In his helpless, horrified sorrow after he learned Gene was going to have an abortion, he had set out to get drunk. He bought a fifth of bourbon, rented a room in a cheap hotel and began the process of stupefying himself. He sat on the bed looking out on the dingy building well outside his window, drinking from the bottle and welcoming the protective insensibility that came over him. But twice he tried to phone Gene, and both times Mrs. Geary hung up on him.
When he woke the next morning, he was conscious of only one thing: he had to stop it. He was shaking when he went downstairs, and his eyes were blurred. He drove out to Mission Hills slowly and carefully, hugging the right-hand side of the road and talking to himself. He had to stop it.
There was no one at Gene’s mother’s house. He thought at first they were just refusing to answer the doorbell, but the garage was empty, and when he broke into the house through the window of what had been Gene’s bedroom, the house was empty.
Slowly, feeling dead, his stomach gripped into a tight, sick fist, he drove out to La Jolla. He parked the car and walked into the lobby of the hotel. He didn’t care that he wore no tie, that his clothes had been slept in and that he had a two-days’ growth of beard on his face. He knew he looked like a tramp and stank of liquor, and outstaring the desk man and the elevator boy, he rode up to the fifth floor.
V opened the door and he pushed past her into the apartment. She was wearing a blue-figured, two-piece bathing suit and evidently she had been sunbathing on the terrace; her body shone with oil and there was a stripe of zinc oxide on her nose. Her eyes were swollen.
“What happened?” she said.
He walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. “Jack, where’ve you been?” she cried. The straps of her bathing suit were tucked in at the sides, and holding the halter with one hand, she looped the straps around her neck and tied them. Her eyes narrowed. “You’re drunk,” she said.
He nodded, feeling the pleasant, cool, handful of glass, studying the warm amber color of the liquor. Then he put the glass down and leaned against the carved front of the sideboard, staring at her, pitying her, feeling how this had brought them closer, although she would never know it, but at the same time had made it completely and unalterably impossible.
She looked angry and nervous. She took a step backward, and holding her hands behind her, pushed closed the tall glass doors. The sun was bright through the glass. “Where’ve you been, Jack?” she said again.
“Getting drunk.”
“All right. Why?”
He found a cigarette in his pocket. It was bent and wrinkled and the tobacco was stringing out one end. He put it between his lips and lit it, the hand that held the match strangely steady.
“We’ve killed another one,” he said.
Her face turned white and haggard, suddenly old. Her hands rose slowly as though to ward something off, and then she dropped them and leaned against the other end of the sideboard. The drink stood between them. Jack snubbed out his cigarette and picked it up and felt the bourbon that warmed his throat turn to sickness in his stomach.
He tightened his lips and wiped them carefully on the back of his hand. “Another one,” he said. “Two stars. Two stripes…” He shook his head. “Strikes,” he said.
“What is it?” V asked harshly. “Is it something about your wife?” Her face was ugly and lined, old above her young body.
Jack spoke slowly and carefully, drawing the words out. “She was going to have a kid. That’s what you have when you get married, you know. Kids. She…”
V made a sound that wasn’t a sound, wasn’t anything.
“She’s giving it the treatment,” Jack said. “She didn’t want to have my kid.” He moved his hand gently up and down, watching the liquor slop in the glass. He could taste grief like brass in his mouth, then the brass mixed with bourbon, then the brass alone again. V’s hands crept slowly up to her face.
“Goddamn us both for this,” he said.
He crossed the room unsteadily and sat down in the big Monterey chair cradling the drink against his chest. He watched V. He studied every inch of her he could see, wishing he could see her face, wondering how she felt. He wondered if she felt anything of what he did, wanting suddenly, desperately, to know how she felt about this.
“Well, how do you feel?” he said aloud, and then he said, “V, I guess this tears it. I think I wanted that kid.”
She said something he couldn’t understand, her voice muffled in her hands. Her fingers kneaded her forehead. “I keep thinking up names for it,” he said. “I keep thinking about that.”
“Do you?” he heard her say.
“Well, we fixed it up, all right,” he said. “Just like everything else. We fix everything,” and all at once he was surprised he wasn’t blaming her. He didn’t need to hurt her for this. This was their doing, the two of them together. It was not just his fault, or her fault. This was the two of them and he could never blame her for anything again.
“Red and the kid, honey,” he said, to himself and to her. “Do you think we’re worth it? Do you think the two of us are worth the two of them?” He was glad he had not mentioned Denton.
“Now we have to be,” she said, and she turned and looked out the glass doors. It was a beautiful day—he hadn’t noticed it before—the sun was shining and the sky was a hot, light blue; the kind of day on which kids pile into their old jalopies and go out to the beach and everything is beautiful. He watched V’s back as she looked out at the sky and the ocean and the sandstone cliffs around the cove.
“No,” he said. “We’re not worth it,” and she turned back toward him. Her face was like a stiff mask with two dark eye-holes in it, her nose ridiculously caked with the white paste.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s only our fault. It’s always been our fault.” His glass was empty. It had left a wet circle on the dark arm of the chair.
V nodded. “I don’t know what to say to you,” she said. “Except…Except I know how you must feel. I’m sorry.”
“I know what to say. I’m going back to her. If she’ll have me, I’m going.”
V put her hand on the edge of the sideboard as though she would have fallen. “No! Jack!” she cried hoarsely.
“See, I have to make it up to her,” he said. “I owe her most now.”
“Jack!” she screamed at him, but then he couldn’t hear her anymore. He heard only her fist pounding hollowly on the top of the sideboard. He couldn’t see her anymore. He knew she was talking, crying out to him, but her voice seemed to come from very far away, and he wouldn’t let himself listen.
He helped himself up and made his way to the door. He turned the knob and opened it. He didn’t look back at V. She was calling to him but he didn’t hear. His legs were like rubber and he felt sick and hollow, but he felt strong in knowing what he had to do. When he closed the door behind him he found he still had the empty glass in his hand. He took it with him.