The Lost Weekend (4 page)

It was an interesting face, no question about it. The mirror
was just dark enough so that he seemed to be seeing a stranger rather than himself. Completely objective, he looked at the face in the glass and began to study it so intently that he was almost surprised to see its expression change under his gaze to one of searching concern.

The face showed all of its thirty-three years, but no more. The forehead was good, the eyes dark, big, and deep-set. The nostrils of the longish acquiline nose flared slightly—they were good too; gave the face a keen look, like a thoroughbred. The mustache was just big and black enough; had it been a little larger, he might have been looking into the tragic interesting face of Edgar Allan Poe. The mouth was full and wide, it wore a discontented unhappy expression—interestingly so. He liked the two deep lines that ran down either side of the mouth from just above the nostrils, half-encircling the set bitter half-smile. He liked too the three horizontal lines of his forehead—not really horizontal, for above his right eye they tilted upward to avoid the perpetually raised right-eyebrow, so fixed there by habit that he was never able to bring it down to the level of the other without frowning. He picked up the glass Sam set before him and began to drink.

He remembered a girl who sat behind him in 1st-year Latin class, a talkative girl, the kind who was always wondering what she looked like when she was asleep—things like that. She said to him once, “Faces are interesting, you know it? I was thinking about yours the other day and do you know what I decided? I decided that if someone should ask me what your habitual expression was, I’d say, ‘Animation.’ ” She had paused for the effect, though there was no doubting her honesty. “Even in repose your face looks animated. You always look so alive, and curious—inquisitive, I guess I mean.” He had been far from embarrassed, of course. When she asked him to describe what her habitual expression was, he had made up something, he didn’t know what, already lost in thought for what she had said. Animation, was it.
You could hardly call that face in the mirror “animated, alive.” It was set in an expression of studied disillusion which not even the new drink could shake.

He glanced at his watch. Mrs. Foley would be arriving in a quarter of an hour. Time for one more drink—two at the outside. He shoved the glass toward Sam and stared at himself over the bar again.

Mirrors seemed to have taken up a hell of a lot of time in his life. He thought of one now—the mirror in the bathroom, years ago, back home. When he was a kid—fourteen, fifteen—writing a poem every night before he went to sleep, starting and finishing it at one sitting even though it might be two or three o’clock, that bathroom mirror had come to mean more to him than his own bed. Nights when he had finished a poem, what could have been more natural, more necessary and urgent, than to go and look at himself to see if he had changed? Here at this desk, this night, one of life’s important moments had occurred. Humbly, almost unaware, certainly innocent, he had sat there and been the instrument by which a poem was transmitted to paper. He was awed and truly humble, for all that he must look in the mirror to see if the experience registered in his face. Often tears came genuinely to his eyes. How had it come about—why should it have been
he
? He asked himself in humility and gratitude. He read the poem in fear and read it again.
Now
it was fine; would it be so tomorrow? He raised his eyes from the scrawled re-written sheets and listened to the night. No sound whatever; and he thought of his brothers sleeping in the adjoining rooms, his mother downstairs. They had slept, all unaware of what had happened in this room, this night, at this desk. Scornful and proud, “Clods” he muttered; but proper appreciation of such a moment was beyond them, of course, even if they should know. He forgot them at once—though he did not forget to the extent of going down the hall at his usual heedless pace. He tiptoed, listening breathless for any sound of stir in the dark bedrooms (too
often he had been surprised at three in the morning by a waking brother, who reported at the breakfast table that Don had had his light on all night long; and the recriminations that followed then—the bitter reminders of how he mooned at his desk when he ought to be asleep like a normal boy, the savage scoldings for running up huge light-bills—how shameful these were and humiliating, in view of the poem that justified all this, did they but know). In the bathroom he snapped on the light and confronted himself in the glass. The large childish eyes stared back, eager and searching; the cheeks were flushed, the mouth half-open in suspense. He studied every feature of that alert countenance, so wide awake that it seemed it would never sleep again. Surely there would be some sign, some mark, some tiny line or change denoting a new maturity, perhaps? He scanned the forehead, the mouth, the staring eyes, in vain. The face looked back at him as clear, as heartbreakingly youthful, as before.

