A Strange Kind of Love

Chapter Nine

Light.

That was the first sensation, just as the last sensation had been one of overwhelming blackness. The light came on slowly, steadily, until everything was far too bright and I had to shut my eyes against it.

Then my name — Dan Larkin.

Then sensation returning to my body.Awareness, first of all. The discovery that I was lying down, and that I was lying on pavement. And that I was lying in my own vomit.

More sensations. An impossible emptiness in my stomach. Every muscle strained and cramped, every nerve twitching. A headache that was too big for my head and spread over the rest of my body. Dampness — in my clothing, my hair, my whole body.

I poked my tongue around my mouth in a hesitant search for teeth and they all seemed to be present. I counted ribs and they were all there too.

No bones broken.

There were two possibilities. One: I was still alive.

Two: I was dead and this was Hell.

I felt like hell but a glance around revealed that I was in New York. I stood up and took several gentle steps without falling on my face. I seemed to be in an alley, and I wondered vaguely had I landed there.

I walked around. I left the alley and found out that I had managed somehow to leave the Village and to wind up over on the East Side.

Then I began remembering.

The first thing I remembered was my magnificent exit in Washington Square. Then the other little gems came back to me, helping the headache I had achieve frightening proportions.

Well, I thought. Well, jerk, you tied one on, didn’t you?

Yes, I answered myself solemnly.

Idiot, I castigated myself. Why?

Yes — why? Why the hell had I gone out and knocked myself for a loop? And, for that matter, what day was it? What month?

But, above all, why?

I got all the way to a subway before I remembered why, and then I felt like going back to the alley again. Ah, yes. Ah, ah, ah. Marcia.

The little hermaphrodite I was in love with.

Yeah.

By this time my hangover had become a contender for an award of some sort or another. My head had bells ringing in it. My stomach had holes in it and my guts were leaking over the subway stairs with every halting step I took.

I felt horrible.

It wasn’t until I dug into my pocket for money to buy a token that it came to me that I didn’t have any money. I reached for my wallet and wasn’t particularly astounded to discover that someone else was now its owner. Nor was I especially amazed to note that my watch was also on the missing list. It was all part of the pattern.

It’s strange to discover how much easier it is to get by on a lie than on the truth. Fifteen persons glared at my growth of beard and sloppy clothing and passed by in a rush when I asked for subway fare. Finally I changed my approach and asked for fifteen cents toward a bottle of sneaky Pete. In no time at all I had enough for the subway and for a hangover antidote as well.

The hangover remedy came first. I left the subway in a staggery rush and hurried into a grimy restaurant. The waitress looked as bad as I felt.

“A glass of Worcestershire sauce,” I grunted. “With a dash of tomato juice.”

She laughed haggishly and brought me tomato juice with Worcester sauce in it, which was better than nothing. It tasted terrible but I got it down and my stomach felt a little better. A cup of black coffee followed. It tasted terrible, too — mainly because they weren’t putting nearly enough coffee in their coffee and my cup must have been the ninth pressing of the grapes.

But I got it down and my head stopped spinning around. I bought my token, boarded the subway, and rested my chin in one hand. I felt rotten — too rotten at first to do much of anything but think about how rotten I felt.

I changed to a west side train at Times Square and my head began to clear up. Physically I was a mess inside and out. My stomach was bubbling and my mouth tasted as though someone had been using it for a garbage can. My clothes were ripped in spots and practically glued to my body. I needed a shave badly.

I rubbed at my beard, trying to figure out what day it might be. After four days it’s hard to guess by the growth of beard how long you’ve gone without a shave.

But it was more than four days.

The simple thing would have been to buy a paper, but I didn’t have the necessary nickel left after the breakfast and the subway fare. I thought of picking up a cast-off newspaper from a trashcan but it didn’t seem to be worth the effort, and when I got off the train at the 86th Street station I walked straight home without bothering to look around and find out what the hell day it was.

I didn’t particularly care.

I walked up the steps and into the hallway and almost bumped into Carol on the way into my room. She looked at me as if I had just crawled out of a sewer.

“My goodness,” she said.

I didn’t say anything; I just looked at her. She looked good — she was wearing an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse that was almost off-the-breasts as well as off-the-shoulder, and I was enough taller than her to see halfway down her navel. It was a nice view.

