The Lost Weekend (8 page)

He supposed he was only one of several million persons of his generation who had grown up and, somewhere around thirty, made the upsetting discovery that life wasn’t going to pan out the way you’d always expected it would; and why this realization should have thrown him and not them—or not too many of them—was something he couldn’t fathom. Life offered none of those prizes you’d been looking forward to since adolescence (he less than others, but looking forward to them all the same, if only out of curiosity). Adulthood came through with none of the pledges you’d been led somehow to believe in; the future still remained the future—illusion: a non-existent period or a constantly-receding promise, hinting fulfillment yet forever withholding the rewards. All the things that had never happened yet were never going to happen after all. It was a mug’s game and there ought to be a law. But there wasn’t any law, there was no rhyme or reason; and with the sour-grapes attitude of “Why the hell
should
there be”—which is as near as you ever came to sophistication—you retired within yourself and compensated for the disappointments by drink, by subsisting on daydreams, by living
in a private world of your own making (hell or heaven, what did it matter?), by accomplishing or becoming in fancy what you could never bring about in fact.

The foolish and tricking fancies of yesterday afternoon, for instance. “In a Glass”—who would ever want to read a novel about a punk and a drunk! Everybody knew a couple or a dozen; they were not to be taken seriously; nuisances and trouble-makers, nothing more; like queers and fairies, people were belly-sick of them; whatever ailed them, that was
their
funeral; who cared?—life presented a thousand things more important to be written about than misfits and failures. “Don Birnam: A Hero Without a Novel.” “My Life; or, Words To That Effect.” “Total Recall: An Anthology.” “I Don’t Know Why I’m Telling You All This”—oh he’d have a circus dreaming up titles but that’s as far as he’d ever get and a good thing too. Like all his attempts at fiction it would be as personal as a letter—painful to those who knew him, of no interest to those who didn’t; precious or self-pitying in spots, in others too clever for its own good; so packed with Shakespeare that it looked as if he worked with a concordance in his lap; so narcissistic that its final effect would be that of the mirrored room which gives back the same image times without count, or the old Post Toastie box of his boyhood with the fascinating picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding a Post Toastie box with a picture of a woman and child holding— But it was silly to consider the book at all or to think of it for a moment. He only wanted to be The Artist, anyhow, with no thought of the meaning or content of the work which would win him such a title—just as he wanted to be (and often fancied himself, especially in drink) an actor without ever thinking of going on the stage, a pianist without having taken a music lesson in his life, a husband and father without marrying.

All he remembered of yesterday was the afternoon or at most the early evening, but that was enough. He had never intended going to the farm from the moment the idea came up. Shameful
to think of it now! At some point he had decided to stay behind; he’d manage it, somehow; he’d get out of it, he’d just not be there. He had used the matinée, the not going, as a way out; and it had worked, as he knew it would work from the beginning, in spite of all Wick’s tiresome pleading to come along too. “We’ve had the tickets such a long while”—he could hear Wick now, and he felt a pang of pity as he thought of the futility of Wick’s ever trying to plan anything with him. You always got left. Wick (or anyone) could never bank on his being “all right” when the date came around. Worse than that, he had become a liar and dodger; there was no depending on him for the immediate afternoon, much less for dates ahead; he wasn’t to be believed; not a word he said was to be taken seriously; but everybody went on pretending, others as well as himself, that this wasn’t true; that maybe this time it would be different; that Don would certainly, now if never, keep his promise, make good his word, meet the date or the debt. Instead of the fellow everyone had always been so fond of—friendly, social, good company, bright, lively—he had developed into a crafty sly masquerader, artful and elusive, presenting a front so different from his real self that they pretended to believe out of sheer embarrassment, as much to save his face as their own. During all that long and repetitious dialogue yesterday, when they sounded the old refrain they had sounded over and over, so many times before that it was like a ritual, Wick hadn’t once said, out loud, what was really on his mind: “I don’t believe you.” That would have been more painful to him than to Don; but only because he couldn’t bear to hear Don’s hurt protestations on top of the rest of it.

