All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (6 page)

I heard her say that she would have to quit writing, but I didn’t answer her for a while. I was leaning back against the wall, a little mesmerized by the quiet of the kitchen. Emma’s kitchen was easily the most restful place I ever went. The sun was shining through the window, and Emma kept walking back and forth through the big sunny spot in
front of the stove. From time to time she stopped making pancakes long enough to rub her wet blond hair with the towel. I liked her calves, chubby though they were. When she stood in the patch of sunlight they were golden as well as round. I wondered, for a moment, how it would have been to marry her instead of Sally, but it was only a passing thought. I was really thinking about my second novel. That was one of the things I loved about Emma’s kitchen—it was a place where I could muse.

Mostly I mused about scenes, or the things my characters said to one another. I saw their faces and heard the way they spoke. Emma knew all about my musing and sometimes snuck up and put a cold washrag on my forehead when she saw me looking vague, but I don’t think she really cared. Maybe she really liked having me there writing. It was a pleasant thing to do in a sunny kitchen.

“Why should you quit?” I asked.

“Because you’re a real writer now,” she said. “I’ll never be a real writer. I ought to concentrate on making pancakes. When I get kids I won’t have time to do anything but cook, anyway.”

“Come on,” I said. “Lots of mothers write books.”

Emma looked at me solemnly, as if I had hurt her. “I wouldn’t want to do it that way,” she said. “I don’t want to write tacky little books. Even if they were clever they wouldn’t really be good. If I was going to do it I’d have to do it the way you do it, and I can’t.”

“There’s nothing holy about the way I do it,” I said.

“No, but nobody but you could do what you do,” she said. “Lots of mothers could do what I’d do.”

I let it drop. There was no real reason why I should try to persuade Emma to keep writing. What she said about babies reminded me that Sally was planning to get pregnant. If she really didn’t love me it might not be a good
idea to let her, but talking her out of it after I had said she could wasn’t going to be simple. I felt really mixed up and tried to forget about it all by eating a lot of pancakes. Flap came in while I was on my second plateful. He had a fit of sneezing just as he sat down.

“Did you take your sinus pills?” Emma asked. Flap stared at his plate as if he hadn’t heard the question, and she went to the bathroom and got him his pills. His nose looked swollen. He took his pills meekly enough, but he didn’t look really alive until he had eaten several pancakes.

“Any more good news?” he asked.

“I’ve just been awarded the Prix de Houston,” I said. “The mayor’s on his way over with a mariachi band.”

“I think you ought to go to a doctor,” Emma said to Flap. “You wheezed half the night.”

“I only slept half the night.”

“It kept me awake,” she said, holding up a couple of pancakes so I could see if I wanted them. I nodded and she put them on my plate.

“You’re just jealous because you didn’t get any champagne,” Flap said. “If you’d got drunk you wouldn’t have heard me wheeze. I only do it when the weather’s muggy.”

“I guess if you don’t want to go to a doctor we could move to Tucson,” she said. “It’s not very muggy there.”

Flap yawned and snapped his fingers. “Pancakes,” he said. “No medical advice.”

It was easy to imagine children in their kitchen. I could imagine five or six little boys, sitting around on the floor like puppies, some with brown hair and some with blond. Emma would have to step over them when she cooked. I thanked her for the pancakes and told Flap to keep taking his pills and got my bike and pedaled home. I was very worried that Sally might not be back from wherever she had gone, but fortunately she was. She was lying on the bed
tying knots in the venetian-blind cord. She looked quite cheerful.

“You could use a shave,” she said when I came in.

“I want to grow a beard,” I said. “I’m bored with shaving.” Since she was cheerful there was no point in reminding her that just last night she had told me I was too clean-cut.

“All right,” she said agreeably. “You grow a beard and I’ll have a baby.”

The two things didn’t seem quite on the same scale, but I didn’t say so. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to grow a beard—the statement had just popped out of my mouth. Shaving was a bore, but a beard might turn out to have its drawbacks too. I felt deeply equivocal about everything. I sat down at my writing desk and tried to write, while Sally tied knots, but I had already missed the best hours for writing, and I was as equivocal about writing as I was about everything else. I wasn’t sure my first novel was any good, and I wasn’t sure my second novel was going to be any better. I looked at the paragraphs I had written the day before and they seemed pretty ordinary. I doubted that anyone could have distinguished them from the paragraphs of a hundred other writers. When I got people talking I was okay, but my descriptive prose didn’t seem to me to be particularly worth reading.

