HER NAME WAS MARGO. She was a 22-year-old addict hooking for her heroin, and when Nelson Algren met her, in the mid-40s in Chicago, while he was working on The Man With the Golden Arm, he violated the immortal principles he’d set down in A Walk on the Wild Side: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.” Algren took Margo in, putting her up in his Wicker Park digs, and eventually got her clean. Years later, when she wrote him a note letting him know she was engaged to a guy she wanted him to meet, he was devastated. His feelings for her had become so strong and complicated that when he tried to put her into the center of a novel he couldn’t finish it.
Perhaps it was the crash and screech of the traffic below that caused him to dream, for often his ears would be ringing and his eyes blinded by the whir and glare of these machines, and he would be conscious of himself lying, as though flung there, across the bed of the darkened room, hearing his own troubled breathing as he struggled to waken and could not.
No, I hope I didn’t pour off a solitary drop. Because I might as well be dead as feeling like this. I might just as well have had it all.
I haven’t written because I am in the midst of travel plans. I am being married April 8. His name is Virgil. He says it’s the little girl he loves in me. I know I have your blessing.
Then the loss came back like a sickness in the heart, and the joke hadn’t come off after all.
The man who was letting everything go held his rumpled note down with both hands. As though a sudden draft might blow it away, as if knowing that the wind that blows below hotel doors blows all such scraps away for keeps.
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Whether the moon was white or yellow, whether the night sky was cloud or clear—who remembers now? It was morning, love past eleven and not yet twelve, and the chambermaid’s voice telling some good-morning porter, “I’m still in the land of the living, Charlie.” That had come to them over the transom at the best of all possible moments; beneath him she had given up the smile that went sea-green miles deep: “I’m still in that land too,” Baby had told him.
Readings by Algren’s editor Dan Simon, Russell Banks, Barry Gifford, Don DeLillo, Willem Dafoe, and Martha Lavey, a performance based on a script by Simon and Gifford, and a slide show by Art Shay, Mon 4/6, 7 PM, Steppenwolf, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20.
