$20 Lust

1

I woke up after nine hours of solid sleep and felt like crawling back under the covers again. My mouth had a nauseous taste to it and my head ached in a most peculiar manner, as though the top of it was about ready to fly off and sail across the room. I felt hung over, and this was out of the question if only because I hadn’t had more than one or two drinks a day in... well, three months, at the very least. A cold glass of beer at Green’s over on Columbus Avenue once an afternoon, that was my limit.

And every afternoon I felt hung over.

While the shower down the hall was turning me from one of the living undead to one of the living dead again, I thought about the way every morning was another morning after, the way every afternoon was a gentle trip to Limbo with a bearded and gaunt Charon at the helm, too tired to pull on the oars. I thought about three months in New York, three months that were supposed to be therapy and that didn’t seem to be having much in the way of therapeutic value.

I got out of the shower, tried to get dry with the little postage stamp Mrs. Murdock jokingly called a towel, and finally gave up and padded back to my room. The window was open and the breeze that came through it was as warm as a willing wench. I let it do the job that the towel couldn’t do.

Therapy. It was half joke and half serious and I never knew just which end was up. If it was doing me any good I couldn’t quite see it. But it was better than going back. Bad as it was, it was one hell of a lot better than going back.

Back to a reporter’s desk on the Louisville Times. Back to a house on Crescent Drive, a small postwar house that was falling apart a little because they never did learn how to build houses after the war was over. A house that was not only falling apart but that was also quite empty; so empty that you could not only hear a pin drop but the fallen pin would echo hysterically in every room.

A cheap, crumbly house. But a house where every room smelled of Mona. Her scent was everywhere, and whether I actually smelled her or only imagined it didn’t make much difference at all. She was gone, gone forever, and the little frame house on Crescent Drive still reeked so strongly of her that I would wake up nights with a scream dying on my lips and cold sweat standing up on my forehead.

Those were bad days. I lasted almost two months in Louisville from the day Mona left me. But they were two very bad months. I lived on liquor and prowled dark streets from dusk to dawn, afraid of the house that was empty now, afraid of the night that covered up the city, afraid most of all of myself. Mona Lindsay was gone, gone with a nameless and faceless man, and Ted Lindsay walked empty streets with liquor in his belly and terror in his eyes.

I managed the job. It was easy work by then; after three years swinging Police Beat you can do it with your eyes closed, or half-open at best. There were no murders, no colorful outbreaks of juvenile jollity, nothing that required the services of a sober and serious reporter. All I had to do was drop on down to the station once a night, take the more significant details off the blotter, pound out fifty inches of tripe for the first edition and go back home to sleep.

I did my job and nothing more. The penetrating features, the exciting style, the little insights that had qualified me for Police Beat to begin with — those weren’t there anymore. But I swung my desk competently and nobody was going to fire me. Hanovan occasionally told me that my copy was dull, but Hanovan was always telling somebody that unless you turned out Pulitzer-grade copy every time a cat got caught in a tree. I did my job, earned my salary, and lived alone in my own private section of hell.

And I remembered. I remembered Mona — long golden hair breaking over creamy shoulders. Eyes like blue ice, cold and hot at once, ice and fire. I remembered all the delicious details of her delicious body. It was worth remembering — big, firm breasts, beautiful legs, skin as soft as feathers.

So much to remember. How much happens in two years of marriage? How many times had we made love? How many times had I kissed her, touched her, run my hands over that soft smooth skin?

Too many times. Too many times to just throw in the towel and forget it when some smooth-talking son of a bitch picked her up and carried her off into the night.

Too many times.

I would drink without tasting the liquor while it made its way down my throat. Then I would walk all over Louisville and the whole little drama would make its way through my mind. I would try to figure out why it had happened, why it had turned out the way it did. I never did figure it. I’m sure I never will. It happened. Period.

One day they found me sitting on a bench in the park across from a water fountain. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t passed out. I was just sitting with my hands folded neatly in my lap and my eyes focused on nothing special. They talked to me and I didn’t answer. Then they stood me up and led me away and showed me to a doctor.

