When I reached the office yesterday morning, I was ashamed of myself. I had not seen Dorothy since the night before, when I had left our apartment to take – home, and I didn’t know as yet how she was going to react to my behaviour. It did not seem possible that she could overlook my misconduct this time. As long as I kept my affairs to myself, as long as I did not force her to acknowledge my infidelity, I was confident of Dorothy’s reasonableness. I did not bother her and she would not bother me. But now I had broken our tacit agreement: I had made love to – before her eyes. I did not know how she would take it.
I did not work all morning. A few minutes after eleven o’clock my telephone rang. It was Dorothy on the other end of the wire. Her voice seemed pleasant and cheerful. She was going to do some shopping and would need extra money, would I stop at the bank and make a withdrawal and then meet her at the Three Griffins for lunch? I asked her how much money she needed. She mentioned a staggering sum which would all but take our balance. I started to protest, then hesitated and finally said nothing. She said she would have to hurry if she were to be on time and hung up. I sat looking at the receiver until the switchboard operator asked me if I wanted another line, then I hung up, too. I could not believe my ears. Dorothy had seemed natural, as if nothing had happened. Yet why did she need so much money?
I reached for my hat and went out the door, telling Miss Grey I would not be back until after lunch and to get the name of anyone who called. I would go to the bank and from there to the Three Griffins – I would see Dorothy and judge for myself.
The Three Griffins is a small restaurant on East Fifty-Third Street run by a hunchback. The décor is pseudo-Gothic: the booths along each wall fit into papier-mâché groined arches, the lighting fixtures are hidden in candle wind screens of pierced metal, the atmosphere is murky, romantically dismal. Dorothy had discovered it during our first year of married life and the place had some obscure, sentimental significance for her that I quite forget. Yesterday, she was as late as I had feared she might be, and I sat there under one of the mouldy-looking arches chain-smoking cigarettes and staring at the repulsive proprietor perched on his high stool behind a very modern cash-register. I was on my second martini when Dorothy arrived.
‘Darling! I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting! But Mimi dropped by to show off a hat she had just bought, and to tell me about a hairdresser she has discovered who has simply done miracles for her – you know how ratty her hair always looks? – well, you should have seen it today! it was miraculous! – and I could not get rid of her for the longest time…’ Dorothy was being bright and gay and artificial as hell. I knew there was a reason for this pose; Dorothy is not usually like that. She went on, ‘Order me a martini, darling, won’t you? That one looks so good!’
I ordered her a drink, and then later the hunchback brought us a cutlet and vegetables, a salad, coffee and brandy. It was a good lunch, but I did not enjoy it. Dorothy kept on talking frippery in that phony, very-very manner with a ‘darling’ tacked onto the end of every other sentence, while all the time I was uncomfortably aware of what thin ice her chatter skated on so glibly. Sooner or later we would get down to cases; I could have done nothing to hurry her, just as I could do nothing to defend myself when the time came.
This was when I lighted a cigarette and Dorothy was finishing her brandy. She had just asked for the money I had drawn out of the bank and I had given it to her; she had thrust the thick wad of bills into her purse without counting them. Butshespent an inordinate amount of time fussing with the catch on her purse, and said without looking up. ‘And how is –?’
‘Well enough, I suppose.’
‘She got home safely, I trust?’
‘I took her to her door.’
‘Just to the door, Philip?’ Dorothy had taken a cigarette from her bag and was bending forward for me to light it. I struck a match – the spurting, spluttering crack it made sounded deafening. I did not answer her.
‘You admit it then?’ Dorothy had turned her eyes away from mine. It was queer. A stranger might have judged us conspirators from the way she was acting.
‘I don’t know what you are talking about!’ I said loudly and distinctly. Too loud, in fact – I saw the hunchback swerve around to look at me. I smiled back at him to assure him that he had not been addressed.
‘Oh yes you do, Philip,’ Dorothy was saying softly, insinuatingly. ‘Don’t you think I know what goes on?’
‘Nothing is going on,’ I insisted.
