Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (19 page)

Wilder went home that day with four pill vials rattling in his coat pocket, and he was stowing them in the medicine cabinet before he realized that he couldn’t possibly keep them here: he would have to keep them in his desk at the office, or up at Pamela’s place. Looking at each label in the bright bathroom light, he tried to memorize the names of the damned things. Brink had assured him that the names didn’t matter – they were silly names dreamed up in pharmaceutical houses – but they were as baffling as words in a foreign language. How could he ever tell Hilafon from Haldol, or Plithium from Plutol? One was a tranquilizer, he knew, and one was an antidepressant, and
still another was what Brink had called an antipsychotic, good for someone recovering from a breakdown, but if Brink had explained each prescription before handing it over the message was lost on him now. And if the names were confusing, what about the dosages? “100 mg, three times daily,” one label read, and another: “8 mg, one capsule at bedtime.” Could an absentminded man be expected to keep track of all this?

“Dinner’s ready,” Janice called; so he knew it was time to stop worrying and wash his hands.

“We’re having Tommy’s favorite tonight,” she said when he was settled at the table. “My own very special meat loaf, baked potato with sour cream, and a simple tossed salad. It used to be one of your favorites too, John. Is it still?”

“Sure is. Especially the meat loaf. You suppose I could have another slice?”

“Why, certainly, kind sir,” she said. “I’m very flattered. I know what your real favorite is, though, and if you’re very good we might have it on Sunday.”

“What’s that?”

“Roast beef, of course. Good roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and Brussels sprouts. How could you forget?”

“Right. That’ll be fine, Janice; I’m looking forward to it already.”

Was this really happening? Was she sitting there forking meat loaf into her mouth and dabbing at her lips with a napkin, and was Tommy really there across the table? How could any family as unhappy as this put on such a show every night, and how long could it last?

“How’d school go today, Tom?”

“Okay, I guess,” the boy said around his chewing, and he swallowed. “It’s only the second week, though.”

“Like your new teachers?”

“They’re okay. I like Mr. Caldwell the best; he teaches math and he’s funny. He’s really a funny guy, like a TV comic or something. And the older guys told us he never stops; he keeps it up all year.”

“Well, good. Here’s hoping
you
keep it up all year.”

“Keep what up, Dad?”

“Your grades. What’d you think I meant? Aren’t you the boy who finished up last year with a straight B average?”

“I don’t know; I guess so.”

“Almost a straight B-
plus
average,” Janice said, and the three of them went on that way all through dinner.

“We having dessert, Mom?”

“We certainly are. Which would you rather have – butter-pecan ice cream or coconut cake?”

It was incredible.

“You’re an escapist, Wilder.” That was what his old Latin teacher had said back at Grace Church School, and he remembered it now as he escaped uptown on the subway, ostensibly bound for an AA meeting but really to visit his mistress. “You’re an escapist pure and simple. I watch you drag your poor tired body into this classroom every day and then bolt for the door like an athlete when the bell rings, and I know. What’s the matter with you, boy? You want to be an escapist all your life?”

“I guess not, sir.”

“What? Speak up, I can’t hear you. That’s another thing, another sure sign of the escapist character. You can make enough noise when you want to – I’
ve
heard you do those big soprano solos in the choir – but whenever it suits your purpose you’re quiet as a snail. I want you to open your mouth now, as wide as you do down in church, and tell me what you just said.”

“I said I guess not, sir.”

“Guess not what?”

“Want to be an escapist all my life.”

“Then you’d better shape up. You know what they say in the Navy?” Wilder had long forgotten the old man’s name but he would never forget this lecture, or the faint scent of halitosis that hung around the old man’s desk, or the way his wrinkled hands trembled or the fact that he used a paper clip for a tie clasp. “You know what they say in the Navy? They say ‘Shape up or ship out.’ And that applies to you, boy, as long as you’re in my classroom and as long as this funny little school pays my salary. Is that clear?”

