past few days, but could remember before that a meal of Chinese food. Sometime during the binge he had bought a bag of salted peanuts, for he had found its remains the day before in the pocket of another suit. Which reminded him, why had he changed suits at all?
This question proved too difficult to solve at the moment so he put it aside. He moved his limbs singly and together and found them all in working order. His calf muscles were sore and the little fingers on both hands were slightly numb from a chronic vitamin deficiency. His head bore no aches, contusions, or bumps and his brain was clear, with no hallucinations, noises, mirages, or other signs of delirium tremens. So far he had it made.
His teeth felt thick and dirty but his face was freshly shaved, and his fingernails were cleaner than they should have been. He remembered now getting a haircut, shave, shampoo, and manicure. But where? In a hotel, an office building? He would leave that question to be answered later also.
There was no use in torturing himself further. He pushed the upper part of his body erect and inspected the bottle on the dresser. It was empty, as he had known all along it would be. He fell back against the pillow, wondering what time it was but too weak and afraid now to look at his watch. That was if he still had a watch. Much more painfully this time he raised himself and looked along the dresser top. His watch, an expensive gift from his now dead sister, was lying on its face beside the empty bottle.
He got up and approached the dresser, lifting his feet from the floor with exaggerated steps. He picked up his watch and after focusing his eyes read the position of the hands. It was nine-fifteen. He moved to the chair over which his suit was draped, and unbuttoned the rear left pocket of his trousers and pulled out his wallet, finding to his intense joy that it still contained two ten-dollar bills. There was also a Quebec Army & Navy Sweepstake ticket, number 1313547. He vaguely remembered buying it from the French Canadian in the attic. From the right-hand pocket of the trousers he pulled out a small amount of change and a crumpled dollar bill. He carried the wallet back to the bed and found that his credit cards were intact. From a bill compartment he pulled a slip of ruled paper on which was written, in a woman’s handwriting, “Gloria, TO 3-3990,” and a laundry ticket stamped June 15, bearing a series of Chinese characters.
He climbed to his feet, placed the wallet on the dresser and hung his suit on a hanger in the closet. Then he shed his pajamas as he glanced at himself in the mirror. His tall thin figure was soft and white, his paunch reduced slightly by his malnutrition. His drunkards flush had been replaced during sleep by a sickly pallor. He stuck out his tongue and winced at its heavy white coating rimmed by a bright pink edge like the inside of a wound. He shook a couple of Beminal tablets into his hand and went to the sink and drank a glass of water to flush them down.
He drank a second glass of water to kill the raging thirst that the first had induced. As he stood there, his head bent above the sink, he caught sight of his toothbrush in its holder. A long fine hair was twisted through its bristles. His stomach tightened as the distasteful sight of the hair was carried by his burnt-out nerves to his gut, and with a few preliminary heaves he brought up the water he had drunk. A moment later he brought up the Beminal tablets.
“Oh, you crazy bastard!” he admonished himself. “Why do you punish yourself like this?”
There was no answer to his question, and he staggered back to the bed. He kept his movements slow, afraid to make a sudden move that would make him heave again. He felt the sweat start on his forehead and watched it slowly seep through the pores on the back of his hands. His chest grew damp and he looked down and watched the rivulets begin their course though the sparse grey hair on his breastbone. With the sweat came a false euphoria that was soon supplanted by the shakes. He knew the course of drink sickness enough to know its prognosis from then on and its eventual end. Staring at his hands he saw them begin to jump and beat an involuntary tattoo on his leg. His head seemed to swell to bursting point, threatening to carry him off aloft like a balloon. By holding his mouth slightly open he could hear the chattering of his teeth, his upper bridge rattling like castanets against his lower one. He sat there until his stomach lost its rawness and the urge to heave had disappeared, amusing himself with some critical and remorseful introspection while he waited.
Suddenly he was struck by the horrifying thought that it might be Sunday and the liquor stores closed. He jumped off the bed and ran to the window. Parked across the street was a cleaner’s delivery truck, its driver making a delivery to a house.
“Thank God!” he acknowledged aloud.
Then he heard Grace banging her dust-mop along the baseboards in the hall, like the call of a salvation drum to the saved and unsaved alike. He knew with gratitude that he was still alive, and with a little less gratitude that he was likely to remain that way.
When he looked at his watch again it was twenty minutes shy of the witching hour when the liquor store opened. What accomplishment or victory could be greater than this!
CHAPTER NINE
Clark had started on this new job on Monday but had sold only two floor polishers all week. The small commissions had kept him in eating money, but had not been enough to pay his rent. Now, on Friday morning, he had decided to hit an apartment and rooming-house neighbourhood off north Jarvis Street. Having to walk and carry his demonstrator made his arms ache, but this was nothing compared to the ache in his ego caused by having to lug the thing in and out of the rooming house twice a day. One thing about selling gas heaters — he hadn’t had to carry a demonstrator.
He hadn’t been seen yet by the woman in the room next to his, but the landlady had spotted him sneaking down the stairs one morning with the polisher in his hand. She hadn’t said anything about it, but she had smirked a little, in the way he thought a spider would smirk at a fly that was approaching its web. If he had to pay his room rent in trade, that was all right with him: he was full of a superabundance of that commodity.
The apartment house he chose as his first calling place of the day was just run down enough for some of its tenants to need floor polishers. He walked into its old-fashioned foyer and rang the buzzer of an apartment on the top floor. When the answering buzz sounded in the door lock he scurried inside, walked to the back of the building, and climbed the rear stairs to the second floor. During June he had had some good days, but too many sales had trailed off into disappointments marked by finance company cancellations and turned-down orders. Most of his sales had been to people whom even the finance companies wouldn’t trust, members of a new substratum of society: the dé classé installment purchaser, who can no longer buy anything at all without cash.
He chose an apartment door at random and knocked. He was sure it would be another turndown and was prepared for it. Mr. Cartwright, the district sales manager, had stressed the selling points of the polisher on his blackboard the previous Saturday, but hadn’t intimated what a glut on the market polishers had become. Clark had memorized the sales pitch, but usually he had not got past the opening sentence: “Good morning, ma’am, I represent the Household Aid Corporation —”
From inside the apartment came the sound of women’s voices, one fairly young and hoarse and the other older and pitched in a querulous key. He had learned there was no use trying to make a sale to two women together, for if one showed an interest the other was bound to take the contrary view.
He was ready to move on down the hall when the door suddenly opened and he found himself face to face with a woman in her early thirties, holding a thin housecoat to her throat.
“Yes?” she asked, in a deep hoarse contralto.
“Good morning, ma’am, I represent the Household Aid Corporation,” he began automatically, then stopped.
“Yes?” she asked again, waiting for him to go on.
He
