“I drink to fill the emptiness”

Roy Watzka’s refrain, “I drink to fill the emptiness,” is both a defense of his drinking and a claim that private grief belongs to a universal human condition. The expression develops from Roy’s sense of loss into a recurring toast to the void, but its attempt to make emptiness shared does not loosen alcohol’s hold on him: after a long sober stretch, he returns to drinking.

The Refrain and Its Challenge

Roy often answers Delphine’s question about his drinking by saying, “I drink to fill the emptiness.” She hates the line, hearing in it a self-dramatizing explanation that gives his suffering a special status. Once, she pushes him backward into a chair and tells him, “Everyone does everything to fill the emptiness.” Her rebuke strips away his claim to singularity, even as it offers a broader kind of kinship: if everyone acts from lack, Roy is not uniquely abandoned by life.

The passage leaves open whether Delphine’s assertion is true. Roy, however, is comforted by the idea. He feels less special in relation to the dark, fixed hole left by his lost love, but less alone among other empty souls. The phrase thus shifts meaning: what begins as Roy’s justification for drinking becomes a shared diagnosis of human need.

A Theology of the Void

Among his fellow singers, seated on old crates and creaking chairs in a vine-damaged arbor, Roy elaborates the refrain into a lecture. With Fidelis away, the men have drifted from their organized rehearsals into gossip and self-pitying monologues. Roy declares that nothing can fill the ache of the abyss except love, booze, or religious belief. He no longer has Minnie’s love, he says, and lacks either the imagination to believe in the Lutheran or Catholic God or the depth to invent his own version of the Almighty.

Roy then turns the metaphor into a makeshift theology. God, he argues, left a hole in people when molding them from clay, a cup that fermented spirits were made to fill. His question about why spirits are called spirits joins religious language to alcohol, making intoxication sound like an answer built into creation. The men nod but do not respond, wary of provoking another of Roy’s open-ended speeches. The refrain gives his drinking an explanatory system, but the scene also marks how others recognize the danger beneath it: they know he is heading for a relapse.

Relapse and the Limits of the Explanation

The return begins gradually, with small trickles of beer, then becomes an increasingly overwhelming wash. Roy drinks at the bum’s jungle, on the back steps of the pool hall, or wherever else will have him; barred from entering the pool hall, he drinks outside. He lies to Delphine that he is working with Step-and-a-Half, concealing how fully alcohol has resumed its place in his life.

The narration links this relapse to the period after Eva’s death. During his long sobriety, Roy had taken Delphine’s remark as an earnest directive and tried to fill the emptiness through what he did. Yet nothing works for him as alcohol does. His old refrain therefore carries a bitter contradiction: it recognizes a universal human lack, but Roy’s chosen remedy narrows his life again around drink.

Concealment and the Refrain’s Consequences

Roy stays away from home both to keep Delphine unaware and to avoid renewed visits from the dead Chavers family. Their spirits leave him alone when he avoids the place where their undoing occurred. He can still sober himself for two or three days each week, returning to Delphine during those intervals and becoming perhaps excessively attentive.

On those sober days he cooks heavy breakfasts, washes his own clothes, and scrubs floors. Delphine has never known this exact pattern in him; his absence followed by domestic industry helps conceal the relapse for a long time. She discovers the truth only after returning from Chicago and looking for work. The refrain’s claim that everyone tries to fill an emptiness does not make Roy’s drinking harmless or transparent: it sits alongside secrecy, haunted avoidance, and a temporary performance of care that delays Delphine’s recognition.