Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man Read online

  Consider this: In all my life I had only found one job that I truly and unequivocally enjoyed, and now I was fired from it.

  I picked up the phone and called Fran’s office. She had not come in to work, someone told me, nor had she called in. I tried her at home and the phone rang for a while before I gave up on it.

  I decided it was just as well. Conversations with Fran had been difficult enough lately, even when I had good news. But I had to talk to someone, so I called Steve Adel. Of course you remember Steve, old college buddy and best friend in all the world. Best man at our wedding, you recall. Best man again, when I married Fran. He’s still in photography, has a loft of his own on Centre Street. He wasn’t around, though, and I sat there trying to think of someone else to call, and the phone rang, and although you might think I’d have known better, I answered it.

  A collect call from Richmond, Virginia. There is only one person who calls me collect, and only one person I know in Richmond. Both of those people are you, Lisa. I accepted the call on behalf of Whitestone Publications—it was all I could do to compensate them for not having made use of my expense account. And there you were, as you perhaps remember.

  You may remember the conversation as well, but I’m going to reproduce it here just for the sake of continuity.

  LISA: Sweetie, it’s good to talk to you.

  LARRY: You’ve eloped.

  LISA: No, honey—

  LARRY: You’ve moved up the wedding, though.

  LISA: (Giggles deep in her throat. There was a time, you know, when I loved the sound of that giggle. There was also a time when I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up.) No, just the opposite, lover. Last night Wally and I called the whole thing off. No wedding bells for Lisa.

  LARRY: No wedding bells.

  LISA: ’Fraid not. Oh, it just wouldn’t have worked out, honey. Just no way. He’s a sweet guy and I do love him some, but as far as marriage goes, no, it just couldn’t have worked out for us.

  LARRY: You don’t want to jump to such an important decision, Lisa.

  LISA: Oh, be sure I gave it mucho thought, honey.

  LARRY: I see.

  LISA: But there is no way to make it work. Oh, we’re fine in bed, lover, but that’s just not enough to build a marriage around. As far as that goes, you and I were good in bed, Larry. I can still say that you were one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.

  LARRY: I don’t know how to thank you.

  LISA: Of course we were both a good deal younger then. You’ve probably learned a lot more since those days. God knows I have.

  LARRY: I can imagine.

  LISA: Can you? But as far as marriage goes, I think it can go without me. Honestly, darling, there are times when I think I’ll stay single for the rest of my life. So I’m afraid those alimony checks won’t stop next month after all, sugar. As a matter of fact—

  LARRY: I was fired today.

  LISA: Fired?

  LARRY: Today. The magazine ceased publication, so they let me go. So as far as the checks are concerned—

  LISA: Oh, I’m sure you’ll be able to keep them coming.

  LARRY: You are, eh?

  LISA: I have confidence in you. But this does change things, doesn’t it? You see, Daddy has been after me to increase the checks. He says with the way inflation is going, and the increase in the cost of living…

  (I missed a lot of what followed there, Lisa. When you quote your father you talk the same legal bullshit he talks. But the gist of it seemed to be that the old bastard wanted you to petition the court for an increase of a third in your alimony payments.)

  LISA: (Cont’d.) But of course this changes things. I still consider myself your friend, lovie, and what are friends for if not to be understanding in times of stress?

  LARRY: Times of stress.

  LISA: So we’ll just let it stand at $850 a month until you get things straightened out. I just hope you won’t be unemployed for too very long.

  LARRY: So do I, actually.

  LISA: Oh, just incidentally, I didn’t get this month’s check yet. I suppose it’s in the mail?

  LARRY: You know how the mails are.

  LISA: But I suppose it’ll get here within a day or two, don’t you think?

  LARRY: You’ll get your money.

  LISA: I’m sure I will, doll.

  LARRY: But I wish to hell you would marry the son of a bitch.

