The Lost Weekend (7 page)

“Why certainly,” he said, pleasantly, “here it is,” and he produced the bag from under his coat and handed it directly to the girl herself with a faint bow.

He would never remember what was said then, who said it, or the order in which it was said. The young man was muttering in threat, the waiter said “Call a cop, Mike’s on the corner,” the girl said “Never mind, never
mind
, I’ve got my bag, that’s all I wanted, please let him go,” the bartender said “If you ever come back here again, if I ever see—” He stood there puzzled in the middle of it all, his polite patient half-smile trying to say for him, What’s all the fuss, it’s only a joke, I’m sure I didn’t realize, truly I wasn’t serious, I was only having a little— The doorman put big hands on his shoulders, turned him around, gave him a shove that made his neck snap, and he was in the street.

He recovered and adjusted his coat and hat and walked slowly, leisurely, away, trying not to hear what the doorman called after him, trying not to see the little group of cabbies staring at him in silent contempt. By the time he got to the corner and out of sight, moving as slowly and leisurely as he was able, his legs were shaking so violently he could hardly stand. He thought he would collapse, he wanted to collapse, wanted to give way, fall down, pretend to be very drunk, be picked up and taken care of by someone, a stranger. He thought of Helen in Bleecker Street and recoiled in terror. He stumbled into a cab in Sheridan Square, gave his address, and fell into the dark backseat as if it were his bed, his own bed at home. During the drive uptown, the blessed oblivion of time-out, he became so calm, so deathly relaxed and still, that he was barely able to respond with gratitude as he remembered the nearly-full pint at home. Was this what he had been seeking? He had reached the point where always there was only one thing: drink, and more drink, till amnesty came; and tomorrow, drink again.

The windows were blue-white. Was it early morning, or evening? He lay watching the panes between the curtains and wondered if they would whiten into daylight or thicken into dusk. He wondered what time it was, what day. The clock said 6:10 but that told him nothing.

He had awakened fully dressed on the couch in the living room. His feet burned. He reached down and unlaced his shoes and kicked them off. He rose to a sitting position and pulled off his coat and vest, untied his tie and loosened his collar. Automatically his hand groped beside the couch for the pint on the floor. His heart sank as he found it, and found it empty.

Had he been sleeping all night, or all night and all the next day? There was no way of telling till the light changed outside, for better or worse. If it were evening, thank Christ. He could go out and buy another, a dozen more. But if morning— He feared to find out; for if it were morning, dawn, he would be cut off till nine or after and so made to suffer the punishment he always promised himself to avoid. It would be like the dreaded Sunday, always (at these times) the day most abhorred of all the week; for on Sundays the bars did not open till two in the afternoon and the liquor stores did not open at all. Once again he had not been clever enough to provide a supply against this very thing; again he had lost all perspective and forgotten his inescapable desperation of the morning, so much more urgent and demanding than any need of the evening before. Last night it had been merely drink. It was medicine now.

He lifted the empty pint to his mouth. One warm drop
crawled like slow syrup through the neck of the bottle. It lay on his tongue, useless, all but impossible to swallow. He thought of all the mornings (and as he thought of them he knew he was in for another cycle of harrowing mornings) when, at such times as these, he would drag himself into the kitchen and examine the line-up of empty quarts and pints on the floor under the sink, pick them up separately and hold them upside down over a small glass, one by one for minutes at a time, extracting a last sticky drop from one bottle, two drops from another, maybe nothing from a third, and so on through a long patient nerve-wracking process till he had collected enough, perhaps, to cover the bottom of the glass. It was like a rite—the slow drinking of it still more so; and it was never enough.

