Enough of Sorrow

by Lawrence Block

  “I feel a little dirty. I feel very coarse and vulgar. You know what I want to do?”

  “Karen…”

  “I’ll whisper it in your ear.” She put her lips to the blonde girl’s ear, blew into her ear, kissed it, then whispered something softly.

  “Oh…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She kissed Rae, drew the girl close, held her tight in her arms so that their breasts were pressed together and their arms were around each other. She was the leader now and the older and more experienced girl was the follower. She was the initiator, the aggressor, and she quivered with excitement at the feel of Rae’s firm female body and the taste of her eager mouth.

  They made love slowly, languorously. Like kids in the back seat of a car, she thought. Like a couple of teenagers parking by the lake to watch the midnight submarine races.

  Her hand moved, cupped the fullness of Rae’s breast through the fabric of the blouse and the bra beneath it. She flexed the firm flesh, rubbed, patted, petted, stroked, and was rewarded with little sighs and gasps from Rae. Her hand dropped to Rack leg and she stroked the long limb slowly and rhythmically from knee to top of thigh stopping just short of the home of love, coming closer each time, closer, closer…

  Her own head swam slightly with the liquor she had had. It didn’t bother her. She closed her eyes and felt a delicious flush of dizziness overwhelm her, then subside lingeringly. She kissed Rae, and Rae’s lips parted to admit Karen’s probing tongue. She drank the sweetness of the girl’s lovely mouth, drank deep, and her fingers moved to toy with the buttons on the front of the tailored blouse.

  It was, she knew, a complete reversal of the way it had been the first time with them. Now she was entirely active, Rae wholly passive. They had no butch-and-femme relationship, nothing so clearly defined. Instead their lovemaking each time assumed the pattern that fit the occasion, the rhythm that suited their mood. The mood now was ideal. Rae leaned back in her arms, stretched out full length upon the couch. Karen crouched over her, unfastened the last button, drew the blouse out from the waistband of the stretch pants. She drew a sharp breath, then dipped her head low to let her tongue race over the silken flesh of Rae’s stomach.

  Rae purred. Karen got her hands behind the older girl’s back, fumbled the bra open. She drew the straps down over Rae’s shoulders and cast the bra aside.

  With her clever fingers, she teased Rae’s breasts into turgid awareness, stopping only to nuzzle the two globes of flesh with lips and tongue. And she talked constantly, her voice an urgent whisper as she spoke every filthy word she knew, mouthing obscenities she had never used in her life.

  She paused once to pour more scotch into her glass and drink it off. Then she took off Rae’s stretch pants, easing them down over the rounded hips. Down, all the way down and off. The blonde girl wore nothing beneath them.

  In the darkness of her mind’s eye she saw, suddenly and in awesome clarity, an image that tore and twisted at her. A girl naked in a naked room, a frightened girl, with a razor blade in her hand, a girl using a razor blade to make experimental red lines upon her pale wrist. Someone screamed inside her head, and all at once it was gone, all of it…

  Her hands moved furiously over Rae’s warm body, touching, probing, finding. Karen did not even take the time to remove her own clothes. She felt driven, oddly and inexplicably possessed. As if she had to bear witness, as if she had to prove herself, as if, somehow, she had to overcome.

  Her hair brushed over Rae’s breasts. The blonde girl, still wholly passive, moaned and sighed beneath her skilled caresses. Karen sucked at her breasts like a greedy infant, rubbed her face over the silken bounty of Rae’s stomach.

  Down…

  There was no moon, there were no stars, there was only the yin and the yang, the alpha and the omega of a burning, brutal, bitter kiss.

  “Rae? I’m sorry, Rae.”

  “Sorry? For what?”

  “Whatever I did.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I thought it was good for us. I thought it…I thought it was good, but it wasn’t, was it?”

  “It was fine, darling.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “I had a good time, Karen, if that’s what you mean.”