  LISA: Men are supposed to be upset when their ex-wives remarry. A virility-anxiety thing, I think it is. They don’t like to be replaced. I read that many of them even enjoy paying alimony, that they get their kicks out of the measure of control it lets them keep over their ex’s life.

  LARRY: You read that, huh?

  LISA: It makes sense, don’t you think? Except for those men who don’t have much virility to be anxious about.

  LARRY: I’ve got to go now. My other phone is ringing.

  LISA: Fun-nee.

  LARRY: It was good talking to you, Lisa. It always is.

  LISA: Sometimes I think it’s a shame we didn’t work out, Larry. But we had some good times, didn’t we?

  LARRY: Some good times. No argument there.

  LISA: How’s Fran?

  LARRY: Fine.

  LISA: Give her my love.

  LARRY: Will do.

  LISA: Bye, hon. And don’t forget the check, huh? I’m kind of broke.

  LARRY: I won’t forget.

  Outside, away from the air conditioning, the weather had gone to hell along with the rest of my life. It had turned hot and damp, and the air was foul. I took a taxi. Pecuniary emulation, your father would call it. Spending money unnecessarily because one lacks it. Ego food. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t hack the subway.

  Bleecker Street had never looked bleaker. I dogged it up the stairs through the cooking smells and let myself in.

  Nobody home. I had a drink and was building another when I found the note. It was on the kitchen table, and I suppose I must have looked at it several times without seeing it. The work of a benign Providence. Obviously God knew I ought to have a drink inside me and another close at hand before I read that fucking note.

  I reproduce it for you, Lisa:

  Larry:

  I can’t go on living a lie. Steve and I have been lovers since March, and everything has grown ever more intense. No doubt you’ve noticed I’ve been acting strangely lately and I guess that explains why.

  By the time you read this we will be on our way to Mexico. We will stay with friends of his in Monterrey for a few weeks and will probably wind up in Cuernavaca. Steve has been wanting to photograph the ruins.

  Cowardly of me, I know, but I couldn’t face telling you all this. Nor could I help doing it. Thanks for some mostly good years.

  With some (but not enough) love,

  Fran

  P.S.—I closed our checking account.

  I went around the corner to the bank, and she was right. The checking account was gone. I sat down with a vice-president and we figured out how many checks were outstanding and cashed my final Whitestone check and put in enough money so none of the checks would bounce. I wound up with a couple of hundred dollars. There were still all those bills upstairs, and I still owed you $850, Lisa, the very $850 which I am not sending with this letter. The bank officer asked me if I wanted to open a new account; I decided to keep the money in cash. Not that I would be keeping it very long.

  Then I came back here and finished the drink, and then I read Fran’s letter a few more times.

  Friday, June 12th. It should have been the thirteenth. I had just lost my job and my wife and most of my money. I had retained my ex-wife and the privilege of defusing my virility-anxiety by paying her four times as much each month as I would receive in unemployment compensation. The only person I really felt like talking to about all of this was on his way to Monterrey with Fran. (And why, I wonder, did the silly cunt insist on furnishing me with their itinerary? Could I look forward to a parade of postcards? Having wonderful time. X m
arks our room. Wish you were here.)

  I called Jennifer, who lives on East Seventh Street and weaves rugs and tapestries. We have an undemanding sort of relationship, Jennie and I. I drop over there once or twice a week and we smoke a little grass and listen to a little music and fuck a little. I told her I was at loose ends, which was as true a statement as any I have ever uttered, and that I thought I might go over and see her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m kind of uptight. I just got my period yesterday and I had this hassle with the super and I’m in a shitty mood. If you just wanted to talk a little and watch me weave—”

  Jennifer is twenty-two, with a supple body and pale skin and long mahogany hair and trusting acidhead eyes. All of this makes her a yummy fuck but a verbal nothing. Going over to her place just for conversation is like going to a Chinese restaurant just for dessert. This is all right on grass—ten-minute silences aren’t bothersome then—but I felt not at all like getting high. I wanted to close the doors of perception, not open them.

