All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (11 page)

Some days I was sorry my novel had been accepted. If it hadn’t been I could have given up on writing and gone out and gotten a job. I was an experienced termite exterminator and could probably have gotten a job. If not, I could have gone back to school. Some days I had a great yen to read literary history, and reading literary history almost
always made me yearn to be a scholar. Whatever candle of talent I had had seemed about to flicker out, and it seemed to me it would be much cozier, much more comfortable, just to be a scholar. I could sit among my books and read to my heart’s content, and be a scholar, like George Saintsbury, or C. S. Lewis. I sipped hot tea and encouraged the fantasy of myself among my books, but the only books I had were paperbacks and even as I was encouraging the fantasy I knew what was wrong with it. I loved to read and probably would love to sit among books, but I hated to write about what I read. I hated writing themes and term papers and would probably hate writing scholarship just as much. Besides, George Saintsbury and C. S. Lewis were so good at it that there was no need for me. I wouldn’t count as a scholar, any more than I counted as a novelist. I was just an apprentice, and might not ever get to be a journeyman, much less a master.

For the first few weeks I was no match for the cold gray weight of San Francisco. On the few days when the sun shone I could see how the city might be beautiful, as beautiful as everyone else seemed to think it was, but despite those days and despite what everyone else thought, I couldn’t really feel it as beautiful. It made me too chilly, and let me sit home too much.

Also, since I wasn’t in school, I had no real way to make friends. I was too pinched by the newness of things just to go out on the street and seize people and make them my friends. I got by on ping-pong and my parka and Wu and Market Street. On Market Street there were numerous three-feature movie houses. They were full of winos and thugs and snoring bums and they stank horribly and were overcrowded and overheated and usually showed terrible movies, but I didn’t care. They were there, and when I gave
up on my novel for the day I could drift down to Market Street and pick out a couple of movies and forget things for a while. I can watch any movie, and I averaged one or two a day all the time I was in San Francisco. The hot, smelly movie houses were my Houston surrogate. I never went to the art films that were always being shown—I only went to the third-rate movies on Market Street. I didn’t want to see films that reminded me about life—I wanted to see films that bore little relation to it: Italian spectacles, horror movies, comedies, anything unreal. I was escaping from reality for a couple of hours, and wanted the escape to be as pure and complete as possible. I could always have reality—it was all around me. It was much like fog. I wanted to see Steve Reeves, in bright Technicolor, wrestling elephants with his bare hands. In one movie I saw, Steve Reeves apparently killed an elephant by twisting its foreleg. He lifted the leg and twisted it, he grunted a few times, the elephant fell dead; a beautiful Roman matron, her bosom shaking, ran out of a villa and gave Steve Reeves a hug. That was the kind of thing I wanted to see.

Wu was not a very good novelist, but he was a smart man. He knew that I was homesick and depressed and he tried, in his way, to help me. Sometimes, in the manner of Confucius, he gave me advice, but more often his approach was gently Socratic. I puzzled him even more than I puzzled myself, and he loved to try to figure me out.

“You do not leave Texas for any reason,” he said one day. “So. If a man leaves a place for no reason, he is not needing any reasons to go back. Is this not true?”

“I guess,” I said. We were sitting in his place, sipping Turkish coffee, which he loved. He had a parrot named Andrew, after Andrew Marvell, his favorite poet.

“Then you are going back?”

“No,” I said. “I have to stay here until I finish my novel.”

“This is a matter of pride,” Wu said. “You are ashamed to go back to your friends. If you go back, then they are thinking you a coward. Is this true?”

I had stopped trying to understand my own motives, and couldn’t really say if it was true or not. Wu always nodded when I spoke, no matter what I said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“You are knowing To His Coy Mistress’?” Wu asked. “Very great poem? Is this true?”

We discussed “To His Coy Mistress” about every third day, so I merely nodded. It was Wu’s favorite poem. He could not get enough of talking about it. His asking if I had read it was merely a rhetorical opener.

“Is not world enough and time,” Wu said patiently. “This is very clear. Nice times are so good to have. If there is no reason, you should be going to Texas and having nice times.”

