Free Clean Slate (Kit Tolliver #4) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page A

signed on the motel register. But once she’d identified herself to Doug Pratter, she’d become the person she’d proclaimed herself to be. She was Kit again—and, at the same time, she wasn’t.
    Interesting, the whole business.
    Back in her motel room, she surfed her way around the TV channels, then switched off the set and took a shower. Afterward she spent a few minutes studying her nude body and wondering how it would look to him. She was a little fuller in the breasts than she’d been eight years before, a little rounder in the butt, a little closer to ripeness overall. She had always been confident of her attractiveness, but she couldn’t help wondering what she might look like to those eyes that had seen her years ago.
    Of course, he hadn’t needed glasses back in the day.
    She had read somewhere that a man who has once had a particular woman somehow assumes he can have her again. She didn’t know how true this might be, but it seemed to her that something similar applied to women. A woman who had once been with a particular man was ordained to doubt her ability to attract him a second time. And so she felt a little of that uncertainty, but willed herself to dismiss it.
    He was married, and might well be in love with his wife. He was busy establishing himself in his profession, and settling into an orderly existence. Why would he want a meaningless fling with an old girlfriend, who’d had to say her name before he could even place her?
    She smiled. Lunch , he’d said. We’ll have lunch tomorrow.

    Funny how it started.
    She was in Kansas City, sitting at a table with six or seven others, a mix of men and women in their twenties. And one of the men mentioned a woman she didn’t know, though most of the others seemed to know her. And one of the women said, “That slut.”
    And the next thing she knew, the putative slut was forgotten while the whole table turned to the question of just what constituted sluttiness. Was it a matter of attitude? Of specific behavior? Was one born to slutdom, or was the status acquired?
    Was it solely a female province? Could you have male sluts?
    That got nipped in the bud. “A man can take sex too casually,” one of the men asserted, “and he can consequently be an asshole, and deserving of a certain measure of contempt. But as far as I’m concerned, the word slut is gender-linked. Nobody with a Y chromosome can qualify as a genuine slut.”
    And, finally, was there a numerical cutoff? Could an equation be drawn up? Did a certain number of partners within a certain number of years make one a slut?
    “Suppose,” one woman suggested, “suppose once a month you go out after work and have a couple—”
    “A couple of men?”
    “A couple of drinks, you idiot, and you start flirting, and one things leads to another, and you drag somebody home with you.”
    “Once a month?”
    “It could happen.”
    “So that’s twelve men in a year.”
    “When you put it that way,” the woman allowed, “it seems like a lot.”
    “It’s also a hundred and twenty partners in ten years.”
    “Except you wouldn’t keep it up for that long, because sooner or later one of those hookups would take.”
    “And you’d get married and live happily ever after?”
    “Or at least live together more or less monogamously for a year or two, which would cut down on the frequency of hookups, wouldn’t it?”
    Throughout all of this, she barely said a word. Why bother? The conversation buzzed along quite well without her, and she was free to sit back and listen, and to wonder just what place she occupied in what someone had already labeled “the saint–slut continuum.”
    “With cats,” one of the men said, “it’s nice and clear-cut.”
    “Cats can be sluts?”
    He shook his head. “With women and cats. A woman has one cat, or even two or three cats, she’s an animal lover. Four or more cats and she’s a demented cat lady.”
    “That’s how it works?”
    “That’s exactly how it