The Lost Weekend (5 page)

Gloria was there, her hand on his shoulder. He turned, startled.

“Why don’t you come sit down and eat something with me? I’m going to eat now.”

“Why? What’s the time?”

“Quarter past.”

“Five?”

“Six.”

“I’ve got a—dinner engagement. Sorry.” In a moment he was gone, in panic to be home before Wick.

At the corner he stopped in the liquor store to buy a pint. He pretended to deliberate a moment, considering the various brands, knowing all the while he would buy the bottle that was just under a dollar as he always did, no matter how much money he had in his pocket; for he had a dread of running out of cash and being cut off from drink and so bought only the cheapest, to make it last. Liquor was all one anyway. He scanned the shelves, self-conscious as always in a liquor store—he could never overcome
the idea that he had no right to be there, that the clerks and customers were eyeing him and nodding to each other (“Sure, look who’s here, wouldn’t you know”), and he envied with a jealous envy those who could come into a liquor store and buy a bottle with the nonchalant detachment of a housewife choosing her morning groceries. He pointed to the brand he wanted and put down a dollar bill.

The Lincoln was in front of the house, the ancient Lincoln that looked as though it might belong to a Beacon Hill dame or a Sugar Hill dinge. He wondered if it meant that his brother was home and then remembered that the garage was to send the car over at about this time. He had to know if Wick was there before going up, had to see that the pint was well concealed in his inside pocket, had to prepare his greeting, his expression, before he walked in. He went in the front door and straight through the hall to the back garden.

The lights were on in the apartment, showing in the two windows of the living room and the window of the one bedroom, his bedroom because he was the older brother (Wick slept on the living room couch). He sat down on a bench in the dark at the back of the garden and looked up. He would wait a few minutes in the freshening air, gathering his strength, cooling off. The night was chill, but he had to open his vest and take off his hat. He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and took the heavy pint out of his pocket and set it on the bench. Immediately he put it back again, afraid that he might walk away and forget it.

He remembered the time they had first looked at the apartment, standing in the bare flat and looking through the windows at the little garden down in back. There was a high board fence around three sides of it, painted white with large flower designs in yellow and a fantastic huge green vine. His brother had laughed in delight and so had he. “God, such quaint,” Wick had said, and he knew that that had decided him: they would take the place because Wick had liked it and it was Wick’s money he was living
on now. He didn’t mind; he was grateful; it was one of those times—a period of several weeks—when he was not drinking at all, when he felt that he would never drink again and said so; and Wick, to help him out, had taken a chance, leased the apartment for them both, and with elaborate gaiety and many plans for the winter (to assure each other that neither had a worry in his head) they had moved in.

How long had it lasted? He couldn’t think of that now, mustn’t think of it, wouldn’t. He sat by the white fence looking up at the lighted windows. Wick would be alone with Mac. They were waiting for him. He buttoned his vest, stood up and shifted the pint to his hip-pocket, then felt to see if it bulged too much. It was all right if he didn’t button the jacket. He sat down again. Why the hell hadn’t he bought two pints, as he usually did, so that if one was taken away he would have the other? He always planted one in his side pocket, the bulk of it showing conspicuously, and protested with passion and outrage when it was discovered and taken—then retired in a huff to his room, there to produce the other pint from his hip and hide it. Where had he not hidden bottles in his time? In the pocket of his old fur coat in the closet, the coat he never wore; behind books, of course; in galoshes, vases, mattresses.

His brother appeared in the bedroom window. He saw his shadow on the pane, and then the silhouette of his head and shoulders as he sat at the desk, his desk. He trembled with excitement but there was no need for fright. Wick was not looking out. He appeared merely to be sitting there, looking straight ahead at the front of the desk. He couldn’t be writing, for his head was erect. What was he doing there, what in thunder was he doing all this while?—for now he realized Wick had been there ten minutes, fifteen, there was no telling how long. The suspense was intolerable. His heart pounded, he ached to open the bottle and take a drink, but he did not dare move—though he knew he was invisible to his brother in the dark of the garden even if he should look out.

