I drove through the rain to the bookstore where the party was to be. Perhaps the police were looking for me. They might raid my party, in which case Random House would never forgive me. Lightning was flashing and the rain fell in sheets. It was almost as bad as the flash flood. Perhaps there would be a drowning family for me to rescue. My ability to imagine absurd catastrophes was getting sharper.
Unfortunately the parking lot in front of the bookshop was low. It was raining furies. It was hot, too. Being in El Chevy was like being in a steam bath. My windows were fogged. I was sweating heavily. Most Houston parking lots are altogether too low. An engineer with sense enough to build higher parking lots could make a fortune in Houston. This one had no drains. I had a choice of staying in the car and steaming or else stepping out into a foot of water.
My sense of obligation to Bruce helped me decide. If I had a public, it was waiting. There didn’t seem to be many cars in the parking lot, but that wasn’t decisive. Perhaps my public had come on chartered buses. I stepped out into a foot of water. If I looked really soppy and awful it might make them love me more. They would think me an inspired madman, like Dylan Thomas.
The bookshop was in the River Oaks shopping center. Hordes of gorgeously attired rich women might be there. I knew the owner of the shop well. Once I had clerked for him. He kept a statue of Petrarch’s Laura in the window. That’s how I had gotten the job. When I walked in and asked for a job the owner, Mr. Stay, took me over to the window and pointed to the statue.
“Tell me who that is and the job’s yours,” he said. Mr. Stay was a vigorous elderly drunk, much like Mr. Fitzherbert only more literate.
“But you can’t tell me, can you?” he added sternly.
“Sure I can,” I said. “It’s Petrarch’s Laura.” It was really just a shrewd guess. Mr. Stay wrote sonnets on the side. He had had a volume of sonnets privately published in El Paso, not long after World War II.
When I slopped in the door Mr. Stay was waiting. He had on a black suit. “Danny, Danny,” he said, grasping my hand warmly. “By God, you’ve come back. Why didn’t you get a haircut?”
“No time,” I said, panting.
I saw a table with a big pile of my books on it. There was another table with a big champagne bucket on it. There were four bottles of champagne in the bucket. A blue-eyed teen-ager in a sports coat stood by, ready to uncork the champagne and serve it to the crowd. But there wasn’t any crowd. The three of us were the only people in the shop.
“I presume the crowd has been deterred by the present storm,” Mr. Stay said gravely.
The present storm passed, almost as he said it. The rain ceased. As usual, it had rained just long enough to get me wet.
“Well, son, I’m proud this day has come,” Mr. Stay said. He stood poised by the cash register.
“Me too,” I said, insincerely.
For the next forty-five minutes not one soul entered the shop. None of us knew what to do. Mr. Stay was not a master of small talk. Neither was I. The blue-eyed teen-ager never showed his tongue, if he had one. We all stood silently, waiting for someone to come in and buy a book for me to autograph. The teen-ager twitched at the sleeves of his sports coat. Occasionally people walked by the front window, and hope sprang up in our breasts, but none of the people came in.
“Some days things go a little slow,” Mr. Stay said, finally.
We stood. I was embarrassed for Mr. Stay, and, somewhat more remotely, for Random House, but inwardly I didn’t feel too bad. Being an author was only a little boring, a little silly, and mildly awkward.
At the end of forty-five minutes we were all startled to see a little fat woman enter the store. I think we had resigned ourselves to standing eternally as we were, positioned near my pile of books. It was a shock to see that the arrangement wasn’t eternal. The little fat woman wore a raincoat and gloves and bustled right over to me. Even so she wasn’t as quick as Mr. Stay.
“Break out the champagne, Chester,” he said.
Chester sprang at the champagne.
“Oh, I’m so glad to meet you, Danny,” the little woman said. “I’m Mrs. Ebbins. Dorsey’s mother. Dorsey’s talked about you for years. We’re all just real proud of your success.”
Luckily I remembered Dorsey Ebbins. For a moment I was afraid the little woman had strayed into the wrong autograph party. Dorsey had been a classmate of mine when I was a freshman. I sat next to him in English class. Dorsey was very sensitive, and the rough and tumble of college life was too much for him. He dropped out of school after six months. It was lucky he hadn’t dropped out of my mind. I asked about him.