She was silent. She held her anger for a moment or two longer as if she savoured it and was loath to part with it. This interval could not have endured more than a span of seconds, a minute at the most; but to me it seemed ten, twenty times that long. I could hear my pulse in my throat, feel the hot throb of blood in my temples… but I could also hear two shopgirls eating their lunch in the next booth talkatively comparing the salient points of their ‘gentlemen friends’.
‘You slept with her last night, Philip. You needn’t deny it, I know you did. And it isn’t the first time, Philip. This sort of thing has been going on for years. You’ve been quite… brazen… Philip.’ Her manner was deliberate, like a judge on the bench; only this judge had a swarm of dark hair in place of a powdered wig, dark eyes that in the past had been merry more often than judicial, dark lips…
I said nothing.
‘I’m leaving town tomorrow, Philip. Don’t try to stop me. You’ll hear from my lawyer. This time you’ll have to talk to Dad yourself.’ She had swept up her gloves and her bag and was gone, leaving me staring at a piece of green paper that I had folded and refolded so many times in the previous few minutes that the scribbled figures on it were nearly worn away – the check.
I went over to the hunchback and paid it; I walked outside and stood looking up at the tall, blue sky; I was not surprised or angry. Now that it had happened, it seemed inevitable.
I didn’t go back to the office; instead I walked over to Third Avenue, entered the first saloon that I saw and started in to drink. I drank very methodically. I drank rye and water, and I would take two drinks in one place and then go to the next one. By four o’clock in the afternoon I had worked my way down to the Twenties and I had run out of money. The bartender in the place I was in then would not cash my cheque, so I went outside and into a pawnshop next door and hocked my watch; the heavy-jowled, bent-over pawnbroker gave me ten dollars after much hesitation although I had paid fifty for it. I kept on drinking. I reached Astor Place by nightfall – the clock on Wanamaker’s told me it was after six. I searched my pockets but could find only a dollar and some change. There was a cigarstore on the corner of Ninth Street and Third Avenue where I went to telephone Jeremy. He told me yes, he could lend me ten until the end of the week if I would meet him at a bar on Sixth Avenue in the Radio City neighbourhood within half an hour. I promised to do that. He sounded surprised. I took a taxi uptown – the fare and the tip took my last cent. If Jeremy didn’t meet me, I told myself, I would have to stop drinking, and the thought of stopping drinking made me tremble.
But Jeremy was waiting for me at the bar. He glanced at me and handed me a crumpled bill. ‘What in God’s name have you been doing to yourself?’ he asked.
I stared at his fat face. One crease of flesh which rolled over his collar revolted me particularly. I could not understand how this man could ever have been a friend of mine.
‘You look like you’ve slept in those clothes,’ he went on when I didn’t answer his first question. ‘My God, Phil, what’s come over you?’
I had intended to have a drink with him – I needed one badly – but I could not stand there and let him question me in his sneering way. I pushed past him towards the street.
‘Hey, Phil! Wait a minute!’ I walked faster. It became a matter of paramount importance to put as much space as possible between myself and him; when I was through the door and on the sidewalk, I began to run; there were many pedestrians – it was the tag-end of the rush
hour – and I had to weave through the crowd like a broken-field runner. I heard him shout, ‘Hey, Phil!’ one more time, that is I heard a faint shout – it might have been somebody else; but I didn’t stop running until I neared Central Park. Then I went into a package store and bought a bottle and took it with me into the park where it would be quiet and I would be left alone to drink in peace.
I am not too clear about all that happened in the park. I remember that I found a secluded bench behind a rocky upcropping that was not close to a street light; sitting on the bench I drank about half the bottle before I began to feel alive again (the ride uptown in the taxi and the energy I had spent in escaping from Jeremy had sobered me; I felt dead). I looked around me and saw that the trees, the distant lights of the theatre district, had all receded into a soft and comfortable haziness. There was a small, but intense, fire in the pit of my stomach that warmed me and encouraged me to feel that everything fitted into place and that I belonged to the world again. I remember stretching out on the bench, my head on my rolled up coat, lying there gazing entranced at the starry, clear, cold sky. It was December, yet I had drunk enough to make it seem like June.
