All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel Page 3

  3

  I HAD almost more liquor than I could carry, inside and out, but fortunately I didn’t have far to carry it. Rice University was just across the street. I staggered along, hugging the jeroboam and feeling slightly guilty. It was obvious to me that if the phone hadn’t rung Jenny Salomea and I would have done something adulterous on her woodblock. I have no real resistance to temptation, drunk or sober. Very few attractive temptations come my way and when they do I almost always yield to them. I can’t smash them away like they were badminton birdies. I just don’t have any moral coordination, as Jenny Salomea well knew.

  On the formal quadrangle in front of the library I ran into Sally. She was riding a bicycle. A tall math major I knew slightly was riding another bicycle, right beside her. He was a campus genius, and very smug about it. I had never liked him and I liked him even less when it dawned on me that he was taking a bike ride with Sally. His name was Rick Leonard.

  “Hi,” I said. “Where’d you get the bike?”

  “Borrowed it,” Sally said. She looked like she was enjoying herself. I really didn’t like the tone of things. My stomach was getting bad signals again. I tried to set the jeroboam on one of the hedges that filled the quadrangle, but it didn’t work. The bottle sank into the hedge.

  “What’s in the bottle?” Rick asked.

  “Champagne.”

  “How come?” Sally asked.

  “Mrs. Salomea gave it to me. She’s not so bad. It’s to celebrate selling my novel. I just got a telegram.”

  I handed it to her and she sat on the bicycle and read it. She could sit on the seat and reach the ground with both legs. Her legs were remarkably long and remarkably shapely. I loved to watch her stand that way, although I was generally in a disapproving mood.

  “Gee, that’s nice,” she said, a little speculatively. Rick did not pretend to be delighted with my success. When the news got out I would be a campus genius too. Actually it griped him that Sally had to break off the bike ride.

  I was an honors student and had a key to the library. Rick had one too, but he declined to come to my celebration. He didn’t deign to make an excuse. The library was the usual madhouse. It had supersilent floors that had to be waxed every night in order to remain supersilent. The waxing staff was hard at it, riding their giant waxers around the huge rooms. I had one friend on the staff, a happy-go-lucky little Mexican named Petey Ximenes. Petey was not important enough to merit a giant waxer, but he didn’t care. He had a middle-sized waxer and spent his evenings smoking marijuana while he followed his waxer in and out of the fifth-floor stacks. He loved to get high and follow his waxer around. The other concern of his life was fourteen-year-old girls. He spent his afternoons hanging around a Mexican junior high on the North Side, picking up fourteen-year-olds. Usually he bribed them with lemon drops and screwed them. He had very trusting eyes.

  “Hey, guy,” he said, when he saw us come out of the elevator. He immediately took a comb out of his pocket and began to comb his ducktail. They had been out of fashion for several years, even among Mexicans, but Petey hadn’t kept up. When he began combing his hair his waxer went swooshing on down an aisle.

  “You better turn that off,” Sally said sternly. For some reason Petey disgusted her. He looked at her humbly with his trusting eyes, but it didn’t make her any friendlier. The huge bottle didn’t surprise him—he had long ago concluded that I didn’t lead a normal life.

  “I sold my novel,” I said.

  “Good deal—you gonna be famous,” Petey said. “Lots of money, lots of ass.” Then he realized that was a mistake. He hadn’t adjusted to my being married. Sally gave him such a hostile look that he didn’t open his mouth the rest of the night.

  We went downstairs and found Henry, another friend of mine. Henry was an executive-level janitor. As usual, he was at the main desk, making phone calls to Hollywood. His aspiration was to be a screenwriter. Once in the twenties he had somehow met Darryl F. Zanuck, and Zanuck had told him that if he ever wanted to get in pictures he had only to give him a call. Henry had been wanting to get in pictures for about fifteen years, and had taken to calling Zanuck almost every night. He never got past the outermost answering service, but he was convinced it was because Zanuck was so busy. He had written eight strange screenplays, all of them involving the Seventh Cavalry—in the most bizarre of them the Seventh Cavalry only barely managed to keep the Flathead Indians from razing San Francisco, which Henry had resituated somewhere near Portland, to save shooting costs, he said. Since I was a fellow writer he let me read his scripts and make criticisms. I thought the scripts were hilarious and encouraged him to write more, which was probably bad.