Talking German to Mrs. Wertheim—aaah! To Mrs. Wertheim, who spoke American better than he did. And calling her gnädige Frau! She was too much of a person to smile—
she
saved his face too, covered up for him, pretended as one pretends with a child that their fancies are real, oh yes, quite genuine and real. She was the aristocrat, not he; and he felt sick shame as he recalled,
now, his fanciful daydream about how he had given the bedazzled Mrs. Wertheim a tantalizing glimpse of reckless glamorous high life. What a fool and an ass he had made of himself—and
there
was one more avenue of escape closed, one more source he had cut himself off from, a source of loan he could never go back to again. One more person to shun in the street, one more shop to go by with face averted, one more
bête noire
added to the growing neighborhood collection of persons he must not see again.

And now he would live in dread, of course, of that moment, a week or so hence, when Wick would come into the flat, the laundry bill in his hand, and say almost with tears: “Don, why did you have to go to her of all people, what will she think, why didn’t you go to Helen or anyone, anyone else?” It was a moment to dread because there was no possible way out of it: simulating innocence was no good; hanging your head was worse; the disarming open admission was long since out. It was one more thing he could and would, in the mornings to come, mornings such as this, build up an anxiety about. Slight it seemed; but by the time Wick approached, came nearer and nearer, it would have grown by then to one of those many real terrors from which he must somehow, someway, escape.

“Two-and-Twenty-Misfortunes” the family often called him, after the character in Chekov. Well, it was a family joke, and fun (to them); but he got a bit tired of hearing it just as he got a bit tired of those two-and-twenty misfortunes themselves. Why wouldn’t he be? They began further back than he could remember (so he was forever being told), they had come to be expected by everyone in the family (Don wasn’t running true to form, something was amiss, if he came through an experience without damage); so that by the time the fraternity shock sent him reeling, the two-and-twenty seemed but a preliminary warm-up. All the woeful errors of childhood and adolescence came to their crashing climax at seventeen. They gathered themselves for a real workout in
the passionate hero-worship of an upperclassman during his very first month at college, a worship that led, like a fatal infatuation, to scandal and public disgrace, because no one had understood or got the story straight and no one had wanted to understand, least of all the upperclassman who emerged somehow as a hero, now, to the others—why, he would never know.… He had survived (didn’t one always?). The experience had left him reeling for a couple of years, sent him reeling back home with the resolve never again to leave the security and safety of his hometown where everybody knew him and had always known him; but after that couple of years, the shock had paled and receded in the back of his mind till he was able to tell himself that the only thing he regretted was that he had left behind and lost forever his precious marked copy of
Macbeth
that day he was ushered out of the Kappa U house for good and all.… That’s what he was able to tell himself; but when he left home and tried his wings again, he knew only too well that he lived unconsciously in perpetual dread of one day meeting up face to face with one of those thirty-six erstwhile brothers, perpetual fear of running into any of the thousand other students to whom he was guilty if they believed he was guilty. It was a dread that he fully understood, but which carried so many other fears in its wake that he had never been able to free himself of anxieties since his seventeenth year.

These were not the fancied fears that had become fashionable, lately, among his class and his generation. Quick to spot the fake in others as in himself, he had only contempt for those fondly-cherished phobias which drove their nourishers to dangerous distraction when they heard whip-poor-wills, which prevented them from sitting in crowded theaters or entering subways, which kept them forever in the country or forever in the city, which forbade them eating anything but ice cream ever, which allowed them to hear only a very little bit of fine music at one time (a whole symphony at a sitting was more than one could bear and to hell with the composer’s design), and which culminated in what their creators
shyly-proudly spoke of as their “weekend psychoses,” meaning nothing more than boredom and irritation at having to spend two days at home with their wives and children. These carefully nurtured aberrations were supposed to signify a refinement and sensitivity superior to the temperament (or lack of it) of maddeningly well-balanced mates; in reality, they provided a compensation and screen to frustration, inferiority, and failure.

He was a fine one to speak of failure, of course. From childhood his record had been one of opportunities missed (on purpose?), excited but half-hearted attempts at finding the right niche (with always the next niche a better one), moves to a new city or new state or even new country where certainly things would be better or at least different, returns home to renew himself, to find again the native stimuli that never existed, to seek the old roots. Excuses, excuses, literary at that. He had repeatedly and purposely destroyed every opportunity that ever came his way, and this pattern went as far back as he could remember. His history of defeat was so consistent that he could almost point with pride to the fact that his Algebra teacher had snarled at him savagely, before the whole class, “Don Birnam, I wouldn’t recommend you to sweep a sidewalk!”—and these same words, syllable for syllable, were spoken at him in clipped impeccable speech twenty years later by the editor of a broadcasting company, a superior Britisher who obviously never had a moment of qualm or self-doubt in his life. Both pronouncements had been received almost with satisfaction; they relieved him of further effort in either field. It was as though he could say to himself, or to the world: “You see?” and shrug.

