The shower helped. It didn’t do the trick single-handed, of course, and when he finally finished his turn under first the hot spray and then the cold spray and stepped out of the tub again, he felt a good deal better but a long ways from human. The dizziness was still present in a smaller dose and his thirst was unchanged.
He drank glass after glass of cold water, not even pausing to count them. He filled the plastic glass and poured it down his throat again and again in a heroic attempt to fill his stomach with water. Then he took his toothbrush and removed the fuzzy woolen sweaters that seemed to be shrouding his teeth.
He looked in the mirror and shuddered. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot. There was a gash on his cheek where he had evidently managed to cut himself during the night. And his face, in one way or another, had aged a good ten years in the one night. The lines in his forehead and around his nose and mouth had deepened perceptibly. He wondered how much of this was a temporary effect of drunkenness and how much was a permanent change.
Back in the bedroom he dressed slowly and methodically, wondering but not caring where Stella had gone, wondering but not caring how he himself would spend the day, wondering about a great many things but caring about very little of anything. He put on a blue sport shirt and a pair of khaki pants, tied his tennis shoes too tight and had to re-tie them, and at last walked out of the bedroom, out of the apartment, down the hallway and out of the building into the cool air of the morning.
It was a beautiful morning — clear without being too hot yet, the air fresh and the sky a deep, rich shade of blue. Somehow this only made everything a little worse. If it were drizzling and freezing and otherwise vile it would be more in keeping with the way he felt.
Well, he said to himself, you really tied one on, you simple bastard. Talking to himself helped in some way or other and he felt a little bit better for it. His step quickened as he walked to the restaurant for breakfast, the same one where he and Susan had had their first conversation over breakfast.
When he arrived at the restaurant he sat alone in the same booth that he and Susan had occupied before. He ordered scrambled eggs, orange juice, toast and coffee. This, as it turned out, was somewhat on the optimistic side. The coffee was helpful and he was able to get the orange juice and toast down, but no matter how hard he worked at it he couldn’t bring himself to eat the eggs. After a while he gave up and glared at them balefully.
Where did he go from here?
It was, he admitted, a good question. A delightfully profound question. He only wished he knew the answer.
He gulped down what coffee was left in his cup and beckoned to the counterman for a refill. The counterman took his cup and filled it up again and Ralph looked down into the coffee, remembering the way he had stared into the shot of liquor the night before to see Susan’s face floating upon the liquid.
He couldn’t see her face in the cup of coffee. But when he closed his eyes for a brief second, every detail of her face and body flooded his brain and his head began to throb from the vision. He lit a cigarette, which didn’t taste good at all, to go with the coffee which tasted like turpentine.
What was he going to do?
Or, to start with, what did he know about the whole thing?
He knew Susan was a lesbian. This didn’t require much in the way of perception on his part since she had taken care to inform him of the fact. He knew that he was in love with her, and that the love he felt for her was a very genuine and wholehearted emotion. He also knew — and again it didn’t take any genius to figure it out — that as a lesbian Susan didn’t have much use for him as a lover.
Which made the whole thing look pretty hopeless.
But he couldn’t help engaging in a bit of wishful thinking. Perhaps Susan’s lesbianism wasn’t anything organic. Perhaps it was her mind rather than her glands which had made her the way she was, her fear of men which had forced her to accept the caresses of women. Deep in his own mind was the notion that he ought to be able to bring Susan out of her shell. If he could convince her that he loved her and that his love wasn’t something to be afraid of, there was no reason why she couldn’t learn to return his love.
And for once in his life, love was the important thing. Susan was the most thoroughly desirable woman he had ever met, but a sexual relationship with her was something he could do without as long as he had to. He saw in her something far more valuable than a bedmate, far more important than a partner in sex games. A woman like Susan could add a whole new dimension to his life. With her at his side he could get rid of his involvement with Stella once and for all and get back on the road to respectability. The Villagers could talk all they wanted about freedom, but he was convinced that true freedom meant more than the right to wear sloppy clothes and go without brushing your teeth and sleep with everybody who came along.
Freedom meant being free to do things. Freedom, or at least the sort of freedom he wanted for himself, meant the freedom to love one person and one person alone, to work toward a goal and to live a life that meant something. And, with Susan, he might be able to achieve this sort of freedom.
It was a cinch he wouldn’t make it without her.
God, why was he such a weakling? The thought nagged at him that another stronger man might have a better chance with Susan. But he couldn’t even get up the guts to break away from Stella by himself. How in hell could he save Susan when he couldn’t even save himself?
Disgusted with himself, he paid the check and left a tip on the table. He lit another cigarette and smoked as he walked slowly back to his apartment. He waited in the vestibule, seeing Stella and Maria in the hallway by the apartment door. After they were inside the apartment he opened the door and walked to the staircase and up the stairs to the fourth floor.
Susan didn’t answer his knock. He tried the door; it was open. Inside on the coffee table there was a note for him explaining that she had to get some work done at the ceramics shop but that she would be back fairly soon and he could wait for her. He sat down in the chair where she always posed and waited.
He recognized her steps on the stairway less than an hour later and had the door open for her when she came in. She had a smile on her face and her eyes were bright.
“Hi,” she said.
“How did the work go?”
“Very well. The design I’m working on is very tricky, and the first three times I tried it the pot fell. But this time I think it’s going to hold up.”
They went on talking while she removed her clothing. For the first time she undressed in front of him and he thought to himself that she couldn’t be a lesbian, that if she was there was still a chance for him, that she was so natural about everything she did that she could learn to be natural about sex as well. He looked at her, marveling how each time he saw her body it was like seeing it for the first time, how each time he talked with her he fell in love with her all over again.
She sat down in the chair without being told and assumed the pose automatically. He removed the rag that covered the painting and began mixing paint on his palette.
Then he looked at her and stopped what he was doing. He looked long and hard at her, first at her body for only a second and then very carefully at her face.
“What’s the matter?”
He started to tell her that nothing was the matter, that he was merely trying to determine how to get the right color for her eyes. But the words didn’t come out.
“Ralph?”