Enough of Sorrow

by Lawrence Block

  During one of the moments of awareness she lipped a silent prayer. A small request, one God could grant with no effort at all. Sooner or later, she knew, it would have to end. Sooner or later she or they or all of them would pass out. Sooner or later the blackness of sleep would roll in like fog.

  And sooner or later after that she would awaken.

  Her prayer was not elaborate. She only wished that, when she did awake, they would be gone and she would be alone. Just that much.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Mister Gordon? This is Karen. I’m afraid I won’t be coming in today, Mister Gordon, I…I’m going to have to have some time off. I’m not sure how long. A few weeks, maybe. I don’t really know how much time.”

  He wanted to know what was wrong.

  “Everything’s wrong,” she said. She looked down at the palm of her hand. It was beaded with perspiration. She wiped her palm on her slacks, transferred the phone to that hand, wiped the sweat from her other hand.

  “Kid, is it money? Because I could help.”

  “It’s not money,” she said. “Everything’s a mess, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suppose I ought to get out of this city but I wouldn’t know where to go. I feel as though I’m all tied up in knots and I have to get loose before I strangle.” She hadn’t meant to run on like this but once she’d started it was impossible to stop. Her hand tightened on the telephone receiver as if she were trying to squeeze water from it. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next, I’m all messed up and I don’t know what to do. I thought everything was all straightened out, and I thought I was doing fine, just fine, and I love working for you and everything else, and—”

  She stopped cold in the middle of the sentence, slapped a lid on the flow of words. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to carry on like a two-year-old. I don’t know when I’ll be able to come back to the office, Mister Gordon. Maybe you ought to hire another girl. All I can say is that I’d like to come back when this is all straightened out but I don’t know when that will be and in the meanwhile I couldn’t possibly work. I’m having enough trouble just trying to keep from snapping inside.”

  “Karen?”

  “Yes?”

  There was a pause while he hunted for the words. Then he said, “I don’t like this talk about finding somebody else. You’re perfect for what I want, you’ve always done perfect work. You’re what the office needs, honey.”

  In spite of everything, his words meant something to her. All at once there was a lump in her throat, a mass in her chest pressing against her rib cage. In another minute, she thought, I’ll start to cry.

  “So get off this kick of hire-somebody-else. All these years in the business I ran my office by myself, the hell, I can do it again until you’re ready to come back. In a week or three weeks or three months. I know how to pick up a phone, for godssake, I know how to dodge somebody I don’t want to see. I’ll put the answering service on fulltime the way it used to be and I’ll manage. Don’t think I won’t miss you, but I’ll manage, I’ll wait for you.”

  She thought, What a sweet man, what an impossibly sweet man.

  “Listen to me,” he went on. “This is all none of my business, so you tell me to go to hell if you want, all right? But a lot of the time a young kid thinks she’s got a problem that nobody ever had before, and most of the problems in the world have been around a long time, And somebody who’s fifty can see that the problems people have at twenty aren’t as rough as they seem at the time. Listen to the old philosopher, huh?”

  She found she was almost smiling.

  “Karen, tell me, are you pregnant?” He was talking very swiftly now, as if embarrassed by his own question. “Because every girl thinks that’s the end of the world, and believe me, it never is. There are doctors who take care of that kind of thing, good doctors, not two-bit rabbitsnatchers but good professional expensive Park Avenue doctors who do the whole bit in regular hospital conditions so that nothing goes wrong. Or there are places you can go where nobody looks at you funny and you wait your time and when you’re through you’ve had the kid and it goes straight out for adoption, you never even see it and you know it winds up in a good home, and nobody knows where you were, you were just out of town on a vacation and you never had a baby at all. Or if you want to marry the sonofabitch there are ways to arrange that, too, and it’s not as hard as you think and not as easy for him to get out of marrying you as maybe he thinks it is. What I’m trying to say, and I know it’s none of my business, but the point is that it’s not as bad as you maybe think it is, and you don’t have to worry about money for a doctor or a place to stay or anything, because that can all be taken care of and no strings. What Sophie Tucker says, I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor and rich is better, well the best thing about having a couple of bucks is you can help somebody when she needs help, so don’t you worry about the money.”

  He stopped, breathless, and she discovered that she was crying. It didn’t surprise her. She swallowed and got control of herself. She said, “You would do all that for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why?”

  A pause. Then, with a verbal shrug, “Well, you’re a nice kid, Karen. You’ve been a real help around the office. The hell…”

  She thought how very extraordinary everything was. If she had been working for this so-sweet man when she had been pregnant with Ronnie’s child, if she had known someone like him or Adrian March, then she would never have wound up in that cold empty room on Rivington Street, would never have drawn red lines on her wrists with a razor blade. How wonderful some people could be, she thought. How very wonderful some people could be.

