“I wish I weren’t so drunk,” I said. It seemed to soften Renata a little. She was almost drunk herself.
“Your hair’s not drunk,” she said. We lay on a vast bed for a while. I napped and we necked and Renata Morris played with my hair. I don’t know why she liked it. Hers was far more spectacular, when she finally took it down. I had forgotten how much I liked to watch women take down their hair. She began to tell me about her sexual adventures, in between my naps and our necking. She seemed to have had many. She once even had a cat that was good to her. Sexual adventures seemed to be her interest in life. Her voice changed when she talked about them. I began to swear to myself that I would never drink again. I hated myself for cutting myself off from the most interesting part of the evening. Even when we managed to escape from our dress-up clothes and were in the middle of the huge bed having a sexual adventure, I wasn’t quite there. Generally I was making love to Renata, but it was all too general. I couldn’t sense Renata. I was making love to her, but I didn’t know what she was like. It was disturbing. Locally, where I was supposed to feel the most, I felt the least. My only distinct impression was of the abundance of her hair. Renata kept saying dirty words in a breathy voice. It was very unlike her haughty voice. Maybe saying dirty words worked for her, but hearing them didn’t work for me. Liquor had made me numb. I was just as glad to go to sleep. I dozed off, hoping I would get a better chance in the morning, but instead I got no chance. Renata was wearing tennis clothes and had two rackets under her arm when I woke up. It was very early, barely dawn.
“Who do you play tennis with, this early?” I asked.
“My pro,” she said. “We play at sunup. For seventy-five dollars an hour he can goddamn well get up when I do.”
She was beautiful, but she looked a little sour. It occurred to me that keeping beautiful must be almost as hard as keeping writing. Maybe it was even harder. I was glad not to have to do both. Her hair had a gold comb in it. It was very lustrous hair.
“You better get out of here,” she said. “My Jap servants are mean. If they find you in here they’ll strangle you.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I haven’t had a good lay since I left New York,” she said. She put her foot on the bed to knot a sneaker. She didn’t look at me.
“I wish I hadn’t been so drunk,” I said.
“It’s a good thing you were,” she said. “You wouldn’t have lasted any time sober.”
The phone rang. Renata picked it up, listened a moment, said, “Maybe” and clicked the receiver down. The authority with which she clicked it down was kind of marvelous. While I was looking for my socks she left the room. As I was leaving I saw two of her servants, tiny women in black aprons. I imagined they had garrotes under their aprons.
Atherton was lovely in the morning. The great estates were hidden in mist. I imagined Renata, playing tennis in the mist; only maybe she wasn’t. Maybe, being so rich, she had a special place to play tennis where the sun always shone. I would have liked to sit by the court and watch her. I felt melancholy, walking past the great estates. I felt sad because I hadn’t been able to feel anything when I made love to Renata. Even if I hadn’t lasted very long it would have been nice to be able to feel. It would have made the morning different. I told myself it would have made Renata different too, but I would never know if that was true. If I had been sober I would at least have had a good memory, something I could recapture from time to time, but as it was I only had a memory of disappointment, of something that might have worked and never would. Once in a while, as I walked, the mist broke and I could see the humpy green hills.
Bruce had told me about a young Texas writer who went to Stanford. His name was Teddy Blue. He was from Fort Worth, and Bruce had given me his address. I was in no hurry to get back to the Piltdown or to my novel, so I decided to go to see him. Maybe he was an early riser, and we could have breakfast together. If not, I could wait around until he woke up.
I’ve always been a lucky hitchhiker. I always get a ride immediately. When I reached the Camino Real the first car along stopped and picked me up. The driver was a dignified old gentleman who was on his way to San Jose. He was using the Camino instead of the freeway because he was too old to drive fast. He was a retired grocer who grew asparagus for a hobby. He wore a blue suit and had a diamond tiepin. I like old men who dress neatly and keep themselves up. He gave me a lecture on the varieties of asparagus and shook hands with me when he let me out.
