William Styron: The Collected Novels: Lie Down in Darkness, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Sophie's Choice (6 page)

Loftis said nothing else. Conscious only of a vague commotion around him—people walking through the dust, astonished voices like those of children caught in a sudden rainshower—he stood with one hand lightly, almost casually, resting on the fender, the other hand still clutching the rag. Then leisurely, in the methodical fashion of a sleepwalker, he let the rag drop from his hand and walked away through the dust. As he started off across the street his first thought was: I mustn’t get sick here. I must get to a place where I can vomit—fighting back the nausea which surged up from his belly in hot demanding waves and then, in the near-deserted restaurant, walking past the juke box now mute and gaudy with shifting kaleidoscopic light, red and blue and green, and into the filthy toilet in the rear where in spasms, bending over an unflushed bowl, he was sick.

Afterward he went out and sat on a stool at the edge of the counter where he could watch the limousine—still shaken but feeling better as the nausea subsided, thinking: I’ve got to get hold of myself. I’ve got to be a man. A taxi driver who had been eating at the other end of the counter got up and paid and went out, saying, “See you, Hazel.” Dully, Loftis watched him through the flyspecked window: strolling past, sucking on a toothpick with the poky, shiftless look of taxi drivers south of the Potomac—casual trifling ease. Then he disappeared beyond the window frame. Loftis, looking absently around him, found the place deserted except for Hazel.

“Hiya, what’ll it be?” the woman said. “Ain’t the dust awful?”

“Coffee,” he said.

“Say, you look real sick,” she said. “You must of hung one on last night.” She went back to the coffee urn. There was a familiar sour odor about the place, neither clean nor particularly unclean: grease, stagnant dishwater, flabby, uneatable bakeshop pastries many days old. He gagged and thought he would be sick, and would have been had he not just finished being sick. He started to leave, rose halfway up from the stool, but the woman returned with the coffee, saying: “I seen you run back to the gentleman’s room just now. I figured you was probably sick.” He began to drink the coffee, saying nothing.

“Say, you got the shakes. What you need is a BC.” He made no reply, thinking: If I can last out this day I might be all right. It’ll get well before you’re married, time cures all, must …

“I told Haywood—he’s the driver just left—I told him you looked kind of green. I don’t drink myself although I’ve always said what’s good for the gander’s good for the goose, to turn around an old parable …”

And Helen. I will bring her back to me today, cure her, make her well, tell her that our love never went away at all.

“… deerlord knows a woman’s heavy enough laden to want to hang one on once in a while. In fact …”

He was thinking: Quiet, just hush, quiet—knowing that at another time he would himself have broached any subject of possible interest: the weather, prices, even the God of the Baptists—anything to make conversation. He was a lawyer, he sensed a need for the common touch, and above all he wanted to feel accepted by a class of people with whom he naturally felt ill-at-ease. In his dealings, no matter how casual, with people whose station in life was palpably lower than his own, he felt embarrassed and guiltily mistrustful. Laundry people, gardeners, Negro handymen appearing at his back door with suppliant grins and appeals for cast-off clothes—all these caused him mild confusion. But long ago, through conscious effort which finally had become a habit, he had found he could disburden himself of any uneasiness by merely talking. And so he had talked, being indeed always the first to talk, even invoking subjects of the wildest absurdity—not only because he wanted to be liked by everyone, which was true, but because he liked to talk, because he liked the round meaningful shapes of words, and because he was afraid of being alone.

But now the woman appalled him, filled him with desperation, and he had a moment’s fright because he didn’t seem to understand a word she said. She seemed to be one with the anxiety and the dust and the nausea: a symbol, horribly purposeful, of all that can plague a man when he most needs peace and repose. She was a tall, raw-boned, sallow blonde of about forty with bulging eyes and pushed-in masculine features. She leaned slackly against a glassed-in case full of razor blades and stale cigars, gazing vacantly out of the window while she talked steadily, stridently and without enthusiasm, as if it made little difference that no one ever agreed with or listened to her—either Loftis now or that echoing, unlistening choir of taxi drivers and trainmen who, drifting in each noonday like flies, gave back to her across the counter what abstracted grunts they could afford between swallows of beer and the slow, indolent buzz of their conversation.

