All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel (20 page)

I saw that he was moved. He clutched the book tightly, and looked at me sadly.

“You are touching me with this gift,” he said. “Also you are young. You can go. I am sorry we will not be having games. We are not having world enough and time, now—this is so? Texas you are wanting. A mistress, wife—many things for you to seek.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh yes, yes, very important,” Wu said. “Go on away, we have been friends, this gift very fine. I keep writing, maybe get published someday. Is not major. You will be sending letters, is this so Danny?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Welcome to literature,” he said, holding up my book. Then he went in.

I went back to the Piltdown and promptly checked out. I never wanted to sit there and write again. I put my typewriter and the manuscript of my new novel in the back seat of my car and drove to Vallejo Street, very uncertain what to do. Usually abrupt action in my life is initiated by someone else, but no one else was around, or likely to come. I would have to do something myself.

Staying in San Francisco without Jill or without my novel to work on was clearly out of the question. I had to go somewhere. There was nothing to hold me but a little furniture and I didn’t want that. Jill wouldn’t want it either. I wrote the landlord a note telling him the furniture was his to dispose of as he wished, and I put some blankets and cushions and a couple of Jill’s drawings and the green Indian rug in the Chevy. That was enough. I was going. I could hardly bother to pack. I really suddenly wanted to be gone. Objects weren’t going to stop me. I had a few travel books that belonged to the San Francisco Public Library, and I took them right to the library and dropped them in the night-deposit box.

Then I left. As I was curving out the freeway I glanced behind me a second at the city I was leaving. It was sort of misty-foggy and the lights of the city were lovely. In the second I had to glance at it as I was leaving, it seemed a beautiful, romantic city. It occurred to me that I hadn’t got to know it at all well. For a brief moment I felt regret. In
a way it felt like San Francisco was leaving me. I had just glanced back and seen it go. We had barely known each other—like two people who notice each other at a party but never get to talk.

Then I was over the first hills and San Francisco was gone. A few minutes later I passed the airport. I heard the roar of a plane overhead and remembered Jill, all the way across the country, in New York. I had no concept of New York, I had no idea what kinds of things might happen there. I pulled off the freeway for a few minutes and watched the airplanes come and go. I had taken a thousand dollars out of the bank that afternoon. I could go. I was very uncertain, though. Going to New York felt wrong. I had a feeling I would get there and not be able to handle the city or myself or anything. Finally I drove on down the freeway, but I kept thinking of Jill, and I was uncertain. Maybe the surprise of seeing me would make her love me. I had no way of judging, but I kept driving. What I really wanted to do was drive all night. There were other airports along the road. I could fly from Phoenix or El Paso and get to New York in the daytime, instead of in the middle of the night. In the daytime I might stand a better chance.

Still, passing the airport didn’t feel right. None of my possibilities felt right. As I was passing Palo Alto I suddenly turned off. I had never gone back to see the New Americans and meet Teddy Blue. I thought I might as well. There was no knowing if I would ever return to California. Perry Lane was almost as hard to find in a car as it had been on foot. My thoughts kept going back to the airport and to Jill.

I found Teddy Blue’s house, finally. When I got there things were very quiet. I knocked and went in and found Pauline and Leslie and Sergei sitting on the floor playing
Monopoly. They greeted me as if they had known me for years.

“How’s your awful wife?” Leslie asked. “Has she had a baby yet?”

“Don’t be so personal,” Sergei said. He was wearing a maroon sweater. Leslie had on the same green dress she had worn the first time I saw her, and Pauline was in her nightgown and a blue terry cloth bathrobe.

“Are you hungry?” Pauline asked.

“She can’t stand not to feed people,” Sergei said. “Play Monopoly with us. Everyone’s gone to Tijuana.”

“It was Teddy’s idea,” Leslie said. “He can’t stay out of Mexico.”

“I’m on my way to Texas,” I said.

“Oh, we have mushrooms tonight,” Sergei said. “Bring him some of the mushroom shortcake, Pauline. The mushrooms are from Mexico. They’re great. Monopoly’s a lot more fun when you’re high.”

