Linda climbed the Shithouse stairs. The air in the stairwell was stale, flavored with old cooking smells. They ought to get out of the place, she thought. She and Marc had moved in temporarily in September, glad to pay fifty dollars a week rather than hassle with leases and deposits. But the temporary stay had dragged out for almost eight months already. For the same rent they could have a larger apartment in a decent building.
It would be worth it — if they were going to stay in New Hope. If.
The apartment door was locked. She fished in her bag for the key, opened the door. She found the note immediately. It was on top of the convertible sofa, where they always left notes for each other. Businesslike notes, some of the time — “Linda, I’ll be late at the theater, go ahead and eat without me.” Cute love notes — “Marcums, I was here. You wasn’t. I misses you. Does you misses me?”
But she knew as soon as she saw the note what it was going to be. She picked it up and stood by the side of the sofa and read it. Her eyes wouldn’t focus at first, and the words were blurred, but she read it all the way through.
LINDA,
I suppose this is cowardly but I can’t help thinking it’s easier all around this way. I just couldn’t handle another scene. Last night was enough.
I guess I’ll go out to the Coast. I’m getting a ride as far as Chicago which is one reason I’m leaving right now, although it probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in any case.
Sorry about a lot of things. It was good while it lasted. Corny but true...
There was a little more. He had left some money in the dresser drawer, not much, but all he could spare. She put the note down and went to the dresser to discover that he had been able to spare one hundred twenty dollars. She counted the bills three times, then got her wallet from her purse and counted up her own cash. It suddenly seemed very urgent to determine just how she stood financially. The thirty-seven dollars in her wallet gave her total capital of one hundred and fifty-seven dollars. After work Friday she would receive thirty dollars from Olive McIntyre, her wages for fifteen hours of work at the Lemon Tree. Around noon Saturday Sully would be around to collect fifty dollars rent.
Problem: If you have one hundred and fifty-seven dollars to start with, and each week you earn thirty dollars and pay out fifty, how long do you last?
Answer: If you can borrow three dollars from somebody, you can last eight weeks. And that’s long enough, because sometime in the course of those eight weeks you starve to death.
She moved to the kitchenette, a corner of the room furnished with a hot plate and a small refrigerator. She checked the refrigerator and the cupboards. There were some cans of chili and ravioli and vegetable soup, a box from a health food store, some eggs and cheese, other odds and ends. It somehow didn’t look like eight weeks’ worth of food.
She opened dresser drawers, checked the closet, all to confirm what she already knew, that he had taken everything of his from the apartment. They had been together for two years, a year and a half in New York and almost eight months here. For the first few months he had kept his old apartment before they decided they were enough of a long-term prospect to live together. Since then they had accumulated rather little in the way of community property. The record player was his, and he had taken it; the typewriter was hers, and it remained behind. He had taken all the records, which was hardly fair in that perhaps a third of them had been hers originally, but she could understand that he would not have wanted to waste time sorting through the stack.
And she had long ago decided that, were she to leave him, she would have left all the records behind. Except for one Billie Holiday record, which he had taken with all the others and which she rather expected she would miss. Alan had bought that record for her — how many years ago? — and she had taken it with her when she left Alan.
She would miss that record. It was good get-drunk music, late Billie Holiday, the rusty old voice just getting by, the phrasing covering up the broken-down equipment.
Do nothin’ till you hear from me... and you never will.
She picked up the letter, and Tanya’s voice echoed, again in her head, “Why read something that’s gonna depress you?” But did it in fact depress her? It shook her, it had her off-balance, but she was not at all sure that she was as down now as she had been before finding the note. He was not entirely right. It had not been good while it lasted, but it had been good for quite a while, more often than not, and then somewhere along the way, sometime in the cold, wet, gray winter, it had turned a corner and become more bad than good. Since then the end had been inevitable.
She laughed aloud, an unreal brittle sound that surprised her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, “I was going to leave you, you bastard. Why couldn’t you wait?”
But it evened out, she realized. He had done the leaving and could bear the guilt; she had been left and could feel worthless and rejected. There would be enough bad vibes to go around.
There generally were.
She had always been distant from people. Even as a girl in Dayton, she had lived very much alone in her own world. She was not autistic, and her withdrawal was recognized less by others than by herself. But she had known very early, so early that it seemed to her she had always known, that other people were able to be a part of one another in a way that she was not. An only child herself, her companions in childhood and after were almost invariably only children. With girls, she was most comfortable in relationships that furnished companionship without intimacy, friendship without the sharing of confidences. With boys and later men, her relationships similarly stayed on or near the surface. What intimacy existed was staged, an illusion created by mutual role playing.
When she was seventeen years old, she began dating a boy named Carl Spangenthal. He was nineteen, a second-year business major at the University of Dayton. He was very tall and very thin, with a narrow, rabbity nose and two high spots of color on his pale cheeks. She did not find him attractive, nor did she like him much,
But for some reason or another it never occurred to her to decline a date with him.
“You know what I like about you?” he would say. And then he would praise one or another negative virtue. “Your hands don’t perspire the way so many girls’ do. One thing I can’t take is clammy fingers.” Or he would praise her complexion by assuring her that acne really put him off. “I mean even a couple of pimples, say two or three pimples on a girl’s chin, and that’s it for me.” It seemed to her that his development of their relationship consisted of forever finding new ways in which she failed to turn his stomach.
One night, giddy and taut-nerved after an evening of petting, she became quietly hysterical in her bedroom at the thought of suddenly breaking out in everything that nauseated Carl. She envisioned herself turning in the course of an evening’s near lovemaking into a creature blossoming with pimples and gleaming with chill sweat, her eyes grown suddenly small and close together (“Just can’t take little beady pig eyes”), her breath foul, her whole body magically transformed into a compendium of everything that he deplored. Then he would turn on the lights and gag and run shrieking from the car, never to be seen again. She couldn’t get the image out of her head, collapsing on her bed in silent spasms of giggling.
However her vision changed her feelings for him, it in no way altered their relationship. He went on taking her out, and presumably would go on doing so until he hit on a flaw and found it in her. And she went on dating him. Few other boys asked her out. She was a high school senior, boys in her classes dated younger girls, and the boys she had dated in earlier years had mostly gone away to college. After she had been going with Carl for two months she turned down all other invitations automatically.