I wrote a page or two, but I didn’t really make much progress. In my mind I wasn’t writing at all—I was trying to think of a way to get Sally to tell me where she’d been without sounding paranoid about it. The two pages I wrote had no clarity and I knew even as I wrote them that I would write them over the next day. Sally kept tying knots.

“I think you’re a frustrated boy scout,” I said. “Want a bacon sandwich?”

She didn’t, so I made one for myself and came back and
sat on the bed to eat it. “I came by early to apologize,” I said. “Where’d you go?”

“I had a visitor,” she said. “Godwin’s in town. He took me to breakfast.”

“What’d he want?”

“Geoffrey’s left Austin,” she said. “Godwin’s got nobody to live with him. He looks like he’s going crazy. He said he’d buy me a motorcycle if I’d come back.”

“I didn’t know owning a motorcycle was one of your ambitions,” I said.

“I’ve wanted one for years,” she said, yawning. “He asked us to a party tonight, too. He knows a professor here who has a pool.”

She turned on her side and went to sleep and I sat beside her for an hour and a half, rereading
Great River
and brooding about Godwin, Sally, babies, novels and other problems. I read and brooded until I slid into a stupor and fell asleep. After a while it got too hot to sleep and we both woke up and took off our sweaty clothes. We went to the kitchen and drank several glasses of ice water apiece. Both of us felt sort of sluggishly sexy—we fiddled around a little, standing by the icebox. The heat gave a kind of vegetable quality to everything. Sally and I leaned together like too heavy, slightly damp plants. I was sensate but torpid. When we grew tired of standing we sprinkled water on the hot sheets and spread out on the bed. We had a sense of sex but no great urge for movement. The damp, sexy torpor was pleasant in itself. I felt like I had suddenly been switched into slow motion. I kept feeling her and she kept feeling me and finally, after about half an hour, we evolved from our plantlike state back into agile animals. We fucked awhile, as Godwin would say. Or as Sally might say. Or Jenny. I don’t know what I would have said—I have some oddly decorous habits of speech.

I had poured down too much ice water just before becoming an animal and it joggled in my stomach and slowed me down a little. Still, there’s nothing that can be done in the middle of the afternoon that quite competes with sex, ice water or no ice water, and whatever the nomenclature you adopt. As we were resting, all soaked and slushy, I had a fantasy of us doing it in an icebox—not ours but a great big icebox with no shelves in it, very white and cold. We could leave the door open. I thought about it awhile and decided I hadn’t had enough, even though we were on a sweat-soaked bed instead of in an icebox. Sally was just as happy to continue—she was really sort of unfinishable. We kept on screwing until I got sore, but somehow it didn’t get us to where I wanted us to be. I just wanted us to be finished so that we were close to each other and not excited, and I couldn’t make it happen. Sally could have six orgasms and still keep herself, somehow, whereas I couldn’t even kiss her and keep myself. She thought it was nice of me to make it possible for her to come a lot, but that was about all she felt. When I finally quit she got up and took a shower. I grew unhappy, lying in the messy bed. I felt as though nothing in my life would ever be complete, not even for five minutes. Sally came out of the shower with a towel in one hand, a beautiful five-foot-ten-and-a-half inches of girl. Water dripped down her long legs and onto the floor mats and she was as far away and as much on my mind as if I hadn’t just been screwing her off and on for an hour. All the screwing should have changed something, or made some fundamental difference. It shouldn’t have left things just the same.

“Let’s go to the party,” Sally said. “I want to swim.”

I wasn’t crazy about going someplace Godwin was going to be, but it was the only invitation on our calendar and if we didn’t go we’d just sit around the hot apartment all
evening, not knowing what to do with each other. I would brood about one novel or the other, and Sally would tie a thousand knots in the venetian-blind cord.

“Okay,” I said.

“I can wear my red bikini,” she said. It was the only garment she owned that she really seemed to like.

“It’ll drive Godwin wild with passion,” I said.

