The Lost Weekend Page 23

  Helen came to the door again. “Are you all right, Don?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You were so quiet, I wondered.”

  “I’m just lying here.”

  “Don’t stay in too long. It will weaken you too much. Please get out soon. I’ve got some milk-toast for you and then you can get into a clean bed and rest and sleep as long as you need to.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “You must eat, Don. And I have a couple of sedatives, too, if that will help.”

  The thought of food made him retch again, but perhaps with the help of the sedatives— Or perhaps, if they made him finally sleep, he could eat tomorrow, in the morning. He let the water run out of the tub. But that was a mistake. He should have got out first. With the water gone from around him, he felt weaker and heavier and more helpless than ever before. He lay in the empty tub like a dead weight of bones; and then, as he began to be chilled, he hauled himself up.

  Wrapped in an enormous towel, leaning against the washbowl, he saw his face in the mirror, and his eye. It was a sickening sight. He regarded it with awe, objectively, not feeling it at all—amazed by it all over again because he had forgotten it for so long. No wonder Helen had said “Your poor eye”—and he had thought she was speaking merely about his bloodshot eyeballs, always streaked with red at the end of these bouts. What had happened to him to give him such a blow? Who? And where? Whatever it was, it was a wonder it didn’t fracture his skull, or finish him off for good.

  In his pajamas, in bed at last, in Helen’s bed, he lay back against the propped-up pillows and felt clean at least. Helen came in and turned off the ceiling light and snapped on the little shaded lamp that stood on the night-table near his head.

  “Why don’t you lie flat,” she said, “and be comfortable.”

  “I can’t. My heart— Maybe later.”

  She brought him a glass of water and two little pills. “Perhaps you should take these before you eat. They’ll work better.”

  “What are they?”

  “I don’t know. Something the doctor gave me this afternoon.”

  So she’d been preparing for this all along, certain of the outcome, certain that before the day was over he’d be safe in her bed at home. He pretended not to notice. He put the pills in his mouth; but under her gaze, he could not hold the glass in his hand, he would shake the water all over the bed. He looked up helplessly. She held the glass for him and tilted it so he could drink. Then she went to the kitchen and returned in a few moments with a soup-dish of milk-toast.

  “No, I can’t. Really. Please.”

  “I’ll just leave it here, then,” she said. “Maybe you’ll feel like it a little later.” She meant After I leave the room, after I’m not here to watch you. She left him then and went to eat her own supper in the kitchen.

  Just as he was about to reach for the plate, a streak of fire ran out of the hall and across the rug to the bed. He stared at the floor and it went out suddenly, like a flame extinguished. The old illusion, the nervous twitch in the eye, the dancing flashes and lights that were seen just beyond the edge of your vision. But you could face them down, and they vanished. Perhaps they would vanish utterly when the sedatives got working.

  He recalled the time the foolish psychiatrist had given him a little envelope containing fourteen sodium amytal tablets, yes, he did that, and told him to take two each night when he went to bed—and two in the morning, if he must—during his hangover period; and he had taken them all at once, on purpose to put himself out for as long a time as possible or for good, even. He remembered Wick’s fright as he came to, two days later, and Wick’s anger at the doctor, and his own disappointment and chagrin at waking up, mixed somehow, and curiously, with relief because of Wick’s concern. He reached again for the milk-toast, but the shaking plate spilled milk in the bed, and he was forced to put it back again, on the night-table. He leaned on his elbow and bent his head down to the plate and spooned up a few mouthfuls. It stayed down, and even warmed him inside. He spooned up some more, and after many minutes, had eaten it all.

  He had come out of that as he had come out of everything else. The fourteen tablets didn’t finish him off—nothing ever did or had or apparently would. He reached the limit of his endurance, the absolute physical limit, and then picked up and went on for another twenty-four hours or a week. He took a dreadful fall or suffered a blow somewhere and all he got was a black eye. He went out to pawn a typewriter on Yom Kippur and came back with ten dollars he got for nothing from the man at the A & P. His heart didn’t stop in the chair or his brain explode; instead Helen came along and saw that he was bathed and fed and saved from a night of terror alone. His very nightmare was synthetic: a dream by Thomas Mann. He got caught in the act of stealing a purse, caught red-handed before a whole mob of people, and what happened: he merely apologized, and they all but apologized themselves, and sent him on his way scot-free. He threatened he promised himself death, and when the doorknob turned that was to be the cue, when the door opened and in walked the victim, the victim of his suicide, all he did was sit helpless as before, more spineless if possible, and wait to be scooped up and taken care of. All that ever happened to him was that he mislaid some money somewhere and mislaid it all over again the next day and the next or lost it or threw it away or something; and even that didn’t matter. He always came up with cash. The same evil genius who took it away from him in his cups was waiting the next morning to hand him some more.

  What was the intention or sum of any of this? It wasn’t even decently dramatic or sad or tragic or a shame or comic or ironic or anything else—it was nothing. He was being made a fool of by some perverse fate or that evil genius who didn’t consider him important enough to finish off one way or the other. He was always left dangling and safe in a way that was merely ludicrous—ludicrous but not worth laughing at, something merely to put up with and bear with because there was nothing else to do about it. It was worse than insulting, it was inane, vacant, empty, lacking sense or meaning whatever. “Helen!”

