All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (16 page)

“I used to hate the rat,” Leon said quietly. We were drinking brandy and watching the rat eat squid. “I made it a symbol of my fall,” he said. “But after all, it’s just an animal. It’s not the rat’s fault I became a producer. It isn’t even the largest rat in the world, for that matter. There’s one in Baltimore that weighs twenty-five pounds. We’ve been negotiating for it. I thought it might be fun to mate them, since the one in Baltimore is female. Maybe I could develop a strain of giant fur-bearing rats and breed them on rat farms, like the mink farms I used to see on Prince Edward Island. This rat is bigger than most minks. You’ll notice it likes seafood. It’s particularly fond of abalone. Whenever we have abalone we give it the scraps.”

The huge rat looked at us complacently. It could clearly afford to be complacent. The greenhouse was full of jungle-like foliage. After a while we strolled out with our brandy and rejoined Juney. I guess I was drunk. I had nothing to say. Neither did Leon. Neither did Juney. My head felt like it was a long way from my feet, or even from my hands. I felt more or less absent. Then I was in the Bentley, being driven back to my hotel. I couldn’t remember any words being said, at the end of the evening. Juney was in the Bentley with me, but she was asleep and snoring, slumped in her corner. I stayed awake, in order to enjoy the ride in the Bentley.

When I got out onto the red carpet at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Juney was still snoring. I went and sat in my room awhile, wondering where I would have to look to find someone with whom I had something in common. All the people I had things in common with were thousands of miles away, in Texas. Finally I turned on the television set and watched
a movie with Rhonda Fleming in it. It was called
The Golden Hawk
. I hadn’t seen her in a long time and I enjoyed the movie thoroughly. By the end of it I had ceased being drunk. It also had Sterling Hayden in it. The movie was all about pirates, but I felt right at home with it. I didn’t feel at all at home with Leon O’Reilly.

The bed I lay in to watch the movie was almost as big as my whole room at the Piltdown. For a few minutes I thought I was going to cry. I had never felt less snug. Only the thought that the Beverly Hills Hotel was a silly place in which to cry kept me from it. What I really wanted was to be a student again. It occurred to me that I hadn’t been reading much, and I suddenly had a great longing to sit in the library and read. In my mind I kept seeing the thirty-nine-volume set of John Ruskin, the one I had never taken time to dip into. If I could have just been back in Houston I would probably have stayed up all night reading
Fors Clavigera
. For some reason it was the one Ruskin book I felt like I wanted to read. Also there were innumerable books about rivers I hadn’t read. I decided to start reading again and the decision cheered me up. While I was trying to decide in my mind what to read first, I went to sleep.

The next day, just as I was about to leave Columbia Studios, I met a person with whom I had something in common. It was five o’clock in the afternoon and I had spent the whole day in an office with Leon O’Reilly. He was extremely neat and brisk and talked about my novel until it made my head swim. We went completely through the manuscript, a page at a time, trying to work out how to turn the novel into a movie. It was just a simple novel about a good old man whose one son had gone bad, and when I went in the morning I didn’t envision many problems about
it at all. To my surprise, Leon O’Reilly immediately suggested that we give the old man another son.

“Certainly,” he said. “Two sons, one good, one bad. As the story stands, our picture is too simple. What it needs is some ambiguity, some timbre it doesn’t have. Let’s give him a brother and let the brother be good. Maybe he’s even a preacher. Or maybe he’s just something dull. A grocer. He devotes his spare time to working with the Boy Scouts. I’m not sure, I’m just thinking out loud. And maybe deep inside himself the old man really likes the bad son better than he likes the good son. Only they fight anyway, and maybe it’s the good son that really gets broken. I don’t know. But you can see how that makes for a richer brew.”

I could see, but at the same time I didn’t have any good son in my imagination. I didn’t let Leon know that though. While we were talking a Negro came in and gave us each a shoeshine. He never said a word, and all the time he worked Leon kept adding ambiguities to the script I was going to write.

We decided to have the bad son get killed while illegally roping antelope from the hood of a speeding Cadillac. We also decided that the good son would have a sexy wife and that the bad son would either rape her or make her fall in love with him or both. Leon’s phone kept ringing and he would pick it up and I would faintly hear Juney’s voice coming through it and then Leon would say things like, “Not today,” or “Send him a little cognac,” or “MGM can go fuck itself,” and briskly hang up. We spent two hours debating whether the good son and the bad son could have an idiot half brother. Leon speculated at length about my old man and decided it was not unreasonable to suppose that he had had a mongoloid son by a prior marriage. “I know an actor who’s perfect,” he kept saying. “I’ve always wanted to cast him as an idiot.”

