Chip Harrison Scores Again

Ten

“You seem different,” Lucille said.

“I do?”

“Maybe not,” she said. She yawned and stretched. She was lying on her back with one arm at her side and her other hand tucked palm-up under her head. I touched her armpit. (It’s a shame there isn’t a better word for it. When you hear the word armpit you think of deodorant. When I touched Lucille’s, all secretly smooth and hairless, I didn’t think of deodorant. I thought of other warm private places, and of better things to do with an armpit than rub deodorant on it.) I touched hers now, rubbing a little with the tip of my finger.

“Maybe it’s me,” she said.

“Maybe what is?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the middle of the week and the lunch hour was only twenty minutes over with. We had another half hour to ourselves and had already done what we did during lunch hours. Usually we would take our time, but this afternoon she didn’t want to pause along the way and admire the view. She just wanted to get there full speed ahead, and she did and I did, and it was very nice.

But now she was in a mood, and it was something I wasn’t used to with her. I asked her what was the matter.

“Oh, nothing,” she said. “Just that you seem all wrapped up in thoughts lately, and you might as well be a hundred miles away.”

“I’m right here,” I said, and touched her to prove it.

She moved my hand away. “Have you been thinking things, Chip?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Oh.”

“I always think things,” I said. “I mean, I’m alone a lot, so I’ll let my mind just wander off on its own some of the time.”

“You like doing that?”

“It beats talking to yourself.”

“I do that sometimes. Talk to myself. I don’t think much, though.”

“Uh.”

“I guess you must think I’m awful simple.”

“What makes you say that, Lucille?”

“I don’t know. Maybe on account of it’s true.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just an old preacher’s daughter. Never been anywhere and never done anything.”

“You’ve done a few things.”

She sat up suddenly and put her legs over the side of the bed. Without looking at me she said, “Do you know what it’s like when you start thinking things and you can’t stop? You don’t want to think them but there they all are in your head and you can’t make them stop?”

“I know.”

“Does it sometimes happen to you?”

“A lot of the time.”

“It never happened to me before. I would just, oh, you know, I would just go along. Hardly thinking about anything, and if I ever had a thought that bothered me I would just whisk it off out of my head and not think about it anymore. Like a program on the television that you don’t want to watch so you turn it off. But now I can’t do that.”

“What’s bothering you?”

“You know what it’s like? Like having that bad television program going on in a set that’s inside of your head, and there’s no way you can turn it off or pull the plug or change the channel, so what do you do?”

“Pray for a commercial,” I suggested.

“Oh, you don’t see what I mean.”

“Yes, I do. I’m sorry, Lucille. It was just a dumb joke.”

“No commercials and the program’s never through, it just goes on. I reckon that’s why Daddy drinks. You know he told me about it once. He said one day he looked into his soul and saw something there that he couldn’t bear the sight of, and drink kept him from seeing it. And I always thought, well, why didn’t he think on something else. I knew what he was saying but I thought if something like that ever happened to me I would just make the thought go away, but you can’t, can you?”

“You want to talk about it, Lucille?”

“I guess not.”

I put my arms around her and turned her face toward me. There were tears in the corners of her eyes.

I said, “Hey.”

“Lemme be, Chip.”

“If something’s bothering you—”

“Oh, I’m making something out of nothing is all. Never had a thought in my head before and I’m just not used to it. Just a mood I’m in that I’ll get over.”

“Maybe it’s your period coming on.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe that’s what it is,” she said.

What it probably was, I felt, was that she had gotten a contact high from my own moods. Because I couldn’t stop thinking about what Geraldine and I had not quite discussed and what Sheriff Tyles and I had not quite talked over. Which was that I would stay in Bordentown and share the management of the Lighthouse with Geraldine, and together we would expand the operation and hire more girls and put in gambling tables, and in a year or two when she was ready to spend the rest of her days sipping banana liqueur in Puerto Rico, the Lighthouse would be mine.

And I could see it all happening just that way.

