The End of Me Page 10

  Anyway, I’d lie down on the couch, loosen my tie, remove my shoes, and nap. One afternoon, about a week after I had quarreled with Michael, Aurora let herself into my suite with the hotel key I had given her. I had asked her to use it whenever she wished to. She could study, or rest, or shower whenever she was uptown. During the week that had passed, I had studiously avoided talking about Michael. The truth was that, despite the fact that I blamed him for the quarrel between us, I found I missed him; not acutely, not importantly: but enough to feel somewhat duller. When I had spent my mornings walking through the city with him I hadn’t napped in the afternoons.

  Aurora looked at me asleep. There was a bowl of fruit on the coffee table among the scattered magazines I’d bought, and she took an orange and sat down in the big armchair near the window and waited for me to awaken. She took her shoes off. She looked out of the window. Dusk was over the park. The trees were almost Japanese in their leaflessness. She peeled the orange. She ate one of the slices. The orange was dry. She spat the orange pips into her hand and then got up to put the pips into the wastebasket. She looked into the mirror over the couch on which I lay asleep. I hadn’t shaved. I had loosened my belt. She looked quite pale in the mirror. She had for the occasion used very little make-up. She went back and sat down in the armchair.

  I opened my eyes. There she was, in the chair: with the orange. I was delighted. She was a nice thing to wake up from a more or less troubled sleep and find. I sat up on the couch, and yawned. I stood up and encountered myself in the mirror. I grimaced. My mouth tasted of sleep and cigarettes. She smiled, wanly, at the look I had given myself in the glass. I went into the kitchenette and rinsed my mouth and drank some water. She could hear the water splash in the metal sink.

  I suppose that afternoon letting herself in, seeing me asleep, sitting in the chair, peeling the orange, examining herself in the mirror, dusk falling, the trees leafless, myself awakening, going to the kitchenette, rinsing my mouth, hearing water, she had asked herself if she looked troubled enough. If she looked pale enough. If eating the orange was the right touch. If I’d notice she wasn’t her usual self. Her gay, her light self. If I’d notice the calculated and desolate air.

  I finally noticed.

  I said: “What is it, darling? What’s the matter?”

  Looking as she intended to look involved a certain darkening of the eyes. An effective hunching of the shoulders. It involved looking somehow small. And exceeding defenseless.

  I crossed the room.

  I said: “Something’s the matter,” and knelt beside the chair, to look into her great eyes. They looked as she intended them to look: beautiful and troubled.

  She said nothing was the matter. Of course, I knew better. Something so evidently was the matter. She said she had no right to burden me with her difficulties. Difficulties, I insisted, were the only things to burden a friend with. And I was her friend. A little uncomfortable, kneeling there, but her friend. Dusk continued to fall. The trees became more disembodied in the park. She said, averting her head, that she would be all right in a little while, she was feeling, she said, just a little low. I took her hand. I am, as Michael might say, a hand-taker. Warm reassuring palm clasped to troubled palm.

  I said: “Now, look. Something’s the matter. I know something’s the matter. Don’t be foolish. Tell me.”

  A pause.

  Sounding as she intended to sound, she said: “It’s my mother.”

  “Is she ill?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very?”

  “Enough.”

  “What is it?”

  “A tumor, I guess.”

  “Isn’t the doctor sure?”

  “That’s why he wants her to go to a hospital.”

  “Well, send her.”

  “On what?”

  “Doesn’t she have medical insurance?”

  “No.”

  She picked at the orange in her lap.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  I took the orange away and held it in my hand.

  I said: “How much money does your mother need?”

  “Two hundred dollars,” she said.

  She hadn’t moved. She didn’t look up. She seemed, I thought, frightened, a little frightened. She had looked just a little frightened, I thought, as she said “two hundred dollars.” I stood up. My knees ached; I wasn’t equipped for prolonged kneeling any more. My belt was still loosened and my pants hung a bit limp drearily folded over my stockinged ankles. Again I encountered myself in the mirror: my hair was much grayer when it was uncombed. I padded to the closet in the bedroom where my coat hung and took my checkbook from the inner breast pocket. I came back to the sitting room and went to the writing desk and sat down and started to write a check. I made it out for two hundred dollars and signed it.