  “No, I—”

  “It was just that things seemed a little vicious there for a little while. As though you had to show me something. As though there was something pretty loveless about what we were doing, and it’s nothing, honey, and I know it’s nothing, but it put me in a mood for no good reason at all and I got a little sulky. I’m sorry, Karen.”

  She said nothing. She wanted to freshen her drink but the bottle was too far for her to reach it and she didn’t have the strength to get up and get it.

  “Karen?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Poor baby. I was afraid you were drinking too much. You’re out on your feet and you don’t know it. We’d better go to bed, love. Come with me.”

  In a fog, she let Rae help her to her feet and guide her from the living room to the bedroom. Rae had to help her undress. It was an eerie feeling. She felt entirely sober, fully awake, but she had trouble getting her sweater off and couldn’t negotiate the clasp on her skirt, and Rae had to help her. And she thought she was perfectly aware of what was going on, but then she would lose track of things from one minute to the next. Rae was right, she told herself; she was a lot drunker than she seemed to realize.

  “My poor girl,” she heard Rae say. “Easy, now. I’d tell you that you’ll feel better in the morning except that I have the feeling that you won’t, not at all. You’ll probably have one hell of a head on you. If you wake up and feel rotten, you wake me right away, do you hear me, baby? You wake me and I’ll see what I can do to help you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you remember? I have a feeling you won’t remember anything I’m saying to you, Karen.”

  “Huh?”

  Soft laughter. “Easy, baby.” Lips that brushed her own, strong hands that eased her down onto her pillow. “Sleep. Sleep like a drunken lamb, baby…”

  She woke early. Rae was still sleeping and she let her sleep, moving noiselessly from bedroom to bathroom and gulping a few aspirins. Her head ached; other than that she was fine. Before long the aspirins had taken care of the headache and she was in perfect shape, not nearly as wretched as she had expected she would be. It surprised and delighted her. When you could drink that much and get that looped and still wake up without a hangover, she thought, it made perfectly good sense to become an alcoholic.

  She scribbled a brief note for Rae. Feeling fine, didn’t want to wake you, thought I’d go for a walk, back soon. Love, Karen. She read the note over, thinking that it was fairly absurd to sign it. Even without a signature Rae would probably have little trouble figuring out who had written it. She read it to herself a second time without punctuation and decided that the closing was not a signature but a plea—not “Love, Karen,” but “Love Karen”— an order.

  Do, she thought. Do love me.

  She left the note on the bathroom mirror, dressed, ran a comb through her hair, scooped up her purse and hurried downstairs and outside The air was cool and scented fresh, although she knew that there was really no such thing as fresh air in New York. She walked to the corner, bought a newspaper, walked halfway down the block on Third Avenue and found an open lunch counter. She went inside, took a stool at the counter and ordered a plate of ham and eggs, a short glass of orange juice, an order of toast and a cup of black coffee.

  Her appetite surprised her, and she wolfed her food and settled down with a cigarette and a second cup of coffee. It seemed almost unholy to feel so very fine after such an excessive evening. Too much drinking, too much of the wrong sort of love, too much of everything, and yet she felt better than she had ever felt in her life.

  There almost had to be a moral there.


  Live it up, she decided. Maybe that was the magic answer—live it up, live life to the hilt, do what you want to do when you want to do it, and to hell with worry and fear and fright and nerves and all the little curses that drove little people to little graves in gigantic cemeteries. Live it up. Drink when thirsty, eat when hungry, love then lustful, sleep when tired, and die when ready.

  A credo.

  And not a bad one at that, she told herself. Not so very bad at all. Guilt and fear and worry put razor cuts on pale wrists in lonely rooms. She had been that route, and she knew, and she would not walk that road again.

  Her job was a good one. She enjoyed it and handled it well, and each day she met more of Gordon’s clients and felt more at ease with them and with him. The girls, mostly tail blonde busty types, were mostly friendly. The men—there were fewer of them—made casual passes now and then, more as a matter of form than out of any desperate craving for her fair white body. And the passes did not unsettle her, not any more.