Then he decided it might be even more dramatic if the bad son had a wife who was secretly in love with the good son but was too good a woman to break her marriage vows. “There’s conflict for you,” Leon said. “You’re wonderful to work with, you know.” When five o’clock came I was exhausted, not from talking or even from thinking, but just from listening. Leon had not so much as loosened his tie all day, and his eyes were as bright as they had been when he was hacking at the raw fish.

“I think we’re solid,” he said, when he shook my hand. “I’ll have Juney type this up in outline form and send it right off to you. It’s not to be considered restrictive, of course. Feel free to invent and embroider. I want Brando and Burton for the two sons, maybe Spencer Tracy for the old man. Think what a picture that would make.”

I went on out. Just being in the hall made me feel better. It seemed to me I had been listening to Leon O’Reilly talk about my novel for several weeks. I didn’t mind all the things he wanted me to do to it. Most of his ideas were better than my ideas. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t had sense enough to give the bad son a good brother, and a wife who would be in love with the good brother. It would have made the book twice as interesting. But it was too late for me to do it and talking about it for eight hours was a big bore. My brain felt fuzzy from trying to keep myself listening to what Leon was saying.

I hadn’t gone more than ten steps down the hall when I heard a woman yelling. She was yelling from an office, behind a closed door, and I didn’t really pick up what she was yelling. It was incoherent yelling, about someone destroying her. Then, just as I was passing the door behind which she was yelling, there was the sound of a very loud slap.

“I’ll tell you why,” a man’s voice yelled. “Because you’re
a fucking no-talent establishment creep, that’s why! You won’t fuck and you can’t draw!”

The door opened just then and a heavy-set redheaded man hurried out, trying to get into his coat. He glared at me, as if he suspected me of intentionally eavesdropping on the fight, but he didn’t stop to challenge me. He hurried on down the hall. Just as he was about to turn the corner a thin girl in a green dress stepped out of the office. Tears were streaming down her face. “I can
draw!
” she yelled after the man. “Don’t you ever tell me I can’t
draw!
”

The man went around the corner without ever pausing or looking back and the girl walked over and leaned her forehead against the wall. She rubbed her cheek with one hand and sobbed. I felt very awkward, but I didn’t feel that I could just go on and leave her sobbing, her forehead pressed against the wall. The slap might really have hurt her. Before I could think of what to say she turned and looked at me, her eyes overflowing. She had mousy blonde hair.

“Oh, why does everyone want to fuck me?” she asked. “Why does everyone want sex, anyway? I can’t even know anyone without sex messing things up. I can’t even have a simple job! Somebody always has to try and fuck me. I hate it! I hate it! I don’t even get to have friends.”

She wiped away her tears and gave me a very direct look, as if she suspected me of being someone else who wanted to fuck her. I wasn’t, though. She seemed very thin and lonely, and not sexy at all. What she touched were my sympathies.

“Can I be of some help?” I asked. “My name’s Danny. Does your jaw hurt?”

“Not enough to complain about,” she said. “Will you help me carry some stuff downstairs? I can’t work here now. He’ll just try it again. I’ll have to take my sketches home. My name’s Jill Peel.”

She went back in the office and threw what seemed like about a hundred pounds of sketches into some big portfolios. It turned out that she did drawings for animated cartoons. Not ordinary Tom and Jerry stuff, but serious animated cartoons. One she had worked on three years before had won an Oscar.

“That’s why he called me establishment,” she said. “He really feels very inferior.”

She had a red Volkswagen bus parked in the parking lot across Gower Street. I put her drawings in the back for her and she got in the driver’s seat and shut the door. But she didn’t drive off. Once she was under the wheel she turned and looked at me. She had a thin, sweet face, and very blue eyes. Her look was very direct. We hadn’t talked much, but I felt that I was going to be lonelier once she drove off, and I tried to think of something to say that would delay her a few minutes. To my surprise she thought of something to say.

“What do you do?” she asked.

I told her I was a novelist, writing a screen play for Leon O’Reilly.

