Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron Read Free Book Online Page B

was a familiar sour odor about the place, neither clean nor particularly unclean: grease, stagnant dishwater, flabby, uneatable bakeshop pastries many days old. He gagged and thought he would be sick, and would have been had he not just finished being sick. He started to leave, rose halfway up from the stool, but the woman returned with the coffee, saying: “I seen you run back to the gentleman’s room just now. I figured you was probably sick.” He began to drink the coffee, saying nothing.
    “Say, you got the shakes. What you need is a BC.” He made no reply, thinking: If I can last out this day I might be all right. It’ll get well before you’re married, time cures all, must …
    “I told Haywood—he’s the driver just left—I told him you looked kind of green. I don’t drink myself although I’ve always said what’s good for the gander’s good for the goose, to turn around an old parable …”
    And Helen. I will bring her back to me today, cure her, make her well, tell her that our love never went away at all.
    “… deerlord knows a woman’s heavy enough laden to want to hang one on once in a while. In fact …”
    He was thinking: Quiet, just hush, quiet—knowing that at another time he would himself have broached any subject of possible interest: the weather, prices, even the God of the Baptists—anything to make conversation. He was a lawyer, he sensed a need for the common touch, and above all he wanted to feel accepted by a class of people with whom he naturally felt ill-at-ease. In his dealings, no matter how casual, with people whose station in life was palpably lower than his own, he felt embarrassed and guiltily mistrustful. Laundry people, gardeners, Negro handymen appearing at his back door with suppliant grins and appeals for cast-off clothes—all these caused him mild confusion. But long ago, through conscious effort which finally had become a habit, he had found he could disburden himself of any uneasiness by merely talking. And so he had talked, being indeed always the first to talk, even invoking subjects of the wildest absurdity—not only because he wanted to be liked by everyone, which was true, but because he liked to talk, because he liked the round meaningful shapes of words, and because he was afraid of being alone.
    But now the woman appalled him, filled him with desperation, and he had a moment’s fright because he didn’t seem to understand a word she said. She seemed to be one with the anxiety and the dust and the nausea: a symbol, horribly purposeful, of all that can plague a man when he most needs peace and repose. She was a tall, raw-boned, sallow blonde of about forty with bulging eyes and pushed-in masculine features. She leaned slackly against a glassed-in case full of razor blades and stale cigars, gazing vacantly out of the window while she talked steadily, stridently and without enthusiasm, as if it made little difference that no one ever agreed with or listened to her—either Loftis now or that echoing, unlistening choir of taxi drivers and trainmen who, drifting in each noonday like flies, gave back to her across the counter what abstracted grunts they could afford between swallows of beer and the slow, indolent buzz of their conversation.
    “No,” she was saying, “I got nothing against drinking personally and as I say I can’t see why a woman shouldn’t drink, too, and it’s a known truth that doctors often prescribe intoxicants for certain nervous disorders, ah, my sister-in-law in Newark had a chronic condition of the uterus and had to have it taken out and was prescribed by her doctor to take a shot of whisky each night before retiring …”
    Peyton, Peyton, he was thinking; successful as he had been for many hours in forgetting all except the loss of her, she came back now to him swiftly, the thought of her exploding against his consciousness like a fist. A fly lit on the counter in front of him; numbly, he watched the black bearded proboscis