  Henry thought my novel was hopelessly dull and kept trying to get me to put the Seventh Cavalry in it somewhere. He was a gaunt man who smoked a very heavy pipe and had a drooping lower lip as a consequence.

  “Don’t that beat all?” he said, when I told him I had sold my book. It was his one comment. While we waited for him to finish trying to reach Darryl Zanuck a crowd of students gathered around us, drawn by the champagne bottle. Most of them were history graduate students, a perennially horny lot. They were indifferent to my success but they certainly weren’t indifferent to Sally. They didn’t bother to conceal their lust.

  The only person in the crowd that I liked was Flap Horton, an undergraduate like myself. He was wavering between history and English—I was wavering between English and nothing. Flap had only been married six months himself. His wife Emma was chubby and loved to drink. We all drank together when we could afford to. Flap had looked sheepish ever since he got married. He seemed to get skinnier as Emma got more chubby.

  When Henry finally got off the phone we went down to the basement and drank the rest of the champagne out of paper cups from the janitor’s water cooler. Petey was insecure amid so many Anglos. He chewed his hangnail. Despite Sally’s order he hadn’t turned off his waxer—it was somewhere on the fifth floor, still swooshing around. The history majors talked incessantly, trying to impress Sally with their erudition. Their effort was a big flop, as I could have told them it would be. Nothing bores Sally like erudition. She looked bored and remote, and she can bring off remote looks better than any woman I know, partly because she’s so tall and beautiful, and partly, I guess, because she is remote. She has very high cheekbones.

  Only Flap was really happy about my success. He generously got drunk with me—otherwise the celebration was a dud. Henry spent twenty minutes lighting his pipe. The history majors even bored me. Sally didn’t utter a word—she obviously wished she had gone on with her bike ride. We didn’t seem very married. I would really have rather finished the champagne with Jenny Salomea, even if it had led to adultery. I longed for Emma Horton to be there. She was my fan and was always pleased when I did something successful. I tried to hold onto a little enthusiasm, but I needed more help than I was getting.

  “Why do you always put the Seventh Cavalry in your screenplays?” I asked Henry.

  “Well, ain’t that the stuff of life?” he said. No one was listening. Getting a novel published was no way to start a drinking party, evidently. I had worked on the novel for over a year and suddenly I felt very strange about it. I was not certain that I liked it, or even wanted it to be published. Maybe it was really a terrible book. I felt flatter and flatter. Sally was glad when we finally left the library. I gave Flap the big, empty bottle—he said Emma might want to plant a vine in it. The night was warm and sticky and still full of mosquitoes.

  “I knew you’d make it if anybody did,” Flap said as he walked away.

  “Why?” I asked. People were always saying things like that to me and I couldn’t understand it. I lived in constant doubt about myself, and never expected anything I did to come out right.

  “Well, you’ve got discipline,” he said. He was carrying the bottle over one shoulder, like a huge club.

  Sally and I walked on home. It was true that I got up and wrote for a couple of hours every mornin
g, but I had never thought of that as discipline, particularly. I just happened not to mind getting up early. In fact, I liked to get up early. I liked writing too—at least I usually liked it.

  Our apartment was about a foot below ground, not so good a thing in a place as swampy as Houston. The mats I used for carpeting were soggy, and the whole place smelled like wet straw. It was hot inside. The minute we got in Sally pulled off the T-shirt she was wearing. She had a beautiful long torso—even watching her back made me feel sexy. I got the carbon of my novel out of the box, to see if anything about it looked good, and I found I couldn’t read it. I just couldn’t focus on it. Sally had been thinking she might read it, but she hadn’t gotten around to it. I put my novel back under the bed and got out Paul Horgan’s Great River, which I was reading for the fifth or sixth time. I can always lose myself in books about rivers—I had read every book I could find about the Nile and the Ganges and the Amazon and every other big river. Sally lay on the bed beside me while I read. She was tying knots in the cord of the apartment’s one Venetian blind.

