Yeah, well, so much for that.
I go to sleep Thursday night with Betsy’s hand wrapped around Oscar and I wake up Friday morning and she’s gone. Friday noon. And she’s gone.
I wandered around the house for a long time before I realized something was wrong. In the first place, I had a hangover, a really beautiful hangover, with the kind of headache I think of as cold stone. There are different kinds of headaches in this world, you know. There are brown wax headaches, which usually accompany clogged sinuses or a stuffy nose. There are thin wire headaches which come from eyestrain. There are green cotton headaches when you’re constipated. And there are cold stone headaches when your brain is loose inside your skull and grating against the bone. Those are the worst, and that’s what I had Friday morning, which is one reason I didn’t think much about Betsy’s absence, except to feel sorry for myself that I had to make my own instant coffee and pour my own orange juice, which was all the breakfast I could even think about.
Another reason is that Betsy and I live at different schedules, she locked into Fred’s sleeping and rising habits, me locked into the fact that I usually work best at night. It’s early afternoon now, about one o’clock, but I’m running scared this month and I’m talking about usually. Usually Betsy goes to bed at twelve or one and I go to bed at three or four. She gets up at eight or nine and I get up at eleven or twelve. So a lot of times she’s already out to the store when I get up, and I make myself a cup of coffee and wait around for her to come back and make breakfast.
That was the way it was Friday, though I wasn’t exactly waiting for breakfast. I was mostly waiting to find out whether or not my skull was going to crack open from the top of my nose up over my head and down to the back of my neck. I would have taken three to two on the positive. As a result, I was up an hour or more before I began to spot the odd signs, the drawers half open, the things gone from here and there.
I didn’t get it. I was just as baffled as Paul, I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. It had been so long since Betsy had read any of my books it never even occurred to me that she might have gone in and looked at the new manuscript. It never entered my mind.
But that’s what she did. I don’t know if she did it Thursday night after I fell asleep or Friday morning when she got up. In either case, I know why she did it, and that only makes it worse.
In Chapter 1, I mean the real Chapter 1, the one that counts, I have Paul having this great rebirth of feeling toward his wife, which isn’t exactly the way things worked in real life. I have that rebirth now, since she left, but there wasn’t anything special in my feelings before then. I was glad the fight was over, but that was just about all.
It was Betsy that had the rebirth first, I see that now. That was why she was taking the lead Thursday night, and that was why she decided she ought to start reading my manuscripts again. Also, I suppose, because I’d let her know in a vague sort of way that I was having trouble with this book, and she knew about me being late the last half-dozen times, and I suppose she meant to read it and say some nice things about it and give me some encouragement.
So she read it.
The note she left is the one I quoted in the last chapter.
The rest of Friday was just this horrible day. I did try to call her at her parents’ house, but she hadn’t arrived yet and they didn’t know she was coming and they didn’t know what it was all about. She’d left me the car, so she must have called a cab to take her to the station, and I considered hopping into the car and driving up there after her but I couldn’t do it. I was afraid of Birge and Johnny, for one thing, and I was also afraid of myself. I was afraid to get into the car, I figured I’d kill myself in the first fifty miles. My nerves were shot, my attention was shot, my morale was shot, everything about me was shot.
So I just walked around, and every once in a while I’d make a phone call to somebody and tell them Betsy left but not tell them why. They’d always ask, and I’d always say I didn’t know. I called Rod, and I called Pete, and I called Dick. Dick wasn’t home and Kay answered and I told her, and she asked me if there was anything she and Dick could do. I said no. She asked me did I want to come into town and stay with them. I said no. She asked me did I want her to come out and talk with me for a while, and I understood she was offering me the follow-up after all, the way a certain kind of woman responds to tragedy with chicken soup, and I said no. I said no for two reasons. First, because I didn’t want Kay, or anything that Kay implied, or any of the emotional complexity of Kay, or any woman like Kay, or anybody else at all but Betsy. And second, because I had this nutty idea that if I demonstrated my saintliness by refusing Kay I would eventually get Betsy back.
I called other people, I called my mother in Albany and Hannah answered the phone and I told her and she sounded very sympathetic, but she can’t help the ice in her voice. Her sympathy sounded like the sympathy of a cold nurse for a terminal patient she doesn’t much care for. I asked her if Mom was around, but Mom was at work at Limurges Restaurant. She asked me if I wanted the restaurant number, if I wanted to call Mom at work, but I said no, what had happened to me was a disaster but riot an emergency, I could talk to Mom some other time. I asked her if she’d heard from Hester recently, and she said Hester had a new address, somewhere in San Francisco. She gave me the address, it was c/o Blench, and I wrote it down with the feeling that it was very important, though I wasn’t sure why.
A little later I called San Franciso information and tried to get a phone number for Hester, but they had no phone for either Hester Harsch or anybody named Blench at that address. She didn’t figure to have a phone, anyway, she’s too much of a gipsy. It’s a big day for her, I think, when she’s got a tent.
Finally Friday night I called Betsy in Monequois again, and Birge answered. She had gotten there by that time and told her story, because when I said who I was and asked if I could talk to Betsy, Birge said, “Why don’t you come on up here and talk to her?” The invitation in his voice was the kind only a suicidal masochist could have accepted. I said, “It isn’t the way she thinks, Birge, honest to God.” He said, “Come on up and explain it, Ed.” I said, “You’ve got to know me better than that, Birge, none of that stuff in the book was true.” He invited me again, and I said some more, and he kept inviting me, and after a while I realized he wasn’t listening to me at all, he was just letting me talk and every time I’d come to a stop he’d invite me to come up and talk to him where he could see me face to face, and then I’d say something else that would bounce off his mind like a tennis ball off a brick wall, and he’d make that invitation again. Finally I hung up.
Friday night I started to drink. I also tore up all the stuff I’d done, all those useless chapters that had caused the whole trouble, and threw them away. Then later on I rooted through the ripped-up pieces and found the few little bits I thought I could use, and put them on the desk, and threw the rest into the garbage. And meanwhile I kept on drinking.
About one o’clock in the morning I drove the Buick into the city and parked it on West 47th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues and went walking around looking for a whore. I found one up across the street from the Americana Hotel, a skinny black panther with her hair piled up in a big airy bouffant on top of her head, hardened into place with several quarts of hair spray. She had eyes so full of obvious contempt for me and everybody else in the world that I almost turned around right there and went back home to Sargass and stuck my head in the oven. Except it’s electric. Also, I agreed with her eyes’ opinion of me.