Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?

by Ed Gorman

  The way things were going, I was going to be the one who was sobbing.

  "McCain?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Why don't you say something?"

  "Because I don't know what to say."

  "I just never realized before how much he loves me. I need to think things over."

  I sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that's how it's got to be."

  "It's kinda funny, isn't it? For the first time it looked like we - you and I - would get together, and then Wes comes along and - "

  "I think I'll go now."

  "You really should take the blouse back."

  "Just bring it to work and I'll pick it up."

  "It's all kinda crazy, isn't it?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess that's a good way to describe it."

  ***

  I was scared and I prayed. The old Our Fathers and the old Hail Marys. I was scared and confused; I felt like I was eight in terms of wisdom and eighty-eight in terms of spirit. I wish I was an old man and love was through with me. Somebody wrote that once and I've never forgotten it, but I couldn't tell you who it was.

  Thoughts like that here in the Lucky Strike-Hamm's beer darkness. TV on but no sound. Me propped up in bed. The three cats fanned out all around me. A little Miles Davis on the turntable.

  I thought of all the dead people too. And all the red scare bullshit and how I hated both sides. And Dorothy. Eyes so forlorn in death, tears collected in the corners of their sockets.

  I stubbed my cigarette out and went to sleep, clothes and all. Needing to pee. Not caring if I ever woke up again.

  And then sometime somewhere the phone rang and I groped for it, badly disoriented, wondering who the hell would call this late, and then I got scared thinking maybe something had happened to somebody in my family.

  But when I got the receiver to my ear, a voice I didn't recognize at first said, "McCain. Listen. I have to whisper. Or he'll hear me."

  "Who is this?"

  "It's Pamela, you dope. We have this big hotel suite. He's in the bathroom right now. Oh, McCain. I've made a terrible, terrible mistake. I'm going to sneak out of here tomorrow and take the train back to Iowa City. Can you meet me at the depot at seven p.m.?" Then, frantic: "Oh, God, here he comes!"

  And she hung up.

  I lay there and lit another Lucky and thought of another great line. This one I knew the source of: E. M. Forster: Beauty makes its own rules.

  It sure as hell does, I thought. It sure as hell does.