Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

The room was long and narrow, dimly lighted, the bar stretching the length of one side. Tables and chairs were scattered without order or design over a bare floor that had begun to splinter, darkened and greasy from innumerable applications of sweeping compound. Some of the tables were occupied. A man and a woman sat drinking at the bar. Two other women sat drinking pale drinks at the bar alone, separated by an intervening empty stool. The two lone women were wearing cheap evening gowns, short-skirted, that clung to the upper slopes of their breasts, and they were obviously part of the place. Enos sat at the bar and ordered whisky and water. He drank the whisky at a gulp, gagging a little before he could lift the water and wash the taste from his mouth. His body was drying now, and not so chilled. The bartender refilled his glass, and he drank again, only part of the whisky this time, holding his breath after swallowing and washing the taste away at once with the water. The nearer of the two lone women moved down and sat beside him. She was wearing a thick and sickening scent, and he could see, looking sidewise and down from the corners of his eyes, a swell of flesh below the cleavage of her breasts. The gown was pale green and looked like rayon.

“Buy me a drink, honey?” she said.

He did not want to offend her, but neither did he want to buy her a drink or have anything at all to do with her. All he wanted, with an intensity of desire that was almost nauseous, was to be left alone by everyone on earth. Specifically, in his general withdrawal, he wanted the woman to go away, and he told her so with an exorbitantly precise articulation of syllables, as if he were afraid she would not clearly understand him and thereby force him to the monstrous effort of repeating himself. “Go away,” he said.

The woman understood him, all right, and for a moment she considered him with eyes reduced to slits of venom. Then she laughed with professional resiliency and laid a hand on his arm in a placating gesture.

“What’s the matter, honey? Something bothering you? Lost your best girl or something?”

Her persistence was an affront, her touch a violation, and her remark was unfortunate, to say the least. He reached across his own body and knocked her hand from his arm with a degree of violence that he did not actually intend.

“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here.”

The woman sucked in her breath with a hiss, and darkened lids slipped down again like purple bruises over gathering venom. She spat an epithet and slapped like a cat with her claws. He saw the attack from the corners of his eyes, as he had seen her breasts and swell of flesh, and he tried to avoid it, but he was not quick enough, and he felt on his cheek the burning mark of a nail. Down the bar, the woman sitting with the man had twisted on her stool to watch them, and beyond her her escort leaned far forward over the bar with his face turned toward them, split in cruel pleasure by a stained grin. Behind the bar, the bartender began to laugh, a windy expulsion without body. Quickly, neither speaking nor retaliating in any way, Enos got up and left. Laughter behind him grew and followed, and the woman, for good measure, added another epithet.

When he reached the sidewalk, he knew already what it was that he had to do next, but it was necessary to stop at the curb and think, for he did not know exactly where he was in relation to the place to which he wanted to go. It was imperative, he knew now, to return to Donna’s apartment. It was not that he hoped to salvage anything of what was surely lost, but only because there was a kind of negative security in establishing definitively that there was nothing to be salvaged, the kind of dark security he had felt in the end that had been no end before the remembered pines.

Moving abruptly, he walked to the corner and read on an iron post the names of the streets. He was able then to orient himself in relation to Donna’s apartment, which was an astonishingly long distance away, and he was dully incredulous that he had walked so far. He began to walk in the direction he needed to go, lunging forward again with the awkward, loping gait that carried him with remarkable swiftness over asphalt and concrete; and he reached the doorway in which he had stood before, just as a Chevrolet drove up from the opposite direction and stopped. He stood quietly and watched as Tyler got out and went around the car and opened the door for Donna. He felt within himself the silent, unbearable beat of pain that was somehow coordinated with the beat of his blood but was separate and stronger and not at all the same. In the brick wall of the apartment house light came up where darkness had been, from Donna’s windows. Time passed, and Tyler reappeared and drove away, and the time that had passed was no more than ten minutes, though it seemed longer than a night could be. After waiting yet a little longer in the distorted night where time, and all things, were deceptions, he crossed the street and went up to the floor on which Donna’s apartment was and pressed the button beside the door.

“For God’s sake,” Donna said, “what’s happened to you?”

She was shocked at his appearance, almost frightened. He wore no hat, and his hair was tousled, as if he had raked his fingers through it in every direction. His clothes were rumpled and stained in spots, his trousers torn at the knee. The side of his face where he had been clawed was smeared with blood and a little swollen. It was perfectly apparent to her that he had been making some kind of fool of himself, and it was quite likely that he had been impelled to do it simply because she had not been at home to meet him. This made her react immediately with compassion and anger, which were ambivalent, which was a kind of reaction she resented strongly because she had had too much of it and wanted no more of it.

“You had better come in,” she said.

He walked past her into the room and sat down. Turning away from him, glad for the moment of the necessity for petty action that would delay her facing fully what was now apparent, that she had taken upon herself an intolerable burden and perhaps a greater responsibility than she had imagined, she went into the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth and a bottle of merthiolate. She cleaned his face and painted the scratch and carried the cloth and the antiseptic back into the bathroom. Returning, she stood and inspected him from a distance of two paces, feet spread and hands on hips, in a posture that seemed to suggest between them a difference of at least two generations.

“Now, then,” she said, “please tell me what kind of idiocy you have been up to.”

“You weren’t here,” he said, “and you didn’t come, though I waited for a long time, and so I went for a walk and walked for a long way.”

“Did you get yourself in such a mess merely by walking?”

“I fell down. I don’t quite know how it happened. Somehow or other I slipped off a curb and fell down.”

“How did you get your face scratched?”

“A woman did it. I went into a bar, and she wanted me to buy her a drink, and I didn’t want to. It made her furious because I didn’t want to buy her a drink.”

“Jesus Christ, are you completely without any kind of capacity to cope with things? Do you intend to go on forever letting every little emotional disturbance threaten you with ruin?”

“Why weren’t you here? You said you’d be, but you weren’t.”

“I know. I’m sorry. There was something I had to do.”

“You were with a man. I was outside, across the street. I saw him bring you home.”

“All right. I was out with a man. I’d have told you so, if only you’d given me time. We had some drinks and went to dinner, but it was really a matter of business. This man may loan me the money to buy the shop, which is very important to me. Right now, it is the most important thing that could happen to me.”