CH02 - Chip Harrison Scores Again by Lawrence Block

Author:Lawrence Block [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-01-29T07:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

THE FUNNY THING is that I kept getting more and more involved with Lucille without really getting involved with her at all. We spent about fifty minutes out of every lunch hour in her bedroom, but outside of that we didn’t see each other at all. I never stayed around after she got home from school, and on Saturdays she would generally manage to spend the day with a girlfriend. We never went to a movie or for a walk or anything.

My job at the Lighthouse had something to do with this. I was working during dating hours, and the one night she could go out on dates was the one night I really had things to do there. But once I asked her if she’d like to catch a movie during the week and she said she couldn’t.

“I have to stay with my father,” she said. “You know that, Chip.”

“He manages well enough Friday and Saturday nights, doesn’t he?”

“Well, those are the only nights I can go out. I’m not allowed to date during the week.”

“You could ask permission.”

“Asking’s not getting. Oh, Chip, I can’t go out with you anyway. I’m going steady with Jimmie Butler, you know that, I told you a thousand times.”

I said something about going steady being a Mickey Mouse institution.

She looked at me. “Do you think I ought to break off with Jimmie?”

“I guess not,” I said.

That was the only time I ever asked her for a date, and I was just as glad she turned me down. I guess I wanted to keep this a lunchtime thing and not let it get very intense.

There were a couple of reasons for this. One of them makes me look like Mr. Nice Guy, so I’ll throw it in first, and it was just that it wouldn’t have been fair of me to take up all that much of Lucille’s time. Because what Lucille wanted out of life was to get married as soon as she was done with high school and start having babies and spend the rest of her life there. And while that might not sound like something worth wanting, it was what she wanted, and it was probably what would be best for her. (Especially if Jimmie Butler developed a little control by doing the multiplication tables in his head or something.)

Anyway, Lucille wanted to be Mrs. Somebody. Maybe she would have been just as happy to be Mrs. Harrison as Mrs. Butler, but I really wasn’t ready for that. She just wasn’t that important to me, so I didn’t want to become all that important to her.

The other reason was more selfish.

See, I was just having too much fun the way things were going. It was a fantastic ego trip for me, the whole thing, and even knowing something is an ego trip isn’t enough to take the enjoyment out of it. For once in my life I was the teacher and she was the pupil, and I was getting a tremendous charge out of it.

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