  Taking it as she had intended to take it, she looked at the check. I suppose she got scared now the check was actually in her hand. I suppose she thought she might be lying her mother into a real tumor. Things like that happened. If only I weren’t in my socks. If only my pants didn’t hang so.

  She handed me back the check.

  “No,” she said.

  “No what?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with my mother.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, shit,” she said. “Do I have to put it on the teletype? There isn’t any tumor.”

  I stared at her.

  She got up from the chair. She looked angrily at the floor.

  “Where did I put my goddam shoes?” she said.

  But, though I was bewildered, though I held the check foolishly in my hand, though she went through the business of finding her shoes and got furiously into them, I was sure something was the matter. I went to her. I put my hands on her arms. I am, as Michael might say, an arm-taker.

  I said: “Now stop it. You do need money. If nothing’s wrong with your mother, what is wrong?”

  She wouldn’t answer. She simply looked furious about something.

  “Now, Aurora. What is it?”

  I was being firm. I was being, again, the patient one. Her knowledgeable senior.

  She said, reluctantly (I was extracting it against her will, I was forcing it from her): “It’s my goddam school tuition. I need a hundred and fifty dollars for my next semester and I don’t have it.”

  I think I looked reproachful.

  “And your mother doesn’t really have a tumor?”

  “My mother,” she said, angrily, “doesn’t even have a four-card flush.”

  “Baby, you didn’t have to.”

  “What?”

  “Lie to me.”

  “Oh, shit. School. It sounded so idiotic.”

  “And that’s what you’ve been so miserable about?”

  “I hate needing money.”

  “We all hate needing money.”

  Business now of looking relieved. Tender smile. A squeeze of her unhappy hand. The things I do with a woman never vary. I see myself, down the years, in the gathering of time, squeezing unhappy hands. I hear my solicitous voice.

  “Baby, a hundred and fifty dollars isn’t one of the great calamities.”

  Actually, of course, what she was thinking at the moment, as she confessed later, was that at the first chance she got she was going to kill Michael. She was going to cut off his bizarre nuts, she was going to fry them in Crisco. And, of course, my pants sagging. She thought any minute she’d giggle. My pants were going to fall, she thought, she’d giggle, and then somebody would throw a custard pie. It absolutely figured.

  “The check is already made out, darling,” I said. “Take it.”

  And I was, again, pressing the inscribed thing on her.

  “Asher, I don’t really want it,” she said.

  “Keep quiet.”

  “Honestly. I’ll get the money. Somewhere.”

  The “somewhere” was brave and indefinite. It simply made me fold the check, open her purse, and put the slip of paper away inside it
.

  Looking distressed as she intended to look distressed, she said, “Oh, Asher.”

  Now I was jaunty. It is possible to say that at similar moments, having thus rescued, having thus alleviated the bothersome finances of a woman, having restored again her sense of being safe, I have been jaunty. My arm went about her. She leaned slightly to me. Her warmth penetrated to me. I am, as Michael might say, easily moved by such penetrations.

  I said: “I just don’t want you to be unhappy, darling. I like the idea of your going to school. I like it that you want to become a lawyer. Pay your tuition and stop looking so woebegone.”

  She tried not to look so woebegone.

  “Better. Now smile.”

  She produced a trembling smile.

  “There. Now where would you like to have dinner?”

  30

  But I didn’t have dinner with Aurora that evening. She begged me to forgive her, she felt so exhausted, perhaps tomorrow night we could have dinner, on Lexington, perhaps, at one of the Balkan restaurants.

  I had a certain hesitancy about asking her if she was going to see Michael. She insisted she wasn’t. She was going directly home and straight into a hot bath. Besides, she was very angry with Michael.

  “Oh?”

  She had, she said, an absolutely sick taste in her mouth about Michael at this moment.