Well, he had never really shaped up – the world had spared him that – but he’d never really been made to ship out either, unless he wanted to count his flunking out of Yale. There had always been some middle course and he’d always taken it; and now, as the loud dismal cars of the IRT pulled away from Grand Central and there was nothing to do but wait and watch the Bellevue-like faces of passengers across the aisle, he guessed the old Latin teacher had been right after all: he had grown up an escapist; he would be an escapist all his life.

But by the time the train set him free at Pamela’s stop he had put the whole dark issue out of his mind. This was no night for tortured introspection.

“Hi there,” she said. “Feel like a drink?”

“I guess not tonight; I’ll cool it.”

“You? Turn down a drink? Really?”

Really. And it was all because Dr. Brink had worried him today by saying, at the very end of the interview, “You drink much, Mr. Wilder? Well, as long as you’re on this one—” here he’d held up one of the prescriptions, but by the time Wilder was out on the street he couldn’t remember which – “I’d lay off the drinking altogether if I were you. This is your antipsychotic, you
see, and it doesn’t mix with alcohol. Just remember that; doesn’t mix at all.”

“Saw my new doctor today,” he said when they were nestled deep in her blue sofa and he’d drawn her close enough to let her head rest on his chest.

“Oh? What’s he like?”

“Very busy. I guess he has to fit his private patients in between jet flights to South Africa, or China, or wherever the hell he goes. No, he’s nice enough. And it’s great to deal with someone who doesn’t expect you to
talk
all the time; I can’t tell you how great that is.”

“Mm.”

Was she just sleepy, or was this the beginning of what he’d feared since Elizabeth Fanning Hospital – that she might soon grow tired of hearing about his delicate mental health? There was no point in taking any chances, so he shut up. “How was your day?”

“Oh, all right, I guess; same old stuff at the office, with Frank Lacy
mooning
at me all day. God, how I’ve come to despise that man. Why doesn’t he just fire me and be done with it?”

“You could always quit.”

“No, I won’t do that. It’s not a bad job, and it’d be a terrible bore having to look for a new one. Besides, the job keeps my father happy. Oh, John, I almost forgot –
Julian
called today.”

“Has he started cutting the picture yet?”

“No, and from the way he talked I have an awful feeling he’s going to put it off. We’ll have to keep after him. He wanted to know how you were, of course, and he asked us both to come to a party at his place next week. Jerry’ll be there, of course, and Peter, and some of the other Marlowe crowd. You won’t mind, will you?”

“Course not. They’re nice kids.”

There was a long, increasingly heavy silence before she said “John? You know something? I wish you’d quit referring to my friends as ‘kids.’ They’re all full grown, after all. Did you like being called a kid when you were that age? After being in the army and everything?”

In the end he agreed to have a drink with her (“Make it light,” he said, like Paul Borg), because it seemed the only way of restoring some romance to the evening. It even seemed, though he hardly dared to admit it to himself, that having a drink was his only guarantee of success with her in bed. What was the matter with him tonight?

“God, that was something,” she said when they’d exhausted themselves. “And you know what, John? I waited for this all day long in that terrible office. Just this.”

“Mm. Me too.” But he lay staring in the dark for a long time – he might as well have been in bed with Janice – wanting to creep away and fix himself another drink. Oh, just a
very
light one, doctor; I promise; the lightest drink you ever saw. Could it really matter much, after all, on his very first night with the pills working in his bloodstream?

“Honey?” she called. “Where are you? Where’re you going? Is it time to go home?”

“Not yet; I’ll come back before I leave.”

Out in the semidarkness of the living room he went straight to her gleaming little bar, and then to the kitchen for fresh ice. There, he told himself, like a mother soothing her child. There … there … there …

The view of the city from Pamela’s living room was extraordinary, every bit as grand as from the white-pebbled terrace at her office, and watching the subtle play of light and dark out there gave him something to do as he sipped and breathed,
sipped and breathed. He took his time, though, because it was very important to make this ceremony last.

Julian’s loft might have served, if stripped of all decoration and darkened for business, as another setting for the celebration of Sylvester Cummings’s single candle; but on the night of his party its multicolored brilliance hurt the eye, its enormously amplified music rocked and rolled from the walls and it was packed deep with a laughing, jostling crowd in which, at first glance, no face looked a day over twenty-five.

