All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (12 page)

It was trying, living with someone who had forgotten my existence, but I consoled myself with the thought that it was
temporary. She was sort of an odd girl. Perhaps her pregnancy was just odder than most. She might remember me, after a while. I played ping-pong, lived in my parka, wrote bad pages, met writers in bookshops and never saw them again, read Wu’s novel, went to the movies and slept sex-lessly beside Sally, who seemed to grow happier every week. I thought a lot about Texas, but couldn’t remember it. Finally I tacked a Texaco road map over my typewriter and stared and stared at it. I was hoping it would solidify me in some way, but it didn’t. For four whole months I didn’t feel solid at all.

MY QUIET LIFE
in San Francisco lasted until almost Christmastime. One foggy week went by, then another foggy week went by. One silent evening was followed by another silent evening. Sally and I never raised our voices, to each other or to anyone else. We waked chaste, and I heard myself murmuring good morning; often the next thing I heard was myself again, murmuring good night. Sally was only morning-sick three times. Then one day I was ejected from my quiet life, and just as cleanly as I had ejected myself from my quiet life in Texas, a few months before.

That afternoon I had put on my suit and had gone to a photography studio and had had twenty-five dollars’ worth of pictures made. Random House had been bugging me for a picture, to put on the dust jacket of my novel. Their publicity lady had written me three letters about it but I was so habit-ridden that it took me three weeks to get around to doing anything new. I figured twenty-five dollars ought to get them a nice selection. If I had thought about it I would have gotten a haircut, but I was already at the studio before it occurred to me that my hair was awfully long. The photographer
didn’t seem to think it odd, and I hoped Random House wouldn’t. It was the first time I had worn a suit in San Francisco.

Sally wasn’t home when I got back, but there was a letter in my mailbox from Emma Horton, and also one from my editor. I hadn’t heard from the Hortons since we had moved, and the sight of Emma’s name, in her handwriting, unnerved me a little. I wanted to save it for a few minutes, so I read my editor’s first. He was coming out for New Year’s, for some reason, and wanted to get together with me. He said there were going to be literary parties. I tried to imagine a literary party and was unable to. It was a very abstract effort, like trying to imagine a triangle or a cube. Wearing a suit made me feel even more abstract. I had a mental picture of me inside my suit, inside a party, inside a building, inside San Francisco. I didn’t know what I was doing, inside so many things that were unlike me. Emma’s return address, written in a ball-point pen on the outside of her envelope, was the only thing that pertained to me that I had seen in months. It had a power that return addresses on envelopes don’t usually have. I felt really shaky, but I was just about to open the letter anyway when there was a knock on the door. I supposed it was Wu, and stuck the letter in my hip pocket, a little glad to have an excuse to save it longer. It wasn’t Wu, though. It was Andrea Beach, her skinny face full of anger.

“I’m tired of waiting for you to do something,” she said. “I’m going to
see
that you do something. That’s why I took off early.”

She walked past me, into the apartment, and stood by the window, screwing up her face and biting her thumbnail. She was a redhead and she wore a very proper, pretty suit. She was obviously very exasperated, and I had no idea why.

“Look, what are we going to do to them?” she said. “We have to do something. I can’t stand it anymore.”

I suddenly had a bad feeling. Andrea Beach was a cool, composed girl. She was not the type to get upset at random.

“Do to who?” I asked.

“Don’t play dumb with me,” she said. “They’re down there fucking and you know it. She fucks him every afternoon. Why don’t you stop her? Don’t you ever fuck her yourself?”

She must have seen from the look on my face that I was just getting a message. Her look changed a little.

“Well, you’re pretty dumb,” she said. “You must not notice anything. It’s been going on for a least a month.”

I was speechless. For a moment I took refuge in the hope that Andrea Beach was incredibly paranoid. But that hope was the tiniest of canopies. In no time I passed out from under it.

“Why do you think I took off early?” she said. “I never take off early. I’ve been waiting all this time for you to stop her. Do you think she goes down there to listen to Willis practice his goddamn cello?”

“But aren’t you her friend?” I asked. “I thought you two were friends.”

