"Sure. Now. _You_ are. So bring her over. Not tonight--or tomorrow
night. I'm busy."
"What about lunch tomorrow? She's not working and I can slide out."
"Lunch, then. Come around one."
The family's very fond of Paul and a good many of us have tried to
spoil him. He was one of those irresistible kids--the kind that wears
glasses, has braces on his teeth, raises bizarre pets, looks up
everything in the encyclopedia, and is always engaged in a project
about five years ahead of his current age--so that he is always in deep
water and needs help. Everybody helped Paul. When he grew up--through
one of the most gangling and precocious adolescences in the history of
youth--the aunts, sisters, and female cousins used to argue constantly
about his looks. Was he genuinely handsome, did he merely have
character in his face, or was he plain ugly but friendly-looking? The
argument was never decided. But, at least, he looked better when his
eyesight was corrected, the spectacles were abandoned, and the braces
had come off his teeth.
I walked Paul to the door and pulled out my bill-clip. There were a
couple of fifties in it and I gave them to him. Not much else--so--when
he'd gone, I wrote a check to cash and phoned for Bill the bellman. He
came up and took my check and brought the money back in a few minutes.
I gave him fifty cents--knowing it was too much--knowing I had always
tipped too much--knowing that I had never cared because I'd been
brought up amidst nickel pinchers and because I like to please the
people around me--and realizing all of a sudden that I would go right
on being extravagant till the day I died which, luckily for my estate,
probably wouldn't be far off.
In this connection, one trifle should be mentioned which on looking
over these minutes, I see I haven't got to.
It crossed my mind at this point, as it had earlier in the day.
I walked over and sat on the arm of a wing chair, staring out at the
hot evening. New York often has a marine sky to which, being a seaport,
it is entitled. That night the clouds were low and small--evenly spaced
and of a size. When the sun hit them, it turned them several different
colors--a dappled effect, like a peacock's tail in which orange, not
iridescent blue-green, was the predominating tinge. It was getting on
toward seven.
I thought about my dollar-strewing habits and the fact that I probably
wouldn't much reduce what funds I'd stored up myself and reluctantly
but methodically amassed in the coffers of the Connecticut General Life
Insurance Company.
Tom-the-doctor had said the damned excrescence in my craw, if mortal,
wouldn't be operable. That meant I wouldn't be lying around in some
hospital, like so many of them, at umpteen bucks a day, while they
slowly took out my neck. It meant, so far as I was concerned, that a
day would come along when I would make up my mind the books no longer
balanced. A day, that is, when pain or mechanical difficulties made it
impossible to proceed with the prose. When I couldn't write any more.
That day, I would have completed my best effort to get my affairs
in order. I'd have seen the people I loved--and seen them before it
was an ordeal for them to see me. I do not have a horror--but a kind
of intellectual rage--over meaningless, agonizing, nonproductive,
lingering existence. In my life, I've seen a great deal of it. I have
seen people who were a stinking nursing problem twenty-four hours a
day--who were afflicted with fantastic agony besides--and who implored
their relatives, friends, and physicians to put them out of their
misery--but who lived in that state for a couple of years.
By taking a reasonable amount of thought, and through a certain
amount of luck, I have avoided several of the pitfalls into which man
persistently topples. Into others, I've all but pitched myself. But
this was one I intended to skip. In the kit I carry for boat trips is
a hypodermic syringe and a thin little bottle of morphine tablets.
I've never had to use them on the broken leg, the gasoline burn, the
leader-wire cut, for which they are always ready. But, when the day
came which, in my judgment, would turn the balance of life, I knew
precisely what I would do. I had always known, even before I had owned
such gentle means.
You dissolve all the tablets--five grains--and fill the barrel of the
hypo. You jab yourself and push.
Simple.
The reader of these notes may therefore spare himself--as I spared
myself--as all human beings should be spared--the anticipation of death
dragged out excruciatingly by the miracles of science.
That is one of the items on the gigantic ledger in which are gathered
those details that prove modern man is mad.
Too many people, for one thing,
when they get to dying,
want to top Jesus.
Wanting that,
inevitably,
they want to kill as many others as possible
by Christlike torture--
forgetting that even He
had his legs broken
as a method of mercy killing.
My apologies, then, for not entering this note sooner.
I sat at the window and I could have pulled out my own hair, or wept,
(or roared with laughter) on account of Paul.