I should have hated her. That occurred to me immediately, and I was surprised to discover that I didn’t feel anything toward her, least of all hate. Snappy phrases popped into my head, about how she liked men and everything else and all that, but they all rolled right back out of my head just as easily. She was just another girl, and the fact that she had fallen into bed with a woman I was in love with didn’t seem to make a hell of a lot of difference. She was a woman — a woman I had slept with, a woman I was on speaking terms with, and that was absolutely all there was to it.

“Hello,” she said. “Remember me?”

I looked up suddenly, realizing that I had been standing still and staring at her breasts without uttering a word.

“Oh,” I said stupidly. “Hello.”

She giggled. “You really lost a weekend.”

“I guess so.”

“You look like hell.”

I grinned. “It figures — I feel like hell. I feel like the inside of a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap.”

“That’s bad. I don’t think I ever felt that bad. I felt like the inside of a football player’s sweat sock once, but never like the inside of a Turkish wrestler’s jockstrap. How does it feel?”

You ought to hate her, I thought. You don’t have to stand around making jokes.

But I said, “I’d like to take off my skin. It’d be a lot better without it.”

“You might leak.”

“Leak?”

She nodded. “Without a skin, I mean. How in the world would everything stay together?”

“I’d grow a new skin.”

“Just like that?”

“Sure. Hell, lobsters and things like that do it all the time.”

“Lobsters have skins now?”

“No — they grow things back. Like a tail, for instance. If you chop off a lobster’s tail—”

“Why chop off a lobster’s tail?”

“To see if it would grow back.”

“Would it?”

I nodded. “Every time. Damned clever, these lobsters.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “You know, I think there’s money in it. All you have to do is buy one lobster, you see, and you chop off his tail, and he grows another one, and you chop that off, and he grows another one. And if you keep on like that—”

“You have a lot of lobster tails,” I finished for her.

“That’s right.”

“You mean there’s money in lobster tails?”

“Of course.”

“It’s a wonder I never thought of it,” I said. “A real wonder. Hardly any capital investment needed, since all you have to do is buy a lobster and a bowl for it to swim around in. It makes sense.”

“You have to feed him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I forgot that.”

“And you have to spend time changing the water and all that. And don’t forget you need a hatchet or something for chopping the tails.”

“That’s right. But it’s still a cheap operation. You could start on a shoestring.”

“Of course.”

“Funny,” I went on, “that I never thought of it before. Are you sure there’s that much money in it?”

“Of course,” she said. “Dan Larkin, you would be surprised how much money some people will pay for a piece of tail.”

When we both finished laughing over that one she said, “Oh, there was a phonecall for you, Dan Larkin. A good many phonecalls, as a matter of fact. All from the same person.”

“Who?”

“Lou somebody. I have the name written down, if you want me to—”

“Never mind; I know who it is.”

“He said it’s important,” she said. “He said that each time he called, and he called two or three times a day, so it must be important.”

“Was there any message beside that?”

She shook her head. “No — he just said it’s important and you should call him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

She smiled and went out the door — probably to provide some happy businessman from Connecticut with some matinee action — and I smiled and went into my room.

My room was the same, except that the bed was made. Marcia made the bed every Friday, so evidently it was after Friday. But that wasn’t too hard to figure out; the whole bit started on a Tuesday, and I already knew it was a good four days since I made like a Peeping Tom.

What could Lou want? Maybe an assignment, maybe something fairly important, or maybe he just wanted to talk to me. With Lou everything was important, and he could keep your phone ringing ten times a day on a good day.

Well, he would have to wait. First things came first, and the first thing was a bath and some clean clothes. I stripped down and wrapped myself up in a towel, more than a little ashamed of the griminess of the clothes and the layer of dirt that covered my body.

I was a mess, when you came right down to it.

I ran the bath water as hot as I could stand it and let myself soak. I washed my hair and worked the soap into my scalp, washing and rinsing a half-a-dozen times. I spent a good hour in the tub and when I got out of it I felt as clean outside as it is possible for a human being to feel.

