“We have to be gone by morning,” I kept saying as I ate the excellent food and drank the wine.
Sally got bored with hearing me. “Quit saying that,” she said. “Nobody’s arguing. I’m bored with this place, too.”
Godwin squinted at his wine glass. “I can’t forget those women,” he said. “Hideous women.”
“They acted like dykes,” Sally said cheerfully. Eating made her look happy. She was oblivious of the fact that the juicy slice of lamb she was eating had once been a live sheep.
“It isn’t because of Razzy,” I said. It really wasn’t, but I was too drunk to try to explain why I wanted to leave. I had been there for three years and had made myself a place and suddenly I didn’t fit it anymore. All the furniture of my life had been changed around. Sally was there, the apartment was too small, I couldn’t see much of the Hortons, I had sold my novel, I didn’t want to study anymore, Jenny wanted me, Godwin was around—it was all too much. Without wanting it to happen, I had let myself be dislodged. Dislodged was exactly how I felt.
It was an enormous restaurant bill, but Godwin paid it with a smile. I remember his smile as he paid it. When I’m drunk, things swirl. Once in a while they stop and I notice something before the next swirl begins. I have the ability to drive when drunk, but once I stop driving I have no ability at all. I drove us home and went to the John and puked. When I came out of the John I noticed that Godwin and Sally were sitting on the bed necking. I yanked Sally up and hit Godwin. He hit me back. It was much too small a place to fight in. Godwin went into one of his purple rages.
“I’ll have my revenge,” he said. He picked up my typewriter and went into the bathroom with it.
“Why were you kissing him?” I asked Sally. I had forgotten Godwin. “Why were you kissing him?”
“He just wanted to,” she said, making a face at me. She was very irritated.
There was a screech from Godwin. We went to see. He had put my typewriter in the bathtub, meaning to run water over it, and had started the shower instead. Naturally he had scalded himself.
“Very well then, if I’m not wanted I’ll sleep in your car,” he said. He was drunk but dignified and his suit was wet. He went off to sleep in the car.
“You could be a little nicer to him,” Sally said.
“I hate your red bikini,” I said. “I knew it would make trouble.”
I started packing my things and she started packing her things. It sobered us a little. Sally began looking through one of her high school yearbooks. Fortunately we had few clothes. Mr. Fitzherbert came driving in as we were packing, and I went out to tell him I was leaving. He was standing in the driveway in a rumpled business suit, looking at Godwin’s feet, which stuck out of the back window of my Chevy.
“Aw no,” he said unhappily when I told him. He shook his head. “You’re not really going, are you? Momma’s gonna skin me alive when she hears I let you get away. You’re the only good renter we ever had.”
For once he was not very drunk. “Now how am I gonna tell Momma about this?” he asked sadly, putting a hand on my shoulder. I asked him to give whatever we left to the Salvation Army, and he said he would.
“Maybe I’ll tell her your folks needed you to help ’em with the place,” he said worriedly. “Otherwise she’ll think I scared you off with my drinking. That ain’t it, is it?”
“No sir,” I said. “I drink too.”
“Son, don’t get in the habit,” he said. “Take care of your body, whatever you do.”
He was about fifty-five years old. We shook hands and he went in. He was a decent man. I felt choked up. I liked Mr. Fitzherbert. I liked my apartment. I liked the table where my typewriter sat. It was only an ordinary brown table, but it was just the right height. I enjoyed sitting at it and writing every morning, through the years. I even liked the smell of the damp floor mats. The apartment and I had seemed to belong together, from the first, but I’m that way about all the places I stay. Without meaning to, I begin to love them, and then I sort of adhere to them, physically. Leaving is like tearing off skin—also it jumbled my insides. I felt like feeling snug, and I no longer felt snug. I couldn’t remember why I had decided to leave, but we were already half-packed. We didn’t own very much. Sally had gone to sleep on the floor, reading her annual. I wrapped my typewriter in a quilt and put it in the trunk of the car. If Godwin hadn’t been in the back seat I might have fitted the table in, but I didn’t feel up to dragging him out.