I must have fallen asleep for the next that I remember is the impression of being on a subway train: the roar of steel wheels on steel rails bottled up and rushing past me in the tunnel, the pale light of the cars. — was sitting across from me, but I was aware of Dorothy’s presence also; although I could not see her anywhere, I sensed that she was there watching me. Then, as I sat trying to decide whether to speak to — or get up and look for Dorothy, the car began to cave in. First, the vestibule careened wildly inwards, then the walls began to collapse and the floor rose to meet them; there was a shrill, screaming rending and I found myself thrown against — on the lurching floor, a warm wetness spreading over me, flooding me, fogging my sight. I tried to get up, to stand on my feet, to force my way out – but I was pinned down, helpless. I opened my mouth to cry out my anguish, but no sound came…
Still trying to scream, I swam upward through the blackness, a blackness that was now relieved by the pinpoints of bright stars. I kept struggling to rise, but something held me down. I fought to free myself, as yet only half-consciously, and then suddenly awake and aware that this was no dream. I heard someone curse and I felt a staggering blow that knocked me from the bench onto the sloping ground; I rolled with the momentum of the blow down a small grade behind the bench, clutching at the slippery earth, trying to stop my fall. I continued to roll all the way down the hill and fell, at last, face down in a pool of icy, revivifying water. Someone was scrambling away up above me; I could hear running footfalls dying away in the distance.
I sat up, cold sober. My clothes were torn and muddy and drenched with rye whisky where the bottle I had been drinking from had spilled over them. My hands were bleeding for they had been scratched in my long, tumbling fall down the grade. I stood up and made my way painfully to the top of the hill. Only when I reached the bench where I had been lying, did I realize that my wallet was gone and with it my money. I had been robbed by a thug.
I set off towards the entrance of the park in search of a policeman. I did not find one; one found me. He walked up behind me, seized me by the collar and pushed me in the direction of the nearest drive out of the park. ‘Get along with you,’ he growled, ‘before I have to run you in!’ There was no use arguing with him. He took me for a bum. At that, I must have been a pretty sight: my clothes were muddied, one trouser leg was torn, I reeked of whisky and my face was scratched and dirty. I left the park and started walking downtown again.
I did not know where to go. If I went back to the apartment, Dorothy might be there and I didn’t want to face her after what she had said at lunch. On the other hand, if she weren’t there, I didn’t want to be there either – I had too many associations connected with that apartment, too many mementoes of our life together. I couldn’t go back to the office in my present condition. Jeremy might have let me sleep at his place, but I didn’t want him to see me looking the way I did. Sooner or later he would have told Dorothy about it, and I never wanted her to have the satisfaction of knowing how her decision had affected me. There was no place I could go.
Philip let the pages fall onto the desk. He pressed his hand against his forehead and eyes to shut out all light. As he had read, he had been overcome with a feeling of unreality – as if he did not exist in this room, but only in the pages he was reading. Even now, with his eyes shut and the friendly, self-consoling pressure of his hand to remind him of his own, incontestable existence, he was not certain. The ‘Confession’ goaded him, tormented him. After another moment, his hand dropped, he picked up the manuscript and began to read again.
But I kept walking downtown along Sixth Avenue. Distances which I had covered many times by bus or taxi, I now had to cover on foot. I was near exhaustion from exposure and the after-effects of the quantities of liquor I had swilled, yet I forced myself to keep moving as if there were a great spring inside me that once it started to unwind was to continue inexorably until the last erg of tension was released. When I reached Forty-second Street, I considered going into Bryant Park; but I was afraid that if I did the police would only chase me out again. I kept on walking, stopping for street lights and when the press of traffic required. I was hungry and I had begun to feel sick when I was in the garment district around Herald Square; I went down into the subway to go to the comfort station before I realized that I would have had to pay a fare to get in there, and I had no money to pay a fare; instead, I stood looking at the exit gate with its ‘No Admittance’ signs, watching it swing open widely and invitingly whenever anyone pushed out. I didn’t have the courage to try to sneak through when the man behind the change-window wasn’t looking. I went back upstairs to the street and started walking downtown again.
