Go by John Clellon Holmes

Author:John Clellon Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504022293
Publisher: Open Road Media

Eight

At nine-thirty the next morning, Stofsky went immediately to Verger’s from his job, not even pausing to eat. He mounted the long, dark flights slowly, at once relishing and restraining the eagerness that filled him.

He slipped into the apartment, finding the door open and Verger sprawled on a cot beside the shattered window. The rooms were damp and Verger had obviously not been to bed at all, for his shirt, ripped on one shoulder and soiled, was deeply wrinkled, and beside him on the floor were three bottles of beer, two of them empty and the other half gone. He looked up wearily, unshaven and pale, and there was in his wanness a kind of resignation through which no surprise, if he felt any, could penetrate.

“I’ve just come from work. Actually this is my first call of the day … What happened to your window?”

Verger explained briefly, omitting any reference to Agatson’s part in the window breaking. He would pause every few minutes to take a painful, determined pull on the remaining bottle, which would leave him gasping and coughing. He seemed to derive some bitter pleasure from these fits and would smile thinly and sadly to himself when they had passed, and then continue as though uninterrupted.

“I’ve been lying here since some time after one,” he added finally. “Reading the Pensées. Cah-cah! I finished up to five hundred and one and then I stopped.” He reached down into the pillows beside the wall and brought the book up with him, held it for a moment, and then let it slip to the floor.

Stofsky was somewhat irritated by all this, and stared out of the broken window, considering how he could most effectively come out with his urgent news, for his relationship with Verger was elaborate.

They had been close friends as undergraduates when their academic thirsts had, for a period, coincided. Verger had proved more scholarly than Stofsky, and less creative; lacking that restless ability to improvise which had seen Stofsky through examinations for which he had not studied, and made him an enfant terrible among the group of shy, intense students that invariably plunge into literature and philosophy rather than dare the uncertainties of football, dates and dances. They had started as conspirators, nursing their wild ideas together, but when Stofsky had begun going about with a crazier, less intellectual element on the campus, they had seen less of each other.

Now Verger lit a cigarette without looking up, and said with a peculiar lassitude: “The last one I read … cah-cah-cah! goes like this. ‘First step: to be praised for doing good and blamed for doing evil. Second step: to be neither praised nor blamed!’ … A sort of ethical relativity.” And he giggled under his breath. “Quite an heretical idea to read at six o’clock in the morning.”

“Oh, well, heresy! Of course, every idea’s heresy to someone,” Stofsky exclaimed impatiently. “But look, I don’t want to discuss Pascal! I’ve come here, you see,” and he brightened up and continued with suppressed delight.

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