He was moved and amused as he recalled that moment—a moment that had been repeated dozens and dozens of times in all his long adolescence. He picked up the glass and drank it to the bottom. A fancy came to him. Suppose the clear vision in the bathroom mirror could fade (as in some trick movie) and be replaced by this image over the bar. Suppose that lad— Suppose time could be all mixed up so that the child of twenty years ago could look into the bathroom mirror and see himself reflected at thirty-three, as he saw himself now. What would he think, that boy? Would he have accepted it—is this what he dreamed of becoming? Would he accept it for a moment? In his emotion and embarrassment he glanced away and signaled to Sam to pour him another.

The men at the end of the bar had gone. Gloria sat at a table in the back, filing her nails. He watched her, indifferent about her now; then fearing that she might see him looking and take it as an invitation to come forward again, he turned back to the bar, automatically picking up the new drink that had been set before him.

Or wait—of
course
he would accept it! It was all crystal clear,
like a revelation (suddenly he was feeling brighter, more alert and clear mentally, than he ever had in his life). That kid, could he have seen this face, the man of today, certainly would have accepted it—he would have loved it! The idol of the boy had been Poe and Keats, Byron, Dowson, Chatterton—all the gifted miserable and reckless men who had burned themselves out in tragic brilliance early and with finality. Not for him the normal happy genius living to a ripe old age (genius indeed! How could a genius be happy, normal—above all, long-lived?), acclaimed by all (or acclaimed in his lifetime?), enjoying honor, love, obedience, troops of friends (“I must not look to have”). The romantic boy would have been satisfied, he would have responded with all his ardent youthful soul. There was a poetic justice in those disillusioned eyes and the boy would have known it and nodded in happy recognition.

In the next instant came disgust (self-disgust and scorn; self-reproach for inflating the image of himself out of all proportion to the miserable truth); and in the very next, the brilliant idea. Oh, brilliant! As it swept over him and took possession of his excited brain—so feverishly alert that it seemed his perceptions could, at this moment, grasp any problem in the world—he fidgeted in suspense, shifted from one foot to the other, and made an effort to calm himself. Now wait a moment, just let me order another drink and think this out slowly—it’s coming too fast.…

A story of that boy and this man—a long short story—a classic of form and content—a
Death in Venice
, artistically only, not in any other way—the title: “In a Glass.” What else could it be?—the glass of the title meaning at first the whisky glass he was drinking from, out of which grew the multitude of fancies; then the idea blurring and merging gradually, subtly, with the glass of the mirror till finally the title comes to mean in the reader’s mind only the glass over the bar through which the protagonist looks back on his youth. “In a Glass”—it would begin with a man standing in a 2nd Avenue bar on just such an October afternoon
as this, just such a man as he, drinking a glass of whisky, several glasses, and looking at his reflection in the mirror over the bar. Thoughts poured in a rush, details, incidents, names, ideas, ideas. At this moment, if he were able to write fast enough, he could set it down in all its final perfection, right down without a change or correction needed later, from the brilliant opening to the last beautiful note of wise and grave irony. The things between—the things! … The wrench (the lost lonely abandonment) when his father left home and left him—but anything, practically anything out of childhood, climaxed by the poetry-writing and the episode of the bathroom mirror; then on to Dorothy, the fraternity nightmare, Dorothy again, leaving home, the Village and prohibition, Mrs. Scott, the
Rochambeau
(the
Bremen
,
LaFayette
,
Champlain
,
de Grasse
); the TB years in Davos; the long affair with Anna; the drinking; Juan-les-Pins (the weekend there that lasted two months, the hundred dollars a day); the pawnshops; the drinking, the unaccountable things you did, the people you got mixed up with; the summer in Provincetown, the winter on the farm; the books begun and dropped, the unfinished short-stories; the drinking the drinking the drinking; the foolish psychiatrist—the foolish foolish psychiatrist; down to Helen, the good Helen he always knew he would marry and now knew he never would, Helen who was always right, who would sit through
Tristan
this afternoon resisting it, refusing to be carried away or taken in, seeing it and hearing it straight off for what it was as he would only be able to see it and hear it after several years of irrational idolatry first.… Whole sentences sprang to his mind in dazzling succession, perfectly formed, ready to be put down. Where was a pencil, paper? He downed his drink.