When I reached the Village, I went straight to Jones Street. It might have been that my subconscious had been directing my steps that way all the while, although if this were true I had not consciously planned it or semi-consciously abetted it. Nevertheless, it made no difference to me then whether I saw – or not; either way I had lost Dorothy, hadn’t I? And, queerly enough, I felt that – was the one person I could trust. I waited in front of her building until there was no one near to see me go in, and then I rang her doorbell. As soon as the buzzer sounded I pushed the door open and started to climb the stairs to her apartment; on the second landing an Italian woman with her arms full of groceries stopped to stare at me – but I didn’t give a damn what anybody thought by then.
I remember – letting me in, her mouth agape when she saw how bedraggled I was. ‘What happened to you?’ she asked. I mumbled something that satisfied her for the moment. She helped me into the other room and let the water run in the tub while I took off my clothes. She was wearing a housecoat that featured a slit from her ankles to above her knees and showed the outside of her thigh when she walked, but I was too tired to do anything about that. She made me some coffee and some hot soup while I was in the tub; later, I sat in the kitchen drinking it and matching her questions with what I thought were convincing lies. Afterwards she took me into the next room and made me get into bed.
The next thing I remember it was morning and I was awake and staring at —’s dark head beside me on the pillow. One of my other suits was lying on a chair across the room, neatly laid out for me. I jumped out of bed and began to shake – to waken her. She looked up at me drowsily. ‘Whassa matter?’
‘Where did you get that suit?’
‘I went to your place last night. Dorothy gave it to me. You couldn’t go out looking the way you did when you came in.’
‘But how did you know to go to my place? I mean didn’t I tell you not to go there?’ If she had been given that suit by Dorothy, that meant that Dorothy knew how cut up I had been over her decision to divorce me. I had not wanted her to know that.
— was smiling at me, that cocky smile of hers that is half a sneer. ‘You
talked in your sleep last night, darling,’ she said. ‘You told me all about Dorothy’s leaving you. There’s just you and me now, Philip. Isn’t that nice?’
I hit her when she said that. I knocked her down on the bed and beat the bejesus out of her. It made me feel like a man again.
Philip’s hand shook as he laid down the last page of the manuscript. If Dorothy were to leave him… he did not know what he would do. He might take it like that. It would mean that he was not only out of a job, but that he had lost his home as well. It would mean the end of his comfortable life and the start of a whole new chapter.
But what concerned him most was the apparent fact that he must have written what he had just read. What kind of mental disorder did he have that would prompt him to try himself in this fashion? It was a kind of slow suicide. And there was a sly masochism about it – a delight in tormenting himself with personal revelations – that was dismaying. If anyone else should see it! And if any of the events predicted in it should actually occur! Yet wasn’t this exactly what he must want to happen – if not, why else would he have written it?
His one consoling thought was the fact that of what had happened the night before in reality, as far as he could remember, there had been a serious discrepancy: he had not slept with Brent. As far as he could remember – ah, that was the catch. He could recall having gone to Brent’s apartment, drinking a whisky and soda with her, holding her to him and having her refuse him. He could remember getting drunk and returning to the office… but he could remember nothing else. What had happened during the rest of the night? Had he written the ‘Confession’, or returned to Brent’s apartment – or both? It could be that his memory was playing him false again, that he did not remember what he thought he remembered. It could be… as the idea occurred to him, he snatched at his desk calendar to check the date. If he had gotten mixed up on his dates and everything that had been ‘foretold’ in the manuscript had already happened it might not have been last night that he had met Brent at a party at his house – but the night before. His heart stopped beating as he looked at the calendar, and then it started beating again. The day was only the second of December – not the third – the events prophesied in the ‘Confession’ had yet to happen. If he wished, he might still prevent them. Somehow he must prevent them!
The Last of Philip Banter Page 10