Enough of Sorrow
Lawrence Block
Writing as Jill Emerson
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR
A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK
CHAPTER ONE
The girl’s name was Karen Winslow. She was tall and slender, with dark brown hair and eves just a shade lighter. She was not a beautiful girl. Her jawline was too hard, her nose a little too long. But she might have been pretty. Prettiness does not depend upon perfect features. If she had held herself properly, It her step were firm, if her eyes were bright and her lips curled in a smile, she would have been pretty. She had been pretty in the past, so gently pretty as to seem quite beautiful at first glance.
She was not pretty now. Her pale lips were a straight line and her eyes were dull, almost opaque. Her whole body sagged as she walked, as though she were literally dragging herself through the grayness of the afternoon. She neither looked nor felt pretty.
At the corner of Second Avenue and Fifth Street she stopped and leaned against the side of a weathered brick building. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. She breathed deeply, closed her eyes, exhaled, took another breath, let it out, opened her eyes again. She was dizzy and she thought she was going to fall down or be sick or both. She wanted a cigarette badly. She fumbled through her purse, found a pack of cigarettes. It was empty. She stood there, still leaning against the building, and she held the empty cigarette pack in her hand and stared at it for a full minute. A woman stopped pushing a shopping cart long enough to ask her if something was wrong.
“Wrong?” She wanted to laugh. “No,” she said slowly. “Nothing’s wrong, only my pack is empty, that’s all.”
The woman started to say something, then changed her mind. Karen crumpled the pack slowly and let it fall to the sidewalk. There was a drugstore on the other side of Second Avenue. At the tobacco counter she asked for a pack of Marlboros. The clerk gave her a pack and took half a dollar from her and gave her a dime.
She remained in front of the counter while she opened the pack. She removed four cigarettes, put one between her lips and dropped the other three into her purse.
“I won’t need the rest of these,” she said.
The clerk looked at her.
“I’ll probably only smoke one or two,” she said. “Four at the very most. So I won’t need the others.”
“We don’t sell ’em one at a time, honey.”
“Oh, I know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t want a refund or anything.” She pushed the pack across the counter to him. “It’s just that I won’t need these,” she said. “You keep them. Smoke them yourself if you want. Or give them to somebody.”
She left him standing there with an uncertain look on his face. She walked out of the drugstore and headed downtown on Second Avenue, the cigarette still hanging unlit from her lips. Halfway down the block she remembered the cigarette and stopped in a doorway to light it. The third match worked, and she drew smoke into her lungs and felt dizzy and nauseous all over again. She swayed, then shook off the feeling and began walking once more.
At the corner of Stanton Street she stopped to toss the cigarette into the gutter. She looked across the broad avenue and scanned the block for the building where she had lived so long. But it was gone, it and the tenements on either side. Now there was a vast hole in the ground where the buildings had been, and soon, according to a large sign, there would be a housing project erected on the site.
She closed her eyes and remembered the building, remembered their apartment on the fifth floor. A drab, joyless building, a cold and sterile apartment of three small rooms and a kitchenette, cracked plaster, cooking smells in the rooms and stale beer smells in the stairwell. How long had she lived there?
When she was six they had moved there from another apartment she could not recall at all. And they had moved out five years ago, and she was twenty-two now. Eleven years in that apartment, and now it was gone, the whole building gone.
She lit another cigarette. There were two left in her purse now. She gazed again at the empty lot. Everything was gone now, she thought. Her father had died in that apartment, and she and Ted and her mother had moved out while his coughing still echoed against the walls. And then her mother died in their new apartment in Parkchester, and now Ted was somewhere in the South—Texas, Louisiana, Fort Something-Or-Other, drafted and packed and gone. Gone, gone, gone, everyone, everything. The family, the building, everything gone, and she was alone and lost.
Now Ronnie was gone, too.
She closed her eyes and tried to bring his image into focus. But it was blurred, fuzzy around the edges, elusive as childhood memory. Only the lips, curled in a smile that was not a smile at all.
“I think this is where I get off, Karen. But don’t think it hasn’t been fun…”
She had cried, and he had left, and then her tears stopped and since that time she had not cried at all.
She dropped the cigarette and crushed it underfoot She had only taken a few puffs on it and she decided that it did not matter—she had two left and two would be more than enough. She turned away from the empty lot where she had lived once, went another block down Second Avenue, turned again on Rivington Street.
The candy store was still here. She looked in through the fly-specked window for Mr. Reuben, but Mr. Reuben was gone and a Puerto Rican with a bushy black moustache stood behind the counter. All of the stools were empty. She opened the door and went inside and ordered a chocolate egg cream. That was what she had always ordered at Mr. Reuben’s store. The man made her an egg cream and she looked at it for a moment, then tasted it. She tried to remember whether or not it tasted the same as egg creams had tasted before and it seemed very important to know whether it did or not. And then she decided that it wasn’t important at all. She paid a dime for the egg cream and put it down unfinished.
