Boys and Girls Together (6 page)

It was ten or eleven in the morning, or at any rate sometime before noon, and he had been driving through thick fog since two in the morning, they hadn't gone to bed at all that night although they had planned to, they'd had a nanny then, and they had planned to go to bed at midnight and get up at five for an early start, but the woman had said, ‘Let's start now, let's not sleep at all, let's just get in the car and go.' He was on his way that instant, going down the stairs from the top flat with the suitcases. They had had breakfast at the only place open in Monterey, ham and eggs and a lot of coffee, but it had only made them sleepy, so that after Big Sur the woman has asked him to please stop soon so she could go to sleep in the car.

‘O.K.,' he said, ‘just let me find a place to get the car off the highway.'

An hour or so later he found the cove. He was there more than an hour while his wife slept, and then she got up and took off her shoes and stockings and went to him where he was gathering pebbles and rocks.

‘The back of the car is full of them,' he said.

‘What do you want with them?'

‘You know I keep pebbles and rocks to look at,' he said. ‘Look at this one.'

He handed her the brown one he was now holding.

The woman held the rock and said, ‘Do you love me?'

‘I stopped so you could sleep, didn't I? Of course I love you. But don't you love anything else?'

‘
Than
what?'

‘Than me or you or whatever it is that you keep asking all the time?'

‘I love you and that's all.'

‘If you love somebody, you love other things, too, don't you? You love everything, don't you?'

‘Not me. Just you, just me, just Johnny, just Rosey, but mainly you, or mainly me, or you
and
me. Isn't that what it comes to?'

‘Yes, I guess it is, at that. Even so, I never saw a place like this before. A man could look for a place like this his whole life and never find it.'

‘It
is
nice, but I'm hungry.'

‘We'll eat at the next town. But don't rush me. I want to stay here a while. I like it here. I don't suppose I could buy this cove.'

‘Would you like to buy the ocean, too?'

‘Yes, I would.'

‘And the sun. Would you like to buy that, too?'

‘Yes, the sun, too.'

‘Well, when you get to Hollywood, just go out and meet the clever agents who are always talking so big and sit down with them and let them be clever for you, so you can get a lot of money and buy anything you want.'

‘If money could do anything like that for anybody, I'd go after it harder.'

‘Are you trying to tell me to be satisfied with the ocean and the sun? I'll bet that's what you're trying to do, and I thought I was kidding
you
.'

‘I'm not kidding. I'd like to buy this cove, that's all.'

‘It doesn't belong to anybody anyway. You can have as much of it as you like any time you like.'

‘It's the nicest place I've ever been. I wish I could stay here.'

‘Well, you can't.'

‘I know.'

‘I'll gather some, too.'

She gathered a couple of dozen small ones, but they weren't very good because she hadn't had any experience with pebbles and didn't know what to look for. The ones that were immortal were the ones to look for, the ones colour and shape
said
were immortal. The ones that were art, that were sculpture, that were whole.

She was a good girl, though, she just didn't know about pebbles. She wanted him to like the ones she'd gathered, so he did, he liked them, he told her they were great; she hadn't gone back to the car and turned on the radio, she had put up with it, she had tried, she was great sometimes, sometimes she could be something made out of light and time and water, like one of the pebbles, sometimes she could shut up and go along, tag along with him even when her common sense told
her he was going nowhere, sometimes she thought about things and decided there might be something to them at that, nothing much but something, a little something, and she looked fine, she looked younger than her few years, sleepy and grave and troubled and thoughtful, the way the little girl always looked when she went to sleep.

‘Are they really good ones?'

‘They are.'

‘What makes the good ones?'

‘Picking them up. Noticing them and picking them up and keeping them, that's what does it.'

Now, in the upper flat he put the big porous brown rock aside and took up the papers that were the work he was doing. It was desperate work and it stank. He put the work back on the table and went to the window to look down at the street. The street stank, too. He just didn't know where to start. What he wanted was money. What they needed was money. What they didn't have was money. What they had was the kids and debts.

He dialled the number of the telephone downstairs and when the woman got on he said: ‘I'll tell you what. I've just figured but how we can get hold of all the money we need. We can sell the kids.'

‘Do you love me?' the woman said.

‘I telephoned you, didn't I? I left my work to telephone you. Take good care of the kids. Give them a good lunch and clean up the joint a little. The whole house is a shambles.'

‘What are
you
going to do?'

‘I'll come down and help you after a while. We'll have some coffee when they're having their naps. Phone me when they're asleep.'

He saw the mail-carrier coming down the street, so he went down to the street-level basement where the mail was dropped. The shelves along the entire far wall were loaded with books and magazines, the baby-grand pianola was there beside the gas furnace, the pianola that had been in his last play on Broadway, the flop, the third in a row. The car was there, and all the junk from New York: the baby carriages and other things with wheels that small children were pushed around in, the cribs and canvas bathing tubs for infants, the toys, the tricycles, and the boy's bicycle that he couldn't ride yet from the seat but could somehow ride, that he loved so much but could only have when someone was there to help and see that he didn't hurt himself. The garden tools, the pruning shears for the rose trees and bushes, the shovel and rake, the lawn-mower.

Christ, he thought, I ought to get up at seven and be at work in an office in town somewhere by nine and come home at six, and live the way everybody else around here does.

One day when he was cutting the lawn and letting Johnny help—it was sundown then, about seven in the evening—a man came out of the top flat of a house just like his house across the way and called out to him, ‘What are you writing?'

The mail was good for nothing.

A woman in Richmond, Virginia, wrote to say that he had twice described someone as being cultured when the correct term was cultivated. The woman asked if he had done this on purpose, as part of his style, or because he didn't know any better.

