Disturbing the Peace (Vintage Classics) (2 page)

Borg turned back to the bar, hoping Wilder might see him first; then he counted to a hundred again, carried his drink across the room in what he hoped was a casual stroll and said “Hey, John. Thought you were in Chicago.”

Wilder looked up, and he looked terrible: very pale, beaded with sweat, and his eyes seemed out of focus.

“Just get back?” Borg said, pulling out a chair to sit down with him.

“While ago. What’re you doing out so late?” At least he seemed to know what time it was.

“Didn’t get out of the office till seven. Hell of a day.
Meetings, phone calls; sometimes everything happens at once. You know.”

But Wilder wasn’t listening. He finished his drink greedily and said “How old’re you now, Paul? Forty?”

“Almost forty-one.”

“Son of a bitch. I’m not even thirty-six and I feel old as God. Waiter! Where the hell’s that waiter?” When his eyes turned back they were clear and keen. “Tell me something else. Why do you suppose we both married homely women?”

Borg felt a welling of blood from his collar to his scalp. “Come on,” he said. “You know that’s a stupid thing to say.”

“True, though. Hell, it’s understandable in my case because I’ve always been a shrimp. Everybody said I looked like Mickey Rooney when I was a kid, and I mean it’s no cinch to get goodlooking girls with a handicap like that. I guess I settled on Janice because she had these wonderful big tits when she was younger; figured I could forget the rest of it, the short legs and the fullback shoulders and the face: I’d just bury myself in those tits forever and shut out the world. Jesus. But that’s my story; what’s yours? I mean you’re
tall
. How come you wound up with an alligator like Natalie?”

“All right, cut it out now, John. You’ve had too much to drink.”

“Hell I have. How do you know how much I’ve had to drink? Need sleep, is all. Absolutely no sleep, the whole week in Chicago. Thrashed around in that bed at the Palmer House with my nerves screaming and my mind going in circles like some crazy – I don’t know. Had a nice little girl thrashing around with me part of the time and even that didn’t help. But you know something? I learned a lot about myself. Sometimes when you can’t sleep you figure things out; I did, anyway. Hell of a lot of things. Then coming in from the airport I got one of these damn
talky cab drivers and you know what he said? He said – Oh Jesus, you’re sore at me now, aren’t you, Paul? You’re sore because I called Natalie an alligator.”

“I’m not sore; I’m concerned about you. You don’t look well and you’re not talking sensibly. Frankly, I don’t think you’re in any shape to go home tonight.”

And Wilder gave a heavy sigh of relief. “Neither do I, old friend. No shape at all. Tried to tell Janice that and she didn’t understand. Listen, you call her, okay? You explain it.”

“Sure, John. I’ll call her later.”

“Because I mean she’ll understand anything if you explain it. She thinks you’re Abraham fucking Lincoln.”

“All right, John.”

“You’re a lucky bastard, you know that, Paul? I mean a lawyer’s a professional man, like a doctor or a priest: people
listen
when you talk. You’re not some turd under everybody’s feet like me. Cab drivers, waiters, all my life I’ve been victimized by slobs. Tyrannized by slobs.”

“What did the cab driver say, John?”

“Ah, that smartass. He was driving like a maniac and I kept telling him to slow down, you see, and I was kind of jumping and squirming around in the back seat, and he said ‘You better see a psychiatrist, buddy, you’re a nervous wreck.’

“Another thing: you’re lucky you don’t have any kids. My God, if it weren’t for Tommy I’d take my sweet little Air Transportation Credit Card, climb into a big silver bird and take off to someplace like Rio: lie around in the sun till my money’s gone and then blow my brains out. I mean it.”

“No you don’t. Let’s try to be reasonable, John. Nobody can go without sleep for a week. I think you need medical care; you need sedation and rest. Let me run you down to St. Vincent’s.”

“Listen, Borg. You’re a nice guy and you’ve had a hard day at
the office and I’m sorry I called your wife an alligator because she’s nice too and she’s probably got a dandy little chicken-noodle casserole waiting for you downtown, but I’ll be a son of a bitch if you’re gonna lock me up in any hospital.”

“Nobody’s going to lock you up. You’ll check into St. Vincent’s for exhaustion; they’ll put you to sleep and you’ll come out tomorrow or the next day like a new man. Like your old self. It’s the only thing to do.”