Andrea suddenly began to cry. “No, no!” she said. “That was just the only thing I could try. I thought if I made her my friend she wouldn’t be able to do it. I know Willis has no resistance—he just sits down there helpless. It gets boring, being blind. I don’t really think he likes classical music all that much. I don’t blame him. But I couldn’t make her my friend. She doesn’t have feelings. She’ll take anything.”

She was so upset she couldn’t stand still. She kept pacing around our apartment, biting her thumbnail. I just felt sick. I wished I hadn’t been wearing my suit. The fact that we were both dressed up made everything all the colder and
the more unnatural. I felt as if I were on some kind of stage, only there wasn’t an audience, just a skinny girl crying because my wife was fucking her fat, blind husband. I knew I had to do something for her but I didn’t feel capable of choosing what to do.

“Do you have friends?” I asked.

“One or two,” Andrea said, sniffling. “Why?”

“I don’t have any here,” I said. “I was thinking that if you had some you might want to go see them for a while. I’ll do something about Sally and Willis. Right now I don’t know what, but I’ll do something. You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that simple,” Andrea said. She shook her head dejectedly. “Willis thinks he’s in love with her,” she said. “When you make her stop seeing him there’s no telling what he’ll do. I better stay around. He might hurt himself. I guess if I didn’t leave him alone so much it wouldn’t have happened.”

“Don’t you have to work?”

“No,” she said. “I have money. I just like my job.”

We were at a strange impasse. Neither of us wanted to go down to the Beaches’ apartment. We both felt indecent, I think. I felt very indecent. Even if what was happening was happening two floors below us we were somewhat involved in it. We didn’t want to go down and get more involved in it, but we couldn’t help being involved in it to the extent that we were. I was a husband and she was a wife. I didn’t know what it meant, but I realized suddenly that, whatever it meant, I hadn’t been equal to it. Maybe Andrea felt the same way. She gnawed her thumbnail.

“I’ll stop her,” I said. “I don’t know how, but I will, even if I have to take her back to Texas. Do you want to take a walk?”

“I guess,” Andrea said.

We took an unusually silent walk. I think we walked twenty blocks without saying a word. The city was very gray. We didn’t see anything interesting. We were both deep in thought. I had never been so deep in thought. Sally had been with Willis every afternoon for a month or more. Andrea had convinced me. It gave me plenty to think about. When we got back to Jones Street it was late in the afternoon.

“She’s gone by now,” Andrea said blankly.

“Don’t worry,” I said, at the door of her apartment I don’t know why I said it. Her face looked pinched. She had plenty to worry about.

Sally was sitting by the window when I got in. She was wearing her black sweater and eating a peanut butter sandwich. She looked tranquil and lovely. She didn’t look at me. She was looking at the bay.

It was a hard moment. I took a deep breath. Then I put myself between her and the window. I blocked her view. This made her look at me. I wasn’t so nonexistent that she could see through me. She looked at me to see why I was bothering her.

“Andrea was just here,” I said. “I know about things. Why don’t you pick on somebody who has a chance?”

She only changed expression very slightly. She looked slightly annoyed with me. “Get out of the way,” she said. “Who do you think you are?”

She was sitting on a cushion. I leaned down and put my hands on her shoulders and shoved as hard as I could. She scooted halfway across the bare floor. She wasn’t hurt and she didn’t change her expression much now either.

“Why don’t you go out on the street and look around the next time you’re bored,” I said. “The Beaches were getting along fine until we came along.”

Sally sniffed. She could look complacent and scornful at
the same time, somehow. If I could have killed her for anything I could have killed her for that look. Nothing could make her uncomplacent.

“He’d never even fucked anybody but her,” she said.

“That’s nothing to be scornful of,” I said. “Maybe monogamy is the way things should be. Now they’ll have awful trouble.”

“She could have stayed out of it,” Sally said. “It was none of her business.”

“Yes it is!” I said. “She’s married to him. She tried to be your friend. Don’t you even want your friends to have good lives?”

Sally sniffed again. “I quit seeing Willis three weeks ago,” she said. “You could have made me miscarry, shoving me like that.”

“Why’d you stop seeing him?”

