Into the Night

“Oh, the coffee. No, little things like that don’t matter. There’s nothing the same about it. The cups aren’t the same. The girl sharing them with me isn’t the same. The only thing that’s the same is the man.” Then the pain came and went. “The only thing that hurts is the one big thing — that she left me.”

I have him going now. I have him going.

The rack of records finally came to an end. There was a definitive little click, almost like a snub. He turned his head around toward it, then gave her an inquiring look.

“No more,” she said curtly, and sliced her hand at it edgewise almost fiercely. Damn that ill-timed machine, she thought.

“Was it very sudden, her leaving you?” She had been straining forward a little toward him. She became aware of it herself, and forced herself to lean back more.

“Terribly sudden. Awfully sudden.” He killed all the rest of his coffee in one swallow, more for the brandy than for the coffee, she surmised.

“Sometimes that’s kinder, sometimes it’s not.”

“It’s never kind, in love.”

And I’m not being kind, am I, doing this to you? But I’ve got to know. Oh, I’ve got to know — why I’m killing you.

“Take another drink,” she said, with perfidious sympathy — which was only partly perfidious. “When you take a drink, it makes it easier to talk. When you talk, it makes it easier to bear.”

He looked at her in acknowledgment. “I’ve never told it to anybody. You see, there wasn’t anybody to tell.”

“There is now,” she said lullingly.

He poured Hennessy into a snifter, about a quarter of the way up the sides. Then he rolled it back and forth between his hands.

She took a chance. It might not come if she just sat and waited. “Was there a quarrel — just before?”

“There wasn’t time for a quarrel.”

“Oh,” she said.

“It started out as some kind of an attack. I didn’t know it was going to end up by her leaving me. I didn’t know until weeks later.”

“But you said—”

It was coming now. It had started. It had started and nothing could stop it. Like when you turn on a faucet and the handle breaks off. Or start a rock slide down a slope of shale.

He pointed to a place nearer the opposite wall than to them. “She fell down on the carpet right there. See where I’m pointing? She fell down very suddenly. Fell like a stone.” And as if to reassure her, he said, “It’s not the same carpet. Don’t be alarmed. I had it changed.”

“Illness?”

“I didn’t know at first, I couldn’t tell. She was conscious, her eyes stayed open. But she couldn’t talk, or wouldn’t. She kept thrashing around on the floor, as if she were having a convulsion. Saliva kept flowing out of her mouth, in spurts. It shone silvery, in little foamy patches. That’s why I had the carpet changed, later on. And she started to bite at it. She pulled little tufts out of it with her teeth.”

Sweat was pouring down his own face now.

Starr? This was the same Starr who died in my own arms so quietly, so unassumingly, later on? “Not temporary insan—?”

“No,” he said quickly, before she had time to finish. “I couldn’t do anything with her. She became worse each time I tried to go near her. When I’d try to pick her up in my arms, she’d thrash violently. Unmanageably. A spasm would go through her, almost like a patient undergoing electric-shock therapy.”

He swallowed some of his drink. He looked as though it were pulling all the lining off his throat as it went down.

“I had to phone for an ambulance finally. The intern examined her right there on the floor where she was lying. He said it was shock. Acute shock. Emotional shock. He said he’d seen it in soldiers, during the Korean War. He gave her a needle to quiet her, and, of course, they took her to the hospital.”

Now he took another drink, a worse one, a more hurtful one.

She took a chance and opened her handbag narrowly, just about the width of the edge of her hand, and dipped inside and pulled out a handkerchief. It had a little cologne on it, but that couldn’t be helped. She threw it over toward him, and he picked it up and mopped his soaking forehead with it, and then pressed it between the palms of his hands.

“As she went out that door on the stretcher, that was the last time I ever saw her. I never saw her again to this day. She never came back here from that night on.”

“But — how is it you didn’t go with her? Doesn’t a husband usually go with his wife, when she’s taken ill like that?”

“She wouldn’t let me. She carried on so terribly. You see the needle didn’t take effect quickly enough, and she must have heard me say I’d ride over with her in the ambulance. She started to moan and plead to them not to let me come near her, she didn’t want me to come near her. Finally the intern took me aside and said it might be better if I didn’t, the idea seemed to have an exciting effect on her. To wait awhile and give her time to quiet down. He said he didn’t think it was anything to worry about, it was just a nerve crisis of some kind.

“So I walked the floor, walked the floor, all night long.”