There was a pause. “Let me think about it.” And thinking about it meant calling for another drink, half of which he finished in a swallow. “I got a better idea,” he said then. “Take me down to Varick Street.”

And Borg winced because he’d been afraid of that suggestion from the start. Several years ago the two of them had joined in renting a dirt-cheap basement apartment on Varick Street (a cellar apartment, really, the kind supposed to be condemned by the city) as a secret retreat from their married lives. They’d had it cleaned up and painted white, they’d equipped it with a double bed and a well-stocked liquor cabinet, a second-hand stove and refrigerator and enough other stuff to make it “nice,” and an unlisted phone: the idea was that when either of them came across what Wilder called a windfall – an available, willing girl – he could disappear into the place for an afternoon or even a couple of nights, feigning out-of-town business, and be a happy if somewhat nervous bachelor again. But it had sounded better than it was: there’d never really been all that many windfalls.

“You don’t want to go to Varick Street, John.”

“Who says I don’t? What’s the matter, you going there yourself ?”

“No. I haven’t been down there for months. But if the girl in Chicago couldn’t help you sleep, what makes you think some other girl could?”

“Might be worth a try. You ever met Rita? Research girl up at Time and Life? Course, it’s probably too late to call her. Or the sort of heavy one? What’s her name? Married to the doctor? No, wait; she moved to Boston.”

“Come on, John. Let’s be realistic.”

And Wilder gave up. “Realistic; right. That’s my trouble. All my life, I’ve never been realistic. I ever tell you how I wanted to make movies? Jesus Christ.” He finished his drink. “Okay, Borg; you’re on. One more drink and I’ll be realistic as hell. Waiter!” He thrust his glass as far into the aisle as his arm would allow and might have fallen out of the chair if he hadn’t clung to the table with his free hand.

“No need to shout, sir,” the waiter said.

“No need to be a little wise guy, either.”

“Look, mister: I don’t have to serve you.”

“Yeah? Well then how’d you like to kiss my ass, greaseball?”

“It’s all right,” Borg said, laying many dollar bills on the table. “It’s all right; we’re leaving. Here, John, I’ll take your suitcase.”

“Whaddya mean, I can’t carry my own bag? You think I’m a cripple?”

But the bag did give him trouble: he got it wedged in one of the plate-glass doors and said “Son of a
bitch
,” causing people to turn and look at him; then as they walked the passageway to Lexington Avenue he stopped and put it down several times, once nearly tripping a woman, because he said it was killing his hand and breaking the hell out of his leg.

He was quiet in the car as Borg crept through crosstown traffic, but when they’d begun the long ride down Seventh Avenue he began to twist and writhe against the passenger’s door and one hand flew up as if to shield his face. “Christ’s sake, Paul, will you watch your
driving
? Will you slow
down
?”

“Try to take it easy, John. I’m going as slow as I can.”

It was a busy evening at the St. Vincent’s emergency entrance – stretchers on the floor with orderlies or interns crouched over them, a middle-aged woman bleeding from the face and groaning on an examination table – but Borg found a partitioned alcove where a young man in white sat behind a desk, apparently in charge.

“Doctor, this isn’t really an emergency but my friend here’s exhausted; he hasn’t had any sleep for a week, and he needs sedation. Frankly, I think he may be going through some sort of nervous or—”

Borg could not afterwards remember how he’d finished that sentence: he was aware only of the doctor’s eyes blinking through thick glasses at one and then the other of them. Wilder had opened his collar and tie long ago; now he clawed them open further and so roughly that a shirt button fell and spun on the floor. When the doctor told him to sit down he dropped his suitcase with a crash and sank into the only seat available, a big old-fashioned wheelchair of varnished yellow wood that made him look very small and helpless, especially when it rolled backwards and was caught by an orderly who’d appeared from nowhere.

“Would you please step outside, sir?” the doctor said, and Borg was quick to obey. His feet hurt. He was hungry and tired and wanted to go home. All this would be over soon. “Oh, I don’t know how to thank you, Paul,” Janice would say. “I can’t imagine what we’d ever have done without you.”

The partition was thin. He couldn’t hear the words of the doctor’s interrogation or Wilder’s replies, but he assumed it was a routine interview for admission – name and age and occupation, next of kin, medical history, previous instances of insomnia – and then it all went out of control.