Dr. Strom was all right. A decent guy. For about an hour we just sat staring at each other; then I started talking. I don’t remember what I told him and I do not want to remember, but I probably told him damn near everything. He sat through the whole bit without saying a word, just looking at me and nodding now and then.

Then he told me what the therapy would be.

“Lindsay,” he said, “I could have you come in three times a week to stretch out on the couch and bitch to me for fifty minutes at a time. You don’t want that. I don’t want it either. Frankly, I don’t think it would do you a hell of a lot of good. You’ve got something on your mind and you’re not going to get rid of it like that.”

I agreed with him. I’d considered analysis — I guess everybody does when he runs up against something that turns out to be a little too big for him. But it never appealed to me.

“I’d like you to try something else,” he went on. “A rather drastic treatment, perhaps, but one with a much better chance of success.”

I waited for him to go on.

“Your life is empty right now,” he said. “For the past two years you’ve been living a certain type of life. In that life your wife has played a predominant role. Now you’re attempting to continue living the same life with your wife left out of it. Obviously the life is not going to be a full one. Obviously any life you lead in Louisville now, living in the house where you both lived and seeing the people you both knew — well, such a life is going to be a strain upon you. A tremendous strain.”

“What do you suggest?”

“You ought to get out of town,” Strom said. “Sell your house, quit your job, head for another town. Take a job that doesn’t mean anything to you; something very different from newspaper work. Manual labor or office work or selling, something like that. Go to a big city and let yourself get lost in it. Make new friends, see new people, be alone with yourself. Develop a completely new routine. Read new books. See new movies. Try to find yourself.”

I interrupted him. “Look,” I said. “Look, it sounds fine. But I can’t do that. I’ve spent one hell of a long time getting where I am right now. It’s my whole life, damn it. I can’t just pack up and turn into somebody else. I can’t do that. I’d go nuts.”

“Nuts?”

I looked at him.

“Nuts?” he repeated. “Lindsay, I wonder if you know just where you are right now. Do you?”

I shook my head.

“You’re about three steps away from catatonia,” he said. “Schizophrenic catatonia. Keep on the way you’re going and one of these days you’ll start staring at a wall and you won’t stop. I’m not saying this to scare you, but I wouldn’t be playing it straight with you if I didn’t let you know just how rocky your present situation is. Your present existence is a whirlpool and you’re trying to swim out of it. Did you ever hear of anybody swimming out of a whirlpool?”

I found a few more objections and Strom found a few more answers for them. It was no contest — he knew what he was talking about and I didn’t, and the more we talked the more I started to realize it. When I left his office I headed for the Times Building, found Hanovan and told him I was leaving. He didn’t seem surprised; Strom must have filled him in. He told me he’d have a job for me anytime, shook my hand, and left me alone while I cleaned out my desk.

Then I found a relatively trustworthy real estate agent named Greg Cabot, listed my house with him, signed a bunch of papers without reading them, and went back to the house.

Inside it, I smelled her again. It made things just that much more difficult.

I packed a suitcase. I took along some clothes, a toothbrush, and nothing much else. The suitcase was a small one to begin with and I still couldn’t manage to fill it up.

So I took her picture along. It was the wrong thing to do, and I realized as I packed it that it was the wrong thing to do, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I packed it, locked the suitcase, heaved it into the backseat of my car and drove to the railroad station where I checked the suitcase in a locker.

Then I drove to the nearest used car lot and sold them my car. It broke my heart to do it but I forced myself. I liked that car. It wasn’t much according to the Madison Avenue tastemakers — just a Plymouth convertible five years old with the paint job starting to go. But it was made when they were still trying to make cars that would last instead of playing idiotic games with horsepower and tailfins. The upholstery was good imitation leather and the pickup was impressive. I loved that car. Mona had liked it too — liked to ride in it with the top down and the wind tossing her long yellow hair to hell and gone.

The dealer gave me a lousy two-fifty for it.

