Enough of Sorrow

by Lawrence Block

  So she needed a system, a regimen. She needed not the peace and quiet and aimless haphazard drifting she had tried upon leaving the hospital, but required instead something entirely different, the utter opposite.

  She had to order her life as completely as she possibly could, had to set little goals for herself, had to saddle herself with foolish but purposeful little disciplines. She had to budget her time, had to schedule it. She had to set small rules for herself and follow them as gospel.

  She had to stop drinking.

  Not because she was a textbook study in alcoholism, a person who was physically incapable of stopping after a single drink. She could have one drink and no more, but this happy fact could not camouflage the fact that she had a problem and that drinking was a part of it. Perhaps it was more symptom than cause. This didn’t matter. When you have a boil under your arm, the first thing you do is drain the pus out of it; later on you can try to figure out what gave you the boil.

  No more drinking, then. Not a taste, because a single drink was more than she could handle—it would throw her off her own system even if it didn’t lead to another drink in due course. No more drinking, none of it, not a drop.

  And it surprised her how easy it was—most of the time—to stick to the rule. There were moments when depression caught hold of her, moments when she craved a sip of wine or a stein of beer or a tangy cocktail or a belt of scotch straight from the bottle, no ice and no glass. By and large, however, these were rare times.

  With those few exceptions, all of them of relatively low intensity and fairly short duration, she found it quite easy to stay away from alcohol. Her new life was a complete departure from the old. The shift in her schedule eliminated most of the standard times when a drink was a must.

  Because she did not work, the ritual of the lunch hour cocktail was easily bypassed. Because she had no friends at all, no one with whom she exchanged so much as an unnecessary word, the social aspects of drinking were completely eliminated. And, because she ate her meals in extremely inexpensive and unprepossessing restaurants where no beer or liquor was served, the before-dinner cocktail was out of the picture, as were the routines of wine or beer with the meal and a cordial after it. With no job, there was no need for a quick one when work let out at five o’clock, or another when she returned home from the office. She had no office and no work to come home from and no one to come home to, and each of these handy excuses for drinking was carefully and deliberately nudged out of her life.

  But the major reason why it was not very hard to stop drinking was the momentum of the last night when she had been drinking, the night when she had touched the very bottom of the world, the night when Cherry and Evelyn had given her a guided tour of the darkest horrors of the human soul. The next morning, according to formula, she should have awakened needing a drink, a hair of the dog that had bitten her, a fast belt to take the horrid fuzzy edge off the world. This had not happened at all.

  Instead she awoke with the worst hangover she had ever had in her life, a hangover of the body and the soul at once, a hangover that was a headache and a sick stomach and an inflamed conscience and a distorted time sense and a black pool of self-hatred all rolled up into one big ball of bitterness.

  Instead of a craving for a drink, the very thought of alcohol in any form made her physically ill. She could not have had anything to drink that day if she had forced herself. She would have gagged on the mildest wine and would have thrown up anything she might have forced herself to swallow.

  That gave her a start, a beginning. She had lived through that day without even wanting a drink, let alone having one. And by the time the immediate reaction had worn off, she had begun to develop the habit of not drinking just as she had previously developed the habit of drinking.

  Ever since that night, she had been as unremittant a teetotaler as Carrie Nation.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  A day in the life of Karen Winslow:

  At seven o’clock the bedside alarm clock rang. She was in the tail end of a dream just then, a nightmare of flight and pursuit, of running until her heart was bursting. She welcomed the ringing of the clock and turned it off and sat upright in bed at once, breathing deeply and steadily while her heartbeat settled itself and the last traces of the dream fled from her mind.

  The dreams were getting easier now! She had ceased to mind them, had taken them as a matter of course, and as time passed they diminished in intensity. There were many nights now when she slept soundly and could not remember any dreams at all the next day.

  She got out of bed, took off her nightgown and went into the bathroom. She showered, finishing with a Spartan half-minute under the cold spray. She got out of the tiny tub, toweled herself briskly dry, put on a skirt and blouse while the teakettle heated water for coffee. She made herself a cup of very strong instant coffee and sat in a chair by the window reading from the Information Please Almanac, the 1954 edition. She had found a copy in a second-hand bookstore for fifteen cents, 1954 having come and gone ten years ago, and she read from it every morning until eight-thirty. The book was hysterically out of date, and included tons of statistics for 1954, a year about which she was rapidly becoming the world’s foremost authority. All the population figures were obsolete, as well as the economics section and the political section—for example, there seemed to be a hundred countries that had not even existed in l954.

  She read the book every morning. It was, she had decided, the best sort of mental discipline. This particular morning she read the list of Nobel Prize winners from the inception of the award to 1952. She found it interesting to notice how few of the Nobel laureates she had ever heard of. How short-lived fame was, she thought. How quickly gone.

