A FEW WEEKS LATER, enriched by a royalty check for several hundred dollars that had caught up with him, McGland sat at the desk in his motel room and wrote out the fourth draft of a poem:
Come let us spread a picnic on the precipice,
Eat, drink, be merry with our backs to the abyss,
Till in that dusk where bats cannot be told from swallows,
Gifts from threats, we’ll banish solemn songs like this.
This is our hopeless heaven, these flowers our eyes have watered,
Wine drawn from our veins, tunes piped from hollowed bones,
And gaiety pouring from every wound.
He had deleted from the previous version the lines, “The world’s too mad for anything but mirth,” and “We know at last the quintessential hoax,” which struck him now as dreadful. How could he have written them? He remembered something he had told a New York journalist in an interview about his “working habits,” a dull subject about which people remained curiously interested in the case of writers and artists. “Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober,” he had said, “and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation—the Apollonian and the Dionysian, or spontaneity and restraint, emotion and discipline.” Perhaps he had written those lines drunk. Well, he was sober now, and not going to stay that way long, so he’d better get the poem fixed while he was. Maybe the whole thing was no good—high-grade Pagliacci it was beginning to sound like on cold reconsideration.
The pain in his jaw had not abated, despite the removal of the bicuspid. The original soreness persisted, clearly distinguishable from the dull ache of the socket, now largely healed. Could it be the molar after all? Oh, dear God, no.
He delayed inspecting it by prolonging the ritual of assembling another drink. He carried his glass to the bureau on which sat the plastic bowl of ice supplied by the management. He dropped three cubes into the glass, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, then twisted the cap from a fresh bottle and poured a generous stream of whiskey over them. “This is my body which is broken for some reason apparently none of my cotton-pickin’ chicken-pluckin’ goddam business,” he said. For the rest, he stood at the window looking out at the traffic on the Post Road, for all the world like any man casually having a drink. Suddenly he set his glass down on the window sill and rushed into the bathroom. He lifted his lip as far back as he could and looked into the lighted mirror. The molar was abscessed.
He emptied his glass sunk in a chair. He instantly poured another, swallowing that till the raw blaze in his stomach overshadowed the throbbing in his mouth. He opened the phone book and found the name of a local dentist whom he had heard praised at house parties here. He tried to force from his mind the mad suspicion that was forming there. Would a dentist draw the wrong tooth deliberately—or at least unnecessarily—knowing all along that the one next it was doomed to follow? He remembered a story he had once read about a sadistic doctor who had amputated a man’s leg unnecessarily. In no case could he go into New York and face Haxby again.
“Dr. Ormsby is busy this afternoon,” the receptionist told him when he phoned.
“I’ve got to see him.”
“Emergency?”
“Yes.”
“What seems to be the trouble?”
“Toothache.”
“Just a moment. I’ll see.”
He could hear the phone being put down and then footsteps, followed by a consultation in the background in which a man’s voice could be faintly discerned. Then the return march and the clatter as the phone was picked up again.
“Can you be here at five? Dr. Ormsby will stay down to see you if you think it’s that urgent.”
He was quite drunk when he climbed the flight of stairs to the office, but his mind retained the stark clarity of panic. “Did Haxby see or hear us on the stairs?” it kept asking, and, as he settled back in the chair, “Is this the last humiliation cunningly planned by what may be then quite accurately termed insane jealousy?” Well, so Bobsy had tried to warn him.
Dr. Ormsby was in any case a short, cherubic sort with pink cheeks and merry blue eyes. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked amiably as he washed his hands at a basin behind the chair. McGland sketched in a brief history of the problem. “Well, let’s have a look.”
A glance sufficed to confirm the belief that the molar was abscessed.
“That’s not necessarily a death sentence for a tooth nowadays, is it?” McGland said, looking up with his whipped dog look again.
“Oh, no. No, certainly not. But I’m afraid that’s not the whole story here.” He drew up a stool in order to sit closer to McGland, and even have a cigarette with him. He was clearly a kind man. In a distant room could be heard the sound of young girl employees getting ready to go home.
“This tooth as such we might save. We can go in there with antibiotics, and if that doesn’t work, drain the abscess surgically. We might draw out all the pulp and still have a shell which, cracked as it is from top to bottom—you must know the enamel’s split—might still hold together for a while. But there’s something more serious than all that. Your gum damage around it. Periodontal disease has left a lot of gum breakdown that’s about to cost you the tooth even if by some miracle all the other factors work in our favor. Didn’t your dentist explain all this when he pulled the bicuspid?”
McGland shook his head, rolling it on the rest without looking at the doctor.
“And did he have to pull it? That’s what puzzles me, a little. He must have known that pulling it was as good as rendering you toothless, because now of course you’ll be stripped clean on that side and we can’t hang a bridge on what’s left. I’m sorry. But you’ll have to have them all—Miss O’Connell! Are you still there?”
She was, but left mercifully soon after McGland came to on a couch in the consultation room. Dr. Ormsby offered him no liquor even if he had any about, well aware from McGland’s condition that that would have been a matter of coals to Newcastle. He smoked another cigarette and walked the floor as he talked.
“I make it a rule never to run down predecessors,” he said, “but it’s a foolish economy not to get the best. Often I find people go to dentists because they’re friends. Is this man a friend of yours?”
“Not exactly, though we see one another socially.”
“Ah, yes. I won’t ask his name—I’m not interested in that—but you do see the importance of having someone who knows what he’s doing.”
“I think he knew what he was doing.”