“Oh, Dorsey’s just doing real well,” Mrs. Ebbins said. “We’re all just real hopeful now. He lets us take him on walks every day or two. He’ll even go around the block if somebody goes with him. You know for years Dorsey just stayed real shut in. But he always remembered you. He said you were kind to him. I’d just be so happy if you’d autograph one of your books for Dorsey. I know it’d just give him a real thrill.”
The only book I had ever autographed was the copy I had given Wu. When I sat down in front of the three neat clean piles of new books to autograph one for Dorsey I almost broke up. His little fat mother stood there in front of me looking so thrilled I couldn’t bear it. I almost broke out crying. My eyes were hot. I didn’t know what to do. I had been land to Dorsey. I liked him. We used to play tennis, sometimes. He hadn’t been much crazier than me—he just happened to have a mother to retreat to. There she was, looking at me as if my success was wonderful, as if it made up for Dorsey sitting in his room for four years, as if I could do something important just because I had twenty-five or so nice fresh clean books in front of me full of my words. Why did Mrs. Ebbins have to be the one person to come to my autograph party? It broke me up, though I concealed it. It was obvious that she would take me home and be my mother and love me like she loved Dorsey, if I would let her. She was waiting like a cheerful little bird for me to write something in the book. I had no idea what to write. The blue-eyed teen-ager was holding two glasses of champagne, ready to give them to us as soon as I inscribed the book. Pressure was on. Finally I just wrote: “To my old friend Dorsey Ebbins, with all good wishes. Excelsior. Danny Deck.”
“Tell Dorsey I’d love to play tennis sometime,” I said to Mrs. Ebbins. I said it with the last of me. I was plummeting.
“I’ll tell him, he’ll just be thrilled,” Mrs. Ebbins said. “It’ll be a little while before he’s up to much exercise, but we’re hoping to have him back in circulation just as soon as we can. He still talks about finishing his degree. I wish you just a wonderful success. We’re all just as proud of you as we can be.”
She wrapped my book in her raincoat and hurried out, little and fat. I quaffed champagne. I had never wanted to be drunk worse. I think in five minutes I was drunk. The blue-eyed teen-ager watched appalled. Mr. Stay was as bad as me. It was long past the time when he was usually drunk. We went through the four bottles of champagne in less than an hour. The pile of books wavered in front of me. Two other people came in, but neither of them bought my book. One bought a cookbook and the other just wandered vaguely through the store and then walked out.
I asked Mr. Stay if he still wrote sonnets. I don’t remember what he said. I got very vague. I sat behind my pile of books, drinking. I began to hate the pile. I wanted to carry it out and dump it in the first puddle that was big enough to hold twenty-five books. I was very glad no one else came in to get an autographed book. There was no telling what I might have written. The party waned, Mr. Stay and I dull. The champagne was gone. The phone rang. A lady asked Mr. Stay how many copies of my book we had. He said fifty. She said I was to sign them and he was to send them to the first fifty people in the Houston phone book. He didn’t believe it. I followed the conversation vaguely, through my drunkenness. It was a beautiful bookshop, with excellent books in it. Mr. Stay had very good taste. Part of him was an art-for-art’s-sake poet and the rest of him was an old-time se
lf-educated bread-for-the-masses-IWW type Communist. He kept good books on his shelves and no one bought them. Dimly I realized that some lady had just bought fifty copies of my book over the phone. When it dawned on me what was happening I knew who it was. It was the only rich lady I knew who liked me. I got up and took the phone. Mr. Stay was glad to let me have it—the whole experience had bewildered him.
“Hi,” I said. “You didn’t have to do that.’
“You’re drunk,” Jenny said. “I better come and get you. If I don’t you’ll marry some new slut and get put in jail for bigamy.”
“I’m stone sober,” I said. “Can you afford that kind of gesture?”
“Of course I can,” she said. “Get on over here.”
“I have to go to the hospital first,” I said. “Then I have to see a friend. Don’t wait up. Just leave a door unlocked, so I can get in. I’ll be there eventually.”
“Promise me you won’t marry anyone,” she said. “I know how dumb you are. Just don’t marry anyone at all.”
