The Lost Weekend (20 page)

He raced up the three flights of stairs, realizing as he reached the top that exhaustion, and its cure, were at hand again. But the whisky was gone. On the living room table there was no other thing but his hat. There was not even an empty bottle, nor any bottle-wrappings or corks or caps. The litter of the table had been swept away and the entire room cleaned up.

Had Wick come back unexpectedly? Had Helen got in? But Mac would have been here, in the basket; and Helen would have left a note. It was fiendish to have taken the bottle, whoever did it. Mrs. Foley? He went into the kitchen to see if it was on the floor under the sink, where whisky had been kept in the past. He came
back through and went to the bathroom. In the mirror over the washbowl he saw how he looked for the first time.

His right eyeball was streaked with red. Around it, for a space as big as his palm, spreading across the temple to the ear, was the discoloration the doctor had so casually spoken of as violent. It was a patch of purple and red and black and shining copper all run together: it looked raw and soft, as if you could poke your finger through it, like a pulsing fontanelle; and it pained now as if he had done just that. He hurried into the living room, snatched up his hat from the table, went into the bedroom and got his wrist-watch, wound it and set it by the Dutchman’s clock, opened the door to the hall again and ran quietly down the stairs.

Sam’s place was locked—it was still a good half-hour before opening time—but he put his face to the glass of the door and peered in. Sam sat at a table in the back, reading a paper, and Gloria stood beside him combing her hair. He tapped on the glass with the edge of the watch.

Sam looked up, came forward a few steps, then pointed for him to go around to a side-door. He didn’t know of any side-door, but he looked and found one. He went into the hallway that led to the stairs and the apartments above, and sure enough, Sam opened a door into the hall.

“Now listen, Sam, don’t get mad.” Sam bent forward and peered at him. “I’ve got to have a bottle. I’ve got to have it. Please take this watch.”

“Now Mr. Birnam, that’s not the thing to do,” Sam said. “I’ve got a drawer full of watches.”

“You’ve got to give it to me, Sam. You’ve got to. Take this until I can get to the bank tomorrow.”

Sam fingered the watch, as if too embarrassed to look at his eye. “I don’t know, Mr. Birnam.”

“Please, Sam. I’ve been in an accident. I’m in bad shape.”

Something in the desperate strange sound of his own voice
made him know that Sam wouldn’t hold out on him. He didn’t. He went back into the bar to get the whisky.

Gloria was watching all this from the table. “Nice guy,” she said, when he looked at her. “Lovely guy. Do you go around doing that all the time? Standing people up?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You don’t need to pretend. I waited here and waited and waited till half— My God, where’d you get the black-eye!”

It was intolerable, waiting; but he would wait till nightfall, if need be. He heard Sam inside at the bar, rattling a paper-bag.

“Boy, that’s a peach! Did Teddy give it to you?”

He glanced at her, immediately suspicious. “Who’s Teddy?”

“Your wife, dope.”

What was she saying, what the hell was she talking about? Was she making fun of him? Sam appeared at the door with the bottle wrapped in a bag. He snatched it from him, said “Thanks,” and ran out. Fool! Where in Christ’s name had she got the fantastic idea that he had a wife?…

Coming up the last flight of stairs, he heard the telephone ringing inside. He stood there in the hall, panting, waiting for it to stop before he went in. He turned and kept his eye on the door to the front apartment where the two ladies lived with their dog Sophie. If the knob should turn, if the door should open— The telephone stopped ringing, he unlocked his door and went in.

With the first drink in his hand, he sat down to puzzle out the story of the hat and half-full quart.

Sure. Of course. The two ladies in the front apartment. He remembered it, now. Remembered the polite little tiff on the stairs—after you; no, after you—and the falling, and then falling again. That was the last he remembered of anything. He must have hit his head and passed out then and there.

And what did they do? Call the police? Send him off in an ambulance? He didn’t know. But he knew a few things they did
do. They had found his hat at the foot of the stairs. They got Dave the janitor to let them into the flat. They put his hat on the living room table. They looked around at the disorder. They cleaned up the place. Cleaned it up and cleaned him out—took away the nasty bottle that was the whole source of the trouble. How nice and neighborly of them to straighten up for him. The dear sweet kind considerate bitches.