“Young man, I hope you stay in college,” he said. “Get your education. If you don’t do it now you’ll never do it.” Then he drove on.
I found a gas station and asked directions to the street where Teddy Blue lived. It was called Perry Lane. Later I found out it was a very famous street. Thorstein Veblen had lived there, and others after him. A vanished host of writers had lived there and brought the street fame. It was near the Stanford golf course and was extremely hard to find. I walked all over the brown Stanford campus, looking for it. I couldn’t even find another gas station, in order to ask where I was. Finally, almost by accident, I stumbled onto Perry Lane. It was only a block or two long and if I hadn’t happened to see the street sign I would have stumbled out again, none the wiser. There were a few small wooden houses along the street, and beautiful spreading trees. The sun had just burned through the morning mist, and its rays came slanting down through the trees. Perry Lane was streaked with sunbeams.
The house where Teddy Blue was supposed to live wasn’t very large, but it looked pleasant. The part of it that faced the street was painted blue. There was a pretty, grassy yard, with two good trees and lots of bushes. Croquet wickets were scattered erratically among the bushes, and little paths led through the bushes, presumably to other little houses. As I was going through the yard I saw a small girl. She was naked, had curly golden hair, and looked to be about two. She was toddling about happily, pulling up croquet wickets.
“Who you?” she asked, when she saw me.
“Danny,” I said. It seemed to satisfy her. She pulled up another wicket, looking at me coquettishly, to see if I would stop her. I liked her. She was obviously a little power, of some independence.
I knocked at a blue door and a feminine voice called, “Come in.” I obeyed, and was immediately confronted by a surprising sight. There was a pile of people on the floor—not several people sitting near one another, but literally a pile of people, right in the middle of the floor. There must have been a dozen people in the pile. At its highest point it was four people deep. Most places it was only three people deep. Many of its heads were pointed my way and several sets of wide, apprehensive eyes fixed themselves on me when I stepped into the room. It was unnerving, like suddenly coming into a stranger’s living room and finding a hydra. It was not an aggressive hydra, but it was still unnerving. When I moved, all the eyes moved too. Certainly it wasn’t a well-dressed pile. Most of the bodies in it were wearing blue jeans and old shirts. All the feet I saw were bare. The room it was in was large and pleasant. Over the fireplace there was a red, white and blue sign that read WE ARE THE NEW AMERICANS. In one corner there was a bed with three people on it. A man and a woman were lying in it normally, under the covers, and a short, plumpish, dark-haired girl was lying across its foot. She had her head propped against the wall and was reading a John O’Hara novel.
“I’m Leslie,” she said. “Come over here so those kids won’t panic. They’re still very anxious. This is Pauline and this is Sergei.”
Sergei was reading too. He glanced at me from behind a copy of the Eranos Yearbooks and then went back to it after saying hi. Pauline just smiled. She was lovely. She had curly golden hair, exactly the color of the little girl’s hair. She was from Oklahoma. Sergei was a psychiatrist. I stood awkwardly by the bed, talking to them. Teddy Blue had gone to Fort Worth for Christmas and hadn’t returned, so Leslie said. Though plump, she had a tiny face and remarkably big brown eyes.
“Are we having breakfast today?” Serge
i asked. Pauline seemed to regard the question as a command. She crawled out of bed and went off silently to the kitchen, looking happy. She wore a white nightgown. Then she stepped back out of the kitchen and addressed the pile. “Are any of you hungry?” she asked. The pile didn’t answer.
“That’s Sergei’s fault,” Leslie said, nodding at the pile. “Don’t let it put you off. He brought home some mescaline and wanted everybody to take it. Everybody that did got scared, except Pauline. It didn’t seem to bother her. The others aren’t over it yet. Look at them. They got so anxious they all just piled together. Sergei says it was bad mescaline. It shouldn’t scare people like that.”
Sergei put his book down. He had a crew cut and an authoritative manner. “I did not say it was bad mescaline,” he said. “Those kids all took too much. Most of them were still high from the mushrooms, too.”
