“I’m not clean-cut,” I said. “What made you say that?”
“Because you are. Just because you haven’t been to the barbershop lately doesn’t mean you aren’t clean-cut.”
The remark really made me mad. “Don’t be so arbitrary,” I said. “Just because I don’t feel like screwing again right now doesn’t mean I’m clean-cut. I’m not clean-cut at all. If you think I am you ought to explain what you mean. I’d like to argue about it.”
But Sally was never interested enough in any argument to stay with it for more than two sentences. Arguments didn’t really involve her. Her face became utterly expressionless and her eyes stopped taking me in. Not only was she not interested in pursuing the argument, she no longer cared to believe I was there. My spirits came rushing back, but they were very hostile spirits. I started putting on my sneakers. I wasn’t just about to spend the night with somebody who didn’t believe I was there.
Sally got up and went into the kitchen. I grabbed a shirt and started to leave, but I looked in the kitchen to see what she was doing. There was no light in the kitchen except the light from inside the icebox. Sally was leaning on the icebox door, eating a piece of chicken. I was choking with things I wanted to say to her, but they were all jammed together in my throat. I left, got halfway down the driveway, and then came back in and got my novel out from under the bed. I might want to read it before I came back. I looked in the kitchen again. Sally was still leaning on the icebox, finishing off the chicken. She didn’t say a word and I didn’t either. I felt like yanking all the shelves out of the icebox and shoving her in for a while. Nobody but her could give total silence quite such an uncomfortable quality. The few sentences she uttered were like eternal judgments. I stood in the door a whole minute, hoping she would say something so I could yell and scream at her, but she could have leaned on the icebox door until daybreak without uttering a sound. She was eating a drumstick when I left.
As I was walking across the library parking lot, carrying my novel, I saw an odd thing. A man in a green filling-station attendant’s uniform was bouncing a golf ball on the parking lot. He was fantastic. He must have been the world’s greatest golf ball bouncer. He leaped in the air, to get his weight behind the ball, and flung it against the asphalt of the parking lot with all his strength. I would never have imagined that a golf ball could bounce so high. It went up and up, out of sight in the darkness, higher than the library, and came down and bounced back up fifty feet and came down again in diminishing bounces until the guy finally caught it. He instantly leaped in the air and flung it again. It was drizzling slightly. The parking lot was lit and shone with rain. I watched for a good ten minutes, trying to understand what the guy’s motive was. It was one o’clock in the morning. He was smiling and his hair was wet and hanging down in his face, and a terrific passion came into it when he leaped and flung the golf ball, as if each time he was going for the world’s record bounce. I put the box my novel was in on my head and used it for an umbrella while I watched. Finally the man stopped for a breather. He was a friendly guy. “It keeps you on your toes,” he said.
I sloshed on into the library and slept on a couch. Henry was at the front desk, writing a screenplay. In my mind I was still arguing with Sally about whether or not I was clean-cut. I kept arguing with her for a long time—the waxing people were coiling the long black cords of their waxers when I finally relaxed and shut my eyes.
4
DAME JULIANA woke me up. She was a short, robust redhead whose real name was Mrs. Norwich. Flap Horton had nicknamed her Dame Juliana. She had never much fancied me, but she ran the library and I did my best to coexist with her. She was the only bosomy librarian I had ever known. In horny periods I had fantasies about her in which I generously gave her not only much better legs than she really had but a far more loving disposition too.
The couch I had gone to sleep on was in the PR section, which was English literature. A thirty-nine-volume set of John Ruskin was shelved just at my feet. I had often meant to dip into it, but when I sacked out in the library I was almost never sober enough to read.
“I thought you got married,” Dame Juliana said. “Even if you’re as smart as people say you are I don’t see that it’s our place to provide you a bed.”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I guess I just read too late and fell asleep.”
“Nobody could get that scruffy reading,” she said. I might be clean-cut to Sally, but I was anything but to Mrs. Norwich.
“I sold my novel last night,” I said. “We had a little celebration.”
“What kind of publisher would wait until after dark to buy a book?” she asked. “Your feet stink, you know?”
“I was just going home to wash.”
“Your wife must have something wrong with her nose, otherwise she couldn’t live with you,” she said, hurrying off to wake up other couch-rats who hadn’t made it home the night before. People were always flaking out on those couches and waking up with Dame Juliana’s indignant bosom hanging over them. The history graduate students were always plotting ways to get her into the library at night, so they could gang-rape her, but nothing ever came of their plots. The gang-rape of Dame Juliana was just their collective fantasy. It kept them going year after year, while the microfilm machines destroyed their vision. Some of them already had to grope their way to the couches after a hard day in the cubbyholes.
Walking home, I felt very good. My novel was going to be published and Sally was probably still in bed, all warm and sleepy. I wasn’t mad at her anymore—on such a nice morning it was hard to remember what I had been so mad about. Beyond the trees of Rice, huge white Gulf clouds were rolling into one another—tremendous clouds. They only meant it would rain and make the floor mats soggier, but I liked to watch them anyway.
When I got to the apartment there was no Sally. The bed was empty. It upset me badly. I had expected her to be there and was all ready to crawl right in bed with her and make love before getting back to work on my second novel. Now that the first one had sold I really had to go ahead and finish the second. At the moment it was only forty-five pages long.
But Sally was gone and there was no note. Her things were still there, though. At least she hadn’t left me. I went outside and tried to decide where to look for her. I had an awful feeling in my stomach. Of course she could just have gone for a walk. Sometimes she took walks at funny times.
Then I noticed Jenny Salomea. She was sitting in her yard with her back against the big tree. She had on a red bathrobe and was hugging her knees with her arms.
