And it didn’t matter now.
Because the kid was dead.
And so was Linda.
He tried to believe it, and then he tried to forget it, and one state was as bad as the next. He tried to imagine what life would be like without her, and he went to the window of the apartment and wondered if a three-flight fall would kill him, and then he realized that he did not have the guts to kill himself.
He didn’t have the guts to live, either.
He took all the money in his wallet and all the money in the apartment and he left. He walked along the streets until he came to the first bar he saw, and he went into it, and he ordered a double of brandy.
And drank it.
He ordered another of the same and he drank that one also. He kept ordering brandies and they kept setting them up for him and he kept knocking them off. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw Linda. Whenever he opened them he saw her again — floating on top of the brandy in his glass.
He kept drinking.
When morning came it was Friday and he was supposed to go to the agency but he was too drunk to go. He thought that he really ought to call them and tell them but he didn’t feel like it and didn’t much care because all he could think about was Linda.
He didn’t call.
He drank instead. He drank brandy for breakfast and brandy for lunch and brandy for dinner, and he kept on drinking until his money ran out, at which time he went back to the apartment and found things to pawn.
And went on drinking.
Saturday and Sunday passed in a blue blur.
Then Monday came, and once again he was too drunk to go to work.
So he drank.
Chapter Nine
He was sitting in a bar on Lexington Avenue in the fifties and he was drinking cognac. He wasn’t sure just what day of the week it was and he didn’t particularly care. He was Johnny Wells and he lived at the Hotel Ruskin and that was all he cared about. Anything else was immaterial.
He was Johnny Wells and he was wearing a gray sharkskin suit with white shirt and pearl-gray tie and expensive black shoes, and he was drinking cognac.
He was remembering a girl named Linda.
She was dead, of course. Dead trying to eradicate from her body the seed some other man had planted within her. And he was alone, and this fact made many things unnecessary.
It made the apartment on Sullivan Street unnecessary, because he had known at once that he could no longer live there, not with her gone. The apartment, a pleasant place in a pleasant area that had been their love nest, would be hell without her. It was the perfect place for a man and a woman in love, but it was no place at all for a man alone.
When the first bat ended, when he woke up one morning with a hangover so massive and all-consuming that he thought for the first hour of it that he was wearing somebody else’s head, he had managed to get back to the apartment on Sullivan Street. He washed up as best as he could and shaved himself without cutting up his face too badly. He dressed, packed the few things he wanted to take with him, and caught a cab to the bank. He drew out a few hundred dollars and took another cab to the Ruskin.
They were kind enough to take him back. His old room had been rented but they gave him another just as good and he went into it and took another bath and then went to sleep. He went to sleep. He went out later that day and bought a bottle of cognac at a liquor store. He took it to bed with him.
Now two more months had passed. He had never even so much as considered returning to his job writing copy for Craig, Harry and Bourke. The job belonged to another world, a world where Linda was alive and in love with him. He no longer inhabited that world. The job was part of the goal, the big, happy, beautiful goal which included Linda and their children and the house overlooking the Hudson and the Cadillac three blocks long.
Now there were no more goals.
And no more dreams.
Only Johnny Wells, alone.
And for Johnny Wells alone there was no point in breaking your hump writing copy for a yard a week with a chance for advancement when you could bust your hump half as hard for ten times the dough taking care of widows and divorcees and other men’s wives. So it didn’t take him long to drift back to the bars on Lexington. He did this automatically. One day the money ran out, and he didn’t feel like further depleting his bank account, and that night he went to a bar whose name he since forgot and managed to get himself picked up by a sloppy-breasted woman with incongruously blonde hair. The hair was from a bottle and the woman was strictly from hunger, but Johnny had a job to do and he acquitted himself nobly. He left the woman’s apartment with the memory of her loose skin under his hands and with a crisp hundred dollar bill in his billfold. He worked a week to earn that much at Craig, Harry and Bourke. Now he was making that much in a night again.
He sipped his cognac and waited for something to happen. In the days when he was hustling he didn’t wait for things to happen. He spotted a likely prospect and worked for his money.
Now he didn’t care enough to try too hard. Besides, he was drinking a little bit more than usual and the cognac was beginning to reach him. He was content to simply sit and drink until something came his way. And if nothing did come his way, well, that was all right too. He didn’t really care that much. He wasn’t going to starve to death. He could afford to bide his time.
He felt very old and very tired. Often he tried to remind himself that he was all of eighteen years old but he could never really believe it. Or was he eighteen? It seemed to him that he’d hit another birthday somewhere along the way, that he was in fact nineteen, but he had trouble keeping track.
It didn’t really matter. As far as he could tell, he was neither eighteen nor nineteen. He felt at least forty, sometimes older. In eighteen or nineteen years — did it matter which? — he had done more living than most men did in a lifetime. And it was beginning to show.
He finished his cognac and signaled for a refill. It was funny, he thought. He’d originally switched to cognac as a steady drink for three reasons. One — he liked the taste. Two — it was something a gentleman could drink. And three — he could nurse a drink for an hour and never get drunk.
Funny.
Nowadays he drank his cognac without really tasting it. And the gentleman bit certainly didn’t matter — he had other more important things to worry about than his boyish concept of what a gentleman was and what a gentleman did and all nonsensical manure like that.
And the third reason certainly didn’t apply. He didn’t nurse his drinks any more. He drank them right down, and he got drunk on them.
Funny.
He decided he wanted a cigarette. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette case, reached in again and got his silver lighter. He took a cigarette from the case and put it to his lips, then flicked the lighter. It lit on the first try, as it always did, and he took the light and drew smoke into his lungs. It tasted foul. Everything did lately.
“Want to hold the light, sweetie?”
He turned and looked at her.
She wasn’t bad, was in fact better than he was used to. She was in her thirties but that was to be expected — girls in their twenties got all the romance they wanted without paying for it. This one was holding up well. She had jet black hair swept back into a bun and her skin was firm and pinkish. She still had a shape, too — a nice pair of boobs, unless they were phonies, and a trim waist. He couldn’t see her legs and didn’t know whether they were good or not.
He lit her cigarette.
“Thanks,” she said. “Nice night, huh?”
“Very nice.”
“The night is nice and so are you. Busy tonight, honey? Or can we get together?”
Most of them didn’t talk like this one. Most of them were subtle as all hell, while this one had half the subtlety of an atomic weapon. He started to resent her, then changed his mind. In a way her bluntness was refreshing. Hell, she knew the score and so did he. Why not call a shovel a shovel?