  So the job was fine. And the home life was also fine, if she merely relaxed and let it be at its best, let herself enjoy what was there to be enjoyed.

  Eat, drink, be merry…

  For tomorrow we live, she thought. So eat and drink and be merry so that there will be something worth living for.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “You look radiant,” Rae said.

  “I should.”

  “Oh?”

  “I had lunch out today.” She drew on her cigarette, set it down in an ashtray, blew out smoke. “That bolsters one’s morale,” she added.

  They were in the Dappled Door, a Third Avenue restaurant that served passable open sandwiches and very good cocktails. Rae was drinking a scotch sour, Karen a Rob Roy.

  “You always have lunch out,” Rae said. “You can’t make do with a sandwich at your desk. That wouldn’t go with that note of class that your employer strives to protect.”

  “I had lunch with a man.”

  “Oh?”

  “Uh-huh. Jealous?”

  “Who was it? Your Judge friend?”

  “Uh-huh. Jealous?”

  “I guess I’m supposed to be, aren’t I?” The blonde girl crushed out a cigarette “I’m afraid I can’t get awfully worked up about it, kitten. In the first place, you’ve had lunch with him before. In the second place, he’s old enough to be your—”

  “Older lover,” Karen supplied helpfully.

  “Father, is what I was going to say. Trite but true. And in the third place—”

  “Are there many more places left?”

  “This is the last one. In the third place, I don’t think he’s exactly your type.”

  “Who is?”

  “I am,” Rae said.

  “We dined in style. L’Aiglon, no less.”

  “Very fancy.”

  “Uh-huh. I really like his company, Rae. You know it’s—” she fumbled for the words “—it’s nice having a man that you can like and can talk to and that you can be completely comfortable with, do you know what I mean?”

  “I know.”

  “Without any sex thing coming into the picture. I mean, we’re good friends and we can certainly talk about things and all…”

  “Thanks a bunch.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean, don’t you? It’s good to be friends with a man, but it would be bad if there were any sex thing. And most of the time there is, I guess. They always make passes unless they’re too old or something. Even if they aren’t really interested, they always throw you a pass, and it can spoil things.”

  “All but the lesbian’s dream trio.”

  “Who are they? The lame and the halt and the blind?”

  “That’s not bad,” Rae said. “I was thinking of the relatives, the old ones, and the faggots.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” Karen said.

  “You’ll drink to almost anything.”

  There was the echo of an edge to Rae’s voice. Karen carefully ignored it. “I haven’t been drinking any more,” she said.

  “You haven’t been drinking any less, either.”

  “I think we’ve got the beginning of a pretty fair vaudeville routine. Vas you effer in Zinzinnati?”

  “Positively, Mister Shean.”

  There were times, as the weeks passed, when she wondered what Adrian March saw in her. They drifted gradually into the habit of getting together once or twice a week for lunch, always in a good restaurant, always with March picking up the check. At first she had tried to pay her own way but he wouldn’t let her.

  “There are only two good aspects to playing the rancid role of Judge Philip Randall and peddling detergents to the Great Unwashed,” he had told her. “One is that the work is steady and easy, and the other is that one makes a surprising amount of money. Even good living fails to dispose of the money faster than it accrues. If I let you pay your own way, Karen, one of several possible things would happen. You might find excuses to avoid lunching with me due to an inability to afford expensive lunches. Or I might stop asking you out of an unwillingness to impose a financial burden upon you. Or, worst of all, we might take to dining in foul little budget-minded restaurants and foregoing the pleasure of a cocktail before dinner. I am far too hedonistic to make that sacrifice for the sake of your misplaced pride. Humor an antique actor, my dear. Let me pick up all the tabs.”

  After that she had not mentioned the subject again. She didn’t have to—they never seemed to run out of things to talk about. He knew almost everyone in the theater, or at least it seemed that way to her, and he was an endless source of anecdotes and inside information. More than that, he talked about anything and everything with her, from politics and such to fairly abstract philosophical arguments.