I agreed, but secretly. I wasn’t about to be coward enough to leave Texas and then go running right back. I was giving Wu a runaround. I hated Turkish coffee and much preferred drinking tea in our apartment, but it happened that Sally was there, and anyhow Wu’s sense of hospitality demanded that he serve me Turkish coffee once or twice a week. My runaround didn’t fool him and he looked a little sad when I stood up to go home. He really liked me and was always hoping he could persuade me to profit from his experience.

“I was leaving China for many years,” he said. “Very hard country to leave. Then I was wanting to go back. But America is interesting country too. I have not been going to Texas so far. I would be going with you, if you are ever needing me to.

“Of course Sally would not be needing me to,” he added, remembering her. It was undeniable. She would not be
needing him to. His English was a little strange, but his points were not hard to get.

Wu wrinkled his yellow brow when he said good night. Sally wrinkled her white one when I walked into our apartment, my ping-pong paddle sticking out of the pocket of my parka. She was learning to make onion soup.

“You didn’t bring any wine,” she said. “You’re so busy trying to be the ping-pong champion of Chinatown that you can’t even remember wine. It’s a wonder you can find your way home.”

“I agree,” I said. “It’s a wonder.” I liked the smell of onion soup, but it wasn’t enough. I looked at her and she was smiling quietly. She had forgotten I was there; she had even forgotten I had forgotten the wine. The fog was in and the apartment was cold. I sat down at the typewriter meaning to write while the soup cooked, but all I actually wrote was my name. I was too distracted to write and I sat quietly in my parka, holding my ping-pong paddle. I had no reason to be unhappy, no reason to pity myself, not one valid thing to complain of, and yet I was so sorrowful for several minutes that I couldn’t have moved or spoken. I hated myself when I got that way. It wasn’t manly. I was too healthy. It was ignoble to be so depressed, but I was anyway. I had acquired an independent depression. I was beyond my control, much like the fog. It didn’t take orders from strong, healthy, soon-to-be-successful, unself-pitying me. It came from a place of Fogs and Depressions and held me in my chair for hours at a time, making me feel lonely and unwanted and tired of everything in my life.

I was in the kind of mood Jenny Salomea would not have tolerated for five minutes. In my mind I often heard her lecture me. Jenny Salomea had become the voice of reason, but in my life reason was like a ninety-seven-pound weakling in a Charles Atlas ad. My depression was twice its
weight and could kick sand in its face with complete impunity. Reason’s lot was one of constant humiliation, and there was no likelihood that it was ever going to weigh more than ninety-seven pounds. I didn’t care. I had known all along that my brain was not going to win any fights—or impress any girls.

Sally fed me supper and then went downstairs and spent the evening talking to the Beaches. I got in bed, or rather, on the mattress, and read
The White Nile
. I liked it very much and intended, as soon as I had finished it, to read all the river books that were mentioned in it. Almost every evening Sally went to talk to the Beaches, and almost every evening I sat on the mattress and read river books. Almost every day I went out to play ping-pong and see movies, and almost every day Sally stayed in the apartment, enjoying her new life. We inhabited the same place but sort of at different times. It was a very strange life—not a life anyone in his right mind would have wanted to lead. At least mine wasn’t. Part of the strangeness of it was that Sally was extremely happy.

She had become happy shortly after our arrival, upon discovering that she was pregnant. “It’ll come about April,” she said, the evening the doctor told her it was positive. She sat by the window all evening, sipping wine and looking happy, and from then on she went through her days looking happy. She had beautiful color in her cheeks and she looked good with her hair in a knot and she became even quieter than usual. She sat around quietly, looking beautiful and peaceful. It was easy for me to imagine her with a baby. She would be a tall, lovely mother. Right away she bought a back pack so she could take the baby with her on walks through San Francisco. I could easily imagine that too. The one thing wrong with my many mental pictures of
Sally and our child was that I wasn’t in any of them. All I could picture was Sally and the baby, and the reason was that Sally made it perfectly obvious to me that that was how she pictured it. I don’t think she used the pronoun “we” at all, after she knew that she was pregnant. For her our marriage seemed to have ended on that day. From then on she said “I’ll,” never “we’ll.”