The time. Four o’clock. Mrs. Foley would be there now but to hell with that! This was more important. But caution, slow. Good thing there was no paper handy, no chance to begin impulsively what later must be composed—when, tonight maybe, certainly tomorrow—with all the calm and wise control needed for such an
undertaking. A
tour de force
? Critics would call it that, they’d be bound to, but what the hell was the matter with a
tour de force
for Christ’s sake that the term should have come to be a sneer? Didn’t it mean a brilliant performance and is “brilliance” something to snoot at? His mind raced on. But how about “As Through a Glass Darkly”?—or “Through a Glass Darkly”? No, it had been done to death; trite; every lady-writer in the land had used it at one time or another, or if they hadn’t, it was a wonder. “In a Glass” was perfect—he saw stacks of copies in bookshop windows, piled in tricky pyramids (he would drop in and address the bookseller with some prepared witticism, like, “I appreciate the compliment you pay my book by piling it up in the window like a staple that should be in every home; but couldn’t you add a card saying ‘Send in ten wrappers and get a free illustrated life of the author’?”—hell, that was too long for wit, he’d have to cut it down), he glanced over people’s shoulders in the subway and smiled to himself as he heard one girl say to another “I can’t make head or tail of this”—(she had something if she meant “tale”), he read with amusement an embarrassed letter from his mother regretting the fact that he hadn’t published a book she could show the neighbors and why didn’t he write something that had “human interest”? With a careful glance about him he picked up his glass, offered a silent rueful toast to human interest, and drank.

Suddenly, sickeningly, the whole thing was so much eyewash. How could he have been seduced, fooled, into dreaming up such a ridiculous piece; in perpetrating, even in his imagination, anything so pat, so contrived, so cheap, so phoney, so adolescent, so (crowning offense) sentimental? Euphoria! Faithless muse! What crimes are committed in thy—
There
was a line he might use; and oh, another: the ending!—the ending sprang to his mind clear and true as if he had seen it in print. The hero, after the long procession of motley scenes from his past life (would the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?)—the hero decides to walk out of the bar and somewhere, somehow, that very day—not for himself, of
course: for Helen—commit suicide. The tag: “It would give her a lifelong romance.” Perfect; but now—oh more perfect still—was the line that came next, the
new
ending: the little simple line set in a paragraph all by itself beneath the other, on the last page:

“But he knew he wouldn’t.”

How much it said, that line; how much it told about himself. How it disarmed the reader about the hero and still more the author—as if the author had stepped in between the page and the reader and said, “You see? I didn’t die, after all. I went home and wrote down what you have just been reading. And Helen—what of her? Did we marry, you ask?” Shrug. “Who can tell? …”

“Sam, I’ll have one more rye.” To celebrate, he said under his breath. To celebrate what?—and a fit of boredom, of ennui so staggering descended upon him with such suddenness that he was scarcely able to stand. He wanted to put his head down on the counter, in the wet and all, and weep: tears, idle tears, I know damned well what they mean—for he was seeing himself with unbearable clarity again and he could beat his fists together and curse this double vision of his that enabled him, forced him, to see too much—though all the while, all the long time he had been at the bar, he knew that to the casual spectator he had changed or moved by not so much as a hair or had a thought more troubling than the price of his drinks. Cloudy the place, who was drinking now with him, in him, inside him, instead of him, he loved and hated himself and that Sam, and groped to think of it again, clearly like before. To live and praise God in blessed mediocrity (Tonio! spiritual brother!), to be
at home
in the world—how with bitter passion he envied that and them, people like Sam here, pouring the rye. Can they imagine the planning of a story like that, the planning alone, much less the writing? Can they imagine how, being able to plan it, being able to master the plan and the writing, can they understand how you would fail—fail merely by failing to write it at all—why, how? The answer was nowhere, the drink was everything. What a blessing the money
in his pocket, he must get more, much more for the feast of drink ahead. Ignorant Sam, sweaty man, how far from thy homeland hast thou come, from thy fair Irish county to this dark whisky-smelling mirrored cheap quiet lovely haven! Surely the most beautiful light in all the world was the light on the bricks out there, under the L, the patches of gold edged in black shadow, a street paved with golden bricks truly, with beams of light slanting upward fairer and purer than rays of sun through cathedral glass. Why should Cezanne have painted the blue monotonous hills and fields of France, let him paint
this
for Christ’s sake! Or me—let me do it—for he knew now just how it could be done, and downed his drink in an inspired impulse to rush out and spend all his money on painting materials and try. He ordered a drink and drank it and looked again, to fix the scene and the light in his mind: the gold was gone, the rays out, the bricks red and black with neon night.