All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (19 page)

“Don’t stand there thinking it’s your fault,” Jill said. “This is my fault, damnit! You’re so lovable some girl will glom on to you five minutes after I leave. No normal woman could ask for more than you and a nice apartment.”

“Oh, horseshit,” I said.

“Some girl will come along in five minutes,” she insisted. It was a silly point of controversy. Jill went around to the rear and opened a big portfolio and gave me the two sketches that she liked the best. I kissed her, sort of. She kicked me lightly with her sneaker and got in the bus and left.

Three days later I got a note from her, in a big package. The big package contained a sketch, protected between two
heavy pieces of cardboard. The sketch was of Jill, just of her face.

The note said:

Dear Danny,

My light was still burning. It burned for two months and two weeks. Light bulbs get better and better. This is how I looked when I got home. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror and drew it for you. It shows how mean and critical I look.

Put it where you work, so you won’t be tempted to write sloppily. I put what little trust I have in your doing your work right. I don’t want you to be cursed like me, but I’m afraid you may be already. I hope not, but if you are, at least you must do your work right.

You mustn’t leave San Francisco until you finish the novel. When you finish it you can come and see me and I’ll read it. Please don’t go back to eating trash.

Love,
Jill

JILL
didn’t call for ten days. When she did call the first thing she asked was, “How much have you written?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I don’t want to be a writer all that much, anymore. You didn’t have to go away.”

She was silent a minute. “Don’t be that way,” she said. “You don’t have to sound so bitter. I miss you too.”

“I
am
bitter,” I said. I was. The more I thought about it all the bitterer and more hurt I got. She hadn’t had to go away. She could even have slept with me. In retrospect it didn’t seem like either of us had tried very hard.

Jill sighed. “You mustn’t be bitter, even if you are,” she said.

“Why not? It wasn’t just a flirtation. I love you.”

“You’re being very stubborn,” she said. “It’s a little late for you to be so stubborn. Why didn’t you think of some way to keep me?”

She sounded hostile suddenly, and I felt hostile. We hadn’t been when we parted, not at all. I was surprised to feel so hostile. I had been brooding for days. I guess I blamed her for not making us work. I guess she blamed me
for the same thing. When she told me she was leaving I had felt paralyzed. I felt really helpless. I watched her leave in a kind of blank daze, as if I were drugged.

“I just couldn’t think of any way,” I said. “You didn’t want to be kept.”

“How much have you written?” she asked again. We talked for an hour, keeping our hostilities and resentments under control. Afterwards I missed her terribly. I went outside and sat in a park. Jill and I had sat there often, in the late afternoons, watching people come home from work and go in houses and come out with their dogs and walk them. It was a pleasant park. Jill had a long green scarf she always wore. When I went to the park after talking to her on the phone I was utterly convinced I would never be happy again. An old fat lady with a golden cocker walked up to me and said, “Where’s the nice girl with the green scarf? We miss her.”

“I do too,” I said.

It was horribly true. My life was scarcely a life at all, since she had left. She had educated me to certain qualities and properties that I hadn’t known before: the properties of food, of nice rooms and nice light and good colors, the pleasures of walking and looking at things with someone intelligent, new qualities of affection, the pleasures of talking. I had never done those sorts of things with a woman before. For a time I almost hated the concept of love and the fact of sex, because they were the missing ingredients that kept me from having all the other good things I wanted. With Jill gone, the nice things she had taught me to enjoy seemed flat and meaningless. They weren’t all that enjoyable, intrinsically: she had made them enjoyable. She started calling often and we argued about it over the phone. She hated my attitude.

“There’s no reason for you to slop around like you used to,
just because I’m not there,” she said. “That’s ridiculous. You see? That’s what I hate about love. You get so dependent on a person that you can’t lead an intelligent life without them. It’s sick.”

“Maybe it is if you’re interested in living an intelligent life,” I said. “I don’t particularly want to live an intelligent life.”

“Well, you certainly aren’t,” she said. “Damnit. Are you going to movies again?”