  “I’ll be glad when you turn the light out,” she said. “It’s drawing bugs.”

  It was drawing a few small bugs. “I left your chicken in the oven,” I said. “It was great. You can really cook.”

  “I don’t need compliments,” she said. “I know I can cook.”

  I looked at her and got a cool look back. It was just beginning to dawn on me that she hated for me to read. No one close to me had ever liked it that I read a lot—I thought surely Sally would. If I was going to have to feel guilty about reading I didn’t see how marriage could be worth it.

  “Are you going to eat your chicken?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “Rick bought me a cheeseburger and a malt.”

  Rick was wealthy, too. We had never been able to stand one another. I closed the book and watched the bugs swarm around the light. The screens in the apartment were terrible. When I turned off the light the bugs all came to the bed.

  “I guess I’ll be getting some money,” I said. “We could even have a baby.”

  “Good-o,” she said. I thought that would please her. A baby seemed to be what she wanted out of marriage. She had already mentioned it several times.

  “Why did you want to read when we could be fucking?” she asked.

  I hadn’t been doing things in any particular order of precedence, but I guess from Sally’s point of view that was wrong. She certainly had an order of precedence. I couldn’t understand why Godwin thought she was frigid. I had never slept with a quicker comer—a man would have had to be awfully premature to get there ahead of Sally. I couldn’t believe my good luck. I had never really expected to get married at all, and I certainly never dreamed I’d get someone who was so beautiful, and such a joy to sleep with.

  A few small bugs got squashed between us, while we were making love. Afterward we sat up in bed and picked them off one another’s bellies. We were very sweaty. The window was open and we sat and watched cars go by on the street while we dried off. Then unfortunately a car turned in. It was our landlord, Mr. Fitzherbert.

  “Thank God we finished,” I said, lying back down. “Just keep still.”

  “It’s our apartment,” Sally said. “We can fuck in it if we want to.”

  Unfortunately our apartment was tacked onto Mr. Fitzherbert’s garage. He was a large, aging oilman who lived with his ancient mother and three even more ancient aunts. I don’t know what his problems were, but he handled them by getting really drunk every night. He drove a Chrysler Imperial and usually came roaring into the garage about midnight. Our apartment was extremely flimsy and when he entered the garage the left wheels of the Chrysler passed within about two feet of our heads. It had been in my mind for two years that if he ever got really drunk and drove into the apartment instead of the garage I would be done for. Now there was Sally to think about, and the physical danger was only part of it. Mr. Fitzherbert didn’t like us sleeping together. He had thrown a fit one night just from hearing our bed squeak, and we were only turning over.

  When he drove in and killed his motor I lay very still. Sally sat very still. But Mr. Fitzherbert was cagy. He opened the car door—it bumped against our wall—but then he too became very still. He was listening for us. For about two minutes things were very silent—all that could be heard was an occasional bug, hitting the window screen. It was a war of nerves. I could imagine Mr. Fitzherbert, sitting in the Chrysler. He was listening for the least sound of movement.

  Wars of nerves don’t interest Sally long. Suddenly she bounced on the bed with her behind. It made an awful squeak. Apparently Mr. Fitzherbert was stunned. No sound came from the Chrysler. Before I could stop her, Sally did it again. She bounced three times and made three really loud squeaks. Anybody could have told it was just someone bouncing on a bed, not two people making love, but apparently Mr. Fitzherbert was in no mood to make distinctions. He came out of the Chrysler roaring and began to kick our wall.

  “No fucking!” he yelled. “No fucking, you hear!”

  We didn’t say anything. The war of nerves was over and Sally had stopped bouncing. But Mr. Fitzherbert was just warming up.

  “You hear me in there?” he yelled. “You hear? Cut out the fucking! Hear me? Dirty little students! Fuck all the time. No respect for property!”

  He screamed the last, and then was silent. I guess he was listening to hear if we were listening. I was ready to strangle Sally if she bounced again, but the damage was already done. Mr. Fitzherbert was going into a fit.