I hiked back to the station, reclaimed my suitcase and caught the next train for New York. The train took a long time getting there, stopping at various whistle stops to pick up the milk and get rid of the mail. I chain-smoked, ate a half-million tasteless ham-and-Swiss sandwiches, and remembered things that Dr. Strom had told me to forget.

When the train shuddered to a stop in Penn Station I took a temporary room in a cheap hotel in the Times Square area and unpacked. While I was putting my clothes in the dresser with the cockroaches I found the picture of Mona. I stared at it for an hour, maybe longer.

It all came back, of course. Dr. Strom would have bawled hell out of me for it and he would have been right, but Dr. Strom was many hundred miles away and I didn’t have him to straighten me out. All I had was the hotel room with its four cold walls, the bed with squeaking springs that reminded me of a motel room where Mona and I had made the walls ring with bed-squeaking. And, of course, I had the picture of Mona. My Mona.

God knows how or when the rift started. My work demanded enough of my time and interest so that I probably never saw the gap begin. Then, when it started widening, I found other things to worry about. I attributed the tension to a batch of convenient scapegoats — job pressure, end of a two-year honeymoon, Mona’s desire for a child and our inability thus far to conceive one. More and more often we were staying on our own sides of the big double bed, talking less to each other and, evidently, loving each other less.

Then one night I came home to her and she was packing a suitcase. I looked at her, unable to think of anything clever to say, and she told me quite calmly that she was leaving me.

I don’t remember what I said.

She told me his name, which I have since forgotten, although it turned up in the newspaper articles later. The Times didn’t carry the story out of some obscure loyalty to me but the Courier plastered it all over page one. But that part comes later.

She was in our bedroom, stuffing the last piece of clothing into her little suitcase and fastening the lid. The big double bed was all neatly made and the unfunny hilarity of that fact struck me — it was just like Mona to make the bed carefully even though she never intended to sleep in it again. She was a meticulous housekeeper, a better-than-average cook, a tigress in bed with the lights out.

Now she was leaving me.

She was saying something but I wasn’t listening anymore. I was looking at her. I can still remember how she was dressed — stockings and high heels, a very plain brown skirt the color of good chocolate, a canary yellow sweater that buttoned up the back. Her hair was falling free and it looked longer and yellower than ever.

She was a big woman. I’m somewhat better than six feet tall and when she wore heels her nose was level with my mouth. And she had the shape to take care of her height.

She went on talking but I still wasn’t listening.

I grabbed her. She tried to twist away from me but I didn’t let go of her. I wasn’t thinking anymore, just acting in a combination of instinct and self-preservation.

I slapped her and she loosened up. I ripped her sweater and all those buttons popped down the back of it like a row of dud firecrackers. I broke the catch on the chocolate brown skirt and tore it off of her. I got rid of the bra and panties. I let her keep the stockings because they didn’t get in my way.

I shoved her right down on top of that perfectly made bed and got my own clothes off and tumbled on top of her. She wasn’t struggling any more. I think that stopped the minute I ripped her sweater. She was just lying on her back with no expression whatsoever on her beautiful face, lying prone like a sack of flour, a broken doll, a corpse.

I raped her. Coldly and furiously, quickly and savagely. It was not good for me and, of course, it was not at all good for her. It had a beginning and a middle and an ending and then all at once it was over and I had a sickening taste in my mouth.

I rolled away from her, unable to look at her, unable to think about anything at all. I tried to stand up but I didn’t make it and I had to sit back down on the bed again. She stood up and began dressing once again. She put on fresh clothes and put the ones I had torn off back into her suitcase. For a long time she didn’t say anything.

Then she said: “I hope you enjoyed yourself, Ted.”

I told her I was sorry. I meant it, too, but somehow it came out sounding sarcastic.

“I’m still leaving, Ted. You can’t stop me.”

And of course she was right. I couldn’t stop her, and so I didn’t try. I let her go and when she was gone I began to cry. I hadn’t cried in years but I cried now. It hurt.

