“You took the pills….”
“I … don’t … care … you’re going back to her … I don’t … care….”
I ran into the kitchen and got the dishpan, came back and placed it on the floor by the bed. Then I pulled Dee Dee’s head and shoulders over the edge and stuck my fingers down her throat. She vomited. I lifted her up and let her breathe a moment, then repeated the process. I did it again and again. Dee Dee kept vomiting. Once, as I lifted her up, her teeth popped out. They lay there on the sheet, uppers and lowers.
“Oooh … my teeth,” she said. Or tried to say.
“Don’t worry about your teeth.”
I stuck my fingers down her throat again. Then I pulled her back.
“I don’,” she said, “wans ya to seee my teethhhs….”
“They’re all right, Dee Dee. They’re really not bad.”
“Ooooh …”
She revived long enough to put her teeth back in. “Take me home,” she said, “I want to go home.”
“I’ll stay with you. I won’t leave you alone tonight.”
“But you will leave me, finally?”
“Let’s get dressed,” I said.
Valentino would have kept both Lydia and Dee Dee. That’s why he died so young.
20
Lydia returned and found a nice apartment in the Burbank area. She seemed to care a lot more for me than before we parted. “My husband had this big cock and that’s all he had. He had no personality, no vibes. Just a big cock and he thought that was all he had to have. But Christ he was dull! With you, I keep getting vibes … this electric feedback, it never stops.” We were on the bed together.
“And I didn’t even know he had a big cock because his cock was the first one I had ever seen.” She was examining me closely. “I thought they were all like that.”
“Lydia …”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got to tell you something.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve got to go see Dee Dee.”
“Go see Dee Dee?”
“Don’t be funny. There’s a reason.”
“You said it was all over.”
“It is. I just don’t want to let her down too hard. I want to explain to her what happened. People are too cold with each other. I don’t want her back, I just want to try to explain what happened, so she’ll understand.”
“You want to fuck her.”
“No, I don’t want to fuck her. I hardly wanted to fuck her when I was with her. I just want to explain.”
“I don’t like it. It sounds … icky … to me.”
“Let me do it. Please. I just want to clear things up. I’ll be back soon.”
“All right. But make it soon.”
I got into the Volks, cut over to Fountain, went a few miles, then took a north at Bronson and cut up to where the rents were high. I parked outside, got out. I walked up the long flight of stairs and rang the bell. Bianca answered the door. I remembered one night she had answered the door naked and I had grabbed her and as we were kissing Dee Dee came down and said, “What the hell’s going on here?”
This time it wasn’t like that. Bianca said, “What do you want?”
“I want to see Dee Dee. I want to talk to her.”
“She’s sick. Really sick. I don’t think you should get to see her after the way you’ve treated her. You’re a real grade-? son of a bitch.”
“I just want to talk to her a while, to explain things.”
“All right. She’s in her bedroom.”
I walked down the hall and into the bedroom. Dee Dee was on the bed in just her panties. One arm was flung over her eyes. Her breasts looked good. There was an empty pint of whiskey by her bed and a pan on the floor. The pan smelled of vomit and booze.
“Dee Dee …”
She lifted her arm. “What? Hank, you’ve come back?”
“No, wait, I just want to talk to you….”
“Oh Hank, I’ve missed you something awful. I’ve been nearly crazy, the pain has been awful….”
“I want to make it easier. That’s why I came by. I may be stupid, but I don’t believe in outright cruelty….”
“You don’t know how I’ve felt….”
“I know. I’ve been there.”
“Want a drink?” she pointed.
I picked up the empty pint and sadly put it down again. “There’s too much coldness in the world,” I told her. “If people would only talk things out together it would help.”
“Stay with me, Hank. Don’t go back to her, please. Please. I’ve lived long enough to know how to be a good woman. You know that. I’d be good to you and for you.”
“Lydia has a grip on me. I can’t explain it.”