  This was something she had missed for far too long. She had always been a bright girl, at least a borderline intellectual. All during college she had lived for the real, meaningful conversation that was as important a part of college as the lectures and reading and examinations. But when she lived with Ronnie all of that somehow withered away. Ronnie did not converse with a person, he played to the person, making every talk an audition. And, she thought now, he had always been a bad actor.

  Even with Rae, there was no real opportunity for conversation. She felt disloyal when the realization first came to her, but it was true nevertheless. With Rae, their talk was always profoundly personal. Despite all their rapport, they could not seem to talk at length about anything outside of their own small if comfortable world. Broader topics were invariably reduced to trivia or else merely flirted with.

  At times this bothered her but most of the time she was able to shrug it off with little difficulty. She and Rae had a good, fine, firm relationship. They loved each other, they were happy with took other. No relationship could be utterly perfect in every way. Theirs came close enough to satisfy her.

  If only Rae didn’t keep harping on one subject.

  Her drinking.

  There was no getting around it, she had to admit. She was drinking more, and was having drinks more frequently. When she lunched with Adrian March, they always had a drink before the meal, often two and occasionally three. Even with a heavy hunch on top of the cocktails, she would get high enough to feel the effect of the liquor through the afternoon. It didn’t seem: to affect her work adversely. If anything, it relaxed her and made her feel more at ease on the job. If she had three drinks, though, she did have a tendency to make typographical errors more readily than usual. But that was about the only place where it showed. Other than that, she could function at least as well with an edge on as she could when she was stone cold sober.

  She was less and less often stone cold sober. She and Rae always had drinks after work, at the apartment. It was a ritual, and certainly a good one—a line of demarcation between the work day and the evening, especially valuable for Rae, who worked at the apartment and could stand a sharp break between work and relaxation.

  If they went out for dinner, which they did a few nigh
ts a week, they generally had wine with their meals. They often drank wine at home when Rae cooked. The blonde girl did not like to cook often, but when she did put on apron she generally made a production out of it, and there was something moderately nauseating in the idea of sitting down to a sumptuous spread of, say, Beef Bourguignon, without a bottle of good Pommard on the table.

  Bit by bit, she kept finding new ways in which alcohol proved itself valuable and then became indispensable. She discovered, for example, that it was a very fine thing to sip a little cognac while reading a book or listening to the FM radio; before long, it was almost impossible to pick a decent book or dial in some music without spilling a taste of cognac into a small snifter and paying at least as much attention to the cognac as to the book or music. And the cocktail-before-lunch routine with Adrian March led her to the happy discovery that one could have a cocktail before lunch even when one dined alone. After all, a meal in a decent restaurant was unthinkable without a martini or sour to sharpen the palate. Some of the time she ate at a hamburger place where no liquor was served, but more and more often she four herself going to the Brass Rail and sharpening her palate with something around eighty or ninety proof.

  Harvey’s Bristol Cream, she found, was nice after a meal. Better than dessert, and less fattening.

  Coffee with Irish Whiskey in it, she learned, tasted much better than coffee with cream and sugar in it. And didn’t seem like drinking at all, since, after all, it was only coffee, wasn’t it?

  “It’s not as though I had a problem.” she told Adrian March one lunch hour. “It would be different if I got drunk, but I don’t. Have you ever seen me stoned?”

  “No, but I see you fairly early in the day, Karen. Do you get drunk at night?”

  “Only if I have a lot to drink.”

  “That’s an extraordinary observation. Do you ever have blackouts? Ever wake up with a fuzzy memory? Or are you crystal clear the day after a binge?”

  “I don’t really have binges, for one thing.” She gnawed the tip of one finger. “And I don’t get hangovers. Sometimes I’ll wake up with a headache, but never anything that a couple of aspirin won’t fix in a minute or two. Sometimes I won’t remember the details, say, of the last half hour before I went to sleep. Why? Does that mean something?”