  “Oh?”

  She was going straight home and get into a hot bath and just soak.

  “Oh?”

  I remember I kissed her at the hotel door, and she went off, down the silent hotel corridor, past the vacuum cleaners and the carts stacked with dishes, huddled in the muskrat, the purse with the check folded neatly in it tucked under her arm. I waited until I heard the elevator, and the door hiss closed, and then I went back and looked into the mirror and thought I ought to shave. It was almost six o’clock and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. Michael had filled my afternoons and the girl had filled my evenings. Now that I had quarreled with the boy, and she had gone home to soak in a tub, I felt lost again.

  I had dinner and then I went to the theatre. I walked down Broadway in the cold past the haberdashery and the novelty shops and looked at some of the pictures of the hostesses at the dance parlors and at the late headlines in the early editions on the news-stands and then I decided to see if I could get a seat at one of the new plays. I hadn’t been to the theatre in years. One simply didn’t manage to go in California. Not that I missed it but I had gone when I lived in New York. I had no trouble getting a seat at the new play: it was only, apparently, the musicals that one had trouble getting a seat at. I checked my coat, and as I sat down in my seat I thought, again, that it was a bit odd that Aurora should have gone to the elaborate extent of telling me the thing about her mother having a tumor; I mean, if it was a lie, it was a rather cruel choice of lies. I could see that she might have wanted a more serious reason to borrow money, for it occurred to me, now, that she must have come to the hotel either hoping or planning to borrow the money, but I couldn’t quite see what had led her to invent and then reject the rather unpleasant thing about a tumor. I decided that she had simply been ashamed about the money, and that she’d said merely the first thing that had come to mind. Still, why should her mother’s having a tumor (something ugly and willful like that) have been the first thing to come to her mind? The play began.

  It was not a long play and it was set in Connecticut in a large, well-furnished suburban house with an inexhaustible liquor cabinet. In my time plays that were set in Connecticut in large, well-furnished suburban houses had had three acts and there was, I could remember, a lot of small talk that took place between the big talk, and I was gratified to see that at least that hadn’t changed. There was possibly, now, more than in my time, more big talk. Or, if one wished to put it a little differently, the small talk was more loaded. Anyway, the play was about contemporary unhappiness.

  The play seemed to be saying that we were unhappy, not only in Connecticut, but by inference in any large well-furnished suburban house, because something in the way we lived now prevented us from living lives that resulted in a felt happiness. We did our best: and our best was all wrong. We grew old but not wise. We weren’t really very nice people. We did not know why we were what we were but the suspicion was allowed that it was because of some contamination in the American air. The play did not end unhappily but one couldn’t say it had ended happily either. It hardly seemed to end at all. It simply exhausted its own uneasy questions. I went out of the theatre. It had rained while I had been at the play and the police wore their big raincoats. I stood for a moment against the window of a pancake eating-place and watched the crowd go by. I watched a redheaded girl in green ski-pants and brown leather boots carrying a hat-box go by. An old woman muttering to herself. A hooker. A Negro in a beret. A Negro in a blue parka. An elderly Negro in overalls and carrying a pail and chewing a cigar and wearing a window cleaner’s harness. A girl with heavy calves encased in black boots. They went by. I didn’t want to go back to the hotel yet. I started to walk in the light drizzle. I thought of my wife. I was pleased that I was able to think of it now and I did not cringe. I could look at it. I could see his hand going under the sweater and unhooking the brassiere and I did not cringe. I could look at it. There was hope for me yet. All I needed was a touch-up artist and double my wheat germ and cut down on the cigarettes. Something could be salvaged after all. I felt good enough to even think that it might be fun to go into one of the discothèques and have a drink at the bar by myself and see what they looked like. I didn’t have a wife to check in with at precisely midnight in Des Moines. Or anywhere else.

