Authors: Lawrence Block
A psychiatrist might have said that she picked gin to drink because she liked it less than any other form of liquor. But there was no psychiatrist handy to clue her in on the reason for her choice of beverage. She drank gin because she felt like drinking the gin.
Period.
End of report.
Speaking of periods, she missed hers.
That was a trauma. It happened in February. It was due on the eighteenth of the month, and then the twentieth of the month rolled around without anything happening that was supposed to happen. She felt like reaching for the razor blade. In a panic she went to Ruth and told her and the two of them sat on pins and needles worrying and shaking and wondering what in the world to do.
They didn’t do anything.
And, happily, two days later there was nothing to worry about. But the false alarm was enough to throw a good scare into her.
Not enough of a scare.
It made her drink—she poured down a lot of gin that night after there was no longer anything to worry about and she cried like a baby.
Four days later she spent the night in a motel with a boy whose name she forgot before daybreak.
By this time she had lost count of the men she’d slept with. It was getting pretty hard to keep track. For one thing, there had been a certain percentage of repeats—two or three time winners.
Besides, who counts?
All she knew was that she was a tramp, a slut, a roundheeled girl no good for anything but sex. She would flunk out of school and wind up screwing her happy way through life until she finally died and they put her in a box and shoveled her into a hole. This, while it made her drink during the bad moments, made her almost happy the rest of the time.
In a sense, she thought, she was lucky. She had found her own particular niche in life, if nothing else. Other girls might go for years without finding the thing they were best suited for, but not Linda Shepard.
She knew what she was cut out for.
Yep.
By the middle of March there was very little she hadn’t done and very few men she hadn’t done it with. The school’s administration must have known about her but if they did they didn’t say anything. Her hall advisors couldn’t have helped knowing but did just as little to straighten her out.
She would do anything, anything at all. Boys went out of their way to think up new perversions to practice with her. One of them beat her with his belt, hurting her and torturing her until she had to scream with pain, and finally making love to her in the most agonizing way known to modern man.
She wasn’t surprised in the least to discover that she enjoyed it.
She went on. Her own mind was inventive enough and she frequently came up with notions when the boys ran out of their own. Once she took on a batch—six men, one right after the other—with the five who weren’t involved standing by watching while the sixth made love to her. She forced each of them to make love to her in a different manner.
She would do anything.
Anything at all …
Except for one thing:
She wouldn’t speak to Joe Gunsway.
It was strange, she thought. Joe was the only really decent guy she knew, the only one who didn’t try to make her or anything of the sort. Even after he way she had treated him he still called her every once in a while, still seemed to be working to straighten her out.
And, for that reason, she wouldn’t so much as speak to him. Whenever he called she hung up the phone as soon as she found out that it was him.
One time he caught up with her on the walk in front of her dormitory. She had just gotten through one of the bad moments and her head was spinning from the alcohol that was making its way through her bloodstream. He gripped her arm and she couldn’t shake him loose.
“I want to talk with you,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I just want to talk to you.”
She tried to shake loose but he wouldn’t let go of her.
“I’m busy.”
“I don’t care.”
Suddenly she was angry. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “You mad because you haven’t had a chance to lay me?”
He didn’t say anything but his lips curled into a frown.
“Don’t worry,” she said drunkenly. “You’ll get your chance.”
“I don’t want my chance.”
“No? What’s wrong—don’t you think I’m a good lay?”
“I don’t care whether you are or not.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“I love you,” he said. “That’s what’s the matter.”
SHE GOT RID OF JOE. It wasn’t easy, but a combination of ridicule and sarcasm finally managed to convince him that whether he loved her or not, his love was not returned. He left her at last and she went off by herself, looking once more for a man.
And, of course, she found her man for the evening. They went off together and did the usual thing in the usual way, with the usual results.
Then she went home.
It was a long time before she could fall asleep. She sat in her room and thought about Joe, thought that the only person who cared for her was a person she couldn’t stand the sight of any more. Now he had told her that he loved her, and it wasn’t hard to see that he was being serious about it.
He couldn’t love her, she told herself. For one thing, she wasn’t worth it. For another, he didn’t know her well enough to know what he was in love with. He was in love with an image, a shadow without form or substance, and whatever love he thought he had for her existed more in his mind than in reality.
Still, his confession disturbed her. She didn’t want anyone to love her, least of all Joe Gunsway. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was ruining her own life? Did she have to louse him up too?
She went to bed about four that morning and lay there in the darkness listening to the sound of Ruth’s measured breathing and wishing that she could sleep too. But she couldn’t—she could only think the same thoughts over and over and wish the same useless wishes again and again.
There were two main wishes. Wish One was that she had never bumped into Don Gibbs, that she had kept leading the straight-and-normal life of a straight-and-normal coed, dating Joe two or three times a week, working in her courses, staying a virgin until she could be sure that the loss of her virginity wouldn’t drive her to the sort of state she was in now.
Wish Two was different—Wish Two was that she and Don had been able to stay together, to love each other forever, to get married finally, to have children and live in a little house somewhere as a family.
Both wishes had the chance of a snowball in hell, she thought. Of a virgin in a den full of dedicated satyrs.
Which wasn’t much of a chance at all.
When sunlight started streaming in through the window she gave up trying to sleep. She got out of bed and dressed, jumping a little when Ruth’s alarm clock went off while she was getting dressed. She left the room before her roommate’s eyes were completely open and went to the cafeteria for breakfast.
She took a tray from the pile and walked along, filling her tray with a glass of orange juice, a stack of pancakes, a few slices of bacon and a bowl of what passed for oatmeal. She paid the cashier and carried her tray to an empty table off to the side. The caf was practically deserted at that hour—it was too early even for most of the people with eight o’clocks—and she had a chance to be by herself. She was glad, too; she didn’t think she would be able to take it if somebody tried to make conversation. Not the way she felt.