“. . . You’re God damned
right
I’ve been drinking. What the
hell do you do when you can’t sleep, sonny boy? Eat fudge? Watch ‘The Late Show’? Pull your prick? Listen! Listen, you overeducated little snotnose, you faggoty little – Listen: I figured out a lot of things about myself this week. Things you’d never understand in a hundred
years
. . . .”

By the time Borg was back in the alcove there was a sound of splintering wood as Wilder stamped one shoe on the footrest of the wheelchair and broke it, and the orderly said “Easy, mister,
easy
.”

The doctor had stood up from his scattered paperwork, and Wilder was saying “I’ve been a turd under everybody’s feet all my life and I’ve just now figured out there’s greatness in me. There’s greatness in me, and if you don’t quit looking at me that way, if you don’t let me into this fucking hospital I’m gonna take your glasses and shove ’em down your fucking
throat
. Is that clear?”

Then the orderly had turned him around and wheeled him down a hall and the doctor was explaining to Borg that there were no facilities for him here, that in his judgment the only course was to take him to Bellevue and that an ambulance would be provided at once. “I’ll call ahead now,” he said. “They’ll be ready for you.”

And the next thing Borg knew he was cramped on a narrow bench of the ambulance with the suitcase between his legs. He had always thought that stretcher patients were carried face-up, but Wilder lay on his belly with the hands of three or four attendants holding him down, and he was still shouting in a monologue so nearly incoherent that only the words “fuck” and “shit” and “greatness” came through. In the dim pink and grey light Borg could see that his coat and shirt were rucked up to his shoulder blades; he pulled them down and rubbed the damp, trembling spine in what he hoped would feel like reassurance.
“John,” he said, whether Wilder could hear him or not, “you wanted a good rest and you’re going to get it. Just relax now; you’re all right.” That was when the ambulance gained speed and its siren came on, growling low at first and rising to a scream as they swerved across town.

“Ow!” Wilder said over and over, as if the smooth ride were filled with bruising bumps and potholes. “Ow! . . . Ow! . . . Ow! . . .”

And Bellevue – or whatever part of the labyrinth of Bellevue they arrived at – was so bewildering that Borg’s own mind went briefly out of focus. He stood around with his mouth open like a fool’s, holding Wilder’s suitcase, until someone handed him a printed form headed C
ITY OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
, D
EPARTMENT OF
H
OSPITALS
, showed him where to sign his name, where to put his home and office phone numbers and told him to write “friend” in the space marked “Relationship.” He did that quickly because they wouldn’t let him see Wilder until it was done; then he found he couldn’t see him anyway because Wilder’s arms were slung tight around the necks of two big orderlies who dragged him still shouting toward a closed elevator, where a third orderly waited with a wheelchair, and they not only forced him into it but strapped him in. When the elevator door slid open they shoved him inside, and across the back of the chair was the stenciled word
PSYCHO
.

“Look,” Borg said to the nearest white-coated man he could find. “Listen: what’s the procedure here?”

The man smiled, shrugged and spoke rapidly in what could have been either Spanish or Italian.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Me? No. Doctor over there.”

“This your bag, mister?” another voice said.

“No. I mean yes – wait – here, I’ll take it.”

Then he said “Doctor, excuse me, but I’m a little – What exactly is the procedure here?”

This man was very young too, like the one at St. Vincent’s, but handsome enough to play the romantic lead in some movie about a great metropolitan hospital. “The procedure? Thanks, honey,” he said to a nurse, or a nurse’s aide, who had brought him a hamburger and a container of coffee.

“You’re very welcome.”

“What I mean is,” Borg said, “could you tell me what they’re going to do with Mr. Wilder?”

“Wilder.” He set his coffee down, picked up a clipboard and squinted at it. “Oh, yes. And you’re the man who signed him in, right? Mr. Berg?”

“Borg. I’m an attorney.” And he pulled his coat straight as further proof of respectability. The warm brown smell of the hamburger was making him weak with hunger.

“Well, he’ll be treated like any other patient, Mr. Borg,” the doctor said with his mouth full. “They’ll put him to sleep, first of all.”

“And how soon do you think he might be released?”

“Hard to say. This is Friday night, and it’s the Labor Day weekend. The psychiatrists won’t be back till Tuesday, and it’ll probably be Wednesday or Thursday before they can review his case. After that it’s entirely up to them.”