“Good morning,” I said, walking over.
“Your wife left with a gentleman,” she said. “I told you last night you were boring her.”
She looked at me a little too triumphantly. I felt as un-triumphant as I have ever felt. I also felt a little weak in the legs, so I sat down near Jenny in the dewy grass.
“I guess you do love her,” she said. “What made you think she loved you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess she was grateful to me for about a week, for taking her away from a guy in Austin.”
“You should have just screwed around awhile,” Jenny said. “You didn’t have to marry her just because she acted fond of you for a couple of days. But that’s you, right?”
“I don’t know what’s me,” I said.
Jenny yawned. “I read that book you loaned me,” she said. “All that sounds like fun to me.”
I had gone from feeling horny to feeling very unhorny. Jenny was so sure Sally didn’t love me that I was convinced. I was not really in the habit of having somebody love me, but believing that Sally did had felt wonderful for about three weeks. Realizing that she didn’t took a lot of the fun out of life. She was probably off screwing Rick Leonard, at that very moment. I didn’t dare ask what the gentleman looked like. The real complication was that I loved her. I had given myself over and had no mechanism for taking myself back. Despite her problems—I guess they were problems—she wasn’
t very hard to love. Jenny Salomea held my hand for a while. She could tell I was in no mood for sexual novelties.
“Don’t look so blue,” she said. “Maybe he was her brother. Anyway, you sold your book. You’ll probably be famous.”
I shook my head. “That won’t make her love me,” I said.
Jenny looked disgusted. “You better learn to call a bitch a bitch,” she said. “Otherwise you’re going to lead a dog’s life, like Sammy has.”
“I don’t want to call anyone a bitch,” I said.
Jenny was getting angry. She stood up and tugged at my hand. “Okay, Danny,” she said. “That’s enough of that. Don’t sit there looking like an only child. Come on upstairs and let’s do something. I can’t stand a man who gets depressed over nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said. “It’s my marriage.”
“Your marriage is nothing, okay,” she said. “It’s not worth an ounce of pigshit. I can tell what kind of girl she is, even if you can’t. You married a bitch and she doesn’t love you and she won’t stay put. So what? I married a queer. He hates the way I smell, even. Tough luck for both of us. It happens to a million people a day. I’m not going to sit in the yard and mope about it all day. Come on upstairs and help me have a little fun. I need a little fun. I never have—much fun.”
She saw I wasn’t coming, and turned and went to her house. The seat of her red bathrobe was wet, from the dewy grass. What she had said made plenty of sense. There was no point in avoiding anything. I got my bike and pedaled over to Rick Leonard’s apartment, about six blocks away. I don’t know what I expected to do, except not avoid anything, but it didn’t matter. Sally wasn’t there. Rick was playing chess when I knocked. He played chess by mail, with a man who lived in Norway. He was as surprised to see me as I was not to find Sally.
“I can hardly wait for your reviews,” he said as I was leaving. He gave me an arch look and went back to his chessboard. He was almost as good at arch looks as Sally was—I suppose that’s why I thought they would be together. If she hadn’t married me they could have got married and spent their lives giving the world arch looks.
It occurred to me that Flap Horton might have come by to see me and then asked Sally to go walking with him, or something. He was turned on by her, as he was by almost all pretty girls, but it didn’t worry me. It was only fair: I had been turned on by Emma ever since I’d known them, and Flap knew it, more or less. It was nothing that was ever going to get out of hand. I pedaled over to West Main, where the Hortons lived, thinking Sally might be eating breakfast with them. They had a great four-room garage apartment, far and away the best apartment of any student couple I knew. It was twice as cool as my place. Occasionally, if we were involved in a late carouse, I stayed and sacked out on their couch. It was a Salvation Army store couch and not as comfortable as the ones in the library, but eating breakfast with Emma and Flap was a lot more fun than being awakened by Dame Juliana.
Sally wasn’t at their place, either. Flap was still asleep and Emma had just washed her hair. “Great news,” she said, beaming at me when I came in. “I knew you’d sell it. Can I hug you to celebrate?
“Oh, you look so successful,” she said, after we had hugged. She had become shy about hugging me since I married, but she was really glad about my novel. She was always begging me to let her read it, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want anybody to read it unless it got published. Emma was my only true, wholehearted fan. She wound a blue towel around her wet hair and went in and made me some pancakes while we waited for Flap to wake up.
“I guess you could read it now, if you still want to,” I said. The huge champagne bottle was sitting by her stove. It was too bad she had missed the celebration. She was one of the roundest girls I had ever known. There wasn’t a flat plane on her body. Her shoulders were round, her calves were round, even her feet. Her features were rounded too. Most people would have put her down as chubby, but for me it all worked. Every part of Emma turned. I liked to watch her pad about the kitchen making pancakes. Her cheeks were pink and she was glad I was successful.
She was such a fan of mine that she had tried gallantly to make friends with Sally, but I guess they were antipathetic types. Emma was a lot more talkative.
“I guess I’ll have to quit writing now,” she said. She wrote short stories from time to time. So did Flap. He and I sent our short stories to New World Writing and they all came right back. Emma never sent hers out at all—or if she did she never told anyone about it. In paranoid moments Flap and I suspected her of sending them out secretly. She wouldn’t let us read them, either, so for all we knew she was a secret genius. If she had suddenly got a story accepted I don’t know how we would have lived with it. It was a petty paranoia, unfair to Emma. She was happy as a lark when the Texas Quarterly accepted two of my stories. It wasn’t that she was competitive, it was just that Flap and I were insecure.
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.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 4