Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man - Lawrence Block [47]
Maybe orgies and switcheroos are what you and Miss Fettuccine and your little schoolgirls enjoy. Maybe that’s very much where it’s at, and maybe my generation gap is showing. Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit, as Rhett Butler really said.
Lisa is just an old-fashioned girl. I’m afraid. All I want is one man who knows he’s a man and who’s man enough to make me know it.
For a while there, even though I should have known better, I actually thought you might turn out to be that man after all. Maybe that’s because you’re a writer and tend to come across better on paper than you do in person. I don’t know. But it was a mistake on my part, just as every man I meet turns out to be a mistake on my part, although I honestly sometimes think they’re all really a mistake on God’s part and not mine.
I know you think of me as a ballbreaker. You’ve made that perfectly clear often enough. Well, you’re not the only man who ever came to that conclusion, and maybe I am a ballbreaker, but if so, it’s only because every man I meet has unbelievably fragile balls. Hit a high note and they shatter to bits.
What I am, and all I am, is a woman. And what I want, and all I want, is a man who knows what to do with a woman when he finds one. A strong man, Larry. A man with real balls on him. A man that I can’t break. A man that would break me instead, and put the pieces back together so that I could feel whole and complete for the first time in my life.
I don’t know if Daddy read the letter before passing it on to me. A cute little game on your part but I’m afraid I’m not playing, because I really don’t care. I’m sick of Richmond, it was a mistake to come here, but where the hell else would it be any better? I’d go to the moon if I thought it would do me any good.
I’m afraid you and Miss Arrivederci won’t have the pleasure of eating fried rice out of my cunt, or whatever it is you’re doing these days.
Ciao,
Lisa
33
c/o Patricia Kettleman
14 Fairfax
Albuquerque, New Mexico
July 23rd
Dear Larry,
Perhaps this is old news to you, but I have left Steve. I must have been insane to have anything to do with him in the first place. I guess I built him up in my mind as some kind of perfect person because I needed an excuse to get out of our marriage, which had turned bad for both of us. Talk about out of the frying pan and into the fire.
I won’t go into details. I was already beginning to realize that he was not the person I thought he was, and then one night he did something absolutely inhuman. I can’t even tell you what he did. I don’t want to think about it, let alone put it on paper. Let me just say that it was horribly painful for me and that he went right on with it in spite of all my pleas.
I would ask you to take me back, but what is the point of it? We are no good for each other. In fact, the last thing I want is to look at a man. I always thought Women’s Liberation was silly, but they really have got something. Men exploit women constantly, in and out of bed. It’s a natural law of nature, though. All the picketing in the world isn’t going to change it, but that doesn’t mean a woman has to like it.
Sometimes I think I should have become a nun.
I’m staying with an aunt of mine. Patricia Kettleman. I don’t think you ever met her. She was widowed three or four years ago. One of these days, if I get up the courage, I just might tell her how lucky she is.
Fran
34
MEMORANDUM
From: Laurence Clarke
To: Laurence Clarke
Date: 26 July
Subject: Various subjects
Aha!
L.C.
35
c/o Gumbino
311½ West 20th St.
New York 10011
July 26
Mrs. Lisa Clarke
219 Maple Rd.
Richmond, Va.
Dear Lisa:
I apologize. For what? For everything.
Lisa, your letter was an eye-opener. I wish you had said what you did years ago. Things might not have worked out any differently between us—you’re absolutely correct in your estimate of the unbridgeable gap between