  I went downstairs and there was the bar and there was the discothèque. The girls who did the dancing were on a small platform elevated above the main dance floor. The lights were dim below and bright above. There were linked gold chains suspended from the ceiling supporting the platform on which the girls danced. It resembled a cage. At the Beni-Bashi in Tokyo the girls waited inside a bamboo cage. You looked into the cage and beckoned the girl you liked. You had dinner and danced with her, or you had drinks and danced with her. At the Cherry Club the girls sat on divans and there wasn’t any dancing. I suddenly remembered the name of a girl at the Cherry Club. Noriko. She shaved. She was completely shaved. Absolutely smooth. The music in the discothèque was loud and the beat was heavy. The girls bumped it a little or ground it a little and their sequins winked and their tassels tossed. It was all very jungly. Broadway jungly. Tab-collar jungly.

  I went down to the men’s room. Slanted over the urinal, accompanied by the soft hum of the perpetual waters, a little flushed-faced man was singing.

  “I’m an unreconstructed rebel

  That’s just what I am

  And for this land of freedom

  I do not give a damn.”

  “Shine?” said the elderly Negro attendant. I shook my head. The little flushed-faced chorister shook it and stepped away from the urinal. He was happily stoned. His accent wasn’t Southern. It was Brooklyn Irish. Upstairs the music throbbed. The happy gent didn’t tip the attendant. He had also forgotten to zip up his pants. He started to climb the marble stairs. He was going back to the music. “I hates the Yankee nation,” he sang, “that’s just what I do.” I looked at the Negro attendant. He winked. He wasn’t going to tell him either. “And I hates the Declaration—of Independence too.” We watched him disappear up the marble stairs. I thought his unzippered fly should add something to the communal merriment. I flushed the urinal, tipped the attendant, and left. I was about ready to go back to my hotel.

  The one thing I still did not seem to be able to do anything about was the insomnia. I had no trouble falling asleep. That wasn’t it. But there was something frightening about the automatic way my eyes opened abruptly in the darkness of my bedroom almost every night and at, uncannily, almost the same hour. It was dark but it was morning not quite light yet and yet the night was really over. I seemed caught between an
end and a beginning. What was it that awakened me? It was as though some sort of clock that I couldn’t hear tick had gone off and insisted that this was the hour for me to awake. I’d lie there and try not to think, hoping desperately that I would fall asleep again without starting to think, but the clock, invisible and without gears, which had awakened me, seemed to insist that this was exactly what I had been awakened for. I had been awakened to think. But to think of what? What was the question that needed so much answering? If I were being awakened to confront a question, why didn’t the question appear? Then I would have had a reasonable chance at an answer. But nothing came to me as I lay on the no longer comfortable pillow with the great hotel asleep and room service shut down and the life of the city itself suspended. Just the not being able to return to sleep and the not wishing to read and the dislocation of objects in the dark. Toward morning, when the light was actual, and I could hear the first trucks below, the necessity of answering the question I couldn’t phrase for myself would seem to leave me and I’d fall asleep, and during the day itself the shadow of those insomniac hours would wear thin and disappear.

  About three o’clock, the next afternoon, I heard the key in the lock again. Clutching her law books, Aurora came into the suite. She looked even paler. She put the law books down and opened her purse. She took out the check I had given her the day before. She put the check down wordlessly on the writing desk next to the album of my photographs.

  I looked at her and I looked at the check. The gesture was unmistakable. She was refusing the money. I thought I knew why. That is: because she was so pale and because she was so silent, I thought I knew why she was refusing the money. I flushed. My god: I was sure I hadn’t meant anything like that. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. Well: maybe a little. I’d meant the money honestly enough. No small print in the contract, no obscene clauses. No strings that led from my indorsement to a small tour of the nearest mattress. $200! I’d lost that much in an afternoon at the track. I’d spent that much on far sillier things than a semester’s tuition. She needn’t have had those belated qualms. She could have ignored it. Smiled. Been quietly grateful or not grateful at all. Paid the tuition. Viewed it as a charitable donation. Treated me like a private foundation who aided slum blossoms having difficulties with their higher education. Forgotten it. Gone on. Now she’d brought the check back and the simple signing of it had a suddenly villainous air.