He wanted to go in, he wanted now to go up and walk into the apartment and say, “See, here I am, I’m not out, I’m not wandering around God knows where, don’t worry, you don’t need to worry now”—but he couldn’t if his life depended on it. Or he wanted to toss a stone up against the window and shout, “Wick! Here I am, see? Out in the garden, sitting here on this bench, getting the air, please don’t worry, this is where I am, you can go on to the farm now, or you can wait a little while longer, just a few minutes more, and I’ll go with you.” He began to cry.

It was probably a moment he would remember all his life long, with tears; or was he just being maudlin, now, in drink? No, it was a moment of awful clarity, it was too real for that, his heart almost died in ache for his brother and for himself, for the two of them together, and he wept as he had not wept since he was a child. Would nothing stop the weeping? His brother sat there above, so near him, so unaware that all the time he was sitting here below, watching, knowing that Wick was wondering where he was, wondering what to do about him, how to help—go or stay? He could not watch any more. He bent down and put his head on the bench and cried. He buried his face in his crossed arms to smother the sobs. He must stop. I won’t look again for minutes, minutes, he’ll be gone by then—and with an effort he quieted himself, shifted the bottle to his side pocket, lay over on the bench on his back, with closed eyes, and began to wait. When he looked up again, the windows were dark.

At once, instinctively, automatically, he was wary. He sat up, alert. Was it a trick? Was Wick waiting for him there in the dark, waiting for him to walk in? He smiled. That would be easy to find out. With the caution of a burglar—feeling the excitement, the game of it—he tiptoed craftily across the garden, through the hall and to the front steps. The car was gone.

In high spirits, completely happy now, he went upstairs. The cool evening air of the garden had freshened him and he looked forward to a drink. The moment he switched on the light he
looked for the Scottie. The basket was empty. On the living room table there was a note:

Did Wick know that he was making him feel it just that much more because the entire message contained not so much as a syllable of reproach? Of course he did! But he wasn’t going to feel it, wasn’t going to allow himself to think of it—I can’t; I can’t think of that now, he said to himself. He had other problems at the moment: chiefly, money.

It was seven-thirty. Wick had got a late start for the long drive to the farm but he couldn’t think of that, now, either. He took the wad of bills from his pocket and counted them. There was more than fifteen dollars. He would get more. He went into the kitchen for a glass, opened the pint and poured a drink.

The problem of money. He knew that if he had money—was suddenly left a lot of money, or found it, or stole it—he would kill himself in a month. Well, why not, what difference did it make, that would be his own affair. If he wanted to drink himself to death, whose business was it but his own? But this way, with his rightful allowance coming to him through his brother, his younger brother at that—driblets handed out to him as if he were a child, not being able to get a suit pressed without finding out first if it was all right with Wick, not being able to tip in restaurants where Wick paid the check, charging everything, never paying cash, getting fifty cents a day for cigarette money—it made him wild to think of it, he would get money and more money, buy as many pints as he liked and still have more money to buy more. How? There were dozens of ways, he had never yet been
unable to find a way, even a new way he had never tried before, except when he was physically unable to get up and go out. But he wouldn’t fall into that trap again; he’d have it in the house, bottles and bottles—for once be prudent enough to provide himself with a sufficient supply.

After the second drink he was ready. Before he left, he went into the bathroom to see how he looked. He smiled in the glass. He looked all right—in fact he looked wonderful. “But don’t forget,” he said aloud, “you’re skirting danger.” He nodded in agreement with his reflection, smiled, winked, and switched off the light. He lifted his topcoat from the rack in the hall and reached for the doorknob. At that moment he heard the two women who lived in the front apartment come up the stairs with their dog. The dog stopped at his door and sniffed, and one of the women said, “Stop that, Sophie. Come here!” The dog ran down the hall and he heard the door to the apartment shut. He listened a moment more, then knew that now he could go out.

Mrs. Wertheim’s laundry, in the middle of the block, was closed, but he could see the light on in the back of the shop and Mrs. Wertheim working there, alone, over the ironing board. He rapped on the glass. She looked up from the board, put the iron aside, hesitated, then came forward slowly, uncertain, peering to see who it might be. (This is the Student Raskolnikov.) He tapped again to reassure her. She came up to the glass and shielded her eyes with her hands. He smiled back. When she saw who it was, she nodded with her funny German bow and unlatched the door.

