The other widow was her daughter. Her name was Mrs. Cooper, and her mother’s name was Mrs. Wollsacket. Mrs. Cooper was about thirty-five and she had a perfectly good chin and no cataracts. She also had a son, who was about seven years old and retarded. Very retarded. They had to feed him with a spoon and he would drool most of it out, and his eyes never seemed to focus on anything.
Between the kid and his grandmother’s nonchin, I had more or less decided not to look for anything that needed fixing. After breakfast Mrs. Cooper left for work and I got ready to go, and when I went to pay Mrs. Wollsacket she started talking about all the things that needed doing, and how difficult it was to make do without a man around the place, and how here it was June and the second-floor storms were still on the windows. (Incidentally, somebody is missing a good bet; if someone would only sell combination aluminum storm windows to all those lonely old ladies, half their worries would be over.)
Well, I couldn’t just leave. It wouldn’t fit the Lone Ranger image at all to run off yelling “Hi-yo, Silver!” without changing those storm windows for her. I offered to do the job for her in exchange for the two-fifty I owed her and another day’s room and board. She said, “Oh, I wasn’t asking you to do it, Mr. Harrison,” and I started to say, well, then, I guessed I’d be on my way, and she said, “but I’m surely glad to take you up on your generous offer,” and I was locked in.
It didn’t take long. I took care of the storm windows and took apart a lamp with a broken switch and put it back together again so that it worked, which completely amazed her. Then I ate a sandwich for lunch and walked around town until I found the library.
The librarian looked vaguely familiar, and when she gave me a tentative smile I realized it was Mrs. Cooper. We had a dumb conversation, and then I looked around until I found a couple of early Nero Wolfe mysteries that I couldn’t remember if I had read or not. Mrs. Cooper told me I could take them back to the house even though I didn’t have a card. I read them in my room.
One of them, anyway; it turned out I had read the other one.
They fed the kid early, thank God. Then the three of us had dinner and I talked about how I was a student at the University of Wisconsin on summer vacation, and trying to see something of the country and possibly earn a little money toward next year’s tuition. (I had been saying this since the term ended. Before that I was the same student at Wisconsin but had dropped out in January for lack of funds and hoped to go back in the fall.) I couldn’t tell you very much about the dinner conversation because it was basically the same as all my dinner conversations, and I had learned to handle my end of it without paying much attention to anything but the food.
Afterward I took a loose leg off one of the dining room chairs and glued it back on. This went over well. Then I went up to my room and read the other Nero Wolfe, the one I had already read once before. I had forgotten how it came out and was willing to find out all over again.
Around ten there was a timid knock on the door. I opened it, and it was Mrs. Cooper. She was a little bird of a woman, as thin as her mother was fat, with a slightly pinched look around her eyes and nose. She was prettier than that sentence makes her sound, and would have looked very nice, I think, if she had done something intelligent with her hair. It was the color of a field mouse and she had it pulled back into a bun.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, “and I thought you might like a nice cup of tea, Mr. Harrison.”
We had tea in one of the living rooms. Mrs. Cooper talked about how nice it was to work at the library, except that so few people actually read books anymore, with so many of them wasting their time in front of television sets. And she talked about how lonely it was in that town, and how she had wanted to leave, but she couldn’t leave her mother all alone and besides there was the boy to consider, and she guessed she would just stay there while life passed her by.
“This must be a lonely summer for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said.
“It is,” I said. “But I do meet a lot of people.”
“I’m sure you must.”
“Yes, I do.” Brilliant, Chip. If you’re supposed to be the Lone Ranger, why do you talk like Tonto?
“I suppose you meet a great many lonely women.”
“Uh,” Tonto said.
She folded her little hands under her little breasts. “You must bring them a great deal of excitement, Mr. Harrison. Excitement that is sorely missing in their wretched and cloistered lives.”
Her eyes were shining weirdly, and she moistened her thin lips with her tongue.
I said, “Well, I guess I change a lot of storm windows, if you can call that excitement.”
She leaned forward and put her teacup on the coffee table. She did this very deliberately, as if it would slide off the table unless she placed it in just the right spot. I realized suddenly that she was not wearing the same dress she had had on at dinner. And she was wearing lipstick, and hadn’t been wearing any at dinner.
She stood up and crossed the room and sat on the couch beside me. She folded her hands and rested them in her lap.
“My husband died eight years ago,” she said.
“I’m very sorry.”
“But there is still a fire in me,” she said. “My fire has never been quenched.”
She put her hand on the front of my pants.
I tried out a lot of lines in my head, like asking her how her husband died, or how long she had been working at the library, or if she thought it would rain tomorrow. Somehow none of them seemed like the right thing to say. I considered telling her that I was a fairy or had been wounded in a campus riot or that I had syphilis. It was like having absolutely no appetite and then having somebody put a plate of boiled turnips in front of you.
“My fire burns for you, Mr. Harrison,” she said. She really said that. “Oh, Chip, darling!”
And her hand did things, and of course nothing happened, and I thought, well, maybe I can sort of move the turnips around on my plate. Because while I was sure I would never be able to rise to the occasion, so to speak, I also figured there was more than one way to skin a cat, or quench a fire, and if she had gone eight years without it she could probably get off without too much trouble if I just went through the motions.
So I kissed her.
The way it started out, I was like a Boy Scout helping her across the street. But somewhere along the way everything changed. It really surprised me. I opened her dress and touched her and kissed her, and in the course of it all I began to groove on her body.
It was a much better body than you would have expected. It didn’t look that great — she was much too thin and didn’t have much of a waist, so that she was almost a straight line from her shoulders to her feet. Her skin was very soft and smooth, though, and there was no fat on her, and, well, her body just felt nice. Some do and some don’t, and hers did.
Maybe what I got was a contact arousal from her, because she was certainly excited and she certainly made it obvious. Anyway, I was on the couch with her, just going through the motions, when all of a sudden I realized that I had an erection.
And I thought, Hey, where did that come from?
God knows where it came from. But even I knew where it was supposed to go, and it suddenly seemed absolutely essential that I put it there as soon as I possibly could. It didn’t seem to matter if she was ready or not, although I guess she must have been ready for the past eight years. All that mattered to me was to get into her, and I shucked my pants and rolled on top of her and jabbed at her with all the subtlety of a tomcat.
It went straight in on the first shot as if she had a magnet in her cervix. She wrapped her arms and legs around me as if she was scared I would take it away. She had nothing to worry about. I kept taking it a little ways away and then putting it back, as fast and as hard and as deep as I could.
Throughout all of this, there was something slightly schizophrenic about the whole thing. Because it was as though there were two Chip Harrisons. One of them was banging away at the poor woman as if he was trying to splinter her pelvic bone, and the other was sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, watching the whole thing and not quite believing what he was seeing.
It went on for a long time, this totally unsubtle relentless sledgehammer screwing, and she came about half a dozen times, and then so did I.