  She didn’t attempt to remember what she read. That was not part of the discipline. The only important thing was to read each section very carefully, concentrating as thoroughly as possible upon the words and figures on the page before her. Concentration was the key. It mattered not at all that the names she was reading so meticulously would not stay with her ten minutes after she closed the book.

  Concentration was what mattered, was one of the four steps in her program. Concentration, Meditation, Relaxation, and Recreation. Each had its place, each was neatly scheduled to fill up a part of her day.

  At eight-thirty she left the hotel and went for a walk. She left Flatbush Avenue and walked through the residential side streets. She had smoked a cigarette with her morning coffee and another while she read the Almanac, but she did not smoke while she walked. She walked briskly and easily, her arms swinging freely at her side, breathing deeply as she went along.

  It was nine-forty-five when she returned to the hotel. Some days she got back by nine-thirty; other days she walked around until ten. Her route varied considerably from day to day but each walk took the same general form. She only stopped to rest when there was something she wanted to look at—a store window, some outdoor construction, a fight, children at play. Her stops were always brief, so she spent almost the entire hour or hour and a half walking through the streets of Brooklyn.

  Back at the hotel, she drew her blinds, took off all of her clothes, placed a flat cushion upon the floor and lay down on her back on the floor with her head on the pillow. She closed her eyes and worked very hard to make every muscle in her body relax. She would tighten up each group of muscles in turn then relax them as completely as she could. When she was as loose as possible, when all the muscular tension had drained away, she remained as she was, breathing very slowly and regularly, inhaling through her nostrils, exhaling through her mouth. Today is better than yesterday, she would tell herself. Tomorrow will be better than today.

  It was just a modification of the old Cone routine, the Every-day-in-every-way-I’m-getting-better-and-better bit. It seemed to have a certain effect as her inner voice repeated it endlessly. And it was almost always true. Each day tended to be significantly better than the one which had preceded it.

  At eleven o’clock s
he came out of the semi-trance state she had managed to work herself into. She took another shower—she averaged three showers a day now, and once had taken as many as six. She dressed again in the same clothes and went around the corner to a little lunch counter. She had a large glass of fresh orange juice, three eggs scrambled dry, a glass of milk, an order of whole wheat toast with butter, and two cups of black coffee. She smoked a cigarette while she drank the second cup of coffee, then left the small restaurant.

  Today is better than yesterday.

  Tomorrow will be better than today.

  The library was four blocks away. It was a small branch library with the usual branch library’s concentration on juvenile books. One would not choose this particular library for researching a doctoral thesis, but the collection was large enough so that she could always find something to read, and the place was properly quiet until three-thirty when the schoolchildren invaded it. She browsed through the stacks, found the book she wanted and sat down at an empty table. She began reading.

  Her morning reading of the Information Please Almanac for 1954 was discipline—cold facts, one after the other, read with meticulous concentration and no particular attention to content. Her afternoon reading was quite another matter. At the library she picked out books which interested her and read them with a purpose in mind. During the first weeks she had concentrated mostly on psychology, but since then she had wandered far afield. Novels, poetry, history, philosophy—whatever seemed suitable to her mood and to the state of her mind. This day she was reading the collected poems of Wallace Stevens. She did not understand much of what she was reading. Many of the allusions were difficult to grasp and many of the images did not entirely register. But she stayed with the book for three hours and a good deal did soak in.

  She returned the volume to its place in the stacks, left the library, lit a cigarette, walked through the neighborhood with no particular purpose in mind.

  She had come along nicely with her meditation. There were many things she understood now about herself and her world that she had not begun to recognize before.

  She had thought, for example, that she had adjusted readily and completely to her life with Rae Cooper. She realized now how completely wrong she had been. If that life had teen so suitable, if she had adjusted to it so perfectly she would never have started drinking heavily. The one was a definite result of the other.

  And she could pretty well see how it had come about. The trauma of pregnancy and Ronnie’s betrayal culminating in attempted suicide. The combination of deep insecurity and loneliness and a fear of the male sex had made her a good candidate for homosexuality. The initial shock of Rae’s embrace had scared her. Then, when she had decided to accept Rae’s love—and this had been as much an intellectual decision as an emotional one, she had realized one day with a flash of insight—when this had happened, she had thrown herself into Rae’s world with a vengeance. All the doubts and hesitations were shoved violently into the background, pushed out of sight and ostensibly out of mind. All of the conflicts were packed away in a closet or swept under a rug, and she had thought that they were gone, and she had been as wrong as one could be.

  Because inside her private self she was the same lost Karen. That was why a part of her consciousness so often sat in the corner; observing but uninvolved, watching but untouched. That was why she had developed such a taste for alcohol in any of its myriad forms. Reality kept threatening to intrude upon the little world she had constructed for herself, and it was imperative that she keep those hard facts in the background—shut in the closet or tucked under the carpet.