  And she told him, then, that she was not pregnant. Almost cheerfully she said, “I wish it were only that. It’s not anything concrete that I can point to. It’s…all inside, the way I’ve been feeling and acting, the general way my life is going. I need time to think. I have to figure out what’s happening to me. I’m all mixed up, half the time I can’t think straight. The whole thing…I wish it was something another person could help with but I don’t think it is. I think it’s the sort of thing I have to work out by myself.”

  “Would you want to see a doctor?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but what I meant was a psychiatrist. I don’t know if they do anybody any good but some people swear by them. The others swear at them. It might be worth trying, Karen.”

  She had thought of this before. Maybe she was wrong, but she couldn’t believe that a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst could help her. She had the certain feeling that whatever had to be done was something she had to do entirely alone, and that she had to find her own way through the woods.

  “Anything I can do, honey, anything at all, you know enough to come to me, I hope.”

  “I know.”

  “Money, a shoulder to cry on, a ticket to some other town. Anything, you let me know. You don’t and I’ll be insulted.”

  She couldn’t speak.

  “And whenever you’re ready, just walk through the door. The job’ll be there for you whenever it is. Don’t be in any rush. Get everything out of your system. Take your time. You mind another question? Would you get upset if you got your weekly check in the mail while you’re out?”

  “Please don’t do that.”

  “You could call it a loan if you wanted. Or an advance against future salary.”

  “No, please.” She swallowed again. “I’d honestly rather not.”

  “You all right financially?”

  “I’ve got some money set aside. It’ll be enough.”

  “Okay, it’s your business, but the offer always stands. There’s something else. You can collect unemployment insurance. It’s something you paid for, it’s not charity, they deduct out of your pay every week and you might as well get some good out of it. You apply, and when they check with me I’ll say I let you go because I found out I didn’t need a girl and couldn’t affor
d the salary. That way you’ll be eligible to collect. Will you do that much?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You damn well ought to, you paid money in, why not get some benefit from it? You get thirty-five or forty bucks a week, tax-free, something like that. And it’s not charity. Do me a favor and go down to the unemployment place later this week and apply. Will you promise to do that?”

  “All right.”

  “Good, good.” He was silent. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s it, huh? Take care of yourself. And this is very soap opera, but it’s never as bad as it seems. Nothing ever is. Soap opera or not, it’s the truth. You remember that?”

  “I’ll remember,” she said.

  Not that day but the following afternoon Rae called. She knew the phone would ring sooner or later and she had been sitting patiently waiting for the call. She was very calm when she answered it.

  “I hoped we’d both had a chance to relax,” Rae said. “I wanted to find out where we stand.”

  “I think we should see each other.”

  “Shall I come over?”

  “No, I don’t think so.” She lit a cigarette. “Rae, I’m going to have to move out of the apartment for awhile. There are a lot of things I have to figure out for myself. I can’t even put everything in words right now but I need some time alone.”

  “Stay in the apartment. I’m comfortable where I am.”

  “No. No, I have to get away. Oh, this is impossible, isn’t it? I want to talk to you face to face. Can you meet me some place?”

  “Neutral territory?”

  “You could call it that. Where can I meet you?” Rae named a cocktail lounge.

  “No, not there. Some place for coffee. The Ham ’n’ Eggs on Union Square? Is that all right with you?”

  “Not a bar? That’s a change.”

  “Yes. I…Could you meet me at the Ham ’n’ Eggs in half an hour?”

  “I’ll be there, Karen.”

  And, in a back booth where they faced each other over a formica-topped table, she drank coffee and chain-smoked and tried to explain what she had to do and how she thought that she felt. It was a very difficult conversation. Rae wanted to know if there was someone else, if Karen still loved her, if she had done something too horribly wrong. The blonde girl began to berate herself for having moved out, for having been inconsiderate when Karen needed her.

  “You were all messed up and I turned into a perfect bitch. My god, Karen, you must hate me!”

  “No,” she said. She wanted to say more but couldn’t.

  “Do you think…do you—”

  “I can’t really talk now,” she said.

  “You’re right. Oh, the awful things people do to each other, And to themselves.”

  She ground out a cigarette, lit another almost immediately. “I’ll pack my things and be moved out by this evening, Rae. You can move in tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “Are you leaving some of your things, Karen?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re packing everything, kitten? Then that means you’re not coming back, doesn’t it?”

  She blew out a column of smoke. “I honestly don’t know,” she said. “I…just don’t know, that’s all. That’s one of the things I have to work out for myself.”

  “Do you mean that? Or is this just a handy way to let me down gently? Because you don’t have to be gentle with me, kitten, I’ve made this scene too many times already to need the kid-glove treatment. Nothing ever lasts in our world. I told you that at the beginning, didn’t I? Always is a lie. And my kitten will never come back to me. Will she?”