“Sure,” I said. It was true. Every day when I finished my work on the novel I scuttled down to Market Street and killed five or six hours going to movies.

“Why do you do that?”

“The apartment’s lonesome,” I said.

“Don’t give me that. That’s pure self-pity. You lived alone all your life up until a few months ago. How come you can’t live alone now?”

“Because I lived with you two months,” I said. “I don’t want to live like I used to live.”

“What do you have for breakfast?” she asked ominously.

“A Milky Way, usually,” I said. “Sometimes a Coke.”

“Danny, you’re being deliberately cruel,” she said. “I’m going to hang up and cry. You’re hurting me.”

She hung up. I called back and apologized. I
had
been being cruel. I was hoping I could convince her I was deteriorating, so she would come back and stop me. It didn’t work. It just made her doubt me.

“I want you to have standards,” she said. “I want you to keep them.”

“But standards are so empty,” I said.

“So what!” she yelled. “Life isn’t exactly gushing with fullness down here, either. That’s no excuse for not living intelligently and having standards and eating well and
working and keeping some order in your life. Emptiness is easier to bear if you have a little order in your life.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “I just don’t care.”

Jill sighed. “I don’t either,” she said. “You oughtn’t to eat trash, though.”

Actually my lapses into old habits were not very major. I worked twice as hard on the novel as I had before Jill left. I wanted to finish it, so I could go to L.A. and see her. Besides movies, I went back to ping-pong and saw a lot of Wu. It was from Wu that I learned that Sally had left.

“You can be coming to my house again,” he said one day. “Sally is not living there anymore. An Englishman came, very jolly fellow. He was taking her to Texas.”

That was interesting news. At first I was relieved. With Sally in the city I always felt slightly conscious of her, as a responsibility. She was still my wife, and she was going to have a baby. The time was drawing nigh. It was March and the baby was due in April. I tried to forget about it but I couldn’t. It would be my child. I would have to do
something
about it. I couldn’t let a succession of Chip Newtons raise my child. I tried to talk to Wu about it but he was no help. He had children in China, but he was very vague about them.

“Children are always problems,” he said. “Good thing there are women.”

When I tried to talk to Jill about it we had fights.

“You’ll go back to her,” she said. “Or shell come back to you. It’s another reason I left. You’re already worrying about her. If I’d have fallen in love with you I’d have been stuck in about two months, you see. You’ll be back in Texas changing diapers.”

Her attitude infuriated me. She seemed to think that because I had some normal concern about my child that I still loved Sally, or preferred Sally to her. I told her a
hundred times that it wasn’t true, but her convictions were unalterable. She believed what she wanted to believe.

“I know you,” she said. “You’re a sucker. I would have been a sucker to love you.”

“I wish you had been,” I said. “It would have helped a lot.”

“I didn’t dare,” she said. “I can’t even raise my own child. I’d have to be crazy to try and help you raise yours, even assuming we could get it away from that bitch.”

“You ought to take more chances,” I said.

“I took too many earlier,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

In late March, for two weeks, I did nothing but work. I was into the last hundred pages of
The Man Who Never Learned
. I gave up movies and ping-pong and worked ten and twelve hours a day. When I got within two days of the end I called Jill.

“I’ll be through in two days,” I said. “Can I come down?”

“You better not have written it sloppy just so you can see me,” she said. Talking to her on the phone was not like looking her in the eye.

“I didn’t,” I said.

There was a pause. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that. I know you wouldn’t. You’re going to be mad at me.

“Why?”

“I have to go to New York tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve got a project that has to be done there. I didn’t know about it until yesterday. I may be gone three weeks.”

I was very let down. “Are you going because you don’t want to see me?” I asked.

Jill sighed. “At least we’re still blunt,” she said. “No, it’s really a job. I wouldn’t avoid you that way. On the other hand, I’m not sure I want to see you.”

“You said you would,” I said.

“I know, Danny,” she said. “Please don’t sound so hurt. I
will
see you, of course. What I said was I’m not sure I want to.”

“Why not?”