Maybe you could laugh about it tomorrow. Maybe you could begin to smile after another drink. Maybe you could even get up in another half-hour and go in and thank them for taking such good care of your hat and your flat, and give little Sophie a kick in the teeth—Sophie who had probably been running around here like mad, smelling for Mac, while the busy ladies were busy cleaning up. He knew what the rest of it would be. A few days later, after Wick got back, there would come a genteel tap at the door; Wick would answer it; one of the ladies would be standing there holding the neck of the half-empty bottle between thumb and forefinger; she would peep over Wick’s shoulder to see if Don was about, and then whisper the whole story, her voice rising again to normal on the words “—And so we just thought, under the circumstances—well,
you
understand.…”

Wick would understand, all right. So did he. Which is why you made the most of moments like these, why you took it while you had it and took all you could get when you got it, why you made hay while the sun shone.

Now he was in for good. No going out for the rest of the day. There was no possibility of raising any more money (not on a Sunday) or getting any more liquor till tomorrow. So this had to last. Well, a full quart would last quite a good while if you took it easy and read a book. After you had it all in you, in slow easy well-spaced wonderful drinks, maybe you would feel like sleeping and sleep till the necessary joints opened in the morning.

He was in no rush, he could take it easy, already he was feeling much better; but after what he had been through, he didn’t feel
like feeling too much better too soon. It sneaked up on you, that way, and before you knew it you felt like starting out somewhere. That wasn’t the idea today, that wasn’t what he wanted at all. For once, maybe, he knew where he was safe.

Now he had himself a good drink, a decent one, and sat back and recalled that moment of departure in the hall, the moment before the elevator came, a moment indeed.
Listen, baby
. The purring Dietrich voice.
I know you
.

Okay, Pal. You win. You know all about everything, wise guy, you weren’t born yesterday. He was aware, as Bim was, of the downward path he was on; he knew himself well enough to know and admit that Bim had every reason to say what he said—but only insofar as Bim saw, in him, the potential confederate that was every alcoholic: the fellow bogged down in adolescence; the guy off his track, off his trolley; the man still unable to take, at thirty-three or -six or -nine, the forward step he had missed in his ’teens; the poor devil demoralized and thrown off balance by the very stuff intended to restore his frightened or baffled ego; the gent jarred loose into unsavory bypaths that gave him the shudders to think of but which were his natural habitat and inevitable home so long as drink remained the
modus operandi
of his life; the lush whose native characteristics, whatever they were at the outset, could blur and merge with the whims of every and any companion who offered companionship or worse; the barred one whose own bars were down—the unpredictable renegade to whom
any
thing might happen.

Bim saw all this with the bright eye of his kind. Okay; so far, so good. But Bim’s was also the overbright eye which saw signs and meanings where there were none. Don acknowledged his right to say what he said and to see what he thought he saw. But wise guys who weren’t born yesterday might very well know all about everything and still be far from the truth.

What Bim did not see was that the alcoholic was not himself, able to choose his own path, and therefore the kinship he seemed
to reveal was incidental, accidental, transitory at best. If the drunk had been himself he would not be a drunk and potential brother in the first place. And not to be oneself was a thing incomprehensible to the nonchalant Bim, whose one belief in life was to be just that, regardless of who or what, to hell with any or all. It could be such a marvelous world if everyone would only let down their hair—marvelous for Bim. He could do it; why couldn’t everybody else? But millions had nothing to let down their hair about, even among drunks, and millions could be themselves by being no different from what they had always been. For Don, the avenue where Bim beckoned was a blind alley, not shameful but useless, futile, vain, offering no attractions whatever, no hope, nowhere a chance to build. Bim knew better, of course: knew that one could not moralize or rationalize oneself out of it: the alley either existed for you, or it did not. Very well, let him know better! Wasn’t it possible that one could skirt the alley by very reason of knowing it was there? And not skirt it out of fear, either, but out of anguished regard for all that one would have to leave behind if one entered, all the richer realizations of self that would never be fulfilled. But this was protesting too much, why argue, why be anguished or angered, why waste time on all that, when the whole thing boiled down to one simple fact: Drunks were alike, sure, but no more like Bim (necessarily) than Bim was like other male nurses or they like him. But could you tell him that? Not in a thousand years. And why bother, why give him a chance to raise his eyebrows any higher than he already had? Why bother with anything but the glass and the whisky at hand.…