I also felt almost as exhausted as it is possible for a human being to feel — exhausted and physically depleted the way you feel after a really hot bath. So I took a lukewarm shower for five minutes to start the blood circulating at the proper speed, and followed it with a quick cold shower to pep me up a little.

Then I shaved and brushed my teeth. That’s the magic combination; if you’re too far gone to be brought back to life by the taste of toothpaste and the tingle of aftershave lotion, there’s not much hope for you. It’s a good indication that you’re dead.

I wasn’t dead. I still didn’t feel perfect because of the general state of my guts, but I felt a whole lot more like playing ball with the outside world. I wasn’t in condition to beat up wildcats, but before a pair of mice could have laid me out. Now they couldn’t. I stood stark naked in the bathroom, silently daring any mice to come out of their holes and try some funny business. But not a single mouse came. They knew I was nobody to fool with.

I padded back to my room and gathered up the clothes I had come in. They weren’t really worth saving, so I rolled them up into a reeking little ball and deposited them gently in the wastebasket. I pushed the wastebasket into the far corner of the room and stretched out on the bed.

Lying down felt good. There was a lot of beauty in the idea of sacking out for a few hours, but there were too many things that had to be done. For one thing, I had to eat. When you’re young you can forget your stomach without doing too much damage to yourself, but I already had a head start on an ulcer with the alcohol and the binge.

I dressed quickly, and the combination of clean clothes and clean skin felt great. It occurred to me suddenly that the greasy spoon on Columbus Avenue was never going to give me credit, and eating money was somewhat essential. Carol was gone, and the idea of borrowing from Marcia had its limitations.

Strangely enough, the name Marcia didn’t give me goose-pimples or anything of the sort. This was a surprise, and I said it twice to myself and once out loud to test myself. No reaction.

Was it possible I was over her? I didn’t think so but the binge had done one thing. It had taken some of the hunger out of my system. I was relaxed.

But I was also certain that the next time I saw her I’d be twice as hungry as ever.

At the moment my main hunger was for food. I rummaged around the room long enough to be overjoyed at finding a misplaced five-spot in the desk, and I kept rummaging for the hell of it and turned up about two bucks more, all in small change.

I felt as though I had struck oil in my back yard.

Seven dollars put a new light on things. I gave up the greasy spoon and treated myself to a steak dinner in a plush chophouse on Broadway near 90th Street — a joint that had been one of the best in town twenty years ago when the neighborhood was a lot ritzier than it was now. But the food was still excellent even though the prices were lower, and to me it tasted unbelievably good.

I did it up brown. I had a whiskey sour first and a top sirloin with baked potato and Caesar salad and a slab of French chocolate cake for dessert with a pony of Drambuie along with it.

I spent a lot of time at that table, and I spent a good share of my seven buck legacy. But it was worth it, and when I walked out of there with a full belly and a clear head I was ready for the wildcats.

I was also ready for Lou Harris. I called from the phone in the hallway, dropping two nickels into the slot, dialing the number almost mechanically, and cooing my name to brittle-voice.

“You,” she snapped.

“Me,” I admitted.

“He’s been trying to get you,” she said. “Christ, has he been trying to get you. Twice a day he’s been trying to get you, and you are never in.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” she said. “Jesus. You got any idea how often I’ve been dialing your damned number for him?”

“Twice a day,” I guessed.

There was a sudden click and a few seconds of delightful silence and suddenly Lou’s voice was saying, “Is that you, you son of a bitch?”

“It’s me.”

“It’s about time. Where the hell are you? It’s Thursday and I been trying to reach you for the past eight days. You out on a drunk?”

Thursday — that meant I’d been whooping it up for a happy ten days.

“Well?”

“No,” I said. “I was up in Connecticut for a weekend that stretched to a little over a week. Why?”

“A weekend?”

“With a friend of mine.”

He laughed. “She must have been one hell of a good friend. Was it nice?”

“Wonderful,” I said, beginning to get into the script of the lie.

“That’s great, Danny boy. Sexing when you should have been working on the book that’s practically sold. What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“I— What!”

“Huh?”

“Did you say something about the book being—”

“Sold,” he put in. “To Lincoln House. But I said practically.”

“Lincoln House!”

“What’s the matter? Not good enough for you?”

“They’re the top house in the country! How in hell did you manage that?”

“Who’s the best agent in the world?”

