Флетчер Флора - Take Me Home

Acting with compulsive abruptness, she went down and asked him to pay for the coffee, but he was mean and chintzy after all, the son of a bitch, although he did claim later, after she had waited on the street for him to come out, that he had paid.

She waited for him for two good reasons. She needed a place to rest and get warm, which he might have and share, and she continued to feel strangely, regardless of his meanness about the coffee, that the two of them, she and he, had a common denominator in a general way, although certainly not exactly. And so she had waited, and she had come home with him, and here she was, and the crazy part of it, the monstrous and ugly joke of it, was why in the world she had gone to all the trouble.

Thinking she was dying, she had made herself live and had forgotten that living was not something she really cared to go on doing. Yes, it was funny, a great joke she had played on herself. Sitting on Henry Harper’s sofa, she lit the third of Henry Harper’s cigarettes and began to laugh at the joke. She laughed and laughed with a hard, internal laughter that shook her body and made her bind, but then she quit laughing and began to think calmly and rationally to determine if the joke might not yet be turned in her favor, the mistake of living corrected. What she should have done, of course, was to lie sensibly in her bed and let death come to her gently as it started, thanks to Lila, and it would have been all over by this time, the dying done, and she would not now have this day to live, nor any of the days after, but it was too late to think about that, what she should have done. What she had to think about now was what could yet be done, and it might be done very simply if only Henry Harper kept sedatives.

It seemed reasonable to assume that he might, a fellow who worked all hours and clearly had trouble sleeping. There was time enough, too. Plenty of time. It was still very early, Henry Harper had not slept more than three or four hours at the most and would certainly go on sleeping hours longer, and by the time he wakened it would have been time enough. Even if it hadn’t, even if he wakened too soon, he would probably think that she was only sleeping naturally and would let her go on sleeping until it was too late. If only, to begin with, he had the sedatives.

She got up and went into the bedroom. Henry Harper was lying as he had been before, face down across the bed with his arms outflung as it he were reaching in his sleep for the horizontal extremities of a cross. She went on into the little bathroom in the corner, where she looked carefully among other items for a bottle or a box that might contain what she wanted, but there was none. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she thought about using a razor blade on her wrist, for she understood that it could be done under water with little or no pain, but the idea was revolting and impossible, and then she saw the old-fashioned water heater in a corner with the gas ring underneath. She went back into the bedroom and opened its single window, and then she went in to the living room and opened its two, both of them overlooking the street, after which she returned to the bedroom and covered Henry Harper with a blanket that was folded at the foot of the bed. She did not think it was necessary, since time would not now be so important a factor, but she feared, nevertheless, that the cold air might waken him before she was ready, and it was just as well to take every precaution. In the tiny bathroom, she closed the door and stuffed toilet paper tightly in the cracks around it. This was meticulous work and took quite a bit of time, and it was with vast relief and satisfaction that she finally sat down on the floor beside the water heater and listened to the sound of gas pouring from two dozen holes into the room.

It did not enter her mind, not once, that she was doing Henry Harper a very bad turn.

It was determined by a distended bladder that she should not die. The bladder belonged to Henry Harper. Waking, he was aware first of the nagging discomfort that had broken his sleep, and then he was instantly afterward aware of the cold air coming in the open window. He could not remember having opened the window, and in fact he could remember, after a moment’s consideration, that he definitely hadn’t opened it. He had taken a last swallow from the bottle, and then he had lain down across the bed for a moment and had obviously fallen asleep, and in the meanwhile, while he was sleeping, someone lad opened the window and had covered him with a blanket, which was something else he could definitely remember not having done for himself. Then he thought of the girl in the other room who called herself Ivy Galvin and who was clearly in some kind of trouble, and he hoped that she didn’t start trying to be ingratiating about windows and blankets and things like that, for it would only make it more difficult to lack her out when the time came, which was not long off, but first, before doing anything else, he would have to get up and relieve the distension of his bladder.

He threw the blanket aside and sat up on the edge of the bed and held his head for a moment in his hands. His temples throbbed, and his eyes felt sore and hot under granulated lids. With the index finger of each hand he pressed against his eyes until the pain became unbearable, and then he removed the pressure and felt for a moment afterward, in the abrupt departure of pain, an illusion of clarity and well-being. Rising in the moment of illusion, he went over to the bathroom door and tried to open it, but the door seemed to be stuck, resisting his effort. He turned the knob as far clockwise as it would go and pulled again, and the door snapped open suddenly in a thin shower of tissue before a gust of gas. He saw Ivy Gavin sitting on the floor with her back against the tub in attitude of definitive peace, and in an instant the stuck door, the tissue, the gas and the girl all slipped into position in a significant relationship. He was always a little proud afterward, thinking back, of the decisiveness of his reaction. Lunging across the room, he closed the tap of the ring beneath the water heater, and almost in the same motion, with hardly a break or change of direction, he gathered up the girl and carried her into the bedroom. In his mind with fear and incipient anger was a small entity of compassion, the thought that she was so light, so very light, hardly anything at all in his arms.

Laying her on the bed in the cold air from the window, he listened with sickening relief to the ragged and reassuring sound of her breathing, and as his fear diminished with the evidence that she was not dead and would not likely die, he became proportionately furious that she had, with no consideration of him whatever, placed him in a position that would have been, without the sheerest good luck of a distended bladder, extremely difficult if not disastrous. He wondered if there were anything more that he should do to help her, but he couldn’t think what it would be, unless it were to loosen her clothing so that she could breathe more freely, and after thinking about it for a few seconds, in a kind of deliberate retaliation to the dirty trick she had played on him, he removed her dress and slip entirely, holding her with one arm in a sitting position as he pulled them over her head. The thinness of her body, he saw now, as he had guessed last night on the windy street, was truly the thinness of small bones. She was incongruously delicate and strong, childish and mature, and there was in the center of his anger, as he looked at her, an aching core that was not anger at all. Reluctantly, he covered her with the blanket and sat beside her to watch and wait until she recovered consciousness.

It seemed like a long time. It was very cold in the room because of the open window, and pretty soon he got up and put on his overcoat and sat down again. Later, when he felt that the gas was gone, or nearly so, he went over and closed the window, but the room stayed cold, although the radiator was hot, and so he went out into the other room and found the two windows there open also. He closed them and returned to the bed and sat down once more on the edge, and Ivy Galvin stirred and made a soft, whimpering sound and opened her eyes and immediately closed them again.