I got a paper and pencil and did a little rough figuring, and then I threw the paper away because the numbers I was using were just ones I was picking out of the blue. And the numbers didn’t matter, anyway, because you didn’t need them to realize that the Lighthouse, run the way Geraldine was talking about running it, couldn’t help but make a fortune.

I mean, it wasn’t just a matter of being secure and established and successful.

I’d get rich.

It wouldn’t be hard, either. At first I thought that Geraldine only thought I was right for it for the same reason that she thought I was fit to play chess with. There just weren’t that many people around to choose from. But I had to admit it went further than that. I was honest, and I did get along well with the girls, and I seemed to have a feeling for handling the customers, and Sheriff Tyles, who she said didn’t take to many people, had done everything on earth short of adopting me. On top of all that, I kind of liked the business itself. I had always thought that the only reason anyone would want to go and live in a whorehouse was so he could have his pick of the whores, but I hadn’t picked one of them yet and I really liked living there. I mean, I felt at home there.

And as far as the gambling part of it was concerned, I suppose I was suited for that, too. I had played cards a few times without getting caught up in it, and I couldn’t imagine ever risking anything important on whether two pair was the best hand at the table or what number would come up on the next roll of dice. And why anyone would drop a perfectly good quarter in a slot machine was beyond me.

Now it seems to me that the one thing you wouldn’t want to be if you ran a gambling operation is a gambler. It was like a blackout alcoholic owning a liquor store, or a sex maniac running a whorehouse. You would just eat up all the profits. And at the time I was kind of interested in gambling in a spectator-type way. I mean, as long as it’s not my money, the excitement’s fine.

I would be rich, and I would be comfortable with what I was doing, and I would be good at it. The whole thing would be officially illegal, but there are laws and laws. And even if Sheriff Tyles stopped being sheriff sooner or later, by then I would be one of the important men in Bordentown. It doesn’t take all that much to be one of the important men in Bordentown, it’s not like being President of the United States. I would be important.

I kept just playing all of this through my mind. It was like Lucille had said, a television set in your head that you can’t turn off.

The thing was, I liked the program.

Of course thinking about all this made me think about Lucille, too, because she was part of it. Until I talked with Geraldine (or listened to her, because she was the one who did all the talking) I took it for granted that I was going to leave Bordentown sooner or later. I was in no rush, and I had more or less forgotten all that business about Miami, until the Sheriff reminded me, but I would be leaving sooner or later.

And, although I didn’t like to dwell on it, when I left Bordentown I would also be leaving Lucille.

Oh, once in a while I would play around with the thought of taking her with me. But I don’t think I ever gave that any serious consideration. In Bordentown, for an hour a day five days a week, she was perfect. In the rest of the world, and on a full-time basis, she just wouldn’t work out. (Maybe that line makes me sound like a shit, but it’s honest. She wouldn’t work out for me and I wouldn’t work out for her and it’s silly to pretend otherwise.)

But if I stayed in Bordentown, that meant I would eventually marry Lucille.

In that kind of situation, she would be perfect, actually. It was her home town and she belonged there. The idea of the preacher’s daughter marrying the keeper of the cathouse sounds pretty ridiculous, but I can’t think of anybody who would have gotten really uptight about it. Except maybe her father, but who was going to tell him? And why should he pay attention?

It would be perfect for Lucille, and in that situation she would be the perfect wife for me. And what I always wanted was a job with a future and a girl who loved to have me make love to her. Which meant I would be getting everything I always wanted.

That was the whole trouble.

I once read a book by Fredric Brown called The Screaming Mimi. (I also read about twenty other books by Fredric Brown, and there wasn’t one I didn’t like. I like lots of books, but I don’t always finish one feeling that I’d really like to meet the author sometime. I always feel that way about Fredric Brown.)

Anyway, this book starts with two drunks sitting on a bench, and one of them says that you can always have what you want as long as you want it badly enough. (The catch is that, when you don’t get it, that just goes to show that you didn’t want it badly enough.) The other guy sees a beautiful girl pass by and says that what he really wants is to spend a night with her, and for her to be stark naked.