I think I got drunk that night. It’s hard to remember now but that’s probably what I did. And I’m positive I cried some more, and shook, and swore an oath that I would find her and get her back where she belonged if it killed me.

That turned out to be impossible.

A car from the Sheriff’s Office found them the next day. The nameless, faceless bastard who took her away had one of those cute little foreign jobs, a sports model that could take hairpin curves at eighty, only either the car goofed or the nameless, faceless bastard wasn’t much of a driver. At any rate the cute little foreign job missed one of those hairpin curves and did an end-over-end off the side of a convenient cliff.

There was hardly enough left to bury.

And so my wife had left me, and all the oaths in the world would not reclaim her. She was gone, quite irretrievably gone, and there was certainly no way of getting her back.

This time I didn’t cry. This time I simply drank.

So I looked at the picture which I shouldn’t have lugged to New York to begin with, looked at it long and hard for perhaps an hour and thought all the thoughts that Dr. Strom would have disapproved of so violently. After the hour or so had passed I took the picture, kissed it somewhat melodramatically, tore it into a thousand little celluloid threads and flushed them down the ancient toilet in the bathroom down the hall.

I went to sleep and dreamed bad dreams.

After a few days in the hotel I got a room and a job in that order. Neither was much to write home about, but for that matter there was nobody at home to write to. The room guaranteed that I wouldn’t die of exposure; the job guaranteed that I wouldn’t die of starvation. What more can anybody ask?

The room was in an old brownstone on West 73rd Street between Columbus and Amsterdam. It was a fourth-floor walkup, a little room with a single bed, a scarred dresser and a chair that might have qualified as an antique if it hadn’t been so ugly and broken down. There was a bathroom down the hall where the cockroaches could lead me every morning. The room cost ten dollars a week, which was reasonable, and the landlady was a sad-looking old baby who let me know that I could drink as much as I wanted as long as I didn’t puke, and screw as much as I wanted as long as I didn’t break the bed. It seemed decent enough.

The job came after the room, because I wanted to find something I could walk to rather than fight the IRT every morning and evening. I passed up the HELP WANTED: MALE section of the Times and wandered around the area looking for a job that didn’t require much in the way of talent.

It was an interesting neighborhood to wander around. There were a large number of faggots and dykes, the more subdued ones who thought it was gauche to live in the Village, a batch of Irish who drank in the wonderful bars on Columbus Avenue, a scattering of Puerto Ricans, and throughout a sprinkling of various Manhattan types. The neighborhood was small stores and bars and shops on Columbus and Amsterdam, bigger stores and restaurants on 72nd Street, and mostly brownstones with an occasional brick building on the side streets. Here and there you could find a tree, if you cared about it. I didn’t.

Central Park was just a block and a half away, which was nice if you cared about birds and grass and flowers and fresh air. Again, I didn’t.

There was a Help Wanted card in a window on Columbus and I took a long look at the place that wanted help. It looked as though they could use it. A big weather-beaten sign said the place was Grace’s Lunch and advised the world to drink Coca-Cola. The window needed a scrubbing and so, by the looks of things, did the people who ate there.

I went inside. There were half a dozen tables with chairs around them and maybe twice as many stools at the counter. A battered dame in her thirties with frizzy black hair was dividing her time between the counter and the cash register. There seemed to be somebody in the back cooking up the slop for her to serve. About eight or ten customers were shoveling it down.

I pulled up a stool and the dame with the hair came over and shoved a menu at me. It was dog-eared around the edges and contained a lot of food. Somebody’s fried eggs were stuck to it in one spot; the rest I couldn’t identify.

I gave the menu back to her. “I ate a little while ago,” I told her. “I’m looking for a job.”

“Ever sling hash before?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“Nothing much to it, actually. No cooking — Carl takes care of that end. Just take the orders, pour the coffee and like that. We don’t get much of a rush here. Just neighborhood people who know the place, regulars that come in all the time. You look at this place from the front and it doesn’t make much of a show. The grub’s good and the regulars know it. They don’t care how fancy it is.”