  She came quickly into the bedroom from the kitchen.

  “Do you suppose I could have— Are there any— Have you got another one of those pills, by any chance?”

  “Oh Don, do you think you need it?”

  “I—I do, terribly. They aren’t working at all.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll see if I’ve got another.”

  “Let me have two. I need them, Helen. I’ve got to have them. I can’t stand this.”

  She didn’t argue. She knew it would be no use. She could hold out on him, of course, but what would be the use of that, either? If the pills would do him any good, put him to sleep—

  She got them and set them down on the bed-table, with a fresh glass of water, and left him again.

  He took the pills and the water, and was gratified to see that his shaking had stopped considerably. He looked at his hands. His fingers were covered with burns. He noticed them now for the first time. There were three or four small burns between the index- and middle-fingers of each hand where he had held cigarettes too long—always the surest sign that he had been drinking himself unconscious and for days. There were probably burns in the trousers he had left at home, too, and perhaps even in the shorts. The wonder is that he hadn’t yet burned himself to death. But he’d never do that, either—he was always going to be spared that too, like everything else. Whenever he got close to it, the smell of the burning wool or cotton or his own sometimes serious burns always awakened him, like the time he had burned up his bed in both the Grand Hotel Dolder and the Hotel Quisisana; like the time he had awakened in the stench of burning feathers in his cabin on the Lafayette and found the édredon aflame on top of him. The cover was one great hole, the feathers were burning all down inside, he sprang up and flung the thing off his berth, dragged it into the bath and turned on the shower. What to do with it then? The porthole, of course; and in the morning, the aged steward not even asking,
shaking his head over the ways of the tourist and wondering silently, perhaps, in whose cabin the édredon would later turn up.…

  What was Helen doing? She had gone into the living room now, what was she doing there? It didn’t matter, he knew what it was. Helen wouldn’t sit here and sew or sit here and read or sit here and anything, though this was the room she ordinarily sat in, in her comfortable chair by her work-table there in the corner. Helen wouldn’t come into this room any more than was necessary. She was keeping out of his way because that was what he wanted; she wouldn’t talk to him because he couldn’t stand being looked at, not like this; she would make up a bed on the sofa in the living room and sleep there tonight, and chances are he wouldn’t even see her when she left for work in the morning. He would sleep, and sometime around noon she would ’phone and ask pleasantly (not too pleasantly, just matter-of-fact, as if nothing were wrong at all) how he was. He was grateful for this, more grateful than he had ever been in his life, but he couldn’t have uttered a word about it. He was feeling calmer, now, not sleepy or drowsy yet, but more relaxed, peaceful, almost good. He felt keenly what Helen was doing for him by staying out of the room—but forget it, as she was forgetting it; pretend it wasn’t so, and thus spare both their feelings and thus prevent the tears—on both sides.

  Helen hadn’t uttered a word of reproach from the moment she turned the doorknob and came through the door. She had never said You’ve been drinking. She hadn’t said Have you got any more liquor anywhere? She hadn’t asked How long have you been at it? Have you got any money left? Are you finished now, or are you going to start again tomorrow? She hadn’t said Where’d you get the black eye, or What in heaven’s name happened to you? She hadn’t mentioned the matinée he had missed or said Sure, you weren’t feeling up to it, you had other plans for that afternoon. She didn’t remind him of the several dozen ’phone-calls she had been making for days. She hadn’t said At least you could have answered the ’phone and saved me that much worry. She hadn’t said Look at you, look what a sight you are. She hadn’t called you a fool or a drunk or a liar or anything. She didn’t say Why can’t you think of your brother Wick, if you don’t care anything about yourself? And of course she would never have said What about me? She had merely said “Let me help you, I’ll take you down to my house, I’ll put you to bed in a clean bed and you can sleep as long as you need to.”

  What was she thinking as she sat in the other room. Was she thinking any of these things? Yes, all of them, and probably more and worse, as she had every right to think; but she could never have brought herself to utter a syllable of these reproaches while she saw that physically, if not inwardly too, he was already so beaten down. And what was he going to do about it? Take it in silence and say nothing, promise nothing—how could he, how could he in all honesty promise anything, it would be so easy when he was feeling so low. Too easy. Keep the promises to himself, hold them until he knew what he was talking about—and then, of course, never say a thing.