“Guten abend, gnädige Frau,” he sang out, speaking loudly as he always did when addressing a foreigner.

“Mr. Birnam, how do you do?”

“I wonder if you can do me a favor, bitte?”

“Okay? What is it?”

“My brother’s gone away for the weekend and I find he’s taken the checkbook.”

“Oh? Do you want a blank check?”

“No, don’t bother, danke. Instead could you let me have a little money till Monday? Just for the weekend.”

“Let’s see—how much?”

“Oh, twenty dollars, bitte schön. That should be enough.”

“Oh dear.” She smiled, but she frowned too, as if puzzled.

“Okay, I guess I can, Mr. Birnam—only, are you sure it’s all right?”

“Just till Monday, Mrs. Wertheim.”

“I mean,” she said—and then seemed to change her mind. “One moment, please. Here, step in.” She went to the back of the shop, stood there a moment counting out some bills under the light while he waited in unbearable excitement, and returned. She handed him the bills, shaking her head ever so slightly in a puzzled frown.

He took the money without looking at it and shoved it into his pocket. He smiled cordially at her. “Thank you so much, Mrs. Wertheim,” he said. “Mille fois,” and he turned back to the street.

In the back of the cab that was rushing him down to the Village he smiled to himself—smiled in triumph. How easy it was. Poor Mrs. Wertheim—she wouldn’t have turned him down, of course. He knew Europeans enough to know that. He had played the aristocrat before the peasant—the peasant who never dared refuse the aristocrat anything; who expected nothing less; who felt it an honor to be imposed upon by that privileged charming irresponsible class; who kept himself and his family in lifelong debt to guarantee the artistocracy its birthright; who would have lost
faith
, perhaps, if he and his fascinating kind should settle down and become sober, industrious and productive, like themselves; who smiled indulgently, admiringly, even affectionately, at foibles which, in their own children, would have deserved nothing but a beating. This, for the brilliant moment, was his vision of himself and Mrs. Wertheim now that he had twenty more dollars in his pocket. “Jack’s, in Charles Street,” he called out, and sat back, pleased with the glimpse of high life he had given the grateful Mrs. Wertheim.

This was absurd, of course; he knew it; the episode had meant no such thing; he knew it even as he daydreamed (Mrs. Wertheim had no use for him whatever, she only did it because of his brother); and he cursed this mocking habit of his which always made him expose his own fancies just as they reached their climax. There was never any pleasure in them beyond the second or two of their inception: they sprang into being, grew, and exploded all in the same moment, leaving him with nothing but a sense of self-distaste for having again played the fool. He didn’t mind playing the fool, that would have been all right—he minded knowing it, hated knowing it. It made him seem a kind of dual personality, at once superior and inferior to himself, the drunk and the sober ego. In neither role could he let go, be himself; in neither did he feel in control.

What trick was it now, for instance, that was taking him on to Jack’s—when had the drunk suggested that? Or rather, the sober ego?—for he was well aware that when he was drunk he preferred to be and drink alone; only sober did he ever drink or begin drinking with others; and soon, certainly within the hour, he found some pretext to excuse himself from the company (temporarily, of course, he thought as well as they) and disappeared for the rest of the night or the week. Was it some vestige of social sense that took care of this, warning him to drink alone and so minimize the danger of trouble? Did some last scrap of pride intrude on his intoxication to remind him that he was never himself when drunk? He knew he wasn’t sober enough now to want to go to Jack’s and drink with others at the same bar, even if they were strangers. Why was he doing it, then? And why the Village—why Jack’s of all places in New York (he hadn’t been there since its fashionable days as a speakeasy)? He was wary, for the moment, as if he suspected a kind of trick; he felt a presentiment of trouble ahead, a premonition and hint of that danger he had warned himself about in the mirror; and then wondered: Was he only imagining this, dramatizing again, having fun?