I filled in with a nod.

“My name’s Grace,” she told me. “I own the place. I need somebody nights from midnight to eight. Horrible hours for most people. It gets tough to keep help those hours. A guy’ll take the job, then quit me cold in a week or two as soon as his belly’s full. If you’re going to pull that bit I don’t need you. If you want to be steady the work’s here for you. The job pays forty a week and meals. You get to stuff yourself as much as you want while you work only don’t eat up all the profits or I’ll fire you. Try to cheat me and I’ll catch you. Sound fair enough to you?”

“Fair enough. I’m just looking for steady work.”

“That’s what it is. You don’t mind the hours?”

I was used to them. I told her I didn’t mind at all. And the job turned out to be simple enough. Grace couldn’t have gotten rich on the midnight-to-eight shift; the bulk of the trade was coffee-an’ with an occasional ham and eggs thrown in. Most of the time the place was half empty; sometimes Carl and I would talk to each other without seeing a single customer for twenty minutes at a clip.

But the food was good and the pay was enough to live on. I spent April and May settling down into a strange sort of routine, the general type of life that Dr. Strom had said would do me the most good. Up at four or five in the afternoon, coffee on a hot plate in my room, a magazine in my room or a movie around the corner on Broadway. A walk, a nap or something until it was time to go to work.

Then eight hours of work, broken up with a meal or two and a few rounds of the harmless and generally useless conversation a counterman has with a customer. I got to know the regulars — a couple of cabbies who made a stop at Grace’s once or twice a night for coffee, a bartender from Maloney’s who’d stop in for a bite as soon as his place was closed for the night, a waitress who ended her shift at four and a batch of guys and dolls whom I knew only by their faces.

It was supposed to be therapy. I was completely alone, as alone as a person could be who still talked to people, still breathed city air and still walked in city streets. No one knew more about me than my name. No one asked where I was from, what I was doing, where I was headed. Come to think of it, Grace was the only person in New York outside of my landlady who knew my last name. To everybody else I was Ted, or Hey, You.

I think I understand what Strom had in mind. Bit by bit every shred of the identity of Ted Lindsay, Reporter, was evaporating. At first I would glance through the New York papers with the eye of a pro, but now all I read were the stories themselves. Fine points flew by me; I was too immersed in other things to bother with them. They didn’t matter at all anymore.

And, as Ted Lindsay disappeared, Mona Lindsay gradually faded into the background. As I lost consciousness of myself the woman who was lost forever gradually ebbed into oblivion, or Limbo, or whatever is the abode of lost and forgotten souls. This isn’t to say that I forgot her, because forgetting Mona would have been like forgetting a white cow. You know the bit? Try not to think of a white cow. See what I mean?

But I would test myself now and then, trying to think of her without caring, trying to remember her without getting a hard painful spot in my chest about where your heart is supposed to be. It got progressively easier. Away from Louisville, away from the Times Building, away from our home and our friends and all the places where we had been together, the memories of her were far less compelling, far less vivid and real.

It should have been ideal. By all rules it should have been ideal, just an inch or two short of Nirvana. It wasn’t, and this was a constant source of irritation to me. It didn’t send me screaming, didn’t drive me to drink in the cool green Irish bars on Columbus Avenue, for the elementary reason that there was nothing to scream about, nothing to drink over.

There was no pain.

But pleasure is more than the absence of pain. And, all in all, the life I was leading was totally devoid of pleasure. One day followed the next with mechanical precision. Eight hours of nothing was followed by eight hours of work which in turn was followed by eight hours of sleep. Life was three shifts of eight hours each, seven of these groups of three making a week. The worst day in each week was Sunday — then I had to find something to do to fill in the eight hours when I would otherwise have been working.

The monotony of it was occasionally overpowering. Little things became very important — taking my shirts to the laundry was a big thing, even if Toy Lee didn’t have much to say to me when I handed him my shirts or picked them up. A haircut was a big deal. I never bought much of anything, but I window-shopped constantly, furnishing an apartment mentally and buying a whole new wardrobe in my mind.

