Boys and Girls Together

by William Saroyan

  ‘I hate being poor.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. It makes people more alive. Even when I used to get money I never stopped being poor.’

  ‘That’s silly.’

  ‘What happens is that if you let yourself get rich in money, you get poor in living.’

  ‘No, you don’t. The richer you get in money the richer you get in living and everything else.’

  ‘You get poor in living. You get poverty-stricken. The more money you get, the more like a beggar you become. A man who doesn’t think about money is a lord. A man who does is a cripple with his hand held out. I think about money all the time. It’s humiliating.’

  ‘Don’t you sometimes think about something else, too?’

  ‘No. Everything else I think about turns out to be money, too.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Last night? The first time?’

  ‘The first and second both.’

  ‘I think about money a lot, too,’ the woman said, ‘but I think more about other things, too.’

  ‘It’s all money you think about,’ the man said. ‘You think you think about other things, too, but you don’t. You never do. If you did, you’d be a different person.’

  ‘Don’t you like the person I am?’

  ‘The person you are isn’t an easy person to like.’

  ‘Well, you can get a divorce, then.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  ‘You can get a divorce any time you feel like it. Get it tomorrow. I don’t want to be married to a man who doesn’t love me. I don’t want a man to make love to me who doesn’t love me. Get a divorce tomorrow. Why can’t you get a divorce tomorrow?’

  ‘I can’t afford it.’

  ‘Get a divorce tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t leave the kids, either.’

  ‘You can leave me, but you can’t leave the kids. Get your lousy divorce tomorrow.’

  ‘I can’t, and shut up.’

  He left the table, walked around in the living-room, poked the fire and put some more wood on it.

  ‘I don’t want a man to love me who doesn’t love me,’ the woman screamed.

  He went into the kitchen. The woman got up from her chair and ran to the other side of the table, away from him.

  ‘If you don’t love me, get out!’

  ‘I told you I don’t want the kids to hear that screaming.’

  ‘Get out!’ the woman screamed, then fell to the floor, sobbing the way that made him think of money all the time and wouldn’t let him think of anything else.

  He lifted the woman and held her in his arms.

  ‘You mustn’t let yourself scream that way. I want to love you. Why don’t you let me? It’s easy to let me. You don’t have to do anything but be on the level and love Johnny and Rosey and not talk about it.’

  When she had stopped sobbing he walked with her to the living-room and sat with her there, looking at the fire. It was a small fire now, barely a fire at all. The door of the bedroom opened and the little girl wandered out into the hall, sobbing the way her mother had sobbed, naked and sobbing.

  The woman ran to the girl and took her in her arms.

  ‘Did you have a bad dream? It’s all gone now. You don’t have to cry any more. You sit on the toddy and Mama’ll give you some water and then you go right back to sleep.’

  He heard the girl stop crying and then he heard the woman and the girl talking softly.

  When the woman came back she said: ‘I’m afraid she heard us. I’m so ashamed.’

  If I had thirty thousand dollars, the man thought, I could straighten this out.

  Chapter 16

  Seven years ago, a year before he met her, he was thirty-two and free and anything could happen because he was a son, not a father, which more than anything in the world he wanted to be. But he wanted the mother of his kids to be all right, so he was taking his time.

  You had to take your time, you just couldn’t start your kids anywhere. You wanted them to have a mother who was all right, because once somebody was their mother she was their mother for ever. You had to think about that.

  Everybody knew what a difference a mother could make. If a man took his time and finally got to somebody who looked as if she’d be all right, as if she was the one for them, then the time taken would be worth it because they would never know about the time taken, they would only have more than they might have had if the time hadn’t been taken, they’d have more because their mother had more.

  You had to keep thinking about that because whatever you were yourself couldn’t be helped, but whatever their mother would be for them could be. You could see that she would be the best you could find for them. You could keep looking.

  Besides being fun, looking was important for the kids. You wanted several of them, not two or three but six or seven, or eight or nine. If their mother was all right, why not a lot of them? They might enjoy it. It might just turn out that they might be very happy about it, happy about their mother, their father, one another, and everybody else.

  It was lonely enough waiting to see them, but it was better to go on being lonely than to see them unhappy about it, not caring about it, not enjoying it, not glad and nicely made inside and out. It was lonely most of the time, but you had to hold out, you had to keep looking, you had to keep guessing what they would be apt to be like with one and then with another and if they wouldn’t be apt to be enough, you had to wait some more.

  Whoever they were to be, they were entitled to the best mother their father could find, because they were stuck with him. He was the only father they’d ever have. It was him or nobody at all.