“No,” she was saying, “I got nothing against drinking personally and as I say I can’t see why a woman shouldn’t drink, too, and it’s a known truth that doctors often prescribe intoxicants for certain nervous disorders, ah, my sister-in-law in Newark had a chronic condition of the uterus and had to have it taken out and was prescribed by her doctor to take a shot of whisky each night before retiring …”

Peyton, Peyton, he was thinking; successful as he had been for many hours in forgetting all except the loss of her, she came back now to him swiftly, the thought of her exploding against his consciousness like a fist. A fly lit on the counter in front of him; numbly, he watched the black bearded proboscis probe against some sticky film and withdraw, iridescent wings fanning upward, downward, coquettishly. Somewhere an electric fan droned without end, in a still and constant minor key.

“… that’s the sister of my
helpmate,
if I might use the expression——” She paused and Loftis, languid eyes upon her, saw her lips compress abruptly in a look of derision and scorn. “You haven’t seen him, I guess, since I rarely if ever seen you in here before … the
ninny,
” she sneered, “well, pore thing, burdened as she was …”

Peyton—he saw her now: shape, form, substance; thinking of her in this way brought sudden fire to his chest. Lost now? Gone? Oh, that this moment should have never come, but would melt away like mist. My God, for a drink. Moving his arm upward, he became aware of a faint noise, as of paper crackling, in his breast pocket.

“Men,” the woman said. “Men!” she was saying. Blind, headlong, she talked on and on exhaustlessly above the droning fan, above the sound of water slowly dripping. The fly pivoted, buzzed away.

Ah, yes, the letter—he had forgotten. Before leaving the house an hour ago he had put it away without thought, fearfully, and now fearfully, with trembling fingers, he withdrew it from his pocket, examining the envelope: a green stamp upon which a three-masted schooner rested at anchor, commemorating something, obscured by the postmark’s sinuous inky lines. For an instant he laid the envelope on the counter, thinking: I just can’t. But then he opened it, saw six pages of writing, the familiar feminine script. … Something wrung his heart like hands as, tremulous, irresolute, he began to read——

Dearest Bunny, today I was 22 and I woke up this morning in a thunderstorm feeling so old—really sick, I guess—and then the money order came with your lovely nite letter (those telegraph people must think you’re my sweetheart) and I guess I feel better now. I went out and bought two quarts of milk and a Mozart concerto and I guess I feel better now. And I bought a lovely big alarm clock, too.

Bunny, you don’t know how much I miss you, how much that long lovely telegram meant to me. You get stewed to the gills and you try to be modern but you’re absolutely hopelessly conventional. Even so I love you and miss you terribly. I’ve really been so lonely since Harry left (has the news
really
gotten around town? What kind of poison’s being spread by the local you-knows? What has
she
said?) Dear Bunny, I suspect you’re the only one who understands and doesn’t too much care—from the gossip point of view anyway. Anyway, I
am
lonely, something I hate to admit but I guess it’s true. After you’ve lived with someone for a time it leaves a huge gap in your life when they’re gone—even if they’re impossible (so you think) or downright horrible (maybe you just think that too). Just feeling that sort of vacuum and silence around you when you’re cleaning the apartment or going to bed—that’s what’s so bad—even though if the person came back you’d slam the door in his face (not really).

So Bunny I just lay there last night and thought about you. New York is so beastly hot in the summer. I felt absolutely miserable. There’s a bar downstairs (I remember you haven’t seen this apt. since I moved up from the village) full of the loudest Italians imaginable. The juke box goes all the time full blast and of course it’s worse in the summer with all the windows open. Then with a pillow over my head I almost drifted off to sleep when the Cecchinos (he’s a dark and mustachioed (sp?) Latin type, a rather ominous young man) came in drunk—their apt. is across the hall—she shrieking at the top of her lungs and banging up against my door. So I just stayed awake until the bar closed listening to the busses go by and thinking thoughts. They weren’t very pleasant thoughts—in fact they were very dreary and morbid and depressing. They’ve just started lately it seems, I’ve had these moments before, but never for so long—and they’re absolutely terrible. The trouble is that they don’t—these thoughts—seem to have any distinctness or real point of reference. It’s more like some sort of black, terrible mistiness like the beginning of a disease, the way you know you feel when you’re catching the flu. I try to fight against this feeling all the time but in it seeps, and I can’t do anything about it at all. Thinking of you helps some, thinking of home—but I don’t know, nothing seems to really help for long. I feel adrift, as if I were drowning out in dark space somewhere without anything to pull me back to earth again. You’d think that feeling would be nice—drowning like that—but it isn’t. It’s terrible. Then when I see the birds it seems [
something crossed out
]

