Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [12]
In the back seat Naughty Nasty Nancy sat directly behind Dawn. Naughty Nasty Nancy does not speak too often, but her occasional remarks are always incisive. There is a distinctly fey quality to this girl, Steve. If you were casting Hamlet, you would pick her instantly for Ophelia.
On Nancy’s right was B.J. B.J. is Barbara Judith Castle. She looks enough like Merry Cat to be her sister, but isn’t. They may be cousins. I’m not certain. My memory of the conversation in which that part came up is somewhat vague, and I don’t know for certain whether they are cousins or lovers. I’m sure it’s one or the other. It’s possible, of course, that they are both.
Now for the luggage compartment, where I was sitting in a modified lotus position. On my right, Ellen Jamison, red-haired and slim-hipped and flat-chested and freckled. If her father ever loses his several million dollars, she can always earn a living posing for Norman Rockwell. She even has braces on her teeth.
Let me tell you something, Steve. Nothing brings you all the way back like kissing a girl with braces on her teeth. It makes you want to go home and stand in front of the mirror and squeeze blackheads. An ultimate nostalgia trip as the tongue-tip tickles all that shiny wire.
And on my left, chubby and giggly and bouncy and rosy-cheeked, Alison Keller. She wears her dark-brown hair in a Dutch cut, and her bangs fall upon her unlined brow. She is happy and bubbly and exuberant, and one is so delighted with this side of her that one doesn’t suspect there is more. But she paints, does Alison, and I have seen some of her paintings, and they are dark and mordant with echoes of Bosch and Dali, and they are weirdly wonderful, and so is she.
“We are truly kidnapping you, Mad Poet,” they kept saying. “And we will keep you hidden away in a cellar and smuggle scraps of food to you from the caf, and every day we will all steal down to you and make mad passionate love to you, and we will never never never let our Mad Poet go.”
How nice indeed.
The only hangup on the drive to Darien was that Merry Cat kept bitching about having to drive. “It’s not fair,” she would say. “Everybody else gets to neck with Mad Poet and all I have is the steering wheel. Doesn’t anyone else want to drive?”
No one else had a license. Except Mad Poet, but no one ever had the temerity to suggest that he drive.
“You’re always pestering to drive,” she accused them, “and now when I’m perfectly willing to let you, nobody wants to all of a sudden.”
So I could only neck with five of them, which was a shame. If life were perfect, we would have had a chauffeur. But why carp?
Steve, this was as perfect as life had ever gotten. Incredible.
You know, I shouldn’t have bothered with that geography shtick. It didn’t apply for very long. By the time we hit the West Side Drive, Dawn had climbed into the backseat, and she and Nancy and B.J. had done whatever it is you do to the backseats of station wagons to flatten them out, so that the backseat area just became part of an expanded luggage compartment. So there I was with the five of them, still in this same alcoholic haze and still sober regardless, and I reached out and kissed one, and the little devil opened her mouth instantly, and another one cuddled up and put my hand on her breast, and from there on you can write your own script. I never knew quite whom I was kissing nor whom I was touching at any given time. Nor did it ever quite matter.
The trouble is that I’m making it sound like an orgy, and it wasn’t at all like an orgy, not in the least. First of all, there was an air of utter innocence about the proceedings that couldn’t have been greater if we had been playing Parcheesi. We all liked each other and we were all having fun and it was all a lazy, giggly, delicious, magical thing.
Absolutely