David Markson - Epitaph For A Tramp

She sucked in her breath. I found a parking slot directly in front of the apartment and she went in ahead of me with her own keys while I was locking the car. I wondered why I was bothering to do that with a rented job. She was in the good chair with one small light on when I came up, sitting with her head on her chest and her arms dangling, looking like a thrown coat.

I made myself a drink, spilling an inch and a half of Jack

Daniels into a kitchen tumbler and taking it without ice. It had the same effect as a short carrot juice. I went out and sat across from her.

You could hear the busses out on Third Avenue.

“Why?” I said.

She said nothing.

“I thought it was good. Plodding, dull-witted old Harry, I thought nothing could be better. And all the while I—”

“It is good. But I’m just—”

“Good, yeah. It must be remarkable. You’re just what?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” Her voice was ragged and she looked up at me. I stared at the rug.

“You go away,” she said then.

“Good God — three, four times in a year?”

“It doesn’t matter. Whenever you do, the minute you’re gone, the minute I’m alone I start pacing. I start walking around this room as if I don’t belong here, as if I’m a stranger.” She was talking from very far away. “It’s as if something is pushing me. I’ve got to get out of here. Just out. And I can’t stop myself, I want to be with — with I don’t know who. It doesn’t make any sense and I can’t explain, I—”

“How many times?”

“Almost every time.” I heard her swallow. “You were in Phoenix four days. When you were in New Orleans it was five. And just now three when you were in Chicago. Almost every one of those nights.”

I didn’t feel sore. I didn’t feel cheated or betrayed or outraged or anything else. I felt nothing. I was sitting there hearing her say all that and somehow it did not have anything to do with me. I knew it would have something to do with me later but it didn’t now. I got up and poured myself another drink and then I came back and sat there again.

“The same guys? How many guys?”

“They’re different each time. A different one each night, Harry. I see one and then they want to make dates but I won’t. It’s all confused, like if it’s only one night it’s not so bad, as if I’m not really doing anything wrong if I don’t let any of them get to mean anything. I go into bars and I meet them the way I did tonight and I… Oh, God in heaven, I—”

She had her face in her hands. She was sobbing and saying, “Help me, help me.” She said it over and over. And four plus five made nine and three made the dozen. And tonight was thirteen. I stood up.

“Harry, I’m sick. Something’s the matter with me. It’s all right when you’re here, when I’m with you, but the minute you’re gone I’m—”

I went into the bedroom. I dug out a suitcase and opened it on the bed. She came into the doorway.

“I’ll go,” she said. She had stopped crying. “It was your place before I came. I can stay with my mother and Estelle until I find someplace else.”

I didn’t answer. I did not have a particularly distinct concept of the ethics involved in that kind of thing.

“It will be easier that way,” she said. “I’ll take one bag. I can come back when you’re at the office and get the rest.”

I went past her and into the living room. She did not take long. She came out with the suitcase and stood it near the door. She hung there like something wet on a hook.

“It’s going to sound pretty silly, isn’t it? But I–I’m sorry, Harry.”

“Forget it,” I said. “You told me all about it that first night on the beach, all about the other ones. I didn’t buy anything without a label on it.”

I wasn’t looking at her. Outside they were running every bus on the line.

“I deserve that and more,” she said. “But that was different,

Harry. Before we were married I wasn’t hurting anyone but myself. I didn’t want to hurt you. Oh, dear God, I didn’t! I— ” Her voice broke. She was sobbing again with her head turned, softly now. “Harry, I love you, I—”

“That’s swell,” I told her. “I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll remember it every time I think about you in that crummy room down there tonight with your drawers flung over that chair and your bare butt sprawled all over the bed. ‘Aren’t you lucky, people bringing you surprises in the middle of the night. And, oh, by the way, my name’s Cathy. Mrs. Cathy Fannin but don’t worry about that, the sucker’s gone chasing off someplace and— m

She missed the best part of it. I hadn’t even worked up a light sweat. The door had not swung shut all the way and I could hear her on the steps. Then the downstairs latch clicked and after that there was the sound of a car door closing that would be a cab and then there was nothing.

The glass smashed low against the wall across the room when I heaved it. The whisky left a stain which I finally scrubbed off but there was a small permanent mark where the paint had been chipped. The mark was still there a year later when Cathy came back up the stairs for the first time since that night and giggled once in the hallway and then fell into my arms and died.

I had not seen her in all that time. She had come a day later to collect the rest of her gear, and a few months after that I’d gotten divorce papers in the mail, stamped from a place called Athens, Alabama, where I suppose they peddle those things on the corner newsstands. And that had been the end of it. The end, except that I still had the pail and shovel but all the sand was gone from the sandbox.

And now I stood in the doorway of the bedroom holding the phone and not listening to a girl named Sally Kline who was trying to tell me something she thought was urgent. The Second Coming could have waited.

I wondered how much of it had been my fault. “Help me,” she’d said. I wondered if it would have made any difference if we really had talked, if I’d tried to understand it and had had the guts to try and work it out. But I’d had to be one muy tough hombre. I’d had to let her walk out that night and I’d had to bury the ache in whisky and the job and other women and not once even ask anybody if she were alive or dead.

And now there she was on the floor like the armful of kindling after somebody’d tripped.

It had happened right outside. It didn’t take Dashiell Hammett to figure that much of it without going down. She’d come in the sports car I’d heard, fast, screeching her rubber along the gutter. And then the second car had stopped, the bigger one, probably right behind her, and someone had caught her between third and home and had poked it into her ribs. Here, smack in the middle of Fannin’s own ball park.

So whatever kind of mess she’d been in, she’d been coming to me. And then she’d let go without telling me who did it because she’d known she didn’t have too many words left and it had seemed more important to her to talk about something else.

But she’d been coming here in the first place because she’d thought she needed me. I kept looking at her, standing there. I’d been as much help as a ruptured aorta. So now all I could do was find out what had happened; and maybe also find out some of the things I should have learned about her a long time before, the things that might have made everything different.

All right, I said, I’ll do that, yes. And then I said I was sorry. Cathy, I said. Baby, I…

I made myself come out of it. Cop, I said. Be cop again, Fannin. Who did it, cop? I lifted the phone.

It was dead. I took the directory and looked up Kline, Sally. There were two of them. One of them lived on 200th Street. I dialed the one in Greenwich Village.