McGland picked his way down the stairs “as if in a dream,” a phrase by which we seek to suggest something of the sensation of a man moving in an environment with which he is not in organic touch. The very familiarity of the streets and buildings among which he wandered deepened this sensation, for he could only view the world now as an exile from it. The store fronts, the houses, the sunlight and the girls walking in it, these no longer had anything to do with him. He was not a total stranger to this alienation—not total. He had for all the years of his sexual manhood carried it mystically in his blood, the destination toward which he knew he moved.
He had been prepared for this Truth by perpetual fears of it, by recurrent glimpses of it, as of a veiled face, seen dimly and imperfectly, now with the last veil removed. “I have seen that face before.” It had been foreshadowed in moments clairvoyant of this moment. And in those fleeting divinations he had sensed that final despair in which alone lay his hope of a dreamless sleep.
He wandered from bar to bar, till afternoon wore on into evening and the lights began to go on, and even out. He wondered that nobody seemed to notice anything unusual about him, apart from the fact that he was drinking rather heavily, which made one bartender refuse to serve him. Surely there must be something special about him tonight, that might indicate to one human spirit another in extremity. He thought this while entering a tavern he had been in an hour earlier. Surely there must, to anyone who really looks at a man, be clearly evident in his aspect some hint that here was one living his last day on earth. As he walked in, two men on barstools momentarily shifted their gaze from a television set to him with no change in their expression. They gave the impression of meeting reality with the same drugged abstraction granted the scene on the screen, so that nothing would have surprised—or, really, entertained—them. So that if McGland were to stagger in like a character in a crime story (which after all he was) exclaiming that he had been shot or stabbed, and opening his coat to reveal wounds so inflicted before collapsing to the floor, they would have followed his movements with the same glazed indifference accorded the violences and grotesqueries to which this nightly substitute for conversation and dispute had habituated them. It was to a commercial showing a woman spraying her flesh while she smiled with secret confidence in her own palatability (the Mona Lisa of the advertisements) that they turned back as McGland advanced toward the bar. He left again without finishing his drink.
The idea of Yeats in his old age had got firmly rooted in his mind. There were the mackerel-crowded seas, the young in one another’s arms, and Yeats left with his “worm” and his rage. McGland had a friend with a painful story of the poet in his last days, trying to read publicly with (as McGland recalled it) the same impediment to diction as that to which he had just been doomed. McGland held on to that picture.
He went back to the motel and checked the phial of seconal he had there. A dozen of the red capsules remained: surely enough. He moved in a kind of leisure now, a crystal certainty of what he was doing, looking into drawers and into the pockets of his clothes for letters, papers, other things he would not for obvious reasons or obscure ones want to leave behind, tearing them up or otherwise disposing of them. The new poem was rent in twain from top to bottom, but the two pieces were left in a desk drawer. He set fire, for some reason, to a shirt and a pair of torn socks, sitting in a chair with a drink watching them burn to ashes in the metal wastebasket. All this while he reviewed what he knew personally of the long outrage of human existence, to justify and confirm his departure by arguments more universal than his own no doubt petty grievances.
There were his father and mother, each in the end a monolith of misfortune. There was his grandmother. Involutional melancholia has its highest instance among the women in rural Scotland. No one knows why. It’s just one of those facts. One of his earliest memories was of his grandmother dying in a mental hospital. His grandfather had been more exquisitely spat upon. He was burned to death in the church for which he had always made financial sacrifices, while briefly napping in the furnace room where he donated his services as janitor when the congregation couldn’t pay him. McGland tallied up each life story like a number in a column at the bottom of which would be the figure he wished before departure to confirm: zero. Nothing he could throw in of his own life greatly disturbed that limpid answer. Finally there was the piece of human cruelty of which he had himself just become the victim. It was in this very room that he had possessed the woman over whom the emasculation had been committed. Did that make any difference?
He sat back in his chair to finish the drink. There was one more memory that wanted rehearsing. It was probably the most vivid of his childhood days in that seagirt village.
Mrs. McLaughlin, ninety years old, had lost everything and everybody, through the simple principle of survival. Not only her children lay in the churchyard next to the white cottage in which she lived, but her two grandchildren too—one drowned, the other taken by sickness. She lived out her own old age with both legs crippled. Yet each day when the weather was fine she went out in her wheelchair to her garden patch, where she would pitch herself forward out of the chair and on her hands and knees crawl between the rows of vegetables, weeding and tending them. That done, she would crawl on through the open gate leading to the cemetery and do the same thing in the family plot, ending with the last grave, her own, awaiting her there. Why did she go on day after day, year after year, to eke out the tail end of an existence that had no longer any substance or meaning? Because she represented human worth at its highest: virtue in a void. That final courage which consists in knowing courage to be useless.
Did he, McGland, have it? Why should he want it? What would he do with it?
He finished the drink and lit a cigarillo. Drawing on that, he walked down the Post Road to a drugstore, where he bought a quart of strawberry ice cream. He wondered, as he carried it back to the motel in one of those insulated paper bags, whether he had a bowl in his room. Yes, of course—the plastic bowl in which the management sent over ice. There was even a spoon in it.
When he got to the room, he took off his coat and hung it in the closet. There were two ice cubes melting in water in the bottom of the bowl. He emptied them into the bathroom sink. Standing at the dresser, he got out the ice cream and began to spoon it into the bowl—the entire quart. He emptied the phial of seconal capsules over it, one by one, mixing them well into the ice cream. He stirred it for several minutes. Then he carried the bowl to the armchair beside the window, sat down, and began slowly to eat.