”

“You did?”

This time it was her turn to nod. She did, and her breasts bobbed pleasantly with the motion.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“They’re junk,” I told her. They are.

“They’re good junk,” she said. “I used to want to write a while back.”

“Ever try?”

She nodded. “Pulp. Nothing sold and I gave it up. There are easier ways to make a living.”

“Like answering the phone?”

It didn’t even get a smile out of her. “I figured the job would be glamorous,” she said. “That’s what the son of a bitch at the employment agency said. Low salary, but the glamour of working around writers and agents and publishers.”

I sort of looked at her.

“I like glamour,” she said. She looked right at me and said, “I get a real kick out of some things. Like exciting things.”

I thought about carting her off to a bedroom somewhere and gave up the idea. The body was worth it, but what was inside the body didn’t figure to be worth it at all. She was the type you meet all over the place — the type who sleeps with you because you’re a writer or because you’re an actor or whatever. They’re all over, all over New York and all over Hollywood and all over everyplace I’ve ever been in my life. You don’t have to beat them off with a club but you don’t have to bait your hook too carefully either.

Sometimes they were fun. But after last night I wasn’t having any.

The buzzer rang mercifully while she was still gazing at me with that soulful look in her eyes. She shrugged, picked up the phone and looked up at me.

“You’re in luck,” she said. “The great man will see you now.”

I walked to the door while she pressed another magical buzzer and the door opened before me. I knew the route — the office was the same as the day I last saw it, even if Lou was a few fortunes richer. I walked through the door with his name on it in gold letters and sat down in the leather chair next to his desk.

He was sitting in the other leather chair, the one behind his desk. The desk was massive, and any man as small as Lou would look ridiculous behind a desk like that. Any man but Lou.

Lou looked a little older and smaller than last time I saw him, but otherwise he hadn’t changed a bit. He had all his hair and it crowded over his ears and piled up on top of his head in a sprawling mass. His eyes were small blue dots that looked right through a person. His forearms were heavy and muscular — he had played handball when he was younger and the muscles didn’t go away.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “So you want to be a writer again.”

I nodded. We didn’t shake hands; it wasn’t necessary.

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“You son of a bitch,” he said again. “Dan, you’re not the rat race type. That’s why you cracked up before. All along you were a guy looking for a place to crack up and you found it out on the coast.”

“What do you mean?”

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a wooden match. “There’s two kinds of writers,” he said. “One kind has a wife and kids and lives in a small town and saves a little money every year and writes regularly and lives without pressure. The other kind lives in New York or Chicago or Hollywood and writes like a machine and makes lots of money and spends all of it.”

“So? I’m in the second class.”

“Yeah.” He flicked ashes in the brass ashtray and stuck the cigarette back in his mouth. “You’re in class two, Dan. But you’ve spent all your life trying to get into class one. You’re a guy who wants a home and kids and who can’t stop running.”

I thought for a minute. I tried to imagine myself in a pattern like that — married, kids, a little white house with green shutters. The picture wasn’t bad.

I realized with a start that the gal in the picture was Marcia Banks.

“Why don’t you chuck it, Dan? Why don’t you marry some broad and get a job as a plumber?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s a funny thing,” he went on. “Every field of work has some other field of work that a guy thinks about when he’s walking around in a brown study. Ad men always want to get a farm in New England and get back to nature. The PR boys get a yen for a general store when they want to chuck public relations to the dogs. And writers — God knows why — writers always get the idea of plumbing. A stillson wrench and hunk of pipe. I don’t know.”

“So you think I should be a plumber?”

He pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and stubbed it silly in the ashtray. Then he pulled out another one and stuck it where the first one came from and lit it with another wooden match.

“You don’t want to be a plumber?”

I shook my head.

“Good money in it. Four bucks an hour, work your own hours, good union. You sure?”

“Positive.”

He dragged on the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke. “You’re a damned fool,” he said cheerfully. “That’s my business — damned fools. What are you going to do now?”

“Write.”

“What?”

“That’s why I came to see you.”

He leaned back and looked at me. You could see the strength in him — the strength that let him start out owing somebody carfare and wind up owning and running the world’s top literary agency. He was the kind of man that nothing could stop. When he wanted something he got it, and he had the guts to want things.

“Write me a book,” he said.

“Paperback?”

“That what you want to write?”

“I want write whatever you want to sell.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and reached for another. “Whatever you want,” he said. “You can write paperbacks, so write paperbacks. Write me a nice solid novel with sex in it and substance to it and blood and guts and women with tits on them and I’ll sell it. You’re a writer, Dan. I don’t have to tell you what to write. I’ve got a whole stable of idiots that I feed plots to, but you’re no idiot. I don’t have to spoon feed you. You’re a writer. So write me a book.”

“Any percentage in writing short stuff?”

He thought for a minute. “There might be, if you could write Saturday Evening Post stuff. But you’re not an SEP writer, Danny boy. You’re too gutsy for that sort of stuff. If you want cigarette money you can knock out slush for the pulps. But write me a book.”

That’s what I wanted to do anyway. The pulps are always a temptation — there aren’t many left, but a fast check and a 5000-word story are incentives. But I wanted a book. Fifty bucks would help, but I needed more than that to get started. And a book would be easy.

“You ought to be a plumber,” he said. “You really should. It’s a better life, Danny boy.”

“Why aren’t you a plumber?”

“I should be,” he said. It would be easier. But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too excited. My wife wants me to quit. My kids want me to quit. My son Billy would like me to have a catch with him in the evenings. It’s nice,having a catch with your kid, tossing a baseball around. Billy could be a good little ballplayer if he had some practice.

