The Lost Weekend (28 page)

Curious that he could have taken to drink, who after his first communion refused to take part in the service again because he hated the taste of the wine. Odd that he of all people should ever have turned into a drinker, he who had been not only bored but
actually impatient with the chapter on the evils of alcohol and what it did to the brain-cells, in the 6th-grade Hygiene book—impatient because all this stuff would certainly never apply to him in a thousand years and it was a waste of time for them all and not very nice besides. Nice people didn’t talk about such things or have such things happen to them, not in their town or among their kind of people. Nice people didn’t go into saloons, nobody he knew ever did, except he himself once, yes at the age of fourteen, as a sacrifice and gesture of patriotism. He and Eddie Richmond were distributing posters through the downtown stores during the Boy Scout drive for the Liberty Loan, he was covering one side of the street, Eddie the other, when he noticed that Eddie had skipped McGill’s saloon. He crossed over to Eddie’s side and they talked about it. No sir, Eddie wouldn’t go in there, not in a saloon. But not even on account of the Liberty Loan? Not even for the Allies? No sir! Well,
he
would, then; and he did, knowing Eddie would marvel at his courage and tell all the others. He walked straight into the dark foul-smelling place and said “Mr. McGill, can I hang one of these up in your window?” He felt wonderful doing it, all the more so because the two or three men standing at the bar with their tiny glasses of whisky looked at him sheepishly; and when he pushed the two half-doors aside and came out, he knew proudly that he would never again in all his life be inside a saloon but
this
was all
right
. He didn’t even care if anyone saw him coming out, in fact he hoped they would, hadn’t he done it for the Liberty Loan?

Was that funny, could you laugh at it now? Let others, if they could, but it was heartbreaking only. He thought almost with tears of that priggish self-righteous lad walking through the swinging doors, so innocent, so unaware that someday— Heartbreaking hell! The thought angered him instead. Little prick, that’s what he was! Smug little bastard who— He sat up suddenly, his senses straining, his nerves on edge. The telephone had stopped ringing. But not only that, he now realized it hadn’t been ringing for
some time. Was she on her way over here again? He looked at the clock.

It was ten minutes past five. Had the day really gone, had it really managed to pass, he was still sane, still alive? The room was cool, the sunlight had long since left the carpet, though he hadn’t realized it till now. He turned to look out the window. The sun had withdrawn also from the apartment building across the way, it was getting dark. Now what? What about the night, how was he going to survive it?—for he knew that sleep, in this keyed-up state, was beyond possibility. Or was Helen going to arrive and attempt again to rescue him from that night? He knew, knowing her, remembering all those times (O times!), that’s just what would happen, she was on her way even now. Never! He would face a nightmare night of devils and creeping horror and shrieking empty bottles twenty times more dreadful than the dreadful day, rather than face Helen, rather than open the door to her. Let her ring the bell, let her ring her head off, he was beyond reach now. He clutched the arms of the chair, fixed his eye on the door, and waited for the bell to ring.

Was there a limit to what he could endure? It seemed not. He was more vulnerable to suffering—and at the same time, paradoxically, he had a greater capacity for it—than anyone he knew; and this was no idle or egotistic boast, something he merely fancied to be true and was proud of because it set him apart, spoke of a superior sensitivity or sensibility. An occasion or period of suffering in his past which, reckoned now in perspective, was a mere incident, one out of many in a long chain, would have stood out in the average life as a major crisis, perhaps indeed the only one, a moment where the victim had reached a peak or depth from which recovery was a lifelong process. But such moments, such peaks and depths, were his very pattern—natural, it seemed, perhaps even necessary, to his development. Why had he not been destroyed by all that happened to him? How is it he could take it over and over again and yet again? What capacity, vitality, or
resilience did he have that others did not? Was it that his imagination laid hold of that suffering and transmuted it to experience, an experience he did not profit from, true, but experience all the same: a realization of who and what he was, a fulfillment of self? Was he trying to find out, in this roundabout descent to destruction, what it was all about; and would he, at the final and ultimate moment, know?