  And what’s deadlier than watching someone weave?

  “Maybe some other time would be better,” I said.

  “Actually, we could ball. Not balling during your period is just a hangup, you know. You probably wouldn’t want to go down on me, but—”

  “It’s not that,” I said, truthlessly. “I’m uptight myself. I think the vibrations would be bad.”

  Jennie is one of those young female persons who will accept any explanation that has the word vibrations in it. She agreed that we would make it another time, and I picked up the phone again and tried to think of somebody to call. Or someplace to go. Or something to do. And managed to think of none of these things.

  I came very close to calling you, Lisa, as a matter of fact. The only thing that stopped me was that I didn’t want to hear your voice. I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds. I had some things to tell you, but I didn’t want you talking back to me while I tried to get it all out.

  So I decided to write a poem, and set the typewriter upon the kitchen table, and rolled a sheet of paper into it, and spent a long time looking at it. Which made it as close as I had come to writing a poem in about a year and a half.

  And then I thought, well, I can’t send Lisa a check, and I’d better tell her as much before her father sends his bloodhounds after me. Does the old bastard still raise bloodhounds? I’m sure he does.

  So I started to write you a letter, and I seem to have gotten carried away. Ridiculous, isn’t it? All of this just to tell you that there’s no check in the envelope, when you found that out before you read a word.

  Christ, Lisa, I’ve written twenty goddamn pages of this. I can’t believe it. This stupid letter is the first thing I’ve written in a year and a half. It is already longer than either of the two attempts I made at writing novels, and probably more cogent than either in the bargain.

  All those months at Ronald Rabbit’s, with a desk and a chair and a typewriter and nothing but solitude, and I never wrote a fucking word. And here I am beating this typewriter to a pulp, the words just rolling straight from my brain through my fingers and onto the page. Pages. Page after page after page.

  Lisa, Lisa, Lisa. We did have some good times, damnit. We truly did. And I think it’s nice we haven’t let the fact that we sort of hate each other keep us from loving each other a little.

  Ah, Lisa. Here’s your letter, and I’m sorry there’s no check to go with it, but there isn’t, and God knows when there will be. You don’t have to answer this letter. You don’t even have to keep it. I have a carbon. I just never did get out of the habit of keeping carbons of things, and when I first put the sheet of paper in the typewriter I hoped it would turn out to be a poem. But maybe this is better. The world has enough poems, and maybe it needs more prose.

  Anyway, I’ve solved a problem. When I started this I didn’t know what to do, and now I do. I’m going to tuck this into an envelope and go downstairs and mail it, and then I’m going over to the Kettle to get drunk.

  You may be hearing more from me, Lisa.

  With love (but without $850),

  Larry

  2

  74 Bleecker St.

  New York 10012

  June 15

  Mr. Stephen Joel Adel

  c/o American Express

  Monterrey, Mexico

  Dear Steve:

  Let me tell you in front, old pal, that I think you’re a total rat bastard and an unprincipled son of a bitch who ought to be tied up and horsewhipped.

  Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, I thought I’d write and tell you and Fran how I’ve spent the past couple of days. As she may have told you, Fran was considerate enough to leave a note, and it seems only civil of me to respond to it. I originally thought of writing to Fran instead of to you, since it was Fran and not you who left the note for me. But I rolled this sheet of paper into the typewriter and stared at it and, instead of typing “Dear Fran,” I typed what you see above. This sort of thing has been happening lately. I started to write a poem Friday afternoon, and what came out was a letter to Lisa. You remember Lisa.

  Why didn’t you ever take Lisa to Mexico, you son of a bitch? Christ, I would have paid your plane fare.

  Anyway, the point is that I’ve decided not to fight my typewriter. Whatever it wants to do is fine by me. I spent a year and a half deep in writer’s block, and now that I think about it I can’t avoid the suspicion that it happened because I would sit down at the typewriter with certain preconceptions that kept getting in the way. I would decide to write a certain poem, and that poem just wouldn’t happen on the page, and as a result I didn’t write anything for a long time, until I decided to shortcut the whole operation by not sitting down at the fucking typewriter in the first place.

