Adios, Scheherazade

When she saw the hitchhiker, she knew she shouldn’t stop for him, a woman alone in a car — Edwina was less than company — should never pick up hitchhikers, but she craved companionship, conversation, someone to help her take her mind off the horrible events of the day, so when she saw the hitchhiker she drove right on by.

No, God damn it. She picked him up.

I can’t do it. I don’t want to write a chapter about Betsy fucking with somebody else, no matter what alias she uses.

But it’s the only way out. Even if I manage to write the chapter about Paul and the whore, I have no place to go from there, no third chapter. I either have to make this an alternate-viewpoint book, back and forth between Paul and Beth, or I have to make it La Ronde. In either case, Chapter 2 has to be from Beth’s point of view.

I prefer La Ronde. Beth and the hitchhiker. Then Chapter 3 is the hitchhiker and some other girl, and so on until Chapter 9 is Paul and the whore told from the whore’s point of view, and Chapter 10 is Paul and Beth getting back together again.

But first I have to write Chapter 2, and in Chapter 2 Beth has to make it with somebody. And I don’t want to write that. I don’t even want to think it, so how can I write it?

This is ridiculous, I can’t go on like this. Things are going to hell all around me, here I am at Rod’s desk, using his typewriter, I don’t even have Chapter 1 any more, and I can’t write Chapter 2 because apparently I believe in sympathetic magic or something.

What a day this is. Ten o’clock in the morning and already it’s been too much day for me, and I can see from here I’m off on another useless chapter again. How many of these things have I done now? Thousands. And out of them I have one useful chapter and a couple of useful chapter beginnings.

I’m too rattled to work, that’s what it is. After Birge and Johnny—

That’s who was at the door last night. I finished my fifteen pages of what-is-it and left the office and walked down the hall and into the living room, turning on lights as I went, and through the picture window in the living room I saw the truck in the driveway.

And they saw the lights go on, because all at once they switched from bell ringing to door pounding. Any second, I knew, it would occur to one of them — probably Johnny — to try the knob, and then they would find out the door wasn’t locked, and then they would come in and turn me into a veal cutlet. With tomato sauce.

So I ran. Through the kitchen and out the back door and across the back yard and across the back yard behind mine, and around that house, and out to the street there. I turned right and ran three blocks, and then I walked a block, and then I ran another block, and then I decided it was ridiculous to be chased out of my own house like that, and besides they were probably gone, so I turned around and walked back, and when I was a block away I could see the truck parked in front. So they were still there. Waiting in the house for me to come back.

I couldn’t do it. They might not actually kill me, I might survive an encounter with Birge and Johnny, but they would definitely put me into the hospital for a while.

I almost went on back just for that reason. It might solve everything. If I was in the hospital, I couldn’t be expected to meet any deadlines anywhere. And if Birge and Johnny beat me up badly enough to put me in the hospital, it might make Betsy feel sorry enough for me to come down and see me and then I could tell her die truth about the baby-sitter business.

But I just couldn’t do it. The idea of walking back there deliberately to get my bones broken and my teeth knocked out and my eyes blackened and my skin bruised just wouldn’t do. No matter how pro-survival it might be from an intellectual standpoint, from an instinctive standpoint the idea was anti-survival and that was that. We know by now what happens with me when mind says do one thing and instinct says do another.

So I turned around again and left there. I walked five blocks to the all-night grocer and called a cab there and took it to the railroad station and called Rod from the station to ask him if I could stay at his place tonight and he said yes. There wasn’t a train till four in the morning, and I kept expecting Birge and Johnny to show up any second, but they never did, and by six I was here at Rod’s place, drinking scotch and telling him my sad story, and only once or twice did he let it show that he thought anything was funny.