Дональд Уэстлейк: Humans

Did it seem larger since Barry’d gone? There was a hole now in the industrial shelving where all his vast holdings in Darth Vader stereo equipment had once stood, and some welcome space in the closets and the medicine cabinet, but not a lot. Your footprints don’t go very deep, pal, Susan thought, angrily pleased at the idea of his insubstantiality, and she got out of bed, a lithe naked girl of twenty-seven who had started worrying recently — unnecessarily — about whether or not her breasts had begun to sag. Her hair, medium long and set for ease of maintenance as much as for good looks, was the precise shade of Clairol blond to complement her not-too-pale skin tones and not-too-dark blue-gray eyes. She was lucky in her nose, and she knew it; it was precisely the nose that girls had in mind when they made the appointment with the plastic surgeon, but never seemed to get, and Susan had been born with it. Otherwise, she found her mouth a problem — a tiny bit too sluttish? or not sluttish enough? — her elbows a problem — ugly! — and her weight a chronic threat.

Seated on the toilet, she remembered again her childhood fear that something would come out of the bowl beneath her, something horrible with claws, and perform unspeakable acts before she could escape. She hadn’t thought of that terror since she was maybe eight; was it really some psychological horseshit rising up against her, out of the bowl, as a result of Barry’s departure, leaving her nethers alone and unprotected? “Gimme a break,” she told herself, but when had that ever happened? Minds go their own way, regardless.

Showering, she thought about AIDS. She had a remote cousin in AIDS research at NYU Medical Center — Chuck Woodbury, his name was — and to listen to his party chitchat at family reunions for fifteen minutes was enough to turn you off humans forever. And that’s the problem. A few years ago, a Barry comes, a Barry goes, and good riddance. But not today.

No, not today. All of a sudden, you go to bed with a guy, you’re going to bed with everybody he went to bed with the last five years, and everybody they went to bed with, and there’s this massive cat’s cradle out there, this Möbius strip of a daisy chain, and unless you’ve fallen in with a horny group of Baptist picnicgoers the odds are getting better every day that somewhere in that humid grid there’s the ding, and all the lines turn red. Wanna climb aboard, honey? No, thanks, I’ll wait for the next virgin. If there’s any more on this route.

Putting on her Reeboks — her grown-up shoes were in her bottom drawer in the bank — she suddenly realized this was the fourth consecutive day she’d forgotten to jog before her shower. All those years of conditioning, going down the tube. Because of Barry? Ridiculous. And if true, even more ridiculous. I’ll leave myself a note, she thought, so I won’t forget tomorrow. Scotch-tape it to the hot water faucet in the shower.

At least she was still walking. Downstairs, she strode west across 19th Street to Seventh Avenue and then headed uptown, the city screaming and shrieking all around her in its usual fashion. Joggers thudded by, to remind her of her dereliction. Macho meatheads driving down the avenue gave that double honk as they went by, that whadayasayhoney honk that didn’t mean a thing but bravado, because even they weren’t so dumb as to think girls who looked like her hung out with guys who drove trucks. It was May and cool but clear, with an underrating of white in the high blue sky. Susan moved uptown at a steady pace, hardly thinking about Barry at all.

The coffee shop where she usually stopped on the way to work was at the corner of 38th Street. She almost passed it by this morning, to punish herself for not jogging, but decided that would be stupid. She’d just be cross and nasty in the bank if she didn’t have her regular coffee and orange juice and English muffin. So she went in and sat at the counter, and the waitress said, “Hi, hon.” She was a stout black woman who looked as though she ought to be motherly but was not. Hi, hon was as far as it went. Three years Susan had been having breakfast here, midway between home and the job at the bank on West 57th Street, and she still didn’t know the waitress’s name. Nor did the waitress show any interest in her name.

“My aching feet !” said a raggedy old bag lady, huge and shapeless, gray-skinned and gray-haired, as she settled onto the stool immediately to Susan’s right, though two-thirds of the stools in the place were empty. Not a penny from me, Susan said fiercely in her mind, and concentrated on the waitress, coming this way with her coffee. The orange juice would be next, and the English muffin last. The waitress plunked down the cup, turned away, and the bag lady said, “Marie, I’d just like a nice glass of tomato juice.”

The waitress turned back to glare, as though she didn’t like being called by name — so it’s Marie, is it? — but then she walked off without speaking, and when she brought both juices and slapped them down, the bag lady pushed dirty-looking coins across the counter, saying, “And fifteen cents for you.”

“I don’t think I know you, hon,” the waitress said, with that suspicious glare.

The bag lady had a huge and sunny smile, beaming and happy. “Oh, I’m nobody,” she said.

The waitress, frown welded into place, scooped the change off the counter and went away again. If this woman speaks to me, Susan told herself, I’ll pretend not to hear. But the bag lady drew a magazine — Esquire, of all things — out of some deep recess within her clothing, opened it, and began happily to read while downing tiny sips of tomato juice.

It wasn’t till Susan’s English muffin had arrived and been half consumed that she became aware of the bag lady studying her profile. Susan gave her a quick glance — that smile seemed sad now, for some reason — then hurriedly looked away to concentrate on the muffin, but it was too late. “A pretty girl like you,” the bag lady said softly. “You shouldn’t be unhappy.”

Surprised, Susan looked full at the woman, and this time saw nothing in her face but pity and good intentions. “What do you mean?” she demanded, knowing she didn’t sound as tough as she wanted. “I’m not unhappy.”

“It’s some fellow, I bet,” the bag lady said, nodding slowly, heavily. “It’s always some fellow.”

Susan gave her a cold and distancing smile, refusing to be drawn any further into conversation, and turned back to her muffin. If she speaks to me again, I’ll move to another stool.

A ripping sound startled her, and she turned to see that the bag lady had torn a page from her magazine and was now smoothing it onto the counter between them. “If I was your age,” she said, “and I was unhappy over some fellow, here’s what I’d do.”

Susan couldn’t help looking at the torn-out sheet, and when she saw it was a full-page ad for vodka she couldn’t help laughing. “I guess that is one answer,” she said.

“No, no, the contest, ” the bag lady told her, tapping the ad with a dirty fingernail and a fat grubby finger. “I’d get away, I would, and that’s just the way to do it.”

How did I get stuck with this? Susan asked herself, but there didn’t seem to be any way not to look more closely at the advertisement, and to see that it was indeed an announcement of some sort of essay contest, in which the first prize was an all-expense trip to Moscow.

Moscow! Russia? What kind of prize was that? Millions of people trying to get out of Russia, this vodka company’s giving away a free trip in. “Oh, I don’t think,” Susan started, smiling with a more gentle dismissal this time, “I don’t think that’s the—”