  There was the actress who had been famous but wasn’t any more and was drinking all the time because she wasn’t but said she could have a lot of them, surely three, she had started acting when she was just a kid, she was thirty but thirty wasn’t so much. (Dubious.) She had something for them: but she couldn’t get to sleep unless she was drunk or took sleeping pills and she looked bad until five in the afternoon and seemed to be trembling a little all the time until then. That might not be so good for them. She had plenty, though: she was deeply funny and clean and had an innocence you had to love, for she had had affairs with half a dozen known playboys and surely half a dozen unknown ones. She was slim, too, and had a way of talking you couldn’t resist because although it wasn’t natural, although it had been cultivated and frequently disappeared, it was very pleasing to the ear, her voice rising sweetly in the right places in a manner so artificial as to be refreshing.

  There was the girl who had studied ballet since childhood but had learned to do other dancing because she had to live and danced almost naked in night clubs and said: ‘It’s so humiliating when they’re rude, when they say things. One night at the beginning of my number I was slapped on the buttocks (Refined) and didn’t even stop, but after the number I sat down and cried.’ She was well-made and had a pleasant nature. She was shy and serious-minded and laughed when she was happy, and didn’t want to dance for a living. She was afraid of having them, though. It wasn’t just a small fear that would go away. She was afraid because her mother had died when she had been four years old, when her sister had been born, and she had heard her mother dying.

  There was the girl who wrote delicate poetry and looked like nothing until she was seen whole and then looked very much like something white and astonishing because the rest of the time she looked bleak and dull because her face was bleak and dull and her hair dry and perhaps dirty. She talked a lot about the discipline of writing poetry. (Not interesting.) She had a nice name in the poetry world and loved to work at poetry. They were walking through the slums one day and a small girl with a dirty face and a running nose said hello to her and she didn’t say hello to the girl but said, ‘I don’t know why they have them.’

  There was the girl who must have been a little crazy, who got past the desk at the hotel and climbed thirty flights of stairs because the elevator boys would ha
ve stopped her: rang his doorbell and when he opened the door walked in quickly unbuttoning her dress at the front and saying, ‘I’ve got to take a shower first because I had to walk up.’ The reason he gave some thought to her in relation to them was that she came from peasants—they were wine-makers in the old country. Her feet were fine to see, although dark and a little rough, for she had never paid much attention to herself. She had thick black hair and the whitest teeth he had ever seen in anyone who wasn’t black. She was the third from the last in a family of eleven children, and her parents had always been poor but had always managed to get a great deal of food on to the table for everybody to eat, and wine. Even if she had been the one, it wouldn’t have done, though, for she only wanted to go on the stage. She came back a second time, taking the stairs, so he let it be known that she was to be permitted to ride the elevators. She was grateful for this and said, ‘You didn’t have to do that.’ (Never forget her.)

  There was the woman who said she was the feature writer for a newspaper in South Carolina and wanted an interview but didn’t ask any questions and seemed to be under the impression that he was the man who had written a book another writer had written.

  There was the woman who did publicity for a famous nightclub and was all right until one night she said, ‘Let me do your publicity.’

  There were others and they were all just fine for him but not for them. They were right for the time, but not for afterwards.

  Well, now it was afterwards. He was no longer a son, and there was his poor woman, there was their mother, sitting before the fire in despair, biting the fingernails that she had had manicured a few hours ago.

  Chapter 17

  He was standing at the window watching the cars and streetcars go by. They hadn’t spoken for five minutes because they’d had another fight.

  They had a fight every day, but every six or seven days they had a big one, and then the woman screamed or the man beat her. They had them all the time. The bad ones were very bad. They felt ashamed and hopeless, and the only thing that started them out again was the kids, remembering them or having to take care of them, the way the woman had just taken care of the crying girl.

  The man wanted to say something that would be true and helpful, but no matter what he said after a fight nothing happened, and the next day there was another fight. After six or seven days there was another big one.

  He had already told her how they could be all right, but he had told her that during or after almost every fight they had ever had, except the little ones. Couldn’t he just let her be? Couldn’t he ask no more of her and go along with her rather than ask her to go along with him?

  He could.

  And he would if he didn’t have to write.

  That’s what it came to.

  If he could get hold of thirty thousand dollars and count on an income of twenty-five thousand a year, that would do it. She wouldn’t have to change at all. He would go along with her and be glad to forget writing.

  Why not?

  All he had ever wanted was a family. The reason he had written in the first place was to be able to have a family. They could have more kids, and let the other writers do the writing.

  The trouble was you had to have money to have more kids, too, and there was no way for him to get money except by writing.

  ‘I think this may straighten us out,’ he said at last. ‘Once a year I’ll go off for a month and write a book. The rest of the year we’ll have money. If I work hard and have a little luck, I think it’ll work.’

  The woman didn’t speak. She didn’t even turn.

  ‘What I’m thinking,’ he said, ‘is this. During that month you’ll have a chance to think about a lot of things for yourself and I’ll have nothing else to think about except the writing I want to do. The month will be gone before we know it and the rest of the year will be all ours.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I’ll have the book and the advance on it. And after it’s published it’ll earn enough for a year. If it turns out to be something Hollywood wants, we’ll earn enough for more than a year.’

  Still the woman didn’t speak. The man turned away to look out of the window again.

