69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block Page B

ensuing relationship had turned out to be a wonderful one.
    But now—
    Now he was in love with her.
    What did it mean? How in the world could he be in love with a girl whom he would never be able to make love to? He not only could never marry her, but he could never take her in his arms, never kiss her or touch her. What kind of love was this?
    He kept walking, laughing bitterly to himself. It was a typical Ralph Lambert play, he decided. Only a guy like him could do a scatterbrained, useless thing like this. Only a guy like him could fall in love with a lesbian and get all hung up about it.
    What in the world would happen? She hadn’t had any lovers since she had moved to Barrow Street, but he knew that in time she would have to. Then what would he do? Maybe he’d be jealous of the other girl. That would be one for the books, wouldn’t it? Ralph Lambert jealous of a dyke. Pretty funny, huh? Yeah. A riot.
    Fantasies flooded his mind, fantasies of possible courses of action. He knew that she had never been with a man, and he guessed that her traumatic fear might stem as much from ignorance of sex as anything else. He remembered reading that blind, ignorant fear was a prime cause of what one author termed “the homosexual neurosis”—that a person who was afraid of sex was less likely to fear someone of the same sex than someone of the opposite sex. To Susan another woman might represent the Known, something she was familiar with because it was similar to herself. A man, on the other hand, was the Unknown—and she had to fear him more because the Unknown was so much more terrifying.
    He fancied himself for a moment as a knight on a white charger coming to rescue her from her homosexuality by showing her that she had nothing to be afraid of. Then the barriers would break down one by one until she came to him and he held her in his arms, held that sweet and beautiful body that he had studied so carefully and reproduced so faithfully.
    Then—
    Suddenly the hilarious impossibility of the situation struck him full force and a hysterical laugh shrieked forth from his lips. He stood on the sidewalk, unable to stop laughing, and was forced to grab onto a lamppost for support. Other people on the street stared at him as he laughed and laughed over something that was not funny at all.
    Finally he caught his breath and started walking again. He walked all over the west side of the Village, looking for something but not knowing what it was that he was looking for. He kept walking until he found the bar.
    It wasn’t much. It was a run-down longshoreman’s bar down by the docks where the liquor was cheap and the air foul-smelling. A jukebox in one corner blared forth with raucous rock-and-roll. A tired prostitute sat at a table in the back, a professional smile on her once-attractive face. A row of tired-looking, husky men drank shots with beer chasers at the long brown bar.
    It was a place to drink. That was all he wanted, a place where he could be alone by himself without being entirely alone, a place where he could sit and drink with nobody bothering him.
    A place that had neither Stella nor Susan around, a place where the only woman present was a cheap waterfront whore.
    He walked into the bar. One stool was vacant and he sat down on it. He ordered a shot of the bar whiskey and a glass of draft beer for a chaser.
    The shot was a quarter and the beer was a dime. It was about as cheap as you could get any place in the city.
    When he had finished pouring the shot down his throat he knew why it only cost two bits. It was rotgut—cheap moonshine brought in from Kentucky and sold with ease because the cop on the beat knew who was paying him. A steady diet of it would raise hell with the lining of a man’s stomach, but it was cheap and it would get a person stoned out of his head as quickly as the stuff that went for six bucks a fifth.
    He sipped the beer. It was a little watery but not too bad. He finished it and motioned for the