  Every day a little more of the past was brought into the light of day and examined closely and clearly. Each day she saw herself with a little more perspective and a little less confusion. And each day she could ask herself the same questions with a little more hope of hitting on the right answer.

  What would she do next? One thing that she was beginning to see was that she could not run away again, that she would have to run back—back to Manhattan, back to Leon Gordon’s office, back to her job. This would be harder than building an entirely new life, but she could see that it was also quite essential. It was too easy to fall into a constant pattern of escape, and she could not afford to do this. She had an awful tendency to run away from situations. It was necessary to face them directly and deal with them on their own terms.

  The job had an importance, too. Before it had been a static situation, pleasant and easy but with no future. It was time she began looking at things in terms of the future. A job that meant nothing but the investment of forty hours a week in return for a comfortable salary was stagnant and meaningless. A job ought to point somewhere, ought to lead to something.

  Gordon liked and respected her. She could be more than a pretty telephone voice for him. She could perform more important services and learn his business more thoroughly. Women could become successful show business agents. Not many of them did, but it was possible, and she seemed to have as good a background for the profession as anyone. If she expressed an interest, if she worked at it, he would let her learn the game. He might even let herself work her way up in his office, so that she could handle tasks of increasing responsibility. And he wasn’t young. Sooner or later he would want to retire, or at least drift into semi-retirement. If she handled things properly, she could wind up in a very good position.

  This meant a complete re-orientation on her part. Her job could not be the simple convenience it had been, the dues you paid in return for enough money to live decently. She would have to care about it and take an interest in it and work harder at it.

  She also had to find the right direction for her love life. At first she had thought she would have to push sex out of the picture, perhaps forever. This was possible, she knew; people did it all the time, sublimating, forcing all their energies in another direction until they literally forgot about sex. But she came to see that this was not an entirely satisfactory solution, although it remained a possibility.

  Perhaps, she thought, she could be happy with men. One bad experience didn’t mean all that much. One bout of drinking had not made her an irredeemable alcoholic, and one bout of lesbianism certainly did not make her inevitably homosexual.

  Perhaps she could go back to Rae. It was possible that she could only he happy with another woman. There were elements of her relationships with Ronnie that suggested she had been basically homosexual from the start, and it was certainly possible that she was incapable of finding any real happiness with a man. If she could overcome the guilt she had felt with Rae, if she could make a real adjustment and get everything out in the open, then perhaps things could work out for them.

  So many things to decide…

  She had a simple dinner at a cafeteria at six-thirty and read a newspaper while she drank her coffee. There was a chamber music concert at the Brooklyn Museum of Science at eight-thirty. She returned to the hotel, showered, changed her clothes, and walked to the museum it was a long walk but the night was cool and she didn’t mind the distance. The music held her attention completely. This, she knew, was a direct result of her new living pattern. Before she had always found her attention wandering at concerts. Even when she enjoyed them she would have long periods of inattentiveness when her mind would let go of the music entirely and wander off along paths of its own. Now, however, concentration had become a habit; when she went to a concert, which she did two or three times a week, she was caught up in the music entirely.

  It was almost eleven when she left the concert and she did not want to walk back to the hotel at that hour. She hailed a taxi and rode back to the hotel. She did not take cabs often, but she could afford one now and then. Her meals had cost her $2.15, her hotel room worked out to a dollar and a half a day, and the concert had been free. With the dollar for the taxi, her total expenditures for the day were under five dollars. At that rate she could live on unemployment insurance and wind up saving money.

  In her room she undressed,
took the fourth and final shower of the day, set her alarm clock and got into bed. She wondered whether the shower habit would last when she got back to an ordinary living pattern. It might be inconvenient, she thought, running home from the office every few hours to hop into the tub.

  She stretched out in bed and went through the routine of relaxing each group of muscles in turn, then let her mind go gradually blank. The first week she had taken a single sleeping pill each night, and this had helped. Since then, however, she had had no trouble sleeping without any assistance from pills Now she closed her eyes and fell asleep easily.

  Today is better than yesterday.

  Tomorrow will be better than today.

  A day in the life of Karen Winslow.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was Tuesday, and it was raining. After she had showered and had coffee and read from the almanac, she realized, suddenly, that it was time. She took her usual walk, knowing he would not be at the office yet, and when she returned she called him from the telephone in her room. It was the first time, she used the telephone since she first moved into the Rainier Arms.

  His answering service took the call, which pleased her—he evidently had not hired another girl to take her place. She left her name and number with the answering service, and he returned the call within five minutes.

  “Karen, honey,” the agent said. “I wanted to call you a hundred times but you never gave me your number. You all right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am.” It was so strange to be talking with someone, she thought. So odd. She had not talked with anyone whom she really knew for such a long time.

  “Everything working out?”

  “Yes. Perfectly.”

  “That’s good news. When are you coming back?”

  “Is the job still open?”

  “It’s always been yours,” he said. “Whenever you’re ready.”