  I wish I knew what to tell her, he thought.

  ‘Go now,’ the woman said. She wasn’t excited. She was just tired and angry.

  The man turned but the woman was still looking at the fire.

  ‘If you’re so anxious to get away from me, go now.’

  ‘I was thinking we’d make arrangements first.’

  ‘I know you’re sick of me, so go now. Tonight.’

  ‘I thought we might plan it, start the first of next month. That would give us a couple of weeks to get everything organised and I could be thinking about the writing, so that once I got there I could get straight to work and not waste a week or two.’

  ‘If you weren’t sick of me, you could write upstairs. Other writers are married.’

  ‘I don’t know how they do it. Maybe some of them go off a month or two.’

  ‘You can go off for a month or two, too. You can go off for a year. Think how much you could write in a year. You can go off for ever. You could write everything then.’

  ‘What’s the use making things more difficult?’

  ‘Yes, what’s the use?’

  ‘I thought you might understand.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  ‘Let’s forget it, then.’

  ‘Why should you forget it? You want to go off and write, so go ahead. Why forget it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be able to write if I went off this way. I’d be too worried about you and the kids.’

  ‘Don’t worry about us. You just get up and go and write.’

  The woman got up and went to the bedroom.

  I’ve got to figure out a way to get work done upstairs, he thought.

  He went to the bedroom and sat on his bed.

  ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll work upstairs. I’ll get up in the morning and get the kids going so you can sleep until you’re rested, but once I get upstairs, let me stay there until I’m through for the day. That ought to be around five. Maybe six. Once in a while maybe seven. But I’ll be up there all the time. I won’t come down for lunch. I’ll take some stuff up there and put it in the refrigerator and get anything I want any time I want it. I won’t see so much of the kids, but that’ll be better for them. I’m seeing too much of them. It won’t be so bad. I don’t want to go off for a month. It’s too lonesome, too expensive, and I’ve got a whole flat upstairs to work in. All I’ve got to do is get the place organised a little, get the decks cleared for work, and make up my mind to keep a schedule the same as any other working man. We’ll keep the gate locked so that nobody can ring the door-bell. You’ll know nobody can get in, so you won’t feel scared. This place is perfect for work if I’d only get things organised a little. If you take the kids for a walk, lock the gate after you. On Sundays we’ll take them for a drive and have a picnic somewhere. I won’t work on Sundays, just the weekdays from ten to about five or six. At night we’ll listen to the radio and dance or talk or read. First thing you know you’ll be pregnant again and I’ll be working and we’ll be getting money. I mean, we’ll like it.’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’ve got to see all of you every day.’

  ‘Not just the kids? Me, too?’

  ‘Yes, you, too. We’ll plan it, the same as if I was going away. Tomorrow you go and see your friends, but the next day we’ll go to work planning it, getting things straightened out and organised. We’ll both have to work hard for three or four days getting things ready. I’ll help you down here and take care of upstairs because, once we get started, we’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to have things all in order down here so you won’t get too tired keeping things going. Once everything’s organised and you know what you’re doing, it won’t be hard, it’ll be fun.’

  ‘I’m sorry about what happened tonight. Are you?’


  ‘Yes, I am.’

  The woman ran to him and he embraced her tenderly, because they were both so pathetic and helpless.

  Chapter 18

  The woman came back from the kids’ room and said: ‘They’re both fast asleep. It’s only ten o’clock. Couldn’t we telephone somebody to come over?’

  ‘Is Rosey all right?’

  ‘Sound asleep.’

  ‘Has she got it stuck up?’

  ‘No. She’s sprawled. Come and see.’

  They went and saw the girl lying on her back, sprawled, relaxed and naked. The woman pointed to the part that made the child a woman and laughed softly because it was so pretty. The boy was sprawled face down, his arms out, his hands loose, his face dark and serious and unwinking.

  The man turned from the boy and took the woman in his arms and held her.

  ‘They’re good kids. They’re both good kids. Better than we deserve.’

  He held her head in his hands now to tell her he loved her. He said the words with embarrassment and hope, wanting to say them with more than his voice and mouth, wanting to say them with all of his life, even if he had to try to do it in the only language she understood, the absurd language of movie and play, novel and story, the meaningless language of the glib mouth, the glib heart and head and emotion, but hopeful that she would know what he meant, hopeful that she would get it; it ought to be easy to get, why couldn’t she get it? You live love, you don’t talk it, you live it every minute, you work at it, you never let it get away, you live it because there’s no other decent way to live. The saying of the words embarrassed him, for they stank, they lied, they had always lied, they over-simplified, they made a gag out of the only decent way to stay alive, loving, no matter what, loving in spite of the lies, in spite of the truth, in spite of the ugliness, in spite of the hatred, in spite of the madness, the damned unbalance, the incalculable difference, the alienations, the irresponsibilities, the malicious mischief, the arrogance, the scheming, the pretending, the deceiving.