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The fact that the adjustment was so perfect merely meant that in the end, with the deep-seated instinct for self preservation, I was consorting with common whores. I was at that time on the evening edition, and finished my stint about two in the afternoon. After a couple of drinks and a late lunch in a speak-easy, then a couple more drinks and a game of billiards at the press club, I might call on one of my friends. Then at di
Then came the final phase, the phase of the Great Sleep. Immediately after di
But of course there was Lois. Sometimes she would come into my bedroom–by this time I had moved into the guest room for my serious sleeping–and sit on the edge of the bed and give me long descriptions of myself, rather monotonous descriptions, as a matter of fact, for Lois had little gift of phrase and had to fall back on the three or four classic terms. Sometimes she would beat me with her clenched fists. She had a feeble, female way of using her little white fists. I could sleep through the descriptions, and almost through the beating of the clenched fists on my side or back. Sometimes she would cry and give vent to a great deal of self-pity. Once or twice she even snuggled into bed with me. Sometimes she would open the door to my room and turn up the phonograph in the living room until the joint shook. But no soap. I could sleep through anything, or just about.
Then the morning came when I open my eyes and felt the finger of Fate upon me; I knew the time had come. I got up and packed my suitcase and walked out the door and didn't come back. To the slick apartment and to Lois who was beautiful and to whom I was so perfectly adjusted.
I never saw her again, but I know what she looks like now when cocktails, bonbons, late hours, and nearly forty years have done their work on the peach bloom of cheeks, the pearly, ripe but vigorous bosom, the supple midriff, the brooding, black, velvety-liquid eyes, the bee-stung lips, the luxurious thighs. She sit on a divan somewhere, held more or less in shape by the vigor of a masseuse and the bands of lastex which secretly sheathe her like a mummy, but bloated with the entire universe she has ingurgitated with a long delicious sigh. An now with a hand on which the pointed nails are as red as though she had just used them to rip greedily the guts from a yet living sacrificial fowl, she reaches out to a silver dish to pick up a chocolate. And while the chocolate is yet in mid-air, the lower lip drops open and beyond the purplish tint of the microscopically scaling veneer of lipstick, one sees the damp, paler red, expectant membranes of the mouth, and the faint glitter of a gold filling in the dark, hot orifice.
Good-bye, Lois, and I forgive you everything I did to you.
As for the way A
She lived alone in a small apartment in the city. Occasionally she had lunch with some woman who had been a friend of her girlhood but who now inhabited another world. Occasionally she went to a party, at the house of one of the women or at the country club. She became engaged for a third time, this time to a man seventeen or eighteen years older that she, a widower with several children, a substantial lawyer, a pillar of society. He was a good man. He was still vigorous and rather handsome. He even had a sense of humor. But she did not marry him. More and more, as the years passed, she devoted herself to sporadic reading–biography (Daniel Boone or Marie Antoinette), what is called "good fiction," books on social betterment–and to work without pay for a settlement house and an orphanage. She kept her looks very well and continued, in a rather severe way, to pay attention to her dress. There were moments now when her laugh sounded a little hollow and brittle, the laughter of nerves not of mirth or good spirits. Occasionally in a conversation she seemed to lose track and fall into a self-absorption, to star up overwhelmed by embarrassment and unspoken remorse. Occasionally, too, she practiced the gesture of lifting her hands to her brow, one on each side, the fingers just touching the skin or lifting back the hair, the gesture of a delicate distraction. She was pushing thirty-five. But she could still be good company.
That was the A
That was why I had got into my car and headed west, because when you don't like it where you are you always go west. We have always gone west.
That was why I drowned in West and relived my life like a home movie.
That was why I came to lie on a bed in a hotel in Long Beach, California, on the last coast amid the grandeurs of nature. For that is where you come, after you have crossed oceans and eaten stale biscuits while prisoned forty days and nights in a storm-tossed rat-trap, after you have sweated in the greenery and heard the savage whoop, after you have built cabins and cities and bridged rivers, after you have lain with women and scattered children like millet seed in a high wind, after you have composed resonant documents, made noble speeches, and bathed your arms in blood to the elbows, after you have shaken with malaria in the marshes and in the icy wind across the high plains. That is where you come, to lie alone on a bed in a hotel room in Long Beach, California. Where I lay, while outside my window a neon sign flickered on and off to the time of my heart, systole and diastole, flushing and flushing again the gray sea mist with a tint like blood.