Though he hated this need of his, hated this dependency on the pick-up, so often impossible to get—hated it for what it did to him till he got it—all the same he had a profound and superior contempt for those who spurned liquor on the morning after, whose stomachs, shaken as they were by the dissipation of the night, turned and retched at the very thought of it. How often he had been dumbfounded—at first incredulous, then contemptuous—to hear someone say, after a night of drinking, “God, take it away, I don’t want to smell it, I don’t want to
see
it even, take it out of my sight!”—this at the very moment when he wanted and needed it most. How different that reaction was from his own, and how revealing. Clearly it was the difference between the alcoholic and the non-. He was angry to know this, but he knew it; he knew it far better than others; and he kept the knowledge to himself. It would tell them too much about him, tell them he was the drinker who couldn’t stop—an abhorrent thing, more shocking to the man who went in for the occasional heavy weekend spree than it ever was to the abstainer. The hair of the dog was no lighthearted joke with him as it was with the others; but he could kid about it with the rest, if need be, hiding his agonized impatience till such time as he was able to sneak a drink or, if offered
one as a dare in the presence of others (dare!), quench his thirst with affected bravery amid the shudders of his hungover friends.

Thirst—there was a misnomer. He could honestly say he had never had a thirst for liquor or a craving for drink as such, no, not even in hangover. It wasn’t because he was thirsty that he drank, and he didn’t drink because he liked the taste (actually whisky was dreadful to the palate; he swallowed at once to get it down as quickly as possible): he drank for what it did to him. As for quenching his thirst, liquor did exactly the opposite. To quench is to slake or to satisfy, to give you enough. Liquor couldn’t do that. One drink led inevitably to the next, more demanded more, they became progressively easier and easier, culminating in the desperate need, no longer easy, that shook him on days such as these. His need to breathe was not more urgent.

Today wasn’t as bad as that. He could stand it. He had only been drinking one night, this time. Tomorrow or the day after would be a different story, but—now it was hangover, nothing more; and he could stand it till he was able to get another pint. What possessed him now even more than his need for a drink was that inevitable and familiar accompaniment to the first morning-after: remorse (how readily he recognized it; how humbly, from old habit, he accepted it as his just due)—remorse merely for drinking, for having drunk at all, any; but even as he acknowledged the first sickening symptom of anguish and guilt, he knew it was only a tiny twinge or pang to the hounding relentless remorse that would drive him to hell and worse a few days hence.

What had happened yesterday, last night, that he should feel so guilty now? Nothing. It was always the same, regardless of what he had done. He remembered little after he started drinking; but what he recalled up to the time he had gone down to the Village, or up to his call at Mrs. Wertheim’s laundry, was enough. Merely to have started again, when he was only just safely out of the other bat, was enough now to make him sick with despair and regret. Why hadn’t he waited—why hadn’t he waited
one more
day
? Just one! He had been coming out of a bad week as it was; he had been off liquor since Monday; one more day would have finished it, made him whole once more, with no need to drink till the next cycle came around. If he had been able to hold off through yesterday, today he would have been normal again; and he knew himself and his habits well enough to know that that would have lasted some days, held possibly even two or three weeks, for he was a periodic drinker, with intervals of sobriety between. At the same time, he knew himself well enough also to know that once started, he had to go through it to the end, there was no stopping now, he could not prevent the downward curve to the final state of danger, destruction, or collapse. Short of being locked up, nothing could help him now till it had played itself out, safely or otherwise. The old Demon of Ennui had given him the shove, the Old Enemy had tricked him into starting all over again before he had recovered from the previous drunk, before he was well out of it at all. They were dangerously close together, those two binges—dangerously overlapping. This new one was bound to leave him worse off than the other, because he was hardly strong enough, as it was, to begin again. How had it happened—at what moment had it started—why? The barometer had been set for a spell of riot, true enough; but in all honesty, no matter how much he wanted to believe it, he couldn’t lay the blame on a phrase in a book. If it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else. Left unguarded by Wick, determined to avoid the long weekend that was to help him, he would have found the thing to set him off, regardless.