  “I—I—I—” She was stuttering, absolutely unable to make the words take form. She stopped and closed her eyes and forced herself to sit back in the booth. Her hands knotted themselves into fists, relaxed, knotted up again. Finally she said again that she didn’t know what she was going to do, that she might not go back to Rae, that she might return later if Rae still wanted her, that she just honestly didn’t know.

  “You’d better go now,” Rae said.

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Leave the restaurant. Now. Please. Just leave, I’ll take care of the check. I love you, Karen. Please go, I’m going to cry. I don’t want you to see me, please go, darling…”

  It was hard to find a hotel; there were very few neighborhoods left for her. The Upper West Side was where she had lived with Ronnie, the Lower East Side was where she had attempted to kill herself, the Gramercy Park section was where she had lived with Rae, and the Village was where she had gone off the deep end. It seemed as though every corner of Manhattan was a web of yet another set of memories she was anxious to escape. There were neighborhoods where she had not lived, neighborhoods she did not know at all, but they did not seem to have hotels in them.

  She thought how extraordinary it would sound if she ever tried to explain her dilemma to anyone. Sooner or later, she thought, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse had to work their way around even the longest of tables, until at last every place was messed. Sooner or later one had to have bad memories of every section of a city, until there was no place left for one to live in.

  Just to get away. Just to go far enough so that she would never see anyone she knew, never pass any place she had ever been. And yet she wanted to remain in New York. She did not want to leave the city. She had never been out of the area in her life, and she sure she would be utterly lost anywhere else.

  The hotel she ultimately chose was not in Manhattan but deep in Brooklyn on Flatbush Avenue near Eastern Parkway. She remember the Thomas Wolfe story…Only the dead knew Brooklyn, according to the title, and this seemed somehow appropriate. She was dead, in a very real sense, and she wanted a chance to find a way to live again, and to find it in a place she did not know and a place where no one would know her.

  The hotel was called the Rainier Arms. It was shabby but clean and seemed monotonously proper. The other guests, as well as she could gather, were pensioners and widows and widowers, tired old people who wanted a clean and respectable place with minimal upkeep and no lease to sign while they tried to make their low incomes and small savings cover the years it took them to get around to dying. It was just the sort of place she wanted, close to wherever she wanted to go yet impossibly remote in that she could live there forever and never encounter anyone from her past life in Manhattan. And her fellow-tenants were perfect—there was not a single one she had the slightest interest in speaking with, and they seemed equally inclined to leave her alone while their arteries hardened. Her room was neat, sparsely but adequately furnished, flooded with sunlight from two to five in the afternoon when the sun managed to get through between the taller buildings. The hotel service was there if she need it. Her bed was made every morning, towels furnished, linens changed weekly. She could place or receive telephone calls through the hotel switchboard, and they would take messages for her while she was out. This was a service she would not use, she knew; no one knew where she was staying, and there was no one she intended to call. She did not even bother checking for mail at the hotel desk. She knew the only sort of mail she might receive—soap coupons address to Occupant, letters from her Congressman (whoever he might be), charity appeals.

  The neighborhood itself had all the conveniences she could conceivably require. There was a shopping section on Flatbush, a movie theater down the street, a library just two blocks away. She had to go into Manhattan periodically to pick up her unemployment checks, her one major concession to Leon Gordon. She had registered for unemployment, and she had listed her job not as receptionist but as theatrical agent, a slight lie which Gordon had backed. Since no one ever told the state employment service he was looking to hire a theatrical agent, they had no cause to send her out for job interviews. They simply paid her thirty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents a week and left her alone.

  Her hotel rent was ten dollars and seventy cents a week, an unusual but reasonable sum. By ma
king instant coffee on a hotplate in her room and scrimping generally on meals, she found that she could live on her weekly stipend with very little difficulty. She didn’t even have to touch her savings, and she was glad of that. Although she had sounded secure enough when she talked to Gordon, she had very little money set aside.

  In a sense are realized, she was back where she had been when they discharged her from the hospital. The two situations had several points in common—a new neighborhood, a furnished room, no job, no personal contacts, and scars that had to heal. This time all of the scars were inside. Her wrists were unscathed. And this time, instead of being content to let the days go by at their own pace, instead of living one day at a time, instead of hating her loneliness and filling time until she could start work and find a friend, she had to take an active role in straightening herself out.

  Because otherwise she would be in trouble.

  In bad trouble, she knew. She was at a fork in the road, and the fork had many branches. One led to a nervous breakdown and confinement in a mental hospital. Another led to the living death of alcoholism. A third pointed to an ever-deeper spiral of sexual depravity and self-loathing. A fourth was a road she had tried to take once before—self-murder, suicide. But she was sure that there was at least one other course open, one other road for her to take, one that would lead her out of the shadows and into the sunshine, one that would take her where she could live again.

  No one could find the road for her. She knew this with complete assurance. If it was there—and if it wasn’t she was lost, lost, as good as dead—but if it was there, she knew that she would have to find it herself.