“She’s a flirt. She’s impulsive. She’ll leave you.”
“Maybe that’s some of the attraction.”
“You want a whore. You’re afraid of love.”
“You might be right.”
“Just kiss me. Would it be too much to ask you to kiss me?”
“No.”
I stretched out next to her. We embraced. Dee Dee’s mouth smelled of vomit. She kissed, we kissed and she held me. I broke away as gently as I could.
“Hank,” she said, “Stay with me! Don’t go back to her! Look, I have nice legs!”
Dee Dee lifted one of her legs and showed it to me.
“And I have nice ankles too! Look!”
She showed me her ankles.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed. “I can’t stay with you, Dee Dee—”
She sat up and began punching me. Her fists were as hard as rocks. She threw punches with both hands. I sat there as she landed blows. She hit me above the eye, in the eye, on the forehead and cheeks. I even caught one in the throat. “Oh, you bastard! Bastard, bastard, bastard! I HATE YOU!”
I grabbed her wrists. “All right, Dee Dee, that’s enough.” She fell back on the bed as I got up and walked out, down the hall and out the door.
When I got back Lydia was sitting in an armchair. Her face looked dark. “You’ve been gone a long time. Look at me! You fucked her, didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You were gone an awful long time. Look, she scratched your face!”
“I tell you, nothing happened.”
“Take off your shirt. I want to look at your back!”
“Oh, shit, Lydia.”
“Take off your shirt and undershirt.”
I took them off. She walked around behind me.
“What’s that scratch on your back?”
“What scratch?”
“There’s a long one there … from a woman’s fingernail.”
“If it’s there you put it there….”
“All right. I know one way to find out.”
“How?”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“All right!”
I passed the test, but afterwards I thought, how can a man test a woman’s fidelity? It seemed unfair.
21
I kept getting letters from a lady who lived only a mile or so away. She signed them Nicole. She said she had read some of my books and liked them. I answered one of her letters and she responded with an invitation to visit. One afternoon, without saying anything to Lydia, I got into the Volks and drove on over. She had a flat over a dry cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. Her door was on the street and I could see a stairway through the glass. I rang the bell. “Who is it?” came a woman’s voice through a little tin speaker. “I’m Chinaski,” I said. A buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open.
Nicole stood at the top of the stairs looking down at me. She had a cultured, almost tragic face and wore a long green housedress cut low in front. Her body seemed to be very good. She looked at me with large dark brown eyes. There were lots of tiny wrinkles around her eyes, perhaps from too much drinking or crying.
“Are you alone?” I asked.
“Yes,” she smiled, “come on up.”
&n
bsp; I went up. It was spacious, two bedrooms, with very little furniture. I noticed a small bookcase and a rack of classical records. I sat on the couch. She sat next to me. “I just finished,” she said, “reading The Life of Picasso.”
There were several copies of The New Yorker on the coffee table.
“Can I fix you some tea?” Nicole asked.
“I’ll go out and get something to drink.”
“That’s not necessary. I have something.”
“What?”
“Some good red wine?”
“I’d like some,” I said.
Nicole got up and walked into the kitchen. I watched her move. I had always liked women in long dresses. She moved gracefully. She seemed to have a lot of class. She returned with two glasses and the bottle of wine and poured. She offered me a Benson and Hedges. I lit one.
“Do you read The New Yorker?” she asked. “They print some good stories.”
“I don’t agree.”
“What’s wrong with them?
“They’re too educated.”
“I like them.”
“Well, shit,” I said.
We sat drinking and smoking.
“Do you like my apartment?”
“Yes, it’s nice.”
“It reminds me of some of the places I’ve had in Europe. I like the space, the light.”
“Europe, huh?”
“Yes, Greece, Italy … Greece, mostly.”
“Paris?”
“Oh yes, I liked Paris. London, no.”