“You are. But—”

“So?”

I didn’t say anything for a minute and he said, “You damned fool, did you think that book was just another piece of junk?”

“Wasn’t it?”

I could picture him shaking his head. “That was quality,” he said. “A good novel. Maybe even a great novel, whatever that means. Solid, hard-cover stuff, great stuff, salable stuff. Good.”

“But—”

“Shut up,” he said. “But me no buts, like it says in that play. I read it at one setting and shot it straight to Lincoln House for a fast reading, and I got the fast reading. They like it. Madge Clyber read it, and Madge Clyber liked it, and when Madge Clyber likes a book you have it made. Understand?”

I gulped.

“Look,” he said, “there’s no contract yet. There will be, and there could be right now if you hadn’t been banging Miss Connecticut for the past eight days. Clyber wants you to have lunch with her, and that means you go have lunch on Lincoln House at some Madison Avenue eatery. Eat as much as you like because Lincoln House picks up the tab and they have more money than God. And you sit over lunch for three hours talking about everything but the book, and as you get ready to leave she hauls out a contract and you sign it.”

“How do I know what I’m signing?”

“Because it’s all prepared. Baby, I got them hung up for a twenty thousand advance with foreign rights and movie rights on our side of the line. It’s a beautiful contract. And you’ll know it’s the contract I set up because it’s got my initials on it. All you have to do is sign and get her to sign and we’re in.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Sure, but— Why the lunch deal, Lou?”

“Danny boy.” He sounded hurt. “Danny, you never sold a big book to a big house before, did you?”

“No.”

“Of course not. These boys play different from the paperbacks. They take a nice personal interest in their writers. They want to know who you are and size you up so they can play the publicity campaigns just right. They want to get an idea how to shoot your mug shot for the picture on the dust jacket, and they want to make sure they like you enough to buy your book. Don’t try to make sense out of it. Lincoln House doesn’t make much sense. Lincoln House makes dollars. And when Lincoln House makes dollars you make dollars, and when you make dollars I make dollars. Is that good enough for you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“It should be. Now for God’s sake wear a shirt and tie and smile pretty at Madge Clyber and be nice to her and laugh when she laughs, because if she decides she doesn’t like you the whole thing can go out of the window.”

“She can decide that?”

“Uh-huh.”

I shook my head to clear it. “When do I see the gal?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Christ, for all I knew you were dead. I got her on the phone an hour or so ago and made an appointment with her myself. I fed her some lie about how you took a night boat to Saudi Arabia or something. I can’t even remember what I told her. That’s when it gets bad, Danny boy. When you forget what lies you tell, then you’re in deep. When you say something and can’t figure out whether or not it’s a lie, then it’s really bad. You know, I had myself believing you were in Saudi Arabia?”

“What’s she like?”

“What’s who like?”

“Madge Clyber.”

“Oh.” He paused for a breath. “She’s a bitch,” he said solemnly. “She’s a fourteen-carat, diamond-dotted bitch with no heart and too many brains. She can half kill you by looking at you hard. I had lunch with her once and I couldn’t eat it, and when I can’t get food down it’s bad. She’s a complete bitch, and you’ll wind up hating her before you finish your tomato juice and you’ll want to kill her halfway through the mashed potatoes.

“She’s a publishing bitch, and that’s the worst kind. They’re worse than Public relations bitches or advertising bitches or any other kind of New York business babe bitches. She’s spending her whole life showing that she can do anything a man can do, and that’s made one hell of a bitch out of her. Because there’s one thing a man can do that she can’t do, Danny boy.”

I felt like telling him about Marcia but I didn’t bother.

“Be nice to her,” he said. “Think about your twenty grand. Think about my two grand. Think about how my little kids need new shoes. Okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You keep my appointment,” he said. “You meet her at La Merover on 49th near Fifth at one o’clock tomorrow. Just ask the maitre d’ to point her out — he’ll know who she is. And you damn well better be nice to her.”

“I’ll be sweet as saccharin.”

He laughed. “You think you can be sweet, Danny boy? You think so?”

“For twenty thousand dollars,” I said levelly, “I can be sweet to absolutely anybody.”

The phone clicked in my ear. There was no topping the son of a bitch.