Sally was drying her legs—she looked up for a moment and made an amused face. “He’s already wild,” she said.

THE ABRUPTNESS
with which major changes can occur in life was something I had never really experienced until I met Sally. I went through three years of college and no changes of significance occurred at all. I read books and wrote my novel and got drunk frequently. That was about all that happened. Existence really held no wild surprises—or wild surmises, either. Sally was my first wild surmise. I woke up on Godwin’s floor and looked at her and almost immediately my life began to veer crazily one way and then another, like a car being driven by W. C. Fields. Around any corner might be a drawbridge, a vegetable cart, or a brick wall—and I wasn’t driving. I was being zoomed. If I had been alert I wouldn’t have gotten in the car in the first place, but I hadn’t been alert and it was too late to jump out.

Not asking where the party was before I agreed to go is a perfect example of my general lack of alertness. Once I had agreed to go there was no way I could back out. Sally was looking forward to wearing her red bikini. The professor who was giving the party was named Razzy Hutton—Razzy was short for Erasmus. He was English, like Godwin,
and was what he called a lineal descendant of Erasmus Darwin. His specialty was protozoa and he wore white trousers the year round. Of course in Houston it’s summer most of the year round, so the wearing of white trousers didn’t really class him as a great eccentric. It was just one of the many little things I held against him.

All he had to hold against me was the suspected theft of an octopus. One had disappeared from the zoology lab while I was taking Razzy’s course in protozoa. I
did
steal the octopus, actually, but Razzy had no way of knowing that. His case against me was built entirely on prejudice, just like my case against him. We brought out all each other’s instinctive prejudices. He was tall, thin, and blond and should have worn a monocle. If he had worn a monocle I would have hated him even more.

Razzy was quite social, and a darling of the Houston rich. Three of Houston’s more prominent Lesbians were sitting by his pool when we walked in. They were drinking vodka and orange juice and baiting Godwin, who looked pale and slightly crazed. I guess the Lesbians were scaring him. The three of them glanced at me as if I were some kind of unattractive dog, but when Sally came out in her red bikini they all but slavered. I expected steam to come out from under their skirts. None of them was attractive enough to show herself in a bathing suit.

“She’s precious,” the fattest one said hungrily. Her girl friend took offense at the remark and went off to get more vodka, watching Sally over her shoulder. Sally dove in and got wet. The Lesbians began to drink faster and I started drinking from scratch, meaning to catch up if I could. Godwin was pacing back and forth near the diving board. Finally he came over and shook my hand.

“You’re looking bloody well,” he said.

“The patina of success,” Razzy said. “He rather glows
with it.” He was drinking extremely dry martinis, and his tone carried the perfect degree of chill, like his martini glass.

“Ah yes,” Godwin said. “You sold your book. Now you have a license to steal any bloody thing you happen to want.”

“Hopefully he’ll start with a change of linen,” Razzy said. “Do swim as soon as possible, will you? You have a body odor.”

I drank my glass of vodka and orange juice in about three swallows. It had just hit me what a mistake it had been to come. Sally was floating on her back, her bosom and belly shining with water. The three Lesbians were watching her. Godwin seemed almost friendly, but Razzy Hutton exuded a rare quality of nastiness. He obviously meant to insult me in every way possible.

“We’re all corporeal beings,” he said, “but very few of us allow ourselves to smell. Very few of us gulp our drinks, either. If you propose to walk among us as an equal you must begin to cultivate one or two of the more basic of the civilized graces.”

“That’s fucking nonsense,” Godwin said. “The boy’s a frontier genius, don’t you know? The fact that he farts in public is part of his appeal.”

“I don’t fart all that often,” I said defensively.

“Come, don’t apologize,” Godwin said. “Genius need never apologize for itself. I didn’t even fart in private until I was thirty years old.” He said it sadly, as if it were something he had often regretted.

“Really?” Razzy said. “What a titillating detail.”

“Those three women you invited scare me fucking green,” Godwin said. “I think I’ll go in with Sally.”

He went in to get his bathing suit. The three Lesbians got up and came over and Razzy introduced me to them. He
managed to do it without moving his lips. I felt like I was in the middle of a school of piranha fish, and I tried to look humble and unappetizing.