Thirty by Lawrence Block Page B

This happens so often lately. I go to sleep around midnight and wake up every four hours or so, have a cigarette, then slip back down under the covers and pull the blankets over my head like darkness itself, snuggling back under a blanket of sleep and drifting off in dreams for another four hours. And there are days when I do this for sixteen hours at a stretch. God knows why, or how.
    After a point it isn’t really sleep. A long waking dream. It just seems that there is nothing worth getting up for.
    A memory—I had days like that in Eastchester. Days of long sleep. I guess it was a way of avoiding things. Housework, things I did not want to do.
    I have none of those responsibilities here.
    Then what? Sleeping the long sleep to avoid being awake and facing—what? The fact that I have nothing to do, arduous or otherwise? The fact that life is empty?
    But is it empty? It does not always seem that way. It seems—oh, I don’t know.
    But I have to write about Susan.
    I bathed and depped and perfumed. Depped—the word I have been using inside my head. Used a depilatory on my legs and armpits. Went to him, clean and hairless and sweet to smell. He opened the door, looking quite dramatic—tight black pants, a black silk shirt, a scarlet ascot.
    “Come inside, Jan.”
    In the living room, Susan is sitting on the couch. The teenybopper, fluffy blond hair, a quietly beautiful little girl face. She looks toward me and tries on a smile.
    This rattles me. We have always been alone together in this apartment, Eric and I. I know there are other people in his life, as there were others in mine, but all our meetings have been one-to-one. I look at Susan and am unable to speak to her, nor can I speak to Eric. I wait.
    He takes my hand, leads me to her. “Jan, this is Susan. Susan, this is Jan.”
    We manage smiles.
    She is very lovely, at once innocent and knowing. I wonder what she might have been like at twelve, when he first had her. Or what she might be now if he had never entered her life. Or her vagina.
    “Each of you,” he says, “is a gift for the other. I trust you will enjoy your presents.”
    I look at him. He turns, walks to the door.
    “I have an appointment,” he says. “Good-bye.”
    He goes out. The door closes. Again the fancy that it is a dungeon cell door swinging irrevocably shut. I look at the closed door, gaze at it and beyond it for a time, then sense the girl’s presence. I turn, and she is standing a few feet away from me.
    She says, “Don’t be afraid.”
    “Afraid? I’m not afraid of you.”
    “I thought you were, you know, uptight in general.”
    “I suppose I am.”
    “What he wants—”
    Harshly, “I know what he wants.”
    “For us to make love.”
    “I know.”
    “You’ve never been with a girl?”
    “No.”
    “That’s pretty weird.”
    “And you have?”
    “Well, like I’ve been with Eric for almost three years now. That’s a long time to be with someone like him. Catch me— someone like him. I guess there isn’t anyone like him, is there?”
    “Perhaps not.”
    “Anyway, three years. Almost three years. I guess there’s not much I haven’t done, you know, in that length of time.”
    She extends a hand. I draw away. She frowns, hurt, puzzled.
    “I just wanted to touch you.”
    “I don’t like to be touched.”
    “Oh?”
    “I’m—this wasn’t my idea. The two of us.”
    “I know.”
    “It was Eric’s idea.”
    “I’m hip. So?”
    “Well—we don’t really have to do anything.”
    “He would want us to.”
    “We could tell him.”
    She shakes her head slowly. “You’re what, thirty?”
    “Twenty-nine.”
    “To be that old and still be uptight about things. And you’re so pretty.”
    “I’m not.”
    “I’d love to look like you.”
    “I’m too thin. Skin and bones.”
    “Beautiful skin.”
    “You can almost see the bones through it.”
    “Oh, come on.”
    I light a cigarette. As I take it from my purse Susan says, casually, that there is grass