  You picked a good day to take yourself and Fran out of my life. I got home early that afternoon because they canned me at Ronald Rabbit’s. They finally figured out that I was a captain without a ship, and instead of finding another ship for me they cut me adrift and let me swim. You’d love the story, but I’ve already written it all to Lisa and I don’t want to go through it again. It wasn’t that much fun to live through, let alone to write about. If you ever have an affair with Lisa (after all, there are only three hundred people in the world, and sooner or later they all sleep with each other), maybe you can get her to show you the letter. Or if you ever meet Clay Finch, he’ll give you his side of it.

  I got home from Ronald Rabbit’s with my cottontail between my legs, and found that you had hied yourself south with my wife and my fifteen hundred dollars. I know it’s ungallant as all hell for me to say this, and you may not want to show this part of the letter to Fran, assuming you want to show her any of it, but of the two, I rather miss the fifteen hundred more. I had a use for it, what with a drawer full of bills and alimony to pay and no money coming in. I had a use for Fran, but we must face facts. If one takes a walk down the street, one has a much better chance of picking up a woman than of picking up fifteen hundred dollars.

  An even harder thing to pick up this late in life is a best friend. Much as my first impulse was to hate you, I’ve decided it would be silly to throw off a fifteen-year friendship over something like this. At the moment you’re near the top of my shit list. There’s no getting around that. But I know that you have a sense of honor, and sooner or later you’ll send back the fifteen hundred and all will be forgiven. If, on the other hand, you keep the fifteen hundred and return Fran, I swear I’ll hunt you down and cut your fucking throat for you.

  Jesus, I hope this letter gets to you. I don’t suppose you were expecting mail, but if I know you, you’ll check with American Express in every town you hit, whether anyone knows you’re going to be there or not. And Fran is just about as compulsive that way. I think I’ll put something on the envelope about forwarding it to Cuernavaca if you don’t call for it in two or three weeks. Fran said (well, wrote, actually) that you wanted to go to Cuernavaca to photograph the ruins.r />
  I didn’t know there were ruins in Cuernavaca. For that matter, I didn’t know you had this big thing for photographing ruins. If you wanted ruins to photograph, old buddy, you didn’t have to go all the way to Cuerna-fucking-vaca to take pictures of them. You could have come over to Bleecker Street and worked your shutter to the bone.

  In fact, precisely that notion was going through my mind when I finished the letter to Lisa. I put a lot of stamps on it and mailed it, and then I went over to the Kettle of Fish and behaved as though they were going to reintroduce Prohibition on the morrow. I drank Irish whiskey for a while, and then I drank some India Pale Ale. Do you remember the time we got totally wiped out on India Pale Ale at the Riviera, and we wound up taking this cab full of conventioneers to Harlem and pimping for them? Of course you remember, how could you forget, how could anybody forget?

  Ah, those were the days, Steverino ….

  I didn’t get totally wiped out this time, however. I kept on drinking, gradually slowing the pace and letting myself get wrapped up by first the jukebox and then some old thoughts. I’d planned on devoting the major portion of the evening to self-pity. In fact I was looking forward to it. But self-pity is like cops and cabs and women—it’s never there when you want it. I would try to tell myself how classically desperate my situation was, how absolutely everything had gone wrong at once, even to Jennifer having her period.

  I know that you know about Jennifer, but I don’t know whether or not you told Fran. I was wondering about that as I sloshed down the India Pale Ale, as it happens, and I tried to put myself in your position. If I were fucking the wife of my best friend, I asked myself, and if I happened to know that said best friend had an occasional piece on the side, would I tell the best friend’s wife about it? I could see one good reason to do so. It could lessen her guilt, after all. I mean, cheating on a cheater is just turnabout, which we all know is fair play.