Free The Lost Weekend by Charles Jackson

without ever thinking of going on the stage, a pianist without having taken a music lesson in his life, a husband and father without marrying.
    All he remembered of yesterday was the afternoon or at most the early evening, but that was enough. He had never intended going to the farm from the moment the idea came up. Shamefulto think of it now! At some point he had decided to stay behind; he’d manage it, somehow; he’d get out of it, he’d just not be there. He had used the matinée, the not going, as a way out; and it had worked, as he knew it would work from the beginning, in spite of all Wick’s tiresome pleading to come along too. “We’ve had the tickets such a long while”—he could hear Wick now, and he felt a pang of pity as he thought of the futility of Wick’s ever trying to plan anything with him. You always got left. Wick (or anyone) could never bank on his being “all right” when the date came around. Worse than that, he had become a liar and dodger; there was no depending on him for the immediate afternoon, much less for dates ahead; he wasn’t to be believed; not a word he said was to be taken seriously; but everybody went on pretending, others as well as himself, that this wasn’t true; that maybe this time it would be different; that Don would certainly, now if never, keep his promise, make good his word, meet the date or the debt. Instead of the fellow everyone had always been so fond of—friendly, social, good company, bright, lively—he had developed into a crafty sly masquerader, artful and elusive, presenting a front so different from his real self that they pretended to believe out of sheer embarrassment, as much to save his face as their own. During all that long and repetitious dialogue yesterday, when they sounded the old refrain they had sounded over and over, so many times before that it was like a ritual, Wick hadn’t once said, out loud, what was really on his mind: “I don’t believe you.” That would have been more painful to him than to Don; but only because he couldn’t bear to hear Don’s hurt protestations on top of the rest of it.
    Talking German to Mrs. Wertheim—aaah! To Mrs. Wertheim, who spoke American better than he did. And calling her gnädige Frau! She was too much of a person to smile—
she
saved his face too, covered up for him, pretended as one pretends with a child that their fancies are real, oh yes, quite genuine and real. She was the aristocrat, not he; and he felt sick shame as he recalled,now, his fanciful daydream about how he had given the bedazzled Mrs. Wertheim a tantalizing glimpse of reckless glamorous high life. What a fool and an ass he had made of himself—and
there
was one more avenue of escape closed, one more source he had cut himself off from, a source of loan he could never go back to again. One more person to shun in the street, one more shop to go by with face averted, one more
bête noire
added to the growing neighborhood collection of persons he must not see again.
    And now he would live in dread, of course, of that moment, a week or so hence, when Wick would come into the flat, the laundry bill in his hand, and say almost with tears: “Don, why did you have to go to her of all people, what will she think, why didn’t you go to Helen or anyone, anyone else?” It was a moment to dread because there was no possible way out of it: simulating innocence was no good; hanging your head was worse; the disarming open admission was long since out. It was one more thing he could and would, in the mornings to come, mornings such as this, build up an anxiety about. Slight it seemed; but by the time Wick approached, came nearer and nearer, it would have grown by then to one of those many real terrors from which he must somehow, someway, escape.
    “Two-and-Twenty-Misfortunes” the family often called him, after the character in Chekov. Well, it was a family joke, and fun (to them); but he got a bit tired of hearing it just as he got a bit