Sally shrugged. She had said all she had to say on the subject. She sat down on the cushion again and began to read a baby book.

“Andrea doesn’t know you quit him,” I said. “Tell me the truth. She thinks you’re still seeing him.”

“Willis probably lies to her,” Sally said. “He likes to tell her about me. I guess it gives him a feeling of power.”

I thought of Andrea. No wonder she had looked so awful. I had no reason not to believe Sally. She didn’t care enough about it to lie. She probably had quit seeing him. My head was pounding. I could argue with her for a week and not change the way she felt by even one degree. I looked around the room to see if there was anything I wanted to take with me. There wasn’t.

“I’m leaving,” I said. “I don’t want to live with you anymore. I don’t know where I’m going to live. When I figure it out I’ll come back and get my stuff.”

“Okay,” she said, looking up briefly.

“If you want to get another apartment I’ll help you move,” I said.

“Why should I move?” she asked. “I like the view.”

“It won’t be very comfortable for the Beaches,” I said. “Not with you living here.”

“Tough shit,” Sally said.

It made me furious. I stepped over and yanked the cushion out from under her, spilling her on her behind. It made her angry, but I was angry enough so that she didn’t say anything. She just looked at me.

“You ought to clean up your language,” I said. I went and got my manuscripts. When I came back through the living room Sally didn’t say a word. I started to threaten her, so that she’d stay away from Willis, but it didn’t seem necessary. If she had already quit him she would stay away from him. I couldn’t think of a thing I wanted to say to her, so I left.

I walked to California Street, not knowing what to do. One impulse I had was to give up, to go home to Texas. I could quit trying to be married, and quit trying to write. I got on the cable car at Powell Street and as we were going down the long hill I looked across San Francisco and in my mind all the way across the West, to Texas. It was there beneath the clouds two thousand miles away.

But I couldn’t go. I couldn’t be a student again. I was already too different from other students. Anyway, Sally was pregnant. I couldn’t just abandon her completely. As I was walking up Geary Street I saw what looked like a cheap hotel and went in and took a room. It was only four dollars.

The room had green walls and wasn’t very cheerful, but I was too low to care. I had a period of jealousy. It was like a high fever and what made it worse was that Sally was too awful to be jealous of. I knew she was awful. I didn’t
approve of my loving her anymore. But she had been sleeping with Willis and I still had the jealousy. While I was having it I sat in a chair by the window. I watched a pink neon sign across the street, the sign over a sleazy bar-burlesque. It blinked monotonously. I was hungry inside my fever, but I didn’t have the spirit to go out even to get a sandwich.

I kept feeling something crinkle in my hip pocket and finally, sometime about dark, I became curious enough to pull out Emma’s letter. It was all wrinkled. I turned on an ugly little desk light, in order to read it. Even Emma’s handwriting was round:

Dear Danny,

I keep writing you and throwing the letters away. I think it’s because you got your book accepted. You being a writer makes me self-conscious about everything I write. I know you probably don’t care, but I keep feeling like you wouldn’t like it if I wrote you bad sentences.

But I can’t stand not knowing about you—Flap can’t either—so I have to take the chance. How are you? How is California? Are you living a wild life? How is Sally?

I wish I had more to tell you, but there really isn’t much. It seems like years since you left, but nothing has happened. Flap’s gotten an obsession with fishing. He and his Dad go almost every weekend, leaving me to languish. His Dad doesn’t think women can be fishermen. I don’t really care. I never learned to tell one fish from another.

We’ve had rain all fall and there are billions of mosquitoes. I read
Wuthering Heights
again last week. I don’t think I’ll ever like any novel better, not even yours. Flap decided to be an English major. He says hi, and to tell you to read
The Medieval Mind.
It’s his other new obsession.

There’s really just no news. Are you coming home for
Christmas? I guess you love it out there so much you’ll never come back, but if you do please come and see us. We didn’t realize that you were our only friend. Being part of a couple makes it hard to have friends, for some reason. I have one named Patsy you might like, but she’ll probably get married anytime now and I’ll lose her too. Why does marriage do that to friendships? I don’t know if it’s worth it.