I put a pillow under Sally’s head and managed to make all my paperbacks fit neatly into two boxes. There were fourteen library books that had to be taken back. I took off my party clothes and put on my Levi’s and sneakers and went over to the library to return the books. It was about two o’clock in the morning and the man with the golf ball wasn’t in the parking lot.
Petey Ximenes was waxing the main reference room, under the watchful eye of the two white supervisors. He looked sulky and his ducktail was unkempt. On the fifth floor he could wax at his own pace, but apparently someone had decided his pace wasn’t fast enough. They brought him down where they could watch him. I had never seen him in such a foul humor—I think he was contemplating charging the two men with his waxer. I told him I was leaving, but I don’t think my words registered. He shook my hand absently when I told him goodbye. He didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t find Henry, so I left my library key on the circulation desk.
It was odd, going out the door and knowing I couldn’t just turn and go back in, if I thought of a book I wanted to read. The door clicked and I was really out. I could see Petey through the big window, still waxing. The quadrangle was full of soft, mushy summer mist. Somewhere above the mist I could hear an airplane. I walked over to Main Street and sat on the curb for a while, watching cars go by. The mist made the streetlights look faintly orange. I didn’t feel one bit drunk, anymore. I got up and walked eight or ten blocks down the orange, misty street and turned off into the darker streets and walked another hour or so.
Houston was my companion on the walk. She had been my mistress, but after a thousand nights together, just the two of us, we were calling it off. It was a warm, moist, mushy, smelly night, the way her best nights were. The things most people hated about her were the things I loved: her heat, her dampness, her sumpy smells. She wasn’t beautiful, but neither was I. I liked her heat and her looseness and her smells. Those things were her substance, and if she had been cool and dry and odorless I wouldn’t have cared to live with her three years. We were calling it off, but I could still love her. She still reached me, when I went walking with her. Her mists were always a little sexy. I felt, in leaving her, the kind of fond gentleness you’re supposed to feel after passion. It was the kind of gentleness I never got to feel with Sally. Its expression might be stroking a shoulder, or something. I had had such good of Houston, she had dealt so generously with me, always, that I walked and stroked her shoulder for an hour or two, in the night. Then, when she was really sleeping, I went home. I wanted to be gone when she woke up.
Almost at once Sally and I got into it. We finished packing in no time. She just had two suitcases full, and I had about as much. When I turned out the lights and shut the door to the apartment I noticed her trying to stuff Godwin’s feet inside the car.
“Where’s he staying?” I asked. “We can drop him off.”
“He’s going with us,” she said. “Didn’t you hear him at dinner? That was all he talked about.”
“I didn’t hear him say a word about it.”
“So what? You were blind drunk.”
“I must have been deaf drunk,” I said. “Anyway, he’s not going. We’re married now. We haven’t even decided where to go.”
“I thought we were going to California.”
It was the only place we had really mentioned, but I didn’t think we had made a firm decision.
“That doesn’t have a thing to do with Godwin.”
“Sure it does. He knows people there. You don’t know a sou
l. He can help us get settled.”
“We’re grown,” I said. “We can get settled ourselves. Godwin can stay in the apartment tonight. Mr. Fitzherbert won’t mind.”
“No,” Sally said, getting angry. “You don’t know how he is when he wakes up from a drunk. He’ll be crazy at first. He loves me and if he comes to drunk and finds me gone he’ll kill himself.”
“Let him,” I said. “You married me. He has to stop loving you sometime.”
“He doesn’t have to stop tonight,” she said sullenly.
“I don’t have to take him anywhere, either,” I said. “I don’t want him loving you. I love you, remember?”