It wasn’t enough.

There were needs, basic and human needs. The need for a woman, of course. I hadn’t had a woman since Mona left. I suppose there were opportunities for that — lonely women nursing cups of lukewarm coffee at the lunch counter, whores walking up and down Broadway, that sort of thing. But I hardly knew where to begin.

I was out of practice. Two years of marriage plus a year of courtship added up to three years without another woman than Mona. The role of wolf was a foreign one; I would have felt ridiculous approaching a girl.

The need for someone to talk to was even more important, actually. Living alone, eating alone, never talking about anything more far-reaching than the weather or the murders in the tabloids — this didn’t make for the world’s most stimulating existence. I didn’t know anybody, didn’t get any letters or write any.

But no single need seemed to be important enough for me to do anything about it. If I had needed a woman badly enough, I suppose I would have found one who would have been obliging. If I had needed a friend badly enough, it’s logical to guess that I would have found one over the counter at Grace’s or over a beer at Green’s. I read somewhere that a man gets anything in the world if he wants it badly enough. But I couldn’t even want anything, not deeply enough for it to matter inside, where it counted.

So it was mid-June, and I dried myself with warm air from the window and boiled water in the teakettle on the hot plate. The water boiled and the kettle whistled. I spooned instant coffee into a white china cup and poured water on it. I stirred it with a spoon, set it on the sill to cool and looked out across the courtyard at somebody’s washing. When the coffee was cool I drank it, then washed out the cup in the bathroom and put it away.

I walked down three flights of stairs as usual, stole a look at the heap of mail as usual — which was silly, since no one on Earth knew my address — and, as usual, walked out of the building and down the steps.

Outside, a damned fine day was finishing up. There’s a line in a song that goes I like New York in June. How about you? and it makes good sense. New York is eminently likable in June with the air warm and the skies generally clear. Later in the summer it gets too hot, far too hot, but in June it’s better than any other time. The sky was clear as good gin and the air even smelled clean. I took deep breaths of it and felt good.

I walked around the corner to the candy store and exchanged a dime for a copy of the Post. Then I wandered over to the park and found an empty bench to sit on while I made my way through the paper to find out what if anything was new in the world. Nothing much was. Some politicians were trying to decide to cut out nuclear tests without managing to accomplish much of anything, some local crime commissions were investigating some local crime, God was in his heaven and all was wrong with the world.

There were only two stories that I read all the way through. One told about a young mother in Queens who had meticulously removed her husband’s genitals with a grapefruit knife; the other reported on a teenager in Flatbush who’d gotten jealous over his girlfriend and then cut off her breasts with a switchblade. I thought that the two of them ought to get together, and then I thought that the New York Post ought to be ashamed of itself; and then I thought that maybe I ought to be ashamed of myself. I threw the paper in a trashcan and left the park before dark. Only mad dogs and Englishmen walk in Central Park after the sun goes down.

I bought a bag of peanuts from a sad-looking peanut vendor at the 72nd Street gate. It was an ordinary day, this time an ordinary day with peanuts. I ate the peanuts and threw the shells in the gutter. I kept walking.

I thought about things. Maybe Dr. Strom had either shot his wad or accomplished his mission in life. Maybe it was due time for me to get the hell out of New York and back to Louisville where I belonged. The Police Beat at the Times was infinitely more exciting than slinging hash at Grace’s Lunch. The house on Crescent Drive was far more livable than the brownstone on 73rd Street. Ted Lindsay, Reporter was a considerably more exciting individual than Ted Lindsay, Nobody.

Perhaps I was cured. Now I could go back to my home and settle down again, take an apartment a few blocks from the Times Building and get my old job back: Hanovan would find work for me, even push some deserving bum out in order to get me back where I belonged. All I had to do was ask him.

I thought about this, and I thought about other things, and I thought about how nice it would be to feel alive again. And then I saw the girl.