Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page B

problem among lovers, as you can certainly appreciate.
    So for that reason I’m taking the liberty of enclosing herewith (if you’ll pardon the formal language) a Xerox copy of a letter I received from him. It’s handwritten, but I’m happy to say the writing reproduced nicely. That Xerox machine is a really wonderful thing. I’ve had some correspondence which indicates I may find it increasingly difficult to gain access to it. I hope this will all work out, however.
    To return to Steve’s letter, you’ll notice that it doesn’t bear any date. I doubt this will make much difference to you, but at the moment I’m rather involved with correspondence in general, rather compulsive about the whole subject, as it happens, and it would make my record-keeping more complete if you could find out just when it was written and relay the information to me.
    It should be easy for you to work it out, actually. As you’ll note from an examination of its contents, Steve’s letter was written while you were out shopping for something to cook for dinner. Since cooking dinner has never been something you do more than once or twice a week, I’m sure you can narrow things down and work out the timing for me. God knows I would appreciate it.
    I want you to really read Steve’s letter, Fran. And try not to be put off by the man’s relative clumsiness with the English language. After all, he’s a photographer and not a writer, and you don’t expect photographers to be up to their asses in verbal facility. They’re far more apt to be up to their asses in darkroom chemicals, aren’t they? Besides, as everyone learns at a tender age, a picture is worth a thousand words. You might say that Steve sent me a picture, as his letter runs quite close to a thousand words. Do you suppose it’s just coincidence?
    You can tell from a glance at this primitive word-picture of Steve’s that he really loves you, Fran. (Somehow I can’t bring myself to call you Frances, although Steve seems to refer to you that way a lot. Is it his idea of a pet name?) His love for you is evident in every split infinitive, in every mawkish turn of phrase. In fact I would go so far as to say that his letter to me was in fact a letter to you, a letter he lacked the self-confidence and, oh, the slick glibness to deliver to you in person. And so he writes his letter to you but addresses and mails it to me.
    I can understand this, actually. I’ve been writing all these letters to various people lately and can’t entirely dismiss the nagging suspicion that I’m really writing them to myself. Or that my typewriter is writing them to me. I’ve tended to anthropomorphize my typewriter lately. This may be bad, but I feel it’s better than ignoring it.
    Thus my passing this letter on to you is in a sense my method of playing the John Alden part, but this is one John Alden who will respectfully decline to speak for himself.
    One interesting reason for assuming Steve’s letter was written for your benefit, Fran, is his stubborn insistence upon going to such great lengths to suggest that the whole bit with the convent girls never happened. That it was all some fantasy of mine, which I wrote to him for some nefarious purpose. Steve has known me a long time, longer than almost anyone, and he can certainly tell when I’m telling the truth, so he knows dammed well that this happened. I may have had to reconstruct some of the conversation slightly, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it came within a couple of words of being a verbatim transcript of what actually went down that night. I guess he must feel that my boasting—and let’s admit it, I was boasting—reflected somehow on your femininity, as if I were not only doing a rooster strut but also comparing you adversely to the six girls.
    A strut, yes; an adverse comparison, surely not. Of course we both know, we all three know, that you are a few years more than sixteen, Fran(ces), and that you will not be sixteen again