Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [1]
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.
So it was a beautiful day, and my phone was ringing, and I picked up the phone, and in my little world the sun hid behind panther-colored clouds, the carbon-monoxide and sulfurdioxide levels soared, the stock market sank without a trace, and the sword of Damocles began its swift descent.
“Laurence Clarke? This is Mr. Finch’s secretary. Mr. Finch would like to see you in his office.”
“In his office,” I said. I have a tendency in moments of stress to repeat the last three