  He was reminded, sickeningly, of something that had passed through his mind hours before, sometime that afternoon. Some such thing as his capacity for suffering and always suffering more than anybody else. Well, he did, maybe; maybe his vulnerability was more exposed and raw than what was normal in others; but if thought could make one ashamed, he was ashamed now. Some minor incident of suffering in his past would have stood out in the average life as a major crisis—he had actually thought and said to himself some such thing as that. How true could it be? It was true, all right, but only true to the extent that his imagination heightened these things and made them greater in retrospect than they ever were at the time. Christ knows other people suffered too; but did their self-centeredness, their self-absorption and preoccupation with self, magnify their troubles or experiences out of all proportion to the actuality and blind them to the fact that trouble was the lot of all? They knew what he never knew: one’s troubles mattered only to oneself. What happened to him was no greater or no worse than what happened to everybody else; if it were odder or more bizarre or more out of the usual, that’s because he went after it; and if he suffered more, he also had the capacity to understand and place and take that suffering without weeping and wailing about it forever and ever. “I haven’t got time to be neurotic,” he had heard Helen say once; and the words had made him go weak with anger. He had thought it was the most stupid and reactionary remark he ever heard in his life; but was it any more stupid than the sneering thrust he had made in reply: “Time! You haven’t got the imagination!”

  Even as he submitted himself to this castigation, this chastisement and searching of self, he knew it was all merely part of his present low and depleted state, symptomatic of his physical condition only, and that tomorrow or next week he would bounce right back, all ego again. He knew it and he was tired of it, tired of that interminable process and recurring cycle; tired now, though, of thinking about it. He sank back among the pillows and tried deliberately shutting all thought from his mind, in the hope that sleep would come.

  But it was no use. He was still wakeful, still jumpy and alert, still sensitive to the slightest far-away noise from the street, for all the false calm that had been induced by the sedatives. And the mind refused to die down: it worked at the top of its bent, piling reminder after disturbing reminder upon him. He became poignantly aware of Helen sitting in silence in the next room.

  What was she waiting for? Oh, not now, not this minute, but tomorrow and yesterday and last month and last year and the long while they had been tied up inextricably together. What did she expect to get out of it, what did she want, what did she think it would lead to—in short, what was she waiting for?

  She loved him. It was as simple and final as that. What difference did it make what she was going to get out of it, she loved him and she couldn’t help herself. Nor could he. He had learned that, one night—and learned, at the same time, that she knew its finality too, and accepted it as inevitable, as he must. Whether he must or not, he did. After that.

  One evening, as he was leaving her, he had planned a question, premeditated a little test. Through that week, one of his soberer weeks, she had been on his mind continually. He was painfully conscious of the kind of life he was leading her, the pain he was putting her through, the impossibility of her ever finding happiness through him. He loved Helen, wanted her, needed her far more than she ever needed him; but what did he have to offer, when tomorrow or next week he was bound to yield again to the downward pull and destroy a little more of himself and of her? Something had to be done. A clean break and an honest one, a break that would be clear and open, wounding her as gently as possible—for she was certain to be wounded when she grasped the import of his question. He thought it out carefully. He would ask her, at the tail end of the evening, just as he was leaving, “Are you taking me seriously?” and then wait for the answer. And when her answer came, he would say, “Well, you shouldn’t.” No matter what her words were, they would provide the necessary cue. If she replied “Yes,” or if she answered “No,” or even if she said “I don’t know,” all he needed to say, then, was: “Well, you shouldn’t”—and they would both be answered, both understand, from then on.

  At the door, he moved up to her in the darkness and took her in his arms. His heart pounded. But it was a necessary thing, it had to be done. Perhaps she would see, one day, that it had been kindness. He released her from his arms. He lighted a cigarette to still his nervousness. He put his hand on the doorknob.

  “Don’t go,” she said.

  He let go of the doorknob and took her chin in his hand. “Helen. Are you taking me seriously?”

  Her arms went around his neck, the answer came without hesitation—tired, whispered, but one he had never counted on, one that did not fit into the little scheme at all: “I love you, darling—what difference does it make?”

  What was she waiting for? What was he! But of course there were too many answers to that one. Wick expressed it in a word. “It’s a
ll right for you to ruin your life; that’s up to you,” he said; “but you have no right to ruin someone else’s.”

  Why did there always have to be some woman hopelessly involved with a hopeless drunk, so that the Helens of this world numbered into the hundreds of thousands?—But from there you went on to: Why were drunks, almost always, persons of talent, personality, lovable qualities, gifts, brains, assets of all kinds (else why would anyone care?); why were so many brilliant men alcoholic?—And from there, the next one was: Why did you drink?

  Like the others, the question was rhetorical, abstract, anything but pragmatic; as vain to ask as his own clever question had been vain. It was far too late to pose such a problem with any reasonable hope for an answer—or, an answer forthcoming, any reasonable hope that it would be worth listening to or prove anything at all. It had long since ceased to matter Why. You were a drunk; that’s all there was to it. You drank; period. And once you took a drink, once you got under way, what difference did it make Why? There were so many dozen reasons that didn’t count at all; none that did. Maybe you drank because you were unhappy, or too happy; or too hot, or too cold; or you didn’t like the Partisan Review, or you loved the Partisan Review. It was as groundless as that. To hell with the causes—absent father, fraternity shock, too much mother, too much money, or the dozen other reasons you fell back on to justify yourself. They counted for nothing in the face of the one fact: you drank and it was killing you. Why? Because alcohol was something you couldn’t handle, it had you licked. Why? Because you had reached the point where one drink was too many and a hundred not enough.