“Don’t say stupid things like that,” she said. “You’re so fucking jealous you can’t see straight.” She kept trying to get his feet in the car, but his knees wouldn’t bend. I felt feverish, as if I were getting drunk again. I remembered they had been kissing and I went over and tried to make her let go of his feet. It infuriated her and she jabbed me suddenly with her elbow and hurt my ribs. I smacked her cheek, but it had no effect on her at all except to make her stop believing in my existence again. She neither spoke nor looked at me after I hit her, but she managed to get Godwin’s feet in the car. I felt guilty and at a loss. I wasn’t mad enough to drag him out. I went back in the dark apartment and sat on my table awhile. I had begun to long to stay in the apartment. Jenny Salomea was just across the yard, in the big, empty house. I felt I ought to say goodbye to her, but I didn’t see how I could. I felt as if I were running out on her and Mr. Fitzherbert. But I had to go. After I thought a little I stopped worrying about Godwin. There were thousands of miles of desert between us and California. I could run off and leave him at a filling station if I needed to. He had plenty of money. He wouldn’t suffer.
Outside, it was just graying. I went out and got in the car. Sally ignored my existence.
“You needn’t think I’m taking him all the way,” I said.
She was completely silent. She sat combing her hair.
As we were driving past Rice Godwin suddenly burst awake. Before I knew what was happening he was trying to claw his way out a car window. Characteristically, he was purple in the face, and he seemed to be frightened out of his mind. When he couldn’t get out the window he tried to come over the seat.
“Bloody kidnapers,” he yelled. “Let me out! Don’t you know it’s a capital crime?”
I had to stop in the middle of the street. For about ten seconds Godwin was demonic. “Kidnap! Kidnap!” he yelled. No one was around. Sally screamed at him and I stiff-armed him two or three times, until he fell back panting amid our clothes.
“Fucking white slavers,” he yelled. “Why have you drugged me? Is this the Ivory Coast?”
Sally knew how to handle him. She pressed her hands over his eyes. “Calm down, Godwin,” she said. “You’ll be all right. It’s just us.”
He panted for a while and then grew calm. “Head’s splitting,” he said. “Frightful dream. I was in a brothel. Arabs were abusing me.”
“We’re going to California,” Sally said.
“You’re not,” I said to Godwin, so there would be no doubt about my position. But he was in no state to be talked to.
“It seems an abrupt departure, if I might say so,” he said, his voice growing softer. “My dear children. Splitting head.” Then he went back to sleep.
I drove out South Main for two or three miles and then remembered the Hortons. I couldn’t leave without telling them that I was leaving. Flap might think it was just part of my discipline, but Emma would be hurt. I turned around and started back.
Sally gave me a questioning look. She was still combing her hair.
“I forgot the Hortons,” I said. “I have to say goodbye to them.”
Sally looked disgusted. “I don’t see why we have to go all the way back, just for them,” she said. “They won’t even be awake.”
I decided not to answer. If she could be silent, so could I. I just drove. The streetlights were on but it was light enough that they looked odd. Rice slept under its light sheet of mist.
“I’m not coming in,” Sally said, when I stopped at the curb in front of the Hortons’.
I got out without looking at her and went to their door. Silence was not so hard to manage. But I felt bad in my stomach and had a hard time knocking on the door. I felt strange about leaving, again. It was not Houston I had to leave now, it was my friends. I knocked several times. Emma was hard to wake up, and Flap was harder. I could see Sally sitting in the car examining her hair. Finally Emma came to the door, a little bleary, in her white bathrobe. A troubled look came over her face when she saw me. Perhaps a troubled look was in mine.
“Come in,” she said, holding open the screen.
“Can’t,” I said. “Could you wake up Flap?”
“Did someone die?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Please come in,” she said.
I shook my head. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen. It would be harder to leave than my apartment and my table. They would try to make me eat breakfast. Emma frowned and went and got Flap. She must have impressed something on him, because he looked awake when he came to the door. His hair was down in his eyes.
“I’m going to California,” I told them. “I’m quitting school.”