He could never get used to the fact that he was grown up, in years at least, living in an adult world. When the barber said, “Razor all right, Sir?” he had to think for a minute. What was it men said when asked about the razor? And when he said it (“Razor’s fine, fine” or whatever it was) he felt a fraud. Out of the corner of his eye, over the vast bib, he looked at the man in the next chair. Did
he
feel foolish at being accorded these formalities,
these symbols of respect? Was he ill at ease in the role of solid and substantial man, obliged to run true to form, behave like all the others, reply in kind, no matter how much his mind wandered on private or past excursions? But that mind certainly didn’t wander; there sat no perennial eavesdropper and wanderer and wonderer; the calm eyes looked neither to right nor to left; the man was as incurious and uninquisitive about Don as he was about himself.

If he had put childhood behind him at all, it had been with a lingering glance backward, and regret. He had never looked forward to the long-pants, like other boys. He remembered his mortal embarrassment, almost shame (as if he had suddenly been exposed naked), when his mother announced, “Don’s shaving now.” It was a joke to everyone; they laughed. Other boys were only too proud of the first shave and boasted of the razor before they ever used one; but he—he was reminded that the razor meant he was growing body-hair elsewhere than on his lip, and he bitterly, privately, resented this evidence that childhood was slipping by.

Where, along the way, had he missed the great chance to take the difficult but rewarding step from boyhood into manhood, the natural hazard that others took as a matter of course, without even knowing; and would he ever have such an opportunity again? Yes, he believed he would; but perhaps it meant going down to the bottom first, the very bottom; and then again, perhaps he might not recognize the opportunity if it should return. But somewhere he had missed the boat (was his own realization of this any good, any help?). Somewhere along the line had come a moment when he had looked the other way, willfully and on purpose, reluctant to part from the pleasant ways of childhood. When, at what time, had he deliberately ignored the responsibility and opportunity that beckoned him? Oh, he could put his finger on a dozen such moments, but no one of them was big enough in itself to have colored and crippled his whole life from that time forward.

Some were more revealing than others; one he would never forget. A note had been passed across several aisles, a note from his friend Melvin. He knew what it said without unfolding it, these came every afternoon, from him or from Mel, worded the same; but he unfolded it as always and wrote “Okay” under the message: “How about going over to the church-sheds this afternoon after school and having fun?” The
having fun
was supposed to veil (and did, since no one intercepted the notes) what went on between them in the carriage-sheds back of the Presbyterian Church, several afternoons a week, in the backseat of an abandoned carriage that hadn’t been used for years—used for anything but this. The phrase was their phrase to describe, for their own private use, what they had lately found to be the most exciting thing in life. And later, amid the dry acrid semen-like smell of the sheds, the two of them shivering and groaning in the dark backseat of the dust-foul buggy, what prompted him then one afternoon to ask (with that prescience that was native to him): “What are you thinking of?”—meaning, What are you picturing? meaning, What scene do you conjure up to aid the act? meaning, Who? And when the panting answer came: “Gertrude Hort. I’m laying my face on her little bare belly”—what instinct then, as prescient as the other, made him hold back, be still, keep to himself the suddenly surprising fact that it was no one like Gertrude Hort with whom he dallied in imaginary amorous play? The realization made him stop. He looked up unseeingly at the jiggling fringe of the buggy, feeling already strange and alone and different. He was lost in startling thought. Melvin stopped too. “What’s the matter?” But what could he answer? He suddenly knew what he hadn’t dreamed of before, Mel was way ahead of him, miles and years—so far ahead that he could certainly never bring himself now to tell Melvin it was his father he had been thinking of, Mel’s own father who, when he took a bath, always had Mel come in and wash his back. This fact had been related casually a week or
so ago, and the scene, somehow exciting (but why? Because there was no father at home?) had stuck in his mind.