“But I get too keyed up, Danny. I get too hot and bothered. The pressure is too much in this business, but I can’t live without pressure like this. Can you imagine me without pressure?”

I couldn’t, and I told him so.

“Neither could I. I’ve been living like this too long, Danny. People talk about what a great business I own. Hell, I don’t own the business. The business owns me. But I love it. I suppose I love it. Can a man love a business, Danny?”

“If there’s nothing else to love, I suppose.”

“And what else is there?”

I grinned again. “You could try the girl at the front desk. She looks like the loving type.”

He got a guilty look on his face which anybody else would take to mean that he’d been doing just that. I knew it just meant he would like to. Lou never mixed business with pleasure — it made him reluctant to fire a girl if he was sleeping with her, and Lou liked to be able to fire anybody without thinking twice about it. “Never crap where you eat” was his motto and his last word on the subject.

We talked some more and he said, “Write me a book, Danny. What else can I tell you? Write me a book and I’ll sell you a book and we’ll be in business again. Okay?”

I nodded. I was anxious to go now, anxious to start banging away at the new typewriter. “Lou,” I said, “I’m short right now. If you could let me have a small advance against future sales...”

His expression turned into a frown. “Suddenly this is a bank?”

“Well...”

“Look,” he said, his eyes softening, “it’s something I don’t do. You know that, Danny. Hell, I don’t do it for any of my writers if I can help it. An advance against a pending sale, that’s different. An advance while an author is waiting for the check to come through. But against future sales...”

“You’re afraid I’ll drink up the money?” I could feel my pulse quickening and my blood pressure going up.

“It’s not that, Danny. Hell, you can come back, I know you can. But what’s the sense of making it easy for you to...”

I stood up, aching to take a swing at him and struggling to control myself. A second later the feeling passed and I got control of myself. “Sorry,” I said. “You’re right. Take it easy.”

I turned and headed for the door.

“Danny!”

I turned around.

“Write me a book,” he said, reaching for another cigarette. “A good one.”

But when I got home I didn’t feel much like writing a book — a good one or a bad one. Hell, Lou was right. In his place I wouldn’t advance a nickel to a bum like me, no matter what my policy was on that kind of thing. It didn’t make sense. No sense at all.

Because the odds were I never would write that book.

Oh, comebacks happen. Scott Fitzgerald did it, for one — and it’s been done by others. Fitzgerald wrote himself out of debt when he was swilling God knows how much Scotch a day, knocking out Post stories one after the other.

There aren’t too many Fitzgeralds.

The typewriter felt like a sack of lead when I got back to my room and I put it down on the table very gratefully. But I didn’t want to look at it, not just then. I had a ream of typing paper and carbon paper and copy paper, but I tossed them on the bed so I wouldn’t have to look at them either.

I wanted to look at Marcia Banks, and I wanted to look at her for a good long time.

She was in her room with the door closed. I called through the door and the first time she didn’t answer, and I called a second time and she asked me what I wanted.

“You,” I said. “I want you.”

“Not today,” she said. “Not today, Dan.”

“I just want to see you,” I said. “Just to talk to you.” It was a lie, but you have to lie some of the time in this world.

“Just to talk?”

“Yeah.”

There was a pause. “Not today,” she said finally. “Tomorrow, maybe. But I don’t want to see you today, Danny — not even just to talk.”

“Look...”

“I mean it,” she said, her voice seeming to come from very far away. “I told you how it had to be, Dan.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure — you told me.” I turned around and walked back to the room.

But I didn’t feel like writing. I got as far as the pint bottle in the desk, got the seal off and was ready to twist the cap with my fingers when I realized that I had to write, that I had to get started then and there or chuck the whole thing and head for the Bowery.

I opened the ream of typewriter paper and set it on one side of the typewriter. I put a stack of copy paper on the other side and I stuck a sheet of paper in the machine. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to write, but I had to get words on paper. Once you get words on paper, once the opening sentence is written you have a start. You can find a plot and characters from there. If you’re going good, the rest of the book will work itself out.

I put the paper in the machine and typed at the top:

Then I left space for the title and tried to write the first word. And the damnedest thing happened.

I couldn’t think of a word.

That’s how blocked up I was, how knotted up inside. I couldn’t think of a goddamned word!

So I wrote:

I sat there looking at it and no word followed it. I ripped the sheet out of the typewriter and put another one in and typed the same four-lined head and solemnly wrote:

Again I looked at it and again nothing happened. So I pulled the damned sheet out and crumpled it up into a ball and flipped it in the vague direction of the waste-basket and went through the same ridiculous routine with two more sheets of paper.

On the fifth sheet I typed:

And I looked at it.

And I added:

And then I reached for the rye.

It was close to midnight when I woke up with my head in a sling again and the familiar purple fuzz between my scalp and my skull. It was almost a welcome sensation — like going home, or having burnt toast and cold coffee or that sort of thing.

But I felt like hell. Not just the hangover — that was bad enough, but the knowledge that I got drunk without writing the first word of the novel was a bit worse. I wanted Marcia, wanted her near me even if I didn’t get to touch her all night. It was crazy, the way I was wanting her. She was just another little piece, just a girl I didn’t know from a hole in the wall who crawled into my bed one night and made me happy.

But I wanted her.

Tomorrow, I thought. Later for you, Marcia. There was still time to start the book, still time to get something written. First of all I had to start feeling human again.

Fortunately there was enough rye in the bottle to unhang the hangover. Next came a bath — I stripped down and wrapped myself up in my one towel and headed for the john.

When I opened the door there was a stark naked blonde in the shower singing Roll Me Over at the top of her lungs. And it wasn’t the hangover — so help me.