Spell of riot, Raskolnikov, indeed! How could his intelligence permit him to blow himself up to such exaggerated proportions, so great by contrast to the miserable fact of his piddling little spree that he was ashamed now of all the heroic fancies in which he had indulged himself yesterday. He had pictured himself as the sensitive gifted man going to the dogs with practically noble abandon, seeking destruction with gallant and charming and even amused
resignation. Balls! He was a drunk, that’s all; a soak and a dip; and the dangers that he skirted were picayune, no more threatening or perilous than the twigs and leaves which the night-flying bat, like the drunk, avoids so skillfully, with such ridiculous and unnecessary ingenuity, darting about in the darkness reckless but safe, always safe, detecting with its sensitive wings the slightest stir of air against the obstacle or tiny danger in its path. Such a creature was he, no more heroic, skirting traps of thread, landing always safely at home at the end of his reckless little tour, with nothing to fear but this unreasonable unshakable remorse—remorse for having done nothing worse than to go out at all. Such self-reproach, without foundation, would be inexplicable to another. A friend could learn all the details of the night before, if he could remember and tell them, and think nothing of it—be surprised, even, at his groundless concern. Only he himself knew the significance of that guilt. It had recurred too many times to be meaningless.

He knew the question was not: Why had he deliberately missed the appointment with his brother, why had he done what he did yesterday, why was he in this fix now; but: Why did he
ever
do it, why was he
always
doing it over and over again, why was he forever fetching up at just such an impasse as this, just such despair, depression, remorse? The remorse was the key to his despair, as it probably was to his salvation, should he ever be able to take hold of that key and use it. If he wanted to drink himself to death it was nobody’s affair but his own; his life was
his
life to throw away, if that’s what he wanted; but—was that what he wanted? If so, why did he suffer remorse? Obviously there was the will in him to destroy himself; part of him was bent on self-destruction—he’d be the last to deny it. But obviously, too, part was not; part held back and expressed its disapproval in remorse and shame. Why hadn’t the foolish psychiatrist ever been able to get hold of
that
part, done something with it, made something of it, brought it into full being till it topped and outweighed the
other? But the foolish psychiatrist knew so much less about it than the poet, the poet who said to another doctor,
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased.… Raze out the written troubles of the brain?
, the poet who answered,
Therein the patient must minister to himself.…

The windows were lighter now, the blue was white, it was morning. With a sinking heart he realized that the day was to start out like the dreaded Sunday after all. He was in for at least two hours of this, two more hours of waiting for the bar or the liquor store to open; for remorse or no, he meant to go on with it, the thing was in him now and must be finished, Wick was away for the long weekend, he’d be alone till Tuesday, he’d have his long weekend, here. A golden opportunity to go on his tear without interference, provided Helen didn’t catch up with him or intercept him, provided he kept out of people’s way, kept to himself and avoided seeing anyone he knew. For six days—for five more—he could move through the city at will, as he often had in the past, going here and there about the town like a ghost, unknown, unnoticed, like a man moving in a kind of time-out. A solo flight (flight indeed), unheeded by anyone because no one knew who he was (whoever stopped the anonymous drunk?); a flight that would last just long enough, for in his present weakened condition he knew that six days would be about the limit of his endurance. No three-week bender this time, ending up in Chicago, Philadelphia, the Fall River boat, a filthy room in a 9th Avenue hotel—God knows where. Tuesday morning Wick would be back and he’d be ready to call it quits by then. Wick wouldn’t return before: he knew too well what he’d be coming back to, he knew he couldn’t stop what had started, it was best to stay away and let the thing play itself out, pretending in the meanwhile that nothing was going on in the city or at least shutting it from his mind entirely. By deliberately not thinking of it Wick had learned not even to worry: if he worried, he would begin by worrying about fires, about whom Don might be having
in the apartment, about the loss of his personal effects, about his brother’s danger, arrest, death—and to do that was to suffer too much. Don knew that at this moment Wick was up and waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Hansen to get his breakfast on the coal range at the farm—or he was already out feeding Mac, or playing with him on the lawn, or throwing sticks in the water for him to swim out to—while he sat here, hanging onto himself, waiting for the liquor store to open, waiting to get started again on the bout that Wick would not allow himself to think of, thank heaven, for five more days. And waiting, knowing that the remorse would pass and high spirits return with the first drink of the day, he deliberately reviewed and explored that remorse, as if self-abasement were a kind of expiation, as if this were his last chance at self-search, as if the promised drinks were justified provided he faced the facts and knew in advance what he was in for.