Oh, Daddy, I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve tried to grow up—to be a good little girl, as you would say, but everywhere I turn I seem to walk deeper and deeper into some terrible despair. What’s wrong, Daddy? What’s wrong? Why is happiness such a precious thing? What have we done with our lives so that everywhere we turn—no matter how hard we try not to—we cause other people sorrow?

I’ve never talked to you like this, dearest. I don’t know why. I just want you to know these things. Please don’t be embarrassed.

It’s true. We’ve all been so unkind. I’ve been so unkind to people. It’s [
something crossed out here.
] wings it

(Later) I hate this city, Bunny. Everything is so false and brutal and ugly. But maybe that’s just
me
because I loved it so at first. The excitement, the students at the school—meeting Harry. He came back the other day to get some of his things. Everything was so terribly strained when he came in—I was in an absolute panic. I wondered—how could I have ever loved him? And yet I did love him once, I
did
very much. Wasn’t it maybe I who had been unkind, who broke us up after all? Yet I couldn’t admit it to myself at all—I just couldn’t. It was a hot day and I suppose we both felt badly so finally we exchanged words. I called him something horrible and banged out of the apt. When I came back later that evening he was gone and I could have died. Do I still love him, Daddy? Do I still love him? I don’t know. All I know is that something terrible is happening to me. Since I left the job I’ve been doing hardly anything, waking up late with the horrible hot noon sun in my face. I sit around and read and now and then I go for a walk. That’s about all. Isn’t it terrible, my telling you all these things? But I want you to know anyway.

Sometimes I see Laura—you remember her. We all went to the Vanguard that night. She’s very tiresome, but I envy her somehow. Maybe that’s the key to happiness—being sort of dumb, not wanting to know any of the answers.

I think of Maudie. Why did she have to die? Why do we have to die?

Oh, I miss you so, Daddy! I wish I could see you, talk to you and have you say nice things to me. I wish I could come home. I wish it were possible. Oh, Daddy, I wish I could come home! The birds are haunting me beyond all belief. Such wingless——

There was more but he read no further; it all became so crazy and confused. He placed the letter down gently, and gazed upward where a monstrous day-flying moth, crazed by light, whirled wildly around a dangling bulb.

“What’s the matter, mister?” Hazel said. Loftis didn’t answer her. “What’s the matter, mister?” Hazel repeated. “Isn’t there something I can do?”

He raised his eyes. “My daughter,” he said, with a look of hopeless appeal.

“Why, you pore man,” said Hazel.

Nothing now, he knew, could be changed at all. He put his head down on the counter and shut his eyes. Helen, come back to me.

“Why, you pore man,” said Hazel.

D
OLLY
B
ONNER
descended the steps from the station dock, sidling down cautiously as if she thought high heels and tight jersey skirt might catapult her sprawling if she weren’t careful, and then hurried up to Barclay, who was still tinkering with the engine.

“Have you seen Mr. Loftis?” she said. “Where is he?”

The boy looked up suddenly and raised a startled arm toward the restaurant. Dolly had given him a terrible surprise. “Over there. Over there, ma’am,” he said. He closed the hood with a bang, for he had just seen Mr. Casper, standing by the baggage car with the remains, motioning him to bring the hearse over. The dust had lifted, although little eddies and swirls still lingered on the air; through one of these tiny clouds Dolly approached the restaurant, patting dust from her skirt. She heard the swollen notes of a mournful guitar; she peered in through the dusty window, shielding light from her eyes. Within, Loftis sat propped up over a cup of coffee, and the woman behind the counter opened and closed her mouth rapidly, soundlessly. Poor dear Milton. A rainbow of juke-box color enveloped the restaurant, a lovely spectrum endlessly shifting; a man with a deep, sad voice sang: “Take me back and try me one more time.” Such a hillbilly song, yet it filled her with gentle, genuine sorrow. Poor dear Milton.