So his whole history had tended. He had been led on through good and bad, fair and foul, by nothing more than his own insatiable appetite for experience, an appetite part curiosity and part desire (but never three-parts coward). Not for nothing had he glanced up again and again from the bed to look in the mirror and see what a weeping boy looked like, a stricken boy weeping his heart away, that time he first learned his father had gone off and left them all and would never come home again (it was an important and awful moment, his childish but native prescience told him it was maybe the most important moment in his life, and he had to see what it looked like, even while his heart was breaking). Not for nothing had he stood by, when he might so easily have escaped by deceit or treachery or merely walking out, and let the fraternity disaster come down upon him, come down with all the nightmare forces of evil that nearly wrecked his life at the very start. Not for nothing had he ignored his secret morning hemorrhages until it was too late, then embraced both the prospect and the actuality of the long years in the tuberculosis sanatorium as if they offered a rich and rewarding experience. (Childish of course; anything but adult; self-dramatization, sure!—but who was more important or interesting to one than oneself?—and perhaps because of that very thing, that dual nature of participant and spectator, he had never gone down truly to the bottom, never gone under entirely, not yet.) He had come out of that dark confinement as he had gone in, wholehearted, and knowing more about himself than it was given to many others to know.

Had it done him any good? Had he got anything out of it?
He needn’t credit himself with self-knowledge as though it were a rare and special virtue; or, if he must, for Christ’s sake let him keep it to himself. For what was the good of knowing he was a fool and an adolescent if he went on being an adolescent and fool even more than when he didn’t know it? That kind of wisdom wasn’t virtue nor that kind of virtue wisdom. Neither had prevented the floundering as before, nor deterred him from the other things, realer and less real than illness, he had faced or gone into: the dangers, the dubious pleasures, the serious undertakings, the disappointments, the trying-anything-once; the mistaken loves and the terrible mistakes in love; the thousand times he had seemed to go deliberately out of his way to get in a jam, while others skirted these same troubles almost without knowing it, almost by instinct, their natural protective sense the very opposite of that instinct of his which led him inevitably and willy-nilly to the trap. Was it really self-destruction; or was it a kind of misguided self-search, self-quest in a blind alley, an untimely extension of the interminable slow pain of growing up, retarded, even cherished, too long? “You are like a plant of slow growth,” Anna had written him once (in words he couldn’t have used in a thousand years), “but the flower will be beautiful.” Slower than many, later than most.…

Too late?

Too late, too late, by default; he knew it and accepted it in his helplessness, even though he might protest it with passion: too late because there was at last a limit to what you could endure, and that limit at last would be reached tonight. Physically alone he was finished. The day of terror would break him down into madness at last, when the day was over; his brain would snap and the one rash and final thing would be done.

But oh, this is not the end he had imagined for himself as a kid! or even at thirty. To the adolescent boy, dreaming romantically of the gifted tormented men who had thrown their lives away, suicide had been a glamorous thing, a gallant flinging
down of the glove, a refusal to submit, to conform, to endure, a demonstration that the spirit with honor is unwilling to go on except in its own way: almost a gesture debonair.

Romantic rubbish!—had he ever believed it, even as a kid? An end like this was abject, nothing more; cringing, groveling, ignoble, contemptible, vile; a way out shameful and ashamed (could you open the door to Helen?); unbecoming, immoral, worse than unmanly. But you could reach a point, too, where the body rebelled though the spirit still stirred, where physical endurance was nearing its limit, where you no longer actually had the
strength to care
how abject you were, how base or despicable; and that point had been reached hours ago. The painful day had unmanned him, and all that was left was the small weak will (but will all the same—all he had left) to end the despair as well as the pain, somehow, someway. A bottle would do it; but the bottle was empty. A window, then; or a knife.