But pronouns were only the subtler manifestations of what really happened. What really happened was that she dropped me from her life. She dropped me so completely that she didn’t bother moving out, or making me move out. I had no tangible existence for her from then on. I couldn’t even manage to get in her way. I knew women were supposed to act strange when they got pregnant, and I knew they were supposed to make unusual demands on their husbands at such times, but I hadn’t expected to be required not to exist. That was the gist of it, though. It took me months to articulate it to myself, but my one practical function in Sally’s life had been to get her pregnant. I had performed it, and that was that. All she had needed of me was my seed. I gave it and that was that. In all other respects she was self-sufficient. She didn’t even say thank you for the seed.

From then on she served me meals as if I were a ghost, a hungry vapor that had happened to drift into the room. Her judgment on my existence carried a lot of authority with it, too. I began to feel like a ghost or a vapor, and to act like one as well. At first I didn’t accept nonexistence. I continued to try to act like a living human. The evening we got the word about her pregnancy I wanted to make love. I touched Sally and she gave me such an odd look that I took my hand away immediately.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I don’t want to fuck,” she said.

Apparently she thought it was something that would be self-evident, though I don’t know why. We had made love almost daily, since we had met, and Sally seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. Then, abruptly, we weren’t making love anymore. What she really meant when she said she didn’t want to fuck was that she was through with me sexually. At first I couldn’t believe it. It was too abrupt. We didn’t taper off, we didn’t grind slowly to a halt, we just stopped. I made passes and Sally rejected them with a single look, a look that made me feel I had absolutely no right to touch her. For a few days I held back, thinking it was a mood. Surely it was a mood. She liked sex too much for it not to be a mood. We had been having enjoyable times—there was no reason for them just to stop.

But they stopped without a reason. I let a few days pass and tried again. Same look. She looked at me the way she might have looked if a total stranger had walked up and put his hand on her cunt. The look made me a little desperate. I was her husband—I had some rights. I decided to be firm. I tried to ignore the look and keep on with my pass. Sally frowned once, but then her look changed. She looked completely indifferent. She didn’t let my making a pass at her discommode her at all. She didn’t even look unpleasant. She looked as if she were lying in bed alone, thinking about something remote, like the isles of Greece. I had proceeded to the point of getting between her legs—I was pretty determined—but somehow her look of pleasant indifference wrecked my play. I felt awkward and stupid. Why had I thought I wanted to make love to a woman who wasn’t even affected by my presence between her legs? It was absurd. Sally didn’t look cold or stiff or frigid. She looked like a warm, lovely woman who happened to be lying in bed alone. The attentions I tried to pay her were so ghostlike they didn’t even make her look jostled. It was an eerie
moment—I didn’t entirely forget it for months, and as months followed months I became very unclear about it. Maybe I didn’t really get between her legs or go inside her. I ceased to know. But when I spoke again that night I wasn’t between her legs.

“Sally, what’s happening?” I asked.

She was completely silent. I was not sure she had heard me. I couldn’t make her feel and I couldn’t make her hear.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t understand why.”

“There doesn’t have to be a why,” she said, turning over.

That was virtually her only comment on the change in our lives. She sat up and picked up her comb and began to pick the hairs out of it, and when she had done that she went to sleep. I stayed awake for hours, maybe for weeks. I can’t remember having really slept, in my months on Jones Street. I made no more passes at Sally and I didn’t even try to talk to her about what was happening. The fog, San Francisco, and the new Sally were too much for me. She had convinced me of my nonexistence, I guess. She was not a talking person, and I all but lost my powers of speech. She never complained and she was not bitter. She was just finished with me. Her body told me so a hundred times a day. If I put my hand on her shoulder at night her body automatically shrugged it off. The authority with which I was rejected simply numbed me. I sank within a few days into a state of glum will-lessness. In my most optimistic moments I assumed that things would change, sometime, somehow. Sally was very happy. Sooner or later she was bound to notice me again. A light that had been switched off would be switched on again, eventually. Even if she didn’t love me she was bound to want to screw, sometime. She liked it too much to give it up overnight.