Well, this happens at the end, only it isn’t quite the way he hoped. (I don’t want to spoil the book for you.) But the ultimate point, the philosophical point, is that if you want something badly enough you will get it, sooner or later, and then you’ll find out that you don’t want it anymore, and maybe you never really wanted it in the first place.

So this is what kept going through my mind, not steadily but off and on. It was all there, and all I had to do was reach out and take it.

But did I still want it?

I liked Bordentown, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live there permanently. I mean, I like swimming, but I’d hate to spend the next fifty years in the middle of the ocean. And more important, there was this major question of identity that was suddenly bothering me. I liked the idea of running the Lighthouse and putting down roots there and all, but I wasn’t convinced that it was me.

Oh, even the way I was talking, the South Carolina accent. I wasn’t consciously putting it on. I talked that way without thinking because everybody else talked that way and I tend to fall into the patterns of wherever I am. But if you woke me up in the middle of the night I wouldn’t sound that way. So it felt natural when I did it but it really wasn’t, not inside.

And the attitudes I had. Like being against long-haired hippies and black people and Yankees and everything else. It didn’t particularly bother me to act that way, or to use the word nigger, for example, because as far as I was concerned it was just part of doing the Bordentown thing for as long as I happened to be there.

But if I was there forever I would be doing all of that business forever, and when you do something long enough either it becomes real for you, which might be bad, or else you spend your whole life living a lie, which might be worse.

If I stayed in Bordentown, it meant I would probably never in my life rap with anybody the way I had rapped with some friends in the East Village, the way I rapped with Hallie the one night I spent with her. I might make a lot of friends, and I might get to know them very well, but they would never really get to know me.

Even Lucille. I could marry her and live with her for the rest of my life, and she would never really know who I was. Even if I didn’t try to keep anything from her, even if I opened up completely. There was no way for me to get through to her that completely.

And sooner or later that part of me that no one knew about wouldn’t even be there any more. Because I would be the only one who knew about it, and I would tend to forget.

This scared the hell out of me.

The trouble with writing all this down is that there’s no real way to get across exactly how I felt from day to day. See, it was never a constant thing. It was a seesaw, really. I would feel very strongly one way on one day, and the next day I would feel very strongly the other way. And after a little while of this I would be aware of the pattern myself, I would know while I was feeling like staying in Bordentown that the next day I would feel like running for my life. When you get like that it’s really terrible because you’re afraid to trust yourself. You don’t dare make a decision because you know that whatever you decide will seem like the wrong choice in a day or two.

If I left, that was the end of it. I could never come back, and I would probably never have a chance like this for the rest of my life. And if I stayed I would gradually get in deeper and deeper, and we would expand the Lighthouse, and I would marry Lucille, and by the time I realized I should have left, I would be too tied down and it would be too late, and I would spend the rest of my life regretting that I didn’t get out while I had the chance.

What I wanted to do was keep my options open as long as possible, but you can’t, really, not for very long.

Lucille helped keep me sane, or as close to sane as I was. My moods kept switching and she was vaguely aware of this but she had her own moods to contend with. And no matter what mood either of us was in, those lunch hours in her bedroom helped. I always wanted to make love to her, and she always wanted me to, and it always worked. Sex isn’t the only thing in the world, despite what you might read in The Swinging Swappers. But when it’s good it can do a lot to take your mind off the other things.

Until finally one afternoon I got so groovily lost in her warm body, so completely out of myself and away from myself, that when the world settled together again all I could think of was how much I owed her. Not what I felt for her, or what future I wanted with her or without her, but how much I owed her.

I wanted to give her something, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t giving her enough. I wasn’t even sharing thoughts with her, and I couldn’t do that, not yet, but there was one thing I could give her, one phrase I had been holding back all along for no good reason at all. There were words I could say that she had been waiting to hear, and I could say them whether they were true or not.

I turned and looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine. And I said the three words she had been waiting so long to hear:

“I love you.”

And she looked back at me, drinking the words, her eyes widening as she heard them. And she opened her mouth hesitantly, and I heard the echo of my own words in my head and waited for her to speak.

And she said three words back to me: