Hunger and Thirst (41 page)

Lynn’s pained scrutiny moved for a moment to the girl, then back to Felix. Erick paid no more attention, occupying himself by jiggling the ice cubes in his drink.

“Well, I …” Lynn started, unnaturally lost for words. Erick turned his head then and looked the girl in the face.

She looked back and seemed to smile although her lips didn’t move. First link. He didn’t sense it exactly.

But something made him extend his hand in the best hotel manager fashion.

“Sit down!” he said with ersatz gusto, “Pray!”

Then he glanced over at Lynn with a smile, getting amusement at the expected ice forming in Lynn’s eyes. For a brief moment he felt like some teasing date who had successfully irritated Lynn. Then the feeling drifted off into the cloudy wake in which all his thoughts mingled.

Felix and the girl hesitated, imagining that either Lynn or Erick would move to the other side of the booth and give them one half of it. But they didn’t move. So Felix put down the drinks and gestured to her to sit next to Lynn. Erick felt Felix’s bunching shoulders as he slid in beside him.

Elation seemed to mist over him. The dizziness, the room spinning with colored lights, the vibrating dull glow of the drunken fancy. Touch of the fantastic, came the thought.

“Now,” he said, “Isn’t this comfy, dears?
Where
were we? Oh, yes.”

He turned blandly to Felix who was sipping his drink.

“I was telling you what an intellectual citizenry we would have if people only had the right books in the bathroom.”

“What?” Felix said, his giant forehead sliding down over his skull.

“And the kiddies,” Erick said, “How are they? Bless me, it seems like eons since I bounced little Muggins on my wooden leg!” and in his mind he heard Felix saying—What’s
he
been drinking?

Felix looked at Lynn, Lynn who had forgiven Erick, Lynn who was erecting a tributary smile at one end of his sensual and snobbish mouth.

“What’s he been drinking?” Felix asked.

Lynn shrugged his shoulders, his eyebrows, as though he had just noticed Erick sitting there.

Felix let it go. He turned to his date.

And Erick looked at her.

Her face was non-committing. There was no way to tell what emotion was bordering on it. Later, Erick grew to appreciate how rare such a look was on her face. It only happened, he discovered, when she was more or less mystified.

“Mace,” Felix said, “I’d like you to meet Sally Birch.”

Lynn turned his head and smiled politely. “Pleasure,” he said. No, it isn’t, Erick’s mind observed.

“Hello,” she said, smiling now. A smile that made Erick feel something, he didn’t know what. It was the sweetest smile he’d ever seen.

“That’s not your first name, is it?” she asked Lynn.

“Lynn,” he said.

“Hello, Lynn.”

Lynn turned back front. His eyes met Erick’s. He pointed a well-manicured finger at Erick.

“This, I am called upon to indicate, is Erick Linstrom.”

“Oh!” she said, “The one whose show is being produced?”

She sounded actually awed. It set Erick off balance. Upset, flattered into startlement, he could do nothing but set aside mental dazzling and smile at her.

And she smiled back. With such a lovely smile that it made his heartbeat catch. It absorbed him, her smile absorbed him.

“Hello Erick,” she said.

“Hello,” he said.

And the next moment found Felix getting socially acceptable revenge by reducing Erick’s right hand to a pulp. Erick decided he could have gotten the same effect by putting his hand in a vise and turning the handle slowly until the bones snapped.

* * * *

“Gee, I think that’s wonderful that they’re putting on a show you wrote all by yourself.”

He didn’t write the music. He almost told her then decided not to. He basked in her attention. It was a new sensation and he like it. He was the center and Felix didn’t like it but Erick did. He leaned back against the booth and studied her through half-closed eyes. She noticed it. But he had finished another drink and was just about past caring whether his surveillance was obvious or not.

“What’s it about?” she asked, radiant with interest.

He gave her a few hints as to the plot. Always looking at her, appraising.

She had a coarse loveliness. There was no delicate precision of line to her features. All was molded roughly and no more. It was as though some potter had fingered out a general symmetry and then gone on to other work before he could refine.

Once, when she got up and danced with some boy who had stopped at the booth to ask her, Erick noticed her figure.

It was fabulous.

The dress seemed to sheathe her more than anything else. She was soft, swelling curves from throat to ankles.

“What did you say you did?” he asked her?

“I teach dancing.”

“At the school?”

“That’s right.”

He looked at Lynn. “Our dance director?” he asked.

Lynn’s face didn’t change. But Erick saw warning in his eyes.

In order that Erick be pacified, however, Lynn turned to her. “Have you ever done any group work?” he asked politely.

“Oh
yes,”
she said, “I’m a co-director of the dance recital we give every spring. We’re having one next week, why don’t you come and see it, it’s free?”

Erick smiled at the way she spoke, in such headlong fashion, rushing from thought to thought without usual grammatical bridges or rests. As though she had so many things to say that she must blurt them out eagerly before she forgot them.

Lynn smiled thinly. “Perhaps.”

“I think she’d be a good dance director,” Erick said. He didn’t look at Lynn. He knew what Lynn’s expression would be.

“Would you be interested?” Lynn said, getting tighter and tighter. Then, as she almost bubbled over with—Yes!—in her face, he added a dampening, “In
trying out?”

She kept smiling although she couldn’t hide the disappointment. And for a moment, Erick wanted to hit Lynn violently and hold her hand and say—There, there, the job is yours.

“I’d like to try out,” she said quietly.

Erick was conscious of Felix, restive at his side, being shoved aside in the conversation. He didn’t care. She was looking at him. And he wanted to kiss her. She looked superbly beautiful to him, there in the dim light with his eyes half-clouded by drinking.

“You’ll be fine,” he said sincerely, “Very fine.”

* * * *

Later. More drinks in him. A few in them. Lynn still dead sober, watching Erick like a detective searching for clues. Erick discoursing.

“What a horror story I could write,” he said, “about drab routine. Werewolves? Vampires? Monsters? Witches?” He raised a finger which weaved in front of his eyes. “Romance, ethereal delight, all of them. But,
routine
. Ah! It is the very word horror. Inescapable, harrowing and all-pervasive.”

He took a swallow from his drink, feeling dryness in his throat. The cold wetness washed the membranes in a moment and he did not relinquish the floor. Even though Felix tried to say something. He broke in.

“I feel the creeping dread of it,” he went on, melodrama bound, “Like a child’s fear of the darkness—unreasonable and irrational. But childish fears of the dark pass as do all transient fears. But
this
remains—a blood-flecked monster that eats you from the inside out!”

At that, he laughed out loud. Laugh number 3-A, his mind said, laughter at one’s own extremes of expression without the negation of one’s basic argument.

Then he let it all go, let the floods of fancy wash over the walls of his brain. Conscious of Lynn watching carefully. Conscious of Felix being bored into rapid death. Conscious of her, rapt and wide-eyed.

“Never!
” he said, “
Never
shall I slide down into the still green waters of common life, letting the stench of uselessness close over my poor head.”

Lynn’s lips twitched a little, uncontrolled. Erick didn’t know what Felix was doing. But Sally’s face he saw, wasn’t registering amusement.

She was taking it straight.

He caught her eyes and they were almost vibrant with sympathy for him. It was a jolt to his equilibrium to have his obvious extremes taken as gospel. He began to know her then. The limits of her humor. But more, the powerful kindness in her.

And something else he wasn’t conscious of, until later.

That Sally was seeing underneath and knowing that, basically, in spite of bald exaggeration, Erick was saying things that he believed in. For it was his common ailment to coat over with humor those things which he believed yet could not help suspecting.

“Finished?” Lynn asked.

“Finished
?” he said with pseudo-shock ringing in his voice, “I have not yet begun to fight, is this Paul Jones whiskey?”

Lynn smiled. And Erick turned to Sally. He looked at her and something flickered between them. Something happened to her eyes. He could never have described it. But he felt it. She saw that for she turned her eyes down suddenly and he saw a soft flush move across her temples. He saw her throat move once.

“I think routine is necessary,” she said, after a moment with an indefinite glance at him. “We couldn’t get anything done without routine.”

“Right!” he said, congressionally, “However, ninety percent of the populace makes of routine, not a slave, but a God.
True
, if we mold it and place it where we will then it is a benefaction, a mechanical aid to accomplishment. But! …”

“Sally, we …” Felix started.

“But! When it becomes our master, then are we truly lost,” Erick said, feeling a sudden tightening, realizing that he was drunk and out of order, even if it was only with Felix Karis. But he went on stubbornly even though he began to feel ill.

“When it becomes our master,” he said, “then are we truly lost. We are no better than clay. We are driftwood in a terrible devitalizing current. We are dead before death. Selah.”

“Hymn number 307,” said Lynn.

“Pass the plate,” Erick said.

Sally smiled, a healthy, honest smile.

“I’m glad you’re only joking,” she said, “It would be terrible if you really felt that way.”

And they all sat in silence for a moment. Lynn smiled and pushed his cigarette into the ash tray.

“Sally, let’s dance” Felix blurted quickly, wedging in his request.

She smiled at him, his date once more. “All right,” she said happily.

Erick felt a sudden iciness coursing him. He’d known all along that she was with Felix, that he was only a stranger. But he was drunk and he wanted to be more to her. And now this coldness came, spoiling his little bubble, upsetting the dream boat and he felt lonely and disgruntled.

“I want her for dance director,” he said sullenly as Sally and Felix moved off into the crowd, swallowed up in a maw of hips and stuck out arms.

Lynn looked patient. He lit another cigarette.

“Lynn
,” he said with rising impatience, teeth clenching.

“For Christ’s sake,” Lynn said, “Will you give these things a little thought? Don’t go embracing the first dance director you meet.”

“You talk as if they grow on trees out here!” Erick said sharply, “What the hell do you want—Agnes De Mille to fly in from the coast?”

Lynn’s mouth took on the lines of patient disgust Erick knew so well.

“Let’s sit on it, shall we, baby?” he said.

“Oh, shit on it,” Erick said disgustedly. The he leaned back and looked out in dull belligerence at the floor. He saw them dancing. She was looking over Felix’s shoulder at him. She turned her eyes the other way quickly.

“Pretty,” Erick said softly.

“What?” Lynn said.

“I said she’s pretty,” he said, knowing it would irritate Lynn.

“In a rather obvious way,” Lynn said.

“How’s
that
, kiddo?” Erick asked acidly.

“I mean,” Lynn said, apparently ignoring the tone of Erick’s voice, “That there’s no subtlety to her charm. She’s uncomplicated. A prototype of the dull-thinking American woman. Legs and breasts and possessiveness.”

“Oh, horse shit,” Erick answered.

“That’s a fine answer,” Lynn said. And Erick had to go on, he felt compelled. He
wouldn’t
lose.

“If you dwell on visceral detail,” he said, flatly, “All girls are alike. Otherwise, they’re all different.”

“In making woman,” Lynn said, “A rib was taken away from man. Since then woman has devoted herself to taking away everything else too.”

“Unquote, Erick Linstrom,” said Erick, “And you’re still wrong.”

“Perhaps,” Lynn said, “I doubt it.”

Bored voice, argument ended. Erick let it go. He slumped back drunkenly irritable and looked out into the room without seeing any of it. He felt an urge to write so he could see how his handwriting and intelligibility showed up in the morning light.

He had never before experienced the odd sensations that being drunk made possible. The strange fuzziness in his head, the feeling that the circumference of his mental circle was coated over with some sort of numbing insulation which left the center intact and hyper-brilliant. The loss of balance, the feeling that the center of gravity in himself and in everything around him was constantly shifting, that his gyroscope was out of order. Yet all without the slightest loss of consciousness. He knew he was drunk and he was doing and saying silly things. He fully appreciated just how silly they were and he could think—I’ll stop them if they get too silly.

But they never seemed to. He realized that later.

And all this fuzziness which was moments before pleasant now became a black fuzziness. He felt disgusted with Lynn, with Lynn’s smugness and detached arrogance. He wanted to punch Lynn right in the nose. He didn’t feel like summoning up any intellectual body blows. All he could think of definitely was that Sally would be dance director or he’d take back his script. That’s how he felt. Mutely truculent, he sat there, watching his own thoughts.

* * * *

When they returned, someone came up to Felix. Erick didn’t hear exactly what was said. Something about football team and little meeting upstairs in the library and rah rah rah. Erick didn’t hear because he was staring quite frankly at Sally’s large, firmly arched breasts. He didn’t know whether she noticed at first. But Lynn did. And for some reason unknown to him, it gave Erick a perverse pleasure to see the look of wordless warning that Lynn gave him.