“He ought to eat first,” Pauline said. She got up and went and made me a baloney sandwich and brought it to me on a plate. She also brought me a boiled egg and some milk. While I was eating Sergei and Leslie argued about how they would divide the properties already acquired with me, so I wouldn’t be unfairly handicapped by starting so late. Sergei already had two hotels on Park Place. I thought we ought to divide with Pauline too, since she had practically nothing. What she did have was lovely calves. Nice ankles too. Sergei explained to me that the mushrooms in the shortcake were vision-inducing mushrooms. Mexican Indians had been eating them and having visions for centuries.

“I’m not having any mushrooms,” Leslie said. “Visions always make me cry. I’m too unstable. I have visions of myself unraveling.”

I ate the shortcake, which was good. I had no reason to
refrain from having visions, that I could think of. Perhaps I would see Jill in a vision and know what to do about her. But instead of having visions I got into a very competitive Monopoly game. Leslie and Sergei competed fiercely and I competed fiercely too. Pauline smiled and looked lovely and palpable and quiet. Occasionally she bought a cheap property. Long before we finished she dropped out of the game and went over and took off her robe and went to bed. “Night,” she said. “Stay for breakfast if you want to. You might have a wreck, driving at night.”

Sergei was bold with his capital, but he was also lucky. He was keen and zestful and awfully intelligent. Leslie groaned often and wrinkled her brow, trying to decide what to do. She was essentially cautious. I was reckless and did about as well as Sergei.

Pauline had gone to sleep. She was so lovely that I kept wondering why Teddy Blue kept running off and leaving her. I ate some more shortcake and began to feel effects. I was not having visions but I felt the distances of things begin to alter. Both inside me and outside me the distances altered. It was a little like being drunk except much dryer and lighter and all in the head. My hands and feet felt distant from one another, and the pieces on the Monopoly board seemed larger, the size of dollhouses. At moments we seemed to be right by the bed, watching Pauline sleep. At other moments the bed seemed miles away. At two in the morning we stopped playing Monopoly. We went out in the yard so Sergei could identify constellations. While we were out in the yard the desert shrunk. It seemed to me that Texas was only a few miles away. I would ease down the road and be there soon. It was absurd to go to the airport, with Texas so close.

“He ought to take some mushrooms with him,” Leslie said. “I can tell they make him feel good.”

I did feel very good. I was delighted I had stopped by to see them. It was wonderful to feel Texas so close. I thought of Emma. I could have breakfast in her kitchen. She’d be very pleased to see me. Sergei gave me a brown paper bag with some mushrooms in it. I stuffed it in my parka.

“Save them for sometime when you’re playing a game,” he said. “They improve all games.”

I thanked them and got in the car. Leslie said she would read my book as soon as she could get a copy. I drove away. When I got to the freeway I slowed down very slow, so I could read the exit signs clearly. I was looking for familiar names. I expected the first exit to be El Paso. Then there would be Van Horn. Then San Antonio. But that wasn’t the way the exits read. It didn’t bother me, though. I felt wonderful. I expected to be arriving in front of the Hortons’ house in a few minutes. I had keen dry light visions of everybody. If I missed the Hortons’ I could just go on and see Jill. I imagined her sitting on a big bed in a hotel, in her bathrobe, solemnly watching TV. There were many homes where I could spend the night. Jenny Salomea would let me in. All the exit signs kept saying San Jose, which was a little odd. Then they began to mention Salinas. I saw Mr. Fitzherbert drive right through my room. He drove right through it with a lovely splintering sound, and the apartment flew everywhere. Pieces of it settled lightly and quietly to earth, as I was passing San Jose. Emma kept hugging me while she was fixing breakfast. There wasn’t much traffic. Then a bad vision came: Sally. She loomed out of a bathtub with her belly like a whale’s back, a little spout of water coming from her navel. She looked contemptuously at me, for being so distanced from myself. She made me feel guilty for being spaced out. While I was looking for hotels I noticed that two of my wheels were not on the pavement.
Jill said I was a dummy, speaking kindly. I let the Chevy drift off the road and stop. I had many cushions and pillows in the car and I piled several of them in the front seat and got the green Indian rug and huddled under it. Sergei had not noticed any constellations. It was very dark. I didn’t want to drive anymore. That would be stupid. I felt very wise, much too wise to do stupid things. I covered myself with the green rug and shut my eyes. I had never felt so wise, or so nicely sleepy.