“He’s the straightest man in the industry,” she said. “What’s your novel called?”

“It’s called
The Restless Grass
.”

“You’re not from L.A., are you?”

I told her I was from Texas, and we began to talk. She put her arm on the car window and her chin on her arm and I stood in the parking lot and we talked. She didn’t really want to drive off and be lonely, either. She just wanted a car door between us, so there would be no chance of my deciding to try anything sexual.

She gave me very straight, clear looks, to determine if I had any intention of trying anything. I didn’t have any intention at all of trying anything and I did my best to let
her know I could be trusted to be friendly. After we had spent an hour and a half talking about Texas and Hollywood and novels and drawings we were both a little bit less nervous. I really wanted to ask her to have dinner with me, but I was afraid it might spook her. While I was debating with myself it occurred to Jill that I had been standing up for an hour and a half.

“You can get in if you want to,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I got in the front seat with her and we both felt awkward. Fortunately we really liked to talk to each other. I don’t think either of us had talked to anyone in a long time, not anyone of much sensibility, anyway. We liked to talk to each other so much that we managed to beat the awkwardness. The sky to the west had turned purple, and from a distance we could hear the low roar of evening traffic out the Hollywood Freeway.

“Would it scare you if I asked you to supper?” I said. “I don’t know anyone in L.A.”

Jill had a way of straightening her head suddenly so that I was forced to look her full in the face. She did it when I asked her to supper. I had never in my life met such a direct look, in such an uncompromisingly honest face. Her eyes weren’t blank, like Sally’s. They were clear and gray and intelligent.

“I’m glad you said supper,” she said. “No one’s ever asked me to supper before. Guys here ask you to dinner, which means they buy you a cheap steak and then try to fuck you before you even get it digested. Let’s go to supper.”

I was very pleased and did my best not to make her nervous. We ate at a diner near her place, which was in Westwood. After we ate we walked around UCLA for a while. To my surprise she invited me to her place. “
Viva Zapata’s
on TV,” she said. “I love it. Come watch it with me”.

She looked at me once more, very straight. I guess she had decided I wasn’t dangerous. We went to her apartment, which was extremely neat. It had white walls, hung with her drawings. Most of the drawings were of strange, curvy cartoon-creatures who reminded me of Reddy Kilowatt. Jill had black modern chairs, but we sat on the floor to watch
Viva Zapata
. I loved it too. “It was filmed in Roma, Texas,” I said. Henry, the old screenwriter in the Rice library, had told me that. He had gone down to watch them film it, hoping that Darryl F. Zanuck might be there. Jill cried twice during the movie. The sight of Texas made me sentimental, but I didn’t cry, mostly because it was such a great relief just to be with somebody again. As soon as the movie was over Jill and I began to talk. We talked for several hours. I told her about my life and career and she told me about hers.

At two in the morning, when it was very foggy, we got in her Volkswagen bus and drove to the Beverly Hills Hotel. We ordered a big pot of tea and sat on my huge bed, drinking tea and talking. We were also holding hands. I never expected it to happen and didn’t make any moves. Jill just took my hand.

I had hardly had my eyes off her face for six or eight hours and despite myself I was beginning to love her. She had an honest, unpretending face, and it had already become dear to me. It seemed to me I knew it much better than I knew Sally’s. I stopped being able to imagine myself living with Sally. Even before she took my hand I had begun to imagine myself living with Jill.

All the time we were holding hands Jill was telling me a wild story involving a baby bed. She was actually twenty-four years old and had a six-year-old son who lived with her parents in Santa Maria. The story was about a baby bed she had had when her son was an infant. It had been given her by the wife of one of her own former boyfriends. That was
only the mere outline though. The baby bed, in only ten years, had passed from one young couple to the next all around the country, and the couples themselves were a great interlocking swirl of lovers and boyfriends and mistresses, ex-mistresses, wives, ex-wives. In its travels it had gone from UCLA to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, then to Utica, New York, then to Edmonton, Canada, and had come almost back to where it had started. It was presently in Redondo Beach. All the people it had belonged to had been friends or lovers of Jill’s at UCLA. She had a soft, rapid voice, and she filled out the story of the baby bed with wonderful, intricately detailed vignettes of the lives and personalities of the various girls and boys whose off-spring had been infants in the same baby bed.