Thirty by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online Page A

where we nod and smile politely at one another. Yesterday he brought someone with him, a little blond teenybopper who couldn’t have been more than eighteen, if she was that. She could have been his daughter, and may in fact have been just that, a college girl visiting her father who is divorced from her mother or something. I think, though, that she is his mistress. Or his occasional piece or something of the sort. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think he’s interested in me, and I don’t think I care very much.
    I was picked up in a bookstore. A couple of times I’ve gone to bars and other places looking to get picked up, and haven’t been, probably because I don’t stay long enough and am so uptight about the whole thing that I don’t come on as very approachable. But the bookstore, I only went to get something to read. The Eighth Street Bookshop. And this young man—I thought at first he was a clerk, but he was just browsing, like me—held this book up to me and said, “Have you read this? It’s really quite marvelous.”
    I hadn’t, and I still haven’t, and I don’t remember what it was but it certainly didn’t look very interesting. I said something and smiled, and he smiled back and I said something about not really feeling like reading but being bored and having nothing to do, which was something of an invitation, the point of which was not lost on him.
    “This is a bad city to be lonely in,” he said. “Sometimes I think companionship is the enemy of education. If I weren’t so much alone I doubt I’d have read half of what I have, over the years.”
    He had longish light brown hair (and no doubt still does) and a rather fierce red-brown moustache and soft, liquid eyes. He was about my age, maybe a couple of years younger. He had a teaching fellowship at NYU. Philosophy. He was getting his doctorate, but philosophy was beginning to bore him and teaching bored him even more and he didn’t think he would want to spend the rest of his life doing it, but neither did he see anything else that appealed more. He had some money from his mother’s estate and had thought about going into some sort of business, maybe opening a store of some sort, perhaps a bookstore, except he didn’t know if he wanted the headache of running a business and if he wanted to tie himself down to anything. He didn’t think he would like it.
    He told me all of this over coffee and at his apartment, which was on Tenth Street between Avenues A and B, not a wonderful neighborhood and several flights up, but comfortable enough inside. We drank wine out of jelly glasses, California Burgundy from a gallon jug, and we listened to a mixture of jazz and folk rock, and we screwed on his sagging bed.
    It was sort of nice. He was a nice person, actually. His name is Arnold, which is less sexy than Eric, which figures, because so is he. His penis is long and narrow. He sort of hinted at one point that he might not recoil with horror if I happened to feel like blowing him, but I didn’t particularly want to so I failed to pick up on the hint. I don’t think he was tremendously disappointed. We did it twice. I didn’t come, but it wasn’t frustrating or anything and was in fact quite pleasurable, just that I didn’t come.
    February 28
    I was thinking about Arnold. He called this afternoon and asked if I’d like to have dinner. I said I was busy, which isn’t true, but that tomorrow would be all right. So I’ll have dinner with him tomorrow. And then I gather we’ll go to a movie and then back to his place.
    He is not what I’m looking for. I don’t know why, any more than I know what it is that I am looking for.
    Eric?
    Oh, shit, Eric’s a fantasy, let’s face it. I don’t know him. But what Eric is to me is what I think maybe I am looking for.
    I would love to blow Eric, and I don’t think I want to blow Arnold.
    I wonder what that has to do with it. I think it must have a lot to do with it. I know that was what I