“I often wonder if you know what you’re talking about,” Leslie said, turning a page of O’Hara.
“I often wonder if you’d like to go get fucked,” Sergei said.
“Sure,” Leslie said. “Tell me where.”
Pauline returned, bringing Sergei scrambled eggs and coffee. She went back to the kitchen and reappeared with some for me. The small naked child came into the room suddenly and slammed the door, causing several members of the pile to jerk apprehensively. One boy stood up, looked carefully in his pants pockets and then wandered out the door. The child paid the pile no mind, but in one corner of the room there was another pile, this one of coats. As the little girl passed it she suddenly stopped and pointed at the floor. “Who dat?” she said. “Who dat?” I hadn’t noticed, but there was a hand and an arm protruding from under the coats. Leslie hadn’t noticed it either. She peered at it.
“I don’t know who that would be,” she said.
“It’s Charlie,” Sergei said. “I saw him crawl under there.”
The child sat down on the floor to watch the hand. People began to peel off the human pile. Most of them stood up, looked vacantly about and walked out the door. One went to the kitchen and came back with a plate of scrambled eggs. He sat down where the human pile had been and ate his eggs. The child suddenly stood up and stamped on the hand with one bare foot.
“Don’t be a brat, Cleo,” Sergei said. “Why wake up Charlie?”
The pile of coats began to stir, and a Jewish youth emerged. As I was, he was dressed in a suit, but his was even more rumpled than mine. His eyes were glazed. He looked about eighteen.
“You can sleep at my place if you’re still tired, Charlie,” Leslie said.
“I have a case to try,” Charlie said. He walked slowly out the door. Leslie informed me that he was twenty-four years old and a precociously brilliant lawyer.
I took my plate to the kitchen. The eggs had been delicious. Pauline was happily scrambling more. The windows of the kitchen were painted yellow. “Are you a friend of Teddy’s?” I asked. Cleo came in and Pauline swooped her up and kissed her.
“Oh no,” she said. “I’m his wife. This is Cleo Blue. Did you get enough eggs?”
Her curly hair and scrubbed face made her look about eighteen, but misjudging Charlie had made me cautious. I didn’t ask her her age.
Leslie came in and had coffee, and Sergei came in and straddled a chair and began a learned lecture on mescaline and Aldous Huxley. Cleo was eating raisin bread. The four of us ignored Sergei’s lecture, but each in his own way. When Pauline finally stopped scrambling eggs Leslie took me over to her place, which was just down a little path. It was a tiny house with yellow floors. One room had a loom in it.
“I can’t take dope,” Leslie said. “I have fits. I can smoke pot though. Want to take a shower?”
I did, actually. I had been in such a hurry to escape Renata’s Japanese servants that I hadn’t cleaned up. To my surprise Leslie turned a shower on and stripped off her one garment, which was a faded blue dress. Since it was her one garment she was naked in about two seconds. She was shorter and plumper than she had looked reading O’Hara. “Come on,” she said. “We better take one together, unless you’re a cold-shower type. There isn’t much hot water.”
It was obviously a practical rather than a sexual suggestion. The one thing that kept Leslie from being ugly was that she had made peace with her body. She looked happy, and was a pleasing person, naked or clothed. If she had been modest or clothes-conscious she wouldn’t have been pleasing. She went into the shower and came out a minute later wet and somewhat irritated.
“People are always stealing my soap,” she said. “I’m the only one on the Lane who buys soap.” By the time she found some more I had shucked my clothes and was hiding in the shower. Leslie politely offered me the soap first, but I declined. Even though Leslie was completely unembarrassed, I was embarrassed. It depressed me not to be able to be comfortable naked, but I just wasn’t. Apparently there were bourgeois shackles I still hadn’t shaken off.
Leslie put on the same faded blue dress and we went out and sat in her sunny yard. She had been born in California and couldn’t imagine any life but the one she was leading. She asked me what my situation was and I gave her a brief rundown.
“You should bring your wife here,” she said. “There are a lot of guys around. Somebody would take her away from you and when you got over it you’d be a lot happier.”
