Davidson, Avrim - SS - The Dive People.pdf - Avram Davidson - przemosta

The Dive People

Avram Davidson

Edward Peterson moved restlessly in the bed, troubled by bad dreams,

fatigue, and swift-approaching wakefulness. His mind insisted on his

recognizing certain things he would sooner forget: that he had left Jinny

to take up with Bran and left Bran to take up with Pauli. And with this last

of the names coming up bubble-like and bursting at the surface of his

mind, his body straightened out with a single convulsive kick and all at

once he was awake and sitting up, sweating and trembling and sickened

with fright. He knew now what he had done. It was no dream after all.

What Peterson had done was to take the sharp knife in his hand, reach

out for the soft throat of someone he knew well, and draw the knife across

from ear to ear.

He knew that he had done this and that it was a hideous thing and that

it could not be happening to him though he knew it was.

~~oOo~~

They had been living in a fetid tenement to the south of Cooper Union,

not one that still had a faint flavor of an honored past, but one that had

been built to be a tenement, a five-story hovel which could never attain to

dignity if it endured a thousand years. Of course, it was a question now if

it would endure a thousand days, if it would not collapse inside its own

filthy integument before the cannibal city fell upon it and destroyed it.

"Chili con carne for supper," Pauli said. As if he couldn't smell it, along

with every other meal ever cooked on that greasy stove. Peterson looked

around the single room of the place, feeling his feet burning in the shoes,

wondering vaguely where he could sit down. Even the broken chair was

piled high—his old shirts, torn ones which the Chinese laundryman had

said wouldn't process; Pauli was going to mend them so they could be

washed and he could have some clean spares. She wouldn't wash them, no,

but she would mend them. One of these days—As for the sofa, it had been

weeks since that had been available for sitting.

Pauli passed into the kitchen, took the lid off the pot. He wrinkled his

nose, opened his mouth. What was the use?

Q. That's not your chili con carne, is it?

A. Oh, you know mine is no good.

That was quite true. Nothing she cooked was any good, because she

never took any pains. But bad as her chili was, it was still better than the

horrid cheap stuff she got in cans; and he had told her so. Again and again

and again . So why do it now? Once or twice he had asked, wearily, why

she didn't just boil a pot of potatoes. "You can boil them in their jackets,"

he said, "you don't even have to peel them." And she said, Yes, but she'd

have to wash them.

"Is there any vermouth, Pauli?"

"No. But that's all right, there's no gin, either."

"I've got a half pint here."

"Where can you get half pints of gin in New York State?"

"It's lemon-flavored—that makes it legal, for some ungodly reason.

Mixer?"

"There's nothing . Except that Chianti."

"Gimme."

"Oh, Ed, it'll taste awful."

"Who the hell cares about the taste? Where's the Chianti?"

But, of course, she didn't know where it was, nor—once he'd found it (in

the closet, concealed by a pile of her things so carelessly hung up that

they'd fallen down)—did she know where there was a clean glass. It turned

out that there wasn't any clean glass. He washed one and she appropriated

it while he was opening the gin, so he washed another for himself.

The Chianti did taste awful.

He had been on his feet all that afternoon, saving taxifare, delivery

service, postage, literary agent's fees. At least he said he was saving the

agent's ten per cent, but he knew he'd simply run through all the

worthwhile literary agents in town and there was no one left who would

advance him a cent until he paid back all the advances of the past year

and a half. And one, Tom Thompson, wanted to know when Ed was "going

to show some signs of straightening himself out." As if the mere fact that

Ed was on his feet, seeing people, writing again—as if that wasn't the best

sign of all that he had straightened himself out.

As compared to the too-long stretch when he was rarely sober, dunning

for advances or loans and, when not getting them, living on Pauli's meager

alimony. That is, not exactly alimony: a sum of money sent regularly by a

Petty Officer Second Class who believed he was the father of Pauli's little

girl. Pauli, who knew better, had told her mother she'd been married to

the sailor, and had sent the kid to her.

And then, even harder to bear—because it was so near the truth—the

agent said, "I don't call this writing, Ed. It's a scissors and paste job. They

all are. What you've got here, you're cannibalizing your old material. No

good market would take it, and I don't bother with the others."