“Pammy!” Julian yelled from the makeshift doorway of his bedroom. “And John! Great to see you, man! You’re looking great! Feeling better?”

“Feeling fine, thanks.”

Julian seemed a little drunk, or high, as he took their raincoats and flung them on top of the heap on his bed – or maybe it was just that being a host intoxicated him. “Jerry ’n’ I figured it was us that put you in the hospital up there,” he said, “as much as anything else – all of us, I mean. That was a pretty frantic couple of weeks. Fun, though, wasn’t it? I mean it
would’ve
been fun, if you hadn’t gotten sick.”

“Yeah; yeah, it was fun.”

“Julian,” Pamela said, “this may not be the time to bring it up, but when are you going to finish the picture?”

“Pammy, I told you on the phone. I’ve got so damn many things going now I honestly don’t know
when
I’ll get to it – and the point is, these other things pay money. Got to have
some
money, don’t I? Don’t worry, though; ‘Bellevue’ has a very high priority in my plans. But what’re talking shop for? This is a party! I want you two to go out there and have fun tonight. Move around! Relax! I know you don’t light up, John, but there’s plenty of wine, cold beer in the tub, and you’ll find
some hard stuff over in the corner near Chester Pratt. Okay?”

“Okay, Julian.”

They found a place to sit on the floor close to the beer tub, and it wasn’t long before Jerry came over and sank beside Pamela. He rolled a joint and shared it with her, and for a little while they talked quietly between themselves.

“… I don’t think I
want
to meet him if he’s that awfullooking skinny man,” she was saying. “Is he always this drunk?”

“He’s amazing. I never saw anybody put away so much booze in my life. I’ve seen him five or six times now, and he’s been bombed out of his mind every time. Even the night I went out to Princeton for his reading.”

“When do you suppose he ever gets his work done?”

“Beats me. Sure does get it done, though. Christ, what a book.”

“How’d you get to know him, Jerry? You didn’t say.”

“Wrote him a letter, that’s all; told him I’d like to do a film adaptation, and he wrote back.”

“Who’s this?” Wilder asked.

“Chester Pratt,” she said. “He wrote
Burn All Your Cities
, and he’s standing over there.”

“Come on,” Jerry said, getting to his feet and reaching down for her hand. “I might as well introduce you. Isn’t every day you get to meet an important writer.”

For once Wilder was not intimidated by a tall man – even a celebrated one, even when Pamela said she was “so happy” to meet him and called him “sir.” The important writer was tall, all right, but thin to the point of frailty, and his drink-distorted face was that of a weak, sad boy more than a man.

“What kind of a book is
Burn All Your Cities?
” he asked her when they were back beside the beer tub.

“I thought it was a fine novel; now I’m not so sure. Have you ever seen such a wreck?”

“… Pammy! Oh, Pammy, it’s marvelous to see you!”

“Pam!”

A breathless cluster of Marlowe girls descended on her now – girls she hadn’t seen since graduation, girls of all shapes and sizes in all varieties of dressy and casual clothes, all with their smiling “dates” in tow – and although she managed to be pleasant enough she was clearly no match for their enthusiasm.

“… and Ruth, Grace, Polly; this is John Wilder.”

They were delighted to meet him; they had heard so much about him; and as soon as they’d gone she said “John? Do I seem as young as that to you?”

“No.”

“Good. And you know something? You were right. They
are
kids. Not just the girls; the boys too. Julian with his swinging pad and his strobe lights and his amplified rock; Jerry giving us the inside dope on his Important Writer – you notice how he’s been over there sucking
around
the man all night? Let’s go home.”

“It isn’t even ten yet.”

“I know, but this is awful. I don’t care if I never see
any
of these people again. And I’m glad it’s early; that gives us more time to ourselves.”

Janice was asleep when he got home, as usual, and before going to bed himself he lingered in the living room to prowl along her bookshelves for
Burn All Your Cities
. There it was, close to the floor, in a bright yellow jacket with red lettering. Pratt’s photograph on the back was scarcely recognizable: it must have been taken when he was sober.

It was nearly a month before his next visit to Dr. Brink, and by then the only thing to do was lie a little about his drinking.