“I promise,” I said.
Mr. Stay and I shook hands very emotionally. It was probably the strangest autograph party he had ever hosted. He had bought a copy of my book too. I wrote the same thing in it I had written in Dorsey’s. My ability to think up inscriptions was very weak. We shook hands five or six times. He was an emotional old Communist sonneteer.
“You write them, son. I’ll sell them,” he said. “It’s all I’m fit for. You need a job, just come to me. I’d be proud to have a real writer working for me.”
I sloshed away. I hated to be called a real writer, especially by nice old failed writers who had never got to think of themselves as real writers at all.
Only the year before I had wanted nothing more in life than to be a real writer. It had seemed worth any effort. Something had happened. Mr. Stay couldn’t get his sonnets published. The high point of his career was getting one published in the New Republic, in the thirties. For all I knew Mr. Stay was as good as Petrarch. But I knew that Mr. Stay would always feel that he had missed it, because he wasn’t a real writer. Almost everybody seemed to miss it. I probably was a real writer. If I kept at it I could probably write as good as anybody but the geniuses. I could be better than average. I could probably even be minor. With great luck I might, by accident mostly, write something fine, sometime in my life, particularly if I kept myself in shape by writing books that were decently good for twenty years or so. But probably I’d miss it too. I felt like I was already missing it. My life was no life. It was sort of a long confused drive. I would have given all my talent to Mr. Stay in a second, if it would make him happy. Or to Dorsey Ebbins. I drove straight to the Methodist Hospital, feeling a great desire to give my talent to someone who would be made happy by it.
Mr. and Mrs. Bynum were there. Sally’s parents. It was one of the many times when it would have been better for me not to be drunk. Unfortunately I had no choice. We spotted one another in the lobby of the Methodist Hospital, immediately after I walked in. I guess they had seen the picture of me on my book. I knew them because they were frightening. They were both tall, taller than Sally. Their faces blotched with anger the minute they saw me and they both got up from their seats and came toward me. Their looks were every bit as hot and insolent as Sally’s had been that afternoon. She had her mother’s cheekbones. Her father had hands like small hams. When I held out my hand to shake with them Mrs. Bynum glared down at me.
“We won’t shake your filthy hand,” she said. “You’re hog drunk, for everybody to see.”
“Boy, you been in a whorehouse all afternoon or where you been?” Mr. Bynum asked. He leaned over me threateningly.
“Is Sally here?” I asked. I was needing all my strength just to face them. I had no immediate strength available with which to argue.
“She’s named Lorena, after my momma,” Mr. Bynum said. “We’ll see the last name’s changed. Two hours old, precious little baby girl. That’s all you’ll ever need to know about her. You just get back to your whores. Me and Mrs. Bynum have had a gutful of you.”
“She was right about him, Lloyd,” Mrs. Bynum said. “Look at that hair.”
“I see it,” Mr. Bynum said. “He don’t even have a decent suit of clothes. He’s just a goddamn young whoremonger.”
I was trying to dig in, but the hospital floor was awfully slick. They were ugly people. They couldn’t have my daughter. They could have Sally, but not my daughter. I had to fight my way up. I couldn’t see one good quality in their ugly, angry faces. Mrs. Bynum looked like the kind of woman who would tear off a dead foe’s genitals after a battle. Mr. Bynum kept leaning over me. Their knuckles were white with the need to hit.
“I want to see my child,” I said.
“Don’t call it yours, you little sonofabitch,” Mrs. Bynum said, in a guttural voice. “My daughter had it. You ruined her name. You and your goddamn book talk. My daddy was alive he’d have seen you dead by now.”
It was blood fury in her face. Mr. Bynum was the same.
“I married her decently,” I said.
“We know all about you,” Mr. Bynum said. “We know about your Hollywood whore. Tried to drown our daughter. I oughta lay you out, right here in this hospital.”
I wasn’t going to be able to hold against them. Not then. They had been waiting, building up fury, and I had stumbled in, unprepared. I was slipping on the floor. I would have to retreat, back away, take a fresh run at them some other day.
I quit talking. I turned and left. They followed me, arguing about whether or not to have me arrested.
“Get the police, Lloyd,” Mrs. Bynum said. “They’re apt to never find him if we let him get away now. His filthy friends will hide him out.”