“I don’t need this,” she said. “There’s nothing wrong with it, you see, but I just don’t want it, that’s all.”
The man did not understand. He said something in Spanish, and she looked at his dark eyes and bushy moustache and turned and fled.
Halfway down Rivington Street a sign said Rooms 4 Rent. She went into a dark hallway and rang the bell marked Superintendent. She waited, and after a few moments an old lady came down the hallway toward her, a fat-bottomed old lady who walked as though she had lead in her shoes.
Karen said, “I’d like a room, if you have one, please.”
“One on the second floor. No cooking, and the bathroom’s down the hall.”
“That’s fine.”
“It’s six dollars a week.”
“I just wanted it for tonight.”
“We rent by the week.”
“Listen, I’ll pay you six dollars, do you understand? But I just want the room for tonight.”
The old woman’s eyes narrowed. “Six dollars you could take yourself and go to a hotel.”
“I just wanted—”
“This is something funny, you and the room?”
“No, I—”
“I can’t charge you six dollars, not for a night. You got three dollars? Give me three dollars and you can have the room.”
She found three dollar bills in her purse and gave them to the woman. There was al
so a five-dollar bill in the purse, lying loose in the bottom of the bag, and there was a ten-dollar bill rolled up tight and kept in an empty lipstick tube. With all that money, she realized, she could have gone to an expensive hotel. Some elaborately clean place, where they carried your bags for you and there was a phone in your room and air-conditioning.
“No baggage?”
“Pardon me? I wasn’t—”
“I said you got no baggage?”
“Oh, no. No, I don’t.”
The woman shrugged and showed her to the room. It was on the second floor in the rear, a small room, a wall of beaverboard to show that the room had been created by dividing another larger room in half. The room was furnished with a narrow bed and a chest of drawers. Little else would have fit into it.
“Good enough for you?”
“Fine.”
The woman cleared her throat and went away. Karen listened to her footsteps as she lumbered slowly downstairs. She sat on the edge of the narrow bed and smoked the third of her four cigarettes, and she looked out the little window at the rear wall of another tenement. There was a shade on her window, yellow, ripped here and there and curling at the edges. She drew the shade and went back to sit on the edge of her bed again.
She finished the cigarette and left the fourth one in her purse. Then she reached into the purse and took out a package of five safety razor blades. She tried to remember when she had bought them. Today was … what? Thursday or Friday, she wasn’t sure which. And she had bought the blades the night she had seen the movie, and she couldn’t remember the title, and she had seen the movie that weekend, probably on Sunday. Was that right?
It hardly mattered.
Ronnie had left on a Thursday. That had been either two or three weeks ago, and she could not possibly remember which. She remembered that it was a Thursday, though, because she remembered going to the doctor Tuesday to find out one way or the other, and being scared to tell him Tuesday night and all day Wednesday, and finally telling him Thursday after he had asked her what was the matter with her.
So she had told him either two or three weeks ago to the day. It seemed funny to know something like that to the day but not to the week, like knowing that the battle of Hastings was fought on October 14th, but not knowing the year.
She knew dates, like the battle of Hastings. October 14, 1066. And the battle of Malplaquet. September 11, 1709. And Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar—October 21, 1805. Most people couldn’t remember dates like those at all, and some could remember only the year, but hardly anyone could remember the whole date without having made a special effort to memorize it in the first place. She could, though. And even now she didn’t forget that sort of thing. It stayed with her.
She could remember the month and day and year that Marlborough and Prince Eugene won at Malplaquet, but she couldn’t say for sure whether today was a Thursday or a Friday.
She opened the pack of razor blades, took out one of the five, unwrapped it. She put the little scrap of paper in which the blade had been wrapped into her purse, along with the four remaining blades. Another loose end, she thought. Four leftover blades, like the one leftover cigarette and the fifteen leftover dollars. She wondered if perhaps she ought to make a will, a very legalistic document full of whereases and heretofores.
I, Karen Winslow, being of sound mind, do hereby bequeath fifteen dollars and four razor blades and a Marlboro cigarette to whoever wants it.
No, that wouldn’t do. She wasn’t of sound mind, and the courts would throw it out.
She got to her feet and began to undress. She kicked off her shoes and placed them side by side at the foot of the narrow bed. She pulled her sweater up over her head, folded it neatly and placed it on the bed. She opened and unzipped her skirt, stepped out of it, folded it and put it beside the sweater. She was now wearing only a bra and panties.
She took off the bra. Her breasts were firm and full. In time, she thought, they would swell with milk. She closed her eyes for just the shortest moment and remembered the touch of Ronnie’s hands upon her breasts, and something turned over inside her and she caught her breath.
She plated the bra upon the bed.
She took off her panties and folded her hands over her flat stomach. Flat now, she thought, but given time it would grow round, and she would feel life within it…
She stopped thinking those thoughts.
