After the First Death - Lawrence Block [11]
But I digress. What I remembered, sitting in the balcony, what I willed myself to remember, was not the course of the average day, the course of several months worth of days, but the course of one particular day.
I awoke. I showered, I shaved, I dressed. I breakfasted in my apartment; a glass of reconstituted orange juice, a cup of instant coffee, two slices of toast—
Details. Immaterial, forget them.
After breakfast I left the apartment I was dressed then in the same clothes I had later found, blood-covered, in room 402 at the Hotel Maxfield. I went—where? To the library? To the park?
No. No, I went up to Times Square. It was a good day, a beautiful not too hot and not too cold day, the air clearer than New York air usually is, and I walked to Times Square. It was a very long walk, and I covered the distance slowly. And I had slept late that morning. I must have reached Times Square around noon, perhaps a bit past noon.
And then what?
I certainly hadn’t begun drinking right away. Why couldn’t I remember it all? What was wrong?
Ah, yes.
I had wandered Forty-second Street—the shooting gallery, the Fascination parlor, the bookstores, the cafeterias, the whole tawdry stretch of the street from Broadway to Eighth Avenue and back again. I remembered it now as an aimless, pointless ramble. And yet, had I been sufficiently introspective at the time, I would have recognized the point of it all. For I was no stranger to Forty-second Street It had always been the starting point of my rambles, the embarkation point for bouts of drinking and whoring in those dim days before I murdered Evangeline Grant.
In a bookstore, a brightly lit bookstore stocked with nudist magazines and paperbound novels entitled Sin Shack and Trailer Trollop and Campus Tramp, and pamphlets entitled Confessions of a Spanker and Sweet Bondage and The Strange Sisterhood of Madame Adista, I leafed through a bin of photographs of more or less nude girls. I glanced laconically at this picture and that picture and this picture and that picture, without any real interest with no response, and then I looked at one picture and God alone knows how it differed in my eyes from the rest, but quite without warning a stab of painful desire seared my groin, and I reeled away from the bin of pictures as if gored in the vitals by a mad bull.
I had not made love to a woman since Evangeline Grant, whom, as you may recall, I subsequently killed. I had not made love to a woman in over four years, in nearly four and one-half years, and I honestly thought I had lost all desire. I had since seen many pictures of girls, both clothed and nude. I had looked at them with admiration, with enthusiasm, but never with lust I had grown to feel that this was no longer a part of my life, that I had killed it when I killed Evangeline Grant.
And now one picture among many, a photograph which I would now be quite incapable of distinguishing from its bin-mates, had proved me wrong.
Yes. I remembered it now. Reeling out of there, stunned, honestly stunned, embarrassed beyond belief by the insistent and undeniable physical manifestation of this reaction, walking hunched oddly forward in ineffectual camouflage, certain that everyone was staring at me, scampering foolishly out of the dreary little shop. And automatically blindly stupidly following my erection down the street and around the corner to the nearest bar, where I promptly proved and discovered beyond any shadow of a doubt that I had not lost my taste for liquor, either.
I remembered the