The Man Who Lost the Sea Read Online Free PDF

entire life up to that instant had made him feel enraged before.
    He scooped up the letter and glared at it. Next to that one infuriating statement—which he again denied out loud—the only other thing the letter had to say to him was the desperate, pleading request that urged him not to go away.
    Leaving Ivy—leaving the only home he had—was something that would never have crossed his mind in thirty years’ trying. But when Ivy said it, and said it over and over, it exploded inside him. “I will so,” he told the piece of paper solemnly. “I will so leave.”
    And he did. He really did. He filled two paper shopping bags with his clothes and left on Saturday afternoon instead of going to the movies as he had planned. He got a furnished room right across the street from the hospital and down the street from the bank and up the street from the movies.
    On Monday they called him in to the main office arid sat him down, in front of a telephone with the receiver off. He picked the receiver up and listened to it, and sure enough it was Ivy, calling him up at work for the very first time. She sounded terrible, with her squeaky pleading, her frequent sobbing, and another one of her head colds. He just listened in complete silence until there was a pause, unable to think of anything to tell her that would make even a little sense to himself.
    He finally said, “No, no, I can’t. You hear, I can’t no more.” He put the receiver on its cradle and sat there looking at it. He found he was trembling. He thought he ought to tell her at least that he wasn’t sick or in any awful trouble. He picked up the phone againbut it only buzzed at him. Ivy was gone out of it. He recradled the receiver.
    The hospital cashier glanced at him, and then came over. “Anything wrong?” he asked.
    Lulu stood up and wiped his upper lip with the hack of his hand. “I can take care of myself,” he said almost belligerently.
    “Why, sure you can,” said the cashier, backing off a pace. “You just didn’t look so good, that’s all.”
    “Well, I’m not going back there,” said Lulu.
    “Okay, okay,” said the cashier, holding up placating hands. “I just wanted to help.”
    “No sense ever asking me no more,” said Lulu. He shambled back to the receiving desk, leaving a very puzzled young man staring after him.
    For a few weeks, getting adjusted to living alone took up so much of Lulu’s life and thoughts that he had no time for his sins. Living in furnished rooms and eating in restaurants are not always completely simple matters even to the intelligent, and Lulu was a babe in. the woods almost from the first. Keeping cash on his person was a habit he found complicated and very difficult to acquire.
    He used his checkbook constantly, for a ten-cent cup of coffee, a sandwich, and once even for a newspaper so he could check the radio programs. Finally the manager of the restaurant where he ate came over to him with a sheaf of his checks and asked him plaintively to cut it out.
    “Write a big one any time, and keep the cash in your pocket and use what you want. Okay? You got my girl spendin’ a hour and a half every week listin’ your checks in the deposit slip.”
    Lulu blushed painfully and promised to do better. To his amazement he found that he could. He tried the same thing at the grocery, where he had been writing a check every night for two soft rolls and six slices of liverwurst for his lunch. He wrote a check for ten dollars, and used the cash for a week. The proprietor was pleased and even increased the thickness of the liverwurst slices as a token of his esteem.
    He passed Ivy twice in the street. She did not speak to him, and he was speechless even at the thought of her.
    His new life wove in one unexpected thread. The second day of his liberation he was in a booth in the restaurant, and had just finished his soup when he became aware of someone standing next to the table. He looked up and there was Miss Fisher from the