Craving
They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That’s what she’d thought: Why, he’s falling to pieces. The place was called Gary’s.
“Honey,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face, gently at first but then harder. “Oh, honey,” he said in alarm. His tie rested in his Mignon Gary as he was pressed forward. He was overweight and pale but his hair was dark and he wore elegant two-toned shoes. Before this, he had whispered something unintelligible to her. No one watched them. Sweat ran down his face. His drink toppled over and fell on them both.
She was wearing a green dress and the next day she left it behind in the hotel along with the clothes he had been wearing, the tan suit and the tie and the two-toned shoes. The clothes had let them down. The following night they were in a different hotel. It was near the coast and their room had a balcony from which they could see the distant ocean. They knew how to drink. They sought out the slippery places that tempted one to have a drink. Every place was a slippery place.
Denise and Steadman watched the moon rising. Denise played the game she did with herself. She transferred all her own convulsive, compulsive associations to Steadman. She gave them all to him. This was not as difficult as it might once have been because all her thoughts concerned Steadman anyway. Though her mind became smooth and flat and borderless, she wasn’t thinking anything so she never felt lost. It was quiet until a deeper silence began to unfold, but she was still all right. Then the silence became like a giant hand mutely offered. When she sensed the giant hand, she got up quickly. That giant hand was always too much for her. She went into the other room and made more drinks. They took suites whenever possible. The gin seemed to need a room of its own. She came back out to the balcony.
“Let’s drink this and go get something to eat,” she said.
They found themselves in the dining room of the hotel. It was claustrophobic and the service was poor. They sat on a cracked red leather banquette under a mirror. On a shelf between them and the mirror was a pair of limp rubber gloves. Denise didn’t bring them to Steadman’s attention. She reasoned that they had been left behind by some maintenance person. They gazed at a table of seven who were telling loud stories about traffic accidents they had witnessed. They seemed to be trying to top one another.
“The French have spectacular wrecks,” a man said.
“I love that Jaws of Life thing,” a woman said. “Have you ever seen that thing?” She had streaked blond hair and a heavily freckled bosom.
“I saw an incredible Mexican bus crash once,” a small man said. But his remark was immediately dismissed by the group.
“A Mexican wreck? There’s nothing extraordinary about a Mexican wreck…”
“It’s true. The landscape’s such a void that there’s not the same effect…”
Steadman and Denise listened attentively. Denise didn’t have a car-crash story and if she ever did she wouldn’t tell it, she decided.
The waitress told them the previous couple at their booth had given her a five-dollar tip but had torn the bill in half, forcing on her the ignominy of taping it back together. She said she despised people, present company excepted, and told them not to order the veal. If they ordered the veal, she told them, she would not serve it, which would be cause for her dismissal but she didn’t care.
They decided to have another couple of drinks, and return to their room.
The room was not welcoming. It had seen too many people come and go. It was wearying to be constantly reminded that time passes and everything with it, purposelessly.
Denise watched Steadman place himself on the bed. He lay on his back. The room surrounded them. For a while, Denise lay on the bed too, thinking. Where had it gone, it had gone someplace. The way they were. Then she went into the other room, where the writing table and television set were. Their new traveling bags were there, big soft black ones. She turned off the lights, feeling a little dizzy. She wrung her hands. They should go someplace, she thought. There was tomorrow, something had to be done with it. She reviewed the day’s events. Her mind was like a raven, picking over gravel with its oily, luminous feathers. She could almost hear it as it hopped across the small stones but she couldn’t quite, thank God. Then she heard someone passing by in the corridor, laughing. A thin breeze entered the room and she thought of the distant water as they had seen it from the balcony, folded like a package between two enormous buildings. She looked at their bags, heaped in a corner. Night was a bad time. Night would simply give her no rest. Steadman was quiet now but he might get up soon and they would have their conversation. It was a mess, they were in an awful mess. He didn’t know how much longer he could stand this and so on and so on…Her eyes ached and her throat was dry, she hated this room. It, it just didn’t like them. She could hear it saying, Well, there’s a pathetic pair, how did they ever find each other? She’d like to set fire to the room. Or beat it up. She could hit, no question. There was someone passing in the hall again, laughing, the fools. The room stared at her lidlessly. Perhaps they could leave tonight. They would go down — Denise and Steadman, Steadman and Denise — past the night clerk trying to read a book—10,000 Dreams Interpreted. She remembered what the book looked like: red and falling apart. They had done this before, left in the night when the moon was setting and the sun rising. To get out while the moon was setting, that’s exactly what she wanted. She lay down on the floor. The room was not letting them breathe the way they had to; it was scandalous that they’d been given this room instead of another. Listening to Steadman breathe, she tried to breathe. She wished it were June. It was June once and they were somewhere and a mockingbird sang from midnight to daybreak, or so it seemed, imitating other birds, and Steadman had made a list of all the birds he recognized in the mockingbird’s song. He learned things and then remembered them, that’s just how he was.
Denise crept across the carpet toward Steadman’s bed and held on to it. His face was turned toward her, his eyes open, looking at her. That was Steadman, he knew everything but he didn’t share. He made her feel like a little animal sometimes, one with little animal emotions and breathing little animal devotions. She would ask him for the list very quietly, very nicely, the little piece of paper with the names of the birds, where was it, he was always putting it someplace and she had already gone through their bags, their beautiful traveling bags, ready for the larger stage.
“Steadman,” she said reasonably.
But how could he hear her? This annoying room was listening to every word she uttered. And what did it know? It couldn’t know anything. It couldn’t climb from the basement into a life of spiritual sunshine like she was capable of doing, not that she could claim she had. The individual in the hall howled with laughter at this. There were several of them out there now, a whole gang, the ones from the dinner party, probably, the spectacular-wrecks people, just shrieking.
At once Denise realized that the gang was herself and it was morning. Her hands hurt terribly. They were as pink as though they’d been boiled. She’d hurt them somehow. Actually, they were broken. Incredible.
She stared at them in the car on the drive to the hospital. Those hands weren’t going to do anything more for Denise for a while.
The doctor in the emergency room wrapped them up, the left first, then the right, indifferently. Even so, some things fascinated him.