Then she told me about herself. Her family had lived in New York City. Her father was a communist, her mother a seamstress in a sweatshop. Her mother had worked the front machine, she was number one, the best of all of them. Tough and likeable. Nicole was self-educated, had grown up in New York, had somehow met a famous doctor, married, lived with him for ten years, then divorced him. She now received only $400 a month alimony, and it was difficult to manage. She couldn’t afford her apartment, but she liked it too much to leave.
“Your writing,” she said to me, “it’s so raw. It’s like a sledge hammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness….”
“Yeah,” I said.
I put my drink down and looked at her. I cupped her chin in my hand and drew her towards me. I gave her the tiniest kiss.
Nicole continued talking. She told me quite a few interesting stories, some of which I decided to use myself, either as stories or poems. I watched her breasts as she bent forward and poured drinks. It’s like a movie, I thought, like a fucking movie. It seemed funny to me. It felt as if we were on camera. I liked it. It was better than the racetrack, it was better than the boxing matches. We kept drinking. Nicole opened a new bottle. She talked on. It was easy to listen to her. There was wisdom and some laughter in each of her tales. Nicole was impressing me more than she knew. That worried me, somewhat.
We walked out on the veranda with our drinks and watched the afternoon traffic. She was talking about Huxley and Lawrence in Italy. What shit. I told her that Knut Hamsun had been the world’s greatest writer. She looked at me, astonished that I’d heard of him, then agreed. We kissed on the veranda, and I could smell the exhaust from the cars in the street below. Her body felt good against mine. I knew we weren’t going to fuck right away, but I also knew that I would be coming back. Nicole knew it too.
22
Lydia’s sister Angela came to town from Utah to see Lydia’s new house. Lydia had made a down payment on a little place and the monthly payments were very low. It was a very good buy. The man who sold the house believed he was going to die and he had sold it much too cheap. There was an upstairs bedroom for the children, and an extremely large backyard filled with trees and clumps of bamboo.
Angela was the oldest of the sisters, the most sensible, with the best body, and was the most realistic. She sold real estate. But there was the problem of where to put Angela. We didn’t have room. Lydia suggested Marvin.
“Marvin?” I asked.
“Yes, Marvin,” said Lydia.
“All right, let’s go,” I said.
We all climbed into Lydia’s orange Thing. The Thing. That’s what we called her car. It looked like a tank, very old and ugly. It was late evening. We had already phoned Marvin. He had said he’d be home all evening.
We drove down to the beach and there was his little house by the shore. “Oh,” said Angela, “what a nice house.”
“He’s rich, too,” said Lydia.
“And he writes good poetry,” I said.
We got out. Marvin was in there with his saltwater fish tanks and his paintings. He painted pretty well. For a rich kid he had survived nicely, he had come through. I made the introductions. Angela walked around looking at Marvin’s paintings. “Oh, very nice.” Angela painted too, but she wasn’t very good.
I had brought some beer and had a pint of whiskey hidden in my coat pocket which I nipped on from time to time. Marvin brought out some more beer and a mild flirtation began between Marvin and Angela. Marvin seemed eager enough but Angela seemed inclined to laugh at him. She liked him, but not well enough to fuck him right away. We drank and talked. Marvin had bongo drums and a piano and some grass. He had a good, comfortable house. In a house like this I could write better, I thought, my luck would be better. You could hear the ocean and there were no neighbors to complain about the noise of a typewriter.
I continued to nip at the whiskey. We stayed 2 or 3 hours, then left. Lydia took the freeway back.
“Lydia,” I said, “you fucked Marvin, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The time you went over there late at night, alone.”
“Goddamn you, I don’t want to hear that!”
“Well, it’s true, you fucked him!”
“Listen, if you keep it up I’m not going to stand for it!”
“You fucked him.”
Angela looked frightened. Lydia drove over to the shoulder of the freeway, stopped the car and pushed the door open on my side. “Get out!” she said.