The gin she had had the previous night hadn’t done the job for her. No sooner had she gotten rid of her depression when Joe Gunsway had deposited a bomb in her lap in the form of a declaration of love, and that neatly negated the effects of the gin. The sex hadn’t helped either, and she was now more depressed than when she had started—tired but unable to sleep, starved but unable to eat.
She tried to eat but it didn’t work. The pancakes were rubbery and she was afraid she would break the fork trying to cut them. The oatmeal was a soggy mess that was impossible to look at, let alone eat. The orange juice was bitter and she only managed to get half of it down. The bacon that morning was a Clifton Cafeteria specialty—half-burnt, the other half raw. Both halves, needless to say, proved equally inedible and unappetizing.
She sat at the table for almost three hours, her food untouched after the first unsuccessful attempt, a cigarette clutched periodically between her fingers and stubbed out in the ashtray when it had burned down to a butt. She didn’t have anything to do or any place to go.
She still didn’t feel much in the mood for sleep. But she realized that the combination of no sleep and no food had exhausted her enough so that she would pass out readily enough. She took her dishes and piled them on the tray, then carried the tray to the conveyor belt that would carry them back to the kitchen. She left the cafeteria, walking back to her dorm in a stupor, not answering the people who talked to her as she walked. Back in her empty room she collapsed on the bed fully clothed and slept.
She slept for twelve straight hours. At ten that night she opened her eyes and sat up. She was instantly awake, her eyes unclouded and her mind alert.
She felt worse than before she went to bed.
Her mouth, to begin with, tasted like a sewer. She had slept in her clothes and they felt as though they had been lived in for at least three months. Her arms and legs ached dully from the awkward position in which she had slept and her stomach was protesting audibly at the fact that it was nearly empty.
But this was nothing compared to the way she felt inside. The sleep, instead of curing her depression, had made everything just a little bit worse. She sat up on the edge of her bed and stared across the room at Ruth, who was reading a book. She sat there, her eyes studying the back of Ruth’s neck, and she felt like reaching for the razor blade.
Instead she reached for the bottle.
The bottle was two-thirds full of gin. The first swallow was properly medicinal in flavor and properly alcoholic in content and she felt better the instant the liquid reached her stomach. She was tilting the bottle to her lips for another jolt when Ruth turned around in her chair, her lips parted slightly and her brow wrinkled into a disapproving frown.
“Linda—”
She took the second swallow.
“Linda, I wish you wouldn’t start drinking like that. Honey, I’m awfully worried about you.”
“Don’t worry,” she said.
“Linda—”
“Don’t worry,” she repeated. “I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you?”
She nodded.
“Honey, you’re killing yourself. You’re letting one little fling with a smooth bastard named Don Gibbs turn you into a living corpse.”
“More than one fling. He was only the first, Ruth. There have been plenty of others since then.”
“Honey, they don’t matter. None of this would matter if you’d only buck up. And for goodness sake put down that bottle—do you want to turn into an alcoholic?”
Linda put the bottle down on the floor. She stared at it for a minute, then picked it up again.
“Yes,” she said thoughtfully. “There are a lot worse things to do than to turn into an alcoholic.”
“Linda—”
“The life of an alcoholic,” she continued with remarkable logic, “is not so bad a life. It is not nearly as bad as people make it seem. An alcoholic has one problem and one problem only. The problem is alcohol.”
“Linda—”
“When an alcoholic has enough alcohol,” she went on, “his problem is solved for the time being. When he wakes up he needs more alcohol, and once again he solves his problem. It’s very simple, you see. He has a problem and he solves it and everything’s fine and dandy.”
Ruth shook her head sadly. She stood up from her chair and closed the book she had been reading. The book was Sepsonwol’s
Fundamentals of Contemporary Economic Theories
and it didn’t take any remarkable display of will power on Ruth’s part to close the book.
She walked over to Linda and sat down beside her on the edge of the bed. Linda turned to look at her, thinking how petite and lovely the little dark-haired girl was and wondering why she didn’t have the same type of problems. The answer, she guessed, was a simple one. Ruth may have lost her virginity earlier than Linda, but she was a good enough person so that an act like that wouldn’t knock her for a loop.
“Honey,” Ruth was saying, “you’ve got to get a grip on yourself. Isn’t there anything I can do for you.”
Linda shrugged.
“Anything at all?”
She shook her head.
“Linda, why don’t you go over to the psych department one of these afternoons? There are therapists supplied by the school that you could talk things over with—that helps a lot of people.”
“What good would that do?”
“It might help you. Honey, you’re not in so deep that you can’t pull yourself out once you get straightened out inside. If you let one of the therapists have a few good sessions with you, you’d probably feel a lot better, if nothing else. How about it?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to.”
“Linda—”
“I don’t want to,” she repeated. “I don’t want any psychiatrist trying to take me apart and figure out what’s wrong with me. I just don’t care, Ruth.”
Ruth didn’t say anything this time, and Linda thought that it didn’t matter what she did or where she went or who she talked to. Just so long as there was either a man or a gin bottle handy everything would be all right.
“Linda—”
“What is it?”
“Honey, this is silly, but I can’t help feeling partially responsible.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“I mean it—if I had been a better roommate maybe you wouldn’t have taken everything so hard. Roommates are supposed to look out for each other, you know.”
“You’ve been a wonderful roommate.”
Ruth sighed, and Linda noticed that the shorter girl was on the point of tears. “Linda,” she said, “isn’t there
anything
I can do for you?”
Linda considered. She wanted to think of something if only so that Ruth wouldn’t feel bad. “You could drink with me,” she offered finally. “I’m going to drink this stuff anyway, and you could give me a hand with it.”