It had been a knife before that had almost done it and then not done it. It wasn’t the first time he had reached this point. Not the first by any means. But always something had lifted him through the moment and beyond it and on safely to the other side. What was it that had carried him over and past it? Most often nothing more than mere curiosity, an interest in his own plight, narcissism itself, a curiosity and interest to know what was going to happen next—even the time he had reached bottom that black week in Provincetown, the very depth of spirit, when the will was so weak he could scarcely write the two or three notes he felt were necessary to leave behind. In a state of depletion, cut off through his own carelessness without a single nickel left and unable somehow to get in touch with anyone who would help, he had stayed on after the season was finished, stayed on out of exhaustion and sheer inability to get away, like a derelict abandoned, stayed long after the last summer visitor had gone and the street lights had been turned off at night for the rest of the year and no one lived in that part of the town but himself. The shack he had rented at the
tip end of Whoopee Wharf and no longer had the money to pay for (but who cared? who even knew?) was as isolated from the world as the lonely melancholy bell-buoy that rang dolefully all night long somewhere out in the bay. With no food, no money, no drink, no possibility of getting himself out of there, he had gone into a fit of depression, a weariness of life, that was illness, that was each day worse, that had lasted longer and struck deeper than any depression he had ever suffered before. Three or four days usually saw the end of such a spell, but this had lasted a week now, this must be meant, this was supposed to be the one. His only visitors were a group of violent Portuguese fishermen who, drunk and predatory, began now systematically to terrorize him. Out of an absolutely silent night (save for the sad clanging harborbell and the querulous wail of the seagulls) they would come thundering along the wharf at two in the morning shouting his name, demanding money, demanding to be let in, yelling for booty, clothing, drink, his very person. They would pound on the flimsy walls and curse him with laughter, calling him names he didn’t dare listen to or think of the meaning of. He would lie breathless in the dark, knowing only too well what they would do to him if they got him (he covered his ears as they shouted insanely: “Donnie boy! Come out and get your breakfast!”) He was the more terrified because he knew he had brought this on himself, it was a kind of grotesque retribution, he and he alone was solely responsible for their wrath. He had carried on wastefully, wantonly, with all kinds of people, for weeks, throwing money away, drinking up more money in a weekend than the Portuguese made in seven days of hard work. They knew all this; they had seen it happen all summer; they had watched meekly, even sheepishly, envying him his continual holiday, his Mrs. Scott and his Doris, his gay shirts, his long idle afternoons, and his nights; and now that he was left behind alone and the others had abandoned him, all their hatred and contempt came out in these night maraudings, these ineffectual but terrifying raids. When they had got
tired, convinced perhaps that he himself had finally managed to get away maybe the evening before, they clumbered off down the wharf to the town again. He listened to the footsteps and laughter and violent talk dying away, and then the tolling bellbuoy and the seagulls took over once more, their plaintive thin cries sounding like chalk scraping fitfully, intermittently, on some vast blackboard raised high in the black night. When daylight came at last, his despair had reached its peak. He wrote his three notes, exactly alike; he got out the Bavarian huntingknife that had come with his
lederhosen
and which he used to wear stuck in the little leather slit provided for it just below the right hip; he drew the still-sharp blade tentatively across his wrist a few times, till the thin skin was streaked with three or four tiny hair-like lines of red. He gazed at the wrist lost in thought, almost without interest, almost with indifference, and the silly notion came to him: “Maybe tomorrow I’ll regret this, maybe tomorrow I’ll wish I hadn’t.…” He put the knife away and promised himself that if he felt like this tomorrow he’d do it then, he’d give himself one more chance, he’d wait one more day;
then
if his despair demanded such a way out, it was right that he should go through with it. He went out on the pier and lay in the sun, too weak to walk farther. During the morning he saw the fishermen. They came along Whoopee Wharf to look over their idle boats and nets. They nodded politely to him, saying quietly, “Good morning, Mr. Birnam.” He looked at them and answered hello. He knew that these same men, now so mild and respectful, would be back again in the night, derisive, ribald, dangerous, shouting the obscenities that were as much a part of their nature as these shy and gentle daytime manners. He knew they would be back in full and maybe greater force, next time; and he knew, too, that tomorrow morning he would go through the same performance with the knife, like a ritual, trying to see how it was or how it would be, and telling himself that if the
next
day he felt this low again.…