  “Come out and fight!” he yelled. “Stand up and fight! No more of that shit on my property! None of that while I’m around.”

  Then he began to bang the wall of the apartment with the door of the Chrysler. That’s what I’d been afraid he would do—he had done it the other time too. Bang bang bang bang! Things began to shake. It was a heavy door and a very light wall. Books began to fall out of the bookcases. Sally began to bounce again, out of bravura, I think. I just sat. Her bouncing was nothing compared to the beating Mr. Fitzherbert was giving the wall. My one picture, which was of an uncle of mine, fell off its hook—I heard the glass break when it hit my typewriter. I was afraid the door might bust through the wall, which meant that Mr. Fitzherbert might also bust through the wall. If he saw us both naked there was no telling what he might do. The reading lamp fell on the bed, and books kept thumping to the floor. Sally quit bouncing. It was such a flimsy apartment that it was possible to imagine the whole thing falling in on us, if Mr. Fitzherbert didn’t stop. I think that’s what we both did imagine. Of course the car door was hitting the wall about two feet from where we sat, but we could hear things falling in the kitchen too. And the shower suddenly started running—it had a hair-trigger mechanism, on hot, at least—and was a good place to get scalded. Mr. Fitzherbert went back to a four-beat rhythm and I could barely think. Sally hugged her knees.

  Suddenly he stopped. He leaned against the wall, right behind our bed. We could hear him panting. “Jesus,” he said, in an unhappy voice. In a minute he said “Jesus Christ,” and stumbled out of the garage. We saw him angle across the driveway toward his house. After so much noise, things seemed very quiet.

  “He didn’t shut his car door,” I said. “I better go shut it for him.”

  I put on some pants and went and shut it. When I came back in I turned on the light a minute, to survey the damage. Sally was still picking bugs off her belly. I inched into the bathroom and managed to turn off the shower without getting scalded. Steam was drifting into the bedroom.

  “You could have turned that off first,” Sally said. “The car door could have waited.” She flicked away a gnat and gave me one of her cool looks.

  “You could have sat still, too,” I said. “What’s the point of provoking Mr. Fitzherbert? He’s a nice man. I doubt if he ever gets laid. It’s no trouble to sit still for five minutes.”

  She wouldn’t argue with me—it was one of the most maddening things about he
r. She just ignored my reply. I picked up the picture that had fallen and broken, a picture of my Uncle Laredo riding the beautiful gray studhorse that he had called El Caballo. Only the glass that covered the picture had broken, but it still annoyed me. I felt very out of sorts with Sally. Making love hadn’t done us any good at all. I was as tense as could be. Her cool looks affected me strangely. One minute I felt like hitting her and the next minute I just felt small. I knelt on the floor and picked up the books that had fallen out of the bookcase. Most of them were Signet paperbacks, including several issues of New World Writing. My real ambition was to get something published in New World Writing—getting a whole book published was not so much a real ambition as a fantasy. As soon as the steam cleared out of the bathroom Sally got up and went to the John.

  “I guess when the advance money comes we ought to get a bigger apartment,” I said, when she came back. “We’ll have to get a bigger place anyway, if we have a baby.”

  “Good-o,” she said. She sat on the bed and ruffled my hair with one foot. Obviously she no longer considered that we were at odds. She never really got tense, so it was easy for her to stop being at odds. She stretched out her legs and put the soles of her feet against my shoulders. It was clear from the way she did it that she was interested in screwing some more, but I didn’t respond to the invitation. I had stopped feeling tense, but I felt extremely wan. The evening had taken something out of me. I don’t think Sally ever felt wan in her life and I didn’t think she’d understand it if I tried to talk about it. For some reason my spirits were sinking straight down to zero. Marriage was beginning to look awfully complicated. I really sort of felt like being alone.

  Sally shook her legs free and made a beautiful V with them, for my benefit. She kicked herself a few times, with her heels, and rubbed herself casually with one finger. When she saw I wasn’t going to leap up and screw her her face became petulant. One of the things I had already learned about her was that she wasn’t at all patient.