“Naw. It’d get in the papers if I do,” Mr. Bynum said. They were three steps behind me on the hospital sidewalk, too furious to let me out of their sight. It was drizzling rain.
“He ever comes near that little child I’ll fix him myself,” he said. He had a thick, slurred East Texas voice, made raw and ugly with anger. Finally his voice burned me too deeply. I didn’t want to fight, really. I just didn’t want to hear either of their voices again. I was pretty tired. I stopped and faced them.
“If you two awful people don’t stop following me I’ll have you arrested,” I said. I knew it was a vain boast, but it shut them up for five seconds.
“What’s that?” Mr. Bynum said.
“I don’t want you following me,” I said. “I don’t like you. No wonder Sally’s so cheap. I feel sorry for her. Maybe that’s why I married her. You two shouldn’t be allowed to raise chickens, much less children.”
Mr. Bynum couldn’t believe his ears, but Mrs. Bynum believed hers. Her face contorted with anger. It had been ugly enough before it contorted. “Hit him, Lloyd!” she said. “Hit the little sonofabitch.”
He certainly hit me. I saw his arm move, but I didn’t feel anything. It knocked me into the wet grass. I didn’t feel my left ear until it really began to hurt, about an hour later. As soon as I realized I was down I sat up, holding my ringing head. The Bynums stood over me. For a moment things were almost comic.
“You’re calling our daughter cheap?” Mrs. Bynum said. “You! The way you look?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “She’s pretty cheap. You ought to meet some of her acquaintances.”
Mr. Bynum was dying to hit me again. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, waiting for me to get up. Mrs. Bynum waited too.
“Yank him up from there, Lloyd,” she said. “He’s too big a coward to stand up and fight.”
I was ready to fight them, all right. The comedy of it all had worn off. But then it occurred to me I shouldn’t. Probably I would have to make peace with them sooner or later, if I was ever to see the baby that had just been born. I looked at the vast hospital and tried to imagine the tiny creature in it. She was a girl. She might need me. I had better try discretion, for the sake of whatever future there was. Without speaking I scooted
back on the grass and got to my feet. I tried to walk away in the squishy grass but Mr. Bynum was immediately after me and hit me again, this time from behind, on the neck. It wasn’t a square hit, but it put me off my feet again. I was very wet and muddy. I sat up again. Mrs. Bynum had followed us onto the wet grass, hoping to see more of the massacre. I looked at Mr. Bynum and saw it was no use. He still had his fists clenched. He would probably knock me down three or four more times before I could get to my car.
“Ruined our daughter for life,” Mr. Bynum said heavily. Maybe he really believed it. If he hadn’t been so awful I might have felt sorry for him. But I couldn’t feel sorry for him.
“Cunt and prick and fuck and shit,” I said, looking at Mrs. Bynum.
It startled her. “What’s that?” Mr. Bynum said. He leaned over me, fists doubled up.
“Vagina, fallopian tube, penis, scrotum,” I said.
It took them both aback. I meant for it to.
“That ain’t what you said,” Mr. Bynum said. But I had him slightly off guard.
“No sir,” I said. “What I said to Mrs. Bynum was cunt and prick and fuck and shit.” I pronounced each word very distinctly. The Bynums were silent. The encounter had taken a bewildering turn. I gave them no time to regroup.
“I’m telling you all my favorite words,” I said. “Anus, penis, semen, nipple, clitoris, pubic hair. I can say them louder,” I said. “I can say them faster. Fuck screw ball. Fuck—screw—ball. Fuck screw ball fuck screw ball.”
I got to my knees. I spoke louder. “Lick suck lick suck lick suck,” I said. The Bynums were staring. My hair was wild, I was wet and muddy, I was rising from the grass chanting terrible words. I rose, I chanted.
“Titillate, masturbate, cunnilingus,” I said. “Cunt prick fuck shit.”
I got a little louder as I walked toward Mrs. Bynum. “Cunt vagina cunt vagina cunt vagina cunt,” I said. I turned toward Mr. Bynum. “Nipple nipple nipple nipple,” I said. I was chanting. I was getting louder. They looked scared. I had them backing up.
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Page 21