They looked at me solemnly. I had meant to go into an explanation involving Razzy Hutton and one thing and another, but it didn’t come out. I couldn’t have stated the real reason—I felt too emotional. The Hortons were beautifully reticent. They left their questions in the same place I left my explanations. Emma’s round face changed as she watched me. Tactfully they didn’t ask me one thing. They accepted it as being a necessity of mine, something I might explain some other time.
“Tell Sally goodbye for us,” Emma said, barely audibly. She was struggling to do her duty. They could see Sally sitting in the car.
“Well,” Flap said. “Who will we drink with now?”
“I decided last night,” I said, by way of explanation.
I couldn’t think of another remark, one to leave on. As I was trying, Emma slowly started crying. Suddenly she yanked open the door and hugged me, sobbing.
“You shouldn’t,” she said. “You can’t take care of yourself. You just look like you can.” Then she rushed back into Flap’s arms. As usual Flap looked sheepish. He rubbed Emma’s back.
“She won’t be good to you,” Emma said, crying. “I know she won’t! She won’t be good to him—I know she won’t!”
“I promise I’ll write you,” I said.
At the car I waved and they waved. Sally still looked disgusted. I drove on out of Houston, thinking of Emma and feeling very down. I had nothing snug left. When I noticed things again we were in the gray grasslands beyond Rosenberg. Houston was somewhere behind, beneath great white banks of Gulf clouds. Sally was idly nibbling her nicely combed hair. We were both silence experts. She had always been one, and I had just become one. Godwin Lloyd-Jons’ pleasant snoring was the only human sound in the car.
6
WHEN GODWIN woke up, one hundred and fifty miles later, he immediately began to talk about Stendhal. Unlike Sally and me, he seemed to feel wonderful. He lay back comfortably amid our clothes and talked almost without interruption for two hours. He was really conning me, like Scheherazade conned the Sultan—he knew I was itching to kick him out, and his talk was just a stall. But it was a brilliant stall, and anyway my spirit was at a low ebb. I let myself be conned. Sally was as silent as Stonehenge.
From Stendhal Godwin went to Alexander Herzen, whose memoirs he had just read. From Alexander Herzen he went to literary hoaxes, and from literary hoaxes he went to the Portuguese epic. From the Portuguese epic he went to pornography and from pornography he went to Lady Murasaki. It was at Lady Murasaki that I began to suspect a con, but Godwin didn’t stop talking just because I was suspicious. From Lady Murasaki he went to Baron Corvo, from Baron Corvo he went to skaldic verse
, and from skaldic verse he went to Ezra Pound. He even seemed to have read Sara Teasdale. He was only a sociologist, but the literatures of the world seemed to be at his fingertips. It was a virtuoso performance, two hours long. He told us all about the Angry Young Men, reviewed the life and works of John Stuart Mill and ended up discoursing on Uruguayan fiction. I admire virtuoso performances, and was an ideal audience. I listened and kept driving westward, through towns where the name of Stendhal had probably never been uttered. Sally was not so appreciative. I doubt she even realized it was a virtuoso performance, but if she had it wouldn’t have mattered. Godwin should have known better than to bore her, but he was intent on his performance. At Uruguayan fiction her gorge apparently rose.
“Oh, shut up, Godwin,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear about all that stuff. I wish this car had a radio.”
“It has one,” I said. “It’s just broken.”
“Big deal,” she said. She was not in a friendly mood. Determined as I was to get rid of Godwin, I was almost grateful for him. He absorbed part of her unfriendliness.
“Sorry, love,” he said.
We stopped and ate in Del Rio. It was an overcast day and the barren country looked dismal. The fat carhop who served us looked dismal, and the three of us looked dismal too. None of us had cleaned up before setting out for the West. Godwin had monologued himself into a state of hoarseness.
“I say,” he croaked, “did the three of us strike one another during the night? I believe we were all outrageously drunk. Wasn’t there some kind of row?”
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 6