Well, so the hell with Tom Thompson.

The whole afternoon had resulted only in a $30 sale to that crook, Joe

Mulgar, who gave $5 in cash and the promise to pay the rest sometime

after publication. Hence the pint of gin (lemon-flavored). The piece had

netted Ed $300 the first time he sold it, five years ago.

Five years ago was just before he had married Jinny. Had he started his

drinking and loafing and playing around because Jinny was the way she

was, or was Jinny the way she was because of his drinking and loafing and

carrying on? It was hard to say; Ed just didn't know. She had never

cheated, like Lynn (Lynn was before Jinny), he was sure of that. Nor would

she ever fight back the way Bran had, nor yield the way Pauli yielded.

Jinny had always stayed so calm and cool. It was infuriating. She never

tried to conquer him, she never even tried to conquer him.

"I'm leaving." That was all he had said to Jinny.

"I'll be here when you come back." That was all Jinny had said. Not

even "if."

"When." Well, he never would go back. Why had she said it? What did

she want with him, if she could go on without him? Pauli, with all her

faults—

Pauli!

~~oOo~~

Ed swung his feet over the side of the bed, cracking his heels on the

floor. It wasn't a bed, actually but a pad, a mattress set up on box springs.

He'd been on and off a thousand of them. Only it had been a regular bed,

not a pad, in their apartment.

And now he realized that he'd known from the first moment of his

awakening that he wasn't in their apartment. His eyes hurt and his head

throbbed and he felt his heart beating in terror. Beside the pad was an

up-ended orange crate, its top encrusted with dirty cigarette butts. The

pad was in an alcove blocked off by a torn screen, and somewhere

someone was taking a shower and whistling off-key. On the floor alongside

was a pile of clothes. His.

Hangovers are funny only to those who have never really suffered from

them. As he bent, half fainting, half retching, over his clothes, it was

nothing so slight as a splitting headache that Ed Peterson felt, but a

condition in which every cell in his body seemed at war with every other

cell, and all his parts seemed loathsome to him. Closing his eyes, feeling

that they would otherwise burst from their sockets, he got into his clothes.

He had to get out of the apartment before whoever-it-was got out of the

shower.

He had killed a human being—instinctively he raised his hands: there

was no blood, unless that dark whatever-it-was, half on and half under the

rough loose cuticle of one finger… And on his clothes? Was that spot

there—and the one next to it—were they blood? Or the Chianti of the night

before? Ed didn't know. He had no memory of the latter part of last

evening.

In the subway station, sitting on the hard wooden bench (first he'd

tried to thrust a nickel into the turnstile, then—recalling vaguely that the

fare had been raised—he had found a dime and pressed that into the slot,

and finally took both coins to the change booth and been given a token) he

remembered that he did not even recall the location of the house he had

just left. So far as he knew, he had never been in the place before, but he

knew well enough what sort of a place it was: a dive.

Who was it that had been so scornful of "dive people"? Jinny? No, Jinny

was never scornful of anyone—at least, not openly. Pauli? (Ah, God, Pauli!)

They had met in a dive—"Riverside Dive" it had been called—a huge

apartment tenanted jointly (or so it seemed) by several hundred harmless

young men, mostly science-fiction fans, with half a dozen bathrooms and

two score beds.

Yes, Pauli, curling her over-red lips and saying, " Dive people!" Pauli.

Few of the dives, to be sure, were on the level of the one overlooking the

River. Some were converted (or unconverted) lofts, some out-and-out

slums; some made a faltering effort at achieving the more abundant life

via the co-op method, with typewritten menus and duty rosters on the

kitchen bulletin board (WEDNESDAY: Breakfast: Doreen and Jack.

Cleanup: Dickie) , and a membership of students or artists or other

pursuers of beautiful dreams. And other dives were sort of pipeless opium

dens, not—to be sure—scenes of orgies, but places for the restless and

roaming to fall back on for a pad and a pancake if there weren't any orgies

going for the moment. But they all had something in common—the same

air of insubstantiality, of wary waitfulness, the presence of those who had

turned their backs upon the past and their faces half away from the

future—the unsuccessfully educated, the believers in nothing…

Davidson, Avrim - SS - The Dive People.pdf

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