Forgive me for going so often to the literary well of Ed McBain,
but he’s so good, and in these two cases, so funny that I have to share them
with you, maybe entice some of you to find his 87th Precinct novels and see for yourself just how good
a writer he was.
This first example shows how Detective Steve Carella, his main
character, first made use of the words “I love you”:
I’m thirty-eight years old, and when I
was growing up in Chicago, I had none of the sexual advantages today’s young
people enjoy. I was seventeen when the sixties were just starting. I missed out
on the permissiveness that followed. A goodly amount of my adolescent energy
was spent feverishly scheming on how to plunder the treasures inside a laden
blouse, each button the equivalent of a Vietcong division guarding the road to
Hanoi, how to slide a wily and preferably unsuspected hand along the inside of
a thigh and onto those cherished nylon panties beneath a fortress skirt, how to
hide from the eyes of a shocked citizenry the erections that bulged the front
of my trousers whenever any girl of reasonably modest good looks (and, quite
frankly, even some very ugly ones) sashayed into view. I loved legs, I loved
breasts, I loved thighs, I loved asses, I loved girls with a passion that was
all-pervasive and overwhelming. And on that perilous road to hopeful
consummation, I discovered that the words, I love you, sometimes worked
wonders: “I love you, Harriet, I love you, Jean, I love you, Helene, I love
you, Melissa,” my fingers frantically working those maliciously obstinate
buttons and those diabolical brassiere clasps invented by a mad woman
scientist, “I love you, Joyce, I love you, Louise, I love you, Alice, I love
you, Roxanne!” Those were the days of garter belts and nylon stockings, soon to
give way to panty hose (invented by that same madwoman in her boiling
laboratory), and God, the delirium of actually touching those secret mysterious
undergarments, the windows of my father’s Olds fogged with the exhalations of
singular male intent and determined female resistance, “I love you, Angela, I
love you, Shirley, I love you Ming Toy, I love you, Anybody!”
I used the words as cheap currency in
a market without buyers.
I’m now reading for the third time Widows, published in
1991. Carella has just lost his father, killed in a nighttime robbery in his
bakery, and in his grief he thinks back to times when he was a young man in the
old neighborhood. He remembers Margie Gannon and his first encounter with
Margie’s freckled breasts. He and Margie were at her home, reading comic books
together, Margie’s parents away for the afternoon, an August rainstorm outside.
This passage expresses adolescent desire better than anything I’ve ever read,
and more masterfully written than most writers could do:
“He could not remember now which comic
they were reading. Something to do with cops and archcriminals? He could not
remember. He remembered what she was wearing, though, still remembered that. A
short, faded blue-denim skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse buttoned up the
front. Freckled pretty Irish face, freckled slender arms, freckled everything,
he was soon to discover, but for now there was only the tingling thrill of her
silken hair touching his cheek. She reached up with her left hand, brushed the
hair back from her face. Their cheeks touched.
It was as if an intensely sharp light
suddenly spilled onto the open comic book. Not daring to look at her, he
concentrated his vision on the brilliantly illuminated pages, alive now with
pulsating primary colors, red and blue and yellow outlined in the blackest
black, focused his white-hot gaze on the action-frozen figures and the shouted
oversized words, POW and BAM and BANG and YIIIIKES!
He turned his face toward hers, she turned
her face toward his.
Their noses banged.
Their lips collided.
And oh, dear God, he kissed sweet
Margie Gannon, and she moved into his suddenly encircling arms, the comic book
POW-ing and BANG-ing and sliding off her knees and falling to the floor with a
whispered YIIIIKES as lightning flashed and thunder boomed and rain
relentlessly drilled the sidewalk outside the street-level living room. They
kissed for he could not remember how long. He would never again in his life
kiss anyone this long or this hard, pressing her close, lips fusing, adolescent
yearnings merging, steamy young passions crazing the sky with blue-white
flashes, rending the sky with blue-black explosions.
His hand eventually discovered the
buttons on her blouse. He fumbled awkwardly with the buttons, this was his
goddamn left hand and he was right-handed, fumbling, fearful she
would change her mind, terrified she would stop him before he managed to get
even the top button open. They were both breathing audibly and hard now,
their hearts pounding as he tried desperately to get the blouse open. She
helped him with the top button, her own trembling hand guiding his, and then
the next button seemed to pop open magically or possibly miraculously, and the
one after that and oh my God her bra suddenly appeared in the wide V of the
open blouse, a white bra, she was wearing a white bra.
Lightning flashed, thunder boomed.
He thought Thank you, God, and touched
the bra, the cones of the bra, white, her breasts filling the white bra, his
hand still trembling as he touched the bra awkwardly and tentatively, fumbling
and unsure because whereas he’d dreamt of doing this with girls in
general and Margie Gannon in particular, he never thought he would ever really get
to do it.
But here he was, actually doing
it—thank you God, oh Jesus thank you—or at least trying to do it,
wondering whether he should slide his hand down inside the bra, or lower the
straps off her shoulders, or get the damn thing off somehow, they
fastened in the back, didn’t they? Trying to dope all this out in what seemed
like an hour and a half but was only less than a minute until Margie moved out
of his arms, a faint flushed smile on her face, and reached behind her, arms
bent, he could see the freckles on the sloping tops of her pretty breasts
straining in the bra as she reached behind her to unclasp it, and all at once
her breasts came tumbling free, the rain kept tumbling down in torrents, and oh
dear God, her breasts were in his hands, he was touching Margie Gannon’s sweet
naked breasts.
He wondered what had ever become of
her.”
There. I rest my case. Find McBain.
Read McBain. Find your own favorite passages.
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