But he had only told her to make her worry, she knew that. She knew it was the one small revenge he had for the sick sister Beth had foisted on him, and she didn’t blame him. She looked at the letter, with the written lines uneven and shaky, and she wondered if he had written it with a glass of booze in one hand, which was just the way she had read it.
God, we’re all so weak, she thought dismally. I’m no better than the Purvises. We can’t even face the crises in our lives without this. She made a face at the drink, and then she shut her eyes and finished it.
And suddenly she remembered something, hazily at first. Just a figure, small and dumpy, male and tired-looking. Then a face, round, heavy-eyed, high-crowned and balding. A short, heavy man. Who was he? She had seen him around the Village. She had seen him going far uptown on a bus, the same bus she was on.
“He was no damn John,” she said aloud. “He was the detective. He’s been following me all this time.” For a moment she swayed a little and her stomach turned. And then she straightened up and stared at her empty glass. The bitterness she expected to feel, the resentment, the injury, were dissipated.
Everything seemed suddenly ridiculous. Love was senseless, life was hopeless. She didn’t know what she was doing there in that stuffy room in a hotel in a city that was foreign to her. She didn’t know what she had come to find or whether she had found it. Nothing was simple, nothing was clear, and she felt dangerously as if she didn’t give a damn.
She had another drink. And another. And then she put her clothes back on and went out.
“You had another call, Mrs. Ayers,” the hotel clerk told her, but she didn’t even look at him and when she was out of earshot he told the elevator boy, “Snippy bitch.”
She went to the Village. She went to all the bars she could remember having been in and drank in all of them. She went to some she had never seen before with girls she didn’t know, and by early morning it seemed as if she knew all of them, as if they had all grown up together.
In the afternoon (who knew what afternoon?—the clock merely said two-thirty and the sun shone) she woke up in an apartment that stank of cats and orange juice. The girl in the bed beside her was still sleeping, her back to Beth. She was naked. Beth knew with a shudder, as she saw her, that they had made love. But she couldn’t remember her name. She couldn’t remember her face. She didn’t know where they had met or what they saw in each other.
At first her physical pains were sharp enough to engross her mind, and she didn’t worry about the girl. She got out of bed, holding her head, found the bathroom and tried to wash and dress herself. In the mirror her face looked tired and she felt a little dizzy. When she leaned over to brush her teeth a wave of nausea clutched her and she threw up precipitately into the washbasin. When she straightened up she discovered a number of curious bruises scattered over her limbs and body, as if she had fallen down. But she had no recollection of falling.
She opened the bathroom door to find the girl she slept with standing there, evidently waiting for her. She seemed fairly cheerful and she tweaked one of Beth’s breasts familiarly, as though she had the right.
“Hungover?” she said, and went past her into the bathroom.
Beth had raised a quick angry hand to stop the tweaking but it was too late. The girl laughed at her and said, “Bad-tempered Beth,” in a singsong voice.
And suddenly Beth was frightened. What in hell was her name? Why had she picked this girl? She found her purse and opened it, almost surprised to find her money still there. She ran a comb through her tangled hair and then she bolted for the front door like a prisoner on the run, buttoning her dress as she went.
“What’s the matter, honey? Don’t you want breakfast?”
Beth looked up to find her leaning in the open bathroom door, smiling suggestively. She was still undressed and laughing at Beth’s confusion.
Beth gave her one last look, wild and accusing, and then went out.
“Come and see me again sometime,” the girl called after her and her voice rang down the narrow hall. “When you can stay a little while.”
Beth found her way out of the labyrinthine apartment house and down a couple of very crooked streets full of homogeneous brown houses. She burst upon Seventh Avenue abruptly, without recognizing it, and found a restaurant.
It was small and not overly clean, in keeping with the nightmare atmosphere she was in, but it had food for sale, cooked. She ordered breakfast, but after letting her enumerate the items and tell him how she wanted her eggs, the waiter said, “What’s the matter, sister, can’t you tell time? It’s three in the afternoon. We got no eggs after ten, in the morning.”
She gave him a baleful look and settled for pastrami on rye. As an afterthought she ordered a beer. Unexpectedly it went down well and she ordered another.
When she left there seemed to be nothing to do but wander again, lost and looking, through the Village streets. The hotel depressed her unutterably; she couldn’t go to Laura, she wouldn’t go to Nina. And somehow, without exactly understanding where it started or how, she wound up in a bar again, drinking too much, talking too much, forgetting names and faces.
Late in the
