Women

23

I blacked out after that. I guess I had consumed more whiskey than I thought. I don't remember arriving at Nicole's. I awakened in the morning with my back to somebody in a strange bed. I looked at the wall facing me and there was a large decorative letter hanging there. It said "N." The"N" was for "Nicole." I felt sick. I went to the bathroom. I used Nicole's toothbrush, gagged. I washed my face, combed my hair, crapped and pissed, washed my hands and drank a great deal of water from the bathroom faucet. Then I went back to bed. Nicole got up, did her toilet, came back. She faced me. We began to kiss and fondle one another.

I am innocent in my fashion, Lydia, I thought. I am faithful to thee in my fashion.

No oral sex. My stomach was too upset. I mounted the famous doctor's ex-wife. The cultured world traveler. She had the Bronte sisters in her bookcase. We both liked Carson McCullers. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I gave her 3 or 4 particularly mean rips and she gasped. Now she knew a writer firsthand. Not a very well-known writer, of course, but I managed to pay the rent and that was astonishing. One day she'd be in one of my books. I was fucking a culture-bitch. I felt myself nearing a climax. I pushed my tongue into her mouth, kissed her, and climaxed. I rolled off feeling foolish. I held her a while, then she went into the bathroom. She would have been a better fuck in Greece, maybe. America was a shitty place to fuck.

After that I visited Nicole 2 or 3 times a week in the mid-afternoons. We drank wine, talked, and now and then made love. I found I wasn't particularly interested in her, it was just something to do. Lydia and I had made up the next day. She would question me about where I went in the afternoon. "I've been to the supermarket," I'd tell her, and it was true. I'd go to the supermarket first.

"I've never seen you spend so much time at the supermarket." I got drunk one night and mentioned to Lydia that I knew a certain Nicole. I told her where Nicole lived, but that "not much was going on." Why I told her this was not quite clear to me, but when one drinks one sometimes thinks unclearly…

One afternoon I was coming from the liquor store and had just reached Nicole's. I was carrying two 6-packs of bottled beer and a pint of whiskey. Lydia and I had recently had another fight and I had decided to stay the night with Nicole. I was walking along, already a bit intoxicated, when I heard someone run up behind me. I turned. It was Lydia. "Ha!" she said. "Ha!"

She grabbed the bag of liquor out of my hand and began pulling out the beer bottles. She smashed them on the pavement one by one. They made large explosions. Santa Monica Boulevard is very busy. The afternoon traffic was just beginning to build up. All this action was taking place just outside Nicole's door. Then Lydia reached the pint of whiskey. She held it up and screamed up at me, "Ha! You were going to drink this and then you were going to FUCK her!" She smashed the pint on the cement.

Nicole's door was open and Lydia ran up the stairway. Nicole was standing at the top of the stairs. Lydia began hitting Nicole with her large purse. It had long straps and she swung it as hard as she could. "He's my man! He's my man! You stay away from my man!"

Then Lydia ran down past me, out the door and into the street.

"Good god," said Nicole, "who was that?"

"That was Lydia. Let me have a broom and a large paper bag."

I went down into the street and began sweeping up the broken glass and placing it in the brown paper bag. That bitch has gone too far this time, I thought. I'll go and buy more liquor. I'll stay the night with Nicole, maybe a couple of nights.

I was bent over picking up the glass when I heard a strange sound behind me. I looked around. It was Lydia in the Thing. She had it up on the sidewalk and was driving straight towards me at about 30 m.p.h. I leaped aside as the car went by, missing me by an inch. The car ran down to the end of the block, bumped down off the curb, continued up the street, then took a right at the next corner and was gone.

I went back to sweeping up the glass. I got it all swept up and put away. Then I reached down into the original paper bag and found one undamaged bottle of beer. It looked very good. I really needed it. I was about to unscrew the cap when someone grabbed it out of my hand. It was Lydia again. She ran up to Nicole's door with the bottle and hurled it at the glass. She hurled it with such velocity that it went straight through like a large bullet, not smashing the entire window but leaving just a round hole.

Lydia ran off and I walked up the stairway. Nicole was still standing there. "For god's sake, Chinaski, leave with her before she kills everybody!"

I turned and walked back down the stairway. Lydia was sitting in her car at the curbing with the engine running. I opened the door and got in. She drove off. Neither of us spoke a word.