I got out. The car drove off. I walked along the shoulder of the freeway. I took the pint out and had a nip. I walked along about 5 minutes when the Thing pulled up alongside me. Lydia opened the door. “Get in.” I got in.
“Don’t say a word.”
“You fucked him. I know you did.”
“Oh Christ!”
Lydia drove back on to the shoulder of the freeway and pushed the door open again. “Get out!”
I got out. I walked along the shoulder. Then I came to an offramp that led to a deserted street. I walked down the offramp and along the street. It was very dark. I looked into the windows of some of the houses. Apparently I was in a black district. I saw some lights ahead at an intersection. There was a hot dog stand. I walked up to it. A black man was behind the counter. There was nobody else around. I ordered coffee. “Goddamned women,” I said to him. “They are beyond all reason. My girl let me off on the freeway. Want a drink?”
“Sure,” he said.
He took a good hit and handed it back. “You got a phone?” I asked. “I’ll pay you.”
“Is it a local call?”
“Yes.”
“No charge.”
He pulled a phone from underneath the counter and handed it to me. I took a drink and handed him the bottle. He took one.
I called the Yellow Cab Co., gave them the location. My friend had a kind and intelligent face. Goodness could be found sometimes in the middle of hell. We passed the bottle back and forth as I waited for the cab. When the cab arrived I got into the back and gave the cabby Nicole’s address.
23
I blacked out after that. I guess I had consumed more whiskey than I thought. I don’t remember arriving at Nicole’s. I awakened in the morning with my back to somebody in a strange bed. I looked at the wall facing me and there was a large decorative letter hanging there. It said “N.” The “N” was for “Nicole.” I felt sick. I went to the bathroom. I used Nicole??
?s toothbrush, gagged. I washed my face, combed my hair, crapped and pissed, washed my hands and drank a great deal of water from the bathroom faucet. Then I went back to bed. Nicole got up, did her toilet, came back. She faced me. We began to kiss and fondle one another.
I am innocent in my fashion, Lydia, I thought. I am faithful to thee in my fashion.
No oral sex. My stomach was too upset. I mounted the famous doctor’s ex-wife. The cultured world traveler. She had the Brontë sisters in her bookcase. We both liked Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I gave her 3 or 4 particularly mean rips and she gasped. Now she knew a writer firsthand. Not a very well-known writer, of course, but I managed to pay the rent and that was astonishing. One day she’d be in one of my books. I was fucking a culture-bitch. I felt myself nearing a climax. I pushed my tongue into her mouth, kissed her, and climaxed. I rolled off feeling foolish. I held her a while, then she went into the bathroom. She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.
After that I visited Nicole 2 or 3 times a week in the mid-afternoons. We drank wine, talked, and now and then made love. I found I wasn’t particularly interested in her, it was just something to do. Lydia and I had made up the next day. She would question me about where I went in the afternoon. “I’ve been to the supermarket,” I’d tell her, and it was true. I’d go to the supermarket first.
“I’ve never seen you spend so much time at the supermarket.”
I got drunk one night and mentioned to Lydia that I knew a certain Nicole. I told her where Nicole lived, but that “not much was going on.” Why I told her this was not quite clear to me, but when one drinks one sometimes thinks unclearly….
One afternoon I was coming from the liquor store and had just reached Nicole’s. I was carrying two 6-packs of bottled beer and a pint of whiskey. Lydia and I had recently had another fight and I had decided to stay the night with Nicole. I was walking along, already a bit intoxicated, when I heard someone run up behind me. I turned. It was Lydia. “Ha!” she said. “Ha!”
She grabbed the bag of liquor out of my hand and began pulling out the beer bottles. She smashed them on the pavement one by one. They made large explosions. Santa Monica Boulevard is very busy. The afternoon traffic was just beginning to build up. All this action was taking place just outside Nicole’s door. Then Lydia reached the pint of whiskey. She held it up and screamed up at me, “Ha! You were going to drink this and then you were going to FUCK her!” She smashed the pint on the cement.