After the First Death - Lawrence Block [68]
“Maybe you still can.”
“Not a chance.”
“Well, you can do something.”
“What?”
A stretch of silence. Then, “I just wish I knew how to say things better. I know what I want to say but I don’t get the words right.”
“Go ahead.”
She turned away from me. In a small, clear voice she said, “Well, I don’t know what good it does either of us, Alex, but I love you. That’s all.”
In the little bedroom where she had never lain with any man but me I said, “I can’t be in very good shape after all that drinking. I may not be much good to you.”
“Oh, Alex. Oh, baby.”
“How soft you are.”
“Baby—”
“How warm.”
And afterward, in the warm sweet darkness, I said, “You’re not going out tonight You’re staying here.”
“Yes.”
And neither of us said anything about tomorrow.
She stayed home the next night, and the night after that. But the following night she told me she had to go out for awhile.
“Stay here.”
“You know I got to go out.”
“I have money.”
She started to cry. I didn’t know why, and I waited, and she said, “Alex, it’s bad enough I have to be a whore. But I won’t be your whore, I won’t do it. I won’t take your money and put it in my arm.”
“Do you need it that much?”
“You know how I get. You’ve seen me. You know what I am.”
“Could you kick?”
“I don’t know.”
“You did before.”
“Yeah. A few times.”
“Could you do it again?”
“Kicking is easy. How many times did you quit smoking? And start up again?”
We tossed it back and forth for a while, and then of course she went out as she had planned, and I wanted a drink for the first time since the binge. But instead I stayed in the apartment and drank coffee. She was gone a few hours. When she came back she went straight into the bathroom and stood under the shower for half an hour. Then she went into the bedroom and took a shot and then she came out and looked at me and started to cry.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”
“Well try.”
“I just don’t know.”
“I love you, you know.”
“I know it. Otherwise you couldn’t stand me.”
“We’ll try.”
“The things we do to ourselves, Alex. The things we do to each other.” She slumped on the couch. “I couldn’t turn myself off tonight That’s what I always have to do, to turn myself off and just be a machine. I couldn’t make it tonight. I thought I was going to be sick. I wanted to die.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“They have this thing called methadone for when you want to kick. It makes it easier. You would have to help me.”
“I will.”
“Alex, I can’t guarantee a thing—”
“We’ll try, that’s all.”
“What happens if I fall down?”
“I pick you up again.”
“You won’t let go, will you?”
“No. Never.”
She only fell down once and she got up right away and stayed on her feet. And after she was past the methadone and the codeine and the thiamine, after she was as clean as doctors could make her, we got out of the city and came here. It’s a little town in Montana where you can drink the air and breathe the water, and it is three thousand miles and several hundred years away from Times Square.
We have new names, and if anybody knows who we are they haven’t let us know about it. We bought a little diner and live in the three rooms upstairs of it. I do most of the cooking, and seem to have an aptitude for it. Jackie is putting on weight and looks better than ever. We don’t make much money, but we don’t need much money, either. And when you own a restaurant you never go hungry.
Understand this, it is not all roses. We are not sure that we will make it. Nothing is ever certain. We do not know quite where we are going. But where you are going is less important, I think, than where you are. And still less important is where you have been.
A New Afterword by the Author
In the summer of 1964, I moved from the Buffalo, New York, suburb of Tonawanda to Racine, Wisconsin, to take an editorial position in the coin supply division of Whitman Publishing Company, a division of Western Printing. I enjoyed my time in the corporate world, but a year and a