The lecture-bureau man who had been writing him for five years wrote again saying that he could arrange for a very profitable series of lectures at a moment's notice, in almost any part of the country, including the Far West.

There was a royalty statement from his publisher which only reminded him that he was still in debt, even though the books had sold fairly well over a period of six months.

There was an invitation from a cousin who lived four or five miles across town to go to the races at Bay Meadows and make a killing.

There was a cheque for $27.81, which represented
his share of royalties from an anthology of one-act plays.

There was a letter from a girl who had been eleven years old when she had appeared in one of his plays but was now eighteen, and there was a snapshot of her in the letter. She wore a low-cut evening dress so that he could see how nicely she had grown and she said she never would forget him for picking her out from all the others and giving her her start in the theatre. She was in Hollywood now, and when was he going to go there and show them how to make moving pictures? She said her mother sent him her love and hoped he would visit them in their nice apartment when he got to Hollywood.

And there was a letter for his wife from her friend Lucretia in New York.

He put the letter with the small cheque in it and the one with the snapshot in it in the back pocket of his trousers, and then went up to the lower flat and let himself in with a key, calling out to the woman first so that she wouldn't be frightened. He handed her the mail, because she liked to look at everything.

‘Is this all?'

‘What's Lucretia say?'

‘Are you sure you haven't kept out some of the mail?'

‘Go ahead. Open it and see what she's up to.'

The woman tore open the fine envelope with the fancy writing all over it and glanced quickly at the
first of the five or six pages of very thin paper, and then she said, ‘They're coming out to pay us a visit.'

‘The hell they are.'

‘They can stay upstairs.'

‘They can shit. That's where I work. Now, listen, I don't want any trouble about your friends. Things are tough enough around here without a couple of phonies coming out here.'

‘They have to go to Hollywood. They only want to stop and say hello.'

‘Hello for a week? Write and tell her I'm working. I've got to get to work and you know I'll never be able to with them around. It takes time to get ready to work and you're always arranging for something to happen that will stop me from ever getting ready.'

‘Can't they come for just a
little
visit? She's my best friend and he's such a great man.'

‘She's a bore and he's a bore.'

‘I never see anybody out here. Just the people you know. None of my people.'

‘Your people stink. Your sister was here for ten days a month ago. Two months before that your mother and father were here. Now don't try to make me put up with these two, too.'

‘O.K. I'll write and tell her the kids are sick, but I think you're mean.'

‘The kids aren't sick. Tell her I'm working. She'll understand.'

‘I can't be rude.'

‘It's not rude to tell the truth. I
am
working. We're broke. I've got to see about getting hold of some money.'

‘O.K., I'll tell her you're working.'

‘Now, don't fool around the way you did about your sister. Don't have her drop in on us and then give me a long explanation about how you must have misdirected the letter telling her not to come because she hadn't received it, and now, as long as she was here, we couldn't turn her away. Don't do anything like that again. That was a dirty trick.'

‘She didn't get the letter.'

‘If she didn't, you didn't write a letter.'

‘You saw me mail the letter yourself.'

‘Then you didn't tell her not to come. You told her something else. Maybe you told her to pretend that she hadn't gotten the letter. All I know is that we agreed that you would write and tell her not to come because I was working, and then a taxi came up to the house and there she was with six suitcases all the way from New York. No more of that.'

‘O.K.'

‘Just take care of your kids and let me see if I can start writing again.'

‘I miss my people.'

‘Your kids are your people now.'

He went out and up the stairs and back to his work-table, but it was no use, he had no heart for the work, he had been fighting the idea of abandoning it for days, and now he knew it was abandoned. He'd worked eight days for nothing. It was the tenth or eleventh job he had abandoned in ten or eleven weeks. Well, he would have to start again and this time see that it was not a false start. But when he tried to think what would not be a false start, he could think of nothing that wouldn't, everything would be a false start, anything anybody might do would be a false start, there was no such thing as a true start.

He took the envelope with the snapshot in it, put a match to it, and tossed it into the fireplace. Then he got the cheque out of the other envelope and put it in his wallet to have when he went to the bank.

The way things were, he wished his profession wasn't writing, but that was silly, writing
was
his profession, it had always been his profession, only now he didn't want to write, didn't want to try to write, never reached his work-table eager to see what he had written the previous day, the way it had been in the old days, all he wanted was money because he always needed money, maybe if he had enough of it once and for all, enough to pay his debts, and buy a house
somewhere where she could feel more at home, in Manhattan maybe, or Long Island, or Connecticut, maybe then she would feel at home and be able to get along with a nanny and herself and the kids and himself.

Maybe then he'd be able to get along with her, maybe help her over the hard times a little better, maybe find out why she had to bite her fingernails and be in despair so often, maybe if he could get hold of enough money all of a sudden,
that
would be how he would be able to forget all about money and be free to think about her only, and the kids, and the work, and never again need to be harassed.

Maybe then she wouldn't be for ever discontented, wanting a better house, better clothes, better times, and all the other things she seemed to be dreaming about all the time, maybe then she wouldn't feel she was losing her youth and beauty for nothing, she'd calm down and see that what she had was just about as much as any woman could ever get, and maybe she'd be thankful for it and make the most of it and not go off by herself in her head dreaming up desperate ways to make up for the loss of her youth and beauty, writing to her friends as if she were writing from a penitentiary, asking them to visit her, for God's sake come and see her, telegraphing them, screaming at them at the top of her voice on the telephone, and then, after talking about hats and shoes and dresses and who'd laid who and why, hanging up on a bill for
thirty-six dollars and seventy-five cents, wandering around in despair, unable to fix a simple supper for the kids, or make a sandwich for herself, or think of anything to do.