A croquet ball came rolling down the path from Teddy Blue’s house. It explained the sounds we had been hearing. Sergei, wearing a pair of old shorts, came strolling after the ball carrying a mallet. Another ball came down the path and a long-haired boy followed it. Sergei ignored us and studied the position of his ball. The long-haired boy studied the position of his ball. Neither of them spoke. Finally Sergei hit his ball down a little trail that led away from Leslie’s house.
“There are ninety-nine wickets you have to go through,” Leslie said. “They’re all over the Lane. The one thing you have to remember, if you start coming here, is never to move a croquet ball. There’re a couple of balls down the street that have been where they are for two years. Everybody’s afraid to move them. The guys who started it may come back some time to finish their game.”
Pauline and Cleo came walking down the path, Pauline still in her nightgown. They sat on the grass, and Cleo played in her mother’s lap. I lay back on the grass and considered taking a nap. The sun was very pleasant to lie in.
“He has a bad wife,” Leslie said. “She won’t sleep with him.”
“She must be unhappy,” Pauline said.
It was a generous comment, but it wasn’t true. I couldn’t have made Sally unhappy if I’d tried. Cleo crawled under her mother’s nightgown and after much giggling wormed her way between Pauline’s breasts and out the neck of the gown. It was a loose gown. They were a lovely sight, so healthy-looking that their mere presence made me feel that my own existence was inexcusably grubby and unhealthy. I should have been spending my days lying in the sun in Palo Alto instead of eating trash all day in the Piltdown Hotel. A thin kid came up dribbling a basketball and asked if anyone wanted to play. The girls didn’t, but I did, sort of. I was torn between a desire for basketball and a desire to nap in the sun. There was a little court at the end of Perry Lane and I went with the friendly kid and played a couple of games of horse, both of which he easily won. He had a beautiful jump shot from the corner—he missed it only twice in two games.
Leslie came riding up to the court in an old MG and asked me if I needed a ride to the city. She was going to Berkeley. I did, of course. It was a convertible and she drove so fast that talking was impossible.
“If you need a place to hide out, come down,” she said when she let me out on Geary Street. “I can always make room for you.”
I had no one to hide from, but I thanked her anyway. She was a hospitable girl. I felt almost cheerful. I felt as if I had found some possible friends. In the interests of healthiness I went in and cleaned out all the Fig Newton boxes and Dr. Pepper bottles. My room took on a more healthful aspect. I even tidied up
my manuscripts. As I was going down the stairs with the last load of trash I met Wu. He had his ping-pong paddle in his coat pocket. Since I didn’t particularly want to go near Sally, he came to the Piltdown when he felt like a game.
“You are looking friendly,” he said. “If you will excuse, you have not been looking friendly lately. Are you having a mistress?”
“Nope,” I said. “I feel like some ping-pong though.”
“Sure,” Wu said. “Very good exercise. You will be having a mistress at a later date.”
We broke even, four games to four. I took a long walk through the Mission District, before I went home, and when I did go home I sat down and wrote Emma and Flap a nine-page letter, telling them all about the wild life I was leading. The next morning I reread the letter and decided it was better than my novel. Half of it was fiction, but it was inspired fiction. My novel was uninspired fiction, at least so far. While I was rereading the letter Bruce called. He had been in Sausalito, with another love of former days. He wanted me to go to L.A. with him, immediately. “They” wanted to see me right away.
An hour and a half later, at the airport, I mailed the Hortons their letter. Bruce was very well dressed. I had never been on an airplane before, but I was ashamed to admit it. When we took off, Bruce tried to point out Atherton to me, but I couldn’t see it. I imagined Renata down there keeping beautiful. Bruce didn’t mention her. I imagined the New Americans, only I couldn’t imagine what they might be doing. Probably I had caught them on a quiet day. I liked the world of the sky. When we went above the clouds I really liked it. The world there was new and beautiful. I admitted to Bruce that it was my first plane ride and he couldn’t believe it. “How can that be?” he said, several times.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 11