“Because it will hurt,” she said. “We already didn’t make it. It’s not going to be any different. It’s not your fault, it’s probably totally mine, but it’s still true. What’s the point of our hurting each other?”

In my mind I had become convinced that it would be different, when I went to L.A. But Jill sounded very convinced when she said it wouldn’t. I stopped being sure. There was no real telling what would happen.

“I still want to come,” I said. “I want to see you.”

“You wanted to write,” Jill said. Suddenly she sounded terribly hostile.

“What?”

“If you’d really wanted me you’d have come the day I left, or never let me leave,” she said. “You’d really rather write than cope with me. I don’t blame you a bit. I’d really rather draw than cope with you. I just don’t think you ought to be so goddamn righteous about wanting me. You did what you really wanted to do.”

“Oh, fuck you!” I said. “You’re crazy. I hate simple-minded people who think other people only do what they want to do.”

“Then you hate me,” she said. “That’s what I think.”

“You’re the one who’s scared to get involved,” I said.

“I admit it,” she said.

“I’m
not
scared to get involved,” I said. “I’d marry you tomorrow.”

Jill was silent awhile. “Maybe you would,” she said quietly. “I guess you would. Only you
are
married. Too bad. I might have gambled on you.”

“Oh, stop it,” I said. “I can get divorced.”

“I’ve got cramps,” she said. “I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m sorry about New York. I really didn’t plan it, Danny.”

“I believe you,” I said. “I don’t know who I’ll celebrate with, now.”

“Wu, probably,” she said. “He’s handiest. There
are
planes that go from San Francisco to New York, you know. Anybody with money enough can get on one.”

“I never thought of that,” I said.

“That’s why I mentioned it. It’s on the order of your wanting to drive to San Francisco because you forgot about cabs.”

“I never claimed to be bright,” I said.

“You’re bright. You’re just not used to thinking. Write me a good ending.”

I did. I finished the novel in the middle of an afternoon. Wu came by just as I was finishing it, and I took him to Berkeley and we ate Mexican food at a fairly good place on Telegraph Avenue. Wu was very congratulatory. “You will be getting fame and money,” he assured me several times. “Also mistresses. I think I am not very commercial.”

It was true. I felt sorry for Wu. He was a middle-aged exile with nothing going for him but gentleness. He would never get fame, money, or mistresses, neither from writing nor from anything else.

By odd coincidence, the first copy of
The Restless Grass
had come to me in the mail that morning. It didn’t move me much. I didn’t really like the dust jacket or the binding, and I felt only a dry interest in the book. I flipped through it, but I couldn’t read it. My heart was with the people in
The Man Who Never Learned.
They were alive, to me. I didn’t want to stop writing about them, or knowing them. The people in
The Restless Grass
I had stopped caring
about. I was so dead to them that I didn’t like seeing their names on the page. I didn’t really want to keep the copy of my book. Handling it made me feel sick, in some way.

That night, on Jones Street, on impulse, I wrote an inscription in the copy and gave it to Wu. He was extremely pleased.

“You will be going to Texas to see your son?” he asked.

“I don’t know. How do you know it will be a son?”

“Always hope for sons,” he said.

It shocked him a little that I would give him my only copy of my first book, but I really felt like it. Of all the people I knew in San Francisco, he had been kindest to me.

The way he mentioned Texas made me think of it, for the first time in weeks. My thoughts had mostly been of Los Angeles and Jill. I could go anywhere. New York, Texas. I could start roaming the world. We stood on the steep doorstep of the house we had shared, and looked at the dark bay. I didn’t have the novel to work on, anymore. I couldn’t stay in San Francisco. With nothing to work on and no one to be with I would just see ten thousand movies.

“I may go to Texas,” I said. “My editors want me to be at an autograph party.”

Bruce had mentioned the autograph party several times. I could go home. Texas was still over there, waiting.

“Sure, you will be going,” Wu said. “It is your land, is that not so? There are no borders in the U.S., very nice. Can always go home. Not so with me. Only heart can go home, for me. Too many borders.”