Oh all the troubling people in the world that could be drowned in drink without their even knowing it; harmlessly, with no real damage to them and what satisfaction to oneself; people that you could drown, thus, here and now and always. Not the least of them you yourself, of course, but others too, and over and over again. How they receded and paled and became anonymous as the livening warmth of the drink quieted your heart; and then,
as the stimulus spread to and awoke your brain, restoring your critical faculties sharper and clearer than ever, how they emerged again and stood off from you, apart, seen objectively, coldly, without passion or even concern.

I know you
. Oh yeah? His anger rose. That was the trouble with homos and he didn’t mean sapiens either. They were always so damned anxious to suspect every guy they couldn’t make of merely playing hard-to-get; so damned anxious to believe that their own taint was shared by everybody else. He never knew one yet who didn’t think that every other man extant, extinct, or to come, had a dash of it too. Well, who didn’t have a dash, or ten dashes even; but did that moot possibility give them the right to go through life with the smug smirking knowledge blazing on their pretty faces as if it were an established fact? As if they just couldn’t wait to tell the world that they knew more about you than you did yourself? And why, if their glance was one of recognition, was it also a look of contempt? If they hailed you as brother, they scorned you for the same reason. Nobody was quicker with the word “queen,” used derisively at that, than the queen himself—like the Jew who cringes under the term “kike” but uses it twice as much as anybody else; like the Negro so quick on the trigger with the word “nigger”; like the TB patient who smiles from his pillow in secret satisfaction because the telltale flush on the cheek of his commiserating visitor shows all too plainly that he will be next. In the same breath that they ridicule their kind, they claim kinship with the great ones of the world: the Jews with Heine and Disraeli (not kikes now); the tuberculars with Stevenson and Chopin and Keats; the others with Wilde, Proust, Tschaikovsky, Michelangelo, Caesar. But why get worked up about it now? If he wanted to get sore, he should have got sore at the time—landed one right on that smiling mouth, if it would have made him feel any better. But anger was just what the nurse Bim would have liked. It would have given him a chance to say “You see?” and rightly too. And it
wouldn’t have made him feel any better either. The only thing that did was this. He drank.

Anger was what the psychiatrist would have been interested in, too. Not the foolish psychiatrist, this time, but the good one, the real one, the one he had never met but knew existed, the doctor whose knowledge and sympathy would have matched his own—and what a relationship that might have been. What might not have come of such a year. It had been his luck (good or bad, what difference did it make now?) to meet up with a fake; but no real damage had been done, since he was as superior to the foolish psychiatrist as the real one, perhaps, would have been to him—the one to whom anger would not have meant anything so glib as “suppressed desires,” the doctor whose respect for himself and his calling no less than for his patient could not have permitted him to palm off fraudulent alloys and counterfeits for the pure metal, spurious coin forged by another and scarcely read properly by himself, hoards of phoney wealth whose total value didn’t even add up to a nickel, much less to the considerable sum paid out every week for the profitless hour a day—profitless, not worth a nickel.…

How was it possible he had only four nickels in his pocket this morning? He knew damned well now—he remembered now—that he had had more than six dollars when he started to leave the flat yesterday to buy that second quart, six out of the ten he’d borrowed from Mr. Wallace at the A & P. What the hell had become of it, and of the good wad of cash he had the day before? Where in God’s name was it
going
to? Of course he could go out of his mind thinking about it and trying to track it down but it was funny all the same, damned funny. You just didn’t let money slip through your fingers like that, not when money was as important to you as it was at times like these. And you wouldn’t have given it up without a struggle to anybody else either. For that matter there hadn’t been anybody around to give it up to. Drama. Mystery. Comedy even. Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individual,
or poem unlimited. At least you could think of it as comic while this bottle sat here at your elbow a good deal more than half-full, oh safely and blessedly a good deal more.…