For a moment she stood straight and tall, and at that moment she was quite lovely. A beautiful body, tall and straight and well put together, the skin smooth and flawless, the carriage erect.
Then she took hold of the razor blade.
She made a tiny cut on her left wrist and whispered, “Oh, I am afraid,” and she made another try and stopped herself thinking Can I do it? Can I? She tried again, another small cut, and she watched blood ooze very slowly from the three my cuts on her left wrist, and she thought Oh, God help me and slashed open the veins in her left wrist and transferred the blade from one hand to the other and slashed again, quickly and unwaveringly, through the vein in her right wrist.
The razor blade dropped slowly to the floor, bounced once and was still. She sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her wrists. The blood flowed evenly. Now I get tired, she thought and then I weaken and then it all stops. I am all that is left, alone and lost and weary, and soon I will be gone like everything and everyone, the building and Mommy and Daddy and Ted and Ronnie and Oh my God oh my God!
When she did move, after so short a time that seemed like so long a time, when she got to her feet and began to scream, when she lurched for the door, shrieking, she was already beginning to weaken. She got to the door and got it open and stood crying out in the hallway, gripping one wrist with the opposite hand while the unheld wrist went on bleeding freely. There were noises in the building, sounds of human movement, and there was a man coming toward her. His face swam in and out of focus.
She said, “Oh, Ronnie, you’re back, you’ll save me.”
She said, “Help me, I’m dying.”
She said, “I’m sorry.”
And then, as the man reached her, her legs gave way and she fell forward and the darkness came in like fog.
CHAPTER TWO
There was a long stretch of gray and black, an endless time of dreaming and waking and sleeping. The dreams were bad ones, and it was as well that she did not remember them. The periods of consciousness were hazy at best and did not stay with her long.
Until finally she opened her eyes and saw a man in white standing by the side of her bed looking down at her. He was scowling. She tried to change position on the bed but couldn’t. Her feet were tied to the foot of the bed.
He said, “Well, you lost the baby, Karen.”
She looked at him.
“Shock and loss of blood turned the trick. Lost the baby, and damn near lost yourself in the bargain. There must be an easier way to induce abortion than by slashing your wrists. But I suppose you were trying to kill more than the baby, weren’t you?”
“I—”
“Do you know what day it is?”
“October twenty-seventh. You attempted suicide on—” He looked at her chart “—the 19th of September. You’ve been here about six weeks Does that surprise you?”
It did.
“We almost lost you. The man who found you outside your room managed to stop the bleeding but by that time you had already lost a lot of blood. You had transfusions. Then we realized you were pregnant and you lost the kid and hemorrhaged and almost died all over again. Shock. How do you feel now?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded thoughtfully “You’ll have to stay here a few days. When people try to kill themselves they don’t realize what a headache they’re giving the rest of the world. You can’t just go ahead and kill yourself when you feel like it. Not in a civilized country. It’s against the law. I’m not sure of the wisdom of the law, to tell you the truth. Sometimes I think a person should have the right to go to hell whatever wa
y he wants to. But this country isn’t geared that way. People have to go on living whether they want to or not. Are you sorry to be alive, Karen?”
She wasn’t, and she said as much. Her head felt very light. She thought that she was going to be sick, but this didn’t happen. She had the feeling that she ought to be thanking this doctor but she didn’t know just how to go about it.
“Karen? I have to ask you some questions. You can lie to me if you feel like it. It doesn’t much matter.”
“I—”
“You killed yourself because you were pregnant? Tried to kill yourself, I mean. Is that right?”
“I suppose so.”
“You were depressed about it? “
“Yes.”
“You’re not married, of course.”
She shook her head.
“Know who the father is? The man who would have been the father if you had left him something to be the father of?”
She winced at the words. It was beginning to soak in— she had had life within her, and she had destroyed that life by trying to kill herself. She was alive but the baby was not.
“I know,” she said.
“He wouldn’t marry you?”
“No.” She swallowed. “He left,” she said.
“You told him you were pregnant and he ran out on you? Sounds like a sweet guy. Tell me, Karen, what do you think you’ll be doing after we let you out of here?”
He went on asking her questions and she answered them briefly without giving them much thought. After awhile he went away and left her alone. A nurse came in later on with a tray and asked her how she was feeling. She ate lunch, had her temperature and blood pressure taken, took a nap. She stayed at the hospital for four days and answered a great many questions asked by several different doctors. What would she do when she left? Where would she live? Would she get a job? Where? Doing what? She had a college degree, she knew how to type, she had had a job in an office until one day she had simply failed to come in, and she would get another job with no trouble. Money? There was some in the bank, some she had forgotten somehow in the middle of everything. How much? A few hundred dollars, she wasn’t sure exactly how much. Her clothes and bankbook and everything else were in that room on West 74th Street, the room where she had been living, the room where she had lived with Ronnie. She would find another room, and another job, and everything would work itself out.
Enough of Sorrow Page 1