When I woke up I felt great. The world had become absolutely white, not only the earth but the air as well. I was in a thick, milk-white fog, the whitest, milkiest fog I had ever seen. It was like the Chevy was at the bottom of a lake of milk. Actually it sat somewhere in the Salinas Valley, as I realized when I got my wits about me. The old man and old woman of the Berkeley hills had had a long argument about Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, the day we had had the picnic. They had argued about the spirits that came out of the fog, and I had gone right home and read the chapter they had argued about. The spirits came out of the fog and approached the pool of blood at Odysseus’ feet and he kept them back with his sword. It seemed to me I was in such a fog. The spirits of the dead ought to be moving in it. If I went and found a heifer and slaughtered it and got a club to fight the spirits back with perhaps the spirits would come. I could talk with Granny and Old Man Goodnight and ask them if I had their stories right. I got out and walked across the ditch to piss. No real spirits came but to my surprise I had a faint intimation of Godwin Lloyd-Jons. It was unlikely he was abroad in such a fog, and anyhow he was in Austin, but I thought anyway that I heard him say my name.

I got back in the car and eased along in the fog, scared
to death that someone would run into me from behind. When I finally ran out of the fog the green country was beautiful and I was starved.

I drove on to Bakersfield in the bright morning sunlight, feeling extremely fresh and extremely happy. Being on the road was wonderful. By the time I had been driving an hour I could understand what had been wrong with me for so many months. I should have taken Jill on the road. I loved watching the land as I passed through it. I stopped at a filling station and had a Coke and some peanuts. The filling station was far out in the Valley, and flat green fields stretched all around. While I was stopped I called Bruce and told him I was going home and would be at an autograph party if he wanted me to.

Bruce was all business. He had already arranged a party, and had been about to call and tell me. I felt generally aimless and happy. Bruce read me a review from
Publishers’ Weekly
, which said I was very sentimental. That struck me as fair enough. I got in the car and drove on and before I had driven fifty miles I had forgotten that I was having a book published, or even that I was a writer. All that day I was just a happy driver.

That night I slept in my car, just east of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The swish of the trucks and cars that passed me put me to sleep, and when I woke up there was no milk-white fog, as there had been outside Salinas, but only a cold, absolutely cloudless desert sky overhead, with stars still bright in the west. I huddled under my rug and covers for a while, watching the sky change. It was very cold in the car. I remembered driving toward Las Cruces on my way to California, with Sally waking up in the back seat, smelling like a warm sleepy girl. I didn’t really want any more of Sally, but despite myself I missed the way she smelled when she woke up.

Finally I shook myself out of the covers and drove on toward El Paso. Ahead of me, forty miles away, the sun was about to come up, over Texas. The rims of the desert had all been dark when I woke up. Then, to the northeast, a line of pink edged along the rim. Slowly the pink became red and widened into a band. Soon the band stretched itself in both directions, north toward the Staked plains, south over Mexico. The curve of the sun appeared and the red became orange. As I approached El Paso the whole great spread of sky in front of me shaded from orange to yellow.

Texas was there, beyond the sunrise, looming as it had loomed the day I left San Francisco. “It is your land,” Wu had said, but Wu had never seen the great sky that opened above me. It was the sky that was Texas, the sky that welcomed me back. The land I didn’t care for all that much—it was bleak and monotonous and full of ugly little towns. The sky was what I had been missing, and seeing it again in its morning brightness made me realize suddenly why I hadn’t been myself for many months. It had such depth and such spaciousness and such incredible compass, it took so much in and circled one with such a tremendous generous space that it was impossible not to feel more intensely with it above you. I wanted to stop at the first filling station and call Jill and get her to come to Texas. No wonder I hadn’t been able to make her love me in San Francisco. I couldn’t feel anything in a place where I hadn’t even noticed the sky. Maybe I hadn’t been very loving—I couldn’t be sure.

Below me, to the south, I could see Juarez and El Paso, nestled in their crook of the Rio Grande. I was almost home—at least I was almost to some part of home. It was an odd feeling, because I had no real idea what I had come home to do. Perhaps I had come home to be a father, but that notion was very confusing. I had no sense of what being a
father might be like, and of course if I even went near Sally I might be put in jail. All my prospects were nonspecific, indeterminate.